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kleinbl00  ·  3081 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Brexit looks likely.

There's a lot of tribalism in politics. There's also a lot of false equivalency. For example, a referendum on EU membership does not, will not, and can not have anything to do with a Trump presidency no matter how much some people may want to draw parallels. NAFTA and TPP have benefits for some people and drawbacks for others, just like EU membership.

The benefits trumpeted for the EU drew primarily on the agility and collective bargaining powers of a single currency. The UK, for example, thinks it's all that but from a population standpoint it's California, Oregon and Washington. From an economic standpoint it's California plus Washington. Meanwhile, the US from a population standpoint is... well, the phrase I like is that there are more honor students in China than there are students in the US and India will be bigger in a few years.

That matters if you're a national corporation. If you're a weaver or a die maker or a cobbler or a haberdasher it matters fuckall.

Post-war Europe was shaped primarily by the Marshall Plan and secondarily by the Non-Aligned Movement. In other words, in service to and then in defiance of the United States. The current political upheaval in Europe is due to citizens realizing that the past 20-odd years since the formation of the WTO hasn't really worked out as well as they'd like.

The emotion driving the Brexit? It's what fueled the Sanders campaign, not the Trump campaign. Be careful whenever someone says "X is just like Y" because it means they don't want you to think about X and they don't want you to think about Y.