Comment by frobozz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by frobozz | Hacker News Reader

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This is like when people say that all racists voted to leave, and someone pipes up with "I voted to leave and I'm not racist, that's really insulting". You are confusing the direction of if and then.

The referendum was won because people were swung to the leave side by the case made by the leave campaigners. A case full of immediately demonstrable lies. If at least 650000 of those people were specifically swung that way by those lies or anything from 30 years of Boris Johnson's EU fibs, then the "they didn't know what they were really voting for" argument is sound.

This isn't about a metropolitan liberal elite thinking abstractly and paternalistically about swathes of poor people in The North about whom I have only heard through Ken Loach films.

All of the halfwits I knew at school (who I still know) voted to leave (I can tell because they post "Get Brexit Done" memes next to ones about councils banning Christmas and illegal immigrants being entitled to more benefits than pensioners).

That doesn't mean that everyone who voted to leave is an idiot, but if the lies of the leave campaign attracted 650000 more of them than the remain campaign did, then the leave result was artificially bolstered by people who genuinely did not know what they were voting for.

Every single thing you just wrote applies to both sides of any political issue. That's politics: you get out there and advocate for a position and then people turn up and vote (or not). People being convinced to vote for something is not a sign that their vote is somehow invalid. It's literally how the political process works.

> People being convinced to vote for something is not a sign that their vote is somehow invalid.

Not inherently, but being convinced of falsehoods by a propaganda campaign should be of concern.

If you voted for McCain because you believe Republicans have better tax policies than Democrats, I'm fine with that. If you did it because you believe Obama's a secret Muslim infiltrator from Kenya, I'm not.

Both sides have a contingent of voters who aren't voting from a place of cool-headed informed rationality. Thinking that your own side is somehow immune from this is blinkered partisan thinking.

People being convinced by reasoned argument, and perhaps by skilled oratory is how the political process works.

People being convinced by outright lies is not how democracy works. If one side can gain the advantage by telling people that the other side currently forbids them buying four bananas at a time, and be believed, even given the extremely obvious evidence against it, then the system is broken.

> People being convinced by reasoned argument, and perhaps by skilled oratory is how the political process works.

In utopia. But in reality, it is possible to simultaneously hold that many people vote for very stupid reasons, and that their votes should be respected anyway.

Personally I am convinced that there never has been an election anywhere where the majority of voters on all sides were properly informed by facts and not motivated by ideology or outright lies.

Some in the UK imply that the referendum should be re-run because of those lies, just like some in the US imply the 2016 election was illegitimate because of Russian interference. That way lies madness, since every side in every election lies and manipulates, and every election would have to be re-run ad infinitum.

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