Hacker News Reader

Comment by twoquestions | Hacker News Reader

"People of $MY_IDENTITY believe a thing, so I'll vote for it no matter what $OTHERS say!"

I thought before reading that story that the above was a bad caricature, but holy shit. How can you not know what the EU is if you're in a member country and can read? It's like an American not knowing what Congress is!

View on HN

Right, but let's imagine there is a vote to abolish congress and it goes through. Wouldn't it be logical for many people who understand congress and how it works try to figure out all of the nuances of the decision?

I think the WaPost is really trying to hammer hard the narrative that:

Searched = Evidence of ignorance = Leave won thanks to ignorance.

America DOESN'T know what Congress is. Or wait, was that the joke? My bad.

My guess is that both sides are equally curious of the outcome. A large number of voters for leaving the EU were older, so I anticipate many of them aren't using Google to figure it out (as they both lived prior to the EU and are naturally less inclined to search on Google).

Likely its the younger crowd trying to figure out "what now?"

By asking "What is the EU?"?

Gosh, you'd be amazed about that Congress thing... Americans are like super good at not knowing shit :)

Pretty sure like 30%+ of Americans don't know what our three branches of government are.

Master, release, and develop?

If only. That actually sounds like a plausible, perhaps even advantageous structure. Imagine that, a testing environment for government. Dang, I actually like that.

While this is what the headline suggests, it's not following from their observation.

Classic policy piece.

It makes a good story. People love reading about how other people are stupid.

You can see the projected bias: people who voted for brexit must be idiots whose knowledge depends on Google.

If you google "What is cancer?" after being diagnosed with it, does that mean that you don't know what cancer is, or that you don't know about it in the detail that you now expect to need?

The upper middle class think that everyone who works with their hands is a failure, and are willing to believe the worst about them.

People were lied to. Some of them believed the lies.

Borris and Farage said that £350m will go to the NHS. Here's a picture of Borris by a sign that he had created for his campaign:

https://twitter.com/mgtmccartney/status/746245181532418048

It says "Let's give our NHS the £350 million the EU takes every week"

Here's a picture of their campaign bus:

https://twitter.com/mgtmccartney/status/746245181532418048

That says "We send the EU £350 million a week

Let's fund our NHS instead"

What have the Brexit campaigners said the day after the referendum?

Here's Farage explaining that saying it was a "mistake" to say the £350m per week would go to the NHS.

https://twitter.com/GMB/status/746218028195426305

> The upper middle class think that everyone who works with their hands is a failure, and are willing to believe the worst about them.

This is just as stupid a generalisation as 'all brexiters are stupid'.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com