UK elections are on Thursday, and in a few months, Nigel Farage has raised his Reform party from 6 to now 17 percent.
Yep… that Farage, who promised UK voters a land of milk and honey, if they voted for his Brexit. And now that Brexit has proven to be a ticket to economic disaster and endless bureaucracy, Farage is telling the Brits, that its all the immigrants’ fault.
17 percent have fallen for this conman.
It is a mystery, how humans could ever become the dominant species on this planet.
Human dominance will come to an end when we blow right past various climate change tipping points, elect populists who initiate nuclear war, criminalize vaccines during the next pandemic -- whichever comes first.
@randahl I feel your pain. In the us we have a candidate who is a convicted felon and is leading many polls. I worry for the world when so many can be hoodwinked into voting for politicians like them.
@randahl He may have damaged all that today, having thrown a massive tantrum with the BBC & channel 4, over an audience event and an undercover investigation which confirmed some well established legends about Farage and Reform wanna-be politicians. Add in that he’s suing two other media outlets for comments about Reform links, and has now refused to do an interview with Kuenssberg unless he gets an apology. Led By Donkeys did a Putin banner drop on an event of his also.
@randahl
😰 the ancient greek created democracy . But voting was not done by all people . Only by a wealthy and honourable part. This way they prevented voting by the mob of society. French and american revolution even limited voting. Also in UK voting was not for everybody in their history. Many historiens and sociologist recommends intelligence tests before registration instead of the automatic right for all.
@randahl I fear they understand him perfectly right. They read between the lines while the gullible news media takes him at his word. His promise is to take Britain out of the EU and create a fascist ethnostate. He will say whatever he needs to say to get one step closer. And 17% can't wait to hear what's next and will support all of it.
We became the dominant species probably because we also tricked the natural world to our "advantage", with promises of milk and honey to ourselves, only to now realise it's been a con, we've destroyed too much of it, and we'll suffer greatly as a result.
@randahl Right wing has governed for ~ 38 of the last 50 years, cutting education spending at every opportunity & selling off school grounds to property #grifters.
In other news, the majority of Britons prefer to read the tabloid press that only recently stopped printing full page photos of half-naked young women on page 3.
Couple this with weaponised Facebook ads and we have the return of fascism.
@randahl Anti-establishment populists allow people to indulge in fantasy politics (and fantasy history). They create a coalition of contradictions and absurdities that can only ever remain unfulfilled; but that anti-establishment element mixed with nationalist nostalgia makes people feel hopeful.
It is blind faith in a hopeful world-view, like religion, like first love. It's a mindset in which we want to be fooled because it feels so good.
I am not sure who is to blame for this, we could blame social media, people can post anything fact or fiction, end users just share, people post for likes etc. So if it gets a like post it, regardless as some people are narcisstic and like to be centre of attention.
There is lots of information about fact checking, mis information / disinformation etc, but writing and also citing sources requires more effort, requres more reading on the part of the reader, not much help when people seem to have a short attention span, which I guess is we have thing like '5 miniute' read on articles
It would be interesting to see what the literacy rate is within this 17 percent, are we talking about people who have completed post school education or not, are we looking at people who may have actual learning barriers, access to books, the internet, are they just usng social media or looking things up elsewhere.
Even within that, it is well known that algoritims are used to target people, so just looking at the reform page on social media gets you MORE content in the feed, even if you are going there to check out what you have said here (as in fact checking what their contract (manifesto) says.
I guess end of the day people are people we can't for them to fact check, so they will believe who they believe.