We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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The Eurocrats were nothing if not predicted I found this post from eleven years ago while hunting around the internet for something else. It is quite strange to read it now. The author may have been on to something:
As several people have predicted would be the case, many of the EU’s ‘great and good’ are just continuing with the Great European Integration project as if the French and Dutch NO votes never happened. But it does seem that the shock to the system those votes administered to the torpid media has indeed woken up a few people. It seems that the insects have not noticed that someone has picked up the rock they were under.
Have they noticed even now?
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When the European Union’s ruling junta are all various forms of failed socialists along the Marxist-Leninist-Troskyist-Maoist spectrum I would be stunned if they weren’t attributing the problem to false consciousness within the proletariat at some level or other.
The problem is that that sort of political claptrap is no longer acceptable, so they have to come up with other, more democratic seeming language. The problem then is that they just come across as foreign snake oil salesmen.
I am sure that in the closed confines of their plush offices in Brussels they see the failure not of the proletariat, who merely expressed their uninformed opinions, ignorance and hatred of foreigners, but rather at the British Government itself, for allowing such a plebiscite in the first place.
About the time when Spain joined the EU, it was being pitched as an answer to the impending global economic collapse, the idea we are all travellers on a raft and if one should fall into the depths, the others can pull them out, the problem is, the only reason one falls is when the entire raft disintegrates and everyone finds themselves floundering. The idea was flawed back then and when the sub-prime sh*t hit the fan the impotence of the EU hit home, it was like we all paid an insurance premium that did not do anything when the claim took place.
Not yet but I think they really will notice the UK sized hole in the EU’s finances 😀
Like they noticed the French-sized hole back then?
That hole was what the UK filled as a net contributor.
The French seem to think that their National Front could be a contender for the French Presidency. Does anyone know anything about this? (I read this in an Australian Newspaper, so I don’t know how well- or ill- informed it is.)
The E.U. is about building a STATE – “ever-closer-union”.
This is why I had no time (none) for people who claimed the E.U. would reform if we worked from the inside (or whatever).
There is no chance of the E.U. giving up powers – it is about gaining ever more powers.
“Conservatives” or “libertarians” who do not understand that simple point understand nothing about the E.U.
Nicholas (Unlicensed Joker!) Gray (July 25, 2016 at 1:26 am): “The French seem to think that their National Front could be a contender for the French Presidency. Does anyone know anything about this?”
Being in the UK puts me closer to France than you, physically, but as to “knowing anything about it…”? The Front National is doing better in the polls than it has ever done. In the past, the run-off system has made it hard for them to win (IIRC, old man Le Pen made it to the run-off in the 80s but all the mainstream parties’ voters combined against him). I think it may be different now, but if it is different enough for his daughter to win, that will be a sea change.
If your French is as poor as mine, you do not read online French reporting in the original, and I suspect English-language translation statistically pollutes the available info with PC to a degree we find hard to judge. Le Pen’s daughter (with grand-daughter and others, no doubt) appear to have revamped the party so that a certain anti-drefusard/vichy/OAS aroma that hung around old man Le Pen is gone – and this, to be fair, was done even before recent events made them aware that Jews, like other “enemies of my enemy” could be their friends (and Israelis have experience with ‘zones urbaine sensible’). On the other hand, the statism that marks France is in them as in other French parties, so I’d guess any support for them in this blog is likely to be much qualified and, one might say, ‘Trump-like”, i.e. with a strong “but look at the other parties” element. :-/
The upcoming rerun of the stolen Austrian election will be an indicator, albeit a mild one. The Austrian president has little real power. Thanks to de Gaulle, the French president has real power.