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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31788 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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Anyone who wasn't plugged into news media would probably struggle to articulate any way in which Brexit has actually materially affected their life. Marginally more waiting times at airports to go on holiday?

If it doesn't affect your life in any other way expect to make you wait more time at airports, it has affected your life in a negative way, no? Which then just leads back to the issue of your country making this change for absolutely no reason that no-one has been able to explain beyond "gave Boris a chance to play PM for a bit", with large promises of extra cash for NHS and various other benefits that didn't come. Which is my point; why should millennial Remainers vote for Tories if what they get for voting Tories is... that?

Freedom of movement is almost never used in practice, indeed 55% of brits never move very far away from where they're born;

But I was not talking about 55 % of Brits. I was talking about Millennial Remainers.

If it doesn't affect your life in any other way expect to make you wait more time at airports, it has affected your life in a negative way, no?

Compared to all the doom and gloom that everyone was predicting, the answer rounds down to "no".

Which then just leads back to the issue of your country making this change for absolutely no reason that no-one has been able to explain

There's plenty of reasons. It's just that the Brexiters were betrayed.

Again, all of this is at the crux of the issue. If even the Brexiteers cannot offer better answers to questions like "What good did the Brexit actually do to anyone?" or "Why didn't the promises made to achieve Brexit come through?" than "Well, it wasn't as bad as the Remainers claimed" or "Brexiteers were betrayed" or "The fault lies with EU coming after Britain for doing Brexit", well... none of those really answer those questions?

If the question is whether Brexit was good or not, "not as bad as claimed" or "well, you see, there were problems but it wasn't due to Brexiteers" are, at the very least, not particularly arguments for it being actually good. If a general loses a battle then he has lost a battle, no matter how much his latter memoirs talk about how the battle wasn't lost as badly as others claim or how his superiors shared the blame or how the enemy used unfair tactics or whatever.

I'm not sure why other haven't said t yet but wasn't the obvious point that self determination is a terminal good in it's own right? Perhaps the patriotism has been totally drained from the millennial British marrow but do you really need to measure the utility of your nation to not be subsumed by a much larger entity in order to value it? Self determination is an abstract value I suppose but it seems incredibly short sighted to place zero value on things that don't directly translate to immediate material benefit.

How far do you take the idea that self-determination is a terminal good? Like, would it be better for Scotland to leave the United Kingdom because that would mean they have more self-determination? Would it be better for individual states to leave the United States because it would improve their self-determination?

Unless self-determination is a good that, at any quantity and put to any purpose, is always worth a trade off against a material benefit you're going to need some justification for why we should give up some material benefit to get more self-determination. Are any Brexiters even attempting to make that case?

How far do you take the idea that self-determination is a terminal good? Like, would it be better for Scotland to leave the United Kingdom because that would mean they have more self-determination? Would it be better for individual states to leave the United States because it would improve their self-determination?

If put briefly I'd probably answer yeschad.jpg to your examples but more nuancedly, at least in the US context, I think it'd be sufficient to just scope the power of the federal government to what it actually needs at that scope. And institution to keep the different states working together cohesively is good and necessary. Maintaining a combined military force for protecting the common interest is good and necessary. That same organization being empowered to put me in a cage for years because I ingest a plant no one in my community would ever object to or have the wrong shape of gun that the leader of my community also has is not good or necessary and the only reason it has that power is that these unpopular people in my community found out they could get their way against the local interest by appealing to a higher authority that happens to be gerrymandered just so that they can then force their views on other people.

I get that this isn't a super bright line and people will have different opinions about what the scope the outside layers of the onion of politics actually need but I am confident at least in saying that wherever the line is we crossed it so long ago and come so far that I can not see it from where I am.

Well, the powers of EU are considerably lesser than those of US federal government (in practice and even moreso in theory), so what's the problem for the UK, then? The rest of Europe does certainly not appear to see this sovereignty issue this way, and for many Eastern European countries, one of the ideas for joining EU was that it would actually increase their sovereignty (ie. serve as something that would wrench them from the presumed Russian sphere of interest).

Of course, evidently there is a number of people in GB who see Brexit as a sovereignty issue and voted Leave due to this... but then again these people are not really the topic of interest vis-a-vis the article starting this thread, either.

Well, the powers of EU are considerably lesser than those of US federal government (in practice and even moreso in theory), so what's the problem for the UK, then?

The American Union did not start with this level of federal control. Who is to say how the EU ends up, it certainly don't seem to be shrinking in size.

The rest of Europe does certainly not appear to see this sovereignty issue this way, and for many Eastern European countries, one of the ideas for joining EU was that it would actually increase their sovereignty (ie. serve as something that would wrench them from the presumed Russian sphere of interest).

The UK and eastern Europe are in pretty different situations for exactly the reasons you cite.

Of course, evidently there is a number of people in GB who see Brexit as a sovereignty issue and voted Leave due to this... but then again these people are not really the topic of interest vis-a-vis the article starting this thread, either.

Well you were asking a more general question about self determination, but I thought the sovereignty thing was the major Brexit issue wasn't it? Sovereignty with which to ban immigration or whatever as a prime example of what to use sovereignty for but sovereignty none the less. I can't say I've seen the messaging targeting the Isle's Millennials so I'm not sure what messages they have or have not received, but leaving a union as a primitive action is reclaiming sovereignty so it is at least pretty implicit in the request.

I disagree. Simply put, I'm happy to concede the way Brexit was done was pointless, but that doesn't change the fact that in the best case Remainers were wrong about the consequences of Brexit, and in the worst case were just lying about them to discourage it.

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