London could make EU “unravel”

Then you’ve destroyed your credibility.

hardly. There are people who grow up in different places. They have a perspective on their place of origin that is almost always a judgment based in facts.

Others who never grew up in, for example, Western Civilization, can have only an outsider's perspective ~ not that it's always going to be bad or anything, but it will not be complete.

You bring in a Russian to tell us that the EU operates according to Leninist principles and everybody is in a gulag, not likely I'll track that thought process all that well. Better to bring me in a high ranking design engineer who is both delighted and absolutely amazed that we use metal for lintels and facings around elevators, and to top that off have brail numbers punched into the faceplate for the buttons and we can do some compare, contrast, and draw conclusions with that fellow.

It's very obvious that Western Europe is not being operated according to the thuggish principles enunciated by Lenin and his barbarian hordes ~

only thing i said Europeans didn't understand was the US uniform commercial code ~ which is an interstate compact ~ and apparently you don't either. Read up on the topic.

Back in the Cold War the Russians had to come up with some common denominator that would allow them to readily send mail to the rest of the world, as well as receive it (since all those systems were changing) ~ there are balance of accounts processes, prohibited plants, etc.

They were at such a loss to figure it out they threw up their hands at a meeting of the governing body of the Universal Postal Union and requested assistance ~ someone gave them a copy of the US international mail manual ~ which they initially adopted word for word including prohibitions on mailing scions (cuttings) to designated areas, e.g. California, Florida,.... We had a laugh riot over it.

over time they figured out how to use those rules. Still, initially they didn't have a designated expert who could even comprehend what was going on in the rest of the world ~ their other points of contact were little different ~ their universities were out of the loop, Soviet engineering and technology was proceeding ahead without feed back from the West ~ that left them some pretty good airplanes with bad jet engines, and even worse, no computer chips worth having except an 8 bit model in Hungary ~ they tried a workaround by writing up a very good OS for that chip but in the end they began installing Western computer chips in their ICBM command and control systems ~ which was positively terrifying to them and us. Eventually Gorbachev moved to the top and Yeltsin's crowd simply abolished the old system ~ Russia became far less menacing since a bit of openness did allow outsiders to tell them about egregious errors that threatened everybody in ways they, the Russians never imagined.

I'm sure some Soviet dissidents knew some things, but even the top guys in the KGB didn't know what they needed to know just to keep things safe.

my neighber who'd been the USSR bag man for the big dogs when they came to DC (he had a roll of $100 bills to buy stuff) decided he'd like to stay here and defected just as the whole system was ready to fall. A lady we hired some years later who'd grown up in the system ~ on military bases with her officer father ~ had also worked in Russian refugee relief in Afghanistan ~ and she had beliefs about 'things' that'd curl your hair ~ rather leftwing, but she really did care about refugees ~ most of us have never met anyone who'd even been a refugee. my neighborhood has many people who'e been late 20th century and early 21st century refugees ~ then there's the guy next door whose brother carried him on his back from the Korean speaking part of China through North Korea all the way to the Pusan perimeter in South Korea back during the war. We were just talking about his experience in the Viet Nam War.

As a child he knew Communism wasn't for him ~ but get him to vote Republican? Now that's difficult.

The way I look at is the way I look at sheep and goats ~ I have a genetic aversion to the meat, but I've talked extensively with folks who grew up depending on every part of a goat or a sheep to live, and they tell me things that I can remember and appreciate. Really incredible what the Navajo are like when they talk about sheep ~ far different than Uzbeks or the old timers back in Indiana.

Politics the world over are like sheep ~depends on how close you can get and which way the wind is blowing. The only people on the planet I've ever met who appreciate the American attitude toward firearms are from Yemen ~ we understand each other at a visceral level that defies explanation to the others.