Irish Brexit

KyussBeeshop wrote: »

You're choosing to ignore, that I was replying to a discussion about imbalances caused by monetary policy - and that I was pulling someone up for making a false comparison.

All posters here are saying in response to me is "there is a mechanism" - while ignoring the vast differences in magnitude (as a percent of GDP) between that mechanism, and what they are comparing it to.

This will just become a broken record discussion of "there is A mechanism" - while studiously ignoring what makes it a false comparison - so I'm out, there's little else that's useful to say there.

I'm not choosing to ignore that. I'm refusing to follow you down your rabbit hole of finding a carefully-chosen basis on which to criticise the Euro. You're right: the UK could use fiscal policy to spend a third of its budget on wealth distribution. But it doesn't - and the EU does.

So yes, it's true to say that if you studiously ignore every other argument on the topic, the absence of common fiscal policy is a flaw with the Euro. But if you're studiously ignoring every other argument on the topic, you're not exactly making a compelling case.

KyussBeeshop wrote: »

See that's exactly what I mean about defensiveness. In the exchange over the last couple of days, I didn't even blame the EU for anything - I asked for citations, for people to back up their embellished statements regarding the EU - which turned out to nearly all be either false or inconclusive.

Fact checking EU popularity embellishment (which is contradicted by the EU's own stats), apparently equals someone trying to "blame it [the EU] for all the world's ills" - the level of defensiveness coupled with fluffing of the EU's reputation when it's in contradiction with the stats, just gives the impression of a general lack of objectivity in discussion surrounding the EU around here (I mean, the raw stats - as objective as you can get in the circumstances - are contradicting peoples statements, and they are just digging in more and more, and backslapping...).

Calm down, not everything is about you. You can't deny that the EU is a favourite whipping boy of national governments throughout the Union.

The reason many of us are defensive of the EU is because so very, very, very many people attack it at every possible opportunity. The EU's biggest real problem (as opposed to the myriad fictional problems so many people think it has) is that it's an unsexy, functional, somewhat bureaucratic force for good.

We've seen it in the Brexit "debate": the remain side was criticised for not putting forward a positive message about the EU. The problem is, "positive" in this day of nanosecond attention spans means "headline-grabbingly exciting". Nobody wants to hear about all the good things the EU does, because they're fundamentally boring. People want to hear about the bad things the EU does, even when they are works of total fiction.

I'm not even talking about straight bananas, even though that particular bizarre fairy tale still has currency in the UK (and, by extension, here). I'm talking about the idea that our property bubble was the Eurozone's fault, because we couldn't set our own interest rates. The fact that the government of the time had any number of fiscal controls it could have implemented but chose not to doesn't matter: the EU is a convenient scapegoat.

So, frankly, I don't really care whether or not the EU is "popular"; I care whether or not it is good for us. When people learn to think about things, I'll start caring more about how they feel about them.

eta: As for there being a role for criticism of the EU, when the EU's critics start loudly calling out the stupid fictions about the Union for what they are, I'll be more inclined to listen to their genuine grievances, but as long as they are prepared to tolerate the "ban on powerful vacuum cleaners" nonsense as useful idiocy, they don't deserve to have their legitimate concerns heard.