This is why I think it was constitution-breaking, the constitution simply isn't set up to gracefully deal with a conflict between 'Brexit must happen' and 'Parliament cannot agree on how to carry out Brexit'. All of this against the ticking clock of Article 50 as well. Instead Boris Johnson ended up brute-forcing his way through the issue with the 2019 election and the purge of his non-Brexiteer MPs. The system did ultimately hold up (even in the face of Johnson's prorogation crisis), but I think Cameron was very irresponsible. Not for holding the referendum, but for not figuring out all the potential complexities of a leave vote before calling the referendum. The constitution got an uncontrolled stress test that didn't need to happen the way it did.

Also to add to that, the limits of Parliamentary sovereignty really were tested with respect to things like the Northern Ireland peace agreement during the Brexit negotiations.

I'm not opposed to voting on EU membership in general, but the way the actual referendum was conducted was poor and it's increasingly clear that Russia attempted to interfere with it as well. Compare it to the Scottish referendum which was pretty well-conceived, the Brexit referendum looks amateurish in comparison. The reason is because it had very little to do with the government suddenly sprouting a love of participatory democracy, and everything to do with Cameron thinking that because he had won one referendum and ostensibly stopped the Scottish nationalists for a generation he could do the same to UKIP and the right of his own party.

In my view the vote should have been held, a democracy is only a democracy if it's allowed to make potentially harmful decisions for itself. However it should not have been rushed into being with zero regard for how it might test the constitution or what a leave vote actually meant, in my view the consequences of a leave vote should have been characterised and defined well in advance; all the debate between 'hard Brexit' or 'soft Brexit' should have happened before the date of the vote was set. It also should have been more credibly secured against Russian influence in light of the threats to democratic integrity that were new at the time, the government appears to have been genuinely lax on this front. They couldn't have carried it out in a more division-generating way if they'd been trying in my opinion, and it's because they rushed it for risky party-political reasons.

This fact is why I think regardless of governing ideology, it's in the interests of any government to not write off wide-spread destitution and inequality as merely the cost of participating in a global economy. Even the Romans two thousand years before us understood all regimes require their bread and circuses, and the first one is the more important of the two.

As a Briton it's a particularly frustrating time to live here. We have wasted the 'peace dividend' on luxury policies like giving incumbent homeowners massive regulatory power to constrain the housing supply with lots of harmful knock-on effects, putting economic stupidity like Brexit to a constitution-breaking and divisive referendum, and harmfully constraining the energy supply by letting every self-interested QUANGO and NIMBY block renewable/nuclear power and the associated infrastructure. We spent more on the paperwork before a single shovel entered the ground on a tunnel under the Thames than Norway did building the longest road tunnel in the world. We cannot continue enacting nonsense policies like this and expecting everyone to muddle through as things get bleaker and bleaker, it'll come to a head one day and when it does it'll be destabilising.

Economic prosperity, or at the very least not having lost decade after lost decade, is necessary to avoid more authoritarian forms of politics coming to power.

It feels very wasteful of a scarce resource to leave this spectrum abandoned, especially when it has interesting properties.

Also imagine having the gall to push a class of technology on the world that dramatically drives up the number of attacks, then refusing to allow said products to be used defensively to avoid the consequences. Who do these people actually think they're kidding?

A million seconds is a couple of weeks, a billion seconds three decades. Comparing a worker at any salary to that singular concentration of socioeconomic power just doesn't make any sense to me, the key distinction of the rentier is that he can avoid the domination non-rentiers must suffer almost by definition when rentiers exist - they are subject to the arbitrary whim of someone who cannot be voted out of power through democratic efforts. In my view liberty is the freedom from domination, and any private individual with the power to dominate in their own right is inherently hazardous to a democratic society. It is in the interests of both workers that the billionaire is prevented from gaining a position of political influence.

Bait so obvious you couldn't fool a mackerel with it.

Where did you hear this? Hitler wasn't anywhere close to a nuclear weapon, Nazi Germany lacked both the necessary theoretical nuances and industrial capacity to create nuclear weapons. Even if they magically had made one, they lacked a credible delivery system for it which is its own enormous can of worms especially in the early 1940s.

Even Britain which did have good theoretical foundations and even a headstart on the American programme was obliged to merge its efforts with the Manhattan Project because it lacked the resources to do it so quickly alone. The largest empire on the planet at that point couldn't fight the Second World War at home and develop the bomb fast enough to be relevant, the Nazis had no chance.

With all due respect, this is Americentric nonsense. If you had to rank the most important British naval battles obviously Trafalgar is at the top. The Nile, Jutland, and even arguably the Armada campaign are also much more important.