E.U: Leave or Stay? Your thoughts.

Fair point on the data, I did mean the research that was available and the interpretations of the data.

 

You could do, I suspect my abstaining was my own little way of protesting against the whole affair, especially with how I spoiled my ballot paper I went into the voting station clueless but came out smiling. I may regret it but it was fun for a mo.

 

You do know this is a public forum and not a conversation in your head right?

If you're going to have discussions in a public space you shouldn't be surprised when people challenge what you say and ask for some form of proof, proof that so far you've consistently failed to provide.

And I'm unsure what snooty attitude your referring to, it's not unreasonable to request that you provide some evidence of what you say is it? It also seems odd that you're proclaiming how I'm being snooty when you've no idea what my social class is.

Also I'm not suggesting anything so please stop trying to put words in my mouth, if my intention was to call you a liar I'd do so, maybe once you've stopped trying to misdirect the conversation by playing the victim you'd care to provide some proof and evidence of what so far have been unsubstantiated claims.

I'm not having a pop and ad hominem attacks will get you nowhere, perhaps now we've gotten yet another attempt at misdirection out of the way you'd care to answer the actual point i raised, that being why despite you saying you read plenty of reports, information, whatever, and refusing to provide details of said evidence, that you claim you were incapable of making a decisions.

By the very nature of evidence once you have even a single data point you have enough information to make a decision, it may not be very accurate or wise to do so but even a single data point provides you with more information than none.

 

I believe I've answered what you are asking, if that isn't enough for you then as the old man says...tough titty. I'm not investing time in digging up all the papers I read just to satisfy you. You can be happy with what I've said or not but don't expect me to waste my own time trying to prove a point to you. Ok matey?

 

Not how it works, I'm afraid, for three reasons:

1. The functioning of a democracy relies on an informed electorate. If the electorate just votes on their prevailing mood, you get mob rule. So the covenant of a democracy is: you get the power of the vote, but with that comes the responsibility of voting wisely. If you don't know what you're doing, then don't rock the boat and leave things as they are. If you have to rely on politicians to tell you how to vote, you may as well make the process more efficient by having a dictatorship.

2. Lies will always sound better than the truth. Lies are fantasy, unrestrained by the pesky realities of life. They sound exciting. The truth is complicated and messy and boring. It is always easy and exciting to promise £350 million a week for the NHS, an immediate deportation of unwanted immigrants and how the UK will, unfettered by the EU, become a global Singapore bustling with the glorious opportunities of free trade. It is a lot more tedious and complicated to explain why such lies are so much ********.

3. A referendum is not an election. There are no manifestos (i.e. if you vote for us we will deliver on this) because nobody is being voted into government, so nobody can be held to account for the promises they make unless they are already in government. The Leave campaign could not only lie, it could lie without any way of holding them to account. It could weave all sorts of exciting wishful fantasies without worrying about delivering on them. Whereas the Remain campaign could only ever tell the messy, boring, complicated truth, knowing that (being largely the government), they would have to deliver on their promises and be held to account if they did not.

We saw this in how the Leave campaigners immediately disavowed their campaign promises the day after their vote, and indeed again by voting down the Article 50 bill amendment seeking to guarantee £350 million a week for the NHS. They always knew it was undeliverable ********.

Now these basic truths should have factored heavily in your thinking, and in the thinking of those who voted Leave just because basically they felt pissed off with their lot: if you need politicians to tell you how to vote, what is the point of democracy? Lies always sound better than the truth. Who will actually have to deliver on all these nice fantasies that are being promised?

Not the Leave campaigners. They ran a mile and left a mainly Remain supporting government pick up the mess.

 

Firstly I'm not your matey so please stop with the snide comments.

Obviously your free to believe what you want however you've not answered what i was asking for, if you had i wouldn't still be asking for it would i, next time you feel the need to make a public statement at least do people the courtesy of being able to backup your claims, if not you tend to come across as the very person you've been staunchly defending all this time.

 

Sorry who are you to decide what I say or how I say it? You can choose to read what I say but damned well do not lay down the law to me, OK matey? Jumped up little ####

 

As said Nexxo, I never voted, I don't disagree with some of the points you make. I do accept the leave campaign was full of hot air and promises that couldn't be kept, but I got the same feeling with the remain camp plenty of times too. Take their stance on immigration for example. They acknowledged that the current system needed revising but they failed to share how that could be achieved other than it's easier from within and they would deal with it. They also never put forth exactly what revisions they would be seeking. It sounded to me like they had just as much foresight and planning as the leave campaign, very little other than let's stick to what we know, which wasn't cutting it for me as I'm a long term Euro Skeptic.

 

If you don't want or like what you say being challenged then don't say it in a public space, or at least don't be surprised and insult people when they call you out on what you say.

 

Go forth and multiply, pretty much all I have to say to you matey

 

The Remain campaign made a poor show of it, but that should not factor much in your deliberations. You knew what being in the EU looks like. What you should have been asking yourself is: what do we know will being outside of the EU look like? What sources of information can we trust?

Not the Leave campaigners: they are biased and they don't actually have to deliver on whatever they promise, so there is nothing to hold them to account. They can say whatever they want with impunity. And if it all sounds wonderful and simple, it is probably a lie.

The Remain campaigners were largely the government, so they would be held to account for whatever they said. This is why their arguments sounded a bit lacklustre: the truth is messy, complicated and big promises tend to be hard to deliver on and full of caveats and reservations.

As I said: lies always sound better than the truth. Lies make better stories. In a debate between lies and truth, lies will always win over the public; engage it more, excite it more, make it feel better than the truth will. This is why, in a debate, it is important to consider proof and evidence, examine the logic and reasoning behind statements and above all be on your guard for rhetorical tricks that appeal to emotion and subjective reasoning bias (which is what we are doing here in this thread, also).

If people can't do that, then democracy is not a suitable system of government for them. And indeed history shows that those who can't handle democracy will choose dictatorship instead, and come to regret it.

 

That's the sort of answer I've come to expect from Euro Skeptic's TBH.

And you wonder why people stereotype them as uneducated when typically they respond like you have at simple requests to provide the evidence that they based their opinion.

 

Glad I didn't disappoint. It's people like you who I try to avoid like the plague. Argumentative and self righteous comes to mind.


So how about we agree to disagree and move on with our lives, you aren't getting what you want from me and I can't be arsed trying to point score with someone I will never have the pleasure of meeting in the real world. I'm up for basically ignoring each other it if you are It's the way forward!!

 

Both of you need to settle down a bit before you get some enforced away time from the forums. By all means have a respectful and informed discussion, even disagreement, but name calling and the like needs to stay elsewhere ta

GK

 

No worries and for my part I do apologise.

 

To be honest. I didn't like that one bit. Stuart is having a quick break.

 

It's nice to see consistency in the moderation, as well as see another moderator move in and 'overrule' another moderator by banning stuartpb, even after he came out and apologized. I can understand his frustration, he had 4-5 members 'ganging' up on him and he couldn't keep his cool. It happens.

Nonsense like this makes me miss Nexxo as a moderator.

In other news.
You've had your referendum.

 

The referendum is only the point at which things began to get interesting. Their leaving will be quite the spectacle.

I respect people like yourself and Disequillibria who I fundamentally disagree with on most levels but can still argue the points. If we let people away with puerile name calling the forum would eventually become degenerate or sterilised of any conversation beyond waiting for something truly interesting to appear in the PC space (What's your favourite RGB combination)

Infighting among the mods is Dogbert's problem.

 

The first actual proper post that stuartpb made in this thread was to accuse Nexxo - and many others in this thread - of being patronising for using the word "poor".

He was then challenged to back up his assertions - repeatedly - and failed to adequately do so. This is a 298-page thread and it's fair to say that many of the same arguments over the last 5 pages have already been done to death. When we've already had these arguments many... many times over in this thread, that's not an unreasonable challenge.

Perhaps mods could have handled it better and not publicly disagreed with each other in the thread, but hey - "free speech" means that people are free to show you the door when they don't like what you're saying. After all, this forum isn't a public service institution.