The Pound has fallen against the US dollar and the Euro since the EU referendum and inflation in the UK is on the rise. This isn’t good inflation, it isn’t being fueled by increasing wages but by increasing prices due to the weak Pound.
Uh, I was going to partially agree with you because I thought that the Pound had recovered after the plunge seen at the Brexit result. **I was wrong on that.
**
It did not recover to the previous levels.
So besides that, what I was going to point out was that Brexithas not taken place in its final form 
(youtube clip making fun of Dragon Ball forms), but clearly the unrest and worries are still there, not causing a disaster, but a malaise. It is like Britain shooting itself in a toe and not doing much for a likely infection that could come. So Britain is still ok at what it can do, but others still realize how foolish that action was and how better the situation for England too it would be if the choice had been another.
I am not “pro-Brexit” but otherwise what he (or she) said.
Brexit has not even happened yet.
It is FAR too soon to decide if this was a good or bad choice.
I will say that Scotland, which voted against Brexit, has suggested they want another go at independence. It was close enough last time that this may be enough to tip the balance so we may see GB broken up over this. I guess whether that is a good or bad thing is also open to debate but for my part I’d hate to see it happen.
I’d actually think that Northern Ireland would be more likely to leave and unify with the Republic of Ireland. With low oil prices, and Spain not likely to admit an independent Scotland into the EU, I don’t think Scotland will be voting for independence anytime soon.
Not till they reconcile the Catholic/Protestant thing. I know they have mellowed over it the past 20 years but I am not sure they can get to merger like this.
To be fair I really do not keep up on this so perhaps everything is copacetic and this could happen. If someone knows how it all works there would love to hear from them.
What we do know is Scotland very recently had an independence vote and while it failed it was reasonably close. Close enough that Brexit could be the difference and people in Scotland (as shown in my cite in my previous post) are seriously considering another try at it.
IMHO the mentioned opposition of admitting Scotland into the EU by Spain is mostly posturing.
Okay, OP, I have a few suggestions for you to ponder.
- your frustration with doomsayers is entirely understandable, and common. But you should not let your frustration with them, cause you to make the mistake of closing your own mind.
There is an old folktale, of the Little Boy Who Cried Wolf. it’s a favorite of mine, for reasons other than what most people take from it. You probably know it in general: a boy is told to guard the entire towns’ herd of sheep. He gets bored, or feels impish, so after a while he sounds the alarm that means that wolves are attacking. The entire town comes to his aid, and to protect their sheep, only to find the boy laughing at the “joke” he pulled. This scenario repeats a few times, and then one day the boy sounds the alarm because the wolves really ARE attacking, but no one comes, because the came to be disgusted by his doomsaying ways. So all of the towns sheep are lost, along with the boy himself.
Now. What MOST people are told to derive from that morality tale, is that they shouldn’t “cry wolf” unless it’s true. But the reason it’s among my favorites, is because of the OTHER big lesson it teaches, which most modern people fail to note. That because dangers DO ACTUALLY EXIST, everyone should ALWAYS respond to those who “cry wolf,” at least to see if there is any validity to the call.
Remember: at the end of the folk tale, those “wise” people who learned to ignore the boy’s cries, lost all their sheep, and the town fell apart financially because of how “wise” they were.
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aside from that, it’s important to recognize some common, albeit frustrating human behavior. In particular, when large groups of people (or individuals) are warned of an impending danger too formally and gently, they will very often ignore the warning, no matter how dire it is. But if you shout and scream at them, even if they get angry at you for upsetting them, they will at least LOOK at the problem. That is WHY doomsayers phrase things as they do.
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because of the above, and because it has to do with selling news (and advertising revenue), doomsaying will always be the bread and butter of world events reporting. Same thing for scandals. It’s well established that most people wont pay that much attention to the news (or watch through the commercials) unless you tell it to them in a way that makes it seem either that we are all about to die, OR that they have a chance to see attractive naked people. It’s still not considered proper to explain politics, finance and the dangers of pollution while showing images of nude famous people, hence the doomsaying industry.
Try to have patience, and just LOOK at what does and doesn’t happen. You will find if you do pay attention, that even when the wolves don’t eat all the sheep, that this is at least in part because all the villagers DID come, and scared them away.
What’s with the automatic assumption that the result of the vote would be a rational decision based on their own best interests? That seems to be going out of style. It’s just as likely they’ll decide to be annexed by Russia.
Some posters have stated that immediate bad things were “predicted.” Links?
According to the IMF the British Pound was overvalued in the lead up to the Brexit referendum. The link below is from 2014 but im sure I also read a more recent claim that the pound was overvalued as late as the first half of 2016. The plunge in the Pound as is good or bad news as anyone wishes to interpret it as. I suspect it’s not quite as bad as some suggest.
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/imf-warns-pound-overvalued-what-about.html
I agree its still very early days. The period of utmost economic danger is still ahead, but up until now the most outrageous predictions have yet to materialize.
Another problem is that when you have many people, many with different threshold of what they think is funny, or what they think is dangerous, you are going to have many cries of wolf, some as jokes, some as over reactions to something innocuous.
If you start to ignore some individuals who cry wolf a bit too often, that doesn’t really make you safer, but it probably isn’t going to cause problems, and you’ll sleep better at night. The problem is that these “wise” people lump in everyone who might cry wolf as being the same, so that when your expert wolf tracker comes to town, and warns the town of an impeding wolf attack, people dismiss it as just more “crying wolf”, they’ve heard this story before, even if they’ve never heard it from this credible source.
So, a few lessons can be had from this story. First, it’s not a good idea to troll or exaggerate dangers, as people may be less responsive to real dangers in the future. Second, it’s not a good idea to ignore danger signs, just because you’ve seen them before. Last, it’s not a good idea to lump everyone who may warn you of a danger in together, as, while some of them may be trolling, and some of them may be over reacting, some might actually be credible sources that are warning you of a very real danger.
And how does that invalidate what I said?
You told us that the "doom-and-gloom seems to be the province of the Left."Not the case really as conservative scientists demonstrate that the efforts like you to make it just a province of the left is not accurate at all, the point was that politically speaking it was not supposed to be a political issue, but powerful right wing groups made it so. And going outside the political ideas scientists could have, the issue is mostly an American issue, in the UK:
Umm… Kerry et al are not in the UK.
Indeed, instead of whinging, they’re getting on with it.
That was the point, no one takes seriously the very few yahoo denier scientists over there. There is a big problem when even the conservative scientists are ignored by the right over here. This is not a left or right issue in Britain really, hence the complaint about your weird use of that doomsday line.
Because, once again, this is really not a left or right issue. Science should guide the efforts and the things that we all need to do.
These are silly examples.
The “population bomb” was never an inevitable disaster although a number of people still regard it as a potential problem, and steps were taken to reduce its possible occurrence.
Ozone depletion was specifically fought with legislative and corporate efforts to eliminate or reduce its effect.
Y2K was specifically targeted with billions of dollars to avoid it.
In each case, while some faction within the popular press made more of it than was likely, actions were specifically taken to avert the disasters and the serious efforts to avoid them did not occur until they were presented as doomsday scenarios.
I, personally, was involved in efforts to avoid Y2K meltdowns that would have definitely happened if no efforts were taken to avoid them and we could not get funding to make those efforts until the popular and financial news services scared a few CEOs, CIOs, and CFOs into actually agreeing to a budgets that would fund those efforts.
Will Brexit be the predicted disaster? I dunno. On the other hand, if it turns out to be nothing more than a bumpy ride leading to a glorious future, historians will need to look at whether efforts were undertaken to avoid catastrophe and then look at how many of those efforts were undertaken in response to the doomsday scenarios.
Another aspect of this, and other similar concerns and controversies, is that some very sneaky and duplicitous people are working on purpose, to get you to THINK that certain warnings are “false wolf cries.”
This game is played through several channels. One is to plant false stories claiming that a given concern is not held to be valid by people who are equally qualified to speak about it, as the people who are giving warnings. Another is to publish derisive taunts, to get as many people as possible to ignore the facts and logic altogether, and instead make their decision based on social approval factors. Yet another, is to purposely misrepresent the original warnings, in hopes of tricking people who are not thoroughly informed, into defending the misrepresentations, and thus discrediting them further.
The thing again, is to watch out that you make your own decisions about whatever is or isn't going on, and watch out for the very real, and extremely unprincipled people who will try to get you to decide things one way or another, for the wrong reasons.This ain’t happening unless the UK itself dissolves. Even then, I’d say “unlikely”.
These are not equivalent predictions.
The population bomb, ozone depletion and the Y2K bug are or were real problems that had vast efforts directed at solving them. The triump of islamic terrorism, the rapture and the Mayan Calendar Apocalypse were doomsday panics from cults of various size.
And the sequester…I have no idea what you’d call it. Budget negotiations as arranged by Inspector Clouseau.
The point is that there is always someone who predicts that the world is ending. If you believe them all, and rank the Mayan Calendar Apocalypse as issue equivalent to ozone depletion, of course your world will be full of predictions of Armageddon. Which fails to materialize.
The solution to this impression of events is to use a bit of a common-sense filter when deciding what to take seriously.
There’s a lot of talk about promises and predictions. Who exactly was doing this promising, and what exactly was predicted?
I suspect the OP is mainly referring to a general sense of doom out there in the public. Unsurprisingly, a lot of nuance tends to get lost between expert analyses, filtered through the inexpert media, down to the general public.