HiJenx

As most of you know, Britain has recently voted in a referendum to leave the European Union. We stayed up the latest we have yet in Arizona to find out the results, which were extremely surprising on one count and extremely predictable on another. We didn’t expect leave to win. The whole political establishment,  all the major political parties, had been pushing remain so strongly that I really though that would scare enough people into voting remain that it would go that way. I am pretty sure David Cameron, current prime minister and pro-remain campaigner, only allowed the vote at all because he thought they would vote remain with the government having the time to change the mood just enough to get the remain result he and his party wanted.

The thing that didn’t surprise us at all was it being very, very close. This seems to be a somewhat recent and horrible feature of modern politics. Just after an election, one half of the country is horribly angry and the other half things they are about to get what they want. ‘The country’ in this case is Britain, but it could have easily been the US or another country all together. Elections have been close and unsatisfying for the last few decades on both sides of the pond. I can’t remember the last landslide vote on anything.

Here is the video of our reaction to the vote as the results came in:

I am not normally one for giving extended political commentary, but waiting up for the results Chris and I both wondered if the parties had all got so good at capturing votes that it would always just go back and forth or if, perhaps, this was in part a design where the policies kept things split evenly. Perhaps there is some benefit to the establishment to have two halves that hate each other and think that the other side are just subhuman racists/fascists/nasty word of your choice. It’s not like half of any given country absolutely think one set of things and the other half think the exact opposite. The policies almost have to be shaped to divide to do it this neatly so many times and in so many places.

The news media really helps shape this divide as well. Chris and I consume the news far less than most of our peers, not because we want to be uninformed or don’t care about what’s happening in the world, but because most daily news is a flash in the pan to get really upset about rather than something major that will have long standing consequences. The main consequence of regular news consumption from where I’m sitting appears to be frequent bouts of anger or frenzied worry and/or constantly feeling that half your country are horrible people/a different species/idiots sent to take your guns/rights/money and possibly even destroy you and your way of life. We check in every few months and it usually turns out we’ve missed almost nothing. Obviously, this was actually big and something that will result in long term change, so it was worth tuning back in for this.

If you are interested in thinking about the value and impact of the news, here is a short video, strangely, put up by BBC News, but done by philosopher and writer Alain de Bottom, who is not a great fan of the news in its current state. He has some much longer Youtube videos on the topic, but here’s the short version: