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Ireland to leave EU should Britain exit ?

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Comments

  • #182
    djpbarry
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 13,104 ✭✭✭✭djpbarry


    A Tyrant Named Miltiades! wrote: »
    I wouldn't claim the No side were correct, of course. Between the Shinners, the church, the far-right and the far-left, their arguments were a smorgasbord of contradictions. But they won. That awkward truth deserved more respect than it was given.
    I'm not sure it does deserve respect though. Democracy is supposed to be an intelligent electorate making informed decisions, not a lazy electorate waiting to be swayed by whichever side has the more slick campaign.


  • #183
    djpbarry
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 13,104 ✭✭✭✭djpbarry


    KingBrian2 wrote: »
    I might be the only moron on here but I actually read through portions of the Lisbon Treaty. Yeah stupid me, go think to actually read through a public document that came out and is freely available to the everyone. So that is not really an argument that people did not take the time or effort to read through a very important international and legal text.
    To be fair, it is. Most people do not have the time to read through such a document in detail and even if they did, given the nature of the language in which it is written, there would undoubtedly be chunks of it that they would not understand.


  • #184
    [Deleted User]
    Posts: 14,242 ✭✭✭✭ [Deleted User]


    KingBrian2 wrote: »
    I might be the only moron on here but I actually read through portions of the Lisbon Treaty. Yeah stupid me, go think to actually read through a public document that came out and is freely available to the everyone.
    Yes, plenty of us read "portions" of the Lisbon Treaty. I'm talking about the whole thing, which almost nobody can convincingly claim to have read and understood.

    The Lisbon Treaty which most of us read "portions" of, was written in abstruse language, constantly referring to clauses and subclauses and articles and sections of other treaties and documents. To actually understand the non-consolidated version most of us had available to us, you would need to constantly refer back to umpteen other treaties on the desk in front of you.
    djpbarry wrote: »
    I'm not sure it does deserve respect though. Democracy is supposed to be an intelligent electorate making informed decisions, not a lazy electorate waiting to be swayed by whichever side has the more slick campaign.
    That's not what democracy is. Democracy is the direct participation of equals, sharing a basic threshold of common values, in the governance of political society.

    There is no requirement that they make intelligent decisions. Democratic societies are well-capable of whopping great bloopers, from the Athenians' vote to execute Socrates way back in Ancient Greece, to the (slightly less gory) Treaty of Lisbon. Meanwhile Paddy Power is offering odds of 21/10 for the Brits to vote themselves out of the EU. Yes, we can say with absolute certainty that political democracy is not defined by intelligence.

    Also, I've already described what I mean by 'slick': efficient, effective and articulate. It doesn't mean shiny, and it doesn't mean 'correct'. I don't see how anybody can deny that the the winning side in any modern referendum will have run a slick campaign. You might not like such a fickle outcome, but that's democracy.

    Democracy denies a citizen the right to override the opinion of a majority of his equals on questions of policy, regardless of the wisdom of their chosen policy.


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