Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

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nonrandomstring

It's the quality of people.

Our institutions are reliable. Our parliament, judiciary, civil services, while weakened by decades of under-funding, remain essentially sound and held together by great hard working people with a deep ethic of civic duty. Our electorate are pretty well educated, active and dutiful. Our elections are fair and well attended. We have a multi-chamber carefully segmented government with plenty of checks and balances to steer a path between conservative and progressive courses.

On the face of it we should have a model democracy and a prosperous nation.

But "politics" in the UK is a seedy, corrupt selection mechanism to find the worst possible human specimens and put them in power. It rewards childish, irresponsible, petulant, mean-spirited, greedy and corrupt little bullies who are vain, shallow, dishonest, weak-minded, cavalier and self-obsessed. And I'm being charitable here.

The era of the statesman is over. No matter how excellent our systems are they cannot function if staffed by incompetent hooligans.

A massive improvement to British politics could be made simply by selecting the cabinet and prime minister randomly from the population and then voting only on policies.

>It rewards childish, irresponsible, petulant, mean-spirited, greedy and corrupt little bullies who are vain, shallow, dishonest, weak-minded, cavalier and self-obsessed.

No coincidence then that the latest batch of fuckups were all Eton educated.

I'd imagine Liz Truss wasn't, being, you know, a woman.

But her Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng was. It was their joint drive to lower tax into a massive deficit that spooked markets and the Party and ultimately must her the job.

Eton gets a bad rap, but Tories aren't helping it by over-promoting idiots just because they're EU separatists.

I'm not sure that the electorate are educated well enough though - pro-brexit votes were higher in poorer, less-well educated areas (there was a strong linear correlation between the two published in The Economist).

Agree with your general points but would add that print media heavily influencing uneducated people allows any narrative to be justified.

What's scary that if this is true, if the electorate is too silly to vote the right people in, it's only going to get worse.

Populist leaders are unlikely to fund schools properly, because it's not in their interest to do so, it's not in their interest to have an educated voting base, and on it will go.

I guess eventually, a champion will come from someewhere and help rectify the situation, but who knows how long this will take.

Political Entropy

It's not helpful to keep labeling people who support Brexit as uneducated or stupid.

It would be better to acknowledge that they have real concerns, which ought to be addressed.

In reality it would be more accurate to call the vast majority of pro Brexit voters ill informed .. and to lay the blame for that on those in power that initiated the entire ill conceived referendum.

The post Brexit vote polling indicated that a great many people had no idea that this was a binding referendum rather than some "national poll of the feels", many were not at all clear on the actual pros and cons, they were swayed by emotive nationalistic propaganda that simplified the question down to "are you proud of your country or not" .. which was almost entirely orthogonal to the reality being voted on "do you want to be part of a free trade union or not" (simplified of course but more accurate).

> post Brexit vote polling indicated that a great many people had no idea that this was a binding referendum rather than some "national poll of the feels"

It's remarkable isn't it, just how fragmented non-broadcast mass media had become at this point? Huge swathes of people in London had no real idea that an important vote was taking place, or what it meant - being busy working and distracted by social media frivolity. The fact that their chosen 'channels' simply did not 'feed' them vital information allowed millions to be hoodwinked.

We still need a postmortem on "Brexit" as a kind of nation healing. All of us, on both sides, were victims of information warfare/abuse of one kind or another.

It depends on the issue. Immigration has caused real problems among the lower earners and free movement prevented any curbs.

IMHO on this the EU put ideology before pragmatism in 2004 and the British government has also massively screwed up by being the only country (ok, also Ireland) not to put any restrictions when that was possible.

Then, obviously Merkel's open door policy in 2015 did not help at all...

Note that the result of the referendum was not binding. But it did not matter: democratically and politically you cannot organise such a referendum then ignore the result because you don't like it.

You're confusing educated with "educated". Proximity to the university system breeds pro-EU attitudes because the EU enforces a similar ideology in Europe to that found in universities. There's however plenty of people who are educated in the sense of having knowledge, skills, but who aren't close to the university system, who dislike the EU and voted against it.

Arguably the practice of conflating university degrees with education is harmful. Increasingly universities seem to focus on anything but education.

>Proximity to the university system breeds pro-EU attitudes because the EU enforces a similar ideology in Europe to that found in universities

That's an interesting claim - do you have evidence to justify it?

Not disagreeing entirely that degree holders benefit from EU membership based on the type of work degrees lead to, but in reality so do people without degrees if the economy is growing. There's really no economic argument for leaving the EU; it seems like it was purely ideological.

Perhaps? I'm not sure what you have in mind as evidence. These are large scale constitutional and social issues, and what I stated is mostly my own opinion. I can elaborate if you like.

I didn't say exactly that degree holders benefit from EU membership. Although they are more likely to want to move abroad than non-degree holders the numbers of Brits who do so are just overwhelmingly trivial. It's just not a factor in Brexit either way; freedom of movement was always more of a theoretical issue for wealthy Brits and a practical one for those in the trades due to competition from the east.

There were actually lots of economic arguments for leaving the EU, that's one of the primary themes I remember about the debates. EU being overly regulation happy, unconcerned with growth, protectionist, etc. But I noticed that this is a common pattern with the pro-EU people. They don't say, "I disagree with argument X" they aren't aware the arguments existed at all.

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