Hard Brexit: what consequences?

Started by TheFrighter, Fri 30/08/2019 20:58:00

Previous topic - Next topic

LimpingFish

Quote from: Khris on Thu 05/09/2019 20:10:45
Also, since this is a thread about Brexit: https://twitter.com/dionfanning/status/1169309541902770182

Very interesting film, Khris, thanks for posting it.

To everybody else, I will say it again. Stay. On. Target.

As a side note, this thread has been brought to the moderators attention, and hopefully we'll have something to say about it soon.

Steam: LimpingFish
PSN: LFishRoller
XB: TheActualLimpingFish
Spotify: LimpingFish

Ali

#81
Fair enough, I haven't actually addressed the original question in this thread.

I think it's very hard to make predictions - we don't know if, or in what form Brexit will happen. But if it happens without a deal under a Conservative government in thrall to it's hard-right flank, then I think we're likely to see significant changes. The economy will falter, and the Tory response will be to turn the UK ever more into Tax Haven Britain - a low-tax, low-welfare state. Tax breaks and deregulation will aim to prevent businesses from fleeing. Britain will avoid any financial transactions taxes brought in by the EU, making the City of London more attractive to traders. The economy will become even more focused on financial services and the South East.

There will, needless to say, be less government funding for the creative arts and training. Non-STEM higher education will increasingly be stigmatised and derided by politicians. An increasingly hostile environment for immigrants will make Britain a less attractive option for students and talented young people. Game development, like everything else, will be negatively impacted.

Stupot

Quote from: Khris
But since this thread is about brexit, remember when Johnson was asked whether he had any hobbies and started talking really weirdly about crafting toy buses from wine crates? Some people suspect he did this to influence the search results when people google "johnson bus".
Anyway, it's a pretty good video.

Quote from: WHAM
It's damn sight clever, though. As an idea, that is, obviously it didn't work in the slightest, and if that was the plan then Boris or his team must have deeply misunderstood how online search engines work.
It's a similar kind of misdirected smarts as the whole "behave like a bumbling fool, pretending not to know you're about to give a speech when you are" -shtick he's been using over and over.
He may look like the village idiot, but there is some cunning to the man.

I hadn't heard about this but it makes absolute sense.
At the end of July, a bus for the Brexit Party was spotted having apparently broken down and been ditched.

While everyone was joking and mocking Nigel Farage I made the following observation.

It was, to me anyway, a clear attempt to manipulate the Google search results for the words 'brexit' and 'bus'. Well done, it worked for about a day.

What Khris posted above proves I wasn't being paranoid.

Gurok

#83
I'm actually glad that discussions with Jack make people like Ali feel uncomfortable. I can't stand people being complacent in their belief that these threads should be cheer squads for whatever politics they side with. I also think people should consider carefully the outcome when they make threads like these. You all know it has no bearing on AGS. It was just an ill-fated attempt to contrive a circlejerk.

I hope every Brit who's posted here fearing Brexit gets the hardest possible Brexit.
[img]http://7d4iqnx.gif;rWRLUuw.gi

Khris

Every single sentence in that post is bad. Every single one.

Laura Hunt

#85
Quote from: Gurok on Fri 06/09/2019 08:38:07
I'm actually glad that discussions with Jack make people like Ali feel uncomfortable.

If someone comes into an elevator and rips a massive fart, it will also make everybody uncomfortable. It doesn't mean it's valuable, productive, interesting, or relevant.

I'm 45 years old. I've been running into men like Jack and others in this thread my whole life. Online, in bars, in workplace conversations, in the bus, or shouting at me while I'm walking down the street holding my girlfriend's hand, edgelords who think that everybody else has been brainwashed out of seeing THE truth, unlike them, the chosen ones, the rebels, the ones who heroically resist against the "political correctness gone maaaaaad!". It's boring. It's trite. It's yawn-inducing. And there are always going to be dudes like him spouting the same literal copy-pasted bullshit. Which is why I never engage anymore with stuff like this. It's a waste of time and only encourages them because they thrive in the attention they get. They think "wow, this is really getting everybody riled up! Let's keep at it trololol".

At least one good thing has come out of this thread: knowing which people here have nothing to contribute to the world but farts.

Ali

#86
I think it was Orwell who said, "if you want a vision of the AGS Forums' future,  imagine a fart, farting on a human face - forever."

I'm always ready to have a reasonable conversation with pro-Brexit folk, especially left-wing Lexit people. But there are limits to what is reasonable.

Matti

Quote from: Gurok on Fri 06/09/2019 08:38:07
I'm actually glad that discussions with Jack make people like Ali feel uncomfortable.

Me too, because if that bullshit wouldn't make people uncomfortable, all hope would be lost.

Stupot

Quote from: Gurok on Fri 06/09/2019 08:38:07
I hope every Brit who's posted here fearing Brexit gets the hardest possible Brexit.

Why though?

What I fear about Brexit, as a Brit living overseas, is the sheer uncertainty. Nobody knows exactly how things are going to go down. That's why making a deal seems so important from where I'm sitting. I have no idea how Britain's leaving with no deal would affect my family back home, who are already all on low incomes.

Maybe nothing bad will come of it in the end and we'll all look back wondering what we were so scared of. Maybe all the doom and gloom is just ‘project fear', But we just don't know that until it happens. And I'd just rather it didn't happen.

Ali

#89
It's especially alarming since we know how easily uncertainty can bring down a bank. If the markets were to panic, if factory owners like Nissan were to relocate, it could have real consequences for people's livelihoods.

Of course, someone always makes money when there's blood in the street, so Rees-Mogg and his fellow disaster capitalists are right to look forward to opportunities galore.

Quote from: Gurok on Fri 06/09/2019 08:38:07
I hope every Brit who's posted here fearing Brexit gets the hardest possible Brexit.

"I hope the people who predicted a bad thing are punished by experiencing that bad thing and being proven correct," is not quite the rhetorical masterstroke it seems.

Blondbraid

Quote from: Jack on Thu 05/09/2019 19:15:18
It's more accurate to say I have a problem with not punching communists. This board has opened my eyes to the possibilities of assaulting people based on their suspected beliefs. ;)
And hopefully you've opened a great deal of other people's eyes to what a massive hypocrite you are. I posted one joke image about Indiana Jones punching a nazi soldier wearing a nazi uniform and was fully armed and had a bunch of other nazi henchmen in the background, and you'd have to be both blind and deaf and raised under a rock to miss that the image depicts a fictional hero punching a guy who is 100% undoubtedly a nazi. You're talking about you going out and beating up random people because you suspect they are communists.

Quote from: Jack on Thu 05/09/2019 19:15:18
Quote from: Blondbraid on Thu 05/09/2019 10:04:54
For crying out loud, the entire point I've been trying to make is that it's not about numbers or body count, it's about ideology.

Right, and the one I made is that the dead end up just as dead and almost as numerous either way. It's funny, when we started discussing this, you said I couldn't compare all the deaths from communism globally to the nazis, because you know how many they have killed, everywhere that communism was the law.
I've already made a post about why your counting is disingenuous nazi apologia, and I got real sources linked to back it up.

Do you think Jack the Ripper was a better man than Winston Chuchill because millions of Indians starved under Churchill but Jack the Ripper only gutted five people alive?

But you've already proven that you don't care one iota about history, or logic, or human morality, or even anyone of those who died under communist regimes. You just desperately want Communism to be seen as worse than nazism so that you can feel better about punching people calling you out on your hypocrisy and spreading transphobia.
Quote from: Matti on Fri 06/09/2019 12:57:28
Quote from: Gurok on Fri 06/09/2019 08:38:07
I'm actually glad that discussions with Jack make people like Ali feel uncomfortable.

Me too, because if that bullshit wouldn't make people uncomfortable, all hope would be lost.
True words!

The more I read up on the Weimar Republic, the more I feel like Cassandra.


TheFrighter

Quote from: Blondbraid on Fri 06/09/2019 17:55:27

I've already made a post about why your counting is disingenuous nazi apologia, and I got real sources linked to back it up.

[/quote]

Thank you Blondbraid, but please don't feed the heat. Jack has spoken his arguments, all of you replied with yours. Make fuzz about this was not my intention.

_

Blondbraid

Quote from: TheFrighter on Fri 06/09/2019 18:07:21

Thank you Blondbraid, but please don't feed the heat. Jack has spoken his arguments, all of you replied with yours. Make fuzz about this was not my intention.

_
I'm sad to see the thread get off topic myself, but at the same time I and several others have a hard time standing by and letting nazi apologia and transphobia stand unopposed...  :(


Snarky

Mod hat:

The moderators are trying to decide on how to deal with the conflict situation on the forums (seen in this thread and others), which a number of forum members have said they find intolerable. If you wish to weigh in, you may PM any one of us, and we'll share it with the rest of the moderation team.

As moderator of this board, I'll say that I deem a number of the posts and patterns of behavior seen in this thread to be unacceptable. Specifically, some of the comments about transgender people arguably cross the line into hate speech, or at least trolling. Jack will not be contributing to this thread for a while.

Without drawing any equivalence otherwise, I will say that both sides are guilty of derailing the thread from its stated topic.
This will not be tolerated any further: any future posts in this thread that are not about Brexit, or that serve to derail it from that topic, will be deleted.

Atelier

It's nice to see the community is still a friendly and welcoming place.

Re Brexit:

Quote from: Khris
But since this thread is about brexit, remember when Johnson was asked whether he had any hobbies and started talking really weirdly about crafting toy buses from wine crates? Some people suspect he did this to influence the search results when people google "johnson bus".
Anyway, it's a pretty good video.

That interview is actually surreal (people have pointed out the similarities with this (laugh))

Stupot, I'm not convinced it was a deliberate ploy to change Google trends though, even if it did actually have that effect. He was quite clearly making it up as he went along, in an attempt to make him seem like he has an 'ordinary' hobby. He mentions his time as Mayor, so he's alluding to the Boris bus. That it was a haphazard attempt at answering a personal question makes more sense to me than him trying to keep the Brexit bus out the news.

From what I see, the Conservatives are pretty much spent. With Clarke, Hammond, nineteen others, and now Rudd gone, there seems to be no moderate, centralising cooling rod. I'm sure others will follow Rudd now.

It's lies that there are negotiations going on with the EU, we know that from multiple sources on both sides. Johnson is delaying because he wants a no deal, that's obvious. However, I genuinely believe he wants to get a deal on paper, and then blame any shortcomings on the EU, delays on Labour, etc, pushing towards severing all ties on Halloween.

Also, I realise that the OP was per se asking about the games industry. I honestly don't know enough about it but I cannot imagine that the entertainment industries will be nearly as affected as, say, farming or manufacturing.

Ali

I can't tell whether we give Johnson too much or too little credit. Johnson sometimes pretends to be stupid, bumbling, chaotic. It's certainly a persona, and a very entertaining put-on. But does that mean that there's a cunning plan underpinning the lies and hot air?

I don't know. This long, but amusing account of two encounters with Johnson is quite interesting:

https://www.facebook.com/thejeremyvine/posts/since-he-is-probably-our-next-prime-minister-i-thought-id-share-this-boris-johns/2449074521979085/

LimpingFish

Quote from: Ali on Sun 08/09/2019 14:25:44
I can't tell whether we give Johnson too much or too little credit. Johnson sometimes pretends to be stupid, bumbling, chaotic. It's certainly a persona, and a very entertaining put-on. But does that mean that there's a cunning plan underpinning the lies and hot air?

Apparently, a lot of people (including critics of his) regard him as having a brilliant political mind, and that his outward persona is cultivated, and intentionally disarming. I'd say, behind closed doors, he probably presents a somewhat different demeanor. I think we got a glimpse of it last week, as he watched his majority disappear live on TV.

To be honest, I'm starting to lose my grip on the situation, with so much happening over the last week or so. And Boris was in Dublin, meeting our Prime Minister, just yesterday! Maybe he's a  Kylie fan too...

Quote from: Atelier on Sun 08/09/2019 12:59:13
It's lies that there are negotiations going on with the EU, we know that from multiple sources on both sides. Johnson is delaying because he wants a no deal, that's obvious. However, I genuinely believe he wants to get a deal on paper, and then blame any shortcomings on the EU, delays on Labour, etc, pushing towards severing all ties on Halloween.

If I can get my head around it, I think that his continued insistence that further negotiations are possible, coupled with his desire to hold an election before the deadline, are really just part of his bigger, continuing power-play. He wants the election before the deadline, so he can build his re-election on the running lie that he's just the man to get a new, "better" deal. One would hope that, yes, he would prefer some form of safeguards in place of a hard Brexit. But I honestly think that all of it, Brexit, hard, soft, whatever, plays second-fiddle to his primary goal; staying Prime Minister.
Steam: LimpingFish
PSN: LFishRoller
XB: TheActualLimpingFish
Spotify: LimpingFish

fernewelten

#97
I can't see that the situation has changed in the slightest in TWO YEARS by now. The outer trappings change, the fundamentals do not:

The sorry fact is that there are three incompatible options each of which has well below 50 %, but each two of which combined exceed the 50 % by a comfortable margin:

  • Hard Brexit,
  • Soft Brexit,
  • Remain.

So whenever some proposal gets more than 50 %, that means that it joins at least two incompatible options that have been confounded and can't be implemented. Whenever on the other hand there is some proposal that could actually be implemented, it has a resounding majority against.

This stupid stalemate started right at the get-go when Cameron asked whether the British wanted to remain. Fundamentally, that question divided the options into Remain, on the one side, and Soft Brexit + Hard Brexit confounded, on the other side. Remain, the implementable option, had a majority against.

Then May followed that fundamentally championed a Soft Brexit (in a slightly underhand way) -- so the other two options, the Remainers confounded with the Hard Brexiters, coughed up a majority against.

Now it's Johnson championing a Hard Brexit (in a slightly underhanded way) -- and calling up a majority against, recruited by the Remainers confounded with the Soft Brexiters.

The external trappings change, but inside, it's the exact same stupid deadlock all the time.

Johnson's move to “disempower” the parliament has nothing to do with it. They've already demonstrated repeatedly that they're incapable of deciding on anything implementable -- even without the whip. And elections won't change anything since the parliament is a fair representation of the nation which is also incapable of deciding on anything implementable.

So the nation needs to remain squatting on the fence, cleaving their b*m ever deeper for all eternity. And that's indeed what the parliament's newest sorry attempt of decision making has turned to, again.

So now it's to be January, is it? Of which century?  (wrong)


Stupot

@fernewelten - I like that analysis. None of those 3 options can get a 50%+ majority, so no matter what they do, a significant majority will be upset.

Except, I don't think that's the case any more. I really think if we had another binary leave-remain referendum, the remain camp would come out on top this time, providing a 50%+ majority over leavers (hard and soft).

I do wonder though, if we had a three-way hard-soft-remain referendum, what the result would be? Remain would probably not win such a vote, certainly not by 50%+.  It would be a perfect illustration of the stalemate you describe above.

As I said in my first reply, the whole referendum should never have gone ahead. It is the single most ill-thought-out political decision in my lifetime (domestically anyway).

Blondbraid

Just found this on imgur:

And this:


SMF spam blocked by CleanTalk