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I was quite impressed by the new 2D animation tools in Blender 2.8. There's a new 2D workspace preset, and it all seems very intuitive. I'm interested to see what people do with this.

One would hope that said rules would be applied equally regardless of political persuasion but that sadly has not always been the case.

Bearing in mind that these rules were only published on Monday, I think we should give the moderators time to apply them evenhandedly. I think conservatives should be welcome on the forums, and I don't think any reasonable conservative would have difficulty abiding by those guidelines.

Well, I agree with WHAM for once. I think these seem like a decent and pragmatic set of rules. Thank you, moderators.

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.

I think Remain would certainly win over two Brexit options (without needing to get 50%+), because the Leave vote would be split. However, brexiteers would obviously see that coming and oppose a 3-way referendum even more vehemently than another leave/remain referendum. I know a few people who are convinced that remain would walk it if we had a 2nd ref, now that the facts are on the table. But I'm very sceptical of that. The facts didn't bother us much last time, what's changed?

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/

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.

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.

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.

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.

Have you noticed that you only show up any more for these shit threads, because I have.

I still visit the forums most days, just to lurk. I don't post very much, in part because of people like you. I don't want to play the Movie Quote Game with a bigoted dickhead.

You can believe whatever shit you want. I don't think you're entitled to make the AGS forums an intolerable place by smearing your shit all over every thread.

Fuck off with your transphobic bullshit, Jack. Someone ban this guy.

Again, gibberish.

[I already wrote a lengthy post on that just last week.]

Are we seriously having the same argument on why communism isn't equal to nazism again?
I already wrote a lengthy post on that just last week.

Somehow we are! Because between them WHAM and Jack are determined to defend - not Nazism! never Nazism! No, they would never defend Nazism. But they will defend all the key characteristics of fascist regimes, separately and presumably as part of a series of innocent mistakes on their parts.

A reasonable conversation is impossible. You either try and fail to engage with Jack's moronic conspiracy theories, or you leave him to spout bigoted toss unchallenged.

WHAM will always be polite and courteous, and conversation with him always lead us to the same point: the Nazis did some bad things, but they also did good things. (To be clear, I'm not exaggerating. WHAM actually said that in this thread: https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=44166.msg592683#msg592683)

Seriously, how can we have a welcoming community if this continues?

That is gibberish.

I can't see, then, what relevance your comment about Corbyn has.

Unless you're presenting Europe's "far left" as a counterpoint to Europe's increasingly significant, racist, right-wing nationalists? This is wrong for two reasons. The Labour party, even under Corbyn's leadership, is a centre-left democratic socialist party with a moderate left-wing agenda. It's not an extremist party. More importantly, I exhort anyone considering WHAM's apparently reasonable opposition to both far-left and far-right extremism to read this very interesting article by David Katz: https://jewishcurrents.org/the-double-genocide-theory/

It's very common to see right-wingers conflate Nazi and Soviet atrocities (which is ahistorical and stupid). But more alarming is those who seemingly weigh one atrocity against another. This is coming from Eastern Europe in particular, where lauded national heroes who defeated Soviets were sometimes also Nazi collaborators. And communist partisans were often Jewish, because they were fighting the Nazis.

The effect (perhaps the goal) of this argument, is not to draw attention to Soviet horrors - but to diminish the significance and uniqueness of the Nazi holocaust. To make excuses for Nazi collaborators and sympathisers.

I'm not sure how we can talk about Brexit without addressing the resurgence of anti-intellectual, xenophobic, right-wing nationalism in Europe. On that subject:

Ah, so that's why "communism" is also a bad word today

For what it's worth, yes communist mass murders are exactly the reason I think the left should wholeheartedly reject the hammer and sickle, and the concept of single-party centrally-planned economies. I can't think what's led you to imagine that I think Jeremy Corbyn or communism are beyond criticism. Especially since I've been very critical of Brexit and the British far-left is rather keen on Brexit.

You're making assumptions about what "certain people" think. The parties I've voted for have never won a majority in my lifetime. The UK's government has never shared my views, and I still think representative democracy is preferable, because this anti-elite populism is fascist bullshit.

(Incidentally, the reason "populism" is seen as negative, is because of the mass murders.)

(Also, the Lib Dems did (incompetently) make an effort to reform the UK's broken first-past-the-post system. What happened? It went to referendum, and we voted to keep things the way they are!)

No, not a conspiracy, and whether it is undemocratic depends on your interpretation of that word. I value direct democracy over parliamentary democracy, which is why I view referendums and direct votes by the people as being more valuable than the parliaments decisions, as it allows people to directly voice an opinion on a singular topic.

This all sounds eminently reasonable, and of course the UK's democracy is archaic and full of absurdities. But your direct democracy sounds to me like the tyranny of the mob. It's interesting to note that almost all of the European direct democracy parties I can find are right-wing libertarians or far-right. Many seem to be populist anti-immigration parties, like the far-right AfD.

Your direct democracy would be a nightmare for minority rights. How can (for instance) gay people, trans people or immigrant communities defend their rights, when they could never hope to hold a majority in a referendum? You're calling for more democracy, but what you're proposing is a world in which the majority can trample over marginalised people. And this is why your posts make me angrier than Jack's incoherent conspiracies, because you present far-right authoritarian positions as if they were moderate.

It infuriates me to see Jack and WHAM insisting there's a nebulous, undemocratic conspiracy to prevent Brexit.

The government (which had a tiny majority until today) has made every effort to push through an unpopular form of Brexit, and they've failed because Parliament has held them to account.

We have a Prime Minister who is a liar, who's responsible for spreading many of the myths about the EU which fuelled the Leave campaign. It was revealed today that he had been planning to prorogue Parliament (i.e. suspend it to make it harder for the opposition to block a no deal Brexit) since August, even though he said a few days ago he had no intention of doing that. He said he had no intention of calling election - now he's saying he will call a snap election. He said he didn't want to be Prime Minister.

He's a fucking liar, but it seems there's nothing he can do that would be more suspicious than whatever the ENTIRELY FICTIONAL shadowy elites are up to. And it's not just right-wing internet cretins who share in these conspiracies. Jacob Rees-Mogg today called his opponents 'Illuminati who are taking the powers to themselves'.

Men of enormous wealth and extraordinary privileged are telling us that the "elites" are out to destroy democracy, while they position themselves to make unprecedented changes to this country, with absolutely no mandate and a non-existent parliamentary majority. Bloody hell.

To be fair to Matt, people were promised all sorts of things - many of them contradictory.  Essentially, we were told that we could retain the benefits of the EU without any of the obligations. So we were told we'd stay in the single market and have freedom of movement, and EU nationals living in the UK were repeatedly promised they'd be secure. Meanwhile, we were told, we would be able to limit immigration from Europe and spend the money that goes to the EU on (e.g.) the National Health Service.

Conservatives Leavers were told we'd withdraw from the hated European Convention on Human Rights, and stop accepting EU law. Tabloid newspapers have been running largely fabricated stories about absurd EU laws for decades - most famously that the EU wanted to regulate the shape of bananas. Left-wing Leavers - for they are many - were told we'd escape from a neoliberal free-trade bloc (which effectively overruled Greece's socialist government) and be able to renationalise power stations etc.

The one problem with all of this, is that it was bollocks.