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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 (6 children)
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!"
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 19 2021, @08:02AM (1 child)
Also abortion rights were rolled back by Stalin. We should be highly suspicious of these Republican commies that want to roll back Roe v. Wade.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 19 2021, @04:26PM
On these sort of divisive issues, it's unlikely either party would actually pull the trigger. A large chunk of republicans are pro-choice and similarly a large chunk of the pro-life contingent is pro-life only in certain circumstances (e.g. - after second trimester or whatever).
They tease the pro-life stuff to get the evangelicals to show up. If they actually passed it not only would they alienate a pretty sizable chunk of their party, but they'd need to come up with a new gimmick to get the evangelicals. Similar to the DNC with reparations or similar hand-outs. The vast majority of people, including democrats, oppose reparations and so there's not a chance in hell they'd ever pass it. They just use it to try to sustain the usually 90%+ black vote which has been slipping in recent years.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 19 2021, @06:30PM (3 children)
Ya lost me when you started babbling about wokeness, wake me up when you have a real point instead of assumptions about mine.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 19 2021, @07:16PM (2 children)
I'm not saying you are "woke"; an absolutely negligible percentage of people are. What I am saying is that the reason our cultural hegemony is fading into nothingness is because notions of freedom, entrepreneurship, expression, and achievement have been replaced with wokeness whose sole existence is persisted only by an adoption by corporations alongside the political establishment of which they are part.
And wokeness will inevitably spur on its own collapse, as has been shown time and again, so looking for external causes when we have blindingly obvious internal causes is nonsensical. We're basically simply playing early 20th century world history over again, except we've decided to take on the role of the losing side.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by dry on Wednesday January 20 2021, @01:29AM (1 child)
Are you still pissed off that Lincoln got elected by the woke folks and all that led to? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Awakes [wikipedia.org]
Considering that you seem to believe the Hollywood propaganda machine claims about America, I'm left wondering what other propaganda you've swallowed wholesale.
(Score: 2) by Socrastotle on Wednesday January 20 2021, @03:36PM
Wokeness in its modern form is a pattern carried out in various countries that have tried to implement Marxist ideals - most notably (though not the only) would be the Soviet Union and China. Whereas Marxism is (in theory) the notion that everybody should be economically equal, wokeness is the cultural equivalent. It achieves the pursuit of cultural equality by arguing that any preexisting culture was wrong (by some interpretation or another) and then thus destroying it to be replaced with the new homogeneous culture. Hence statue tumbling, 'purification' of 'problematic' references to the past, Google promoting 'unthanksgiving day', and so on.
China's cultural purification was much more overt since they had leadership that were able to freely express their ideology. So see things like Destruction of Four Olds [wikipedia.org] campaign. The "Four Olds" in this case: were old culture, old habits, old customs, and old ideas. It started off similar to own with little more than renaming campaigns and the occasional toppling of a statue or whatever, but by the end they were engaging in widescale "purification" of China's thousands of cultural heritage sites. It was not a travesty not only against the Chinese people but the world. China has a direct history far longer than anywhere in the western world with a continuation going back thousands of years. This "purification" destroyed an unimaginable amount of not only their cultural heritage but really of *our* cultural heritage as humans.
And then we get into things like struggle sessions [wikipedia.org] which are likely coming to America soon under the guise of justice. And that is "wokeness" for you.
The problem with wokeness is what happens with any ideology that lets people think themselves 'holier than thou.' I think people are generally, inherently, good. But let them become self righteous and convince themselves that they're fighting the devil, and they will all too happily turn into the very monsters they've convinced themselves they're fighting against.