Light On Dark Water

An Interesting Brexit Reaction

From Damon Linker. Surely he exaggerates in saying that progressive beliefs have been "shattered," but they certainly have been shocked and challenged. 

But I suspect Angela Merkel is the real catalyst behind the outcome of the UK referendum. Not only did the German chancellor insist on admitting well over a million refugees and migrants from the Greater Middle East into the heart of Europe. Supporters of the policy have also made it clear on numerous occasions that they consider racism and xenophobia to be the only possible grounds for opposing her stand…. Merkel's grand progressive-humanitarian gesture has backfired badly — rekindling and potentially intensifying the very nationalistic solidarity that progressives once hoped the EU would dissolve or erase.

I wonder, too, about the influence of Mr. Obama's little jaunt across the ocean to instruct the British, in his distinctively condescending way, about the foolishness of leaving the EU. No way to measure that, I suppose. Rudy Guiliani shocked a lot of people a while back by opining that Obama does not love America:

“I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America,” Giuliani said during the dinner at the 21 Club, a former Prohibition-era speakeasy in midtown Manhattan. “He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.”

It was a very harsh thing to say. But I think Guiliani is basically correct, as the famous "bitter clingers" remarks suggested. And I think Obama's basic view of Americans–that most of us are primitive, bigoted, superstitious creatures in need of general enlightenment and particularly in need of constant policing to prevent the spasms of mindless violence to which we are naturally prone–is similar to that of European progressives toward many or most of their countrymen, though I suppose all would agree that Americans are the worst.

Maclin Horton

80 responses to “An Interesting Brexit Reaction”

  1. Stu

    I wait all day for you to post something because I’m bored and I hate writing anything on Facebook. But then I’m in general disagreement with you, so I hate to be upsetting. But not so much in disagreement that I feel strongly about it. Let’s just say that I stand with Obama and the “Hag Chancellor”. With that said I do think that the British have a right to be out of the EU if they want, and I’m not sure I love America so much myself, but I’m an American and want the best for its people. It is fun to think that the past eight years has been all about destroying America – the evil Obama plot!

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  2. Mac

    Ah, well, sorry to disappoint. Re-reading that post I think I might need to tweak it a bit. The love I’m talking about is a gut-level thing that I think comes naturally to most people in any country–just the natural love for one’s native land. And in this country it’s also bound up with love for the American ideal (which I think gets rather twisted sometimes, but that’s another topic). I know American progressives who do seem to have that, though it seems to coexist with enormous disdain, sometimes hatred, for much of the country’s past and present.
    But I just don’t get the feeling that Obama does. My supposition is that because of his background and the circumstances of his youth, it didn’t happen. Maybe he has a genuine love for what he sees as the promise of the American ideal, but for the actual existing country? I’m doubtful.
    As for a plot to destroy America–no, he just wants to “fundamentally transform” it. That’s not the language one uses about something one loves. That’s different from saying you want to fix the things that are wrong.

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  3. Mac

    And regarding the EU question: obviously reasonable people can differ about the wisdom of staying or going. It’s the apocalyptic reaction that’s so strange. As Peter Hitchens said, “acting as if we’d gone Nazi overnight.”

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  4. Art Deco

    Jimmy Carter could be an abrasive scold and George McGovern given to inanities. At the same time, Carter was (for a time) a navy professional and always quite invested in his home turf. McGovern was a combat veteran of the Army Air Corps. Per J. Bottom, he owned property in South Dakota to the end of his life and took fishing excursions there. Michael Dukakis lives in the suburban town he grew up in; except for his schooling and a stint in the military, he’s never lived anywhere else.
    Michael Dukakis’ parents were exotic to a degree (his mother undercut some of his chatter about a Greek upbringing “we were living an American life”), but otherwise local burgesses of a familiar type. Same deal with McGovern’s parents and Carter’s.
    BO’s mother spent much of her adult life abroad and conducted herself from her adolescent years in such a manner as to suggest her life was a series of efforts by a drab and unattractive woman to establish herself as someone Special. His father was largely a fiction; someone his mother was palpably acquainted with for less than a year and someone who spent all of 9 weeks in the same city as her son. To the extent BO is from anywhere, he’s a child of Honolulu’s haolie society, which has some well-established families but mostly consisted at that time of people like his grandfather who abandoned their home turf for the climate. (Honolulu is one ticky-tacky town). He hasn’t lived there at all since 1982, preferring the shambles that was New York in that era. Obama is also an intelligent man who reminds you that intelligence per se is over-rated.

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  5. Art Deco

    There are some Youtubes up derived from the White House tapes recorded in 1971, 1972, and 1973. You get to hear Pat Nixon’s amiable chatter with her husband and her daughters and it hits you that this crew actually liked each other. With the Obamas, I’ve always had the impression that each was a trophy spouse to the other. The media leave the daughters alone, a courtesy not offered to Amy Carter or the Bush girls, so who knows about them.

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  6. Stu

    With Hillary as the presumptive next president it would be fun to hear more of your take on the Clintons, Art! I know you are (not) a big fan. 🙂 I won’t bother to defend them, but I think anyone is better than The Donald. Jesse Ventura for President!

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  7. Janet

    I would absolutely vote for Jesse Ventura in this race.
    AMDG

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  8. Art Deco

    With Hillary as the presumptive next president
    Partisan Democrats live in a bubble.

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  9. Mac

    Are you implying that you think Trump can win? I can’t see it myself. But then I had a lot of trouble seeing him getting very far in the primaries.
    You said something about Obama’s relation to American black culture that stuck with me: “He married into it.” If the guy weren’t president and doing harm to the country, I’d feel sorry for him.
    My impression of his mother–and impression is absolutely all it is–is that she was likely a type one sees in universities and university towns: an American, usually female, who seems to derive some sort of cachet from spending a lot of time with “international” (formerly “foreign”) students. Maybe in part because she doesn’t fit in all that well with the natives (which I can certainly relate to). At any rate it seems that BHO’s father victimized her to some degree.

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  10. Grumpy

    Indeed Art D, do you think Trump can win?

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  11. Marianne

    I remember seeing this photo of the child Obama and his father and finding the way the little boy was holding onto his father’s hand very sad. That lack of a father he so desperately wanted had to be awful for him, and perhaps influenced him more than anything else.

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  12. Mac

    My wife read his autobiography and had a similar impression.

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  13. Art Deco

    Per Rothenberg, Trump is favored in states with 191 electoral votes, Hellary in states with 221 votes. HRC has an advantage in the remainder, but they’re competitive. Election’s not for four months, and she’s usual separated from him in national polls by single digits. Why would anyone think she has this in the bag?

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  14. Janet

    I agree. I think he’s going to win.
    AMDG

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  15. Art Deco

    My impression of his mother–and impression is absolutely all it is–is that she was likely a type one sees in universities and university towns: an American, usually female, who seems to derive some sort of cachet from spending a lot of time with “international” (formerly “foreign”) students. Maybe in part because she doesn’t fit in all that well with the natives (which I can certainly relate to). At any rate it seems that BHO’s father victimized her to some degree.
    Her father was a restless man who kept yanking his family from one locus to another, looking for a better situation. They never stayed anyplace longer than 5 years. Then, she finishes high school, and he contrives another move – to Honolulu. Vocationally, it worked out better for Madelyn than for her husband. She’d displaced him as the primary earner. That, and age, is I will guess why they both died in Honolulu, a city to which they were strangers until they were around 50.
    There previous place of residence was an exurb of Seattle. She was intelligent, and that’s about it. People who knew her in Seattle said she contrived to do things to make herself distinctive (like proclaiming herself an atheist).
    The University of Washington is a fine public university and regarded congenially by the locals. The University of Hawaii, as late as 1978 and perhaps still, was treated as a joke by locals. Stanley Armour Willy Loman Dunham took her away from what friends she was able to make in their five years there and took her away from the best opportunity an unattractive lower-middle class girl is likely to have. He did so to take a job selling furniture, as if there were not furniture stores in Seattle or Tacoma. Didn’t work out. He ended up semi-employed selling insurance out of his apartment while Madelyn was promoted through the ranks at the Bank of Hawaii.
    Madelyn Dunham (b. 1922) seems from the description of her a type you still saw in that cohort but perhaps more common among women half a generation older. Outside the house, asperity was her default. Inside the house, according to people who knew her, deferential to her husband, even though he seems the sort you’d roll your eyes at. For whatever reason, they had one child. That’s not the best bargaining position to be in if your kid’s a problem.
    She had one thing she could do that most girls of her cohort (attractive or no) would not do, and that was put out. And who’s there to take her up on the offer but an unscrupulous foreign student with a wife (and children) at home. He was 6 years her senior, but it’s not as if she could not and did not have skeezy objects of her own. Gov. Abercrombie, who knew them all at the time, has reminisced as if there were the beginnings of a family life there, but one’s best guess retrospectively was that she was just a shag to BO Sr, to be shucked off at the earliest opportunity. I’ll wager he married her to keep the immigration authorities off his back, or the bursar off his back, or because Neil Abercrombie and others made it clear that his standing depended on not abandoning her.
    You’ll notice that Ann Dunham had her mother, her father, and her 2d husband cleaning up after her until she was 37 years old and was 50 when she finally completed her schooling. The cleaning up began in 1961, when they had to swallow an unplanned pregnancy perpetrated by an African student (at a time when only a single digit share of whites and blacks were willing to tell the pollster that they approved of miscegenation).
    Ann Dunham took the baby and moved to Seattle in September 1961, an oddly willful act. BO Sr. finished his degree in May of 1963 and headed off to Harvard, having refused a fellowship at the New School for Social Research which would have allowed him to maintain Ann and the baby. He married someone else. Coincident with that, Harvard tired of him, awarded him and MA and expelled him from the graduate program.

    Ann Dunham returned to Honolulu in 1963 and finished her degree while serving papers on BO Sr. She married another foreign student, a good natured man named Lolo Soetero who was willing to take on her excess baggage. She follows him back to Indonesia, is able to find work on the staff of some NGO, and has another child. She would not consent to any more, which damaged her marriage. She goes back to Honolulu for four years, then heads out to Indonesia again to do anthropological fieldwork, leaving BO with her parents. She’s eventually divorced from Lolo Soetero, who married someone else willing to give him more children.

    My reaction to his mother is that she persuades me to appreciate my own mother better. By the time I knew her and her contemporaries, they were nearly middle aged and reconciled to the world in which they lived. It was a less child-centered world than we have today, but it was child-centered enough and perhaps optimally child-centered.
    As for his father, the man was stupefying in his self-centeredness, in his sense of his prerogative, in his malignant pride. It did not injure his son all that much, because his son was never around him.
    Did you catch how, as his mother lay dying of cancer in Honolulu, BO was at the Million Man March in Washington? Vigilantly self-centered women do not commonly beget affectionate children.
    I suspect BO’s capacity to have anything but superficial and pro forma dealings with others is pretty minimal. Mooch has been willing to settle.

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  16. Art Deco

    I remember seeing this photo of the child Obama and his father and finding the way the little boy was holding onto his father’s hand very sad. That lack of a father he so desperately wanted had to be awful for him, and perhaps influenced him more than anything else.
    I believe BO has offered an account of that visit and admitted that after 5 weeks, he was pleased to see the back of papa.
    I suspect for most of my (male) contemporaries, your father was part of the architecture, someone you were dependent upon (not thinking about it too much), but not someone with whom you had affectionate dealings. I’ve heard it said that fathers and sons grow closer as they grow older, and I believe that’s true for most.

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  17. Mac

    ” she contrived to do things to make herself distinctive (like proclaiming herself an atheist).”
    Yeah, that fits, too. And–spiritual but not religious! Yay!
    I know and respect a lot of people who have that vaguely defined spirituality. But I’m really sick of having it presented with the suggestion that it’s somehow brave and unconventional.
    Well, she’s got an endowed chair in the anthropology dept at U Hawaii.
    I don’t necessarily think Hillary has the election in the bag in the sense that she has a definite large and measurable lead. I just have the impression that Trump’s support maxed out a while back and is not likely to grow again.

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  18. Janet

    Well, that may be, but I long ago gave up the notion that there is anything predictable about this election.
    AMDG

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  19. Grumpy

    I am not a Trumpkin, and think that he is a desperately bad candidate for the GOP. But I would rather Trump were president than Hilary. I mean that in the ‘if someone put a gun at your head and forced you to vote for one or the other’ kind of sense. I don’t think I could have said this a week ago. The past six days have reminded me how deeply I dislike the liberal elite.

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  20. Mac

    Given the gun-at-the-head choice, I’d vote for Trump, too. We know what Hillary is and how she would operate, whereas Trump is a wild card. But my vote is pretty much irrelevant since I live in a very heavily Republican state.

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  21. Stu

    Living in the same heavily Republican state in which Mac resides I will happily cast my vote for a 3rd party candidate, and hope one day those might actually be viable in our republic.

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  22. Grumpy

    Yes, exactly. We know for certain that Hilary will make dreadful Supreme Court Nominations. We do not have certainty about that with Trump.

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  23. Grumpy

    Stu, I was thinking until this week that I would vote Libertarian, if I was an American, or Green. I know those are crazily different, but there’s things in the Green platform I agree with. And things in the Libertarian platform, though I’m sorry they nominated Johnson (all the parties chose dreadful candidates this year). But as of Thursday, I’m feeling like, *I do not want the people who tried, and are still trying, to prevent Brexit to be in power. Anywhere. In. the World.’

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  24. Janet

    I think that we can also be pretty sure that Hilary will be much worse for the Church.
    AMDG

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  25. Rob G

    “The past six days have reminded me how deeply I dislike the liberal elite.”
    I’ve just run across this book, by a veteran of Polish anti-Communism and current member of the European parliament, which appears to deal somewhat with the rule of the elites. It will be interesting to see what a non-American conservative has to say about these things.
    https://www.encounterbooks.com/books/the-demon-in-democracy-totalitarian-temptations-in-free-societies/

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  26. Art Deco

    And things in the Libertarian platform, though I’m sorry they nominated Johnson (all the parties chose dreadful candidates this year).
    Ann Coulter, the rude syndicated columnist, thought she’d run for Congress to knock out Christopher Shays, Congress’ most liberal Republican. So, she meets with members of the local Libertarian Party. The meeting didn’t go well, “I discovered the only thing they gave a damn about were the drug laws”.
    That’s likely the modal sort of libertarian. One thing that ought to be an issue for Libertarians is the demise of freedom of contract and association, a particular problem now re the machinations of the gay lobby and their lawfare artists. Running a business, unlike sitting in your basement sucking on a bong, is something adults do, so it does not get libertarian juices flowing. Gary Johnson, while pushing for free trade in street drugs, favors giving lawyers the tools to harass bakers, presumably because he absorbs the attitudes of his class and the libertarian principle does not penetrate below the second layer of his epidermis. Stick a fork in him.
    The faculty types like Alex Tabarrok are worse than Gary Johnson. They chuffer about occupational licensure, they hate cops, they tell you they’ll ‘miss’ Obama, and they offer not one single observation that will lead to an awkward conversation in the faculty rathskellar.

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  27. Grumpy

    Yeah, I know you are right. They care about the drug laws, not about laws which overwhelm businesses with red tape. Its just my inner 21 one year old really would prefer Libertarian to anything else. I had hopes for Aaron Petersen getting the nomination.

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  28. Louise

    I actually think the question of Britain’s independence is an important one. I know there are British people in favour of remaining in the EU (which may be what happens in the end, since parliament is clearly in no rush to implement an exit) whose views I respect, but so far I’ve not heard any compelling reason to change my mind. Both campaigns were awful as far as I can tell.
    I have a strong intuition that – independence itself aside, which I favour – it would be easier for the impossible to happen if Britain leaves the EU: the impossible being the conversion of England.
    Again, it’s just an intuition, but I think the conversion (humanly impossible, but God specialises in such things) of England would be the beginning of the rolling back of secularism and protestantism etc in the whole of Western civilisation.
    For all our societies, imo, it is conversion, or the abyss.

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  29. Louise

    As appalling as the Trump and Hillary thing is, to me it’s just a sideshow of freaks.
    Australian politics means almost nothing to me now.
    For me, it’s all about Britain and Holy Mother Church.

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  30. Grumpy

    yes, Louise, let’s pray that UK Independence happens and that it is the beginning of the conversion of GB.
    We are the people of England and we have spoken.
    There is of course no certainty that it will happen. But one reason for the tardiness is simply that Cameron did not instruct the civil service to prepare contingency plans for a Brexit. This was utterly irresponsible, especially given that the two campaigns were neck and neck throughout. He was so certain that Remain would win that the Civil service had nothing ready to ‘roll out’ on Friday. It is said that Johnson and Grove should have had a ‘plan’ but they were leaders of one of the four ‘leave’ campaigns, not leaders of her majesty’s government. They could not instruct the civil service to draw up contingency plans for a Brexit. Only that fat pigface Cameron could have done so.
    Cameron found time, one week before the Referendum, to take ot a mortgage on a new house.

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  31. Louise

    Cameron is useless and will always find time to look after his own interests. Peter Hitchens asserts that Cameron never expected to win the 2015 election outright, but even hoped to win minority gov’t, which would enable him to be liberal while pretending to be conservative. He never intended to be able to honour his promise of a referendum.

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  32. Louise

    I really don’t know if Johnson and Gove believe in British independence. They ought to have had some kind of plan. Arguably, they ought to be clamouring for a general election.

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  33. Mac

    I’m very busy today and don’t have time to say much. But one quick note about the Liberterians: I could conceivably vote for their guy as a protest against our metastasized central govt. But I agree that they are hopeless as a serious alternative. One of their candidates said something like “I support the right of gay married couples to defend their marijuana fields with machine guns.” Which made me laugh, but certainly suggests that he should be nowhere near power.

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  34. Grumpy

    No, I don’t agree they ought to have had a plan. They were not running for office – when a party runs for office, it has a manifesto, and says what it wants to do. Gove and Johnson were one of four Leave campaigns. They were seeking a ‘Leave’ answer to the question, ‘should we leave or remain in the EU’. It was not in the mandate of referendum campaigners to make plans for what happens afterward. Neither of them had the authority to tell the civil service to draw up a shadow, continengy plan for Brexit and without parlez-vous with the civil service, they couldn’t draw up such a plan. They would not have had the resources. Only the PM had such resources.
    There were four separate Leave campaigns. There was a leftwing one with Labour MPs like Gisela Stuart in it, there was the Tory Leave campaign (the official Leave campaign, with Gove and Johnson), there was the unofficial UKIP campaign, and there were some oddballs like Christopher Booker, obsessed about the ‘Norwegian Arrangement.’ I happened to google Leave Campaign on the Sunday before the Referendum and they’ve all got their own websites.
    So what says Louise? Well, with four groups in favour of leaving, they couldn’t have a policy. They all wanted different things AS A GOAL and result of leaving. The left campaign wanted none of that – what’s it called TTTP thing, which the EU looks set to sign. The oddballs wanted this Norwegian arrangement. UKIP wanted no more immigration. The official Leave campaign said it was all about democracy. They could politely distance themselves from each other, but they could not be at really open logger-heads, or they would have lost their ability to get their own set of voters / interest groups into the ballot box on June 23. Leave won because it had these four different interest groups. The minute one had a policy, which indicated the goals or desired outcomes of leaving (ie, said what democracy will be ‘for’), the unanimity would be gone, and Leave would have lost. We could not afford to piss off any single of the four interest groups, even the 15 thousand or so people following Christian Booker.

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  35. Louise

    Well, referenda are unconstitutional anyhow, aren’t they? It does look like you have a constitutional crisis. The people have voted ‘Leave’ and Cameron, or parliament, look like they will do nothing. That’s a problem. I was only saying Gove and Johnson and others should have had some kind of idea about what could perhaps be done in the event of a ‘Leave’ vote – even if just a plan to pressure Cameron to do whatever needed to be done. I do understand that the various leaders of the campaigns have no authority to do much.
    What, if anything, can be done now, do you think?

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  36. Art Deco

    I cannot imagine what a ‘plan’ would incorporate. Perhaps something like an insurance binder for EU law not incorporated into British law, with staggered expiration dates on various components. I imagine there are co-operative arrangements to work out with EU customs inspectors and the common Frontier agency. I don’t recall any disasters when the Czech lands and Slovakia separated. It seems to me the agreement took about 4 months to implement.

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  37. Louise

    “I support the right of gay married couples to defend their marijuana fields with machine guns.”
    Ok, that’s funny.

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  38. Art Deco

    Cameron found time, one week before the Referendum, to take ot a mortgage on a new house.
    And it’s a good thing too. He’s losing his primary residence. I imagine SamCam reviewed all the paperwork and brought him in to put his John Henry on it.
    SamCam still has some association with her old employer and he worked for a broadcasting company for about seven years, including the 1st five years they were married, so they’ve known something other than politics. Might be sweet for them if they just got out of dodge and enjoyed a quiet life. The last 4 PMs have left parliament within a few years of leaving the cabinet rather than hang around the way they used to.

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  39. Art Deco

    One of their candidates said something like “I support the right of gay married couples to defend their marijuana fields with machine guns.”
    Then he dropped his trousers, right?

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  40. Grumpy

    The funniest part is the break up of the UK scenario which was all over the press on Friday and Saturday. Scotland was all set to hold a second referendum on Scottish independence as a result of the Leave vote. Then today and yesterday Nicola Sturgeon, the leader of the SNP in Scotland went to Brussels and none of the Brussels leaders wanted to give her the time of day. The Spanish told her firmly that in the event of a second referendum leading to Scottish independence, Scotland would have to renegotiate its place within the EU and it would take years. Spain does not want Catalonia and the Basques going off at a tangent! Nearly every country in the EU has some region which wants its independence. None of them want to encourage this!
    But the morning after the vote to Leave the EU, we Leavers were told we had broken up the EU.

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  41. Grumpy

    Well, with any luck we have broken up the EU! But we have not, as we were told we had done, broken up the UK. Because the EU leaders don’t want to subsidize an independent Scotland. Germany does not want another Greece on its hands.

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  42. Grumpy

    I read this in The Telegraph’s iPhone app and thought you’d like to read it:
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/29/nicola-sturgeons-hopes-of-keeping-scotland-in-eu-dashed-by-spani/

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  43. Mac

    What do you think about the situation of Northern Ireland? I know some people there (on the unionist/British/Protestant side). NI voted Remain, of course and they are upset and worried. I can’t recall any of the U.S. commentators over the past few months even mentioning it.

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  44. Mac

    “Then he dropped his trousers, right?”
    I don’t know if it was the same guy or not, but reportedly someone did.

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  45. Grumpy

    I think its the same as Scotland, Mac. Everyone said it was the four horses of the apocalypse, but the EU doesn’t want ‘Northern Ireland’ as an EU member state. It would be a total basketcase.

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  46. Mac

    The fears I’ve heard expressed had more to do with relations with the Republic. Having NI out and the Republic in will make relations more difficult at the day-to-day practical level. And there’s a fear of more serious tensions following on that.

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  47. Grumpy

    The South of Ireland is totally secular. Its filled with Poles not ITA men. The journalist literally told me about a pub he used to go to on the border to meet IRA guys. It’s now run by people from Eastern Europe. And in addition to that of very large number of people in the south would tather like to get out of the EU themselces

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  48. Mac

    The last bit of that Telegraph piece touches on a bit NI-I question: “the benefits of the common travel area.” I must say, reading that article and others, it seems like the UK is going to be experiencing some serious internal tension. Scotland or a large part of it is surely going to feel trapped and resentful.
    Here’s a Guardian piece that goes into some of the worries (sent to me by one of the worried).

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  49. Grumpy

    As one of my Scottish students wrote on his FB last week, with some justified exasperation, ‘in 2014 Scotland voted to stay in the UK. In 2016 the UK voted to leave the EU.’
    Scotland is not an independent country with its own opinion about the EU. And that is by its own people’s choice, in 2014.

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  50. Grumpy

    The EU boffins lnow that full well, which is why the EU leaders would not give Sturgeon the time of day.

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  51. Grumpy

    Do you aporeciate that Scotlands only independent source of wealth was oil? Which is now selling at under 50$ a barrel? Do youhink the Germans want to pay for another Greece? Do you think they want to take over subsidizing Scotland from England?

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  52. Mac

    I don’t really have an opinion on any of that, I’m just watching. Rational or not, a lot of Scots seem to be upset. So it seems like another attempt to bolt would interest them.

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  53. Art Deco

    Nearly every country in the EU has some region which wants its independence. None of them want to encourage this!
    The regional parties of consequence are in Galicia, the Basque Country, Catalonia, Flanders, Wallonia, Scotland, Ulster, Wales, Bavaria, Transylvania, and the northeast of Italy. Not all of them are secessionist. It’s a problem for Spain, Belgium, Britain, and, in a way, Roumania and Germany. Belgium’s a non-country and would do well to break up.

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  54. Art Deco

    the EU leaders would not give Sturgeon the time of day.
    Seceding from Britain and then turning around and submitting to Brussels is unclear on the concept. Sturgeon’s a tool.

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  55. Grumpy

    Assasrrrgg

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  56. Marianne

    I’ve now read that linked Damon Linker piece. One of the things that caught my eye is this:

    Hegel’s greatest 20th-century student, Alexandre Kojève, pushed even further, to propose that mankind was on the cusp of establishing a “universal, homogeneous state” in which all of humanity’s desires would be recognized and fulfilled.

    Did he actually say that out loud to people? If so, what was the reaction?
    Both Linker’s article and Kojève’s Wikipedia entry indicate he had a great deal of influence in the formation of the European Common Market. Wikipedia says he also may have been a KGB spy for 30 years. If so, just perfect.

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  57. Grumpy

    Even Maritain wrote an idiotic book advocating world government in the early 1950s. It was the high point of 20th century scholastic rationalism, and the EU was one of the products of that rationalism.
    Gilson wrote a brilliant book mocking Maritain’s claims, called The Metamorphoses of the City of God.

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  58. Mac

    Contemplating the wars of the first half of the 20th c, I can see why the idea was appealing, and for that matter still is to a lot of people. Especially as the last one ended with nuclear war as a very possible next step.
    I’m pretty sure that within the next thirty years or so the breakup of the U.S. is going to start looking like a possibility. Secessionist movements are going to get more serious.

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  59. Art Deco

    The culture manifest in Traub’s article (and which I’m confronted with re the academic-professional types in my family) is incompatible with democratic institutions. It’s manifest in the judiciary and associated lawfare artists. How do you get out from under Anthony Kennedy? Secede, and dare the twit in the White House to try to use federal troops.
    The liberal sites I’ve participated in (before they ban me) are clueless about every dimension of this.

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  60. Art Deco

    I don’t really have an opinion on any of that, I’m just watching. Rational or not, a lot of Scots seem to be upset. So it seems like another attempt to bolt would interest them.
    Tell ’em don’t let the door hit your ass on your way out. Particularist movements are an obstacle national politics has to steer around. The Scottish National Party has sufficient support to reliably disrupt the process of forming ministries. Either this dies down or the rest of Britain will be on a treadmill of begging from the Scots. Tell them they’ve been accommodated (noting that England gets no regional governments at all) and if it’s not enough for them, go hang. Sturgeon’s blather makes plain elites and populace re in the business of maintaining contradictory thoughts in their head. Scroom.

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  61. Grumpy

    The vote against independence in 2014 was clise on 55/45 against. Many Scots dislike the Union but they know that Scotland is not econically viable as an autonous state

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  62. Art Deco

    The vote against independence in 2014 was clise on 55/45 against. Many Scots dislike the Union but they know that Scotland is not econically viable as an autonous state
    They know no such thing. New Zealand’s not a member of any supranational bloc. It has a smaller population and smaller output than Scotland. Auckland’s no larger than Glasgow. New Zealand has a full service bourse and cities of Auckland’s size in the States readily host both research universities and university hospital complexes.
    The problem is their political class, which exhibits the social anxieties of much of the voting public in Scotland (which, to be fair, are likely no worse than their Irish counterparts). .

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  63. Grumpy

    The only major export Scotland had was its oil, and as I said above, that is now worth very little.

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  64. Art Deco

    Per the British Office for National Statistics, the catch-all “Agriculture, Mining, and Utilities” accounts for 7.6% of the value added in Scotland. If the agricultural sector and the utilities sector are as consequential as they are in the US, that wold leave about 4.5% accounted for by mining. I’d say there were other things being produced there than oil.
    ONS does not, as far as I can tell, have export data for Scotland alone. The Scottish government contends they exported to England and the rest of the world 76 bn pounds of merchandise and non-factor services, of which 5 bn pounds consisted of the issue of the mining and quarrying sector. They’ve got other irons in the fire.

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  65. Grumpy

    You didn’t answer the question. Why is Aberdeen in serious financial trouble if it has all these other sources of income?

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  66. Art Deco

    Why is Aberdeen in serious financial trouble if it has all these other sources of income?
    1. Journalists routinely sensationalize problems for readership and because they don’t know their ass from their elbow.
    2. Politicians exploit this tendency to soften up public opposition to tax hikes and such.
    3. Public finance in Scotland may have been overly reliant on severance taxes, because it’s easy money from a politicians’ perspective.
    4. Students of Alex Salmond and the SNP have described it as a Peronist free-s*** coalition. To the extent that’s the case, they’re going to have an unlimited appetite to feed clientele with the fruits of others labour. Hence, budget deficits (and a resistance to doing aught but accounting tricks to close them).

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  67. Grumpy

    I gave y ou those newspaper articles to read because you do not have any direct knowledge of the city. I lived in Aberdeen for fifteen years, I have a dozen friends there and two dozen acquaintances, and I can tell you that the city is in serious financial trouble.

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  68. Art Deco

    I have a dozen friends there and two dozen acquaintances, and I can tell you that the city is in serious financial trouble.
    Lots of places are in financial trouble. Mismanagement takes a toll, mistaken decisions over capital projects take a toll, intrametropolitan migration takes a toll, l/t decline of the economy of the metropolitan region takes a toll. Does not make the territory they nestle in ‘non-viable’, nor does it make that territory a petro-state a la Kuwait. Utica’s been demographically stagnant for 90 years and saw the relative income levels of the metropolitan region undergo a slow decline (vis a vis the state as a whole) lasting nearly 30 years. That indicates Utica’s kind of a sad place. Doesn’t say much about the rest of the state.

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  69. Art Deco

    I gave y ou those newspaper articles to read
    Which ones?

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  70. Grumpy

    I posted half a dozen newspaper articles about Aberdeen. It’s not in trouble because of financial mismanagement. It’s in trouble because all of its economy turns on oil.

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  71. Paul

    I find the idea of Merkel as a “progressive” slightly humorous.

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  72. Mac

    Depends on who you’re comparing her to, I guess. She certainly seems to be have the progressive view on immigration.

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  73. Paul

    That we have a duty to take in refugees from war zones? I would hope that view is not held only by progressives.

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  74. Art Deco

    This report
    http://www.aberdeencity.gov.uk/nmsruntime/saveasdialog.asp?lID=51860&sID=3365
    Contends that 22% of gross value added in 2010 in Aberdeen City & Shire was accounted for by mining and quarrying. The area’s abnormally dependent on that industry. About 86% of the gross value added in Scotland is not added in Aberdeen City and Shire.
    I’m not understanding how Scotland is ‘non-viable’ because Aberdeen’s experiencing economic shocks.

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  75. Mac

    Sure, plenty of other people, probably most people, hold that view, as you state it, Paul. But it doesn’t seem to be an adequate description of what Merkel did. Too many, too quickly, with too little regard for the impact. And by many accounts too many who weren’t really legitimate refugees from war zones.

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  76. Art Deco

    That we have a duty to take in refugees from war zones? I would hope that view is not held only by progressives
    The refugees can be cared for in Turkey and Jordan with a view toward their eventual repatriation. Inviting the young men among them (with a mess of young men from miscellaneous loci) to resettle in Europe is asking for trouble. Attempting to impose quotas on countries like Hungary which never wanted this flash mob is imperious in the extreme.

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  77. Paul

    Neither imperiousness nor impetuosity make her a progressive.

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  78. Mac

    Actually I think imperiousness is very much a characteristic of today’s progressives, although it isn’t part of the definition, and can just as well be manifested in their opponents. It certainly is in this country.
    But anyway I think the important point here is not so much whether Merkel herself fits the category, as that removing as many restrictions on immigration as possible is something that progressives in general favor.

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  79. Grumpy

    Mac, could you take a look in your spam bin and see if my original response to Art Deco, quoting a number of newspaper reports, ended up in there?

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  80. Mac

    No, sorry, there’s nothing in there at all. Don’t know what happened. I remember thinking, when you mentioned (7/1) having posted a number of articles, that I must have missed it.

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