This prevents the situation from getting out of hand before it completely descends into violence.
That's it. That's the sum total of what democracy gets us.
Analyzing critical ideas is not now, and wasn't ever part of the democratic process. Cicero was complaining about citizen's lack of analyzing critical ideas (except when directly hurting them in the wallet) in 70 BC. You can read about leaders from the French revolution lamenting the same, and even in cases where only limited self government exists, like today in Bahrain, you find most analysts complaining that the large majority of the people who have influence (usually local landowners) do not think critically at all.
What has happened is simple: the previous government was pro-Europe, couldn't get Europe to commit to basic concessions that would make British lives easier, and the imposed austerity made a lot of people's lives worse in a very concrete and visible way. So they were voted out.
Now you can argue that they were right, that it wasn't their fault that this happened, and I might even agree with you. But as the government, I do understand, this is not good enough.
Are you thinking of Greece here?
The "imposed austerity" was purely the choice of the Conservative government in the UK, and the "concessions" demanded seemed to be an end to freedom of movement, which was always a non-starter and wouldn't make the lives of Brits better in any discernable way.
What has happened is simple: there has long been a war inside the Conservative party between the pro-EU side and the anti-EU side. Cameron hoped that calling a referendum and deploying "project Fear" which had won the Scottish indyref would settle the question. Unfortunetely he'd misunderstood the Scottish result and Project Fear was hugely counter-productive.
This is why UKIP have ceased to exist in the council elections: they're now in control of the Conservative party.
(I mean, if I wanted to make a case against the EU, I'd do it on the basis of how Greece was treated - but even Greece didn't choose to leave, as they recognised that it would make them even worse off economically. UK anti-Europeanism seems to be built around a mixture of desire to deport foreigners, "bendy bananas" lies promulgated by Boris, and hatred of the metric system)
Greece had literally no choice. The ECB threatened to deliberately nuke Greece's economy if they left. Since the process of leaving would have required about 5 years of careful extrication to be done painlessly and the ECB and switching off emergency lending can be done in hours (they gave Greece a little taster of that), Greece was in no position to do really do anything except kowtow to ECB demands, which they did.
Meanwhile Varoufakis's contingency plans to wrest control back of the tax agency from the troika and issue an alternate currency as a first step to potentially leaving attracted Orwellian charges of high treason.
If the EU/ECB wanted to make it possible for Greece to leave without nuking their economy, they could have, which probably would have been more conducive to being paid back in the long (long) run. They went for their pound of flesh instead.
All of which makes me wonder what they have planned for the rest of Europe.
Do you mean anything other than "stopped lending additional funds" here?
> Orwellian charges of high treason
By whom? Where? When?
As I said, Greece's treatment could have been a lot better, but this doesn't apply to the UK. The UK is not a member of the Euro, is much larger than Greece, and potentially could have a much better position.
(Even more ludicrous is the idea of "Frexit". France have got literally everything they wanted out of Europe, including the Strasbourg gimmick)
That's the switch which they can use to turn everything off, but what is also prohibited is implementing policy to actually dig them out of this hole without needing additional lending assistance which you'd think the EU would be in favor of if being paid back were actually their goal.
>By whom? Where? When?
Pro-EU Greek judges, aided and abetted by opposition parties:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jul/27/greece-cris...
It's worth noting that not everybody in Greece is against Greece's harsh treatment - some are profiting from it, in fact.
Anyway, that was basically the only route out (issuance of a new parallel currency or tax anticipation notes) and it's telling that the ELA got switched off in the following few days and how furious many in the EU were that he actually had a plan to get out.
>As I said, Greece's treatment could have been a lot better, but this doesn't apply to the UK.
Greece's treatment is inhuman. The EU was directly responsible for triggering a humanitarian crisis not even to get their money back (that debt is clearly a lost cause since 2011), but simply to inflict punishment for punishment's sake.
No, it doesn't apply to the UK. There are a lot of parallels though, mostly because the Tories and Labour's Blairites share a similar ideology to the ideologues at the ECB.
Greece's treatment demonstrates the depths the EU appears willing to sink to, however. Past behavior is indicative of future behavior.
And that generally what separates 'democratizing' nations from 'democracies' is that one simply has democratic institutions such as voting, and the other has a culture of democratic decision making, civil discourse etc etc to go with it. Iraq may have elections and be able to kick out its leaders but it sure isn't a democracy in the same way Britain and the United States are.
Now its not a 'the people are stupid' argument that I'm making - there have been people throughout history who have contended that we take a too simplistic view of affairs. Fine, blah, I'm sure they do, and I'm happy to accept there are people who don't reason critically on both sides and there's no reason to think one side has a monopoly on those.
What I'm saying is that we can't fairly determine the information that is being seeded to all parties. It's the equivalent of someone turning up to lots of Tocqueville's town hall meetings and distributing pamphlets biased to one side to people who look like they're from a certain socioeconomic background as they walk in.
There is something that happened in Britain in the last five years that merits explanation. A population which according to Eurobarometer 2010 data, only five years ago was 45% Pro-EU and 33% anti voted 52% to 48% to Leave when the government of the day, international instutitions, and all major political parties were arguing that we should stay. This, in Britain, a country not generally known for upending its whole political system on a whim.
Now you can pin the explanation for that on whatever you want (and I happen to think your austerity theory has something in it), but it's reasonable to think in a democracy that we should be able to have a discussion (or at least know about) the factors that swayed people.
Looking at the Eurobarometer autumn 2010 report at http://ec.europa.eu/commfrontoffice/publicopinion/archives/e... on page 47 (of the report, not the PDF) we have the UK listed polling 39% "negative or very negative", 38% neutral, and 19% "positive or very positive" in terms of their general perception of the EU.
And on page 36 of the same report, it's claimed that the UK was polling at 27% "we benefit from the EU", 60% "we don't benefit from the EU" and 13% "don't know".
Page 39 lists the UK (without specific numbers) in the list of countries where a majority believes that their "national interests are not properly taken into account".
So at first glance it seems to me that in autum 2010 the population of the UK wasn't all that sweet on the EU as a concept at all. I'd love to know what question the "45% Pro-EU and 33% anti" was a response to; I haven't found it in that PDF so far. The only mention of "45%" in reference to the UK I see is on page 49, where 45% of UK respondents think the EU is "democratic" (the only EU country with less than 50%!).
Granted elected officials often listen to side channels, but they care about what will influence the election not what most people actually want aka 'the will of the people'.
Or even "you are doing a terrible job, but that other person would be worse".
Why do you think anyone should be in the position of "determining" the information that is being seeded? Fight disagreeable speech with agreeable speech, amirite, but don't yearn for a boss to tell which is which.
Maybe the more exact word for what I mean is "discern" rather than determine, though determine works fine too ("Officials are working to determine the cause of a bus crash").
Anyhoo, I don't yearn for such an arbiter.
This is not what is being said - I will quote the parent commenter:
"Here it seems that an influence / behaviour change campaign could be waged relatively cheaply against a relatively small number of people, exist completely outside the normal rules for fact checking or veracity, and the majority of the population would have no idea about it."
This is talking about being "bubbled", and how different collections of people are seeing completely different things, and because both sides don't know what the other is looking at, they become alienated from each other.
Furthermore, there is another problem - while a singular lie can be countered, a thousand different lies told to a thousand different communities is much harder to defend against.
This is factually incorrect. The EU had nothing to do with the crash of 2008 which prompted pro-cyclical austerity, the EU has given the UK opt-outs on many important policies, the concessions demanded (limits on freedom of movement) are not linked to economic benefits for the U.K., and the EU had nothing to do with conservative policies of austerity.
What has happened is not simple, and there is no one clear cause of the vote to leave.
Britain has always had a large number of concessions with respect to their EU membership. They have a large rebate compared to other countries with a similar economy and effectively don't have many more obligations than Norway does, plus they sit in the European Parliament.
other countries then have a rebate on the rebate...
norway chooses to stay out, so is not a fair comparison
I'm curious what "basic concessions" the parent poster had in mind, beyond those that the UK could already enjoy. Certainly the end of free movement of people (which both Norway and Switzerland have to obey) doesn't count as a basic concession.
Also, in some cases the Eastern countries also put restrictions on workers from the West.
Not to nitpick, but that term dates back to 12th century England.
How did the EU impose austerity on the UK?
"The fiscal discipline is ensured by the SGP by requiring each Member State, to implement a fiscal policy aiming for the country to stay within the limits on government deficit (3% of GDP) and debt (60% of GDP); and in case of having a debt level above 60% it should each year decline with a satisfactory pace towards a level below"
"The only EU member state being exempted to comply with this MTO procedure is the UK, as it per a protocol to the EU treaty is exempted from complying with the SGP. In other words, while all other member states are obliged nationally to select at MTO respecting their calculated Minimum MTO, the calculated Minimum MTO for the UK is only presented for advice, with no obligation for it to set a compliant national MTO in structural terms."
The Stability and Growth Pact would be hard to enforce in the UK, not least because Germany didn't even follow it itself.
I think the UK is civically engaged and that the brexit outcome actually reflected this despite the sour grapes in London... and at the Guardian.
1) Audience members are self-selecting.
2) Audience members are then selected from the group that self-selected to represent a cross-section of the population.
3) Not all audience members get to ask their question, they are selected by the host.
The problem with the second stage is that there is a person, called an "audience producer", who selects people. When that person reposts the social media output of Britain First, an extremely far right political organisation, it questions whether they may have a political bias that may affect the sampling [0].
Watching Question Time could quite easily convince you that you are in a majority or a minority and you could be wrong. Treating Question Time as any kind of meaningful measure of public opinion is a form of self delusion, albeit one that's hard to shake off even if you know it. The only thing a person speaking on Question Time could tell you is that there exists a person with those views, and even that might not be true. Same goes for any other audience panel.
[0] https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourbeeb/tim-holmes/is-question...
It doesn't "skew left" in any meaningful sense. There's almost always a UKIP member on the panel, regardless of how badly they do in the elections. There's always people banging on about how immigrants have ruined the country. Participants shout over one another, especially over women.
And it's not "sour grapes", it's people who wonder if they or their family members are going to be deported, or whether their business is going to continue to exist. Many people in the scientific community have already had their work disrupted due to uncertainty over funding and pan-European collaboration.
http://www.thecanary.co/2016/12/05/fresh-scandal-erupts-bbc-...
My argument is that we are potentially no longer able to determine the arguments that are being used to influence people, which is significant when there has been a marked turn away from the EU in public opinion over the last five years.
Does it not bother you that David Cameron's first press officer was Murdoch-stooge Andy Coulson, who had already resigned as Editor as News of the World, and who was subsequently imprisoned for his role in phone hacking?
We're talking about someone who would attempt to hack the phone of anyone with a public profile - including politicians - and who was then employed to run the official government press office.
Meanwhile Rupert Murdoch's attitude to Europe is public knowledge:
https://www.indy100.com/article/this-terrifying-rupert-murdo...
So. It's not shadowy at all. It's not mysterious. No joining of dots is needed.
It's completely overt and out in the open. And it should never have been allowed this level of influence over British politics without being challenged.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/david-camerons-ex-staff...
How does this conspiracy theory even work? That Cameron's staff were secretly trying to lose whilst they were out campaigning to win? Because of an ex-employer?
That's not just illogical, it's completely incoherent. Think about what you're trying to argue there for a moment.
And that quote has always just been a standard issue made up internet quote. Murdoch was literally in the Guardian letter pages denying he ever said such a thing. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/dec/19/rupert-murdoch...
And why would he say it? "When I go into Downing Street they do as I say" would be a bizarre utterance from a newspaper editor.
My preference is strongly however to attempt to understand (and have visibility over) the factors that are influencing people rather than retreat behind a veil of 'we can't possibly understand it' ignorance.
I would hope that a branding specialist would have no trouble understanding the Brexit result. It doesn't require deep analysis. Remain mounted a campaign that was defeatist and based on fear: "ok, our attempt to negotiate resulted in nothing at all, but we must still remain and obey Brussels because if we don't our friends and allies will destroy our economy."
As a logical consequence, they were effectively arguing that there was no future for British democracy, because the trend over time has always been for the EU to take more powers out of the hands of democratic local government and take it for itself.
That's a terrible brand. Leave campaigned on a better future with "take back control" as their byline.
You don't need conspiracy theories about corporations with mind-control machines to explain what happened next.
I think this alone serves to demonstrate 1) your assertion about what caused the Brexit vote is a gross oversimplification 2) Why many people still won't accept the result.
No it's not. Can you show that with any sort of data at all? Or do you define "a lot" as simply "more than a few"?
The Remain obsession with a single bus is really sad. There's no evidence that this was a major factor in the vote. Immigration and sovereignty were the top two issues as shown by repeated polls, vox pops, the views of campaigners themselves, etc.
It's an especially weak point to bring up because it appears to have been wrong in the wrong direction: nobody campaigning for the EU mentioned an £80 billion exit fee, and if that had been known about or incorporated, the true cost of membership would have been much higher, perhaps more like £500 million a week.
Additionally there were lots of lies told by the Remain campaign that were far more impactful and serious. For example, Cameron saying he'd stay on to negotiate with the EU in the case of an out vote (despite having failed to achieve anything before), which turned out to be a colossal lie. And a very important one because it made Osborne's threat of a "punishment budget" credible. Yet he resigned immediately, clearly he didn't decide that on the spot, he knew he wouldn't continue if he lost the vote.
If that was true then Cambridge Analytica would not make any money. The fact that Cambridge, and facebook, make money, and a ton of it, can make you relatively certain that they can influence people.
That said, plenty of firms make money despite not actually doing as they purport to do. Perhaps Cambridge Analytica and Facebook and the like simply have yet to be exposed as charlatans.
Nobody upthread has disagreed with you on that. So why are you arguing?
Cambridge Analytica might just make money by convincing fools that they have some secret insight or power, when they actually don't. Psychics and mediums have in the past made a ton of money, as did quack doctors. Coca-Cola started out as a quack cure-all and it still makes a ton of money today.
The basic narrative you're pursuing here is one that has cropped up a lot in the past 18 months: voters are, by and large, easily manipulated putty who don't have real reasons or analysis behind their decisions. Instead they simply do whatever shadowy Russian conspirators make them do through subtle manipulation of Facebook, the press, or whatever.
Simple, obvious explanations for what's happening in politics are staring us all straight in the face. Occam's Razor guys ... there is no need to go full chemtrails and pin responsibility on some invisible evidence-free conspiracy of random firms, people and countries. Just assume voters are on average, of average intelligence, and thus probably have reasonably straightforward reasons for doing what they do.
I tend to believe the opposite (purely anecdotally). Most people are apathetic when it comes to politics. We've just had local elections in the UK (seats for local councils and regional mayors). The turnout (i.e. the proportion of the population who turned up to vote) ranged from 21% to around the 30% mark for most regions in England. Turnout was higher in Scotland.
In the UK we have a lot of political discussion on TV, radio and in our highly partisan national press, but that doesn't mean the public are well-informed or particularly interested in politics. It doesn't help that many of our national newspapers deliberately seek to mislead or sway readers either. For example, when Theresa May announced a snap election, the headline in the Daily Mail wasn't 'May announces snap election', it was 'Crush the saboteurs' (opponents of Brexit).
While in London it may be more equal (including the famous Remain voter who asked who was going to make all the sandwiches in Pret), in somewhere like Grimsby, Scunthorpe, Lincoln, absolutely.
Not to mention that the EU wasn't ever a great success with many states. EU participation was voted down by several countries populations even when the times and economies were better.
From Denmark's opt-outs to Norway voting against participation in the EU (time and again), to the rejection of the European Constitution in referendums, to Ireland, etc. Add lots of protesting, and tons of criticism (including from Guardian, who know seems to have forgotten all about it) of the bureaucratic and un-democratic way decisions were taken in Brussels.
And considering that the explicitly stated concern of the pioneers of the European community project was to corner Germany and not let it attempt to dominate Europe again, that the EU ended up as a playground for German ambitions, where there's a de facto power center (10,000ft gorilla) that trumps democratic processes, doesn't speak well to the success of the original plan.
It's not like it's some great success, and the idea of abandoning it is batshit crazy. It's not even like EU has a vision for the future, or any answer to the challenges (of e.g. automation, immigration, terrorism, the digital age, etc).
Lately I've been wondering what the percentage of paid shills on /r/the_donald might actually be. Considering how cheap it probably is, it could be extremely high. The thing is, unless I specifically filter out the subreddit, it regularly shows up in my 'all' feed, so it strikes me as an extremely cheap way have a far and wide reach.
Care to provide your source for this?
“The 5 A DAY programme was launched in March 2003 as part of the health promotion activity by the Department of Health to encourage people to eat at least 5 portions of a variety of fruit and vegetables a day.”
This was a public health awareness campaign, and given the huge number of TV (and other) adverts they had, I'm surprised if people didn't see it as such.
I wouldn't call the road or railway safety campaigns 'marketing', but they're also well-run campaigns with lots of visibility and sometimes memorable phrases.
"the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating,delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large." [1]
Having worked with the people who run such campaigns they would absolutely describe themselves as marketing practitioners, many move between public and private sector during the course of their career and the skillset and techniques for doing both are completely fungible. Worth remembering also that public health campaigns are paid for with public money.
Yes. An agenda.
Personally, and I have held this opinion for more than 2 decades now, is that I don't see any practical difference between marketing campaigns and political propaganda. They are both trying to influence an audience for their own benefit, and are constantly trying to sell something.
Services. Check. Products. Check. Ideas. Check. A way of life. Check.
An agenda? Check.
(EDIT: make quoted text appear in italics)
For example, I wouldn't say this was political, they have nothing to sell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QO5pI5pmYE4 (railway safety)
The campaign that started the "5 a day" thing was called Change 4 Life, and seems closer to education and information than propaganda: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb0fLYdPEPM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change4Life
http://www.nhs.uk/Change4Life/supporter-resources/downloads/...
There isn't really any better option. The basic problem is that political science isn't a science. It's cargo cult science. (What passes for "analysis" among the wonktitude drives the engineer in me bonkers). On an issue like Brexit, there is nobody who can predict with anything approaching scientific certainty what the outcomes of the two choices will be. You can dress up your choice however you like, referencing reports of this or that expert (who all have conflicting opinions), but at the end of the day is imagine most Remain voting was also done based on a gut-feeling commitment to Pan-Europism.
Alas for the chance to get a good drunk out of the whole rigamarole, at least. Such things would be considered shocking, perhaps career-ending, for today's politicians, but in a country that never quite fell out of love with the temperance movement, how could it be otherwise?
Who do you mean by "we"? I'm pretty sure I still can analyze arguments.
OTOH, that's what I'd say if I lost the ability too. Oh noes. We are all doomed now.
> exist completely outside the normal rules for fact checking or veracity
Could I get a copy of these rules? Or, even better, could somehow major media outlets each get a copy? Because I am under distinct impression that most of them somehow missed the memo about these rules existing.
Back in the days of network TV, you might not agree with everything that was being said, but you could at least see the arguments that were being used to convince others.
Even the early so-called behaviour change campaigns, such as 'Five a Day' (a marketing campaign that most didn't realize was a marketing campaign that has long since been accepted as a piece of general health advice) were quite benign.
Here it seems that an influence / behaviour change campaign could be waged relatively cheaply against a relatively small number of people, exist completely outside the normal rules for fact checking or veracity, and the majority of the population would have no idea about it.
I'm not sure I agree with the thesis of the piece - that Cambridge Analytica played even a primary role in Brexit happening (I think it was always pretty likely, due to UK tabloids having campaigned for around 20 years on the issue, lack of organization in the Remain campaign, Corbyn failure to engage working class voters etc, hell even a latent feeling that the EU maybe isn't that great after all), but the techniques for doing this will only become more sophisticated and I wouldn't be surprised to see them become a common feature of our democracy.