3 thoughts on “There Is A NARN In North Ontario”

1. I look forward to what King Bannion — someone who you might deem an expert — has to say about Brexit being a good direction for UK economic policy.

   In response to your belief that because India is kinda big, that they will through trade deals make the UK successfully independent of the EU, I would offer this to add to such a discussion.

   I routinely read Asian news sources, particularly the Times of India, the largest selling news paper and the largest English language edition newspaper in the country. But I also occasionally read the Deccan Herald, one of the top ten English language newspapers in India.

   Both papers in addressing the Brexit vote noted the following things: that Economists agree almost unanimously (on a par with those scientists who agree about man made global warming) that the Brexit vote is disastrous for the UK.

   They also focused quite a bit on how the anti-immigration bigotry was the driving force behind Brexit, overwhelmingly, and that there was an unusually large amount of misrepresentation by the ‘Leave” side about UK/EU financial dealings that appeared to be accepted uncritically by Brexit voters. There is a lot of concern in India and surrounding nations about the strong feelings and even violence towards anti-Indian ethnic residents of the UK. It would not be an overreach to posit they find those people hateful bigots who not only vote emotionally rather than rationally, but vote their worst emotions consistently.

   And they focused a lot on how the 2.8 million voters who succeeded in passing Brexit were pretty much entirely either new voters who had not voted before, or voters who had been inactive for two or more decades — and that these same 2.8 million voters were likely to vote in the future.

   In that context, here is the analysis the Deccan Herald ran about the Brexit voters:

   “The leave vote was strongest in regions economically dependent on the EU. A higher percentage of East Yorkshire and Northern Lincolnshire’s economic output is sold to the EU, and yet 65% elected to leave. Although thousands of jobs depend on the Jaguar Land Rover factory in Coventry, 55.6% of voters in that constituency voted to leave. Wales and Cornwall have the highest level of EU subsidies in the country, and yet they voted to leave.
   There was a strong negative correlation between the share for leave and education. Apart from London, which is generally more outward-looking anyway, in the rest of the country, the lowest education areas had a higher propensity to vote for leave.”

   Reading the press of Asia, particularly ‘big’ India, I can only conclude that India believes that the stupid people — the uneducated old white people, like most conservatives here — are driving the UK economy bus, and are likely to continue to do so, and that they (in their anti-elite, anti-expert insanity) are likely to further harm the UK economy, particularly the sectors that affect them directly.

   So in that context, I would argue that India is negotiating a new trade deal to protect themselves economically from the bad trade prospects with the UK (sometimes referred to as vulture capitalism, making money out of the demise of a company or economy) and to leverage whatever trade deals they can cut to protect people of Indian ethnicity from the bigotry of conservatives.

   In asserting that conservatives are the stupid political group, I would point out that there are many conservatives – including you – that I find well educated in a narrow area, but lacking in a broader and well-rounded education. Conservatism – like your anti-expert propaganda where you praise disregarding people who are knowledgeable and competent in their fields – promotes this, which is propaganda precisely because it is not rational or factually well informed. The anti-science propaganda is the least soundly based, but this is running up a close second.

   Worldwide, the Brexit kind of conservatism, like the Kansas or other kind of far-right conservatism is pretty thoroughly regarded with disdain and contempt.

   No one is approaching the UK with trade deals because they expect the UK to do well post-Brexit. The existence of new trade deal proposals does not argue success for the UK. You have to be pretty superficial and simplistic to believe it does — and thoroughly unacquainted with what the press in those countries proposing trade deals are saying.

2. Incredibly thought-provoking show so far. Brain is fighting itself.

3. It’s a series of issues that make preconceptions on either side hard to hang onto.

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