Brexit, Bregret and Brecovering Brefore it's too late

So. Some thoughts on the EU referendum, and the problems with the outcome.

People are complaining that MPs delaying invoking article 50 (or not acting on it at all) would be 'undemocratic,' while seemingly only having a vague idea of what democracy is. Well, this result is not democracy. This has never been how democracy has been conducted. 

Right back to its roots in ancient Greece and Rome, democracy has been about people appointing an expert to represent them. This expert then researches the issue on your behalf, with your interests in mind. Finally, they argue their case and makes sure their interests are represented as the experts decide together the course going ahead. 

And it'd probably be called Boaty McBoatface
via: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:QE2-South_Queensferry.jpg

If Britain was a ship, democracy would be making sure the heads of engineering and steerage pass on their team's concerns to the captain, who ultimately weighs up their advice and decides whether to change course or not.

Democracy is not giving every idiot a steering wheel so we can 'show that iceberg who's boss.'

This result is not democratic, it's mob rule, one of the things Democracy has always tried to avoid. At every stage, the referendum campaign has been about who could lie the loudest and most often; the Sun being one of the chief offenders, who are now having to deal with a readership who are pretty mad at being manipulated, as are readers of the Daily Mail.

Image unrelated.
via: https://www.flickr.com/photos/harald/4510869982

Will Self's comment was that "Not all Brexiters are racists, but almost all racists will be voting for Brexit." I disagree with the conclusion that many or even most of the Leave voters were eurobigots or racist themselves, but I do think that bigoted logic was combined with a media campaign against immigrants to convince a lot of people to vote Leave. 

The news pushed immigrants because scary news drags in viewers. UKIP and BF capitalised on it because it suited their agendas. Murdoch and Dacre have long wanted to drag us out of Europe, and so the final push from the Sun and Mail all combined into this perfect storm in which the UK is now being compared to 1930s Germany. 

It reminds me of the #notallmen and #gamergate arguments. Individuals who supported or voted Leave without bigotry complain every time an article calls the Leave campaign racist, without understanding that they are in the minority, that there is an issue of race and nationality here, it absolutely does suit the Leave agenda, and it's emboldened racist mobs to a dangerous degree. 

In other words, it's fucking tragic.
via https://www.flickr.com/photos/lionheartphotography/4650421582

But there's a growing body of evidence that we don't necessarily have to accept this result. Even vinegar-faced human lollipop Nigel Farage said before the election that he would contest a 52-48 vote for Remain as 'undemocratic.' With increasing reports of leave voters who regret it, this new petition with over 3.7 million verified votes, and just over 75% of MPs voting against the referendum in the first place, it's clear that very few of the population understood what they were voting for, especially since the second most popular Google search the day after the referendum was "What is the EU?"

I've never been a believer in "Tough titty, live with it," especially now that so many of the Leave arguments have been proven untrue, or at best extremely misleading insinuations.

In the name of absolute transparency, yes I was pro-Remain - and by that I do mean pro-Remain and not anti-Brexit. There are many reasons, most of which are pointless to go over now. I read up on the Leave arguments, researched them, and found out that most of them were bullshit. I read up on the Remain arguments, and found them to be mostly well researched and rational. I respected the opinions of the personalities that were backing Remain, and Jim Davidson was among those backing Leave.

Pictured: Not a racist, being not racist.
via: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8XXrE9r0kM

But like most of the country, I ultimately voted with my heart. 

You see, I have depression, which limits my capacity to deal with stress. I also have a chronic injury which limits the amount of time I can work in a day without worsening my condition. But a year or so ago, my own government turned the support network that was supposed to be helping me back into suitable work into something to be afraid of. ATOS, who's administrator with a week or so's training disagreed with the medical opinion of two GPs and a consultant. 

The thing is, the recent Osborne / IDS attacks on chronic illness and disabilities could have been so much worse, but a lot of the deeper cuts and impositions have since been successfully challenged in Europe. But now that last line of defense, the final oversight stopping them from fucking me completely, may soon be gone.

So yes, that's why I'm mad, and that's why I don't particularly feel like 'just accepting the result.' 

"Well, guess I'd better just get used to all this fire now."
via: https://www.flickr.com/photos/aj-clicks/4054799944

The stakes are far too high to equate this to stern parenting. If your child was about to walk off a bridge, you'd stop them for their own sake - especially if they were begging you for help, which is what this petition is begging of our MPs.

But because I was so pro-remain as well as anti-leave, it'll probably just seem like sour grapes, and like I want to flip the vote my way, despite that the petition in question was started by a Leave voter hoping to shoot down a predicted narrow win for Remain.

I think the real thing to come out of this whole debacle is the amount of fact checking the media needs to do, and that the various statistical and media regulatory bodies need more power to take action against the press for their role in the misinformation, and politicians taking liberties with the truth.

Image not quite so unrelated.
via: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jun/25/cameron-brexit-bet-drama-night-ripped-britain-apart-ukip-eu-referendum

To have a situation where the news is nothing but Brexit for months, then the day after the vote the truth emerges and the public cries "But we didn't know!" is a shameful indictment of our political and media landscape.

So yeah. If the basis of the re-vote is that it was only a narrow majority, the public were misled, and now regret having put our economic recovery back five years and emboldened a terrifying degree of racism, I can appreciate that. And I think it's an appreciable enough viewpoint that when this issue is debated in parliament, I hope our MPs will vote to indefinitely suspend invocation of article 50 while an inquiry is held into whether or not the country understood what the hell they were voting for.  

Which, as I said, they clearly didn't. 

What's in a word?

So I woke up this morning to this:

http://metro.co.uk/2016/01/30/hundreds-of-masked-men-beat-up-refugee-children-in-stockholm-during-revenge-attack-5652849/

And the article in the Daily Mail (which I'm not linking to because I don't want them getting any more ad revenue) is using the word Migrant to describe the victims.

Migrants.

It's a word the right wing loves throwing around these days. It comes from the Latin migrāre, to change one's abode. It implies a choice. It implies that they woke up and decided they were going to pack up and head over here for a better life, like Katie Hopkins' imaginary 'army of cockroaches.'

But what's the harm in a simple word?

The vast majority of the 'migrants' were bombed out of their homes by our governments. A brief look at any shots of Syria will tell you that.

Source: http://www.pythagorasandthat.co.uk/a-syrian-street-in-2011-and-2014

And Syria's just one of the countries where we've bombed, or funded insurgencies, or otherwise screwed their infrastructure to the point that the people can no longer live there. So they did NOT 'change their abode.' Their abode was changed by war. They were driven out of their homes, and they are looking for a new one.

The word you are looking for is refugee.

1680s, from French refugié, noun use of past participle of refugier "to take shelter,protect," from Old French refuge (see refuge ). First applied to French Huguenots whomigrated after the revocation (1685) of the Edict of Nantes. The word meant "oneseeking asylum," till 1914, when it evolved to mean "one fleeing home" (first appliedin this sense to civilians in Flanders heading west to escape fighting in World War I).In Australian slang from World War II, reffo.

noun
1. a person who has fled from some danger or problem, esp political persecution: refugees from Rwanda

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/refugee?s=t

When David Cameron uses a word like migrant, it is a very deliberate linguistic choice, even if it not at a conscious level. It is a change from passive to active. It changes the image in the listener or the reader's mind from those seeking refuge, those desperately dragging themselves through country after country seeking a better life, into dehumanised targets for our ire. The same way the same paper that supported the Fascist Oswald Moseley warned us about the outrage of 'aliens' and how they were 'pouring into this country,' and is now comparing the refugees to rats.

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/07/31/daily-mail-1938-jews_n_7909954.html

Floods. Hordes. Migrants. The same words. The same paper. The same meaning.

I found myself wondering how it is that the mob responsible for the violence yesterday could have done it. How they could have walked up to a complete stranger and hated them so much that they would beat three children in broad daylight.

The above article makes it clear that this was 'sparked' by the death of Alexandra Mehzer, stabbed by a refugee child. The mob see themselves as taking revenge for that, I have no doubt. Whipped up into a frenzy by the media and the political right wing over the refugee crisis.

But I have no doubt either that the refugee child was blinded by the same fear of us that drove the mob to yesterday's atrocity. I also have no doubt that somewhere in a refugee camp right now, someone is reading a sensationalist report about 200 men beating up a sixteen year old and planning revenge against the 'monsters' who attacked kids.

And I also have no doubt that when it happens, there'll be a Daily Mail journo all ready to go with another 500 words of fear and misinformation, a tory MP who'll stand up and tell us they must be stopped, these migrants. All ready to whip us all up into giving them a little more ad money or a little more power.

We're all going round and round and round taking revenge for this, and that, and the other: a pointless and ongoing cycle of destruction. I asked myself why it is that the attackers couldn't see the refugees as victims, how this cycle of blame is being perpetuated. It's easy.

It's the words.

The press is dehumanising everyone involved for sensationalisation, to be the paper that everyone reads. The news is turning into clickbait. Why use a word like refugee - a nice sympathetic word - when you can use the word migrant, and grab everyone's attention?

Get some clickthrough. Or in Cameron's case, get some votes. Whip up the public into being afraid enough to vote for the warmongers who put us in this situation by bombing the Syrians in the first place. Sod the consequences, we're all just playing the game and if you criticise that, you're just naive. There's money to be made from the latest two minutes of hate. There's power to be gained.

You want to know why we're in this war? Why it keeps going? Why people are killing each other?

Because we've all become afraid of each other, and the right wing are literally making a killing out of it.

The More you Know...

This coming week I will mostly be working on my Kindle collection, so posts may be thin on the ground. In the meantime, here's something to think about. Derren Brown recently tweeted about something called the Dunning-Kruger effect. I'd heard of it before, but not with quite as succinct a wording. Put simply, the Dunning-Kruger effect demonstrates that the less you know about something, the less you realise that you know very little about it; and so you can often approach the subject with inflated and unrealistic confidence. Conversely; the more you know the more you realise you don't know that much, and so you approach the subject with diminished confidence. Or maybe that's not putting it simply at all. Examples then. Most people will be familiar with someone from another department coming down and asking you to do something by the end of the week that you know couldn't realistically be done by the end of the month. Like the graphic designer who's client wants 'all the butterflies replaced with faeries, by 3pm' when they've only got two stock images of faeries, neither are silhouettes and the client didn't send the email 'til 2pm. It could be a requested spreadsheet that the other department generates with the click of a button, but yours couldn't afford the software and so has to assemble the data by hand, and everyone's busy frantically trying to find images of faeries anyway. There's this website as well. To those who don't write it must seem like half an hour or so's work to just type a few hundred words and stick it on the internet. What isn't taken into account is the hour or so trawling through news feeds to find something interesting and thought provoking (you can skip this step if you write for Heat magazine or you're Jan Moir), then the basic write-up, then the spell check, then the redraft, then (because I'm not very good at PHP yet) finding, sourcing and formatting images to embed in the post. Then putting it up and linking it on various social media making sure it's appropriate for the site in question (featured image and leading text on Facebook, attention grabbing blurb for Twitter, porn / hipster inspirationals for Tumblr and so on). And then the time that evening and the next day scouring everything for reactions and replying. So all in all, even a quick post usually takes two to three hours. The best example I can think of is photography - it probably seems like the easiest thing in the world for a lot of people to 'just pick up a camera,' especially with the price of bridge and SLR cameras falling every day. And yet what distinguishes the professional from the amateur is that they will take the original image in RAW (which takes longer to process but captures more information), they will obsessively edit the colour levels, crop the image to better frame the composition and generally faff monstrously over every single shot to the point that would drive any mere mortal screaming for the hills (without even a polaroid to capture the panoramic views). And in all these cases, people are underestimating things because they don't understand the intricacies of them. They have little or no experience in that field, so the large gap between 'beginning' and 'end' is filled with an amorphous green jelly in which they assume you're picking your toenails or staring into space. The client has never sat down with a design program and tried to wrestle with it over a vague and ill-defined list of requirements, so it seems simple to them. Because it looks simple, they think it's easy.

---

And so goes part one of the Dunning-Kruger effect: The less you know about something, the less you realise that there is a vast amount of information about it that you don't know. Being blissfully aware of that, it allows people to confidently make sweeping generalisations on topics like immigration, welfare reform and climate change. In the last page's examples, all the client knows is that the graphic designer is being difficult over a couple of pictures of faeries. Websites seem to take forever to update (I know, I'm sorry). Complex and inter-related ethical debates get reduced to "hang 'em all" and "send 'em all back." I realised I had been jealous of an old friend who had been putting up amazing photographs on Facebook recently only to find out he had been 'cheating' by going to photography workshops. He hasn't been cheating. He's been learning. Whereas the people who do know the full range of a subject are not only aware of it's complexity, they're also aware that there are more avenues of inquiry to explore. There are conflicting ethical considerations, where alien cultures can seem to be 'taking over' when it's more likely that a minority is no longer small enough to remain ignored. It can appear as though people are flooding to our country because they have it good here, whereas it might also be important to look at what's so bad in other countries that it's making them flee like amateur photographers. And while a blanket policy of sending everyone back out the way they came in might reduce the number of immigrants, it also raises the number of helpless internationals who are being abused, starved and exploited in their own countries. The end result is that the people who actually know the most about a subject are often the least likely to speak authoritatively on it for fear of oversimplifying the subject. In contrast, the people most eager to speak or act on a subject's definitive answer are usually the people who understand and appreciate the subject the least. Unfortunately, Dunning-Kruger is more than just a hilarious oddity of human psychology that explains the classic "I'm no expert but..." mentality, it's a glowing warning sign pointing towards idiocracy. Politics is often as bipolar as it is bipartisan, both sides pouring out unworkable policies backed by righteous belief. Bosses are employed straight out of management degrees who have no experience of the job they're overseeing, running businesses into the ground and destroying the NHS trying to apply business techniques to a public service. People destroy and vilify each other over incompatible 'truths.' Piers Morgan is still on the air. It's horrible. Of course it's entirely possible that I've only been able to write this because I don't understand how it all works. If so, maybe I'm better sticking to fiction, in which case I'll see you on the other side.