We must sometimes face cold hard facts. I canb give you a list of cold hard facts we need to face. Climate change. Nuclear and Coal has no future. We as a human civilisation will have to stop industrial and largescale animal farming agriculture. All cars will be automated in 10 years. We will lose more than half existing jobs in the next 15 years. Plastic waste is really really bad and killing nature. Saudi Arabia is the biggest exporter of oil, and is using a lot of that money to fund terrorism. Trump is probably destroying the US as it exists today and we’ll soon see civil war. The Star Wars prequels and sequels are a cinematic abomination.
I know, it’s really horrible to tell this news to someone’s face, especially someone in total denial. These people will do whatever they can to ignore what you said and if you insist they’ll become furious.
One such non-negotiable topic is Brexit.
I recently saw a live presentation by Joris van Luyendijk, and I absolutely love the guy. When he presented angry white voters I laughed rather loud in the audience and he misread that and said “you hear that laughter? that’s what these white voters hate.” And of course he was right. A lot of people in the UK are furious with these arrogant uppity European elitists, and their damn EU rules, and their petty EU bureaucracy. Brussels! Ze Germans! And the French!
A lot of people in England are in a psychotic irrational rage and they can’t think clearly. It’s like a really bad marriage that both parties want to end at any cost, and they’ll rather burn down the house to make sure neither other gets half its resale value.
You can’t argue facts with these peope. You can’t outright tell muricans that america is a mess. You can’t tell a trucker in his face that his job is gone in a few years and he’ll have to go on welfare almost certainly. You can’t tell farmers that their industry is deeply immoral and destructive to the environment, and MUST stop growing immediately. You can’t tell someone in a car that for every euro he spends on gas about 10% goes of that euro is rerouted by Saudi Wahabbists to fund lunatics that want to kill every westerner. You can’t tell politicians in the US that climate change will competelt annihilate the american modern western way of life in less than 2 decades, if we do nothing, and reduce in wealth by about half if we take all the required actions to mitigate climate change. The list of things people are in denial about is virtually endless.
So, facts, Brexit is gearing up to become one of the worst catastrophy’s in the history of Europe. People will literally starve, cities will burn, there will be mass protests, politicians will be lynched, people will die because of lack of access to medication, people in england will have serious vitamin deficiency because of lack of fresh foods in a year, millions of jobs will be lost.
I happen to have a friend in the UK. She’s transgender so her outlook on career, schooling, social life, dignified sexual gratification, meaning, etc. is pretty precarious to begin with. She’s very young and unspeakably stressed out to begin with. Her mom is really difficult about it and apparently understands very little about everything. Clear I am worried about her, and I am pretty certain I have reason to be. If I mention to her it is looking pretty bad, she clearly is in denial. She asks me for “sources” on what I am talking about. Most lurid video I found describing the sheer horrific magnitude of what awaits is is this one.
We in the western world have become basically a bunch of spoiled assholes, myself included. The modern world IS horribly fragile and things can go horribly wrong, and in some cases this process is clearly already underway. Dmitry Orlov did some amazing presentations about this years ago, and instead of doing something about it, people are hoarding guns these days in an orgy of misantropy. Everyone hates everyone else, everyone blames anyone but themselves. The end for some of these systems will be horrifying.
The problem is the UK is walking distance away. If things go totally south we’ll get to hear the screams of despair across the north sea. We in the EU can pretty much throw up our hands and say (as Joris Luyendijk seems to be doing, “they can go fuck themselves, good riddance”) and laugh at the hilarious misfortune those stupid english idiots.
But I say we should start making some contingency plans, at the level of the collapse of the soviet union, to help the poor people in the soon former UK. Things will get real bad. They are likely to need food aid, medication, disaster relief, maybe lots of other things. We may in the EU start thinking about mass migration and refugee streams from the UK. Clearly most won’t be able to get in to the EU – we simply have no place to house, clothe, feed and care for a few million utterly angry, shellshocked chavvy brits – most of them most likely to be seething with resentment.
But I do call on my politicians to start making plans for worst case scenarios. Literally – malnourished people, people traumatized by months of civil collapse, crime, riots, institutional racism and state repression. Sure, we can endlessly go laugh about how stupid these brits are, but we have to accept that in this day and age pretty much everyone is suspectible to mass campaigns of lying, media manipulation, fake news and russian interference. The poor simpleton brits just have a collective national psychosis, and these poor people will need help soon. Let’s get ready to give it to them.
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