Brexit Thread IV - Negotiations begin (and we're all screwed)

This is definitely not a sinister front page, no sir

sigh

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Think of the boost to ruddy, bloody great British components manufacturers!

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read the comments in the thread (or maybe you did)

quite illuminating

Britain is fucked if Brexit goes ahead

totally fucked

I canā€™t help but wonder what the guy in the the thread thought who tried to make this argument and then got school.

Iā€™m hoping a variant of ā€œOh god what have I doneā€

Brexit will go ahead. Thereā€™s no if.

Will Britain be fucked? If thereā€™s no deal at all, yes. Thatā€™s why we - both leave and remain voters - have to hope there will be a deal, even if, inevitably, it will be a lesser deal than the one the UK currently has.

Thanks for this, got me reading this Lean manufacturing - Wikipedia which iā€™d never heard about before and is fascinating

we are so totally fucked

I think the opposite. A catastrophic No Deal being the final option, precipitating the collapse of the government, has always been the only way that a disastrous Brexit can be avoided.

This article feels a bit ā€œLook everyone, lets tut at the idiot, racist, well-done-steak-eating, homophobe leave votersā€, but thereā€™s probably something here about why the economic arguments/facts just wonā€™t sway the core Brexit vote.

It feels more like Brexit as an issue is part of a progressive/conservative culture war which wonā€™t be resolved by either leaving or staying.

I guess this is what the Express/Mail/Sun and the rest have realised and why they keep pushing those buttons.

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Reminds me of this a bit

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Yeah some of the connections were important, but things like the steak issue seemed pretty elitist, for want of a better word. Like it should be obvious to all good Guardian readers what the right answer should be

Nah, this will be fake news. Just scaremongering :roll_eyes:

Yeah. Things like the fact that leavers are more likely to believe that homosexuality is unnatural, that climate change is nonsense, that we should ban the burka, Trump would be a great president - that stuff is actually a really good indicator of why thereā€™s such a gulf between the two sides.

And then they go and undermine it with ā€œyeah, and they donā€™t even know how to eat a steak - troglodytes eh?ā€

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Seems to be asking, has Trump popularised well-done steak?

That 23/12% figure is odd, but medium rare is still the most popular, though it would be nice to see the figures (the right answer is rare, however).

Nearly a quarter of leave voters (23%) say they prefer their steaks well done, compared with only 12% of remain voters. The most popular way to cook steak for remain voters is ā€œmedium rareā€.

No idea what to do with these people though:

Six percent of both remain and leave voters say ketchup is their favourite sauce to go with a steak.

I think the same thing about all of these articles that treat Leave and Trump voters as zoo exhibits, educational how-do-we-reach-these-apes that are really just excuses for the metropolitan types who read them to gawp. Itā€™s that fucking idiots have always existed in our country. Sure they arenā€™t quite as outright about their bigotry; their homophobia is now ā€˜concernsā€™, their wogs and darkies have evolved into proxy issues about immigration and Islam. But thatā€™s because the left fought a relentless culture war against them, positive action which made them grudgingly give up ground.

And that to me is key - itā€™s never been about trying to capture these peopleā€™s votes, about persuading them with rational arguments. Itā€™s about getting as many other people as possible to vote against them. And for that you need to make a positive case for something, rather than define yourself by not being them, an entreaty to authority and the status quo, which is what Clinton and the Remain campaign did. In a world gone as badly to shit as this, that no longer works. They may be horribly fascinating to us, but thereā€™s a limit on how much there is to be gained by putting arseholes underneath the microscope.

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So bankers will have free movement after brexit say Davis. Iā€™m pretty sure itā€™s not going to work like thatā€¦

same with trump, the fact that heā€™s not actually built a wall or whatever is fine compared to the bigger issue, the fact that you feel the president has validated your bigotry

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I think youā€™ve absolutely hit the nail on the head with this. In a way the very existence of the referendum in the first place was significant ground conceded back towards the idiots, and now theyā€™re pushing for more. It needs to be resisted every step of the way.

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Itā€™s a two tier system. The rich and powerful have free movement and everyone else doesnā€™t.

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You make some good points but I believe the capacity for evil or cruelty or narcissism exists in the intelligent and outwardly compassionate as well as the ā€œfucking idiotsā€, itā€™s probably in all of us to different degrees.

All of the sexual assault/harassment that has come to the public consciousness recently shows this, I mean werenā€™t some of these people from bands/scenes that people here would identify with?