Further down below is a list of the six flavours of Brexit Britain can aim for. This has been inspired by The Economist. At this point, it is not at all clear what the British government is aiming for, but given the weakness of Theresa May, I do not think it matters much.

I think/believe/hope that there will be another election soon, and this time there will hopefully be a real debate about whether or not to continue with the Brexit.

One can only hope that this time around politicians will finally tell people the true cost of Brexit and its impact on their lives over the next decades.

Personally, I would prefer one of two extreme options (however unlikely either of them are):

Option 1) Britain withdraws from Brexit (through another referendum or a new clear election mandate). The ongoing debate about the EU in Britain might finally quiet down. Economically, this would be the best medium term solution.

What I do not like about this scenario is that Britain will still have a seat at the table and be able to torpedo any and all deeper integrations of the EU that I am looking forward to (deeper military integration and deeper fiscal integration, just to name the two most important ones). In the past Britain has been strongly opposed to this and given the close vote on Brexit it is very unlikely this will change. In order to be accepted by its citizens, the EU will have to change somewhat drastically over the next few years. With Britain on board, I cannot see how this will happen.

Option 2) Britain leaves the EU with no deal and is properly hurt by Brexit’s impact. No mercy should be shown by European politicians. A) they had it coming and B) this will act as a deterrent to other countries trying to make a similarly bad choice.

Even if we do not get either of the two options above, this would leave Britain with some limited membership/ access, which means it might be paying for the access to the market without having any say in the EU’s future development. And that is a good thing!

There should also finally be a mechanism to expel countries from the EU for various reasons such as being at odds with the EU’s core principals (Poland and Hungary are currently atop that list) or being in strong disagreement of the future course of the Union. There is a lot more to be said in a future post.

Next up are your different flavours of Brexit 🙂

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1) While the coup was not ordered/orchestrated/organised by the Erdogan-Regime, it did know about it in advance and allowed it to happen or rather, forced it to happen earlier than planned and prepared worse than intended, and it used it as a justification for the purge that has been going on ever since.

2) Before the referendum, some expressed the hope that Erdogan would get more modest once he got what he wanted… that has never been true! They (tyrants, dictators, etc.) get more paranoid and more extreme as their power grows.

3) Despite an extremely unfair referendum with straight out fraud, it only just passed, meaning that probably a majority of Turks voted against it and if the opposition hadn’t been suppressed as it has been, there would have probably been a comfortable majority against it.

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So, here is what happened, as I remember it:
On 4th / 5th April 2017 news outlets around the world started reporting that the Syrian airforce had used chemical weapons in an attack. Pictures appeared on social networks and the internet with experts claiming that the most likely cause was Sarin gas. The Syrian regime denied any wrongdoing and claimed they had attacked a rebel hideout and in the process hit a rebel weapons dump where the chemicals were stored.
“Experts” claimed that this was an unlikely scenario. Most news outlets said that all pictures and “proof” was from local sources only and had not been confirmed, but never the less the articles made it sound like a Syrian airstrike was the only possible explanation and that the Assad regime, of cause, would deny it.

I myself was convinced of this narrative and did not question it, as it fit nicely with previous reports and actions in this war.

So, when President Trump decided to launch 60 odd Tomahawk Cruise Missiles at an airfield used by the Syrian airforce, I felt that it was justified (in my opinion not the best way to respond (or even close to it), but at least a response!).

However, research by Seymour M. Hersh, a US journalist, has now shown that “the facts” that were presented in the media actually weren’t facts at all and that things happened rather differently.

Spoiler Alert: the denial by and version of Russia/ the Syrian Regime now appears to be the true story!

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A dangerous mindset is present with many people in the world today:

“There is no real harm from a large scale invasion of privacy because only people who are engaged in bad acts have a reason to want to hide and to care about their privacy.”

This is grounded on the view that there is only two kind of people in the world: good people and bad people. Bad people are those who engage in terrorism or other crimes and therefore have reasons to want to hide what they are doing.

Good people are doing nothing wrong and hence have nothing to hide and no reason to fear the government monitoring them.

People who argue this are engaged in a very extreme act of self-deprecation. What they are really saying is “I have agreed to make myself such a harmless and unthreatening and uninteresting person that I actually don’t fear having the government know what it is that I’m doing.”

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