The latest in this series:
- Why it’s taken so long for the Brits to tell Germans, Frogs and other assorted Dago countries just to fuck off.
- Why, after Brexit, the Brits will continue to use the European-spawned metric system instead of the fine Imperial one they themselves created.
- Why there’s such a to-do about fishing territories. Considering that the entire EU has a navy of a size comparable to Rhode Island’s, and even though the Royal Navy certainly isn’t what it used to be, I would have thought that the British negotiating position re: fishing would be: “If you chaps fish where we don’t want you to fish, we’ll blow your ships out of the water.”
Feel free to express your own areas of puzzlement about Brexit in Comments.
Puzzled why they ever agreed to that freak show in the 1st place. Irritated that we’re going down the same road in our own fucked up way. If it’s prez harris, we’ll be rejoining the Paris agreement, the Iran nuke deal, & we’ll all need Kung Flu papers to buy, sell, or travel. Bow down to your overlords, bitches.
I have no idea why it’s taking Great Britain so long to implement Brexit. I would think it would take 6 months to a year to start erecting customs checks at borders. In the mean time, the bureaucrats would start figuring out which laws needed to be repealed, re-written etc.
JQ
They could start with “all of them”, and just go from there.
I seem to recall that the UK lost a cod war with Iceland. The combined navies of the EU may not be much but I don’t think Iceland even has a navy. It is not so much the hardware or even the quality of the crews but the will to use it. That is what the Place Where Great Britain Used to Be sorely lacks. The other two questions involve will also. The Metric system is a product of Napoleon. I guess he won after all.
What happened in the Cod Wars was that the Cold War was going on and the U.S. needed Iceland inside the NATO tent for various strategic reasons, so Iceland used this leverage to get the U.S. to apply pressure on the U.K. to accede to Iceland’s fishing rights claims.
I should add that this also helped define our current regime of offshore economic zones, as Iceland kept pushing them outward to restrict British fishing.
Suffice it to say that a very large part of the UK elites don’t want Brexit and have been fighting it tooth and nail.
They can move, then! It isn’t like they aren’t leftists and there’s no place else to go.
They would lose their places on the gravy train.
As far as I know, the EU doesn’t have a Navy at all. However, several member countries do and a few of them are forces to be reckoned with.
Take France, for example. (Go ahead. I’ll wait for the howls of laughter and the cat-calls to die down.) But consider this. France, though we all like to make fun of them as “cheese eating surrender monkeys”, they are no such thing, and any reading of French history will bear that out. And though France alone may not have a Navy quite on peer with the RN, they do have a respectable carrier aviation force – and – nuclear submarines.
And they are not alone.
When you add up the Naval assets of all of the EU member nations they really will be a peer Navy to the RN.
That whole: “…we’ll blow your ships out of the water.” canard appears to me to necessarily be a bluff. What are the limeys going to do if France – or Germany, or Italy, or even someone like Norway – calls that bluff?
So, let’s say an RN frigate sinks a French patrol vessel guarding the fisheries, and one of the many French SSNs sinks the RN frigate. Does that mean war between Great Britain and France and therefore the entire EU? (Both Britain and France being nuclear powers and all?) I don’t think it could ever get that far – at least I HOPE so.)
And what of the USA? One of the things that the US is adamant about is the freedom of the seas. We go out of our way to demonstrate this to all comers – including nations like China and Russia, and even CANADA! (It’s true! Several years ago we sent a flotilla up into Baffin bay and through the Beaufort strait to Alaska for no other reason than that Canada said we couldn’t.)
The US recognizes a 12 mile territorial limit and a 200 mile exclusive economic zone. I believe the entire EU and Great Britain does too. So that begs the question: Where are these fisheries? Are they inside someones exclusive economic zone as recognized by all of these countries. If so, then everyone else can bugger off. If not, then the Brits can sod off.
But really. Britain and the EU going to war over fish? Wouldn’t THAT be ironic. Russia would declare it a national holiday.
I guess I got a little off the subject in my last comment.
I don’t know why it’s taken so long for Great Britain to secede from the EU. It’s probably not a secession matter really, but a matter of nothing more than economic agreements. A little part of me is glad they left, but mostly, I don’t have a dog in that fight so I really don’t care all that much.
I have been to Europe several times since the formation of the EU, and I must say, it seems okay to me. The inhabitants of the countries I visited were uniformly friendly – or friendly enough – and I liked not having to do the whole visa/customs/currency-exchange bit every time I went anywhere.
In all my travels in the EU, the only culturally negative incident I ever had was with a couple of fellow tourists in our group who were from New Zealand who, unprovoked, went out of their way to insult America and Americans in general. They didn’t like it when I replied that, yes, I knew where New Zealand was, and it was nothing more than an “insignificant archipelago” somewhere southeast of a real country – Australia.
I have been puzzled when someone identifies themselves as a “European” as though there was actually some uniformity in Europe ever. When I was in Brussels, just down the street from EU headquarters, the hotel had signage in only one language. That was English. Even the EU flag copied part of Betsy Ross’ design, a circle with stars.
So I dunno, do they want to be like Americans?
As a matter of fact, they do. Many people around the world want to be like Americans but they don’t know how, and don’t want to let go of what they think is the safety line of socialism.
At one time, Mexico was divided into forty-eight different states, like the United States, but they mistook the result to be the cause.
Why the hell isn’t there a Frexit, Spexit and all the little *exits? These dumb butts voted to add another level of government. When in history has that ever proven to be a good idea?
It’s easy to vote yourself into socialism, but you always have to shoot your way out.
Way back when the Euro was first going to be coined/printed I commented to may friends that I wondered if proof sets would one day be valuable, or as worthless as Confederate dollars. They were astonished, and asked me if I thought the EU would break us because the French hadn’t forgiven the Germans for WWII. I replied that the French hadn’t forgiven the Germans for siding with Wellington against Napoleon, and when they managed that, if the ever did, they would start on forgiving the Franco-Prussian War, and then get working on WWI.
The idea of a political union including France and Germany was always absurd. What astonishes me about Brexit is that it happened BEFORE either France of Germany had a psychotic break and one went for the other’s throat.
Middle point. The metric system will be retained because the Imperial system(s) are a fucking nightmare if you occasionally work across disciplines. For solid mechanics, CFD, thermal and electrical , a kilowatt is a kilowatt. Always. British thermal units are especially annoying. Not that its going to happen, but the change I’d make as emperor of measurement would be temperature. Fahrenheit is scaled to human experience. Consider the alternatives:
Rankine (Fahrenheit divisions taken to absolute zero) 0 – you’re dead; 100 – you’re still dead
Centigrade 0 – mite nippy; 100 – you’re dead
Kelvin(Centigrade divisions taken to absolute zero) 0 – you’re dead; 100 – you’re still dead
Fahrenheit 0 – damn cold, don’t be lingering outside; 100 – pretty damn hot, find AC
The thing I realized years ago about Metric and Imperial is that metric is for science and engineering (where everything needs great accuracy and the use of calculators is necessary) and Imperial is for crafts, where a lot of measuring is done by hand and eye and having units divisible by many factors is useful.
So, scientists and engineers like Metric and wonder why everybody doesn’t do it there way, and craftsfolk (cooks, carpenters, cabinetmakers, seamstresses, etc.) like Imperial and wonder why anybody wants to use anything else.
And most of the rest of us consider the debate about as interesting as spelling reform, and wish people would leave it alone.
And then there is the issue of clothing sizes – especially women’s clothes – which seem to be based on some kind of astrology.
“And then there is the issue of clothing sizes – especially women’s clothes – which seem to be based on some kind of astrology.”
It’s actually a cross between wishful thinking and marketing.
re:
break their fishing boats
YouTube has videos of Argentina coast guard breaking illegal chinese fishing boats.
Although the chain of ownership invariably shows those illegal fishing boats are titled to chinese elites (pretending to be marxists…), the crews are poor folk earning wages.
Breaking the illegal chinese boats puts the workers out of a job, but accomplishes zero-zero-zero to reduce hookers-n-blow for the chinese elites (pretending to be marxists…).
During the 1960s, I suggested we nuke Peking to smoldering rubble.
The marxists responded by changing the name to ‘beaking’.
PS:
* As any old-time welder/fabricator can explain, ‘beaking’ is a method of joining one joint to a series of joints.
* As any new-time hypochondriac can explain, ‘beaking’ is one method for the hypochondriac to remove hygienic gloves worn by hypochondriacs to prevent icky cooties from touching their precious hypochondriac skin.
Is the choice of ‘beaking’ by the chinese elites (pretending to be marxists…) merely coincidence?