Wasn’t sure whether you were coming from the other side in your original comment 
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When the referendum was proposed, I instinctively wanted to remain.
Because certain people from all points of the political spectrum wanted to leave, I wanted to actually look at the argument properly.
I don’t think there was ever enough genuine, detailed information made available to even make a truly informed decision. Holding a referendum largely based on bullshit marketing campaigns was unforgivable imo.
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We had to spend about £700 on a carnet (list of all equipment you are exporting)
That’s £700 purely for paper work??
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I can’t disagree. I had a big falling out with my Mum over Christmas when I (half heartedly) suggested that those in retirement perhaps shouldn’t be allowed to vote on meaningful “long term” decisions. I guess I said it out of frustration but the stats don’t lie on things like Brexit & Scotland’s referendum from a few years back - youth vote very differently to those in retirement/pensioners and I don’t think the latter truly realise how much they need the youth onside or how unjust it is to rob them of significant future opportunities.
Without derailing things, much of the shit show we are living through can be linked in some way to batshit crazy behaviours and decisions through the late 70s and 80s. And who was in government during that period…
Anyway, I’m at least 15 years away from retirement. I wonder if I’ll remember how I feel just now for the next big crisis vote in however many years time. I sure hope so as I really don’t want to be that old bastard (sorry Mum) that is blind to reality with fingers in ears going “la la la” while flag shagging away until death.
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It’s obviously shit, not that the hardcore Leavers will ever admit it.
I don’t only blame Cameron and the Tories for the result, though. Jeremy Corbyn has a lot to answer for - his lukewarm support for the Remain campaign (he put nowhere near as much energy into it as he did for his actual causes) didn’t help, neither did his bizarre insistence on the morning after the referendum that Article 50 had to be enacted immediately. (Boy oh boy, his supporters have VERY selective memories…)
The EU also has a lot to answer for. Cameron went to them a few months before the referendum, expecting that he would be able to come back with a few meaningful concessions that he could use as part of the Remain campaign. He returned with basically nothing. EU arrogance at the time led to them being sure that we’d never vote to leave.
Who remembers Johnson and Gove’s horrified expressions when they realised they’d won? True believers, they were not.
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I take your point and appreciate that, and, if you feel the need fair enough. 
I feel that the majority of people here would be on the same page about it overall though.
The motivation for this thread came from the Marketplace Sell category… it’s so frustrating to now be completely isolated to FS(UK) and not able to simply partake in buying and selling with our FS(EU) mates BECAUSE of (pathetic populist) politics.
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Actually let’s delve a bit deeper. I see brexit as the harbinger of the death of free will.
Brexit was the vessel for Cambridge Analytica’s ascent to western notoriety (though they had been fucking about in the developing world doing portfolio projects for a while previously). What Camridge Analytica did was technically impressive, and ethically horrifying, and was an even more significant example of the importance of data privacy than the Snowden leaks.
The Snowden leaks showed that the CIA was/is systematically harvesting incomprehensibe quantities of data from systems that were supposedly “secure”. The Cambridge Analytica scandal showed us what that actually means; what kind of power can be weilded with that kind of data. Elections can be won by simply exploiting more data, subtly manipulating multiple, disparate groups of individuals simultaneously with extremely targeted campaigns based on inferrence.
Inferrence is the principle of inferring new data points from an existing data set. For example, if I volunteer information on my gender, location, occupation, age, and so on, it’s conceivable that someone could have a decent enough guess at one of my hobbies or interests. With huge data sets and machine learning algos, that becomes trivial to do, and highly accurate. This means that while you may only allow a certain number of permissions or data points to a tech platform, they will actually know a lot more about you than just that. Plus, they can trade this data with others, which allows them to build an even larger profile on your over time. Before you know it, these entities have a huge bundle of inferred data; they know your innermost thougths and fears, and those of your friends and family, and your boss, and your doctor and so on.
CA’s implementation of this was pretty rudimentary compared to what’s around today. This was pre-GPT, pre-DALL-E, pre-TikTok etc. Technology (and especially AI) is advancing exponentially, and now when I visit my in-laws, their doorbell takes the biometric data from my face and sends it to a third party with whom I have no contract, and who now knows my whereabouts, hair colour, age, height, associates, and even my name (if I’ve been set up as a ‘known person’ on the doorbell software).
We are on the brink of being unable to guarantee that our thoughts and actions are our own, rather than the product of a series of sub-perceptible nudges made by a third-party with a vested interest. We may already be there; we wouldn’t know if we were.
Brexit showed this in action. It works. It was a brilliant demonstration of how well it works, and it was done with tech that pales in comparison to what’s out there now, only a few years later. If this doesn’t make you want to delete Facebook, I don’t know what will.
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I’ve heard some on the news today… the ‘head above the fence’ leaver common line is ‘well Brexit has never been delivered like it should have been…’, which just adds to the annoyance that they still don’t get it. But, I partly feel sorry for these people tbh. You know, stupid people don’t tend to know they’re stupid.
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It’s frustrating that they were obviously sold a lie originally, but if anything it’s more frustrating that now that lie can metamorphose into any number of excuses.
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Honestly the important thing is to recognise that a lot of leave voters were victims. If they’d all been waterboarded into voting leave we wouldn’t treat them with such disdain, but in a way they were kind of intellectually waterboarded. It was a very deliberate and very effective domestic psy-op campaign, which is now well documented. This is the kind of shit that MK ULTRA could never dream of accomplishing.
We really should be considering what kind of subsequent operations are happening now or in the future, and what we can do to protect ourselves from this as a society.
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A non binding vote that had no detail, interoperated by a few who read the minds of 80 Million people and said what they really wanted was to crash out completely and as soon as possible with no plan. After ‘selling England by the Pound’ for so long they had nothing less but to cause populist chaos and engage in disaster economics.
The greatest con trick of all time- ‘ever get the feeling you’ve been ripped off’! RIP UK.
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The carnet itself is about £350, but you also need special insurance for all the equipment on it, OR a deposit of the full value of the equipment.
Needless to say, we didn’t have the money to cover the deposit for two bands/9 people worth of equipment.
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I didn’t get to vote, some personal observations nonetheless: spending money in the UK, i.e., ordering stuff online, has become a lot more difficult, time consuming and generally annoying for me as a EU citizen. Delivery times have skyrocketed, there are import duties and handling fees on things as mundane as magazines and in one case I had to visit my local customs office to pick up (and pay for the import of) a … …T shirt. Most UK shop owners I spoke to didn’t seem to pleased with the additional hoops they have to jump through to serve EU customers. On the other hand they were unanumously ecstatic about the 350 million pounds that are no longer being sent to the EU on a weekly basis and that are now used to make further improvements to the NHS. All in all I’d say everyone wins.
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Unfortunately it is the same the other way around: Coming from EU (Germany in this case) and entering UK for work is tied to a carnet, which only covers equipment worth of max. 24999,99€. You can imagine that this threshold is overstepped very quickly…the insurances for anything above that are insanely high, plus you need a patronage from a bank as a proof. You cannot go over that threshold legally if you are freelancer, only companies with net worth of several thousand € are allowed to…
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Think that another referendum may see the slight majority tip the other way were there ever to be another vote.
Always been amused by the somewhat lazy stereotyping of it being a right / left vote though as the likes of Benn and Corbyn were hardly EU enthusiasts for much of their political careers.
G
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Ughh, man that’s madness.
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Unfortunately that’s what will lead to its demise … folk aren’t on the same page, and the ‘other’ opinion is being slaughtered with OTT caricaturing - I fucking hate everything about it, but it doesn’t make it a viable conversation here - the flags will come, then it’s a matter of time
shouting in an echo chamber may make folk feel better, but it changes nothing and merely creates divisions which permeate elsewhere on the forum … we all lose, for no gain ! (Brexit TM)
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Who had “it was Corbyn’s fault” on their bingo card?
Accurate data showed that Corbyn attended far more campaign events than any other MP I believe. It was another great bit of media bias to lay the blame on him though. All they had to do was ignore any campaign events he did, then let everyone believe he wasn’t doing any.
There are plenty of bits he did wrong, but lack of campaigning was not one of them.
On the second part, none of this is the fault of the EU. The UK had pretty much the best deal out of any country in it, yet we consistently complain(ed) while at the same time most of our MEP’s couldn’t even be bothered to turn up a lot of the time.
Cameron only went there to satisfy members of the Tory party, then only called the referendum to shut them up when they still kept complaining. He didn’t believe there was any chance the vote would go the way he did. Hence not even bothering to put any limitations on it (like 50% of the population need to vote for the change for example).
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