i mean if u earn £15K a year and dropped out of intro to engineering or w/e I don't think its fair to call you a success

its very clear that people who have spent the most time around higher education and in white collar settings tended to vote remain. You can interpret it how u want that the people who have the most practice working in areas based around critical thinking and researching options were also the most likely to vote remain.

This is pretty funny considering fear and propaganda were the primary drivers in the Remain campaign. Naturally if people are willing to accept the bullshit they are being fed by those with interests in the EU then this was their target audience to swing the vote in their favour.

Unfortunately for them, Bob Geldof and a bunch of other celebrities backing Remain didn't mean shit in the end and people were able to see through the facade. In addition, there was a severe lack of counter-arguments against Leave in the debates, and if you haven't seen them then you should look them up.

I know your pain. I live in one of the most liberal areas in Maryland and I constantly heard people who were uninformed and only believed what the media said. I would challenge their beliefs (I'm fairly libertarian, but more conservative than liberal) only to be called a bigot when they were saying very reactionary and authoritarian ideals.

They all wanted to move to Canada if Trump got the nomination. I promptly sent this video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIH-J3uLN3E

both sides were terribly campaigned. that doesn't mean that the side that was more terribly campaigned didn't have the most backing amongst people who actually knew anything.

You called 17,410,742 people retarded, because they as British citizens voted for self-determination, so you should not bitch and whine about ad hominems when your logic is turned on you.... retard.

and yea, maybe it is good to listen to the bottom 5% of the people, who also consist of the most honest and decent people you can find, when it goes over issues that effect them the most. (As when social housing is given with priority over native signle english men with mental problems or shelter, I know a Belgian with lots of mental issues who was not allowed in a shelter becuase it was already packed with illegals, and thus forced to roam the streets for a week or two until he did a crime to get himself sheltered in a jail)

and i'm sure a lot of remain voters were totally uninformed and their only arguments were vague feelings based arguments. No prob with that though, heh?
The EU membership lasted for 40 years, and the older people also remember a time before that. while the young ones never did, once again, lack of experience. and life wisdom.

I don't get the thinly veiled anti-intellectualism. When 90% of everyone whose job it is to research this kind of thing politically and economically says its a bad idea and they do it anyway and say "the British public are tired of listening to experts" then frankly they are fucking stupid.

"because they as British citizens voted for self-determination"

I called them retarded because they voted for something that is only going to hurt them without even bothering to look up what they were voting for. Stop trying to assume I called them retarded for what they voted for. I'm calling them retarded because of why they voted for it.

"who also consist of the most honest and decent people you can find"

I wouldn't consider people in poverty particularly honest or decent but u do u and enjoy getting mugged i guess lol. You may or may not have noticed, but when it comes to voting, people tend to vote against their interest quite often.

"No prob with that though, "

Its just as terrible as a reason to vote, but staying in wasn't going to cause your economy to collapse so good job, you won !!!

"and the older people also remember a time before that"

I mean here in the states the old people remember a time when a good saturday involved lynchin a nigger but we don't really base our policy off the feelies of people with dementia because we're not interested in being economically ruined

should have sent this instead

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04u58ifxmRA

I don't really understand this whole, "get our country back" the EU is "undemocratic" argument, as a good enough reason to leave.

If the goal is to truly have democracy.
Do we also now need referendums in the UK on the monarchy and house of lords? Arguably far less democratic institutions than the EU.
Even the UK parliament is undemocratic, with gerrymandering and the first past the post voting system.

Elliot you're a retard for trying to claim that the leave voters are uninformed people who in your ivory tower perception, shouldn't even be allowed to vote.
The biggest muggers and robbers are multinationals evading taxes, and people parking black money in shady constructions and others sort of fiscal fraud. the difference between them and the 5% poorest people is that they will never be accounted for. How idiot your claim is to call the poorest, idiots and thugs, while I lived amongst them most of my life and i've never been mugged. I do get to read about things like the panama papers and the Luxembourg connection, or the art auctions with heavily inflated prices as a cover to whitewash money. You must be endowed with this 19th century mindset that the rich are more morally "good" people than the poor.
Calling people from 40 years and up, the biggest segment of the population all demented and be so stereotypical to call up the KKK boogeyman (we are talking about England here), the generations who worked in mines, grew up in a time of war, who transformed the country into the 5th biggest economy in the modern day with a culture that brought the beatles, black sabbath, the who. aphex twin and monthy python. Yea sure, totally incompetent.

"trying to claim"

I'm not claiming anything. Polls directly indicate that the average voter on both sides was horribly uninformed about the nature of the referendum. They didn't understand what the EU did for the UK, the extent of immigration in the UK, how much the EU was costing them, or how extensive the EU welfare system in the UK was. Here's an Independent article about it.

"The biggest muggers and robbers are multinationals evading taxes"

I agree. Leaving the EU isn't going to solve any of that though. All you've done is hurt the short term profits of the 1%. They'll either relocate to mainland Europe or Ireland or pass the increased tariffs and legislation onto the public. If you want to actually control multinational corporations, the EU was your best shot, since it gave you a large governing body with enough clout to actually prevent tax havens and the like from forming effectively in Europe. Now all you've done is set up a situation where either you become a tax haven or somewhere else does and you lose the advantages of having huge corporations use your country as a stepping stone into the EU. Overall, you cut your nose to spite your face and don't have any way to stem the bleeding. I assume that UKIP was trying to maneuver for a better position with this referendum and didn't actually expect to succeed, otherwise there would have been a better plan to ease the economic fallout.

"Yea sure, totally incompetent"

The problem with your argument (and more broadly democracy) is that the entire system depends on people being well informed on a specific set of skills that the vast majority of the population doesn't have. You can be a fantastic miner, farmer, doctor, or teacher and not have at all of a clue about international politics and trade. You can even be a great local business man or politician and still be myopic to the international or intercontinental implications of your actions. The problem is that the people who are employed to inform the public and make decisions about things like this underestimated the anti-EU sentiment. The remain camp half-assed their defense, and since talking points are always over-simplified and selective, Brexit came down to a really weak issue that was far too nebulous to debate (immigration). While there is some merit to the argument about the amount of autonomy should England have on its borders, that shouldn't have been the focus of this discussion. Since the discussion got paired down into such a small and specific issue, people didn't bother to research it and mostly went with their gut feeling about how immigration affects them. Because immigrants tend to take lower paying or unskilled jobs, the people who felt the most threatened were the working class of the UK, and they obviously showed up to defend their employment. These people don't know dick about the EU or immigration, they just know they're kind of related and that immigrants might take their jobs. Voting exit was obviously a rational choice in that light, and the biggest failing in letting that happen was the Remain camp not shifting the discussion towards more concrete issues like welfare, the economy, etc.

That said, you can't place all the blame on the politicians who misinformed the public, at some point the public needs to be responsible enough to actually look deeply into issues and do personal research.

also im not a retard pls stop saying that i have papers saying im anti-retarded plssss stop

Good move by UK, don't prop up the weaker nations, Germany and France would be wise to follow their lead.

i got downvoted for not typing like an autist so here's my actual normal response

if the best you can do to defend the Leave vote was it was supported by people who liked the beatles, your argument is actually beyond terrible

i could of course explain why that's retarded but i think it'll be lost on you since you seem to think being good at one thing automatically makes you better at other things, I'm assuming this is because you're a weeaboo with no life experience who lives in the shittiest parts of his country and has yet to master anything

You're Elliot.

Why don't you relax and listen to some good music, instead of throwing some empty insults together that make you look like you're having a fit. Don't worry about the downvotes, you're not on reddit anymore ;).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usNsCeOV4GM

1. After a certain point in life, cognitive function worsens with age
2. Older people generally have less ability to gather information compared to young people
3. After a certain point in life, a person's social circle decreases in size. The chance of interacting with non-likeminded people decreases, therefore your own beliefs get challenged less and less.

I see no reason to assume that elders make smarter decisions on things like this.

edit: Oh and then there's also this thing where the tendency towards nostalgia becomes greater with age. Because why believe that the future will be better, when you probably won't be part of it? Believing that the past, the time that you lived, was better, seems like a good coping mechanism when reaching the end of your life. In this case that means an EU-less past

1. before a certain point in life, you lack the maturity and experience to be able to form a nuanced and more complete perception of the world. Thats why you have minimum voting ages, not maximum.
2. The internet and old school information centers like libraries are both in the grasp of an able older person. Whereas, wiki suffices for most young people, and most never even read a book or follow the news.
3. I'm sure 25 year old shut ins who live their life on the internet have a bigger social circle than older people who have social habits and networking from a time before the internet.

Not saying you should automatically assume that the oldest will make the wisest decision, but calling the older people just senile, or even the calls by some young people for putting a max voter age for 65 as one pundit already proposed http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/eu-referendum-results-age-data-young_uk_576cd7d6e4b0232d331dac8f is just plain silly.

im also a college junior with a 3.9 GPA and i can bench more than u

the fact u cant even come up with tangible, factual arguments for why the Leave was a good idea is a really good example of the ability of the average leave voter to understand economics :)

"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." - Winston Churchill

Blows my mind that people do this.

I think i talked about this in my nerd essay but:

I don't think anyone was expecting this to actually happen. The Leave leaders aren't stupid. They knew a leave was going to have strong market effects. But we've seen relatively little in the shape of a plan or ideas to stabilize the economy and transition smoothly. If I had to guess, they wanted to pressure the EU into giving them more control as well as set up a precedent for leaving.

http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-eu-32314486

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/greek-debt-crisis-how-goldman-sachs-helped-greece-to-mask-its-true-debt-a-676634.html
EU policy is like the one enacted in Greece, where EUROSTAT first approves the fiddling off the books of greece, and then enforces "austerity' which crippled a country and put its citizens into poverty with no hope to crawl out.

You still didn't explain at all how Leave is a good option. The EU is a piece of shit? Well you just backed out of being in its good grace and gave up any sort of political power you had in it, and you haven't gained anything from it.

http://i.imgur.com/wrGDnFm.png

sac I don't plan on replying much further in this thread so I might not get back to your reply to this if you do, but I don't think anyone is saying the EU is perfect, because it isn't, and there's definitely some shitty aspects to it, but it's still infinitely more preferable than what leaving it is going to do to the rest of the world and esp England. Instead the EU's members should be working together to fix the shitty aspects, all Brexit is doing is basically telling people that the UK (by which I actually mean England here, because I'll be impressed if Scotland doesn't call for independence again and Northern Ireland doesn't attempt for unification with Southern Ireland soon) gives up on the concept of the EU and doesn't want to bother with making it better.

Plus as time goes on globalization is only going to increase, not lessen, and we should be striving to work together as one people not divisions of nationalistic ones, and the EU is pretty much the biggest thing actually leading that charge.

I understand your sentiment, but consider this: The Brexit forces Europe's hand in starting to think about a choice. Do we want an Europe of sovereign states working with each other as good neighbours, or an "United states of Europe" with an unelected commission, very well paid politicians bribed by lobbyists, and plagued by inefficient bureaucracy (like moving the offices from Strasbourg to Brussels every month) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Parliament#/media/File:CantinesEUbrussel.jpg, and a currency plagued by problems who only pushed inflation.

Also Elliot,give me a tangible factual argument for why you aren't retarded.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37iHSwA1SwE

i mean if u need actual proof that my brain isn't under developed i guess. im not particularly smart but my brain at least works

Your argument is "Leaving the EU causes the EU to do things" but you haven't explained why leaving was necessary to make those things happen, what those things are, or what you think the best plan to further your goals are. Your objections are basically "the EU is bad and I don't want to support its shittiness" and your solution is to ruin your countries economy without actually doing anything that hurts the EU in a meaningful way. You still have to deal with the EU.

inb4 Scotland tries to join Ireland, since they're already part of the EU. Gaelic Union?

When they talk about the more educated being likely to vote remain, you have to bear in mind that the young are more likely to vote remain and more of them went to university because university access is much wider than it used to be. The old grew up in an age where only the most academic could get near a university, and the A-levels and O-levels needed to quality for entry were much harder. Today there is a deliberate government policy to get as many kids into university as possible, so they've opened up way more universities with much lower standards, and made the exams much easier to pass.

Most of the 'uneducated' old people would probably have degrees if they grew up today, and most of today's young educated people would have left school with no qualifications to work in a coal mine if they grew up 50 years ago.

#231

If anything Greece is an example of the EU being to forgiving towards Greece, they should have siezed Greeces currency reserves, sold off federally own property(land, art, military assets) to private individuals or companies, with the exception of the weapons which should have been sold off to other governments, if the Greeks still had debt after that, take a portion of their tax/tariff revenue every year until it is fully paid off. Might not have been good for Greece but it would have stopped Greece from dragging everyone down with it, plus it is Greeces fault they are in the situation they are in so they have no one but themselves to blame.

I mean there was a article here in a Calgary newspaper about refugees who had fled to Canada saying they didn't like the hospitality and were considering returning to Syria. The reasons they listed were, the sheets weren't being changed daily and they were being served "westernized middle eastern food" so it is to say maybe all the refugee's aren't fleeing violence considering they'd be willing to return because they didn't like the food.