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U-Know! Forum » Jesus I despise Brexit. |
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nigelswift 8112 posts |
Feb 21, 2019, 07:33
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I don't think there's room for denial that the Brexit uncertainty is having a bad effect - on England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Europe and the World and the blame for that lies squarely with the 52% to start with and now the anti Europe hard right and anti Europe hard left. Most of the culprits put salve on their guilt by citing Project Fear but Fitch has today put UK's Double A credit rating on negative watch (it was triple A four years ago) and if that gets lowered it will reduce the prosperity of every man. woman and child in the country. So Project Fear won't wash and Farage, Fox and the other near criminals are running out of plausible deniability. Could we eventually have a Truth and non-reconciliation commission with prison sentences for the leading liars?
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Howburn Digger 986 posts |
Edited Feb 21, 2019, 21:14
Feb 21, 2019, 21:13
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I think some people on here imagining Britain carpet bombing Ireland are having too much of their red wine a little too early this week. It is only Thursday. Thankfully Syria wasn't in the EU and didn't decide to leave even though it wasn't a member. Or Britain along with the USA and Israel would have bombed vast areas of it back to the Stone Age. Oh yeah. We did anyway. And Syria didn't do a thing to the UK. Syria wasn't in the EU. Nor was Iraq. Nor was Libya. None of them did a single thing to have any material impact (however "imaginary") on Britain and its jobs or economy. Nothing, that is, bar provide lots of jobs for British Engineers and Oil Workers. But we carpet bombed them. Playing "let's imagine" is so much easier than playing "let's actually look."
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grufty jim 1978 posts |
Feb 21, 2019, 21:22
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Howburn Digger wrote: I think some people on here imagining Britain carpet bombing Ireland... Playing "let's imagine" is so much easier than playing "let's actually look." Isn't it though? Just to be clear... you're the only person here imagining that. I suggested the British tabloids would be up in arms and screaming blue murder if Ireland made a decision that caused as much harm to the UK as brexit is causing us. I suggested the tabloids and those in their comments sections would be making extreme statements and extreme demands. I certainly didn't suggest there'd be actual carpet-bombing. You did that all yourself. But maybe you think The Sun and The Mail, along with their already virulent readers-comments sections, would take such a set of circumstances calmly. Perhaps you think Nigel Farage and the tory right wing would be taking a measured approach and not making any inflammatory statements at all. And you are more than welcome to think those things. But I suspect most of the "imagining" is happening at your end.
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nigelswift 8112 posts |
Feb 22, 2019, 05:31
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Irrational nationalism is ever-present within a proportion of English people and it can be summoned up in a moment by The Sun and The Mail. Remember "Up yours Delors"? Maybe that was the moment a percentage of us turned against Europe in our guts, and once a prejudice is there it can't be changed by mere logic. It's very useful if your paper wants to promote its owner's agenda or simply to sell more copies. Remember the Sun's headline announcing Thatcher's murder of 1,800 eighteen-year-old Argentinian conscripts on the Belgrano which had been sailing towards its home port for 24 hours: Gotcha! Incidentally, being anti-Irish over Brexit doesn't need hypothesising that the boot was on the other foot. It seems to me that Europe as a whole and Ireland, in particular, has been far more grown up and dignified than Britain yet the press constantly portrays them as unreasonable and scheming. I seem to remember several years ago on here I said, before it had happened, that we'd end up demonising Europe. Now it happens every day.
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tjj 3606 posts |
Edited Feb 22, 2019, 22:31
Feb 22, 2019, 20:13
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nigelswift wrote: Irrational nationalism is ever-present within a proportion of English people and it can be summoned up in a moment by The Sun and The Mail. Remember "Up yours Delors"? Maybe that was the moment a percentage of us turned against Europe in our guts, and once a prejudice is there it can't be changed by mere logic. It's very useful if your paper wants to promote its owner's agenda or simply to sell more copies. Remember the Sun's headline announcing Thatcher's murder of 1,800 eighteen-year-old Argentinian conscripts on the Belgrano which had been sailing towards its home port for 24 hours: Gotcha! Incidentally, being anti-Irish over Brexit doesn't need hypothesising that the boot was on the other foot. It seems to me that Europe as a whole and Ireland, in particular, has been far more grown up and dignified than Britain yet the press constantly portrays them as unreasonable and scheming. I seem to remember several years ago on here I said, before it had happened, that we'd end up demonising Europe. Now it happens every day. I always read your posts Nigel and generally agree with you. I have never bought or read the Sun or the Mail but just lately find myself looking at the front page headlines. Yes, appalling. No wonder the French press say we are a dreadful country. I haven't actually been aware of any anti-Irish sentiments though - spent the evening on Wednesday with a friend who is visiting from Derry. She said the dissidents back home are just waiting in the wings for an opportunity to start something up but the people do not want that awful conflict back again. Have been thinking about Nationalism a bit - where does loyalty to the place you have been brought up and lived most of your life cross over into xenophobia and dislike/distrust of 'other' peoples. Earlier in the week I had spoken about the Honda/Swindon situation. Got me thinking about Japan - I had been told by someone who spent many years there that the Japanese have an innate mistrust of foreigners. Now they have the freedom to build and export cars directly from Japan I guess they can't get out of the UK quick enough. As a race they are known for 'honour' - how must our shambolic, self-serving, incompetent government seem to them - who can blame them for calling time. Sad for the Honda workers - collateral damage I'm afraid but then the workers always were. Incidentally, did you know (according to Wikipedia) 98.5% of Japan's population is Japanese.
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nigelswift 8112 posts |
Feb 23, 2019, 05:55
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"where does loyalty to the place you have been brought up and lived most of your life cross over into xenophobia and dislike/distrust of 'other' peoples. " I suppose the standard answer is Nationalism bad, Patriotism good but actually I've always struggled to see what are the claimed but rarely voiced advantages even of patriotism. It was OK long ago when tribe loyalty had a survival advantage, but now? It all seems a bit irrational. But it's in us: other countries,regions,towns,villages, streets and the people next door - we have a propensity to see them as "the others" and to hate 'em all! I remember my Dad told me that if a young man from our village visited a girl from the next village he risked a beating. That was definitely a biologiical mistake because if ever an area needed a bit of genetic diversity it was ours!
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nigelswift 8112 posts |
Feb 28, 2019, 13:34
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What happened in June 2016 to change the graph so dramatically? https://www.instagram.com/p/BubNy5iBau2/?utm_source=ig_twitter_share&igshid=1wdjaemrq93ra
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nigelswift 8112 posts |
Mar 02, 2019, 12:07
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The EU is a “museum of agriculture”, the US ambassador to Britain has said, as he urged the UK to embrace American farming methods to seal a transatlantic trade deal. Writing in The Telegraph, Woody Johnson says US practices such as chlorine-washing chicken and feeding growth hormones to cattle are “the future of farming” while the EU’s “traditionalist approach” belongs in the past.
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grufty jim 1978 posts |
Mar 02, 2019, 12:12
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nigelswift wrote: The EU is a “museum of agriculture”, the US ambassador to Britain has said, as he urged the UK to embrace American farming methods to seal a transatlantic trade deal. Writing in The Telegraph, Woody Johnson says US practices such as chlorine-washing chicken and feeding growth hormones to cattle are “the future of farming” while the EU’s “traditionalist approach” belongs in the past. Brexit's a farce, but I wouldn't pay much attention to any of the messaging coming out of the current US administration. They have as much understanding of the issue as the average member of the tory party. in the past week alone they have made two completely contradictory demands about Brexit... firstly that any future free trade deal with the UK is contingent upon the terms of the Belfast Agreement being respected and the British border in Ireland remaining open. And at the same time demand a relaxation of UK agricultural standards (which would -- by definition -- require a hard border in Ireland). The whole thing is a clusterfuck of epic proportions, but I'm not sure anything said by one of Trump's diplomats can technically be described as a "fair" warning.
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nigelswift 8112 posts |
Mar 02, 2019, 14:29
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Yes, for "fair" read "ominous". The big one always wins in "negotiations", obviously. Who didn't know that? Yet people were told the opposite in 2016 and now the EU's strength is being characterised as unreasonableness. How amazing it is being pretended that the same thing won't happen with the US - in fact, worse.
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