BBC reporter goes fishing for anti Brexit headline.
Shock! Horror!
..Quickly followed by the resident TechPower UP Remoaner Twats, saying why a democratic referendum should be ignored....because they know better than the horrid little working class plebs, that don't agree with their self entitled, Middle Class World view.
Ah, so a direct negative consequence of Brexit for the UK - the loss of a chance to even be in the running for a large-scale industrial project with thousands of jobs - should just be ignored, and not reported on? That's an interesting angle.
I haven't seen anything but poorly handled democracy in my life.
You should come to the Nordics
Our systems are
far from perfect, but they do work pretty well. There's a high level of trust, a lot of cooperation, a relatively low level of shit-flinging, and low degrees of corruption. Still
plenty of issues, to be sure, but we're overall doing pretty okay.
The 50.0001% choice you mentioned is exactly why brexit happened. I believe people should not be asked, or even allowed to vote on matters that they have no chance to acquire adequate knowledge about, especially if it's a "yes or no" kind of thing. The neighbour's grass is always greener, so the results of such polls are manipulated and easily predictable. As an IT analogy, if you'd asked people "is AMD shit?" 5 years ago, the majority would have said yes. If you ask people "is Intel shit?" right now, the majority will say yes. Some will say no, of course, but not many will say "well, it depends" or "let me elaborate on that". Few have the perspective and critical thinking skills to realise that the truth isn't black or white.
My opinion might not be very popular in the 21st century, but I think democracy as a political system is a failure on its own because 1. it gives power to common people who are inherently stupid and vote for people/parties of their own likeness, aka. just as stupid as they themselves, and 2. it puts disagreeing parties into temporary power, essentially allowing them the chance to get rich on state money in a short period of time, then F off without any responsibility for their actions. There's so many statesmen in a country that you don't even see where all the money disappears, or who's fault this or that bad decision is. I wouldn't want to live in the middle ages by far, but waring dynasties at least had an interest in staying in power and making sure they left a flourishing kingdom/empire for their children to rule over.
I can't quite say I share your view, but I understand it. The thing is, functional democracy has been under systematic attack since ... well, let's say the 1960s or thereabouts - it's hard to draw a line, and this differs based on where you are, but that's roughly when neoliberalism started making itself known. Most democratic European countries in the ~2 decades immediately past WWII had a high level of trust in government and relatively well-functioning systems of government (though these had
severe issues of their own, such as an inability to deal with racist, colonialist and classist baggage), but neoliberal politicians in the late 60s or 70s started propagating the idea that government was inherently wasteful (rather than fulfilling a highly necessary function of any large-scale society), and that in the name of "efficiency" we should start counting and measuring everything in order to "reduce waste" through budget cuts. Which has the funnny (and largely intended) consequence of making government fundamentally dysfunctional, as the focus becomes on reporting and measuring rather than governing and
doing the things that need doing, leading to the seemingly paradoxical outcome of ever more bloated beaureaucracies and ever less effective governance. It's easy to say this in hindsight, but it really shouldn't be surprising that if you ask someone to please start documenting every single thing they do, in detail, across ever more complex reporting systems, they will have less time to actually do their jobs. And when coupled with budget cuts (=less staff), this is just exacerbated. Which, of course, the neoliberals then use as proof that government is indeed bloated and ineffective, and should be
further downsized. Of course the idea of economic "freedom" through deregulation is used as a key selling point for all of this, while consistently failing to address how deregulation inherently favors those who are already wealthy and powerful. It's consistently baffling to me how these policies have continued to gain public traction, but then leftist politicians have also failed to effectively counteract this incredibly damaging ideology (in part because of its own insistence on not being an ideology (but rather framing it as the absence of ideology, as if this was somehow a "natural state"), making it inherently slippery and difficult to argue against). Half a decade into the throes of neoliberal domination of world politics and economics, we have yet to properly find a functional alternative to it that also addresses the inherent flaws of Keynesian economic theory, which is at least part of the reason why we're stuck in a downward spiral (that often looks like an upward spiral unless you start asking questions). And due to the majority of people alive today never knowing another way of thinking, it's becoming increasingly difficult to imagine an alternative. Late-stage capitalism eats everything, and promptly sells it back to us for a profit.
iagine if China take Iranian space man to 