Comment by mpweiher | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mpweiher | Hacker News Reader

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And for millions and millions of people it was shit. Utter shit. Credit card chomping, crappy zero hour job, minimum wage, second hand clothes, crappy car, no life insurance, no pension, crap.

Yep.

Except for one teeny weeny insignificantly minor detail: these things have nothing whatsoever to do with the EU, and everything to do with the austerity/de-industrialization policies of neo-liberal UK governments, primarily Tory, but to a somewhat less extent also New-Labour.

And the EU was, if anything, a counter to those forces, with structural funds, with labor standards, with investments by non-UK firms in the de-industrialized parts of the UK for access to the common market etc.

And leaving the EU will make these things worse.

So voting against the EU to protest these conditions is not even cutting off your nose to spite your face, it's cutting off your nose to spite someone else's face!

While it deserves the word "pathetic" I can't bring myself to it. It really is just sad. Very, very sad.

what other option was there? I'm genuinely interested. The vote card said IN and OUT.

Pathetic? Name calling, wow that's low. I love how butt hurt you are. The more furious rich people are the better the decision feels.

There probably should have been some more options on the paper, seeing as how people voted Leave for many disparate reasons and with many disparate ideas (or no idea at all) of what to do instead, and there is no way to keep all of them happy.

In fact there may be no way to keep any of them happy, since apparently many of them voted Leave for impossible/EU-unrelated reasons: to keep non-EU immigration down; to spend money we won't even have on the NHS; because they don't like what the UK government has been doing and will keep doing outside the EU with even greater impunity, etc.

"Pathetic" 1. Arousing sadness, compassion, or sympathy, esp. through vulnerability or sadness; pitiable.

Seems fair enough. "Name-calling"?

"Rich people": I work for a university as support staff. I earn under the median UK wage and surely well under the median HN wage. We've had deeper and deeper cuts year on year for the past several years and post-Brexit an even bigger chunk of our budget looks like disappearing along with our best academics and researchers, not to mention other support staff, foreign language teachers/cataloguers/negotiators, etc. Education and research careers have been a route into the middle class for many and it's a shame to see that threatened - even more of a shame when the people who voted for it, the press, politicians have hardly even acknowledged it's a problem.

But have fun assuming that only rich people are interested in science or can get any benefit from cooperating with colleagues elsewhere in Europe...

So when you are upset with a specific person, do you also randomly punch someone else who happens to be nearby?

If you are unhappy with what the UK government is doing, and the things you say you are unhappy about are 100% UK gov, not EU, then the time to "vote the bums out" is the UK general election.

Really having a hard time figuring out what you were/are trying to accomplish.

> what other option was there?

To address the description of the source of the problem offered upthread? Voting against the people actually responsible for the problems in UK elections (general elections and otherwise.)

If the problem is in Westminster, voting against the EU does nothing to solve the problem.

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