|
Korean Job Discussion Forums
"The Internet's Meeting Place for ESL/EFL Teachers from Around the World!"
|
| View previous topic :: View next topic |
| Author |
Message |
trueblue
Joined: 15 Jun 2014
Location: In between the lines
|
 Posted: Fri Jun 24, 2016 4:52 pm Post subject: Britain Exits, Democracy Lives, And Everything Has Changed |
 |
|
As of now, this the best piece I can find on the matter...
http://www.weeklystandard.com/britain-exits-democracy-lives-and-everything-has-changed/article/2003017?utm_source=newsletters&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily+Digest
| Quote: |
A dispatch from liberated London.
8:37 AM, JUN 24, 2016 | By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
London
London feels like a city liberated by one side in an ongoing civil war. The papers on the newsstands seem to come from a foreign country—yesterday's country. At twenty minutes to five this morning, it became apparent that Britain's citizens had voted by a 4-point margin to leave the 28-nation European Union. Most Londoners, politicians across Europe, and virtually all pundits and politicians are in a state of shock and rage.
The EU has always found, by hook or by crook, the wherewithal to forestall populist outrage against it. A poll released on election eve showed that those who favored remaining in the EU would scrape through pretty easily. But so deep is the cleavage between those who profit from the present order and those who feel screwed by it that the latter have become unfathomable to, and unpollable by, the former. Despite driving rains across Britain on Thursday, voter turnout was at record highs—72 percent, higher than in last year's general election. Within hours, prime minister David Cameron, who led the Remain side, had announced he would resign. Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn was facing a party vote of no confidence. The pound had fallen to its lowest level against the dollar since 1985, and people were dancing in the streets of various European capitals and calling for referenda of their own.
"It was a noble idea for its time," said the former conservative London mayor Boris Johnson, Cameron's rival since their days together at Eton, and now his probable successor. "It is no longer right for this country." The universe of what is politically possible has expanded—and not just for Britain.
Remain was backed by the leaderships of all three major parties, not just Cameron's Conservatives but also Labour and the Liberal Democrats. Yet British people have never particularly liked the European Union, and Remain never aspired to convince them to. Instead, in an extraordinarily well-funded and well-choreographed campaign, it trundled out one high-ranking functionary after another to warn that outright catastrophe would befall the U.K. should it retake control of its political destiny. Cameron and his colleagues coordinated anti-Leave interventions by the IMF, various economists, and even Barack Obama, who, during a visit, threatened to discipline an independent Britain by sending it to the "back of the queue" on trade relations.
People derided this coordinated effort as "Project Fear," but it was highly effective. This created a rallying and broadening of the establishment. Even the usually conservative Mail on Sunday made its peace with the EU, editorializing: "The great chorus of economists, businessmen, educators, historians, scientists and others who have urged that we remain in the EU cannot simply be brushed off as if their opinions are so much babble."
Brushing off those opinions was exactly what Leave intended to do and, ultimately, succeeded in doing. As Leave saw it, those whom Remain called "experts" were nothing more than what voters in a more democratic age used to call "bosses" and "elites." The conduct of the EU's leaders provided eloquent proof. European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker spent half his time urging Britain to unite with its European partners in brotherhood, love and solidarity; and half the time, warning that, should it decide to leave the EU, he would personally see to it that the country was chopped off at its knees. What is more, he insisted, there would be "no kind of renegotiation" of any agreements on immigration even should Britain opt for remain.
The well-read Tory cabinet minister Michael Gove reacted to this daily procession of prominent naysayers by citing an anecdote about Albert Einstein, whose theories had been denounced in the late days of the Weimar Republic, in a book called A Hundred Authors Against Einstein. Einstein replied, "If they were right, one would have been enough." To his old ally Cameron, this was likening Remain to Nazis. Cameron said Gove had "lost it." Ultimately fear was all the Remain side had.
But the Leave side did not have much more. Leave was split, rather like the Republican party of the Reagan era, between sunny free-trading libertarians like Gove and former London mayor Boris Johnson (who joined a movement called Vote Leave), and romantic pessimists, like Nigel Farage of the U.K. Independence party (who rallied behind a group called Leave.eu). This split worked to Leave's benefit. Voters in politically correct Britain, who would be embarrassed to associate with UKIP, could identify themselves with Johnson and Gove's cosmopolitans, but the issue that really rallied many of them to the Leave cause was immigration, and it was only Farage who dared mention it.
Net migration into England is perceived as being out of control. It runs to over 370,000 people a year, most of it from non-EU countries. On Wednesday June 15, Farage unveiled a poster reading "Breaking Point"—it showed mobs of Middle Eastern migrants moving across Europe towards Britain. Not a good word was said about it in the press but it made its impression. The only solution the EU has proposed for stopping this migrant flow is accelerating negotiations to bring Muslim Turkey into the Union, a process Cameron supports. Cameron could not assuage voter fears about that. Remain called it racist even to discuss such things, but it was evidently out of desperation. The migration issue was swinging polls sharply towards Leave.
And then, the following day, the whole narrative of the campaign changed. Jo Cox, a young and pretty Labour party member with a bent for solidarity campaigns abroad and multiculturalism in Britain, was murdered on the street in her Yorkshire constituency by a psychopath with ties to American neo-Nazis. The incident very much resembled the attack on US congresswoman Gabby Giffords in 2011, and it left Britons even more shaken. Two strong narratives had been established in the campaign—Remain evoked fear of chaos, Leave evoked fear of foreigners—and here was an event that seemed to support the former. If Leave had ever had a chance, it seemed to evaporate with Cox's death.
It turned out not to be decisive. Apparently there was too much at stake. Odd as it sounds, there were always signs that Britons wanted to leave. Although most polls showed roughly equal numbers voting for each side, very different results emerged when the Independent newspaper asked people how the results would make them feel. Forty-four percent said they would be "delighted" with a Leave vote and only 28 percent would be delighted with Remain. Only 33 percent said they would be "disappointed" with an exit from the EU, versus 44 percent who said they would be disappointed staying in. The referendum resembled many such mimetic phenomena in which a people tries to work up its gumption against its elites. It is possible that two-thirds of the country wanted to leave the EU. They just didn't know whether they had elites' permission to want it.
But there were sharp divisions in how those attitudes were spread. Remain seemed to be a coalition of those who owned second homes and those for whom English was a second language. A YouGov poll showed that voters who could be described as upper-class favored Remain, 53 percent to 38 percent. What you could call working-class people were for Leave, 52 to 29. Remain won in rich London 60 to 40, and its top 3 English results came in the heavily immigrant boroughs of Lambeth, Haringey and Hackney. When Boris Johnson emerged from his house in London to head to Vote Leave headquarters, he was met by what the BBC called a "sea of boos." Remain also won Brighton, the university towns of Oxford and Cambridge, and the immigrant hubs of Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool as well as Scotland and Northern Ireland. Leave won overwhelmingly everywhere else—by margins running as high as 75 percent in parts of Lincolnshire.
At midday on Thursday, the leader of Scotland's devolved government warned that she would not see her country taken out of the EU against its will and said she had been in touch with Sadiq Khan, London's newly elected Muslim mayor, who had shared her sentiments. Such political moves were a more important and more ominous story than the various shifts in the market that the media have grown used to prioritizing—the fall the pound, the drop in home-building stocks, both of which seemed to be moderating by midday, anyway. These can be seen as merely the responsible revaluing of a mispriced asset: democratic consent.
It is worth remembering that that asset has been mispriced in every Western country, and that in all of them some turbulence will result from the British decision to leave. There will be rejoicing in the streets of Athens. In Italy last week, the populist, Euroskeptic Five-Star movement took the mayor's office in Rome and Turin. Forty-eight percent of Italians—who helped found the EU—now say they would leave if they could. Fifty-eight percent of the French want their own referendum.
And consider the United States. There was a debate on the Tuesday before the vote pitting Johnson and two Leave MPs on the side against Khan and two Remain leaders. It may have tipped the balance. Khan had little to offer but invective and shaming, accusing the other side of "lies." His sidekick, the Scottish Remainer Ruth Davidson, deferred to Obama's remarks about sending Britain to the back of the queue. But the Leavers scored points when talking about migration, bureaucracy and economics. "The European Union has 10,000 officials who earn more than the English prime minister," MP Andrea Leadsom reminded voters, "and you're paying for them." Johnson sought to dispel worries that Europe would erect tariff barriers against an independent U.K. by noting that Germans exported a fifth of their automobiles there. Did anyone serious believe they would be so stupid as to endanger that?
Indeed, Johnson's view was confirmed the day before the vote by Markus Kerber of the Germany's federal body of industries, Kerber said it would be "very, very foolish" to raise tariff barriers. This is a version of Donald Trump's notorious view that Mexico "would pay for a wall" on the U.S. border. It amounts to saying that, contrary to recent financial orthodoxy, governments consider a trade surplus an asset worth protecting. One hopes now that talk about "legacies"—which politicians indulge in with such Promethean arrogance—will now die down a bit. Legacies get figured out by historians, not by history's actors, to whom they are unknowable. The UKIP leader Nigel Farage, the founding father of the idea of British departure from the EU, can no longer be dismissed as a clown, as he was almost universally in the British press until 24 hours ago. He is a political figure of major dimensions.
Everything is being revalued. Political institutions, too. Economic issues, fear, immigration—these all caught Britons' attention and rallied them to the polls. But at its core this was a battle over definitions of democracy and freedom. This may have been Britain's last chance to exit peacefully and democratically from a democr[b]acy-destroying, elite-flattering, and inequality-producing machine. You can say that Britain finds itself in a constitutional crisis today, but that crisis was revealed, not created, by the referendum vote. Most U.K. citizens repudiate the claim of foreign bureaucrats to rule them, and yet, on what turns out to be the defining issue of British politics in this generation, 478 of its elected members of Parliament favored Remain, and only 159 Leave. That will change.[/b]
Britain is, as David Cameron said in his resignation statement, a "special country." Its citizens are going to pay a price for flouting markets and European bureaucracies. They have gambled that what they now recover—control of their own laws—makes that price worth paying. Look at their history. They are probably right. |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
 |
TorontoToronto
Joined: 20 Jun 2016
|
| Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2016 7:12 am Post subject: |
|
|
| Older people voted overwhelmingly for leave. I find it amusing or maybe sad older people really just voted for a major hit to their pensions. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Swartz
Joined: 19 Dec 2014
|
| Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2016 12:02 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| TorontoToronto wrote: |
| Older people voted overwhelmingly for leave. I find it amusing or maybe sad older people really just voted for a major hit to their pensions. |
And they probably find it sad that people like yourself are unable to understand that there were more important factors at play than pensions. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
TorontoToronto
Joined: 20 Jun 2016
|
| Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2016 4:26 am Post subject: |
|
|
| Swartz wrote: |
| TorontoToronto wrote: |
| Older people voted overwhelmingly for leave. I find it amusing or maybe sad older people really just voted for a major hit to their pensions. |
And they probably find it sad that people like yourself are unable to understand that there were more important factors at play than pensions. |
Probably. Time will tell if the positives outweigh the negatives.
Last edited by TorontoToronto on Tue Jun 28, 2016 7:41 am; edited 1 time in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Rteacher
Joined: 23 May 2005
Location: Western MA, USA
|
| Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2016 5:39 am Post subject: |
|
|
Reports of (even older) people acting xenophobically and racistly ... https://www.yahoo.com/news/brexit-post-ref-racism-000000858.html
"... Older woman on the 134 bus gleefully telling a young Polish woman and her baby to get off and get packing.Horrific..."
"... Woman in an Enfield bank shouting 'this is England we're white get out of my country'..."
“I’ve spent most of the weekend talking to organizations, individuals and activists who work in the area of race hate crime, who monitor hate crime, and they have shown some really disturbing early results from people being stopped in the street and saying, ‘Look, we voted ‘leave.’ It’s time for you to leave,’” Sayeeda Warsi, former Conservative Party chair, told Sky News. “And they are saying this to individuals and families who have been here for three, four, five generations. The atmosphere on the street is not good.” |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Swartz
Joined: 19 Dec 2014
|
| Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2016 10:19 am Post subject: |
|
|
| TorontoToronto wrote: |
| Swartz wrote: |
| TorontoToronto wrote: |
| Older people voted overwhelmingly for leave. I find it amusing or maybe sad older people really just voted for a major hit to their pensions. |
And they probably find it sad that people like yourself are unable to understand that there were more important factors at play than pensions. |
Probably. Time will tell if the positives outweigh the negatives. |
Any move towards nationalism is a good thing. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Swartz
Joined: 19 Dec 2014
|
| Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2016 10:22 am Post subject: |
|
|
| Rteacher wrote: |
Reports of (even older) people acting xenophobically and racistly ... https://www.yahoo.com/news/brexit-post-ref-racism-000000858.html
"... Older woman on the 134 bus gleefully telling a young Polish woman and her baby to get off and get packing.Horrific..."
"... Woman in an Enfield bank shouting 'this is England we're white get out of my country'..."
“I’ve spent most of the weekend talking to organizations, individuals and activists who work in the area of race hate crime, who monitor hate crime, and they have shown some really disturbing early results from people being stopped in the street and saying, ‘Look, we voted ‘leave.’ It’s time for you to leave,’” Sayeeda Warsi, former Conservative Party chair, told Sky News. “And they are saying this to individuals and families who have been here for three, four, five generations. The atmosphere on the street is not good.” |
Sayeeda Warsi … what's that, Welsh?
I'd bet at least one of those stories is a lie, but I hope they're all true. Those are good signs that the English people might finally be un-cucking themselves and becoming unafraid to express their national will/interests openly.
“Xenophobia” and “racism” are not words that represent bad things; they are words that convey the most natural of human instincts. (((Liberals))) use them as top-down projections to make the goyim police each other and feel guilty, because they want to limit the likelihood of the people rising up and overthrowing the dual-citizens and traitors sanctioning their displacement through immivasion. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Rteacher
Joined: 23 May 2005
Location: Western MA, USA
|
| Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2016 10:59 am Post subject: |
|
|
| Nationalism needs to be distinguished from patriotism. Although patriotism - the willingness of a person to defend his/her country's ideals (i.e. equal justice for all) and right to self-determination - is a positive thing, nationalism is based on negative feelings/ideas (i.e. racial/religious superiority) and leads to aggression towards other countries ... |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
TorontoToronto
Joined: 20 Jun 2016
|
| Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2016 11:04 am Post subject: |
|
|
| Swartz wrote: |
| Any move towards nationalism is a good thing. |
I disagree. I agree with Rteacher's distinction above. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Swartz
Joined: 19 Dec 2014
|
| Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2016 11:34 am Post subject: |
|
|
| Rteacher wrote: |
| Nationalism needs to be distinguished from patriotism. Although patriotism - the willingness of a person to defend his/her country's ideals (i.e. equal justice for all) and right to self-determination - is a positive thing, nationalism is based on negative feelings/ideas (i.e. racial/religious superiority) and leads to aggression towards other countries ... |
Nationalism is based on positive feelings about ones own people and the land that belongs to them. It does not lead to aggression against others, but it might (and should) if traitors within aggressively move others into their national homeland, in which case counter-aggression is justified. Civic nationalism is a facade.
| TorontoToronto wrote: |
| I disagree |
I have a feeling your disagreement pertains to your own lack of ethnic or national identity, perhaps brought about because of the reality in that multicultural utopia of Toronto, which you are now trying to flee. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
TorontoToronto
Joined: 20 Jun 2016
|
| Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2016 11:58 am Post subject: |
|
|
| Swartz wrote: |
| I have a feeling your disagreement pertains to your own lack of ethnic or national identity, perhaps brought about because of the reality in that multicultural utopia of Toronto, which you are now trying to flee. |
I don't think so. But you're welcome to your own opinion on this matter. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
catman
Joined: 18 Jul 2004
|
| Posted: Sun Jul 03, 2016 6:24 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| I see there has been a sharp spike in hate crimes since the Brexit vote. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
bigverne
Joined: 12 May 2004
|
| Posted: Sun Jul 03, 2016 10:44 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| Quote: |
| I see there has been a sharp spike in hate crimes since the Brexit vote. |
Some of these 'hate crimes' are the result of people calling the police and complaining about Nigel Farage.
Maurice Mason was speaking to the assembled councillors at Thurrock Council on Wednesday night, according to Your Thurrock, and revealed that 46 complaints of hate crimes across the county since last Friday had been logged. This is the “spike” that is being referred to in the mainstream media.
But some of the incidents are as simple as people calling the police to complain about the UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage.
“Some members of the public complaining about Nigel Farage, or whatever, that will get recorded as a hate crime no matter what it is. If the person feels its a hate crime it will get recorded as a hate crime”.
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/06/30/revealed-rise-hate-crimes-includes-people-phoning-police-complain-nigel-farage-says-police-chief/
Some other incidents are about as believable as the 'poop swastika' at Mizzou.
Here is an actual hate crime, the victims white, the suspect black. But black on white violence is so common, so ordinary, and so anti-narrative, that the media prefers to report 'horrific' incidents of people being told to 'go home.' Truly horrifying stuff.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3606210/Teenage-boy-blinded-one-eye-four-suffered-burns-strangers-threw-acid-waited-train.html |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
trueblue
Joined: 15 Jun 2014
Location: In between the lines
|
| Posted: Mon Jul 04, 2016 8:19 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| catman wrote: |
| I see there has been a sharp spike in hate crimes since the Brexit vote. |
Well, I guess the thought police will show up any minute, to question me regarding the thought of you being full of it. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
trueblue
Joined: 15 Jun 2014
Location: In between the lines
|
| Posted: Tue Jul 05, 2016 3:12 pm Post subject: |
|
|
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/07/the_real_meaning_of_brexit.html
| Quote: |
July 5, 2016
The real meaning of Brexit
By Anthony Bright-Paul
On June 23, 2016, Great Britain voted to rule itself. I have got to repeat that. Britain voted to rule itself. I have to repeat it even to myself. The Remain camp wanted Great Britain to be ruled by 28 members of a secret cabal called the Commission. Every trick in the book was used to obscure the main issue. Were we to be ruled by Brussels/Strasbourg, or were we to make our own laws at Westminster?
We were promised by the Remain camp that the economy would take a hit – they were right. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. The markets fell, and the markets climbed back. Some traders made a packet; some companies’ values fell. Nothing really new in that, since the value of companies is always rising and falling. The Stock Exchange is a gamblers’ paradise.
The dust of conflict has not yet settled, and surely it will take some time for it to settle, for the simple reason that many people had not even been aware that we as a nation no longer ruled ourselves. We had our own Parliament – of course, we ruled ourselves. Alas, that simply was not true. We were under the dominion of a foreign body called the EU, whose laws pre-empted our laws, whose Courts were superior to our Courts.
It all happened by stealth, by bits and pieces, by treaties like Maastricht, so that the man in the street hardly noticed that his liberties were being eroded piece by piece. Regulations appeared from Brussels, and suddenly they were law. Companies were bound down with useless and time-consuming red tape, and there was no recourse. There was nobody to appeal to. We were under the dominion of a body that could simply demand from us any amount of money that it chose.
Not what we as a nation chose, but what Herr Juncker and his 27 commissars chose. It is useless for the Remainders to argue that it was a lie to say that we were and are presently paying into the EU some £350 million a week, since we get some of it back as a rebate, since these figures can clearly be looked up on the internet.
Let us be clear, then. We are taxed by our own government, we are taxed by our local authority, and in addition we have given a blank cheque to the EU to tax us for whatever they deem to be a budget to support their overweening bureaucracy. Bit by bit, our liberties were taken away.
Some people now argue that the Referendum was unfair. While over 17 million voted to leave the EU, some 15 million voted to remain. So the Remain camp feels deprived. However, let us imagine what the result would have been if the Referendum question had been worded differently.
Do you wish to be governed by Brussels/Strasbourg?
Do you wish to be governed by Parliament at Westminster?
Had the question been phrased in this manner, can anyone doubt that the vote for self-governance would have been overwhelming? Could any warm-blooded Englishman or Scotsman, for that matter, have ever voted to be ruled by a foreign entity, however benign it may have seemed? Of course not! The vote would have been 85% to 15%, which is why the Independents have to make clear their case, even though they have won. For it is imperative that the British people understand just what they have achieved and let it not slip from their hands through ignorance of the realities.
So Nicola Sturgeon flies over to Brussels to plead that Scotland wishes to be subject to Brussels but independent of England, but she wants to keep the £ sterling. What sort of mishmash is that? She is a feisty young lady, but logic is hardly her strong suit.
Others get hung up on the immigration issue. Those poor immigrants, risking their lives and trudging through Europe – for pity’s sake, help them! Of course, no question!
But that is not the question. The question is, “Does our Parliament decide on the question of immigration or does the EU? Does our government, however bad or good, govern our country, or have we surrendered to the EU?”
That is the crux. We are either a puppet state with a puppet prime minister and a puppet parliament, or we are a sovereign state under the Crown. There are arguments both ways, but one way is treason. |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
|
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum
|
|
FAQ
Search
Memberlist
Usergroups
Register
Profile
Log in to check your private messages
Log in
