h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

They'd better if they want to speak tooth to power.

"You appear to have conceded my point."

Do not speak for me. I was never arguing about the age or mortality of Leave or Remain voters and you know it.




"Also, I didn't say 'higher degree = more intelligent'."

Oh?


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"Fact: 70% of voters whose educational attainment is only GCSE or lower voted Leave [...] Fact: 68% of voters with a university degree voted Remain in the EU"

[...]

"Summary: although Leave had a majority in 2016, the group of people voting Leave was disproportionately old and stupid."

[...]

"This isn't even factoring in the fact that the dumb ones die younger because they smoke, drink to excess, get obese etc., that winnows their numbers early, and it's the dumb ones that were voting Leave."


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Is there some other way you expected people to interpret these words?



"Every PhD holder I know (and I know a lot) admits that IN GENERAL getting one is mainly about hard work and choice of career path, rather than, per se, being brighter than a holder of a Bachelor's or Master's."

Yet, right up there, you clearly hold the opinion that having a degree means you're more intelligent than someone who doesn't.




"It's measuring that more than it's measuring your intelligence."

"I'd argue by doing that, it's properly measuring your intelligence."


And here you do again.



"But then we get into a debate about what intelligence is, and we all know where that got us on this site seventeen years ago, right?"

Can't say as I do, since I've had way more important things to worry about in that time than remembering everything I was arguing with you about almost two decades ago.

Besides, it's been my observation that the only way you're able to argue anything is by insulting and belittling anyone who disagrees with you. You're always right and anybody who thinks otherwise is foolish, dumb, or ignorant with no room for compromise or alternate points of view. Why would I bother remembering that? It isn't convincing to anyone.

AND, unlike you, I would not necessarily expect someone to hold the exact same opinion on any matter that they had ALMOST TWENTY YEARS AGO!

(Whatever it was.)




"I am sure that you can provide a substantive opinion with your proven great intellect."

"Are you paying ANY attention at all? Because this seems a deeply stupid question, in the context of this thread. You *know* I can't provide a substantive opinion."

Can't even tell when someone's using your own methods to show how ridiculous you sound. So sad.




"The dull fact of the matter is that IN GENERAL, formal educational attainment is a reliable guide to general intelligence. It better be, otherwise what's the point?"


Well, personally, I always thought it was about teaching people things.

If all it was about was measuring someone's intelligence what would be the point of that? There are much faster, much more reliable ways of doing so.

/sigh/

I did not "speak for you". I described how your argument appeared to me. Specifically, the following:
- "We actually agree on this matter, for the most part"
- "Now I see your point,"
- "To be sure, there is a certain threshold of intelligence you have to have..."

You appeared not to be engaging with the main point, merely pleading that there are occasional exceptions - something I don't dispute.

"I was never arguing about the [the entire point of this thread] and you know it"

Well, yeah.

"Is there some other way you expected people to interpret these words?"

Yes. I observed the fact of strong correlation between educational achievement and intelligence. I did not propose strict identity. I apologise for expressing that in an abbreviated form (i.e. using the "=" symbol) which you did not understand. I hope this goes some way to clarifying.

"you clearly hold the opinion that having a degree means you're more intelligent than someone who doesn't."

See above.

"Can't say as I do, since I've had way more important things to worry about in that time than remembering everything I was arguing with you about almost two decades ago"

I forgive your failure. That was a joke about an argument that involved neither of us, as it happens. I won't dissect that particular frog.

"personally, I always thought it was about teaching people things"

Oh dear. Reading comprehension fail. What is the "it" you are referring to there?

Look again. I said: "formal educational attainment is a reliable guide to general intelligence".

Your response only makes sense if what I said was this: "formal education is a reliable guide to general intelligence".

I leave it to you, and anyone else bothering to read this, to spot the difference, and try to understand the difference it makes.

Any way to look at the Leave/Remain issue would be to examine regional differences. Were there places where the Leave vote was particularly strong? If so, maybe someone could poll them to see if the people are still in favor of leaving. You might find that in those places, young and old and educated and not-quite-so-educated are not all that far apart. Then again, I might be wrong, but I'd rather know if I'm wrong so I can move on to look for other perspectives.

Sorry, I meant "Another" rather than "Any"

"Were there places where the Leave vote was particularly strong?"

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-36616028

Broadly: England. More narrowly: shitholes. Disproportionately the rundown, poor, rural areas and small towns. The areas most likely to be in receipt of EU development grants and people most likely to be most catastrophically badly affected by Brexit. I hope.

Big cities tended Remain:

Bristol was 62% Remain,
Manchester 60%
Liverpool 58%
Newcastle 51%
Leeds 50.3%

Birmingham was VERY close at 49.6% remain.

Remain won in Scotland and Norn Irn, London and unsurprisingly Gibraltar. Wales was Leave but it was narrow.

It's cold comfort that, in general, the people who voted Remain will most likely be OK, whereas those who voted Leave will suffer.

Thanks for the info.

Today's "Wall Street Journal" says that if the May government is turned out of office, there might be a second referendum.

I hope that that happens. It's just that I'm a foreigner and can do nothing to affect things either way.

Many of the people who live in "shitholes" stay there because they don't see a way out.

So, the same demographic divide we see here between more conservative rural areas and more liberal urban areas. You should look at the snaky, salamandery districts in Houstin and Austin, Texas. Republicans cracked every district in very liberal Austin by having rural districts squeeze their pseudopodia into downtown Austin. Houston did so but also packed only a couple of liberal districts combining several ethnic and collegiate neighborhoods.

From what I can read, that practice of "gerrymandering" is well used by both sides of the US coin. Some degree of that seems to happen here in Canada as well.

But there are a few states where nonpartisan committees can draw sensible districts that aren't engineered for the benefit for one party or the other. I wish this was more common.

"Leave voters, as a mass, are not like Remain voters, as a mass.

Case one risks riots, large scale civil disturbance, and more incidents like what happened to Jo Cox.

Case two risks some sternly worded letters to the Guardian and some loud tutting."


This is a very good point in general although students have been quite fond of rioting in recent years when their free stuff was taken away. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_Kingdom_student_protests

I think 'free stuff' is slightly hyperbolic. The theory behind education being subsidised out of general taxation is that graduates eventually have better paid jobs and consequently pay more tax (apart from the possibility that a better educated population benefits the economy generally). Whether this actually works or not is a different debate.

"Many of the people who live in "shitholes" stay there because they don't see a way out"

I'm not criticising them for that. Market forces mean it's expensive and difficult to move to more prosperous places.

What I'm criticising them for is not realising, and in a lot of cases not caring, that their lives in these shitholes would be worse without the EU. In the immediate aftermath of the referendum I remember an excellent news report from some backwater town - might have been in North Wales. It was heavily Leave voting, and the reporter did some vox pops around the town. The three or four yokels were vocally anti-EU. The reporter then pointed out that numerous local amenities had been paid for by EU grants, and that the town was by far a net beneficiary of being in the EU.

AND IT MADE NO DIFFERENCE. He might as well have been speaking Japanese. It wasn't that they didn't care. They didn't UNDERSTAND. A couple basically said that it would be fine because the grants would keep coming in. They were so inured to the process of being fed that they simply couldn't process the idea that they'd just amputated the hand doing the feeding.

That's what you're up against in a democracy where every adult gets a vote, and particularly in a referendum. You're at the mercy of people who can't be trusted to sit the right way on a toilet.

I think it's a lot more complicated than that. People have been lied to for years and years about the European Union by elements of the media which deliberately and mendaciously peddled myths and outright lies, and that's even before the referendum campaign started.

There's little point in re-documenting the lies and false assurances and cake-and-eat-its and unicorns peddled by the leave campaign. Yes, the EU funds work in poorer areas, but out of the EU we'd have 350million a week, so we could keep up those programmes and more and fund the NHS. We'd get 40 trade deals signed before Brexit, they said, the EU needs us more than we need them, they said, easiest trade deal ever, they said. Turkey's joining the EU, they said.

If decent, non-racist leave voters are guilty of anything, it's gullibity and naiveity rather than stupidity. It's believing the wrong people. If everything the Leave campaign said was true, I might have been tempted to vote leave if I was motivated only by considerations of narrow national interest.

Others are to blame too. The Remain campaign for pathetic complacency, the rest of the media for failing to explain the issues and turn the whole thing in to a Cameron v Johnson beauty contest. Much as we might wish it, not everyone in this country is well informed, well educated, or even particularly clever.

So no - and speaking as a former resident of at least one post-industrial "sh1thole" - I'll take no pleasure in the lives of some of the worst off getting even worse, nor do I think they deserve it. Nor do I think it won't affect the rest of us.

I agree that this was not an appropriate choice for a referendum. A referendum has to represent a clear choice between two options... what we had was a choice between the status quo and... Bob only knows what.

"If decent, non-racist leave voters are guilty of anything, it's gullibity and naiveity rather than stupidity. It's believing the wrong people."

Show me a decent, non-racist Leave voter. I'll show you a unicorn. Take a look at what I said before the referendum:

"I don't know whether Leave or Remain would be a better vote.
If they are honest, neither does anyone else. So since the facts can't help, I'm going to choose my company.

Remain has every living Prime Minister, the Labour Party, the majority of Tories who aren't racist swivel-eyed loons, the Lib Dems (remember them?), Barack Obama, Kofi Annan, the G7, Unite the Union, Asda, M&S, Mars, Tim Berners-Lee, Jeremy Clarkson (yes, I checked...), Bob Geldof, JK Rowling, Gary Kasparov, Ian McKellen, basically all of the NHS, the Royal Society, Peter Higgs (the man with the boson) and Paloma Faith.

Leave has got... the BNP, UKIP, "Respect" (i.e. George Galloway), Duncan Bannatyne, Rupert Murdoch, Theo Paphitis, Michael Gove and Boris Johnson and the bits of the Tories are ARE swivel-eyed racist loons (and ten Labour rebels), Marine LePen (French National Front leader), Geert Wilders (Dutch "Freedom Party" leader), Donald Trump, Aspall Cider, Go Ape, Wetherspoons, David Icke, Julian Assange, Keith Chegwin, Katie Hopkins, Arthur Scargill, The Express, the Mail and the Sunday Sport. "

Now: absent any more up to date information if you can't work out for yourself which out of those two groups are "the wrong people", gullible and naive are the starting point for describing you, and "stupid" is only about halfway there.

Leave voters are bleating "we didn't know what we were voting for, but it wasn't this rubbish deal". My counter is this: you DID know what you were voting for. You were voting for Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and Michael Gove. And you know what? You GOT it. Now fscking choke on it.

"Show me a decent, non-racist Leave voter. I'll show you a unicorn."

I have a hard time believing that a non-unicorn proportion of the 52% of those who voted in the referendum are racists, or voted primarly for racist reasons. Of course, racism/prejudice/xenophobia/nationalism is a spectrum, but even so.

True enough, racism is a spectrum, and to be clear I'm not saying (or even implying) that I think all Leave voters are "I don't like darkies", send 'em back Nazis. (Not all Leave voters are Nazis. All Nazis are Leave voters. Discuss.)

What I am saying is, ALL Leave voters looked at a binary choice, and knew in advance which option ALL the Nazis were choosing, and chose that one.

Sure, they bleat about having their own reasons blah blah sovereignty, blah blah legitimate concerns about levels of immigration and labour exploitation, blah blah the NHS. And as I said, it was not possible to tell, in advance, which option would, in the long or short run, be economically better for Britain. It absolutely WAS possible to tell who was supporting which side. And if, in any election, you find yourself on the same side as Geert Wilders, Marine Le Pen, Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, you don't get to describe yourself as "decent" to me without an argument.

Thanks for reminding me that Donald Trump favored the Leave option. That's one more reason to disagree with him.

"Swivel-eyed loons" is a great expression. Not that I want to insult actual loons .

An interesting question for Trump and Leave voters who arguably are not ALL racists, is why are actual racists so attracted to their causes?

Waits for answer