Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by goobatrooba 26 days ago
That's a rather odd point. One country has left the EU due to a very narrow 'exit' vote, so it's not anyone's prison. Across surveys the EU enjoys broad support, often even more so than the national government.

Clearly not everyone loves the EU but the majorities are very much in favour (and certainly this is the case among the people who actually understand politics, economics, etc.).

2 comments

I think the grandparent references many referendums that rejected EU treaties:

- Maastricht Treaty, 1992, Denmark, - European Constitution, 2005, France and Netherlands, - Lisbon Treaty, 2008, Ireland.

The votes were usually redone and passed. The exception is Norway which refused to join twice.

> Clearly not everyone loves the EU but the majorities are very much in favour (and certainly this is the case among the people who actually understand politics, economics, etc.).

This is quite the loaded statement. I've heard from people on either both sides of the argument that understood politics and economics very well (professors, lecturers, etc.)

It's always interesting to see accounts popping up in this thread trying to delegitimize EU and spew out bunch of vague misleading statements against it.

Why is that? Which EU citizen protection is angering you? :)

Nothing of that is angering me, I live in the EU and life is pretty nice.

My comment above was meant to provide context and to point out that both sides of the argument can be legitimate.

The comment is neutral, you shouldn't be able to infer what I think about the EU from it. It simply points out facts and says that reducing a point of view to being uninformed is too easy.

My stance on the EU is complex: it does good, it does bad, it affects each member states differently, it changes over time. Those are all pretty neutral statements too, only siths live in extremes ;-).

That was not because the EU didn't want or try to stop it, but because they couldn't.

The EU was going to pause it indefinitely because of the border issues. UK diplomats in Brussels were actually helping with that. And the UK just went ahead with it ... That option would not be open to anyone except very large countries.

Now make of that what you want, but the EU definitely doesn't want to let people just leave, and the UK leaving is not a great illustration.