EU referendum, brexit and the aftermath

All closed on Lewis for the Sabbath..

When are sainsburies et al ever closed for two days in a row?

Boxing Day this year, according to their announcement last week/this week (Morrisons also - announced a couple of weeks ago) - but that does include Christmas day. Not brexity though - "a thank you to staff" for efforts during lockdown

https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/sainsburys-announce-plans-two-day-24975727

Bound to cause a run on bog roll again...

Strange he voted Remain unless he thought Brexit would be bad for him at that time.

As long as he cares about you as a friend I guess?

He does, but he can't empathise. I'm the one person he knows who used to be rich and is now ill and can't work and lost everything. After the 2008 crash I was homeless and shoplifting for a spell, but I survived, unlike many, and I've raided my meagre pension to buy a 3rd hand Parlee and Lightweight wheels. So now I feel blessed. What a bike...it's a magic carpet. Thank god I never had children. I don't drink/smoke or go to restaurants/cinemas/anywhere, so all my money goes on the bike and the cat.

But along the way I noticed that the well off people I used to know are very ruthless. I suppose they mostly earn 300-750k a year. Some of them are in a higher bracket...multimillionaires. Maybe you don't get there unless you're ruthless? They are completely uncaring about so many things...refugees drowning in the Med, benefits claimants who are sanctioned and die of hunger...such a long, long list, which I'm sure the typical LFGSS bod is well aware of. In their mind I'm history, a non-person, down there with the Big Issue seller.

Anyway, I haven't seen him for a year, we're meeting soon, and I just hope we don't fall out over Brexit, all the untreated mental illness, landlords who reject benefit claimants, Tory rape of the NHS, the increase in NI...fuck, I hate this country sometimes.

If he benefits from Brexit, Brexit=good.

Political divides can generally be described exhaustively by reference to people's understanding of the concept 'good'. The most fundamental divide is that between those who think that 'good' means 'good for me/my close family/those I care about, etc.' and those who understand it as 'good per se'. The former are generally in the grip of lack of understanding, poor education, or serious personal problems, which are not the only causes leading to their false conception, but the most directly explanatory ones.

tl;dr--He's pitiable rather than contemptible.

I'm afraid it's much worse than that...this is the majority view of ambitious privately educated men in highly paid jobs. They've been taught to think like this and they don't have a higher than average incidence of personal problems. Boris Johnson is typical of this group.

He's clearly very damaged emotionally. Not that that excuses anything. There's also, obviously, generally more about people than meets the eye/superficial appreciation.

The main category is a lack of conceptual understanding, though. Some 'education' actively tries to drive conceptual understanding out of people.

You're not English, are you? Snobbery is the biggest factor. Snobbery doesn't prevent conceptual understanding, but it instructs you to ignore it and to stay behind the barriers between you and the ordinary people. The barriers are expensive - living in certain areas, private education for your children, business class on planes, private doctors, private hospitals, au pairs and maids and housekeepers to go to the supermarket for you. That whole package of barriers costs a fortune in London, and there is great peer pressure and parental pressure to make enough money to afford it all. If you can't afford it you share some of your existence with the common herd, which is unforgivable. It forces you to be ruthless and self-serving.

It's exactly the same mindset of the colonial administrators whose job was to exploit the natives throughout the British Empire. The same schools, the same families. Now they have to find other ways to get to the top of the pyramid.

What is good per se? I struggle to understand this sort of moralism.

What is conceptual understanding?

Yeah I read that, so two days in a row.

How bad is the run up to christmas and panic buying as shops maybe shut for a day now two.

Basically people start to become product.

There is no point trying to keep up with the sweeping moral generalisations.

Chapter 15, Part 2 of Vassily Grossman's Life and Fate is one of the best things I have ever read on the concept of the general good, and where it leads.

Russell's paradox should also be added to the GC reading list.

Oh good, we’re gonna revert to pounds and ounces, like I never was brought up on it before.

Human Resources, or Talent, or Workforce, please.

Separately, will foreign producers or their domestic importers be forced to convert the measures on their packaging into imperial units?

Oh good, we’re gonna revert to pounds and ounces, like I never was brought up on it before.

Fuck all will change apart from the odd market trader who will end up fed up with confused people asking about prices before long anyway. It's just an empty load of bollocks meant to distract idiots from realising what a shitshow Brexit is and pretend they've taken back some control.

Don't people have taps?

My taps are still on water, the water company haven't switched over to non-alcoholic beer yet.

revert to pounds and ounces

What the fuck?

They really are smoking some crack up there.

Save water
Drink beer!

Well you don't have as much as him but you feel blessed and like you have enough.

And you got out of homelessness so yay you!

I hope it won't trash your friendship.

Pretty good article on the shortage of labour in the UK that the pandemic and Brexit uncovered;

https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/17/empty-shelves-covid-brexit-britain-lorry-drivers

It’s so fucking stupid, I don’t think anyone use those measurements for over half a century, it look like it will appeal to the over 50’s.

I reckon it is purely designed to get Johnson's own ratings up with the members - he was only just hovering above the 'relegation zone' on the polling:

Christ! +65 for the unelected bureaucrat Lord Forest. The guy should be allowed to wipe he's own backside without supervision, let allow anything else.

and Truss, just because she's bent the country over to sign some proper shit trade deals, she made us look like a laughing stock.

Tory party members really are as thick as shit aren't they.