6 ms·

Branching histories of the 2016 UK referendum and ‘the frogs before the storm’

40 points by robinhouston 10y ago

noir_lord 10y ago
They won by lying and using a controlled press to feed fears of immigration, the whole campaign was one of dishonesty, lies and feeding on people fears and anyone involved should be fucking ashamed.
- Kenji 10y ago
  Emotion won't win you a debate. Or convince anyone. As a matter of fact, precisely this 'should be fucking ashamed'-culture is what enabled Brexit and Trump in a large part. Learn and correct course.
  - gdulli 10y ago
    But 2016 showed us that manipulating people's emotions can win you an election. If a lazy tactic puts you on the losing side of a debate but the winning side of an election, that's worth being concerned about.
    - branchless 10y ago
      I think it's lazy to claim people voted because they were "manipulated". Many voted because they profoundly dislike the status quo.
      - gdulli 10y ago
        But with so many lies being told about the status quo (drumming up fear of immigrants being one example) it's hard to say what rejecting the status quo even means. Sure, if I love guns and I'm being told daily through talk radio that Obama wants to take all of them, I'm going to be upset and vulnerable to making an emotional decision.
- mzw_mzw 10y ago
  That sort of rhetoric may make you feel better, but anyone who voted the other way is not going to be "ashamed" because someone insulted them for it; they're just going to dismiss you even more and harden their positions. If you want to win these political debates, as opposed to just having a momentary emotional release, you need to reach out, not attack.
  - hnhg 10y ago
    I think he means the people who misled voters, rather than the voters themselves. Edit: I think you're right about reaching out, btw.
  - rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
    The problem as I see it is less how the people voted(/debated) either way, and more of the establishment's arrogant disdain for the people that disagree with them. "Those pesky proles wouldn't actually vote Leave, and even if a few do there's no way it will be a majority, so we can stay the course with the EU because that's all we are offering and they are gonna have to take it either way." - my mental image of center-left politicians. Exact same attitude annointed Clinton with the nomination.
  - pasquinelli 10y ago
    Honestly, who needs to reach out? Did the Republicans get in the nice situation they find themselves in now by reaching out? If the Democrats learn from the Republicans they should wait for the pendulum to swing and meanwhile be as loud, vehement, and derisive as they can. Lay the groundwork for people think voting against the Republicans is a matter of life and death. Shit, trump might do that himself. I just hope it's only perception.
    - rfrank 10y ago
      > Lay the groundwork for people think voting against the Republicans is a matter of life and death. Liberals already tried that this election, it's still impossible to go a day without a MSM outlet saying Trump is literally Hitler and that America is now a fascist state. It's probably not wise to eschew diplomacy when the GOP is as powerful at all levels of government from local to national as they have been in 80 years.
- mmanfrin 10y ago
  Word-for-word how I feel about another similar vote this year.
  - mzw_mzw 10y ago
    And that sort of rhetoric is exactly why you lost that vote. Learn from it.
    - branchless 10y ago
      I totally agree, it is quite incredible how people cannot accept that many people who are from different class/job type/social circles utterly hate the current system. They are very frustrated with the inequality, the financialisation of the economy and the way the upper middle and beyond are frankly asset stripping their homelands. And I fully accept my downvotes which will rain down from the well educated. I'm not a fan of Brexit but the status quo has profound problems and this is what you get when you keep looking the other way.
      - pasquinelli 10y ago
        I totally disagree with the comment you're replying to, but totally agree with yours. The difference is that afaic attributing the election results to a matter of the opposition's attitude is a form of looking the other way.
    - user837387 10y ago
      Only because Trump's supporters were spread out in the right places. Hillary won the popular vote by almost 3 million votes so I would not brag about anything if I were you. That large opposition force that surpasses all Trump supporters will not go away. Comments like yours will only piss them off much more and if Trump fucks it up even people that voted for him will turn on him on a dime. This is not over my Trump supporter. If the Republicans overreach there will be a backlash.
      - mzw_mzw 10y ago
- morsch 10y ago
  I read the first couple hundred words, then skipped through the rest (at increasing speed, it really is ridiculously long, 40 printed pages if I'm counting right), found this gem: I will go into the problems of the EU another time. I will just make one important point here. I thought very strongly that 1) a return to 1930s protectionism would be disastrous, 2) the fastest route to this is continuing with no democratic control over immigration or human rights policies for terrorists and other serious criminals, therefore 3) the best practical policy is to reduce (for a while) unskilled immigration and increase high skills immigration particularly those with very hard skills in maths, physics and computer science, 4) this requires getting out of the EU, 5) hopefully it will prod the rest of Europe to limit immigration and therefore limit the extremist forces that otherwise will try to rip down free trade. I guess I'll have to read (or more likely, skip through) that "another time" post, because to me that just sounds incoherent. Maybe it makes more sense for people familiar with the current (conservative) British narrative.
  - surfmike 10y ago
    Sounds coherent to me. The argument is that controlling immigration now (which requires leaving EU) will stave off a future, even greater anti-immigration backlash which could add protectionism thrown in for good measure. So Brexit would prevent a protectionist like Trump from ruling Britain. The main counterpoints to this argument are that Brexit itself is quite harmful to free trade already (we'll see what happens in the next year), or skepticism that an even worse backlash would ever happen later.
    - andrewingram 10y ago
      Yeah, it's coherent enough to me that if i'd ever heard it pre-referendum i'd have been more comfortable that there were at least some real arguments to be made in favour of leaving.
      - smikhanov 10y ago
        Why, arguments for both sides could've been made easily. You absolutely can make a case for both leaving or staying. It's just that neither side of the referendum bothered to do this before the vote.
- alva 10y ago
  He covers your type of attitude very well in this excellent piece. You are doing yourself no service in holding this view steadfast. You will learn nothing and only be patting yourself on the back for having the right-on opinion that is likely dominant in your social group. As is covered in great depth, touching on some interesting HN relevant topics like complexity theory, this was a huge campaign with many moving parts, motivations, draws and repellents. Telling yourself it is simple as "those who don't hold my opinion were only persuaded by lies as they are stupid" is a virus that holds you back from understanding and amplifies and reinforces your prejudices. Massive amount of very interesting info in this article that covers a wide range of strategy and persuasion topics. edit: re-reading your post made me realise you have almost definitely have not read the article if you believe the press were on their side
  - mafribe 10y ago
    Massive amount of very interesting info Agreed. The most interesting account of the Brexit vote I've read, and one of the most insightful of how modern politics works.
  - arethuza 10y ago
    "believe the press were on their side" Well, the Sun seems to believe they were critical to the Brexit vote and they are the largest circulation newspaper in the UK: https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/1338543/our-paper-led-the-fight-against-the-eu-and-had-the-strongest-influence-on-people-voting-for-leave/ https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/1338543/our-paper-led-the-figh...
    - alva 10y ago
      Nothing cements reader loyalty like proclaiming you won the battle for them. Here is a selection of the papers that were fighting for remain. The Economist, Financial Times, The Guardian, New Statesman, The Observer, The Independent, The Scotsman, The Times, Daily Mirror, London Evening Standard, British Medical Journal, Daily Mirror, Daily Record, The National, Sunday Mail, Sunday Mirror. Someone would have to have an extremely convincing argument to persuade the majority that the media were not almost totally for Remain (including the BBC).
- TrevorJ 10y ago
  I will make no argument relative to your opinion, but I do want to point out that many on both sides of the issue hold to this very same opinion of the opposition.
- dang 10y ago
  Please don't post angry rants about divisive topics to HN. They lead to flamewars and make higher-quality discussion impossible. You've more or less ruined this thread by tossing a Molotov cocktail into it. Instead of inflammatory generic comments, please post neutral specific ones. Good HN comments either engage the specifics of an article or go on an interesting—i.e. not pre-worn—tangent. Partisan battle is the opposite of what we want.
  - Doctor_Fegg 10y ago
    Ugh, dang, I think you do a superb job of moderating HN, but please have some sensibility for those of us in the UK. This guy, Dominic Cummings, is the equivalent of one of Trump's most rabid advisors. In his previous role (advisor to Michael Gove as Secretary of State for Education) he demoralised the entire teaching profession. I know that sounds hyperbolic but it's absolutely true - check out the TES or any other specialist press. He has now, absolutely mendaciously (again, check out the expert commentary on the £350m bus claim), swung us out of an economic union on which lots of HN readers' livelihoods depend - including my own. Already, every time we go abroad, the ATM reminds us that we are getting less for our earnings than we did a year ago. Already multinationals are closing warehouses and cancelling the contracts that keep us able to pay the mortgage at the end of the month. People reading this post are losing their jobs because of this guy's sixth-form philosophy. It hasnt happened in the US yet. Come back to this post in a year's time and tell me everything's ok under President Trump. I honestly hope it will be. But please have some tolerance for those of us who are losing out from 2016's wave of populism.
    - alva 10y ago
      What has any of that got to due with the poster not meeting the expected level of discourse? Just because you are personally upset it does not mean that histrionic and aggressive posting is suitable.
      - Doctor_Fegg 10y ago
        Is it suitable? Maybe not. Is it understandable? Yes, I think so. I believe it is kinder and fairer to understand commenters' motivation rather than holding them to cold rationalism at all times. (After all, understanding emotions rather than just rational self-interest is how we can move forward from Brexit and Trump.)
- krona 10y ago
  Dishonest, yes. The whole thing was a deception from the start. The person I am most ashamed of is Jacques Delors. What an ignorant fool. At least he was cognizant of his failures in later life, once the damage was done.
prodmerc 10y ago
Oh wow, I never say this, but this post definitely needs a TL;DR
- simonbyrne 10y ago
  Political operative in leave side of recent U.K. EU referendum thinks victory was not assured, and that "EU costs £350 million a week, give to NHS instead" slogan was the deciding factor.
- alva 10y ago
  Summary of topics covered, although I highly recommend reading the whole thing. The author appears to be a relative insider to politics however approached the entire campaign in a very different manner than is expected from political types. 1. Game theory 2. Probability 3. Issues with managing a large number of people, some with diverging motivations and how that effects succeeding in the group's aim 4. Enormity of establishment backing of Remain and how that helped/hindered 5. 3 conditions that left the Leave vote possible. Maybe the best section, parallels to recent US election obvious here. 6. Making persuasive arguments to a wide demographic, including their timing. 7. Warranted distrust of establishment post 2008 and its effects. 8. IYI (intellectual yet idiot) class. 9. Incredibly strong post establishment media backlash and its motivation,"Fake news", "Idiots couldn't understand", "Racists". 10. Importance of error-correction in large systems. 11. Some very innovative solutions to the above. Overall a fantastic summary of why we have seen some political "shocks" in the West.
  - smikhanov 10y ago
    Sounds like a typical "Lessons Learned from My Year as a Startup CEO" post on Medium!
rndmize 10y ago
While unfortunately I don't have time to finish reading it at the moment, this is a very interesting post, even for someone with no interest in brexit. It feels more like a discussion of effectiveness/efficiency, organizational structure, motivations and their effects, with the leave org being an example of how these can benefit/harm your efforts. I found the occasional paragraph on advertising/media strategy especially interesting. That said, 20k words is lengthy to the point that I suspect this will fall off the front page before any reasonable discussion can happen.
losvedir 10y ago
Ooh, I'm going to like this article. I had to stop to post this comment when I came across this statement: Much political analysis revolves around competing simple stories based on one big factor such that, in retrospect, ‘it was always clear that immigration would trump economic interest / Cameron’s negotiation was never going to be enough / there is an unstoppable populist tide’, and so on. Alternatives are quickly thought to have been impossible (even if X argued the exact opposite repeatedly). The big event must have had an equally big single cause. Confirmation bias kicks in and evidence seeming to suggest that what actually happened would happen looms larger. People who are quite wrong quickly persuade themselves they were ‘mostly right’ and ‘had a strong feeling’ unlike, of course, the blind fools around them. Soon our actual history seems like the only way things could have played out. Brexit had to happen. Trump had to win. It really reminds me of this[0] wonderful blog post "Tuesday shouldn't change the narrative" which predicted very well how the narrative changed after the election of Trump. This Brexit blog post also has this wonderful epistemic statement: > Also, it is clear that almost nobody agrees with me about some of my general ideas. It is more likely that I am wrong than 99% of people who work in this field professionally. Still, cognitive diversity is inherently good for political analysis so I’ll say what I think and others will judge if there’s anything to learn. Both of these quotes really resonate with me. I fear that many people will downvote this because the author is a Leaver, but I think that would be a mistake. The author clearly isn't dumb and is telling a firsthand story of their involvement in this important event. People should read and watch primary sources more often, I think. [0] http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/07/tuesday-shouldnt-change-the-narrative/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/07/tuesday-shouldnt-change...
pm24601 10y ago
Whatever you feel the Brexit result should have been, read this article to understand deeply how politics plays out. Dominic spends much of the article showing how it was the errors of IN that gave the opportunity for Leave to have a chance. In the US, the progressive movement is learning from the Tea Party how to fight Trump. Pro-EU Brits should learn from the euroskeptics. As Dominic says, the easiest person to lie to is yourself.

40 points by robinhouston 10y ago

They won by lying and using a controlled press to feed fears of immigration, the whole campaign was one of dishonesty, lies and feeding on people fears and anyone involved should be fucking ashamed.

Kenji 10y ago
Emotion won't win you a debate. Or convince anyone. As a matter of fact, precisely this 'should be fucking ashamed'-culture is what enabled Brexit and Trump in a large part. Learn and correct course.
- gdulli 10y ago
  But 2016 showed us that manipulating people's emotions can win you an election. If a lazy tactic puts you on the losing side of a debate but the winning side of an election, that's worth being concerned about.
  - branchless 10y ago
    I think it's lazy to claim people voted because they were "manipulated". Many voted because they profoundly dislike the status quo.
    - gdulli 10y ago
      But with so many lies being told about the status quo (drumming up fear of immigrants being one example) it's hard to say what rejecting the status quo even means. Sure, if I love guns and I'm being told daily through talk radio that Obama wants to take all of them, I'm going to be upset and vulnerable to making an emotional decision.
mzw_mzw 10y ago
That sort of rhetoric may make you feel better, but anyone who voted the other way is not going to be "ashamed" because someone insulted them for it; they're just going to dismiss you even more and harden their positions. If you want to win these political debates, as opposed to just having a momentary emotional release, you need to reach out, not attack.
- hnhg 10y ago
  I think he means the people who misled voters, rather than the voters themselves. Edit: I think you're right about reaching out, btw.
- rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
  The problem as I see it is less how the people voted(/debated) either way, and more of the establishment's arrogant disdain for the people that disagree with them. "Those pesky proles wouldn't actually vote Leave, and even if a few do there's no way it will be a majority, so we can stay the course with the EU because that's all we are offering and they are gonna have to take it either way." - my mental image of center-left politicians. Exact same attitude annointed Clinton with the nomination.
- pasquinelli 10y ago
  Honestly, who needs to reach out? Did the Republicans get in the nice situation they find themselves in now by reaching out? If the Democrats learn from the Republicans they should wait for the pendulum to swing and meanwhile be as loud, vehement, and derisive as they can. Lay the groundwork for people think voting against the Republicans is a matter of life and death. Shit, trump might do that himself. I just hope it's only perception.
  - rfrank 10y ago
    > Lay the groundwork for people think voting against the Republicans is a matter of life and death. Liberals already tried that this election, it's still impossible to go a day without a MSM outlet saying Trump is literally Hitler and that America is now a fascist state. It's probably not wise to eschew diplomacy when the GOP is as powerful at all levels of government from local to national as they have been in 80 years.
mmanfrin 10y ago
Word-for-word how I feel about another similar vote this year.
- mzw_mzw 10y ago
  And that sort of rhetoric is exactly why you lost that vote. Learn from it.
  - branchless 10y ago
    I totally agree, it is quite incredible how people cannot accept that many people who are from different class/job type/social circles utterly hate the current system. They are very frustrated with the inequality, the financialisation of the economy and the way the upper middle and beyond are frankly asset stripping their homelands. And I fully accept my downvotes which will rain down from the well educated. I'm not a fan of Brexit but the status quo has profound problems and this is what you get when you keep looking the other way.
    - pasquinelli 10y ago
      I totally disagree with the comment you're replying to, but totally agree with yours. The difference is that afaic attributing the election results to a matter of the opposition's attitude is a form of looking the other way.
  - user837387 10y ago
    Only because Trump's supporters were spread out in the right places. Hillary won the popular vote by almost 3 million votes so I would not brag about anything if I were you. That large opposition force that surpasses all Trump supporters will not go away. Comments like yours will only piss them off much more and if Trump fucks it up even people that voted for him will turn on him on a dime. This is not over my Trump supporter. If the Republicans overreach there will be a backlash.
    - mzw_mzw 10y ago
morsch 10y ago
I read the first couple hundred words, then skipped through the rest (at increasing speed, it really is ridiculously long, 40 printed pages if I'm counting right), found this gem: I will go into the problems of the EU another time. I will just make one important point here. I thought very strongly that 1) a return to 1930s protectionism would be disastrous, 2) the fastest route to this is continuing with no democratic control over immigration or human rights policies for terrorists and other serious criminals, therefore 3) the best practical policy is to reduce (for a while) unskilled immigration and increase high skills immigration particularly those with very hard skills in maths, physics and computer science, 4) this requires getting out of the EU, 5) hopefully it will prod the rest of Europe to limit immigration and therefore limit the extremist forces that otherwise will try to rip down free trade. I guess I'll have to read (or more likely, skip through) that "another time" post, because to me that just sounds incoherent. Maybe it makes more sense for people familiar with the current (conservative) British narrative.
- surfmike 10y ago
  Sounds coherent to me. The argument is that controlling immigration now (which requires leaving EU) will stave off a future, even greater anti-immigration backlash which could add protectionism thrown in for good measure. So Brexit would prevent a protectionist like Trump from ruling Britain. The main counterpoints to this argument are that Brexit itself is quite harmful to free trade already (we'll see what happens in the next year), or skepticism that an even worse backlash would ever happen later.
  - andrewingram 10y ago
    Yeah, it's coherent enough to me that if i'd ever heard it pre-referendum i'd have been more comfortable that there were at least some real arguments to be made in favour of leaving.
    - smikhanov 10y ago
      Why, arguments for both sides could've been made easily. You absolutely can make a case for both leaving or staying. It's just that neither side of the referendum bothered to do this before the vote.
alva 10y ago
He covers your type of attitude very well in this excellent piece. You are doing yourself no service in holding this view steadfast. You will learn nothing and only be patting yourself on the back for having the right-on opinion that is likely dominant in your social group. As is covered in great depth, touching on some interesting HN relevant topics like complexity theory, this was a huge campaign with many moving parts, motivations, draws and repellents. Telling yourself it is simple as "those who don't hold my opinion were only persuaded by lies as they are stupid" is a virus that holds you back from understanding and amplifies and reinforces your prejudices. Massive amount of very interesting info in this article that covers a wide range of strategy and persuasion topics. edit: re-reading your post made me realise you have almost definitely have not read the article if you believe the press were on their side
- mafribe 10y ago
  Massive amount of very interesting info Agreed. The most interesting account of the Brexit vote I've read, and one of the most insightful of how modern politics works.
- arethuza 10y ago
  "believe the press were on their side" Well, the Sun seems to believe they were critical to the Brexit vote and they are the largest circulation newspaper in the UK: https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/1338543/our-paper-led-the-fight-against-the-eu-and-had-the-strongest-influence-on-people-voting-for-leave/ https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/1338543/our-paper-led-the-figh...
  - alva 10y ago
    Nothing cements reader loyalty like proclaiming you won the battle for them. Here is a selection of the papers that were fighting for remain. The Economist, Financial Times, The Guardian, New Statesman, The Observer, The Independent, The Scotsman, The Times, Daily Mirror, London Evening Standard, British Medical Journal, Daily Mirror, Daily Record, The National, Sunday Mail, Sunday Mirror. Someone would have to have an extremely convincing argument to persuade the majority that the media were not almost totally for Remain (including the BBC).
TrevorJ 10y ago
I will make no argument relative to your opinion, but I do want to point out that many on both sides of the issue hold to this very same opinion of the opposition.
dang 10y ago
Please don't post angry rants about divisive topics to HN. They lead to flamewars and make higher-quality discussion impossible. You've more or less ruined this thread by tossing a Molotov cocktail into it. Instead of inflammatory generic comments, please post neutral specific ones. Good HN comments either engage the specifics of an article or go on an interesting—i.e. not pre-worn—tangent. Partisan battle is the opposite of what we want.
- Doctor_Fegg 10y ago
  Ugh, dang, I think you do a superb job of moderating HN, but please have some sensibility for those of us in the UK. This guy, Dominic Cummings, is the equivalent of one of Trump's most rabid advisors. In his previous role (advisor to Michael Gove as Secretary of State for Education) he demoralised the entire teaching profession. I know that sounds hyperbolic but it's absolutely true - check out the TES or any other specialist press. He has now, absolutely mendaciously (again, check out the expert commentary on the £350m bus claim), swung us out of an economic union on which lots of HN readers' livelihoods depend - including my own. Already, every time we go abroad, the ATM reminds us that we are getting less for our earnings than we did a year ago. Already multinationals are closing warehouses and cancelling the contracts that keep us able to pay the mortgage at the end of the month. People reading this post are losing their jobs because of this guy's sixth-form philosophy. It hasnt happened in the US yet. Come back to this post in a year's time and tell me everything's ok under President Trump. I honestly hope it will be. But please have some tolerance for those of us who are losing out from 2016's wave of populism.
  - alva 10y ago
    What has any of that got to due with the poster not meeting the expected level of discourse? Just because you are personally upset it does not mean that histrionic and aggressive posting is suitable.
    - Doctor_Fegg 10y ago
      Is it suitable? Maybe not. Is it understandable? Yes, I think so. I believe it is kinder and fairer to understand commenters' motivation rather than holding them to cold rationalism at all times. (After all, understanding emotions rather than just rational self-interest is how we can move forward from Brexit and Trump.)
krona 10y ago
Dishonest, yes. The whole thing was a deception from the start. The person I am most ashamed of is Jacques Delors. What an ignorant fool. At least he was cognizant of his failures in later life, once the damage was done.

prodmerc 10y ago

Oh wow, I never say this, but this post definitely needs a TL;DR

simonbyrne 10y ago
Political operative in leave side of recent U.K. EU referendum thinks victory was not assured, and that "EU costs £350 million a week, give to NHS instead" slogan was the deciding factor.
alva 10y ago
Summary of topics covered, although I highly recommend reading the whole thing. The author appears to be a relative insider to politics however approached the entire campaign in a very different manner than is expected from political types. 1. Game theory 2. Probability 3. Issues with managing a large number of people, some with diverging motivations and how that effects succeeding in the group's aim 4. Enormity of establishment backing of Remain and how that helped/hindered 5. 3 conditions that left the Leave vote possible. Maybe the best section, parallels to recent US election obvious here. 6. Making persuasive arguments to a wide demographic, including their timing. 7. Warranted distrust of establishment post 2008 and its effects. 8. IYI (intellectual yet idiot) class. 9. Incredibly strong post establishment media backlash and its motivation,"Fake news", "Idiots couldn't understand", "Racists". 10. Importance of error-correction in large systems. 11. Some very innovative solutions to the above. Overall a fantastic summary of why we have seen some political "shocks" in the West.
- smikhanov 10y ago
  Sounds like a typical "Lessons Learned from My Year as a Startup CEO" post on Medium!

rndmize 10y ago

While unfortunately I don't have time to finish reading it at the moment, this is a very interesting post, even for someone with no interest in brexit. It feels more like a discussion of effectiveness/efficiency, organizational structure, motivations and their effects, with the leave org being an example of how these can benefit/harm your efforts. I found the occasional paragraph on advertising/media strategy especially interesting. That said, 20k words is lengthy to the point that I suspect this will fall off the front page before any reasonable discussion can happen.

losvedir 10y ago

Ooh, I'm going to like this article. I had to stop to post this comment when I came across this statement: Much political analysis revolves around competing simple stories based on one big factor such that, in retrospect, ‘it was always clear that immigration would trump economic interest / Cameron’s negotiation was never going to be enough / there is an unstoppable populist tide’, and so on. Alternatives are quickly thought to have been impossible (even if X argued the exact opposite repeatedly). The big event must have had an equally big single cause. Confirmation bias kicks in and evidence seeming to suggest that what actually happened would happen looms larger. People who are quite wrong quickly persuade themselves they were ‘mostly right’ and ‘had a strong feeling’ unlike, of course, the blind fools around them. Soon our actual history seems like the only way things could have played out. Brexit had to happen. Trump had to win. It really reminds me of this[0] wonderful blog post "Tuesday shouldn't change the narrative" which predicted very well how the narrative changed after the election of Trump. This Brexit blog post also has this wonderful epistemic statement: > Also, it is clear that almost nobody agrees with me about some of my general ideas. It is more likely that I am wrong than 99% of people who work in this field professionally. Still, cognitive diversity is inherently good for political analysis so I’ll say what I think and others will judge if there’s anything to learn. Both of these quotes really resonate with me. I fear that many people will downvote this because the author is a Leaver, but I think that would be a mistake. The author clearly isn't dumb and is telling a firsthand story of their involvement in this important event. People should read and watch primary sources more often, I think. [0] http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/07/tuesday-shouldnt-change-the-narrative/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/07/tuesday-shouldnt-change...

pm24601 10y ago

Whatever you feel the Brexit result should have been, read this article to understand deeply how politics plays out. Dominic spends much of the article showing how it was the errors of IN that gave the opportunity for Leave to have a chance. In the US, the progressive movement is learning from the Tea Party how to fight Trump. Pro-EU Brits should learn from the euroskeptics. As Dominic says, the easiest person to lie to is yourself.