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Showing posts from December, 2016

What does Brexit mean?

What does Brexit mean? Brexit means  Red White and Blue  because, you know, the flag and that. Brexit means Cricket.  The EU is just not cricket, whilst Britain is and literally invented cricket. This should be a self explanatory reason for leaving it. The EU is more like petanque or Korfball. Brexit means British self determination. That's right no silly French or Belgian people and their soft smelly cheese will start telling you what shape your bananas will be anymore. In fact you will have no representation in European affairs at all! Who can be bothered with boring MEP elections anyway and the hideously undemocratic EU commission? No instead everything will be checked over by our wonderful House of life-term Lords and the hereditary monarch as it always has been. God save the Queen! Brexit means Exacting control over our borders. That's right! No more can immigrants come and exploit soft touch Britain by stealing our jobs and claiming benefits at the same time. No

The people have spoken. Does that mean they're necessarily right

Having worked in PR and  before I've seen a lot of liberties taken with statistics. "100 people say this." "10,000 people can't be wrong," etc. Suddenly when you add a number bigger than 50 that takes on a suddenly more statistical credibility, whether or not its right or not. I think this group forget 11,339,446 voted for Hitler, 17,410,742 voted for Brexit, 59,000,000 voted for Trump (ok I'm not saying Brexiters or Trump supporters would have voted for Hitler, well not a large majority of them anyway) which is significantly more than the average PR story sample but in these cases we're often met with a coverall excuse to implement the tactic. The people have spoken. Let's put this into context. Democratic engagement is huge within social media and online polls. Sure they are open to abuse if not managed properly but they are showing more and more of an idea of what people in a certain group actually think no matter how biased or socially un

The Apprentice: Proving grounds of the new elite?

We say we're tired of experts and of people who claim to be smarter than us. So why do we have so many commentators like this and why did we elect someone like this to the White House (I said claim remember). To put this in context let's look at a couple of examples. I was thinking about the weird connection between Katie Hopkins and Donald Trump, besides the anti-Muslim rhetoric. Both were in fact involved with the Apprentice a topic I've written about more than once on this blog. A program where cocksure blowhards are brutally put in their place by failing spectacularly at simple but convoluted business tasks, with Hopkins representing an example of a contestant and Trump in fact portraying the big boss. Why have we given people from the Apprentice (a show which openly mocks the big headed bravado of smarmy business idiots) such influential positions in society. Just because Trump got to smack down the ego-maniacal sales-people doesn't mean we should put him in ch

Is looking after our own the only priority in life?

One of the major criticisms of your government taking part in a major humanitarian effort is the common "we should be taking care of our own first" before worrying about the people with severe problems. I'm going to politely disagree with this idea and argue that in today's world that kind of closed-minded nationalistic (or tribal) attitude needs to give way to a more pan-global world view. Many countries want to retreat towards isolationism and damn the consequences of the outside world. America does it. The UK does it. Russia most definitely does it. Secessionist countries like Catalonia do it and overall it probably should stop. To argue that your needs and your families needs are more important than anyone else is a naturally programmed idea. We will all fall victim to this thinking in our lives but this doesn't mean we shouldn't aim to overcome it. The idea of nation states was really solidified in the 1800s. Old colonies were becoming new countri