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Putting aside your ridiculous belief that Brits did not suffer in WW2, what I don't get about your position is that the EU is run by powerful, entirely unaccountable leaders who very frequently and publicly take a dump on the entire concept of democracy and voting. The EU's law making is done in secret, which is similar only to North Korea in opacity.

https://euobserver.com/institutional/136630

And the EU is busy telling eastern European countries they're going to be punished financially and legally for not adopting "european values" (as these countries are without a doubt in Europe geographically, what that means of course is "german values").

Of all the people who should be attuned to the dangers of powerful leaders who dislike referendums, citizens of ex-Soviet countries should be the MOST aware. Yet you are running headlong into another giant undemocratic bloc.

No it's not. Can you show that with any sort of data at all? Or do you define "a lot" as simply "more than a few"?

The Remain obsession with a single bus is really sad. There's no evidence that this was a major factor in the vote. Immigration and sovereignty were the top two issues as shown by repeated polls, vox pops, the views of campaigners themselves, etc.

It's an especially weak point to bring up because it appears to have been wrong in the wrong direction: nobody campaigning for the EU mentioned an £80 billion exit fee, and if that had been known about or incorporated, the true cost of membership would have been much higher, perhaps more like £500 million a week.

Additionally there were lots of lies told by the Remain campaign that were far more impactful and serious. For example, Cameron saying he'd stay on to negotiate with the EU in the case of an out vote (despite having failed to achieve anything before), which turned out to be a colossal lie. And a very important one because it made Osborne's threat of a "punishment budget" credible. Yet he resigned immediately, clearly he didn't decide that on the spot, he knew he wouldn't continue if he lost the vote.

Are you serious? What do you think the Blitz was?

They are, actually:

1) The number being cited keeps changing (upwards)

2) When asked how they calculated those figures, and what the legal basis was, the Commission said it wasn't going to tell you.

There is a useful analysis of what's going on here:

https://www.cer.org.uk/sites/default/files/pb_barker_brexit_...

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/david-camerons-ex-staff...

How does this conspiracy theory even work? That Cameron's staff were secretly trying to lose whilst they were out campaigning to win? Because of an ex-employer?

That's not just illogical, it's completely incoherent. Think about what you're trying to argue there for a moment.

Cambridge Analytica might just make money by convincing fools that they have some secret insight or power, when they actually don't. Psychics and mediums have in the past made a ton of money, as did quack doctors. Coca-Cola started out as a quack cure-all and it still makes a ton of money today.

The basic narrative you're pursuing here is one that has cropped up a lot in the past 18 months: voters are, by and large, easily manipulated putty who don't have real reasons or analysis behind their decisions. Instead they simply do whatever shadowy Russian conspirators make them do through subtle manipulation of Facebook, the press, or whatever.

Simple, obvious explanations for what's happening in politics are staring us all straight in the face. Occam's Razor guys ... there is no need to go full chemtrails and pin responsibility on some invisible evidence-free conspiracy of random firms, people and countries. Just assume voters are on average, of average intelligence, and thus probably have reasonably straightforward reasons for doing what they do.

I would hope that a branding specialist would have no trouble understanding the Brexit result. It doesn't require deep analysis. Remain mounted a campaign that was defeatist and based on fear: "ok, our attempt to negotiate resulted in nothing at all, but we must still remain and obey Brussels because if we don't our friends and allies will destroy our economy."

As a logical consequence, they were effectively arguing that there was no future for British democracy, because the trend over time has always been for the EU to take more powers out of the hands of democratic local government and take it for itself.

That's a terrible brand. Leave campaigned on a better future with "take back control" as their byline.

You don't need conspiracy theories about corporations with mind-control machines to explain what happened next.

Of the candidates running in the French first round, all of them were anti-EU except Macron. Given the "anything anti-EU == Russian" idiocy, perhaps you can explain why this is seen as some kind of rare thing that needs frantic dot-joining?

However, the big tech firms do seem to have a problem with firing. I've heard this several times now from other people and saw it myself when I worked at Google. Hiring is never 100% accurate and so even if hiring itself is unbiased (questionable at best), without unbiased firing the quality of that segment of the worker pool goes downwards over time. Even though the engineers often truly believe in a meritocracy, HR in particular is a strongly female dominated profession and unfortunately I do suspect a "sisters gotta stick together" mentality because I saw within the span of a single year at Google a man get canned for merely not being particularly productive, whilst a woman who openly and repeatedly lied in meetings (and lied very badly at that), and who caused her team huge heartache due to her terrible quality work, was not only not fired but in the end promoted into management. It was widely known that women who weren't very good or caused trouble were almost impossible to get rid of and were typically transferred around between teams rather than shown the door.

Well ... nothing. He just knows it's the Russians.

Assange has stated, very clearly, that Russia is not the source and that if they had leaks related to Russia they'd publish them. But they don't. Probably because Wikileaks isn't necessary for Russian leakers: it arose because western newspapers were so reluctant to publish leaked material from western governments. But those same newspapers are desperate to publish anything that makes Russia look bad. So why go via Wikileaks, when you could go directly to the NY Times or the Guardian.

The whole "Wikileaks = Russia" line just comes off as delusional. There's no evidence, it has been explicitly denied, and the supporting arguments are very weak.

The heart of De Correspondent is our founding document from 2013 – a manifesto of sorts – and these core principles have informed how we’ve built De Correspondent ... 1. De Correspondent provides an antidote to the daily news grind. 2. De Correspondent challenges oversimplification and stereotyping.

Here are the top four headlines from the "selected stories from our archives" section on the front page:

"This is how we can fight Donald Trump’s attack on democracy"

"If Shell knew climate change was dire 25 years ago, why still business as usual today?"

"We’re heading into dark times. This is how to be your own light in the Age of Trump"

"How billions vanish into the black hole that is the security industry"

These headlines read exactly like a typical front page of the Guardian. How is this "challenging oversimplification" or being "an antidote to the daily news grind"? I can find content like that anywhere on the internet for free, its value is literally zero.

The Manifesto itself does not seem very consistent. It says things like:

Correspondents are fair and independent, yet also explicitly subjective

and

De Correspondent is ambitious in its ideals, yet modest in its claims

after making a series of decidedly not modest claims. It also has this amusing statement:

Although De Correspondent is a commercial, for-profit enterprise, we do not strive to maximize profits for shareholders. A profit ceiling has been stipulated in our statutes: Any profit distribution may not be greater than 5% of revenues.

But 20 seconds googling throws up a claim that the average profit margin in the newspaper industry is around 3.2%, which sounds about right. Average profit margins across all industries are 10% but the news industry is famously in decline and laying off employees, so 10% would be far too high. Aiming for 5% profit margins as if it's some great sacrifice indicates that either they believe their readers don't know much about business, or they themselves don't know. Neither possibility makes me want to subscribe.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/25/opinion/the-public-editor-...

Apparently the actual staff of the NY Times are under no illusions about the even-handedness of their own work. And that was written over a decade ago. I'm not sure how you'd objectively define high standards or trustworthiness except in a circular manner.

Jonathan Haight has a similar dataset where he shows the remarkably fast and steep political homogenization of academia, with Democrat domination of universities massively increasing over the past ten years.

Lots of people have an intuitive understanding that certain professions like journalism, economics, social science professors are dominated by particular worldviews to the exclusion of all else. But only rarely is this shown with raw data.

For instance, the CLR doesn't do any profile guided or speculative optimisations at all. That's a 20% win for most Java apps and even more still for languages with higher levels of abstraction like Scala. So right there from the start .NET is 20% behind. The CLR doesn't have an interpreter, so, it spends a lot of time JIT compiling code that isn't particularly important. That takes CPU time away from your app, not sure how much of an effect that is but I can imagine it's at least another 10% down. C# asks devs to control de-virtualisation by hand to try and compensate, but the JVM can do a better job automatically. CLR is only now starting to look at tiered compilation and even then only a very basic form compared to Java which has had it since Java 8.

But not only is the base infrastructure and approach far more advanced, the JVM's JIT compilers are way ahead of even the new RyuJIT. Not just fancy optimisations like devirt and escape analysis/scalar replacement, but even basic things like profile-guided basic block ordering. JVM can do auto-vectorisation of loops, lock optimisations, it can even replace speculatively profile and replace synchronised blocks with hardware (TSX) transactional memory. The CLR is multiple generations behind where HotSpot is. And the JVM team is extending its lead even further with projects like Graal.

Java's focus on cross-platform support from the start probably seemed like a waste of resources back in the 1990s when Windows was so dominant, but it had the advantage of making it more popular amongst UNIX users and the existing open source culture. Java going open source long before .NET also contributed to this. The end result is that you get organisations like Red Hat, Apache, IBM that create vast quantities of high quality open source Java code, and a culture that is steeped in open source development. Whereas in .NET it's rare to use components not built by Microsoft and when they do exist they are typically proprietary, same as in the 1990s.

Given that, putting even more load on public transport by restricting vehicle traffic would be politically very difficult. Crossrail will help relieve the pressure along its route (10% capacity bump on rail!) but given the growth in the cities population and the possibility that the population figures are wrong anyway (the UK has not done a census for a long time), planners are anticipating that nearly all the added capacity will be used within just a few years. Hence them starting to plan Crossrail 2 before Crossrail 1 is actually finished.

The EU uses propaganda so routinely people don't even notice it anymore. Like how federalists always refer to the EU as "Europe" even though Europe is a continent with several non-EU countries in it, and the EU is a political arrangement. It's a subtle word trick but it plants the feeling of permanence in people's minds.

Also, the way it charges countries huge sums of money to trade with it tariff free and then dishes out the money to projects ... but only on the condition that they erect giant signs with the EU flag and saying the EU paid for it. The EU of course, produces nothing itself, it's the countries that paid for it, but putting the actual flags of the nations that paid might lead to people feeling loyalty to actual European countries instead of the EU institutions.

And then there is the actual propaganda. Including, ironically, propaganda targeted at Russia:

http://collections.internetmemory.org/haeu/content/201603131...

http://collections.internetmemory.org/haeu/content/201603131...

Mussolini himself said that fascism was basically a form of socialism, and his beef with socialism was more that - at one time - it had an internationalist and interventionist outlook. That didn't last long before "Socialism in one country" came along though and at that point the distinction between fascism and socialism largely disappears.

After all, what are the characteristics of the right? I'd say a preference for free markets over state intervention, a reverence for tradition, desire for a strong military, a leaning towards democracy and localism, and a general sense that government should do less. Would a far-right society then not be something like anarcho-capitalism? Whereas under Mussolini about 75% of Italian industry was state controlled and arguably fascism is about the fusion of the state and industry into a single whole (hardly distinct from bulk nationalisation).

I'm not sure there are any examples of far right societies in the 20th century, although perhaps Victorian England and the early years of the independent USA could be described that way.