from an Instapundit comment

I got zero upvotes for writing the following on Instapundit:

I've long contended that the very concepts of the EU and the euro were horrible ideas. Europe was joyfully and nationalistically Europe before all of this EU/euro nonsense. Europeans were proud to be European, but they were openly [my country]-first. Then along came the transnationalism of Brussels, the dictionary-sized EU constitution, the steamrollering of all that pluralism into stultifying monoculture, and it was as if a vampire had latched itself, tick-like, onto Europe's very heart and has been draining out the continent's soul ever since.

Every European country should engage in its own "-exit" (Frexit, Italexit, Grexit, etc.) for its own sake. Destroy the EU as a political body. I don't know the exact history, but I get the impression that the grand idea behind the EU was to be a political, economic, and cultural bloc serving as a "counterweight" to the US, which is a fundamentally stupid thought because allies shouldn't think that way about each other. (Assuming we are still allies at this point.)

And in mentioning "counterweight," I immediately think of France and Charles de Gaulle's silly concepts of contrepoids and troisième force (Gaullism + leftist entities). Later French presidents (Mitterrand, Chirac, not so much Sarkozy) predictably did their best to continue de Gaulle's asinine policies. How much has this stupidity damaged Europe as a whole in the long term? So many of today's problems come down to France and its deleterious effects on the Western mind.

I'm still very attached to my French host family—we're in regular contact—but I've never agreed with France's politics, economics, and sense of its own role on the world stage (my French family's patriarch is a conservative entrepreneur who wants to preserve France's culture). The French as individuals are fun people who can teach us a lot about life and its value, but as zoa politika, they are utterly hopeless. If he were alive, I'd say Just ask Jean-François Revel, the modern philosopher who started off as as a diehard leftie before embracing free-market capitalism and classical liberalism. Revel was a true contrepoids against French nihilism and postmodernism.

You can never tell what's going through the 60-year-old mind of an Instapundit commenter (60 is their average age), and in the comment area, there's a definite policing of ideological purity. So maybe the above comment, which expresses some love for France and certain of its people, wasn't "pure" enough.

I normally get 15-18 likes every time I write something about my latest distance-walking exploits, but whenever I sound off about politics... it's crickets. Meanwhile, most commenters seem content just to repeat quips and phrases they've learned from Glenn Reynolds, so you'll see a lot of commenters (and I've been guilty of this, too) slinging around Reynoldisms like embrace the healing power of "and" or That's not a bug; it's a feature or a French phrase like pour encourager les autres or some other such unoriginal nonsense, think they're being clever. I'm not saying that all of the commenters are like that, but there are a lot of them. It's probably better just to say nothing if you have nothing to say.