When I was a kid in the 90s – AKA the good old days – when the most pressing question facing Society was does Posh Spice take it up the you-know-where, I was taught that history was an inevitable march toward progress, a straight line leading humanity inexorably forward. But now I’m older, I’ve learned the truth: history isn’t a straight line, it’s a fucking hamster wheel, And so I decided to do what any concern citizen would do upon seeing the world is intrinsically fucked: make a podcast. This is my attempt to break the cycle of the hamster wheel by making a History podcast that doesn’t Aim to give its audience self-satisfactory feel good Factor as celebrate the genius of our species, But rather this is designed to make you feel like shit and harangue for being a part of the Endless cycle of repeated stupidity the constitutes you in history. withmaybe we can actually stop and move forward and instead of fucking either new king ourselves or burning up the world to until it resembles something like cocoa Kellogg’s cocoa pop,
Welcome to Homo Stupidus, an exploration of some of the stupidest ideas, events, and people in human history, including the recent past and present. Because if you be looking for stupid ideas, events, and people, then let’s face it: today’s world is a bumper harvest, and today, we’re going to start off with some of its low-hanging fruit: Brexit.
To start us off, a quick unscientific but telling survey. I want to know how many of you, in the past 8 years since Brexit, have ever heard anyone you know, at any place, at any time, formulate a sentence that sounded something like the following: ‘Wow, Brexit’s going really well.’ or ‘Thank God for Brexit.’ or ‘Everything’s got so much better since Brexit.’ I can guarantee that none of you have ever had that conversation or ever will, because while the whole thing was very controversial at the time and immediately afterwards, the passage of time has brought everyone in this country to know, in their heart of hearts, the blatant and obvious truth: Brexit was a bloody stupid idea. And we knew this because, in our heart of hearts, us Brits always knew the true purpose of the EU: it wasn’t a transnational body that existed to impose on us the three pillars of tyranny: regulations, taxes, and oppression. It was a transnational organization that existed to provide us with the three pillars of a bloody good life: booze, fags, and Stilton.
The reason we all came to understand that Brexit was a stupid idea, whether we said it out loud or not, was because our emotional relationship with the European Union has much longer roots than the temporary derangement caused by Brexit farce. While all those old cunts who voted for brexit were getting riled up by the propaganda of the moment, one of their most powerful memories of the European Union was that phenomena of the 90s called the booze cruise. The booze cruise was a phenomena that went across all classes: factory workers would all chip in to hire a bus and go over to France. And I’m sure a lot of fun was hard, and good memories retained. so while all the remainer and remoaner stuff slowly died down and then became irrelevant those memories of the EU – Conscious or unconscious remained Until a state was reached in the National conscious or subconscious where we all said to ourselves, I can’t actually remember what was so bad about the eu, but I can definitely remember what was good.
And it was good, because it wasn’t just the booze. it was the three pillars of the eu. freedom of movement, freedom to work wherever the fuck you wanted From the Irish sea to the Black Sea, And for businesses, the freedom to import and export without taxes. Notice the role of the word freedom,and then compare it with those 3 words which make me ******* cringe to my bones when I think about them. Take Back Control. If I think about that slogan now, I just feel embarrassed because it just leads to the glaring, slap in the face question the question what exactly were we taking back control of, because the only control we got was passport control.
Being in the EU was like living in a block of houses with all sorts of cool different types of houses Spanish villa, Greek cave house all that s***, you can just go around your neighbor’s house without knocking on the door drink all his beer, sit by his pool f***his daughte, selling him a kilo of homegrown come and getting back home with bad sunburn, good memories, the pocket for the cash . it’s a win-win.
But that’s the trouble with today’s stickstick of a world, All you need to do is connect a human to a mobile, connect the mobile to an information source and voila: you can turn a win-win into a lose-lose.In fact you can turn reality entirely on its head. The first example that springs to mind is that you can lose elections but make people believe you won them. And so this is what happened with brexit. The right amount of people got connected to the right amount of shit and suddenly our European partners became our overlords. Not only was this patently untrue, but if there were any mini Hitlers running around Europe it was us, constantly demanding our own rules With respect to immigration, budgetary controls and many other features. yet wanting to be part of the club, constantly negotiating exceptions, mounting protests And generally causing the EU problems all the time. they weren’t like our overlords,
they were our f****** mums and dad’s constantly dealing with our whining and bitching. And like good parents still loving us anyway.
Being in the EU was not perfect, but it was a fuck of a lot better than being out of the eu. and we all know it. A lot of foreigners think that we are Pig shit ignorant in england, and they may be right, but one thing we do know is ourselves. we are hardcore fucking Delphi Temple know yourself, and US Brits know something. we are miserable bastards. We invented the Smiths for Fox sake Being a part of Spain and Italy and Greece made us feel better. we were better for it and we all know that. And I would argue that that even includes the people who caused this problem in the first place: Euro skeptics.
What’s my evidence for this? It’s obvious. Their name. They founded a whole movement that was supposed to be anti European, but because they know what all Brits know deep down that the EU is a bloody good idea, they couldn’t even call it the anti EU group or euro loathers or europhobic or nothing just euro skeptic.That means not even they hated europe, they were just a bit skeptical.
Brexit remains, therefore, a profoundly stupid idea, And not so much for the economic and social and political reasons, And the fact that all the money promised to the nhs, all the reduced migration, all the trade deals that were promised, never really materialized,but because the majority of people didn’t want it .If people truly wanted to leave the European Union then you would actually be able to Find a friend or colleague or family member who will say at the dinner table how glad they are we are outside of the eu. you can’t find that, because it’s not anything you could be glad about. leaving the EU was a fucking stupid idea. Period.
