[polmolea]

I read your entire rant and it's based on the sole idea that the EU is a cult, not a single quantifiable fact. This is the kind of judgement that leads to bad decisions. I think it's best we make this kind of decisions based on numbers rather than abstract thinking.

For the record, I want to understand why people voted "leave" but every time I try I end up reading something like this which doesn't get me closer, it just upsets me.

[vixen99]

Try this:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/03/23/leaving-...

'So, obviously, it's not in fact the leaving or not of the EU that causes the changes in the economy. It's the policies of openness to trade that do.'

[zigzigzag]

There are lots of quantifiable facts. Here are some quantifiable facts for you.

https://euobserver.com/institutional/136630

> Secret EU law making reached a high in 2016 that has only been matched once before, according to figures obtained by EUobserver ... according to figures provided by the parliament, not a single bill ended up in a second reading agreement in 2016, only the second time this has happened since EU parliament record keeping began in 2004

If you dig into that story you will find people (Brits) raising the trend towards secret law making as a problem way back in 2005. The EU said it'd improve, it didn't, it got worse. Only one other legislature in the world makes law in secret: North Korea.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/24/eu-faces-brexit-c...

> A recent survey by the Pew Research Centre found that only 38 per cent of France had a favourable view of the EU, marking an astonishing negative shift in attitudes towards Brussels since the 2009 financial crisis that has been mirrored to varying degrees all across Europe. A poll last month by Ipsos-MORI found that nearly half of voters in eight European Union countries want to be able to vote on whether to remain members of the bloc, with a third saying they would opt to leave, if given the choice.

That's a pretty large number of people wanting their own exit referendums. However, there appears to be no chance of them getting such a vote. European politicians tend to describe allowing people to vote on the EU as a "contagion", a "mistake", "populism" etc.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/10/is-the-ignorant-l...

> learning more about the EU may be just as likely to lead people to have a negative view of the EU as a positive view ... in 2003 a team of researchers from University of Twente in the Netherlands concluded that, contrary to Inglehart’s thesis, the more voters understand about European democracy the less satisfied they become.

Summary: the idea that people can only disagree with the EU because they don't know the facts is not supported by the EU's own polling and studies.

The quotes and references to events I suppose you can Google for yourself. Are there other things you'd like me to provide data for?

I note that some people seem to think my post says things that are wild/extreme/unsubstantiated. But we're talking about the UK which just voted to leave despite all the warnings about how painful it's going to be. What I wrote above is not really considered an extreme POV in the UK, you can find op-eds with similar lines of reasoning in mainstream newspapers. And many of the things I refer to can be easily checked with a few minutes on a search engine, like the quotes from European politicians.