Lowlights of 2016

[titch juicy]

Sod all this Christmas positivity; aside from the deaths, politics, terrorism and conflict, what were your biggest negatives of the last 12 months?

James Corden's continued and inexplicable rise in popularity is a big one for me.

I can't remember a single snowflake falling in London this year, either at the back end of last winter or early part of this- I love snow, so this is a huge negative for me.

Merry Bloody Christmas everyone! x

[Loz]

Has to be the Brexit vote. Pretty much the lowlight of the century so far.

[jaywalker]

oh you really do want to position your respondents as grumpy old men and women. well i'm up for that:

- that the prison population continues to rise, and prisoners that protest about their inhuman conditions are labelled rioters and threatened with even more severe penalties.

- that the Justice Secretary seemed unwilling to perform her constitutional duty to uphold the autonomy of the Judiciary after the disgraceful Mail headline.

- that I still cannot go into a shop and buy cannabis, something I want to do.

- that the vast majority of my posts on this forum are said to be "rubbish". Truly, I do blame myself.

- that I had not heard of and then read Cortazar's masterpiece Hopscotch until I was middle aged.

- that I am still slave to my cat (le roi) - (a Cortazar theme.)

So I feel for you Titch, I really do.

[Sue]

Jo Cox's murder.

Brexit.

Trump.

Aleppo.

Nigel Farage/Boris Johnson/Theresa May

The rise of far right politics in Europe and beyond

Climate change not being addressed. Too little too late.

The continuation of many humans and groups of humans acting like the animals we are instead of evolving.

Lack of love and respect.

Sorry, feeling quite pessimistic at the moment :(

[teddyboy23]

My wife leaving me after 25 years.then coming back 2 days later

[uncleglen]

The extent to which the over-privileged of the UK threw their toys out of the pram before and especially after the referendum because if ANY of the remoaners had put an ounce of thought into the underclass of Europe, or knew anything about what has gone on in working class heartlands, they would have predicted it. (here and in the USA)

There we all were thinking that the educated were reliable, decent, upstanding, humane people and in fact they were a bunch of spoilt children instantly worried about their house prices, cost of building work, border controls threatening their weekends in Paris etc (sod the climate change and pollution eh, and the waste of finite fuel resources). And the fact that all their selfish reasons for wanting a remain vote were deflected by them trying to paint the Outers as racist.....

(post was inspired by the above post by Sue)

[Louisa]

Brexit and Trump are not outliers, they sum up a growing and powerful feeling of disenfranchisement in struggling working class communities. The social democratic urban elite have been brushing it under the carpet for a good few decades and here's the result.

For me the low lights of this year are:

- Privileged left of field urban dwellers ignoring realities outside of their bubble causing far right politics to flourish

- The continued and shameful situation in Aleppo, where people are being massacred and yet the politicians and media seem to live on a different planet in their response.

- some of the awful stories on this very forum about street crimes e.g. Mobile phone thefts.

- the continued threat to the United Kingdom as a nation state by regional nationalism.

Louisa.

[red devil]

If there's anything worse than a bad loser it's a bad winner.

If Trump, Farage, Johnson, Gove et al aren't 'over-privileged' then I don't know who is. You've been mugged off by an elite pretending to be against the establishment. Gold plated lifts and celebratory bashes at the Ritz...true men of the people, yeah right.

And if you think Trump is going to address climate change/pollution, you're having a giraffe.

When these jokers don't deliver who are you going to blame next?...

[Loz]

The funny thing is: both Louisa and RD are both kind of right. Trump and Brexit are both due to the working class (and the white working class especially) feeling marginalised via left-wing identity politics - usually by them being at best ignored, and at worst being called names and told to sit down and shut up. And, in the UK, having their political voice (i.e. Labour) slowly taken from them, leaving them to be drawn over to the far right, rather than stick with the very people that marginalised them in the first place.

But both Trump and Brexit are going to do absolutely nothing for them. Probably make their situations worse, if anything.

[KalamityKel]

M&S coming to ED... *sigh

[titch juicy]

Thanks for all the responses but the bit in the original post that said, "aside from the deaths, politics, terrorism and conflict...." was key.

[titch juicy]

It was intended as a lighthearted look at 2016.

[Louisa]

red devil Wrote:

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> If there's anything worse than a bad loser it's a

> bad winner.

> If Trump, Farage, Johnson, Gove et al aren't

> 'over-privileged' then I don't know who is. You've

> been mugged off by an elite pretending to be

> against the establishment. Gold plated lifts and

> celebratory bashes at the Ritz...true men of the

> people, yeah right.

> And if you think Trump is going to address climate

> change/pollution, you're having a giraffe.

> When these jokers don't deliver who are you going

> to blame next?...

I agree with you RD, the working classes have for sure been mugged off, but such a situation would never have flourished if social democrats had addressed long standing isssues with immigration and deprivation, and not allowed a political vacuum to take hold. The borderline contempt for traditional electoral bases from the likes of Labour and other left of centre political parties in the western world, are ultimately to blame for marginalising working class, and more especially white working class, communities. They've concentrated political efforts on creating a globalisation model which is alien to almost everyone outside of wealthy urban centres such as London, New York etc..

Louisa.

[teddyboy23]

Titch they don't get it

[jaywalker]

Titch, how is the absence of snowflakes not political? it is one of the most contested and polarising issues we face other than those you tried to head off in your OP. OK i accept I had a sense of irony failure; but raw nerves and all that.

i do think a defining characteristic of this terrible year has been the outbreak of a kind of civil war. families are riven by brexit (i heard much about this around the table at xmas lunch) and it is particularly unsettling that this is very often inter-generational and regional. in particular, young voters feel (in my view with good reason) BOTH betrayed by the vote AND financially repressed by the older generations that voted to leave. And this is quite apart from the damage we have done to the good workers of Europe on whose labour we depend. The lack of leadership in the Labour party on this issue will destroy them. There has also been a marked slip in what seems to be tolerated in the media: some highly unpleasant contributions to Question Time and a quite appalling lack of moderation on the BBC have your say website. The ED forum is all sweetness and light in comparison.

Although part of our vibrant EDF forum culture, unclegen's characterisation of those who were against Brexit (including those like me on strongly interventionist wing economically (what was the EU for other than to redistribute wealth to deprived areas, and allow people facing very low wages to come to the UK and (justly) earn much higher ones?) and strongly hands-off in terms of civil liberties (guaranteed by the ECJ and ECHR in the face of an increasingly heteronomous UK justice system) seems to me to be completely misplaced. I do not think the severe emotional response I felt to the Brexit vote was childish, or an expression of personal interest: rather I think it encompassed a sober reflection of what the vote means for the future direction of UK politics and the well-being of all those who live here. Not to mention what the vote might seem to legitimise in forthcoming elections in Holland and France and the perception of Russia that the EU is already falling apart.

[TheArtfulDogger]

My lowlight has to be the mugging of the masses by the sweet makers with their same price but smaller offerings

Just look at what they have done to Toblerones for an example, they now look like a crocodile that's never seen a dentist

[Otta]

teddyboy23 Wrote:

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> My wife leaving me after 25 years.then coming back

> 2 days later

Just to clarify, was the low point her leaving or her coming back?

[teddyboy23]

Coming back😀

[DulwichFox]

February 29th. As if dreary February isn't long enough at 28 days.

Foxy

[Mystic Mog]

You might get a proposal!

[TheArtfulDogger]

turtle Wrote:

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> You might get a proposal!

Can we propose that the 29th is the new foxy hunting day ?

[Jah Lush]

From Brian Eno's Facebook page. Good points well made.

2016/2017

The consensus among most of my friends seems to be that 2016 was a terrible year, and the beginning of a long decline into something we don?t even want to imagine.

2016 was indeed a pretty rough year, but I wonder if it?s the end - not the beginning - of a long decline. Or at least the beginning of the end?.for I think we?ve been in decline for about 40 years, enduring a slow process of de-civilisation, but not really quite noticing it until now. I?m reminded of that thing about the frog placed in a pan of slowly heating water?

This decline includes the transition from secure employment to precarious employment, the destruction of unions and the shrinkage of workers? rights, zero hour contracts, the dismantling of local government, a health service falling apart, an underfunded education system ruled by meaningless exam results and league tables, the increasingly acceptable stigmatisation of immigrants, knee-jerk nationalism, and the concentration of prejudice enabled by social media and the internet.

This process of decivilisation grew out of an ideology which sneered at social generosity and championed a sort of righteous selfishness. (Thatcher: ?Poverty is a personality defect?. Ayn Rand: ?Altruism is evil?). The emphasis on unrestrained individualism has had two effects: the creation of a huge amount of wealth, and the funnelling of it into fewer and fewer hands. Right now the 62 richest people in the world are as wealthy as the bottom half of its population combined. The Thatcher/Reagan fantasy that all this wealth would ?trickle down? and enrich everybody else simply hasn?t transpired. In fact the reverse has happened: the real wages of most people have been in decline for at least two decades, while at the same time their prospects - and the prospects for their children - look dimmer and dimmer. No wonder people are angry, and turning away from business-as-usual government for solutions. When governments pay most attention to whoever has most money, the huge wealth inequalities we now see make a mockery of the idea of democracy. As George Monbiot said: ?The pen may be mightier than the sword, but the purse is mightier than the pen?.

Last year people started waking up to this. A lot of them, in their anger, grabbed the nearest Trump-like object and hit the Establishment over the head with it. But those were just the most conspicuous, media-tasty awakenings. Meanwhile there?s been a quieter but equally powerful stirring: people are rethinking what democracy means, what society means and what we need to do to make them work again. People are thinking hard, and, most importantly, thinking out loud, together. I think we underwent a mass disillusionment in 2016, and finally realised it?s time to jump out of the saucepan.

This is the start of something big. It will involve engagement: not just tweets and likes and swipes, but thoughtful and creative social and political action too. It will involve realising that some things we?ve taken for granted - some semblance of truth in reporting, for example - can no longer be expected for free. If we want good reporting and good analysis, we?ll have to pay for it. That means MONEY: direct financial support for the publications and websites struggling to tell the non-corporate, non-establishment side of the story. In the same way if we want happy and creative children we need to take charge of education, not leave it to ideologues and bottom-liners. If we want social generosity, then we must pay our taxes and get rid of our tax havens. And if we want thoughtful politicians, we should stop supporting merely charismatic ones.

Inequality eats away at the heart of a society, breeding disdain, resentment, envy, suspicion, bullying, arrogance and callousness. If we want any decent kind of future we have to push away from that, and I think we?re starting to.

There?s so much to do, so many possibilities. 2017 should be a surprising year.

- Brian

[rendelharris]

That's a fascinating and pretty positive take on things, thanks for sharing. It would be great to look back on 2016 not as the year it all started to go wrong but the year we got on the rebound.

[Jules-and-Boo]

My lowlight has been witnessing a work friend suffer a breakdown of the worst possible kind.

Seeing fragility in people and at the same time seeing how easily people take up an opportunity to be hurtful.

We all need to be kinder to each other - the whole political shake up should not be used to turn us against each other - as it has with families torn over Brexit. With the media inciting hatred and all sorts of lies to stir up this very negativity, we should all be even more mindful to be considerate and compassionate. Even if it is very testing at times.

[JohnL]

Jules-and-Boo Wrote:

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> My lowlight has been witnessing a work friend

> suffer a breakdown of the worst possible kind.

> Seeing fragility in people and at the same time

> seeing how easily people take up an opportunity to

> be hurtful.

>

> We all need to be kinder to each other - the whole

> political shake up should not be used to turn us

> against each other - as it has with families torn

> over Brexit. With the media inciting hatred and

> all sorts of lies to stir up this very negativity,

> we should all be even more mindful to be

> considerate and compassionate. Even if it is very

> testing at times.

Unfortunately May telling us to unify (no doubt she

means behind her version of Brexit) won't happen.