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Megan McArdle on Brexit — 19 Comments

  1. Ace of Spades (blogger Y Not) repeats Greg Gutfelds comments regarding all the pearl clutching over the Brexit vote and impending disaster while Venezuela is actually in free fall as we speak. A quote from Tim Worstall of the Adam Smith Institute sums it up perfectly:

    Venezuela has been held up for years as a glorious example of what socialism could do for a country. And of course now we can still hold up Venezuela as a glorious example of what socialism can do for a country. Which is, if current reports are to be believed, manage to create actual famine in a middle income country.

  2. That’s the problem with the socialist utopia. The wretched ingrates don’t appreciate it and flee if you let them. That’s why the socialist workers paradise had a big fence around it and people that tried to leave were shot.

  3. The other thing that amazes me about the Brexit vote is that the establishment (supposedly our progressive moral superiors) have essentially become the modern day equivalent of George III.

    How dare these upstarts claim their own sovereignty and exit the “utopia” that we have dutifully provided. (/sarc off)

    This may well prove to be Great Britain’s 1776. Bully for them.

  4. Goo piece by McArdle. Don’t know that it will get through to many of the Bloomberg readers, but it’s good stuff.

    Journalists and academics seemed to feel that they had not made it sufficiently clear that people who oppose open borders are a bunch of racist rubes who couldn’t count to 20 with their shoes on…

    I am not a fan of David Cameron, but he at least had the smarts or class or whatever not to do that. Maybe that’s part of why he was able to rise as high as he did.

  5. It’s difficult to see what the Brits are really giving up in leaving the EU. Years ago they had to contribute huge sums to prop up French Farmers (the CAP Common Agricultural Policy). Britain is outside of Schengen (as is Ireland) so Brits need a passport to travel. They are not in the Euro so no loss. Yes young Brits can move to anywhere in the EU and work, but so can French move to London to escape the crappy french economy. In either case you basically are a permanent resident, with privileges on health insurance etc, but cannot vote. As for trade barriers, the UK economy is larger than France so obviously the others need to trade with them. With some energetic diplomates suitable trade treaties can be done quickly.

    I often tell my french colleagues that they should study US history, specifically the history of the Articles of Confederation and then the US Constitution. But since they insist that the US Revolution owed a lot to the French Revolution (even though the US one was years earlier than the French) there is not much hope there. Had they done so they would have seen the difficulties of having a union without full franchise and political integration. Fools

  6. What I find especially grating is the elitist “Remain” crowd thinking they just hadn’t explained it properly to the rubes on the “Leave” side. No, it was explained quite well. The “Leaves” knew the arguments, and did.not.agree. I’ve met a lot of these elitist types in my travels, and their smugness in their own beliefs usually results in no space between their ears for the merits of dissenting opinions. Serves them right.

  7. I’ve had to stop reading my Facebook because of the nonsense being spewed by close relatives who are deeply upset by the result.

  8. A quick primer on why the Brexit is good.
    (H/T American Digest)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzNj-hH8LkY

    According to Daniel Hannan, the UK has no trade agreements with India and Australia in spite of years of negotiating through the EU. Does that make sense? Also, the EU’s GDP is shrinking along with Antarctica – the only two economies in the world. Those two points alone are sound arguments for leaving.

  9. Funny, remember how the Leftists used to howl with indignation whenever anyone questioned their nonexistent “patriotism”?

    When I was in elementary school, we all read “Man Without a Country.” It made a huge impression on us all. Now? well, you know what I mean.

    The Leftists have relabeled patriotism “nationalism” and made that a dirty word. As is their wont, the conservative pundit-wallahs have unthinkingly adopted the Leftwing nomenclature (this dreadful habit drives me nuts, and has a LOT to do with why we lose so many arguments in the citizen’s eyes).

  10. What is meant by the modern term referred to as ‘POLITICAL CORRECTNESS’.. The definition is found in 4 telegrams at the Truman Library and Museum in Independence, Missouri. The following are copies of four telegrams between President Harry Truman and Gen Douglas MacArthur on the day before the actual signing of the WWII Surrender Agreement in September 1945.. The contents of those four telegrams below are exactly as received at the end of the war – not a word has been added or deleted! I did have to modify one word so it would be allowed on these boards.

    (1) Tokyo, Japan 0800-September 1,1945 To: President Harry S Truman From: General D A MacArthur Tomorrow we meet with those yellow-bellied bastards and sign the Surrender Documents, any last minute instructions?

    (2) Washington, D C 1300-September 1, 1945 To: D A MacArthur From: H S Truman Congratulations, job well done, but you must tone down your obvious dislike of the Japanese when discussing the terms of the surrender with the press, because some of your remarks are fundamentally not politically correct!

    (3) Tokyo, Japan 1630-September 1, 1945 To: H S Truman From: D A MacArthur and C H Nimitz Wilco Sir, but both Chester and I are somewhat confused, exactly what does the term politically correct mean?

    (4) Washington, D C 2120-September 1, 1945 To: D A MacArthur/C H Nimitz From: H S Truman Political Correctness is a doctrine, recently fostered by a delusional, illogical minority and promoted by a sick mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a piece of sh– by the clean end!

  11. Brexit reminds me of a Leonard Cohen song: “First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.” Perhaps we are seeing the first cracks in the facade that masks the progressive agenda. It is a bit of jolly good cheer in this ‘interesting’ year.

  12. Artfl — no, the term “politically correct” arose in the ’30s in the YCL and CPUSA, when they were still arguing about Lenin and Stalin and Trotsky. After the Molotov-von Ribbentrop Pact, those who were still anti-fascist were “politically incorrect.”

    I’m surprised you don’t know this, master of all things Communist as you are. I know it because my parents were YCL until the date of the Pact, when the Daily Worker turned pro-German overnight and excoriated anyone who didn’t. They left the Party that day and never looked back.

  13. Its not the elites not grasping the peoples whims

    its the people not knowing what the elites know and why they are making the choices they are making (and hiding what they are hiding)

    in EVERY country where feminism of the modern kind is dominant, the populations self exterminate… russia found this out before us because they did these same things 30 years before we did, and so learned its a social anti population bomb just as harmful and society ending as a nuclear device over a slow time period in which the victims cant believe or see it happening.

    the elites do not want to give up on the control and then admit that they self immolated society with the ideas of feminism and so on.

    women are NOT the future, since women who dont have babies go extinct…

    The real crisis underlying Brexit: It’s about anemic population growth throughout Europe
    http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/errol-louis-real-crisis-underlying-brexit-article-1.2690319

    Something far more primal and tribal is at work: A continental population crisis that has been building for decades is now at the breaking point.

    “Europe needs many more babies to avert a population disaster,” blared a 2015 headline in The Guardian newspaper. The British paper noted, in a long analysis, that “a demographic crisis is unfolding across the continent. Europe desperately needs more young people to run its health services, populate its rural areas and look after its elderly because, increasingly, its societies are no longer self-sustaining.”

    The heart of the problem is that in most European countries, women of child-bearing age are giving birth to, on average, fewer than 2.1 kids, the statistical level needed to prevent a nation from shrinking.

    Smaller families are a natural consequence of prosperity and urbanization: Middle-class families with two working parents no longer need five, six and seven kids to help run the farm. But along with prosperity comes a gradual dwindling of a country’s population that can accelerate into a full-on collapse with surprising speed.

    According to demographers, when a nation’s fertility rate drops to an average of only 1.4 children per mother, the country’s population shrinks an astonishing 50% within 45 years.

    The average fertility rate in the EU is currently 1.55 and dropping. Many European countries – including Spain, Italy, Germany and Hungary – are already at or below below the fateful 1.4 level.

    i have been ringing this bell for decades..

    but the victims, especially women, do not want to hear that they are destroying their society, and ruining its future, and that they wont have enough warm bodies to be a force for anything.

    even worse, the race grooups are taking over and see most of these self exterminated idiots seeking fortune and so on, as the makers of the evil white men and are getting pushed out of all their projects and efforts!!!

    it was much like arguing what would happen to venezuela with a socialist. until the people are starving and the whole thing is in total collapse they wont admit or see it happening.

    well, until the collapse is so final there is a war to grab the land from the elderly who cant fight and or the islamic anti feminist high birth places repalce the feminist cultures, and take their lands…

    They wont see it.

    THIS is what drives the choices of the elite. how to keep the people they need to tax, to run things, to take care of the old, and so on… without admitting that their feminist experiment in social engineering has ended with the self extermination of the west who HAS to import non feminist high birth others to make up for the extinction process before it happens and they lose their whole nation to some invader (like russia or china) who did NOT follow the idea they gave the west!!

    Europe is vanishing.

    “We are very close to the threshold of nonrenewal where the people dying are not replaced by newborns. That means we are a dying country,” Italy’s health minister, Beatrice Lorenzin, said after statistics showed the country had just over 500,000 births in 2014 – the smallest annual number of births since modern Italy was formed in 1861.

    “We need a wakeup call and a real change of culture to turn the trend around in the coming years,” said Lorenzin.

    anyone who goes to youtube to watch the ladies give their speeches on how bad men are, will realize that there is no way to back this out. you have to let the west die out and deal with their repalcements as the western ladies will continue to self exterminate and wont stop till its so far along they live like coptic christians in a muslim state..

  14. Richard Saunders your right and i do know it, and have said it, but they dont believe it nor does it have any effect on them. the example wasnt the invention of the term, but the first finding of the official use

    back in the communist era it was considered good to have the right mind… the socialists came up with this idea of things…

    but you see, we love commnunism and self extermination and the cancer we just adore.

    so they are not hip any more to my telling them its from the soviet states and even german state under other names or similar names.

    but thanks for the comment..

  15. Richard Saunders, i have also told them the feminism they follow is the one that exterminated the russians before they dropped it and kept it up in the west (to destroy their enemy)… and many many other things… but they dont care if they are speaking sovietiisms, following the party lines, etc… i think they want to end themselves as they certainly deny the poisons that are ending them and drink heartily cause they like the way its sold. kind of like enjoying the cigarette that kills you 20 years later.

    Political correctness

    In the early-to-mid 20th century, the phrase “politically correct” was associated with the dogmatic application of Stalinist doctrine, debated between Communist Party members and American Socialists. This usage referred to the Communist party line, which provided for “correct” positions on many political matters.

    According to American educator Herbert Kohl, writing about debates in New York in the late 1940s and early 1950s,

    The term “politically correct” was used disparagingly, to refer to someone whose loyalty to the CP line overrode compassion, and led to bad politics. It was used by Socialists against Communists, and was meant to separate out Socialists who believed in egalitarian moral ideas from dogmatic Communists who would advocate and defend party positions regardless of their moral substance.
    – ”Uncommon Differences”, The Lion and the Unicorn Journal[3]

    In March 1968, the French philosopher Michel Foucault is quoted as saying: “a political thought can be politically correct (‘politiquement correcte’) only if it is scientifically painstaking”, referring to leftist intellectuals attempting to make Marxism scientifically rigorous rather than relying on orthodoxy.[29]

  16. yelling at deaf ears just makes your through sore.. they have to die to believe.

  17. I’m surprised you don’t know this, master of all things Communist as you are.

    Art’s knowledge comes from his reading. Thus being able to synthesize conclusions from data is a different skill set.

    There’s a difference, I think, in reading Bella Dodd’s School of Darkness and personal testimony, to living a life with similar experiences to her.

  18. Beverly Says:
    June 27th, 2016 at 12:38 am
    Funny, remember how the Leftists used to howl with indignation whenever anyone questioned their nonexistent “patriotism”?

    Indeed.

    It’s also why the Left attacks Nathan Bedford Forrest, while keeping Robert KKK Byrd in the Senate for life.

    The KKK, as a community of knights designed to improve the economies of whites in the South, was the original vision, corrupted by Southern slave lords.

    It’s something that any descendant of Southerners or of the US CW 1, should look into. This war started by slave lords, fought by people who didn’t own slaves, based upon the orders they were given, while the slave lords that started it all for profit refused to fight.

    Appalachia, the white part, is much poorer now. Why? Cause they kept voting in Democrats. Why did they keep voting Democrats in? Because in the South, traditionally, the only people who had totalitarian political/religious/economic power were the slave lord houses.

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