Serious Talk About Brexit – Part 2

(Well, mostly serious — with a sidebar on RINOs, WINOs, BRINOs, TINOs, and Tiggers.)

(Part 1 here.)

UPDATED! Those making an honest, fact-based cost-benefit analysis of Brexit are coming back to say, “Leave the EU? Are you barking?” But those wedded to Leave as a political ideology (almost a religion) are turning every fact-based study counterclockwise (putting their thumbs on the scale, so to speak) in order to continue stoking the emotional fervor for Leave. Apparently, “It’s all about democracy.” Toffee-nosed Tories like Jacob Rees-Mogg are transformed almost overnight into humble servants of the common folk — the latter demanding that politicians deliver Brexit or else.

But who was it who aggressively propagandized the common folk (sometimes using dark or foreign money) in order to persuade them that Brexit was something like re-fighting the Second World War or repelling an invasion of terroristic foreigners? I admit this is an oversimplification, but to me Brexit looks like something dreamt up by a clique of eccentric millionaires of the English aristocracy, then put over on the common people by appealing to the worst sentiments in human nature.

Serious Talk About Brexit – Part 1

With a sidebar about The Independent Group and Mrs Pritchard

I continue to care about Brexit for a number of reasons:

– It’s like watching a slow-motion train wreck, but with some possibility that the wreck might still be averted, perhaps by getting the Conductor to stop sleepwalking or robot dancing.

– It’s very sad for the UK, the EU, the world at large, and all the people who are likely to be adversely affected.

– I want to see the UK thrive in the present and in the future, but Brexit looks to me like a retreat into the past. That never works. (Maybe it should be called brexosaurus rex.)

I take the subject of Brexit seriously, but often treat it with humour because that’s my approach to reality in general. Humour is not just entertainment, but also a way of stepping outside the system and looking at things in novel ways that the bureaucratic process (or a purely logical mindset) might filter out.

So much has been said about Brexit, and I’ll try to avoid stating the obvious or oft-repeated. Still, let me begin by discussing a couple of terms which have arisen during the Brexit debate:

EU’s Juncker hasn’t read his George Lakoff

Today’s topics: Brexit, poindexters, I am not a nerd, and yes we have no bananas. Oh, and Donald Tusk’s “special place in hell” comment.

In an impassioned (for him) but possibly counterproductive speech, European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker said he had a message “for those who are saying that the Commission is composed by blind, stupid, stubborn technocrats…” What was his message? No one knows, because the audience quickly drowned him out with cries of “They’re right!”

Okay, maybe they didn’t, but the point is: This is a prime example of what George Lakoff might call “negative framing,” e.g. Richard Nixon’s “I am not a crook” speech, or Monty Python’s “There is no cannibalism in the British Navy.”