h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

sorry could not resist parking this here, since so apt,
http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,14173,1426804,00.html

Those of us who live outside the united 'States of Europe' cannot fully appreciate how much each 'nation' stands to lose under the homogenization process of becoming one continent indivisible.

But using the bureaucratic rationale that a common marketplace with equal rules and technologies must be established in every nation at any cost really looks like cultural euthenasia. A kind of semi-final solution to Dutch doors, French cuffs, Italian pitstops, German beer and British bulldogs.

I get a picture of an octopussy shooting itself in all eight feet with equal indifference to the bleeding.

It was not so long ago that individual European cultures were considered a positive value, worth fighting for. And now it looks like everybody's falling over each other to create the lowest common market denominator.

By stripping the inherent cultural value out of everything, by rendering out all national identities and idiosynchracies, there's nought left but technocracy and money in a souless cycle of goods and services sans personality, sans heritage, sans legacy, sans vitality.

All that's left is the Euro-Bureau dictating prices and policies to anonymous consumers with equal contempt.


~jwf~

thank you for those thoughts ~jwf~ ,always nice to see your name on a thread ,bound to be interesting, and insightfull or witty .or all three,

Not suicide - more like murder