Tuesday 24 August 2010

Oh How Superior...

...are we?
European affairs are still the domain of a minority of well-informed and alert people, who understand the interdependence and interaction between politics and issues at EU level and national level. Attitudes are passive and they change slowly.

Then there are the flat-earthers who actively keep digging deeper trenches, exemplified by EUReferendum.
With arrogance like that Grahnlaw could almost be a rugby fan.

3 comments:

  1. Well-informed minorities were at the forefront of the Enlightenment as they are today in European affairs. This is more a statement of fact than an expression of arrogance.

    However, improving the European Union may be a more constructive attitude than severing the ties and leaving only an abstract love of Europe.

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  2. Anyone who knows anything about anything can claim to be in a 'well-informed minority'. Car mechanics, botanists, people who know the secret of a great pasta sauce ad infinitum.

    You choose to compare the EU clique with the leaders of the Enlightenment because it is a flattering comparison. A more accurate one would be the Bolshevik regime in the old Soviet Union which, like the EU, was largely ignored or hated by the population and, like the EU, was comprised of people who believed they were at the forefront of a great leap forward in human society.

    The people who are against the EU, or at least this country's membership of the EU, are also a well-informed minority. We actually try to read the treaties and the laws, and the more informed we become, the more we oppose the EU.

    I don't want to improve the EU, because, as a member of the informed minority, I know it cannot be improved. It is the way it is, because it was always intended to be this way. I know what the founders wanted, and I don't want my country to be part of it.

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  3. Well-informed minorities were at the forefront of the enlightenment

    I don't dispute this as a fact, but instead dispute that you've used it to argue that only those that are well-informed support the EU. In doing so you’ve clearly implied that anyone who doesn't cannot be well-informed; i.e. are basically ignorant. Thus the arrogant observation. In short; “Enlightenment = the EU”.

    The juxtaposition of your observations against one post from Dr Richard North with this added comment; 'flat-earthers' makes your intentions very clear, and by doing so also questions North's intellectual abilities at the same time (whatever you may think of the tone of some of his posts).

    Your comment that; “However, improving the European Union may be a more constructive attitude than severing the ties and leaving only an abstract love of Europe.”, reinforces your initial views that suggests that anyone who argues otherwise must be anything other than moderate.

    It is not unconstructive to argue that the EU should not exist or that the UK should leave. One man’s constructive is another’s destructive. The EU is designed not to be democratic: that’s the whole point and it makes no secret of this.

    Therefore I do not see the point in trying to reform it or why anyone that argues against the whole concept is apparently not 'enlightened'.

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