Via valued commenter Origuy, a song for Brexit:
And from valued commenter Humboldtblue, a second-hand quote that looks to the bright side: “The last time the UK economy went into the shitter we got The Clash, the Psychedelic Furs, The Pogues, The Smiths and Simply Red.”
I’m seeing lots of “watch out Americans, Brexit passage means Trump could win.” Eh. I agree some Brexit supporters were animated by the same xenophobic, brain-dead nostalgia that motivates the Trumpenproletariat.
But while Brexit had many odious supporters, it is a concept, whereas Trumpism is embodied in the bloated, shambling, narcissistic Circus Peanut that gives it name. At least that’s how it looks from this side of the pond…to me.
Krugman has thoughts on Brexit:
…I’m finding myself less horrified by Brexit than one might have expected – in fact, less than I myself expected. The economic consequences will be bad, but not, I’d argue, as bad as many are claiming. The political consequences might be much more dire; but many of the bad things I fear would probably have happened even if Remain had won.
-snip-
Where I think there has been real additional damage done, damage that wouldn’t have happened but for Cameron’s policy malfeasance, is within the UK itself. I am of course not an expert here, but it looks all too likely that the vote will both empower the worst elements in British political life and lead to the breakup of the UK itself. Prime Minister Boris looks a lot more likely than President Donald; but
he may find himself Prime Minister of England – full stop.So calm down about the shortrun macroeconomics; grieve for Europe, but you should have been doing that already; worry about Britain.
Huh. Your thoughts?
Baud
I knew someone would go there
comrade scott's agenda of rage
Once again, ‘Life of Brian’ explains it best:
http://imgur.com/gallery/1TCxMOV
“Peace? SHUTUP!”
raven
Another Country
Electric Flag
“If I could lose
All my troubles
By running away
No, no I wouldn’t stay
No I wouldn’t
But they just keep on
Hangin’ ’round me
And won’t go away
No, no won’t go away
It just ain’t fair
No, no, no
It just ain’t fair
This whole year
Has been a blunder
Yes I’ve lost my sense of wonder
And there are no sweet warm love birds to turn to
I have no one to call brother
On every street
In the city
Well you’ll get afraid
Yes so afraid
You can’t see
Past the surface
Of plans that I made to drive you insane
Everywhere, everyday
You won’t even want to find yourself a place to hide
And you’ll be hurt so many times
You’ll lose your love of nursery rhymes
Get the safest room you can find
And lock the door
Find yourself another country
Trentrunner
Best UK twitter insult to Trump: “You ludicrous tangerine ballsack.”
schrodinger's cat
deleted because I can’t edit my comment.
redshirt
I agree with Krugman; this might not be as bad as I feared yesterday, if a united Ireland and Independent (and in the EU) Scotland are the result.
I just hope it doesn’t lead to other countries in the EU to try the same thing – the right wingers in France will do their best, I’m sure. When Russia is gleefully celebrating this vote, it ought to make you think.
Also, counter to pundit claims, I think Brexit makes Trump even less likely.
schrodinger's cat
Its ironic that Brits don’t want people from other countries to live and work in their country, considering how many other countries their ancestors were uninvited guests to. This own goal is going to hurt them more than anyone else. Can’t say I feel too bad.
Baud
It’s hard to see the actual political separation of the UK from the EU as being all that economically significant for the US over the long run unless we are about to enter into a period of trade wars. I agree that the main significance will be sociopolitical.
Iowa Old Lady
@Baud: I actually wondered that at the gym this morning as we exercised to ABBA.
Leto
‘If you’ve got money, you vote in … if you haven’t got money, you vote out’: Brexit is about more than the EU: it’s about class, inequality, and voters feeling excluded from politics. So how do we even begin to put Britain the right way up?
redshirt
On the other hand, and feel free to talk me off the ledge, I feel like world civilization has been degrading since 9/11. Hate and fear seem to ever increase, stability and peace seem ever more rare, and the forces of chaos seem on the upswing. Which is tragic, as I used to think in the late 90’s the world was on a very optimistic trend towards global peace and prosperity.
Osama really did win, big time. The West is devolving because of that attack (but really the response to the attack).
Applejinx
Indeed. Krugman is right. The thing is, Remain policies were already killing the UK so it’s insane to suggest that Brexit will do all this damage. It is very disruptive to the status quo of the Eurozone. The status of Britons? Already extremely bad due to austerity politics and death-of-capitalism bullshit.
I don’t think the racists get to claim a mandate for racism, any more than apologists get to pin it all on racists. What Krugman has pointed out is that Eurozone economies are already pillaged and looted by banksters and the whole thing is in the process of collapsing. In that light, Brexit is indeed a vote of no confidence.
Globalization isn’t working when it’s dedicated to furthering the wealth of bankers and ‘investors’ (what is even to invest in, anymore? Oh, right: London real estate. WHOOPS! XD )
schrodinger's cat
@Baud: For an economy as large as the United States this will be like a bug bite.
redshirt
@Baud: It might affect some US financial concerns in terms of HQ’s and staffing, but that’s minor. I agree this is not a big deal economically for the US (it’s huge for the UK), but like you say, sociopolitically, it’s unsettling.
schrodinger's cat
What is Niall Ferguson saying about the Brexit? What about Sully? Are they crying in their tea?
Baud
@redshirt: The economies were a feel good time because the economy was good and the USSR had recently collapsed. 9/11 was bad and Bush’s response made it a million times worse. But I don’t really see that strong a connection between 9/11 and the 2008 economic collapse.
Gin & Tonic
Contrast this vote with the young (and some not-so-young) Ukrainians who’ve literally sacrificed their lives in the cause of joining the EU.
hitchhiker
@Trentrunner:
I just saw “weapons grade plum” and thought that was pretty good.
C. Isaac
I feel this isn’t so much about the economic issues, though those certainly won’t be kind to the English folks, but as mentioned the sociopolitical.
Seeing one of our best and oldest allies balkanize over this rank self inflicted stupidity over the next few years will not be something anyone rational will see as a good thing. All this while they’ll be engaged in less than amicable relationships with the rest of our allies in NATO and the EU.
It makes being the “leader of the free world” an even bigger pain in the ass when England, France, and Germany are all dickering over what happens economically between each other instead of dealing with problems like ISIS and Climate Change.
This, intrinsically, leads to a less safe world.
Baud
@schrodinger’s cat:
@redshirt:
In a strange way, the US economy might eventually benefit if we are able to play the UK off the EU in terms of trade. That’s speculative, of course. Too much uncertainty about what happens next.
Mnemosyne
So during this time of turmoil in Europe, we have a choice between a former Secretary of State who is extremely familiar with all of the issues and personally familiar with most of the players, and a loudmouth jackass who can’t even run a golf course in fucking Scotland.
And yet the loudmouth jackass is still going to get a majority of the white vote, because my people are stupid. Sigh.
redshirt
@Baud: The real estate bubble was fully encouraged by W. in order to conceal the fundamental weakness in the economy that he created. Iraq greatly added to this weakness.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@schrodinger’s cat:
Ferguson has been a staunch “stay” guy.
Baud
@redshirt: I guess I disagree. Even if there had been no 9/11 and no Iraq, I think they still would have encouraged the real estate bubble. I don’t disagree that Iraq made us weaker economically.
Betty Cracker
@Trentrunner: Brilliant. Buzzfeed has a collection here. I’m partial to “toupéd fucktrumpet.” I’ve always admired the Brits’ talent for clever insults.
hellslittlestangel
Well, it is a non-binding referendum. I think there’s a chance that Parliament will say, fuck this, and the people will say, yeah, maybe that’s not such a bad idea. There could be a whole lot of buyer’s remorse in the next couple of weeks.
Humdog
@redshirt: I get what you are feeling, it seems things are falling apart all over. But then again, look to history. When anarchists were assassinating our president or foreign leaders on either side of the 1900s, that surely looked like falling apart. When our government felt it was just fine to send soldiers to kill strikers and their families at Sunday picnics, that surely looked like things were falling apart. When the depression hit and we had zero social welfare programs to fall back on, that surely looked like all was falling apart.
We simply witness more of the crazy everywhere but I don’t see how we can say there is actually more crazy today. We have gotten better at filming and disseminating it.
And now we have one party fully committed to crazy. Maybe it is worse now after all.
Stan
With family origins in Scotland and Ireland…..I find myself wondering if Scotland will vote to get out of the UK now (seems more likely than not) and Northern Ireland will stay in, even though the border with the republic will now be an EU border.
redshirt
@hellslittlestangel: While that may be true, it looks like the EU is saying GTFO.
schrodinger's cat
@Betty Cracker: Their insults are the best, they deliver maximum hurt with minimum words. A talent jackals and hyenas of Balloon Juice appreciate and try to emulate.
Singular
@schrodinger’s cat: What the fuck? ~17 million out of a significantly larger population, voted for this, on the basis of lies and bullshit. But you “Can’t say I feel too bad.”
I’ve read BJ for a long time now, and I understand the focus is US politics But every so often, I am reminded that a sizeable chunk of the readership simply does not give a shit about anyone outside the states.
Leto
@Mnemosyne: I have a few coworkers who fall squarely into this category. They just absolutely cannot bring themselves to vote for Hillary (emailz! Benghazi! Made up 90’s talking pointz!) and, even though they’re continuing to see the shit show for offer on the other side, will still pull the R handle. I just can’t repel stupidity of that magnitude.
Villago Delenda Est
@schrodinger’s cat: All those terrible brown people they have now are a direct result of the Empire.
You broke it, you bought it, English pig-dogs.
schrodinger's cat
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage: I would think so. The man is an idiot and an apologist for the Empire.
schrodinger's cat
@Villago Delenda Est: I hear that they are even more upset with all the Poles and other East Europeans who don’t speak English well.
James E Powell
@schrodinger’s cat:
When I tried to edit a comment this week, I go a message that I was not authorized to do so. Did you get that?
schrodinger's cat
@Singular: Its not a natural calamity, they have made their own bed.
redshirt
@Humdog: Good points. I don’t mean to compare it to historic periods – we’re obviously far better off now then any other time in history.
I meant it more in terms of I feel the USA and the world was on a very positive trend in the late 90’s which has been completely demolished worldwide. The Middle East is a burning wreck, China is aggressively expanding influence, Russia is basically a rogue state, the EU is starting to break up, religious fundamentalism seems on the ascent everywhere, and oh yeah, the world is literally cooking and even though we know it, we can’t do anything about it.
It’s hard to be optimistic now when optimism seemed so natural in 1998.
Villago Delenda Est
@redshirt: The deserting coward’s craven insistence on putting the entire Great Mesopotamian Adventure “off-budget” tells you all you need to know about the economic impact of the illegal immoral totally unnecessary war of aggression the war criminal maggot launched.
OldDave
@raven: Thank you. Somewhere, I have that album.
schrodinger's cat
@James E Powell: Yep and has been happening since the latest “upgrade”.
Splitting Image
@Applejinx:
Leave voters are the strongest supporters of austerity in the UK. And they just voted for more and better austerity.
hellslittlestangel
@redshirt: Yes, but it’s a non-binding GTFO (as most are).
Villago Delenda Est
@schrodinger’s cat: Slavic Untermenschen. Where have we heard this song before?
GregB
@redshirt:
They say it is darkest just before the Apocalypse.
Mnemosyne
@Singular:
I think people would be more sympathetic if we were not currently facing a non-zero chance of President Donald Trump, to be elected by people with the exact same mentality as the “Leave” supporters.
Ridnik Chrome
Make no mistake, the UK just voted for chaos, and chaos is what they’re going to get. This is going to be bad policy implemented in the most ass-backwards possible way by grifters and charlatans. I expect it to go about as well as the Iraqi occupation did…
Snarki, child of Loki
@redshirt: “it looks like the EU is saying GTFO.”
After all the long whinging about the EU rules, and battering with handbags to get a ‘rebate’ on the fees, the EU is fully justified in responsing to the Brexit vote with “FINE! GTFO, then”
Brachiator
@redshirt:
A united Ireland might be preceded by an extremely violent civil war. Even an independent Scotland might see some harsh economic dislocations.
I’ve been listening to some of the BBC podcasts on Brexit. At this point, so early on, nobody knows nothing. But we are certainly headed for some interesting times.
redshirt
@hellslittlestangel: Heh. Well, since this is the first time this has happened, who knows how this will play out. I read that most MP’s are firmly in the Remain camp, and it’s up to them to make this happen. They could ignore this vote, but surely they’d pay for it politically. If the EU let’s them – I’ve read that it’s the leaving party that has to request to exit, but I’ve also read the EU is researching whether they can initiate it.
hedgehog mobile
@Betty Cracker: I like “mangled apricot hellbeast”. I needed that laugh.
Villago Delenda Est
@GregB: Somewhere Thanos is laughing his ass off right now.
LAO
@Betty Cracker: Not only are their insults cleverer, the British are pretty clever with pranks as well. I did nazi that coming!
schrodinger's cat
@Brachiator: Britain has a lot experience in partitions, should come in handy now.
Betty Cracker
@Singular: As a Floridian, I feel you. We’re not all stupid, crazy or deserving of chaos. I am sorry for people everywhere whose countrymen or governments bring bad things down on their heads through no fault of their own.
redshirt
@Snarki, child of Loki: No kidding. This is why this vote is even more preposterous – the UK has been given so many special exemptions within the EU and treated like a special snowflake, and even then they said fuck off. I’ve read elsewhere that Wales benefits enormously from EU aid, and yet they had a substantial majority voting Leave. It’s nuts.
Brachiator
@Singular:
To be fair, I think that some of schrodinger’s cat’s feeling is based on long standing feelings about the historical British domination of India, not US politics.
Ridnik Chrome
Also, the last time the UK economy went in the toilet was 2007-2009, and so far we’ve ended up with Ed Sheeran, Robin Thicke, and Mumford and Sons.
Yutsano
@hellslittlestangel: I’ve been looking around Twitter, and a lot of it is going around now. So the politicians might not be bad off to just say bollocks to the whole idea and not certify the vote.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
UKIP’s Farage- “whoops!” Admits he didn’t really want to catch the car.
debbie
@Splitting Image:
Are you sure? I’ve been hearing that most Leavers were more blue collar (or whatever the Brits term it) and so more against free trade, etc. It’s the Conservatives who love Austerity. It seems to me that Brexit is scapegoating the EU for Austerity.
redshirt
@Brachiator: Yeah, and this vote may re-ignite violence in Northern Ireland too. But Sinn Fein is already out there today pushing for a unification vote and since the majority in NI did vote to Remain, maybe this will be the event which allows for reunification with a minimum of bloodshed.
JMG
1. Eurovision has already posted on Twitter that the UK will still be in the competition. Lots of non-EU countries are.
2. Hatred of all foreigners has been a staple of English society for at least 1000 years. As the country becomes less and less important to the world, the hatred goes up. The funny thing is, the crabby old white people who voted to Leave are themselves too young to have experienced the peak of British influence and wealth. That began to die on the Somme in WW1 exactly 100 years ago next week. They grew up in austerity Britain post WW2. They danced to Herman’s Hermits. They want to bring back a past that they never knew, like the Trump voters who think the peak of our existence was the 1950s, and who were like eight years old at that time.
raven
@OldDave: You know I’m glad Another Country prompted me because right nest to it on the tube was this great version of 25 or 2 4 at the peak of CTA and Terry Kath.
debbie
@redshirt:
Nonsense. It was greed on the part of the brokers and bankers. I’d practically guarantee W. didn’t know what was going on or the extent of it.
schrodinger's cat
@JMG: The peak was in the late 19th century, in Queen Victoria’s time. WW I just exposed the hollow enterprise that was the Empire.
raven
@JMG: The did the Freddy! Now that is reason enough to sink the whole fucking island!
Matt McIrvin
@redshirt: What’s happening is this: The part of the world that used to be controlled by white people is getting less white, and/or less controlled by white people. And white people are FREAKING OUT and behaving badly. (And this incorporates more local concepts of “our kind of people” that we might not recognize as involving whiteness, like English people freaking out about Bulgarians in England.)
9/11 and the response were side issues, more symptoms than causes. This is the rage of a majority in decline.
raven
@Villago Delenda Est: I fart in you general direction!
? Martin
@Applejinx:
Remain policies weren’t killing the UK in a way that Brexit will fix. Their GDP has recovered as well as Germany or the US, which isn’t bad considering how exposed they were to finance in 2008. The problems in the UK, as in the US, is that the macro policies that are effective at making the pie larger aren’t being balanced with policies that give everyone a more equal slice of the pie. Those policies can be completely orthogonal to each other. Brexit, as with Trump, as with Sanders, too often focuses on increasing the distribution problem by making the pie smaller. Brexit will hurt the overall UK economy and it will make the bottom 50% more like the top 50% not by improving things for the bottom, but by making them worse for the top. Resentment is not the basis for sound policy. The UK problems were internal to the country and not related to the EU, just as the US problems are internal to the country and not related to immigration or trade.
Look, when the top line of the economy is good, you can have any number of discussions about how to distribute that prosperity internally. The UK failed on that, as the US is failing on that. But when the top line of the economy is bad, then the distribution argument is pointless because nobody will be happy with their share. Arguments that attack the top line to solve distribution problems are profoundly misplaced (there are other reasons to attack the top line – environmental, human rights, geopolitical, etc. but distribution isn’t one of them). The status of Britons is not bad. There is enough money within their borders to solve all of their problems – more than they’ve had per-captia except for the 2005-2007 period. Hell, the amount of money tied up in London real-estate is (well, was) massive and could have been extracted but now is being burned for no positive gain. The status of individual Britons may have been bad, but the country had the means to fix that. After this, it’s not so clear.
redshirt
@debbie: His administration created the regulatory environment that allowed the bubble to grow.
hellslittlestangel
To me, the scariest prospect is Boris Johnson becoming PM. He looks like Donald Trump after drinking elixir of youth that’s past it’s sell-by date.
gogol's wife
On the bright side, it got a shirtless Roger Allam frontpaged on Balloon Juice.
Tripod
@Brachiator:
The EU pounds a lot of money into NI.
? Martin
@redshirt: The EU is saying that they want this resolved quickly to return stability to the economy. Nobody benefits by dragging this out. If the UK wants out, then get out and get out quick. If they want in, that’s fine, but they better stop fucking about. The EU doesn’t want to be hostage to what was supposed to be the equivalent of voting to repeal Obamacare.
Emma
@redshirt: Not really, no. They are good neighbors but there’s this saying about good fences that apply here.
Dread
The EU isn’t perfect, has at some times to some countries been downright shitty, and reforms seem difficult to implement, so I can understand the frustrations some voters probably felt.
That said, my grandfather fought racist fascist shitheads in Europe, I’m hoping my son won’t have to when he grows up.
rikyrah
PHUCK.OUTTA.HERE.
UK Independence Party Leader Admits His Bold Brexit Claim Was a “Mistake”
Nigel Farage backs away from the Leave campaign’s signature pledge to spend £350 million of European Union money on the National Health Service.
INAE OHJUN. 24, 2016 9:29 AM
As Britain awoke on Friday to the news that it had voted in favor of withdrawing from the European Union, voters were introduced to their new reality with a stunning admission from Nigel Farage, the pro-Brexit advocate who leads the U.K. Independence Party. Farage said that the Vote Leave campaign’s signature pledge—that leaving the European Union would allow for £350 million to be spent on the U.K.’s National Health Service—was a “mistake.”
Farage’s mea culpa was made during an appearance on Good Morning Britain, where he was asked if he could continue supporting that promise after the campaign to extract the United Kingdom from the European Union had succeeded.
“No I can’t, and I would have never made that claim,” Farage said. “It was one of the mistakes I think the ‘leave’ campaign made”
Emma
@? Martin: There’s a legal, imposed by the EU, two year process. Unless they rewrite their own laws they can pressure the UK but they cannot force it to comply.
Brachiator
@schrodinger’s cat:
That experience has often been horrible for everyone involved, and this goes back to the Roman partition that was Hadrian’s wall.
Various BBC news programs are very interesting. Nobody knows nothing, and people are in shock over the Brexit results. But looking at this from a larger perspective, consider.
The UN estimates that there are 65 million displaced persons. A large percentage of these people are seeking asylum in Europe. This has to put more pressure on the remaining EU countries.
The Brexit results may spur votes for Scottish independence and a united Ireland. But the Brexit sentiment and the issue of refugees may also ignite nationalist sentiment throughout Europe. Not just right wing nationalism, but also a resurgence of Catalan, Basque and other old, ongoing nationalist efforts. And, who knows, these flare ups might even have some impact on nationalist movements in India, Bangladesh, and elsewhere.
M. Bouffant
The punters cut off their noses to spite their faces. The schaden freudes itself.
schrodinger's cat
@redshirt: Bill Clinton gets some of the credit too.
Humdog
The Brexit vote makes me wonder what the vote would have been if we had allowed a vote to determine whether the slave states remained in the union. And wonder what the vote would be today if some red states tried to exit. I am not finding much of a reason to argue against Texit, for instance.
redshirt
@Matt McIrvin: While that’s true, I feel it’s bigger than that. There’s trends that shape everything, and our global trends all seem bad now. I mean, 30 years ago, who’d imagine the world would become a MORE religious place? And yet Fundamentalism is raging out of control all over the globe in a way it did not 30 years ago.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@rikyrah:
I posted that above. Shorter Farage: You fucked up – you trusted me.
LesBonnesFemmes
I am totally watching The Filth and the Fury right now.
“Another council tenancy!”
redshirt
@Brachiator: This is my real fear over this vote. That it will ignite other secessionist movements across the world, leading to more death and destruction.
? Martin
@Emma: I understand that. But the EU is saying ‘get on with this’. They don’t want to see the UK drag this out, second guess themselves, etc. Make a fucking decision and commit to it (recognizing that the official act to withdraw hasn’t happened, that Parliament will probably hold an advisory vote, etc.) They aren’t asking for a change to the contract, they are asking for a clarity of message – get your house together and speak clearly. Everyone needs predictability here.
Calouste
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: Well, the problem for Farage is that he doesn’t have anything to cover his racism once the UK is out of the EU. UKIP will just deflate to be slightly larger than a bunch of other neo-fascist parties that are floating around. And he will lose his European Parliament sinecure.
The only chance he has now is for Boris the clown to bumble up the Brexit by delaying too much, and whipping the Tories in the next General Election. And I wouldn’t bet against that happening.
Brachiator
@redshirt:
Technically, I don’t believe that there was ever a time when Ireland was unified, so you would not have a re-unification, but a first time unification. You would also have to sever Northern Ireland from all political connections with England. The Protestants would fear that they would become, by definition, second class citizens in a majority Catholic Ireland.
I don’t see this ending well.
Hal
I was just wondering what brilliant insights Sarah Palin has on the UK vote:
http://theslot.jezebel.com/a-collection-of-very-dumb-republican-thoughts-on-the-br-1782573790
Poopyman
Brexit is good news for
John McCainPutin!And the WaPo tells me The British are frantically Googling what the E.U. is, hours after voting to leave it
(It might actually be good news for John McCain’s campaign, come to think of it.)
J.
@redshirt: I feel the same way — and was just discussing this with my daughter, who just graduated from high school. She asked me, “Mom, when, if ever, were things good?” And I said, “In the 1990s, after Clinton was elected. At least things were good here, in the United States, economically.” I remember making good money freelancing, not worrying about money all the time, being able to buy a house, and feeling hopeful. The dotcom bubble bursting, which I expected, W. being elected, and then 9/11, though, totally harshed my mellow — and a lot of other things. I was feeling hopeful after Obama got elected, but in many ways, things (racism, shootings, inequality) have gotten worse. I grew up in NYC in the 1970s and 1980s, when things were pretty bad, but I don’t remember feeling as depressed, frustrated, helpless, and angry as I do now.
jacy
@debbie:
That’s the feeling I get. Conservatives went with austerity, and then pointed at the EU as the source of working class discontent. Not even the source really, but a handy target. And so a lot of people who are unhappy shot at the target. There are parallels here to be sure: an undereducated (or at least not-prepared-to-critcally-think) white populace who are pissed off at something and have an overwhelming need to express how pissed off they are, whether it benefits them or not. There’s your Trump voter.
SiubhanDuinne
@Emma:
gvg
I wonder what the consequences to the EU to UK leaving? Somehow I doubt it will be painless to them either, so they may want to slow down with the insults. It’s true their were innate problems with the joint currency but not real joint government that has resulted in the big kids bullying the poor kids. Apparently this was pointed out decades ago by a few but not many and it took this long to see the results (Greece). So a lot of problems that haven’t been faced because frankly citizens of Germany and France don’t really want to pay for Greece etc. Austerity seems to have been chosen because of this kind of xenophobia. This has hurt all their economies. They can’t seem to let go either. I suspect it’s still a bad idea economically for Scotland and Ireland to go independant because if they rejoin the EU together they will be much smaller potatoes than the whole UK which means they will be treated like the poor countries not the big shots they were used to. England of course will also be a smaller deal.
I can’t help wondering how many “mixed” marriages will find this a horrible complication and how is citizenship settled? Frankly if I was one of their MP’s, I think I would stand up against the “popular” vote and not support exit. This is one of the responsibilities of representative democracy.
I am not despairing but there do seem to be a lot of forces of anarchy and dumbness.
schrodinger's cat
@redshirt: Why should this ignite secessionist movements elsewhere? Its not like people in other countries are waiting for guidance from British voters.
Calouste
@Brachiator:
Not much to resurge there. The Catalans held a non-binding referendum on independence in 2014 and 80% voted Yes.
Splitting Image
@debbie:
The “blue-collar” voters who wanted out ARE the backbone of the Conservative party. The typical Leave voter is an ignorant slob who has been supporting Thatcher’s party since the 1970s, and blaming the effects of Thatcher’s policies on unions, feminists, and swarthy foreigners. It’s perfectly true that Cameron was trying to scapegoat the EU for the Conservatives’ own policies, but that’s why the UK is where it is now: Conservative voters believed him.
daves09
@Baud: Iraq didn’t hurt the US financially because it was paid for with fiat money. Need a couple more billion? Move a decimal point, add a zero. If we actually had to pay for these things we wouldn’t do them.
Emma
@? Martin: You are more trusting of EU officials than I am. They are by nature bullies and don’t like to be “disrespected” (see Greece). It’s an organization whose goals I support, but they have a sclerotic European approach to the work, and yet here they are demanding speed. Basically, they want their pound of flesh, and they might get it.
Brachiator
@? Martin:
Guardian news coverage on Brexit mentions the Norway Option.
Even if the UK exits the EU, there are a number of options short of total severing of all connections that might be possible.
petesh
@M. Bouffant: Magnifique!
Tripod
Wrong band.
‘ll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around…
redshirt
@schrodinger’s cat: Inspiration. Why is terrorism far worse today across the world then 30 years ago? Inspiration.
You can bet cheap pounds that other countries in the EU will be facing similar pressures for referendums in the upcoming years.
Patricia Kayden
@schrodinger’s cat: True. Their empire encompassed Asia, Africa, the West Indies, etc. Yet they want to whine about immigration. For some reason, the influx of Eastern Europeans appears to have been the last straw. Keep in mind though that hundreds of British expats live abroad, especially in Spain and France.
Emma
@SiubhanDuinne: I love that! Unfortunately there are a lot of metaphorical cows in these fields.
redshirt
@daves09:
Can you explain this more fully? What do you mean by “fiat money” for example?
schrodinger's cat
@Brachiator: Oh I know that it has been terrible. Most of the mess in the Middle East can be traced to the borders drawn by the British and the French after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire following WW I.
Then there is also the Radcliffe line between India and Pakistan post WW II. Its a gift that keeps on giving.
Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class
On the positive side, vacation properties in Ionia, Spain, Cyprus and Portugal just got a shitload cheaper as UK pensioners have to spend a shitload more time in England each year, paying more for agricultural products and finished goods.
Couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch of spoiled people.
if Trump gets elected because of an overwhelming turnout by the olds and Ryan starts moving forward on his goal of fucking us under 55s in the ass on Social Security and Medicare (I’m currently 54), I’m going the full Glibertarian, and strongly advocating that the current batch of olds get to experience the glory and benefits of full-on post New Deal capitalism. This will include the fun of getting to access the private insurance markets and experiencing privatized SS.
They deserve nothing less for their efforts….
Jonny Scrum-half
@redshirt: I considered myself a conservative Republican in 2001, and although I was never impressed with GWB I thought at the time (and still feel) that 9/11, as awful as it was, gave him an opportunity to be a great President. For example, he could have used the almost unanimous domestic support he had for months to push-forward a smart energy-conservation program (maybe invest in alternative fuels) to reduce our dependence on Mideast oil and to otherwise cement our unity as a nation. He also could have used international support for us to engage with Iran’s overtures at the time, and perhaps to lead a world-wide effort to combat terrorism in a manner that expressed common-cause with other nations and was consistent with our values.
Instead he embarked on policies that drove Democrats away and actively insulted numerous reliable allies in Europe. His actions drove me out of the Republican Party and opened my eyes to some things that I had previously been blind to.
I understand that Presidents, being human, make mistakes, and some people are more talented than others, but the contrast between what Bush could have been and what he became is the reason that he’ll always be among the worst Presidents in history, in my opinion.
Poopyman
@M. Bouffant:
“The freude schadens itself” would be more correcter.
different-church-lady
Now that we’re done with the psych-ops of the Bernie Bros, we’ll have to muddle through the psych-ops of the Trumpstains.
It’s kind of like a video game: your reward for completing a level is a harder level.
sinnedbackwards
@Ridnik Chrome: Well, it has been a triple dip recession for the UK and they’re still behind the recovery curve of the thirties.
Their austerity experiment is proving almost as definitive as Kansas’s.
Patricia Kayden
@JMG: Even with the Brexit vote, England will still have hundreds of non-White citizens (many of whom were born there).
Will be interesting to see how immigration will be handled now that England is out of the EU. Will we see a mass expulsion of Eastern Europeans and refugees, for example?
redshirt
@J.: Yeah. It’s not just money, either, but an atmosphere of optimism.
I give you an example: In the 90’s, there was a burgeoning neo-hippy movement that was popular in music, fashion, movies, etc. That movement was absolutely crushed by 9/11 and has not existed since then, replaced by angry, dark, gritty themes and style. I feel as if we’ve “darkened” as a culture, becoming more angry, fearful, and mistrusting.
Matt McIrvin
If Brexit makes people get serious about the possibility of Trump winning, it’s all to the good, but I think that rationally it tells us no more about the probability of this than we should have already known. Yes, this kind of stupidity probably appeals to a narrow majority of white people.
Brachiator
@schrodinger’s cat:
It’s not a matter of British voters instructing people elsewhere. But ideas, movements, revolutions, have a way of inciting possibilities, positive and negative, elsewhere.
If the international community allows and supports Scottish independence, how could they disapprove of Basque or Catalan independence? If right wing, nationalistic separatism is good for England, shouldn’t it also be good for India?
Some of the most appalling treatment of refugees happens in Australia. I will bet that the worst nationalists there feel vindicated by the Brexit vote.
The entire world watches, reflects on and reacts to events that happen outside of particular borders.
? Martin
@redshirt:
I disagree strongly with that. The world is less religious, but the intensity at the edges is much stronger. The change is that the extremists (religious, political, whatever) have vastly more ability to organize and to get their message out. One benefit of an analogue society is that if only 1% of the public agrees with you, it’s hard to find the other 1%er without alerting the 99% who disagree. In a digital society, it’s much easier to pull together these diluted populations without being noticed and, effectively weaponize them. And with social media and immediate non-stop live coverage, getting outsized attention for your deeds is easier than ever before so you can magnify your message far disproportionate to your real strength.
What’s hard is that civic infrastructure has not kept pace. You can organize your extremist cell online and broadcast your suicide bombing on Facebook – all for a few hundred bucks, but we can’t figure out how to get the 99.9% of the public that is outraged by these acts to vote and participate in a manner that can respond to these changes except by 19th century mechanisms. And we haven’t really created loose positive civic structures that can carry a positive message against that extremist one. That’s what rallies and protests did in the past but don’t work nearly as effectively today. That needs to be reimagined in some way.
The trends are mostly positive. The unbelievably rapid decline of people living in extreme poverty helps to address all sorts of problems related to this. These trends do lead to other problems. The decline in the role of fossil fuels is now overturning governments that were too heavily dependent on oil. And there’s a LOT of change taking place, so I agree it feels worse, but these major economic and societal changes are overarching good, but will carry a LOT of local pain until structures that aligned with the old way of doing things are toppled and new ones created. The trick is to do as little damage as possible to the overarching trends while you work through it. I’d say UK failed at that. The US generally made headway with Obama, hopefully will with Clinton.
Matt McIrvin
@redshirt: I recall baby boomers saying that the soul of America died the day JFK was murdered.
Since I was born in ’68, I’ve never experienced a country that had a soul. It’s all just been an empty shell, like a philosophical zombie.
different-church-lady
@different-church-lady:
I know very little about Boris, but from the little I do know, it seems unlikely he’d be Prime Minister long enough for that process to play out.
schrodinger's cat
@different-church-lady: I don’t buy that. Brexit makes Trump less likely. We can see what an own goal looks like without doing it ourselves.
debbie
@Splitting Image:
Thanks. Who is it that supports Labor?
Chris
I think the basic point is simply “do not underestimate what a group of brain-dead identity-politics-driven morons in the service of a stupid idea can accomplish if sufficiently motivated.”
And Trumpism isn’t “just” about Trump, I think. Trump is just the candidate that the horde of goose-steppers eager to “take their country back” happen to have found to lead them this time. They were around before him, they’ll be around after him even if he loses.
Calouste
@Brachiator:
Well, that would mean that the UK would have to implement more EU legislation (they have an exemption for the working time directive at the moment, and there are other things), and they wouldn’t have any say in it. So basically they would have even less power than they have now.
Thing is, the leaders of Leave (Boris the Clown, Nigel the Falangist) didn’t really want to win. They wanted a close loss for secondary purposes, like the Tory leadership and Farage’s ego.
J.
@redshirt: Exactly.
Chris
@redshirt:
I don’t really want a broken up U.K. any more than I wanted a broken up EU. But I have to admit it’d be poetic justice, especially since the “stay” people in the Scottish referendum were arguing that staying in Britain meant staying in the EU.
Brachiator
@Tripod:
And get on my knees and pray
We don’t get fooled again.
? Martin
@Brachiator:
I realize that as well, but that seems to be politically impossible now. How do you say to voters that demanded to leave that you’re actually mostly going to stay and only change this one bit? These voters are already blaming all manner of things unrelated to the EU on the EU. Why would they suddenly start aligning cause and effect now? I understand why leadership would see that as an attractive option, but the GOP in the US see replacing Trump as an attractive option, but also one that they can’t afford to exercise. I don’t see how you politically get from where the UK is at this hour to a point where remaining in the EU in any but the most minor of respects is possible. They seem to want their empire back. The EU is incompatible with that.
schrodinger's cat
@Brachiator: India is huge and its internal politics follow their own dynamics and I don’t think they will be terribly affected one way or the other by the Brexit vote. It might affect the other EU members, though.
different-church-lady
@Matt McIrvin: Everything is always the worst thing that ever happened.
@redshirt:
Oh how I long for the upbeat, sunny, pre 9/11 days of Nine Inch Nails, Nirvana, Marylin Manson, and grunge style.
Omnes Omnibus
@debbie: Minorities, women, educated whites.*
*Noting that there is cross-over between the categories
Matt McIrvin
@redshirt:
30 years ago, that was 1986. Reagan had emboldened all the two-bit Jesus-peddlers. Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart and the Ayatollah Khomeini were in their prime; the fatwa against Rushdie happened just a couple years later. It felt like the whole world was going violently God-crazy and America was in the vanguard.
gvg
@redshirt:
I don’t agree that terrorism is far worse today. When I was growing up, terrorism was still pretty common. Maybe you didn’t notice as much as I did. Irish terrorists used to blow up people mostly in England all the time. Sensationalist killer bands used to stage various killing targets. Munich Olympics, the Manson family, Patty Hearst’s kidnapping, Plane hijackings, Weathermen, regular bomb threats to schools…never turned up anything but I had to evacuate my elementary school and Jr high several times over bomb threats. There were more things in Europe. The KKK is a terrorist organization going back past your 30 years but the 60’s and 70’s into the 80’s at least had quite a bit of bad stuff going on. It died down some but wasn’t ever really gone. Atlanta Olympic bombing, Iran hostage crisis. I dunno, I remember some worse stuff and more numerous than now really.
Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class
@sinnedbackwards:
Dear Austerians:
If you’re gonna sell trickle down, eventually, you have to actually trickle down. And no, trickle down does not get done when you excessively tip your private hostess over great bottle service with the Gray Goose.
redshirt
@different-church-lady: It’s not a perfect analogy. But the Spin Doctors would have words with you.
schrodinger's cat
@redshirt: Globally terrorism is not worse today than 30 years ago. The media has just magnified their coverage post 9/11.
? Martin
@schrodinger’s cat: I think it can go either way. If the pain of Brexit is all felt by the elite in the next 5 months, then it’ll help Trump. If it’s felt by the folks at the bottom, then it’ll work against him.
So far all of the measures have been stock and currency markets. Only rich people are affected by those at this stage. It’ll take some time before the currency effects get priced in for consumers, for companies and jobs to leave, etc. There will be a certain optimism around the leadership change which won’t resolve before our election. In short, the feeling of control will last a while, but the consequence of that will take time to play out.
I think it’ll hurt Trump, but a lot of people will see a lot of positives in it here in the near-term.
Greenergood
I live in Scotland, where people voted 65+ -percent to STAY in Europe.Most of us know that Europe’s got a lot of problems, but the English Parliament is really out to reduce Scotland to a colonial level, whereas Europe will still treat us like sh*t but not a total colony, mebbe even a real country at some point, cause England never will – rock or the hard place?? Give us the rock we know and are always struggling against rather than the hard place defined by overlords that don’t give a sh** about us.
Brachiator
@Calouste:
Funny thing when you play at being a Mastermind and your evil schemes actually come to some fruition.
It’s kinda like Trump actually becoming the presumptive GOP nominee and now having to actually mount a campaign and entertain the idea of actually becoming president and doing the job.
RandomMonster
The Scots elevate cursing to poetry. “Tiny fingered, Cheeto-faced, ferret wearing shitgibbon”…
Matt McIrvin
@gvg: The World Terrorism Database is good:
https://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/
As I recall the last time I looked into this, it shows a vast increase in recent years, but most of the incidents are not in the West (there’s a huge number listed in the Philippines). I suspect this is to some degree an artifact of recording and classification; that is, what gets listed as terrorist incidents now used to be “oh, yeah, there’s been a low-level civil war going on there since forever; it’s those Ancient Tribal Hatreds”.
Meanwhile, terrorism in Europe and North America is generally down, though there are infrequent huge incidents that get tremendous coverage.
redshirt
@gvg: That’s western terrorism. And yeah, IRA bombings and hijackings have been replaced by mass shootings. As far as I know the KKK never shot up a school or a club and killed dozens. Not defending the KKK here by the way.
But worldwide, terrorism is far worse now than 30 years ago. Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Nigeria, Kenya, etc.
Mnemosyne
@rikyrah:
And, yeah, when he says “mistake,” he clearly means “bald-faced lie.” Christ, what an asshole.
schrodinger's cat
@Patricia Kayden: The current immigrants are not trying to “civilize” them either, like the ancestors of the Brits did not that long ago, all over the world.
GregB
@Jonny Scrum-half:
I really think that this sentiment cannot be repeated enough. It was such an enormous chance to move towards a better world and instead he embraced the Cheneyesque “it’s our turn” credo.
Despicable.
Chris
@redshirt:
An interesting observation that used to be made about post-communist countries since the eighties was that as communist ideology faded away (either through outright collapse as in Russia or more discreetly by moving away from the original hard-line values as in China), the rulers were increasingly relying on nationalism in order to replace it as the legitimizing ideology of the realm.
Welp, I feel like that’s increasingly the defining phenomenon all around the globe. Observers have said the same thing about Iran, especially after 2009 – that religion and the clergy were mattering less, and nationalism and the military/paramilitary mattered more. And with the rise of the far right parties in Europe and the teabaggers/Trump voters over here, hard to say that a similar thing isn’t happening here. All around, ideology (whatever it is) is on the way out, and ordinary crude nationalism is on the way up.
Jim Parene
@raven: Thank you for the Electric Flag’s lyrics.
Emma
OK, back to our own crazy. From Steve Benen:
Why didn’t anyone ask who would be the other “first”?
WarMunchkin
Yeah, except this conveniently avoided responsibility for austerity policies. Speaking of NATO, what’s the procedure when a nuclear power starts to break up? I guess we’ve done it before with the Soviet Union (non NATO).
schrodinger's cat
@redshirt: You seem to have totally forgotten that the Cold War was not so cold for many parts of the world.
different-church-lady
@redshirt: I suppose it was peak Phish around that time too.
Emma
@RandomMonster: It’s one of their most endearing qualities. And they have been dumping on The Donald all day.
redshirt
@? Martin:
While I’d like to agree with you, I can’t. Yes, certainly, Obama has provided some much needed correction to what I see as downward trends, but it feels like he’s fighting the tide. Not his fault, but during his two terms the US government has in large ways broken down and stopped functioning – because of Republicans. Politicians now completely identify as religious when in the past people paid lip service at least to the separation of church and state. While the majority may be less religious, the very vocal fundamentalists control the debate – abortion rights were more open in the 90’s then they are today, despite the law.
Technology is both to blame and can help assuage these trends, but we’re on a razor line here. Say Trump wins in November – how fast will the regression happen? And how dramatic will it be?
Singular
@Betty Cracker: Thanks for that Betty. But when Schroedinger is coming out with a quip-a-minute, for example with Brits having so much experience at “partition”, and others basically saying “you’ve made your bed”, I feel even more sick than I felt at 7 am this morning.
My daughter is 4 years old. I don’t want her to grow up in in an isolated UK, run by the very right wing of a right-wing party, while our European neighbours look on in bafflement, wondering why we fucking hate them so much. And these comic book villains, Farage declaring victory against big banks and big business. The guy was a goddam trader, now a grifter. I work with 2 Romanians, a Spaniard and one of my best friends is an Italian, who has studied, worked, and built a life in the UK, but never saw the need to go through the arduous process of applying for citizenship, because it didn’t really matter. Now all their futures are uncertain, because some piece of shit thought he was Harold Wilson.
I have family and friends on both sides of the border in Ireland. Border controls will bring back some very bad memories for a lot of people.
This is going on 70 million people, and god knows how many others it will affect in the EU.
different-church-lady
I’m going to be blunt here: terrorism seems worse to us post Sept. 11 because it was the day that big time terrorism came to our (U.S.) soil. We finally got a direct taste of what the rest of the world has been putting up with for decades, if not centuries.
The blunt part comes where I say that I’m surprised to see a lot of otherwise intelligent folks here missing that rather obvious point.
Cacti
De Gaulle was right to oppose British entry into the EU.
All his fears about Perfidious Albion have come to pass nearly 50-years after his death.
rikyrah
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
Mann….
I can’t even.
Cannot even….
Betty Cracker
@? Martin: That’s some damn good ledge talkin’!
Chris
@Snarki, child of Loki:
YES!
RandomMonster
@Emma: Reading their tweets has been the highlight of my day.
MCA1
@Brachiator: Good points. The next 10 years or so will be the stress test on whether the EU as a concept has achieved its primary goal. It’s not really about freer trade for the sake of a rising tide lifting all boats, or making it easier for people to move about logistically, and it’s never been about presenting a unified European front in world power and politics. All of those sorts of things are just discrete subsidiaries of the ultimate prize. The transformational idea here has always been about binding together disparate European nationalities into a collective idea of “Europe” as something more than just a landmass designation. To cultivate a common identity that transcends the regional grievances and rivalries that had been tearing the continent apart since the Renaissance and almost destroyed it all, twice, in the first half of the 20th century.
The timing here does not help (nor do the continuing weakness of the domestic economies in 2/3 of the Eurozone and the newfound stresses from increased immigration, of course). Looking at the demographic breakdowns of the Brexit vote by age category, it’s pretty clear Remain would have won by a lot if this vote had been in 2026, all other political forces remaining equal. Clearly, younger Britons sense a European identity worth keeping. We may be about to see how ingrained that idea is in Italians or Greeks or Austrians, too. “Europe” as an idea has pretty much failed if anyone else heads for the door now.
gex
@redshirt: Yeah but even their band name has a kind of cynicism.
daves09
@redshirt: Money created out of nothing. It has value because we say it does. If Bush had raised taxes to actually pay for the war Kerry would have been president. Conservatives will make any sacrifice for their principles except actually pay for them.
The economic effect was probably nil because absent Iraq and with a repub, administration the money wouldn’t have been spent domestically anyway.
rikyrah
@jacy:
Like I said…..Cameron trying to be too cute by half.
Austerity doesn’t work…just doesn’t. They didn’t want to own that it didn’t work….sound familiar?
Brachiator
@? Martin:
It’s early and the British people will have time to consider what Brexit really means and what they really want. They will also have to think about ejecting a largely pro-EU Parliament, which will also spur reflection on what they really want.
It says something that the most popular google searches in the UK were as follows:
Another top question, “what happens now that we have left the EU?”
It makes you wonder whether people knew what they were voting for.
As for wanting their empire back, this may be the feverish dream of some of the oldest Brits, but it’s never going to happen.
Cacti
@redshirt:
They bombed a church.
redshirt
@schrodinger’s cat: If you have any sources I’d love to read them. Here‘s a chart from the Economist showing global deaths from terrorism since 2000.
Maybe I missed it because as you say, the media didn’t cover it, but I don’t remember near weakly death tolls in the hundreds due to terrorism in the 1980’s and 90’s.
Calouste
@WarMunchkin: Not a practical problem really. The Scots will be happy to send the nukes that are currently there back to England in case of independence. They’d be happy to do it yesterday.
SiubhanDuinne
Still confused about Brexit? This clip from Yes, Minister explains everything!
redshirt
@Cacti: They did. Again, I don’t want to defend the KKK. But 4 died in that bombing. Compare that to our weekly mass shootings. I’m just saying the violence – the domestic terrorism – is far worse now than in the past.
schrodinger's cat
@SiubhanDuinne: I love Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister.
daves09
@gvg: In the seventies Italy was having a major incident every day for years, the Baader-Meinhof gang was kidnapping and bombing all over W. Germany. The IRA nearly blew up Thatcher, weekly plane hijackings.
Mnemosyne
@redshirt:
You realize that what’s going on in Syria right now is a civil war, not terrorism, right? You’re conflating a whole bunch of stuff together.
And add me to the list of people saying that if you thought the 1990s were an optimistic, happy-go-lucky time, that’s more a reflection of your own age at the time. You were in high school, right?
Bostondreams
@redshirt:
You don’t have to when you basically control the levers of power throughout many levels of government for a somewhat significant period of time (the late post Civil War era and the early 20th century). You can do all your terrorizing legally when you have governors, congressmen, sheriffs, and judges as your members.
Baud
@daves09: The money used for the Iraq War was mostly borrowed money. That was the controversy because all the financing was off budget.
Brachiator
@MCA1:
Well said. It is a hopeful sign that younger voters in the UK were in favor of Remain, and that Scotland, for example, may want independence but also membership in the EU.
The next several months and years will indeed be a test of whether this idea can hold.
Mary G
@Calouste: Boris and Nigel are the dogs that caught the car they were chasing.
Calouste
@redshirt: It helps if you count people murdered by terrorist groups different from people murdered by terrorist regimes. To the people it doesn’t matter, they’re dead whether they are killed by ISIS or Al-Qaeda or whether they are killed by Saddam’s henchmen, various Latin-American juntas and generalissimos, the South African security forces, the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, the Vietcong, the Red Khmer, etc.
Bostondreams
@redshirt:
Respectfully, a matter of perspective I guess. Domestic terrorism, in significant numbers, has been a thing for a long long time in this country at least. Every incident of lynching should be seen as an act of domestic terrorism.
GregB
@Bostondreams:
They razed whole towns and lynched over 5,000 in their heyday.
daves09
@redshirt: Depends how you define terrorism. State terrorism in those countries was prodigious, Assad’s destruction of Aleppo, the viciousness of the Baath regimes everywhere.
C. Isaac
@Cacti:
You’re missing a plural there.
Peale
@redshirt: I can’t figure out why that is. I would think that the EU folks would want to give the UK every chance not to. Although I also think they might be trying punish the UK as much as possible for being disruptive. I mean, capitalism is all good and well until there is “uncertainty”…then the free marketeers get all control freaky. “Must stop all uncertainty! Ja vol!” the Germans seem to be saying.
Egads the markets lost 3 months of value! 3 months! Ve must stop the caranage!
Poopyman
@Bostondreams: Ding!
@Mnemosyne: I grew up during a golden age – the 60s. Man, those duck and cover drills were awesome, and we got all those movies in school about what to do when the Russians bombers came over. Man, those were the days.
redshirt
@Jonny Scrum-half:
Agreed 100%.
I voted Gore, but I didn’t really care back then. I figured W. would do just fine since he was inheriting his father’s team. But then 9/11 and everything fell apart. But to be clear, he was already picking a fight with China before 9/11, so maybe the event didn’t matter. We were going to war regardless.
Imagine, like you say, if W. had used 9/11 to completely overhaul the US energy sector to reduce our use of middle east oil and secure our national defense. I’m sure we would have bombed Afghanistan, but imagine if we didn’t invade Iraq and unleash that chaos. Imagine if we had worked with Iran to attack Sunni terror. What a different world it would be right now.
Mnemosyne
@redshirt:
Uh, Tulsa race riot? Rosewood massacre? Any of these ringing any bells?
The problem here seems to be that you’re ignorant about American history, not that terrorism is so much worse nowadays.
JMG
Morgan Stanley is moving 2000 jobs out of London to elsewhere in Europe. JP Morgan Chase is going to do likewise. Those aren’t all coke freak, hit the strip club traders. They’re IT and others of what used to be called the back offices. Finance is eight percent of British GDP. If London stops being a finance center, then it’s just a theme park and place for Russian and Arab superthieves to stash their ill-gotten gains. Without London, Britain has no economy worth mentioning.
Matt McIrvin
@GregB: I was just reading a while back about the Tulsa “race riot” of 1921. It began with aerial incendiary bombing of the town’s upscale black neighborhood.
? Martin
@redshirt:
I don’t disagree, but I think these are local issues. Yes, the US is dealing with these difficult issues as other countries are, and yes there’s an extreme level of polarization taking place, but I think they will be dealt with. You get these regular extinction bursts that are frustrating and locally damaging, but which eventually pass. Everything happening in the US seemed to happen first in CA – we brought you both Nixon and Reagan (you can thank us later). We did the anti-tax thing and then we learned from it. We had the immigration fears and then we got over it. We turned the corner on the abortion debate and CA is far more open with abortion today than in the 90s. We’re not fast at this, but we do work through it. It often takes decades.
As usual, the insurgents are faster to exploit new things – ideas, technologies, tactics, than the citizenry is. And that will be a growing problem as the pace of advancement continues to pick up. But eventually we do work through them. And I think some of what we are seeing is that the intensity is maybe getting higher because we work through them faster now. Gay marriage was remarkably fast. 2004 was the year of the anti-gay marriage ballot initiatives and the constitutional amendment to ban, and only about a decade later it was legal. That’s fast. But you see how opposition builds intensely when the trend has been set. I think we’re seeing the same thing on the gun debate and on abortion. There is this urgent rush to get pro-gun and anti-abortion legislation on the books in a desperate effort to head off what must seem inevitable. These are not actions of a confident group. They are desperate, almost panicked actions. They know they are losing public opinion and they are trying to turn it or to at least get what they can while they can. Remember this, and Joe Barton’s crusade to save the 100W light bulb?
The arc of the moral universe is long. Don’t get too hung up on every speedbump that the lunatics manage to drop on the road.
Mnemosyne
@Poopyman:
I once saw someone publicly refer to the 1970s as “a more innocent time.”
/forehead slap
daves09
@Baud: It was borrowed money in the exact same sense that the money that created the ’07 crash was borrowed money.
It was created out of nothing and one day people realized that it didn’t exist.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@redshirt: in the 80’s the violent Shi’a-Sunni conflict in the ME was called the Iran-Iraq War, today it’s called terrorism. Google says the number of killed between 82 and 88 was over a million, Wiki suggests this is a highly contested figure, but half a million military and 200,000 civilians deaths seems to be a conservative estimate. I don’t know what criteria the Economist is using for “terorrism” as opposed to death by other forms of political violence, but off the top of my head, a lot of people died in the 70s and 80s in Biafra, Angola, Nicaragua, Cambodia. In the 90s, the Balkan wars, the conflicts in Central Africa. I think it comes down to how you define terrorism, and why.
Baud
@daves09: I don’t understand, but I’m pro fiat money.
Mnemosyne
@Matt McIrvin:
Yep. The 1920s in America was basically a full-out race war by whites against blacks, but it was covered up at the time and still is not really discussed today.
A lot of the most onerous Jim Crow and other segregation laws were passed in the early 1900s-1920s, not in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War.
ETA: Plessy v Ferguson was decided in 1896 and set off a series of segregation laws.
SiubhanDuinne
@schrodinger’s cat:
Me too! Watched them all when they first aired over here (PBS) and own them all on DVD. I must haul them out and treat myself to a Sir Humphreython one of these times.
Chris
@redshirt:
I think jihadism has blurred the lines a lot between old school terrorism as it was always performed in the West (and otherwise in stable, functional democracies) and outright civil war as it exists in failed and failing third world states.
And also that the rise of non-state actors in general has indeed increased some terrorists’ power. In the old days, countries like Libya and Syria could be state sponsors of terrorism; Taliban Afghanistan was more of a terrorist sponsored state.
Bostondreams
@GregB:
Yup. I used to teach in Levy County, the site of Rosewood. Terrorism in all but name.
“Another newspaper reported: “Two Negro women were attacked and raped between Rosewood and Sumner. The sexual lust of the brutal white mobbists satisfied, the women were strangled.”[31]
The white mob burned the black churches in Rosewood. Philomena Goins’ cousin, Lee Ruth Davis, heard the bells tolling in the church as the men were inside setting it on fire.[19] The mob also destroyed the white church in Rosewood. Many black residents fled for safety into the nearby swamps, some clothed only in their pajamas. Wilson Hall was nine years old at the time; he later recounted his mother waking him to escape into the swamps early in the morning when it was still dark; the lights from approaching cars of white men could be seen for miles. The Hall family walked 15 miles (24 km) through swampland to the town of Gulf Hammock. The survivors recall that it was uncharacteristically cold for Florida, and people suffered when they spent several nights in raised wooded areas called hammocks to evade the mob. Some took refuge with sympathetic white families.[2] Sam Carter’s 69-year-old widow hid for two days in the swamps, then was driven by a sympathetic white mail carrier, under bags of mail, to join her family in Chiefland.[9]
White men began surrounding houses, pouring kerosene on and lighting them, then shooting at those who emerged. Lexie Gordon, a light-skinned 50-year-old woman who was ill with typhoid fever, had sent her children into the woods. She was killed by a shotgun blast to the face when she fled from hiding underneath her home, which had been set on fire by the mob. Fannie Taylor’s brother-in-law claimed to be her killer.[2] On January 5, more whites converged on the area, forming a mob of between 200 and 300 people. Some came from out of state. Mingo Williams, who was 20 miles (32 km) away near Bronson, was collecting turpentine sap by the side of the road when a car full of whites stopped and asked his name. As was custom among many residents of Levy County, both black and white, Williams used a nickname that was more prominent than his given name; when he gave his nickname of “Lord God”, they shot him dead.[19]”
They literally razed the town to the ground. Terrorism.
sinnedbackwards
@daves09: I lived in Italy from 1974 to early 1979. The Re Brigade bombings were just getting started as I was leaving.
The 2nd class waiting room at Bologna Station I had often sat in was destroyed. My correspondant bank branch in Milan (dell Agricoltura) was blown up. The Prime Minister was kidnapped and murdered.
God bless the Italians. They had all recently enough experienced Mussolini that they did not flinch. The Red Brigades were crazy left wingers who thought if they could provoke a right-wing reaction THEN they could incite Italians to refight Fascism. Messy, multi-party, indecisive boring democracy they couldn’t get people to fight against.
You beat terrorists by not being afraid. By living your normal life. That is the bravery of the masses; that is the lesson living in Italy taught me.
Every Thanksgiving when the local tv runs down to the airport to record how much safer the sheeple feel to participate in security theater I cringe at the idiocy of my fellow citizens, and despair that it is precisely their fear that allows the bad guys to win.
Cacti
@GregB:
Rosewood, FL was literally wiped off the map and treated as if it never existed for the next 7 decades.
ETA: I see Bostondreams beat me to it.
Betty Cracker
@Singular: It’s a tough situation for sure. We’ve had shitty presidents and periods of mass insanity here in the US, as you know, and you can wait that sort of thing out (if the idiot(s) doesn’t get you killed). But the Brexit thing has a permanence about it — an official closing off. I can understand your despair over it, and I sympathize. Best of luck to you and yours.
Fair Economist
@? Martin:
It’s pretty easy. I’m going to make a prediction now:
In October a pro-Euro candidate will become Prime Minister, probably Theresa May. They won’t pick Boris because most Tory MPs are pro-Euro. She’ll call for a vote in Commons on invoking Article 50 but allow a free vote; the vote will fail overwhelmingly. She’ll then say “sorry, I tried, I can’t call snap elections because of the Fixed Term Parliament Act, we’ll try again in 2020”. In 2020 if the Tories win, they’ll call another vote, and that will fail too because most of the pro-EU Tories will still be in Commons. Then it’s “so sorry, another 5 years”. By *that* time the demographics will have put exit out of reach.
Yeah, maybe PM May will get clobbered in 2020 by a schism in the party – in which case she’ll go to some cushy City of London job given to her in gratitude for saving the City’s financial racket. 4 years as PM, then a cushy job to retirement and the gratitude of England’s 0.1% Not a bad life.
rikyrah
@redshirt:
someone got here first about the 4 little girls in church on Sunday.
There were 5,000 lynchings of Black folk – that have been owned up to. …
but, I guess we can forget about them….
uh huh.
redshirt
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: War vs. terrorism is a good example of themes I’m talking about. Iraq used to be a functioning state, able to wage war against other functioning states. It no longer is, and thus it’s all terrorism. Perhaps it’s semantics, but I think regressing from functioning state, no matter how despicable, to anarchic hell hole, is a bad trend.
schrodinger's cat
@Singular: I am sorry about your personal situation. I hope things work out for you and your friends.
redshirt
@rikyrah: Jeez. I am NOT defending the KKK in any way, shape, or form.
rikyrah
@redshirt:
Rosewood….
Black Wall Street…..
you really wanna go down this path?
Bill Arnold
@redshirt:
and
@Baud:
Yep. Tax cuts for the affluent, and a real estate bubble for the rest of us.
redshirt
Also, for the record, I’m not comparing the America of 1920 with today, or the America of 1890.
I’m talking specifically and only about the trends in the 1990’s as compared to now, globally. For instance, in the 1990’s, the EU achieved the remarkable goal of a single currency.
Brachiator
@schrodinger’s cat:
But we also live in an era of global news and the Internets.
Europe and Germany has its own traditions and problems; but would the recent nutcase who tried to take hostages in a movie theater acted as he did if he had not been able to internalize mass shootings in the US that he read about or saw info about on the Internet?
And Prime Minister Modi did not offer advice, but seemed to have an opinion about Brexit on his recent visit to the UK:
The whole world is watching, evaluating, making judgments.
Omnes Omnibus
@redshirt: No one is suggesting that you are defending the KKK, but you were rather glossing over what they did.
redshirt
@rikyrah: Nope. You’re missing my point or I am not explaining myself well enough.
redshirt
@Omnes Omnibus: In the long ago past. Not in the 1990’s.
rikyrah
@redshirt:
There was a post on DailyKos a few years ago from a Black poster. He was young, and spoke of an argument he got into with his father – a man who had grown up in the Police State known as the Jim Crow South. The poster said that he was going through his ‘ militant’ phase, and said something smartass about Martin Luther King, and his father WENT OFF on him.
Sat his smart behind down and told him the reason King was so revered was because he stopped the random reign of TERROR that Black people lived under during Jim Crow, where if a White man woke up in a bad mood, any random Black person could be dead by the end of that day – with no repercussions.
Who the phuck do you think reinforced that Police State?
Omnes Omnibus
@redshirt: Then it is quite possible that you are talking about statistical noise.
ruemara
@Applejinx: I hate to be so blunt, but you know fuckall about racism as a motivator. It’s not globalism & economic insecurities with a slight heaping of xenophobia. It is a very large side of racism & xenophobia that keeps pushing the button for greater economic disparity.
gogol's wife
@Emma:
Россия, конечно.
Mnemosyne
@redshirt:
Yeah, whatever happened to Iraq? It’s like one day they were a functioning state, and the next they were a dysfunctional hellhole.
It’s days like this that I suspect you started drinking a little early. You may need to go sleep it off.
JMG
@Fair Economist: Not gonna happen. That’d be the @DumpTrump of British politics. It was Tory voters who most supported Leave. For May and the other pro-Euro Tories, the only move is to put Boris in charge, watch him make a cock-up of it, then blame him for the results instead of having to tell their voters that said voters were simpletons in 2016. If there’s the slenderest thread of connection to the EU left after the divorce, a remarriage is at least possible.
One thread might be Scotland. If Britain agreed to let Scotland get independence and join the EU on the condition the Scots still retain a monetary union with England and use the pound. England would have a back door path to participation in the EU economy,
Cacti
@Matt McIrvin:
Yeah, with “race riot” being the term used to sanitize the pogrom of what was then probably the country’s most affluent black community.
hovercraft
@Trentrunner:
I resemble that comment.
schrodinger's cat
@redshirt: In the 1980 there was a separatist movement in Punjab, India. Indira Gandhi was shot dead by her bodyguards. Many people lost their lives, planes were hijacked. There were riots following Mrs. Gandhi’s death which targeted the Sikhs.
There was the whole matter of Tamil Tigers which erupted in the late 80s, Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by suicide bomber at an election rally. Many Sri Lankan leaders were assassinated too. That continued till the mid aughts
Yeah but it didn’t reach these shores so I guess it didn’t exist.
redshirt
@rikyrah: The racist Democrats that ran the South. Who are now represented by racist Republicans attempting to bring back “the good old days”.
Cacti
@ruemara:
And when the economic pain continues, does anyone doubt it will continue to be blamed on the “wogs” and “Pakis”?
redshirt
@Mnemosyne: I don’t know, W. invaded, destroyed the country, then we left?
Chris
@Cacti:
That’s the conclusion now, but I can understand why he wasn’t heeded. It was the sixties; people were trying hard to turn over a new leaf and build what was at the time a radically new idea of a peaceful and cooperative Europe. How were we supposed to do that and then say “except for Britain! Because fuck these guys?” Everybody had bad blood, everybody had questionable behavior in their past that implied they wouldn’t be able to play well with others, and everybody deserved a shot at the new project. That Britain decided to spend the next fifty years navel-gazing and longing for the days of empire was on them.
@MCA1:
Precisely – very well said. And that’s what makes this entire thing so sad. I can only pray that nobody else follows suit.
Betty Cracker
@Bostondreams: I grew up down the road from Rosewood. Never learned about it in school, of course (graduated high school in the 1980s). But my grandfather, who also grew up nearby and was a little boy when the Rosewood massacre happened, told me about it. He never failed to mention Rosewood when we passed the empty, former site of it.
I was last there about a year ago. There’s a historical marker now, but pretty much nothing else. I posted a photo of it here but can’t find the post to link.
gex
@redshirt: However, you are counting the artificial state deliberately imposed by the Brits on three warring tribes as when things were better. Better in America, sure. Better for Kurds in Iraq? For Iran? Probably not so much.
gene108
@redshirt:
The KKK and/or white supremacists killed thousands.
4742 from 1882 to 1968. From 1882 to 1900 there were 100+ lynchings a year.
This doesn’t take into account the race riots of the late 1910’s and early 1920’s, where whites rampaged through black neighborhoods, with I think Tulsa, OK, in 1921, being one of the more famous ones.
Mnemosyne
@redshirt:
So the answer to your question of “Whatever happened to the good ol’ days?” is … ?
ETA: You also seem to be forgetting about those good ol’ days of rioting in the 1990s. Hello, Los Angeles 1992? How soon they forget.
The Ancient Randonneur
David Cameron had his “hold my beer and watch this” moment and millions of people will pay the price for his craven political move. Remain had a good argument, unfortunalely they never really framed it properly. This always was, and still is about immigration. The recent migration from Afghanistan, Somalia and Syria didn’t help but for many in the working class the free movement of Eastern and Southern Europeans was the real issue. Polish migrants are the second largest group after Indians coming into the UK. The Poles are absolutely reviled in many white working class areas. (Most of this information I’ve gotten from an old grad school friend who lives in London now.)
The UK is a far less diverse population than here in the US so with that in mind and your observation that they were voting on an issue and not an individual I don’t feel as nervous about this result as others might. Certainly it cannot be take for granted that Clinton will win. Most of the odds I have seen put Trump at about 1 in 3 to 1 in 5 chance of winning which is terrifying enough but it isn’t as close as the Brexit vote.
I also feel sad for my English friends who retired to Spain and Portugal and invested much of their savings to purchase a property. They are all on pins and needles, It will force somes very difficult choices on them.
redshirt
@gex: Afghanistan is another “pretend” state. You can look at pictures of Kabul from the 60’s with museums and parks, universities attended by women no less, etc. Here‘s a link to a photo series from 1960’s Kabul.
schrodinger's cat
@The Ancient Randonneur: Cameron has always reminded me of Bertie Wooster and his buddies at the Drones Club. Unfortunately, he didn’t have a Jeeves to rescue him from his worst mistakes.
redshirt
@Mnemosyne: So your point is everything’s always sucked?
redshirt
@gene108: I meant the KKK in the 1980’s and 90’s.
I realize their history is filled with murder and destruction.
schrodinger's cat
@redshirt: Yes it has always sucked but now you are no longer insulated from the suckitude.
Cacti
@The Ancient Randonneur:
In terms of the human displacement issue, I read that Britain has 1.2 million citizens living on the continent, who were entitled to lawful permanent residence via EU membership, which will be up in smoke if Article 50 is invoked.
Omnes Omnibus
@redshirt: There never was a golden age.
ETA: And neo-hippies in the ’90s don’t match Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo.
Mnemosyne
@redshirt:
Pretty much. You were just too young to realize it.
I was 9 years old in 1978, which meant I was just old enough to understand what Jonestown was all about. There is no golden age and never has been. All we can do is try to make our current age suck less for as many people as we can
Brachiator
@SiubhanDuinne:
Very funny stuff.
And on point.
I like the sly point that the Civil Service has its own agenda, independent of whatever political party is in power.
redshirt
@Omnes Omnibus: 1996 was the Golden Age.
But seriously, while I get your point, I also think it’s inaccurate to say some times were not better then others. Were the 1950’s USA better then 1930’s USA? Seems likely.
Robert Sneddon
@redshirt: 1994 was the year the Rwanda genocide occurred. From Wikipedia:
So that’s 5-10,000 people a day killed for months on end, in one small country, a gtreater-than-9/11 death toll every day but since it happened in a far-off land of which we know little it’s not so significant.
ruemara
@redshirt: not to join in a scrimmage, but we don’t even have a body count on deaths due to the KKK during reconstruction to now. There was a war on, it was just affecting people the majority didn’t care about.
We’re just noticing now because white nationalists feel all of society is complicit. So it’s hitting everyone.
Miss Bianca
@Trentrunner: “ludicrous tangerine ballsack” is da bomb. Man, no one can insult like the Brits. Going back at least as far as Shakespeare!
Cacti
@Mnemosyne:
Indeed.
How could one forget those happy, halcyon days of the Rodney King riots, the OKC bombing, the first WTC bombing, and the Heath and Columbine High School massacres?
redshirt
@schrodinger’s cat: I am fairly well insulated from the suckitude and terrorism in the US is a non-factor.
Botsplainer, Neoliberal Corporatist Shill
@The Ancient Randonneur:
Something interesting I note about traveling Americans: the wingnuts like cruises and (to a far lesser extent), canned tours. If you’re in a European destination, take informal surveys on any feelings of fear.
The further they get from the canned tours and cruises, the less worried they are about threats AND they tend not to get excited about ethnic or cultural differences.
ETA – goddamn spell check on replacement iPhone mucked up my name
Iowa Old Lady
I heard a lecture on EU recently in which the French prof giving it stressed the extent to which it was a response to decades of war in Europe. From his POV, that was the main driving force of the EU’s founding.
Mnemosyne
@redshirt:
If you were white and ignored the news? Sure. But the Montgomery Bus Boycott started in 1955.
Peale
@Cacti: Yep. And I believe that those 1.2 million weren’t allowed to vote if they resided out of the country for a certain period of time. Basically, their countrymen voted to turn them into bargaining chips. I’m fairly certain EU member states would be more than willing to expel them if the UK decides to expel their EU immigrants. Two can play at that game.
Raven on the Hill
Brad Delong and the Equitable Growth crowd have some good commentary and links:
http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/06/procrastinating-special-brexit-reading-edition.html
Myself, I posted the following:
My other thought is that resurgent fascism has legs, and we must do all we can to defeat it in the USA. Gods help me, I plan to work for the Clinton campaign.
Croak!
redshirt
@Robert Sneddon: Hard to argue against. Rwanda was a tragedy the world ignored.
Fair Economist
@JMG:
Well, it’d be like @DumpTrump if the nominee were still decided in smoke-filled rooms. They don’t have primaries in England. If Boris gets the job they still won’t exit, because he’ll never get enough of the 185 pro-Euro Tories to flip. The details of the script will be different, but still no exit.
Brachiator
Scientists are worried about the impact of Brexit:
Brexit: the gift that keeps on giving.
schrodinger's cat
@redshirt: Here are the attacks attributed to LTTE. There was a big one in 1996 where they killed 91 people.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
@redshirt:
Augmenting that is the explosion of argutainment: AM rage jocks like Limbaugh, Hannity, Coulter, et al; Fox News, hate-filled books stuffed with misleading information and truthiness. Plus, the old reptilian brains are fearful of diminishing resources and opportunities. Xenophobia grows.
Damnit! I thought we’d have formed the United Federation of Planets and overcome our differences by now.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Betty Cracker: Here ya go:
Saturdy Afternoon Open Thread (8/28/2015):
Cheers,
Scott.
The Ancient Randonneur
@Botsplainer, Neoliberal Corporatist Shill: I hear you. In my own experience from travel and living abroad I found a segment of the American population is always afraid of something. For all the bravado we spout many of us really are quite cowardly and not open to new experiences.
Omnes Omnibus
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: The first comment on that thread was … interesting.
Gene108
@redshirt:
I agree with you that in the USA there was a general sense of optimism in the 1990’s. The Cold War had ended in our favor. The economy seemed to be on solid footing. By 1999 we no longer had a budget deficit.
Not everything was perfect, but there was more optimism about the future. If you look at consumer confidence surveys, they were largely positive.
Mnemosyne
@Omnes Omnibus:
I vaguely remember that troll. He wasn’t very interesting.
Brachiator
@ruemara:
The peak year for lynchings was 1892, when 161 black people, and 69 whites were murdered. Other years in that decade were almost as bad.
Ironic that some nostalgic white folks used to look back and refer to those times as The Gay 90s. Of course, this was always much of a lie, and even hid history of a terrible economic depression, the Great Panic of 1893.
nutella
@Chris:
Nobody’s mentioned the South American dirty wars of the 70s and 80s. The majority but not all of the terrorism committed in those wars was by state actors. Many tens of thousands of people died.
berliner2
Judging from the map and the age distribution of the Brexit votes, Great Britain is in a lot more trouble than the EU. The EU will do just fine. Great Britain will very probably cease to exist within the next five years.
schrodinger's cat
@Gene108: Redshirt has been arguing that the deaths due to terrorism are up since 9/11, globally.
Botsplainer, Neoliberal Corporatist Shill
@The Ancient Randonneur:
Tell me about it. And it gets worse with age.
debbie
@redshirt:
I know I shouldn’t jump in in the middle without taking the time to read everything (which I don’t have), but seriously? The Black List? Joseph McCarthy?
debbie
@Omnes Omnibus:
Thanks for the info. I was relying on the info I got from a Brit Tory back in the early 1990s. That’ll learn me.
Gene108
@Iowa Old Lady:
I have heard that too. After WW2, Europe felt it needed a way to stop going to war with itself.
The post-WW2 peace has been the longest period European countries have had in ages, either since Charlegmene or maybe the Roman Empire. at its zenith.
Brachiator
Did everyone see this? And idiot UK voter is shocked to discover that his vote to Leave actually mattered.
As one commenter noted, “A protest vote. You know, like voting third party because Bernie didn’t get the nomination…”
Fair Economist
@Brachiator:
It’s weird how particular periods get picked out as targets of nostalgia. The Gay 90’s were for the first half of the twentieth century what the 50’s have become for today. It’s the period Disney chose for Main Street. Why the 90’s and not the 80’s or the 1900’s and why the 50’s and not the 60’s or 70’s? It’s all pretty arbitrary. People *think* the 50’s were “good times” but that’s mostly the nostalgia industry – economic growth was better in the 60’s, and there was a lot of fear from the Cold War or of a return of the Depression.
There doesn’t seem to be a new “nostalgia decade” getting picked now but maybe we’re too close to the 50’s still.
Baud
@Brachiator:
“Leave the EU? I thought it said Lead the EU!”
Patricia Kayden
@different-church-lady: The BREXIT vote was pretty close and given the demographic makeup of the UK, older and angrier voters held sway. Our demographics are much different so I don’t anticipate that there are enough angry White people to elect a Donald Trump, especially given the fact that Donald has given minorities more than enough incentive to get out and vote against him.
Matt McIrvin
Just saw a Disqus commenter announce that the Brexit vote was the death of the West as an idea and a project.
Mnemosyne
@Gene108:
I think you’re arguing something slightly different, though. Plus, that again can often have a lot to do with one’s age at the time: most people are more optimistic in their teens and early 20s, so the time when you were that age automatically seems like a more optimistic time.
As West of the Rockies said above, I suspect that at least some of the lack of optimism is due to the relentless everything sucks! drumbeat from right-wing media. Economically, we’ve been in a pretty good recovery for the last 5 years, but polls still show people aren’t optimistic.
inventor
@Baud: Or, since all money in the world is fiat money, I just call it money.
All that borrowed fiat money for the Iraq war is now a significant chunk of the national debt, it didn’t just go away.
jl
Put me down as agree with Krugman.
It ironic that most of the recent economic problems in EU countries, and particularly the Eurozone subset, that Fox News and other pundits like to blame on liberal goodies for the lesser people, are really due to bad, and rather conservative market oriented macroeconomic and financial policy. And Cameron has followed their lead even when and where he did not have to (since UK is not in the eurozone). The smug Cameron’s bad economic policies bit him in the ass with this vote, I think. Couldn’t happen to a more deserving guy.
Not sure what will happen in short run politically. Brexit is not a good ‘make England great again’ policy, which besides the bigotry, was the main selling point for the Brexit advocates.
The US generally, and if you want to pin it all on presidents, the Obama, and even the W macroeconomic policies look like wild free spending irresponsible, even depraved Sanders style, commy-nism free lunch madness, compared to the EU and especially the Eurozone. And the more it fails, the more the European ruling elites want to dig in and keep at it.
Groucho48
@Emma:
His buddy, Vladimir, of course!
debbie
@Gene108:
I think any optimism was due to the belief that the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s was an aberration, when really it was the bird in the coal mine of the financial industry’s craven evilness. We should have seen 2008 coming.
Groucho48
The tech bubble had lots of folks dreaming of making millions either in the tech world or in the stock market.
Old Broad in California
First, as someone who’s very new here, I need to tell you all how much I appreciate reading all your thoughtful, literate and sometimes wonderfully snarky posts about important subjects.
I do think (at least I hope) that the Brexit vote was as much about nationalism as about racism. I know the two are often related, but there’s a subtle difference. We would probably chafe here in the US if important rules that affected us were being made in Ottawa.
I do, however, worry about what happens now. And what this means about our election in November.
Raven on the Hill
Someone (I think in a previous thread) asked about other referendums. Felix Salmon:
Elie
@Matt McIrvin:
THIS:
Not much more to say except that I hope that they don’t destroy too much before they finish their rage. There are few ways to stop them coercively beyond their own exhaustion and eventual realization of what they have done.
Miss Bianca
@rikyrah: I remember that diary. It was powerful.
Elie
@rikyrah:
Absolutely….
I remember driving to Georgia with my parents back in the early sixties and what a gut check it was to stop for gas…. The sense of their fear — though nothing was said. THAT is terror imbedded after a lifetime of threat by everyday whites in every day situations. I guess they miss that — the intimidation and seeing fear in the face of others. Fuck em is absolutely what I think. No white person ever has had that experience…The closest that I can think of that would be a white woman living a long time with a serial abuser….
Miss Bianca
@Matt McIrvin: I think that’s un peu d’exaggeration, myself…
Taylor
@redshirt:
If the Republic of Ireland gets to vote on a United Ireland, my bet is they would reject it.
They have enough to deal with.
redshirt
@schrodinger’s cat: You’ve provided no links to prove it isn’t. I showed you a link from the Economist showing the rise in terrorism related deaths since 9/11.
Brachiator
@Fair Economist:
Good points. It’s weird that some bigoted Trump supporters specifically reference 50s and early 60s tv shows. Maybe they see this period as “good” because they were children then, and also insulated from the larger world, or have been lulled by the faulty memories of their parents and grandparents.
And of course, much of the media they remember and can even stream and watch, was often deliberately scrubbed of reality and diversity.
Betty Cracker
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: Thank you!
Singular
@Brachiator: I watched that fucking idiot on TV today, the transcript doesn’t nearly do justice to it. And he is not alone, I know people with the same views and feeling.
Sloane Ranger
@Calouste: This. It’s why Boris said this morning that we should be in no hurry to initiate Article 50.I bet he and Gove were having kittens when the results came rolling in thinking what do we do now.
Farage probably less so. He knows the EU will fold like cheap paper and give us everything we ask for. His only problem is that he doesn’t know what to ask for despite having had over 10 years to think about it.
danielx
in the Trump insult sweepstakes, two thumbs way up for “toupéd fucktrumpet.” Though “ludicrous tangerine ballsack” is coming on strong in local sentiment.
Sloane Ranger
Just to let people know that the BBC is reporting protests by young Remain supporters outside the Murdock owned newspapers and that an online petition for a 2nd referendum has gained over 400 thousand signatures since it was launched earlier today.
The young are making their displeasure known.
schrodinger's cat
deleted.
schrodinger's cat
@redshirt: Economist’s chart only starts from 2000. I did give you the link to the terrorist attacks LTTE was responsible for. They were responsible for a total of more than 70,000 uring the time they were operational from 1980s to the late aughts. Most of the people they killed were Sri Lankans and some were Indians. Never even made the news here, so to you these never happened. Got it
The link is in comment # 255
Uncle Cosmo
@Miss Bianca: Dishonoré duh Ballsack, if ya ast me. Currently authoring Le Grosse Farce Humaine one 140-byte blurt at a time…
Uncle Cosmo
@Botsplainer, Neoliberal Corporatist Shill:
Something I noticed on my very first European trip in 1980 is that the worst & best (most/least obnoxious) Eurotourists were quite easy to categorize & it had fuck-all to do with country of origin, native language, etc. The worst were those in package tours, traveling in a bubble, insulated from the nations they move through by a hypercritical mass of compatriots/colinguists, outraged that everything isn’t just like home. (And abetted by native tourguides whose primary interest is often the cut they get from the souvenir vendors they steer their
markscharges to.)The best were the ones traveling frugally in ones & twos who had little alternative to interacting with the locals on the latters’ terms, often (haltingly if necessary) in the latters’ tongue.
I saw tour groups of half a dozen different nationalities acting atrociously, & I saw individual travelers from the same nationalities who couldn’t have been more respectful & considerate of their hosts. I met young Austrians who worked at a student-dorm-turned-summer-pension who told me the Americans they’d met were as a group the best tourists–because no US tour group would ever book rooms where the showers & toilets were down the hall.
(This is probably less globally true now, in a world of smartphones & ubiquitous wifi with concomitant maps, GPS, hotel/restaurant listings & instant translation apps , with English-as-lingua-franca [ha!]. But still.)