Brits would much rather have a closer economic relationship with EU than US

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Man I studied French and still had to look that up. I half-remembered parfois meant sometimes though!
 
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I had six years academic French, culminating in a year long upper level college course in French history, literature and language, conducted entirely in French, il y a cinquante-quatre ans.
J’ai oublié presque tout.
 
StudentMI said:
Dude I’ve heard of that one! I read it in some conservative journal, reportedly told to the American author by a European guy.
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I wonder if “the European guy” in question happened to be our very own Right Honourable Boris de Pfeffel Johnson before he became PM…

His claim to fame at the time was in his notoriety as a journalist writing entertaining but also very lowbrow, tabloid gossipy pieces (littered with inaccurate rumours, half-truths and outright fabrications) about the EU, whilst in his capacity as a Brussels correspondent.

(It really is a sick joke played on us by mother nature, or the Fates, that he is now the Prime Minister negotiating a post-Brexit trade deal with the EU.)

The editor-in-chief at the time of The Daily Telegraph, Sir Max Hastings, described Boris as the worst individual he’d ever employed (he had indeed just been sacked from The Times before taking up that job under Sir Max, for lying as an excuse to print a juicy article as (name removed by moderator) mentioned earlier on):

www.theguardian.com

I was Boris Johnson’s boss: he is utterly unfit to be prime minister | Max Hastings

The Tory party is about to foist a tasteless joke upon the British people. He cares for nothing but his own fame and gratification, says the former editor of the Daily Telegraph Max Hastings
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com

A career he’s never quite abandoned, incidentally. He’s still doing the same thing today that he did back then, only now as the leader of the British state.
 
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GKMotley said:
I had six years academic French, culminating in a year long upper level college course in French history, literature and language, conducted entirely in French, il y a cinquante-quatre ans.
J’ai oublié presque tout.
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Well, well, well look at you 😉
 
StudentMI said:
Man I studied French and still had to look that up. I half-remembered parfois meant sometimes though!
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Same, I studied advanced higher French in my last year of high school and despite passing it very well at the time (and having learned it since childhood), can’t remember much of it today without thinking it through quite a bit.

My language fluency, back then, was aided by repeated stays in France but once you stop pushing yourself to converse in it with actual speakers, I find the years spent not honing your skills just evaporate a lot of what you’d learned - leaving a pretty basic grasp.

Or, at least, that’s what happened in my case! A friend of mine did it as a main part of his degree into his first or second year of university and today, five years on since graduation, his French is little better than mine (although, he maybe could handle a very basic conversation or two without having to look up a dictionary).
 
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PickyPicky said:
Anyway, any system of measurement should be based on cricket. The distance between the wickets is one chain and there are ten chains to the furlong, so an acre is ten square cricket wickets.
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So where did stones come in for weight? That’s one that didn’t translate to the US.
 
StudentMI said:
As an American, my opinion on the EU is that it is a flawed idea for various reasons. I’m very localist and prefer describing myself as a Michigander rather than American. But, in the end I don’t really care if Europeans decide to organize themselves that way.
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A respectable position and also prudent/diplomatic for someone looking at it from overseas.

All governing institutions and societies are, of course, flawed - because human beings are a deeply flawed species. We aren’t going to find paradise this side of the eschaton.

With that being said, Catholic Social Doctrine doesn’t conceive of any conflict between a vibrant localism or regionalism on the one hand and supranational order within a multi-level, subsidiary system on the other. I personally think we ought to cut out the ‘binaries’ here - i.e. like “localism good”, “supranationalism bad” or indeed the reverse.

Ideally, we should be wanting a system of governance that is balanced: with proportionate competences at each appropriate level of authority. Wherever a given sphere is best equipped to address a given matter in the most efficient way possible and in a manner closest to the individual citizen, then it should have it. That’s what subsidiarity actually means in a Catholic context.

In an increasingly interconnected world, the church believes there is a need for limited institutions at the continental - and indeed global - level to compass within their remit problems that can’t be solved through policy-making by public bodies which oversee more confined or territoriality circumscribed areas.

If a continental ‘government’ can better implement a policy which affects that said continent as a whole, as opposed to just countries or regions within it (as for more ‘local’ issues), then why shouldn’t it have that competence? The only thing preventing it from doing so would be ideology i.e. “I believe in nationalism and the ideal of an absolute state sovereignty, so under no circumstances can I countenance intervention from the EU”.

Or, flipped, in a situation where a national, regional or local government can better implement a policy which affects people in that locale particularly - as opposed to the continent as a whole - why should a supranational authority be able to deprive it of that competence and arrogate that power to itself? Of course, it shouldn’t. To say otherwise would be ideological: “I believe in supranationalism and international solidarity, so under no circumstances can I countenance state sovereignty”.

The pragmatic answer in both cases would be to reject extreme ideologies of localism, nationalism and supranationalism and on the contrary admit all of them where they can serve the interests of the common good the best, and likewise exclude them where they cannot.

Some people get understandably edgy about that, because they are strong libertarian localists, or indeed quite firm national-sovereignists such our friend @GKMotley - but Motley isn’t a Catholic. He isn’t bound to abide by our social doctrine, whereas we need to take these principles seriously and apply them as concretely as we can.
 
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Sounds about right.

Still, I keep a basic Larousse’s and a couple guides to irregular verbs on hand, in case of an out-break of Froggy.
 
A very good post. Given me a lot to think about. Oddly a lot of what we’ve been discussing here and in other threads really ties in with this novel I’m reading, The Star Fraction by Ken MacLeod. I highly recommend it. It’s about a future UK, and world, divided by intense political factions all vying for supremacy. The author said in the intro that the idea that “capitalism is unstable and socialism is impossible” haunts the novel. Very interesting reading.
 
Motley understands your use of the term. Motley has a slightly different usage, which no one need agree with.
 
PickyPicky said:
Our beer mugs are the same size they were before we joined the EU: imperial pints and imperial half pints.
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I can’t find my source on the issue with glass sizes, but I read it years ago.

To support my point about regulations managing the minutia

EU controls how bananas may look, banning those that don’t measure up.
EU says you can’t say drinking water can prevent dehydration
EU says Stilton cheese can no longer be produced in Stilton
EU won’t let local govt not tax certain products, like tampons
EU fishing regs require dumping of unintended catch (very wasteful)
EU banned halogen light bulbs
EU banned barmaid cleavage when serving customers

The EU resulted in significant bureaucratic creep, enforcing all their regulations.
Compliance costs also shot up.
 
Your use of the third person reminded me of this.

(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)
 
Motley has medium infusions of Scottish tendencies. And a tartan tie, a skean dhu, and 58 bagpipe albums and cds.
 
Indeed. Hence worn in the stocking, after surrendering the dirk, to indicate it is not hidden.

BTW, Picky Picky is supposed to be the picky one.
 
As mobster Tony Montana put it in Scarface (1983): “I always tell the truth, even when I lie.”

Boris Johnson’s life mantra.
 
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