What my Belgian in laws got up to would make your teeth fall out!
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Try a Belgian visit:
My favourite buffer zone.
Lovey chocolate though.
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Well I’m not sure about personal taxation, but on corporate tax fiddles they are in the halfpenny place compared to the Dutch and Luxemburgers. Who of course are beginners compared to the Worldwide capital of tax avoidance and money laundering, the City. Kids die on slum estates and people like Wooster-Mogg profit.
I’m fascinated by this phenomenon. Just a year or two ago here on SurviveFrance good discussion (thought out and evidenced arguments, from different points of view) was welcome, I think by pretty much everybody. But more recently the very different approach articulated above has emerged: the wish for merely an echo-chamber for their own views; a wish, explicitly not to engage in discussion.
EDIT:
Amazing! Just also looked into the ‘Eurovision’ thread and found almost exactly the same thing:
I have to admit to on occasion not engaging with one individual, so guilty as charged. But sometimes there comes a point, with some people, where one realises one is flogging a dead horse. And being an animal lover, I have to desist 
Oh absolutely John - there are lots of threads and posts I don’t read - that’s one of the strengths of the ‘threads’ structure of the site - you go straight to what interests you and ignore the rest.
But that’s rather different from not wanting to hear any opposing views.
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I am not British, but I can clearly see, that BOJO is not the most successful person in politics! He might have succeeded with Brexit, however the victory of Sin Fen in Northern Ireland is clearly showing that Northern Ireland sooner or later will reunite with the Republic of Ireland. Scotland would be interested in joining the EU for economical survival. So what will be left of the UK, if Scotland and Northern Ireland are leaving?
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That’s just the lies of that sly bastard, the unspeakable bastard, Farage. Nothing Farage says, or has ever said is true. It’s just sound bites for the terminally stupid. .
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Well Annie, the NIP and many other indicators show that Johnson has failed on Brexit. In fact Brexit was a loose loose. Johnson just lies, black is white, failure is successes, whatever you’re having yourself. Nothing he says is worth listening to, except as an indication of where his goldfish like attention span is pivoting to next.
Northern Ireland is a failed little statelet kept afloat by a £4/5B PA intervention from Westminster and EU funding, which has now gone away. Successful, outward looking Ireland doesn’t need NI and its two flavours of headbangers.
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…and the best chips with mayonnaise in the world
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But are there still significant numbers of ‘headbangers’ outside the extreme right unionists John?
This is an alternative view of the rise of Sinn Féin north and south of the border - and of the Alliance party in the north - attributing it precisely to the extent to which they have relegated sectarianism in favour of focusing on broadly socialist priorities - and criticisng UK media for its failure to understand NI politics in anything but Westminster’s terms (ie. as all about nationalism and brexit):
A thoughtful article and I don’t think anyone (south of the border anyway) would disagree with Ciarán’s view Geoff. He’s probably right that British media doesn’t really understand the subtlety of what’s happening in the North, and certainly Johnson doesn’t, nor does he care.
I liked the phrase “fracturing the binaries between Catholic and Protestant and nationalist and unionist”. For the last forty years I’ve hoped that joint membership of EEC/EU would blur and defuse the nationalist/unionist issue and that the Catholic/Protestant, which in fact has always been a civil rights issue, would be blurred and defused by increasing prosperity across all communities in the six counties. My first hope was clobbered by Brexit but I think the second is still on track, albeit with a £4/5B PA Westminster handout.
Just through gut feel I think that rabid nationalists have declined far more quickly than rabid unionists (my favourite is Sammy Wilson, who always looks as if he’s about to explode). That is undoubtably true south of the border. There’s no rebel songs in pubs anymore or cries of “up the RA” as there was in the seventies. Southern nationalism is now a matter of quiet pride in being Irish and the many achievements of the minnow nation over the last forty years. NI unionism is stuck in the sixties and really offers nothing to the electorate except nostalgia and stagnation, so there’s a leak to the middle ground. SF have done a better job of broadening their field of operations from nationalism to real day to day issues, so they’ve done a better job in retention.
Ciarán also makes the point that “These binaries had been built into the region’s power-sharing structures, and have in turn patterned the narratives brought to bear on the post-conflict polity…”.
I diverge with him a little here, IMO the power-sharing structures were built around the binaries, because that was fundamentally all that existed. The big question now is as these binaries dissolve how can the power-sharing structures be adapted to accommodate the new reality? As long as Johnson kisses the DUP’s bottom, there’s no chance.
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Great post John - very thoughtful.
My big worry is that both the Johnson government and the DUP, as their power and projects break on the rock of reality, will behave more and more like cornered animals, and lash out chaotically.
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John, I just wanted to voice a gentle version of the facts. Since I am not British I leave it to British Expats to speak in clear terms!
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The Cambridge spies also had convictions. I don’t really think this is comparable.
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It’s not just SF. It’s across the board online.
Oh I know Annie, I just wanted to be sure that there was no confusion, Johnson has not got Brexit done. He’s lied for start to finish.
Yes indeed - I remember seeing some research a few months ago into the tendency for social media to break down into ‘echo chambers’.
Some of this is probably natural and inevitable - you join the groups, or read the threads you find interesting - and like-minded people are doing the same. But I think SurviveFrance has been protected from this to some extent by the common interest things French - or things like brexit.
But I still think the ‘I do not wish to debate with someone of an opposite viewpoint’ attitude - the conscious choice not to listen to different views - is relatively new here.