Re: What's going on in Benelux?
Reply #29 –
Analysing his doublespeak does not make him better. It makes him worse.

Yeah, right. Good that we've made sure he's no good at all.
And yes, our government is lying often enough when saying this, but what have you (EU, Brussels, Benelux) ever done about it to prove that you are not like that? This is the EU reputation we are talking about, you know.
That is the moral duty of a free press, which is why freedom of press is important to the EU. The EU also releases promotional materials about the way it functions in every language and its websites are perhaps surprisingly well-made. How do you tell the hog it ate the cabbage? People just swallow these lies and half-truths whole seemingly without applying critical thought or independent inquiry.
What if freedom of the press is among the lies that politicians tell? I know that the EU says that freedom of the press is important, but we hear a lot of other things that the EU says are important. And this is not a case of people swallowing lies. It's rather like the game "Simon says": We have to obey. Why do we have to obey? Because this is what the gov't and the free press assure to us.
We smaller countries can form voting blocks.
Yeah, remember how this worked so well when Rumsfeld was rallying everybody for the wars and demolished any hope for the EU common stance by dividing us into "old" and "new" Europe. Those were brilliant blocks, weren't they?
Or the way Russia tricks the West with gas (you surely know about the pipeline that marks the Schroderisation of the West), so that Brussels demands from us (so we hear, the free press says so) border agreements with Russia so as to prepare for the hopeful
visa-freedom with Russia. Even the mere idea of visa-freedom with Russia was a moral outrage from our point of view, not to mention that we have border disputes with Russia which we found no support for from Brussels. Luckily the idea of visa-freedom was eventually put on hold, even though too late, only a year ago, after signing the humiliating border agreements and after revealing to Russia lots of ways in which to pull the strings among the EU member countries. Thanks a lot, Brussels.
On the flip side, we have "bullied" (in your vocabulary) the likes of Italy and France in the past for transgressions. But that was before most of Eastern Europe joined.
Our previous prime minister thought it was funny to make jokes about Greece. You can say he was bullying the Greeks. At the same time he went along with guaranteeing Greece's state bonds. He thought we would get something in return. Of course we didn't, never did. So we are paying now the welfare of the country which has double higher welfare than we have here. How funny is that? This is the manner in which we are able to bully.