Frenzied Debates in the UK

Hi there,

I don’t know whether there are many Brits here or interested people from other countries, but don’t you have the impression that much of the debate in the UK, especially since the Brexit-Referendum, has become frenzied and partisan, failing to find common ground on which to have an objective debate about any subject at all.

There seem to be groups of people everywhere trying to find some reason to feel insulted by the rhetoric of other groups, which escalate to a verbal brawl with nobody wading in to calm them down.

Is it me, or are people losing it …?

Bob: Hi there,

I don’t know whether there are many Brits here or interested people from other countries, but don’t you have the impression that much of the debate in the UK, especially since the Brexit-Referendum, has become frenzied and partisan, failing to find common ground on which to have an objective debate about any subject at all.

There seem to be groups of people everywhere trying to find some reason to feel insulted by the rhetoric of other groups, which escalate to a verbal brawl with nobody wading in to calm them down.

Is it me, or are people losing it …?

K: it is not you… this phenomenon has been going on here in the U.S for decades…
I would say it began during the Raygun years and escalated during the Clinton years…

what I am interested in is the why, why has this phenomenon hit the U.S so
hard and why is it spreading around the world?

I think that it is a sign of modernity…that which has given people peace of mind
and security and stableability of soul and mind no longer exists…

the question becomes “what can we believe in” and the answer is…
not much… the primary loss of the modern age has come from Nietzsche,
when he said, “God is dead” but what is forgotten is the statement afterwards,
where he says…

…"where has god gone? he called out. ‘I mean to tell you’! We have murdered
him, you and I! We are all his murderers! But how have we done it? …

it goes on for a few sentences and then…" Do we not smell the divine putrefaction?
—for even god putrefy! God is dead! God remains dead! and we have killed him! How
shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murderers? "

this is from Nietzsche book, actually he says it in two different books, the Joyful wisdom
and Zarathustra…

the question becomes how do we console ourselves after murdering god?

this partisan holding on to beliefs is a substitute to our faith in god…

we still might have faith, but if there is no god, what do we have faith in?

our little ideology beliefs that we hold onto for dear life…….
to the extent that we see it today…partisan fights that are blown way
out of proportion because we have place our faith there instead of god……

it is not the how but the why that is important here… why do
the partisan factions hold onto their belief unto death?

because if those beliefs are taking away, what is left for us to believe in?

the ism’s and ideologies and myths and prejudices we have today,
are substitutes for our former belief in god… and poor substitutes
they are……. but they are all we have……….

Kropotkin

Okay, the question for me is then, what did he mean by “God”?

Was it a metaphor for the pre-enlightenment naivety, or for the illusion of a purposeful world, guided by an all-knowing deity? The enlightenment is, to some degrees, the extension of the Eden story, where Adam and Eve became aware. Now we have even found the scientific method to get to the bottom of our existence and experience and have found nothing that can take the place of the comforting idea of a God and an afterlife with him in a new world if we are good children.

But what I find disconcerting is that people are becoming frenzied with a self-imposed ignorance, despite knowing the facts, in the face of obvious consequences, they use a kind of faith to reconcile the threat of destroying every accomplishment we have made because it is deemed worse than it was.

I spoke to my mother about Brexit and she told me that “it’s all them Europeans who are blocking every suggestion we make,” although the EU has been good for Britain, who always had a “special” deal. The negotiations have made it clear that Brexit hasn’t been prepared, nobody has a clue how it is going to work out, and there are self-proclaimed experts spouting off things that are blatantly false. The whole campaign has been said to have been a con-game using claims that were completely made up and are coming to light as time goes on.

President Trump is a bigot and a loud-mouthed con-man who has deliberately upset the cart and who is completely against science and lies pathologically. There are parallels. The defense his supporters give is incoherent and not even in keeping with their own standards. They’re throwing everything overboard to support him.

By this standard, the “God” that Nietzsche mourned was the reason to go to war, the reason to build and grow, virtually the reason for everything that is in danger today. If you’re right it is a huge self-realizing apocalyptic prophecy, and nobody knows where we’ll end. The problem I have with this is that there are people, like Putin etc., who are just waiting for the right moment to step in.

ok, let us use Brexit as a guide…….

who gained from England’s leaving the EU?

that is the real question… or, or was
the entire campaign driven by sheer stupidity?

I am guessing the leaders, the one’s who began this campaign,
the one’s who might have profited from leaving the EU, they
started the campaign and it was driven by stupidity/nationalism…
for nationalism is nothing more then sheer stupidity…

the real question is shown by who paid for the campaign…
who put up the money for the advertising and arguments for leaving
the EU? that is the question… whoever paid for, were the one’s who
thought they would benefit in some manner from Brixet…
so who were they? I am very curious as to who put up the money
for the Brixet campaign especially in the beginning…

so the believers, the real believers in Brexit, the one’s with “faith”,
did they actually understand what they were voting on or did
they just run with the nationalism argument that prevailed…

the path of nationalism that has dominated the world over
the last 200 plus years is now the path to failure…

for nationalism is based on a false understanding of who we
are………for nationalism is based on an artificial understanding
of how people are organized… nationalism is artificial because
of the line used for nationalism is artificial… the border
of Alsace, now in France, has been fought over and moved
over the last 1500 years, between France and Germany……

is it French? is it German? yes, it has been both hundred of times
over the last 1500 years………… to have nationalism in the face of
such artificial line drawing is silly…

and that is the problem with nationalism…… it is an argument over
artificial lines that can be changed overnight… tonight you are French,
you can just as easily be German by the signing of a pen……… what does
that mean for nationalism?

to make arguments based on nationalism is entirely stupid…
because if nationalism is not based on boundary, then what
is nationalism based on? the values a country might hold?
we then run into the question of values that plague philosophy…
which values and why those values? and values change……
this is shown here in the US with the changing values in regards to
both the gay marriage issue and the Marijuana issue………
within the last 30 years, values have changed dramatically in regards
to both issues………… what was once seen as sinning against god is
generally accepted nationally…… and what was once seen as outright evil,
the common joint, is now seen as a safe form of pain killer…… quite a change
in the last 30 years……….

so, once again to return to the point, which often escapes me…

is simply the reason why people believe and what changes or moves those
hard firmly held beliefs? What is the reason for the dramatic change in the
acceptance of Gay marriage? the issue itself didn’t change at all…
the understanding and acceptance of the issue change…… but why?
the same for Brexit? why did the belief change from acceptance
to no longer accepted? What drove the change from the accepting
the EU to the EU being the enemy? I would suggest that what drove
the change is not actual policy, but a change in the understanding
of what it means to be British…………nationalism is what drove
the change and nationalism is a really stupid grounds for accepting
or changing anything… because nationalism is so malleable because
the lines defining a country are so subject to change and being as artificial
as they are……………

so in other words, people had more faith in nationalism
then they had faith in a union with other counties………

this is a startling change… but we ask our usual question, why?

a union with another country in fact is the next step in our
political evolution and it will be quite common in the future…
the answer to just about any political question is, globalism……….
that is the next step…but why fight the next natural step?

and we are lead back to the fight against Brexit? why fight it?
and we come to the final answer, fear………
people are afraid… and fear drives people to make really stupid decisions…

but that is a whole lot to think about………

Kropotkin

I’ll reply as soon as I can.

In the meanwhile:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=3+Blokes+In+The+Pub…+Talk+NO+DEAL+Brexit

I don’t think that they’re more frenzied than what you see coming out of any other parliamentary chamber discussions… the furore seems to be mainly centred around trade agreements and therefore money. Surprised?

The majority of the country wants out… due to the arbitraryness of the decisions the EU were making, in relation to the UK, at the expense of the U.K.

The neo-cons dislike brexit. A warning sign about not brexiting

You have two nationalisms: one with a huge conglomerate country, and one with a nation-state. But these are boht nationalisms.

There are downsides to larger states, and some of these are why the neo-cons want one in Europe. EAsier to organize continued military ringing in of Russia. Easier to create a poor underclass that will buckle left wing and union resistence to lowered wages and rights. Easier to carry out lobbying on one site, in Brussels- that, is corporate reduction of democracy.

Giant states have more degrees of separation between citizens and politicians. They will be less accountable.

Sure, racism is involved in one of the two nationalism and the neo-con press has just loved making it a binary, you are a dumb racist working class moron manipulated by some rich person’s interests for doing this. Not mentioning how the rich people lined up in a huge majority to fight Brexit.

and nobody talks about how Syria’s refugee crisis is primarily caused by regime change fucking around by EU plus US intelligence agencies and proxy interventions by Saudia Arabia and Turkey. So the whole context of the refugees is not honest at the core. And they knew they were giving Isis power, early on. It might be going too far to say they intended that, but they sure did not care.

If you think neo-cons give a shit about refugees as humans, you are confused.

So why are they so big on marketing against any nationalism as this racist stupidity.

And of course it is off the table that economic issues are not so easy to analyze and it might be good for Britain the long run to leave.

There is no real debate because you have no real diversity in the primary media.

God was born by the sword and killed with softness.
He’ll be back. In fact Allah already brought the sword back.

There will be a thousand year war for our souls.
The traitors, the voters for the child murderers Albright and HRC have made it inevitable.

They murder a million Muslim kids and said it was just. So Islam has good reason to vanquish them.
As long as the west still supports the neoconservative heritage and doesn’t redeem through Trump and us all, Islam is a just reproach for it.

I must apologise for getting back so late, I was ill and then I was in the UK, so I have been a little preoccupied.

Judging by the way these people are now reacting to the facts being presented about what will need to be done for a “no-deal-Brexit”, the whole campaign was driven by sheer stupidity and especially the influence of one man, Boris Johnson, who previously wrote derogatory articles about Europe and then entered politics to enforce his one intention of getting out of Europe. The question I ask myself is, what is his agenda, considering his praise of Trump and Bannon?

Having come back from England, where surprisingly, we heard virtually nothing about Brexit in the Pubs and Beer-gardens, we have the impression that the whole Referendum is an embarrassment that nobody wants to talk about, but they feel they have to go through with it anyway and hope for the best. On a radio station when an expert came up with the facts, another listener said it was “boring”, to which the expert said, that it may be boring to him, but millions of households will be affected by it.

I think they take umbrage at the fact that leaving the European Union means canceling membership, which in turn means that Britain has no right to the advantages of membership. The argument you often hear is, that the European Union is “punishing” GB for leaving and that the EU could leave them a few advantages for friendship’s sake. You wouldn’t expect any club where you canceled membership to continue as though nothing had happened. If you were a member and saw that other people could cancel membership and carry on as though they were still a member, you would complain.

I certainly am with you regarding nationalism, especially since I have discovered that very often the British, the French and the Germans, as well as other nations, get on very well once they get an international view of things. Some years ago a Frenchman and I met at a party in Germany and had a fantastic discussion, coming to the conclusion that the discussion would have taken a different turn if it had taken place in France or Britain. We started asking ourselves why this was the case and came to the conclusion that nationalism is often a narrow-minded provincialism to begin with, which can be pushed to further extremes with the right causes.

I have experienced the views of my family as representative of this provincialism, which is often fuelled by ignorance. Once I have explained things in a way that they don’t see as offensive, they very often abandon their narrow views, but sometimes they don’t. I then ask myself whether it has just been the way I expressed myself or has someone been making a stronger case and using examples that I am unaware of.

Once visiting areas that years before had been East Germany and under the communist regime, I was shown how much had been done to improve the conditions there. Buildings had been refurbished and the before-and-after pictures were impressive. I had to interrupt the guide though, because he considered this to be “returning to normal European standards”, but I told him that somewhere along the way, Britain had missed out.

When I travel to England, where my family lives, I see buildings that haven’t changed in the forty years I have been away, and because some of my family live in them, I knew that the conditions inside were the same as well. In comparison, when my family came to visit me, I often heard the words, “We haven’t got anything like this.” Obviously, my rise in status gave me more money to spend on housing, but I couldn’t help thinking that the standards had improved in the last forty years as well.

The question that I asked myself was, how could Britain miss out on something as important as housing standards, so that Germany was able to refurbish the east, but Britain still had the same housing as after the war? Visiting my brother, who had also built a career and risen to a high position in the industry, he told me how he was struggling to improve his housing situation because of the prices he would have to pay.

At the same time, living regularly in Bed & Breakfast in various parts of Britain, we knew that there are Guesthouses that clearly had the standards we experience in Europe, albeit in smaller rooms by comparison. This isn’t, however, the standard in which numerous members of my family are living, which does make me ask, what has gone wrong, or, has anything gone wrong at all? Is this the choice of people in the U.K., and I am just out of touch?

This year, just months before Brexit, I am also puzzled by the approach to the oncoming changes to be made. It is as though people just don’t want to talk about it because it makes them emotional. Only, their emotionality drives them out of the single market, losing the simplicity of trading as part of the EU and forces the country to build up numerous new trade deals in a short time.

Information about the conditions of a “no-deal” Brexit is only now being released so that companies can prepare, and the general view seems to be that the EU is “punishing” Britain for the decision to leave. It isn’t understood that the EU remains what it is when Britain leaves, and Britain then is outside. The offer of partial membership, like some other countries, have, has been rejected. There are people desperately trying to inform the public that they have been misled and that this means that conditions will be more difficult and lead to shortages, but many people just don’t want to know.

But “Brexit means Brexit!” There seems to be no way to prevent it without causing an uprising.