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Brexit finally got done at 23:00 GMT on 31st December 2020 when the UK's Withdrawal Agreement with the EU finally expired. A "trade deal" between the UK and EU was agreed on 24th December. The Alt-Wrong finally got their prize of freedom, democracy and British sovereignty.
What did they actually win? Chaos at the ports, thousands of tonnes of fish that can't be sold, tariffs, duties, and all sorts of things which were once Project Fear and the undemocratic, treasonous lies of the Liberal Metropolitan Elite, Socialists, Marxists, quislings, traitors, lefties and people who hate their country. Socialism, Marxism, EUSSR, Venezuela, toilet paper!
We are on the third week of this glorious new future of sunlit uplands with no downsides, only upsides with much more to look forward to. And Donald Trump is going to give us a fantastic trade deal with the USA straight away.
Over at the Guardian, Polly Toynbee has an excellent summary entitled Brexiters are waking up to the damage they've done.
As Brexiters turn on each other, Brexit politics move fast. Until now the Tories planned to move on, only reviving “Brexit done” triumphalism to re-arouse the captured red wall at the election: Labour just wanted to bury the whole issue.
The Westminster system has failed us (the UK). We are now looking at Irish Reunification and Scottish Independence. Gibraltar has already got its own deal where it gets to join Schengen.
We have Taken Back Control(TM).
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 19 2021, @06:09AM
This is so unbelievably ironic. Do you know the USSR lost? The nominal reason given is that they ran out of money and so we out-cold-warred them, but there was something much more fundamental. Soviet citizens envied the US: our freedom, our culture, our capitalism, and our ability to live, grow, and express ourselves in a way that was impossible in the USSR. When your own citizens envy your enemy, you're going to lose.
The USSR was "woke", hardcore. All of the precepts of wokeness from identity politics hovering about race and sexual identity, to the equity for all, cultural cleansing, and censorship of wrong-think - these were all key precepts of the Soviet Union. The sexual identity stuff was rolled back under Stalin, but all other aspects remained for the breadth of the Soviet Union's brief flicker of an existence. And the people hated it.
I think this is similar to what's happening in the US today, and even to a lesser degree within the EU. Our "cultural hegemony" is not being killed off by outside actors, but by ourselves. "Wokeness" rapidly trends towards self depreciation, censorship, intolerance, and ultimately - authoritarianism. It seeks to "purify" culture and does succeed in that - by destroying/suppressing it.
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Ultimately there's some great irony. The only reason you might think the deterioration of our "cultural hegemony" must be being driven by outside forces is because we are now collectively censoring and attacking anybody who dares to speak out against it. And so, in mainstream discourse, you are presented a false picture of relatively homogeneous views. But reality is quite different. Censoring and suppressing views does not make them disappear, it only evangelizes the people who are oppressed and drives them to discourse outside the public eye. And so when people push back you now suddenly have no idea where this all could have come from, leading to absurd conclusions like "It must be Putin!"