Cognitive dissonance

A follow up to my last point.

More than half the pro-Brexit tweets in my twitter feed today have been either

a) Accusing the Remain side of scaremongering, being "Project Fear" etc, or

b) Talking about "the risks of remain" (often linking to an article by Andrew Lilico in the DT called

"How the EU would dominate us if we stayed inside.")

Many of the tweets in the latter group have suggested that the risks of remain are being ignored. Are they serious?

Leave.EU, Vote.Leave, Conservative Home, Iain Duncan Smith and most of the other pro-Brexit politicians have all run articles, made speeches, or unleased a torrent of tweets and Facebook posts stressing the risks of staying in the EU. The quality of the arguments concerned has varied from reasonable points to baseless scaremonger.

I do find it bizarre that the same side of the argument is simultaneously filling my timeline and twitter feed with comments about how disastrous it might be if the other side won, and accusations that those same opponents are playing "project fear" scaremongering.

Cognitive dissonance, methinks.

Incidentally, despite the very one-sided title and an utterly ridiculous cartoon which someone using the pen-name "Blower" drew three years ago, Lilico's piece is otherwise not a bad article, looking in a reasonably objective way at the upsides and downsides for Britain of four scenarios if we stay in.

Of course, the people who just read the headline and look at the cartoon will imagine that a killer argument for "Leave" has been presented, which it certainly hasn't. The article itself, while I do not agree with every word of it, is definitely worth a read.

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