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Off Topic Politics Thread

Discussion in 'Southampton' started by ChilcoSaint, Feb 23, 2016.

  1. oldstocktonsaint

    oldstocktonsaint Well-Known Member

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    Agreed but it’s not racism. Being stupid isn’t a bar to being an MP even. Every voter is stupid in some way, we all are but they are not all racists or bastards. I voted Leave because I believe all large organisations are corrupt. Olympic Committee, Fifa, all political parties. I voted against Empire Building. If the vote had gone the other way, there is no way I would have branded all Remainers as idiots or bastards. I like Europe and Europeans. I dislike the European Union as an organisation, which treats millions of people as cannon fodder to a political ideology.
     
    #24381
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  2. Farked19

    Farked19 Well-Known Member

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    And there probably was a very good reason that they were treating them like they couldn't think for themselves.
     
    #24382
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  3. Schad

    Schad Well-Known Member

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    What is that political ideology, exactly? One of the striking features of EU governance is that it necessarily covers a pretty broad portion of the political spectrum, as attaining the presidency requires the agreement of several parties which themselves are drawn from the membership of a large number of national parties. In general, you need to have the agreement of the centre, centre-left and centre-right, plus often the green-ish parties, in order to form and maintain a coalition position.

    Unless the ideology = thinking the EU is good, in which case it's true, if a bit tautological.
     
    #24383
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  4. oldstocktonsaint

    oldstocktonsaint Well-Known Member

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    By ideology I mean the overarching desire to irradiate any national identity, so that future generations have only a loyalty to the European Empire. May seem pedantic but nobody has been asked if that is what they want. If people vote for it at some time in the future, then so be it. What started out as an Economic Union has become an all encompassing push for a European Empire. The EU only seems to abide by votes that go its way. If a country votes the wrong way, economic sanctions are applied until they vote the right way. Our result bucked the trend.
     
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  5. VocalMinority

    VocalMinority Well-Known Member

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    the EU as a federation enhances national identity imo. the whole point is to allow nations to trade freely, which in turn allows more specialization in industries as it provides a bigger market for companies to sell goods to. more specialised industry means more unique culture as areas develop around that industry.

    The only things thats blurring culture is technology and the modern, smaller, world. which is going to happen whether we are in the EU or not. But Britain is still creating its own culture and still will whether we are in the EU or not.
     
    #24385
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  6. ChilcoSaint

    ChilcoSaint What a disgrace
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    Please could you explain how this country is better off by opting out of the Anti-Tax Avoidance Directive which came into EU law this month?
     
    #24386
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  7. Farked19

    Farked19 Well-Known Member

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    The country may not be. But Rees-Mogg ( where has he gone?) certainly will be.
     
    #24387
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  8. ChilcoSaint

    ChilcoSaint What a disgrace
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  9. Schad

    Schad Well-Known Member

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    This is directly contradicted by the actual realities of action within the European Union. I wrote my thesis on the Treaty to Establish a Constitution for Europe, which scared a lot of people who fear European Empire because it had the trappings of supranational formation, and what happened? It was defeated in national referenda, reworked significantly, and then passed by national governments, having been stripped of the offending elements that might be viewed as eradicating national identity. It was not forced upon the countries; it was, as all major EU reworkings are, agreed as a multilateral treaty through the democratic institutions of the member-states. I agree that it was a dumb move to even go down that route, but it wasn't particularly pernicious: ironically, the UK's self-removal from the EU has likely done more to forward a European identity than the TCE ever would have.

    There is no European Empire coming. There will be no European Empire coming. This is not a rational fear having viewed the past three decades of EU development.
     
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  10. VocalMinority

    VocalMinority Well-Known Member

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  11. Beef

    Beef Well-Known Member

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    Again not all Brexiteers are racist. But they voted for a bigoted filled political side, which is just as bad. Have fun thinking UK will be any better out of the EU with more and more poor people die in this country
     
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  12. ......loading......

    ......loading...... 25 undefeated

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    Very excited for the next ten years of excuses as to why we are not better off!
     
    #24392
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  13. ChilcoSaint

    ChilcoSaint What a disgrace
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    Seems that Big Ben bonged after all. Well done Led By Donkeys!
     
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  14. Schad

    Schad Well-Known Member

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    This is probably way more information than anyone cares about, but when I wrote my thesis, despite the TEC setback, it was at a high-point of constructivist thinking, which amounts to the belief that self-identification with institutions and structures gradually builds "we-feeling", where a group or groups come together under a banner of mutual determination. And that was what the TEC was meant to foster: the belief that the people within that treaty were a common entity with common aims. The scary supranational stuff that people fear, in essence. And it crashed and it burned in short order.

    My argument, which ran so contrary to the norms of the time that my advisor refused to sign on to my thesis, ultimately resulting in me writing it entirely on my own, was that this was nonsense, and that national interest would always be at the forefront...that, where the EU succeeded, it would succeed because the constituents of the member-states believed it benefited them *as individual states*. And that might look awfully like the sort of argument put forth by those who want to secede from the EU, but it isn't. The EU has always been a multilateral organization. It will always be a multilateral organization. Sometimes, the occasional dingus will get the brilliant idea that it should be more than that, but in short order it reverts to a multilateral organization, because there simply will never be sufficient support for it to be anything else. Any suggestion that the EU becomes a supranational organization is self-defeating, because it requires the consent of member-states who don't want that in the slightest.

    So on paper, I should be spiking the (American) football here, because Brexit was the purest distillation of my argument: the EU overreached in a fashion that, at least in a theoretical sense, encroached on the national identities of its member-states, and that resulted in a push-back that saw one of the largest constituents leave the Union. But I'm not, because it's dumb as all hell: the EU made a head-fake toward a thing that its members didn't support, and when they didn't support it, it pulled back, because that's how the EU does things. And more than a decade later, people are still freaking out about the thing that didn't happen and won't happen because the people of the EU didn't want it to happen and that isn't and shouldn't be a mark against the EU.
     
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  15. Osvaldorama

    Osvaldorama Well-Known Member

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    Great post. Exactly right. But also add that the countries propaganda has been fixated on that one issue for a decade, and there we go.
     
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  16. StJabbo1

    StJabbo1 Well-Known Member

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    Lifted this from another forum sums up the current state of affairs given we go into the next stage of negotiations without parliamentary scrutiny it being removed in the WAB:-
    Like a teenage girl at an Epstein party, we are royally ****ed.

    Allegedly.
     
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  17. Beef

    Beef Well-Known Member

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  18. San Tejón

    San Tejón Well-Known Member

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    That is just bloody awful and really inflames the belief that many (not all) voted Leave simply because they are bigoted and racist.
     
    #24398
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  19. ChilcoSaint

    ChilcoSaint What a disgrace
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    More importantly, the Leave vote gave licence to scumbags like that to crawl out of the woodwork. They have to be shown that the majority of British people really don’t think in that way. The irony is of course that Brexit will mean that we will still need immigrants to bolster our under-trained workforce, but that they will be coming from nations across the world we end up doing trade deals with rather than the EU.
     
    #24399
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  20. St. Luigi Scrosoppi

    St. Luigi Scrosoppi Well-Known Member

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    It is not just the sentiment it is the language. Infected this land? What sort of person talks about others like that?
     
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