I think having a referendum where we have more options than remain or “every conceivable idea about leaving the EU all as one option” would have produced more coherence.
I’m past caring at this point. We have the authoritarians and xenophobes marching us off a cliff, and centrists suggesting that if we march a little bit slower it will somehow make things better. It’s not just Brexit, it’s climate change and sociopathic capitalism too. Dark humour stops me from feeling like killing myself for a little while.
Anything to make sure I wake up in the morning. I still don’t know if I will lose access to my medication if they begin rationing it, and that will make my life a lot worse.
Also, my strong dislike of Iain Duncan-Smith goes back 9 years now, ever since he started his campaign of hate against disabled people. His actions have killed people, mine haven’t
And yet Britain chose that hard border when it invoked Article 50.
That was a known consequence at the time.
Parliament will never approve a deal that leaves the EU border in Ireland open, because that would defeat the whole point of Leaving, and too many MP’s want to Leave.
It doesn’t matter whether Parliament deliberately chooses a Hard Brexit or not. Hard Brexit is the default Brexit. The clock is running out, and Britain will leave with no deal, and there will be a hard border in Ireland, and everybody will be sad.
I wasn’t trying to make any big claim about the modern German use (the use being objected to was in English, after all), just that the word’s been around forever in multiple languages.
The original complaint just made it sound like it was some sort of Soviet invention that was unclean, and that’s a bit much. In english use, it just means a group (of countries or whatever) working together, like alliance, coalition, partnership, organization, whatever. It’s no more or less monolithic than those.
It’s like not wanting to call Ben&Jerry’s a “company” because the word came from the military.
With a PR system i find it unlikely we’d have ever gotten to this point.
The fundamental problem here is a broken excuse for democracy: The FPTP voting system.
It basically reduces politics to a two party system with a massive inbuilt bias against any other parties…
If the party with the most funding then infiltrates the second largest, they can effectively control the whole thing: IE the recent UK setup: Vote for Tories / lesser Tories or your vote is ignored by FPTP and you get Tories anyway…
Indeed… and yet there was the promise of things that would or would not happen from the leave campaign and included a promised unicorn for everyone. Of course there will be a hard border under a no deal and people will be a little more than sad i’d say, there will likely be violence. The leave bullshitters also promise a soft border with technological solutions that haven’t been invented yet.
LutherBlisset complained that the NY Times (and others) refers to the EU as a bloc of countries, which, in proper English, it is.
That doesn’t mean that the NY Times is saying that Germany and France and Greece don’t exist as wildly different countries, any more than the thousands of other times, over generations, that they have used the word “bloc” to describe some grouping of countries.
I was just responding to a comment that seemed super-disturbed about what is a very boring and traditionally used term.
Yup. Mine goes further; back to his 90s days of villifying single mothers. He’s an irredeemable shit, who has reduced actual people Iknow and love to penury across generations with his Fuckwitted, spiteful plans. I, too, most assuredly actively wish him harm.
It was a known consequence way before Article 50 was invoked. The likes of Gove and Johnson pooh-poohed any such risk during the campaign, because they were incapable properly understanding it and/or of finding a resolution (other than magical unicorn shit). So it was easier for them to stick their fingers in their ears and deny any such possibility. There is no hell hot enough for these wankers.
People have already died (though I completely agree that probably more will follow) because of anti-immigrant brexit rhetoric. For example a citizen of Poland living in UK was brutally murdered only because of his nationality.
Quite the opposite. The Eastern bloc didn’t speak of itself as Eastern bloc. The term was coined in The West™.
It is a union. No-one would call the US a bloc.
I asked if anyone has the same confused and concerned feeling about this as I do. You clearly do not. However, I don’t follow your argument, so we can happily agree to disagree on this.
Let’s not forget that the POS brexiter Arron Banks ignored the agreed end of campaigning because of her murder. Or that most of the brexit related violence (if not all) has come from far-right hard brexiters. Or the massive increase in reported crimes from minority victims. Why the fuck are we letting these people get their way while the mostly peaceful remainers are repeatedly told no?
Pacifists are looking more like doormats every day. Is it any wonder some of us are resorting to dark humour about guillotines?
No one did. And no one would call any single country a bloc.
The EU is not a single country like the US. It is a group of countries. “Bloc” means a group with some common aims and sympathies, to me and to the New York Times. It can be a formal trade bloc like the EU, OPEC, the African Union, NAFTA (formerly). Bloc isn’t a pejorative, it’s literally the name people use. I admit I still don’t understand your concerned feelings about this common word, but I wish you all the best.
Very good point. In a PR reality, I suspect Leave would be more popular among the MPs, but ironically enough, that might have prevented the Conservative PM from allowing a referendum that was meant to put a stake in the heart of “Leave” forever. If he’d actually thought there was any chance of “Leave” winning, he might have not had the referendum in the first place.
(We Canadians had our own play of a leader “rolling the dice” and losing, leaving a crisis that haunted for decades. Except in this case, our PM’s reputation somehow survived it, even if it annihilated his party. In the UK, the party survives, even it it buried the career and reputation of the PM.)
The level of stupid and pointless kicking the can down the road is really something to behold. Especially since it’s clear that there’s only one vote that will clear this up decisively one way or another, and that it ultimately won’t take place within the confines of Westminster.
There really only seem to be two plausible outcomes at this point.
Either it gets called off last minute, or they run out the clock and it’s the hardest of hard Brexits.
There doesn’t seem to be too many seriously pushing the former. The bulk of parliament seem more interested in demonstrating their opposition to the latter, while not technically doing anything to stop it.
