8 ms·

Between this and the TPP - it seems as though the lines are getting increasingly fuzzy between borders.

rayiner 10y ago
This is what you get when you embrace internationalism. You break down borders between countries, and now you not only have to deal with your own corrupt and/or incompetent bureaucrats, but everyone else's too. There's no kumbaya scenario where there are no borders for the proletariat but governments still mind their own business.
- hyperbovine 10y ago
  I notice that "internationalism" has acquired a pejorative connotation of late, particularly in the right-wing US media. I'd just like to put in a good word for internationalism, which has successfully staved off a land war in Europe for 70 years now, and is the best / only hope we have of preventing WWIII going forward...
  - Natsu 10y ago
    While I certainly hope we keep peace with each other, but I think what people want is for it to be easy to choose which sort of government they live under, but what we get is other governments "forcing" our government to do things our country doesn't want. (I put "forcing" in quotes because quite often it's more of an excuse than a reason.)
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      Reminds me of the "Archipelago" idea Scott Alexander used to play with[0] - the concept that takes the assumption that people, given freedom of association, eventually form into groups they feel good in, and follows it to a logical extreme. You'd have a word formed into "countries" and a central body that basically enforces two rules: 1) no aggressive actions of one country against another, and 2) freedom of movement for all - so if you don't like your group, you can migrate freely to a different one. There are some caveats in that thought experiment, but it does strongly resemble what you said - that "what people want is for it to be easy to choose which sort of government they live under". [0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-communitarianism/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-...
  - wcummings 10y ago
    This. Perspective is important, especially in light of recent events in Europe.
  - killerpopiller 10y ago
    so, the price for peace is to further the international 1% and give up democracy in exchange for plutocracy?
  - marcoperaza 10y ago
    I'm pretty sure that the massive presence of American troops in Europe (which amazingly outnumber all European troops combined) and nuclear deterrents are what's keeping the peace.
  - Teever 10y ago
    Are you sure it wasn't the development of nuclear weapons that has staved off another major war?
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      Given how close we were to launching them at each other during Cold War? I guess we'll never[0] know. Human societies are a very complex system, so it's hard to pinpoint the real, exact cause of a particular geopolitical event - a cause that if it was hypothetically removed from the timestream, would change the outcome of that event or prevent it from happening. [0] - for a practical, pre-singularity definition of "never"
      - dexterdog 10y ago
        Something about horseshoes and hand grenades.
        TeMPOraL 10y ago
        I'm not sure what you mean. Could you elaborate? I could only find references to a song, a musical band and a videogame. EDIT: I guess you mean the phrase "Almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades"?
      - zarriak 10y ago
        I think all the examples of times in which the situation demanded the launch of nuclear weapons but they were not launched demonstrates how far away humanity was from ending it all.
        fapjacks 10y ago
        This is totally off-topic, but your point can't be emphasized enough: Both sides of that potential nuclear war went to great lengths not to fire their missiles. Up to and including insubordination by missileers in the silos. Having spent most of my adult life serving in the infantry in various warzones, I have a pet theory about why this happens. The reason we don't start a nuclear war is because that would bring the war from the front lines to grandma's house. War is a thing that plays to the male psyche of being a kind of exciting grand adventure. This may seem hard to believe for those of you that haven't been shot at or shot at other human beings. But after a while, when the urgency of mortal concerns begins to wear off, you can see things for what they really are. I think that war is a very male extension of childhood play. It's exciting until faced with one's own mortality, and indeed nobody thinks they'll be the ones getting blown to pieces. There's a great quote by Winston Churchill about being shot at. But I think nuclear war is such an existential thing that transcends conventional warfare to such a degree that no one wants to "play" with destroying the everything. As proof of my theory, I predict that the person that actually employs more than one-off nuclear weapons (and escalates a conventional war to a full-scale nuclear war) will be widely seen as being a total psychopath, legitimately insane.
  - MicroBerto 10y ago
    You act like WWIII isn't inevitable but for other reasons. The fear of nationalism thanks to WWII has caused the pendulum to swing way too far in the other direction. And it's okay to call it "globalism" like everyone else does.
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      It's a scary thought - one that I end up thinking more and more often. It seems that while memories of WWII were fresh in Europe, and the destruction still clearly visible, people were very much into peace and cooperation. But now, with new generations for which WWII is a story told by dying or dead grandparents, who were born into wealthy world and take it as a given - not realizing how much work of several past generations it took to build it anew after the World Wars - I fear we'll be facing another huge conflict here in Europe in the coming decades.
      - intrasight 10y ago
        Liberal democracies can have political conflict, but never in history have they gone to war.
        TeMPOraL 10y ago
        There's first time for everything. I don't see anything in liberal democracies that would make them unable to wage a war. Not to mention that regimes change, and their names even more often. Today it's a democracy, tomorrow it gets called fascist, day after tomorrow it goes to war.
        intrasight 10y ago
        But it's never happened - let's hope it never does
        MicroBerto 10y ago
        Odd that right now we're living in an era where the "liberals" have become intolerant and aggressive, criminal war hawks as well as enablers for criminal activity. It might be time we started qualifying what liberal really means anymore.
  - Shivetya 10y ago
    Internationalism has become the you cannot escape the state no matter where you reside. either because you pissed off some politician over tax or spying issues. a land war hasn't occurred in Europe simply because the US and the USSR stalemated each other. Once the USSR ceased to be trade had a tendency to convince people having stuff was fun.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    There are different flavours. There's the League of Nations / United Nations model, which tends to be fairly constructive. There's the "citizen of the world" / cosmopolitan model, which has tended to have egalitarian and idealistic overtones. There's the Mont Pelerin Society / Atlas Network "Free Trade / Invisible Hand" globalisation model, which seeks benefits for transnational corporations and the plutocracy, without any safety nets or provisions for the mass of the world's population. This viewpoint is strongly adopted among many who align as "right", contrasted with left. Generally, neoliberalism. See Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, George Monbiot, Naomi Oreskes, or Bill McKibben as among its critics. The populist conservative mode of xenophobic / nonalignment / isolationist tendencies is another element, and among the few which are specifically opposed to international engagement. It's hardly specific to any one nation -- you'll find it expressed among the populist conservative factions of the UK, France, Germany, much of the Islam world, Japan, Russia, and the United States, just off the top of my head.
    - iofj 10y ago
      Unfortunately, as illustrated here and in many other places: http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-obama-anti-business-president/ http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-obama-anti-business-p... The democratic party belongs to the 3rd category and the republicans can't pick between 3 and 4. For most parties worldwide the same goes. 1 and 2 only occur in the movies. Also, worldwide, a majority wants : criminal punishment for non-standard sexuality non-equality between the sexes no free speech (a large majority is against free speech as it exists in America) and very significant minorities want to kill freedom of religion equality between people of different religion ... The obvious problem is very simple: internationalism/globalization is a slight benefit in the short term, and a long term disaster.
  - berkut 10y ago
    This. Obviously having massive troop presence prevented war with the soviets, but it can't be overestimated what stuff like the European Coal and Steel Community, the EEC and other following integration steps did after WWII in terms of getting France and Germany to "need" each other, instead of wanting "revenge" and repayment.
    - Semiapies 10y ago
      Revenge is an excuse to get citizens whipped up for the wars the governments already want. The problem with Europe is the concentration of powerful and aggressive nations jockeying for advantage. The world wars were just the latest examples of cyclic major wars in Europe, exacerbated by the empires many of those countries still had. The EEC and the EU haven't kept Europe from having another two or three major wars since the fall of Nazi Germany. (Whether they could have started more world wars after the end of their empires is less clear). Outside powers imposing alliances that prevented the usual suspects from going to war with each other kept this from happening. Today, NATO keeps this from happening.
      - berkut 10y ago
        I suggest you read up on stuff like the European Coal and Steel Community and the Schuman Declaration. Some of their implicit goals were harmonising French and German interests so they wouldn't want to go to war again.
        Semiapies 10y ago
        I suggest you read up on stuff like the League of Nations.
      - nl 10y ago
        What are the two or three wars you speak of? There have of course been wars in Europe outside the EU (the former Yugoslavia and various wars in the former Soviet states), but within the EU or even involving a EU member? The closest I know of is the Cyprus conflict in 1974, but Greece wasn't an EU member then.
  - SturgeonsLaw 10y ago
    There's still war being waged, but it's being done using lawyers and banks rather than troops and tanks.
  - Crito 10y ago
    Are you trying to use the thought of world war to scare people into accepting absurd IP law bureaucracy?
    - ra1n85 10y ago
      Yes, that's the argument.
    - hyperbovine 10y ago
      Absolutely. Neither you, nor I, nor anyone reading this has ever lived through anything even remotely approaching the sort of privations that were routinely experienced by people everywhere in every century up until the last. "IP law bureaucracy" pales in comparison. Again, I say this not as someone with any sort of firsthand knowledge, but simply as a student of history.
      - Crito 10y ago
        Absolutely disgusting.
        hyperbovine 10y ago
        The feeling is mutual.
  - ra1n85 10y ago
    Citation needed. Quite a limb to claim that internationalism is the lone reason that Europe hasn't imploded again.
  - johnnyhillbilly 10y ago
    Completely depleted economies[1], a general anti-war movement, a cold war + nuclear weapons surely mean there is no credit left for "internationalism". 1) barring the US' selective rebuilding of the West German economy after the war.
- tarikjn 10y ago
  There are two (or more) dimensions around these issues: (1) is being open to commerce and immigration for law-abiding entrants, and nurturing friendships with other nations while respecting their sovereignty. This is considered a good thing by moral standards and economic theory. Also the George Washington school of though: "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none" (2) is starting with closed borders to the detriment of a country's citizens but giving more power to leaders and creating a system of favors and alliances, interventionism, adventurism etc. this is what create wars in the first place. Let's call it the Trump school of thought. Looks like this kind of deal is more (2): giving up sovereignty though alliances, for no benefit to the common citizen, but increased power for the powers at play.
  - marcoperaza 10y ago
    It's amusing that you've somehow attached Trump to a bunch of positions that range from things he's never said to things he's said the exact opposite of. Looks like he's the boogeyman of the year.
    - tarikjn 10y ago
      If you judge Trump by what he says, you're in for a big surprise. It is true he claim to be non-interventionist, but on the other hand he nurtures antagonization, so what good does it do if he ends up forcing interventions through provocations? He has also openly proposed creating systems/actions on trade that correspond to (2) (e.g. comments on Ford).
    - Turing_Machine 10y ago
      It's pretty much a given that any Republican candidate is going to be HITLER!!! in the eyes of the opposition. Reagan was HITLER!!!, Bush I was HITLER!!!, Bush II was HITLER!!!, heck, even a mild-mannered nebbish like Mitt Romney got the HITLER!!! treatment. Given that, as far as I know, none of the above ever launched a global war of domination, nor murdered millions of people for belonging to a specific ethnicity, I'm pretty sure that none of those guys were Hitler. The problem is that the opposition has cried Hitler so many times that no one (other than their fellow rabid partisans) pays the slightest bit of attention any more. Certainly I don't. Nor does Donald Trump. A nice guy like Mitt Romney gets upset when people call him a Nazi and tries to prove that he isn't one. Trump doesn't give a shit. He's the honey badger of candidates. That's going to suck pretty bad if an actual Hitler ever comes along. I think there's some kind of old fable about that, isn't there? Note: I do not like Donald Trump and am not planning on voting for him. I expect him to win handily, though, so we'd better hope he's not, you know, actually Hitler.
- revelation 10y ago
  It seems there should be a strict ordering here though. Why yield official privileges to country X that your own plebs can't even enter without inquisition-level interrogation? There is police cooperation in Schengen countries because yeah, you can pretty much just stroll over the border. But the timing was open borders, then interpol.
- ajmurmann 10y ago
  What you are saying is of course true. However, I believe we also are getting the worst of both worlds right now. The state of the EU is a good example of this. On one hand more and more things are regulated on an international level. In the case of the EU these decisions are being made by representatives who were in many cases indirectly elected. If we had something like a European president people would have a much better, direct way choosing what and whom they want. It also would give a platform for previous representatives to point out what good they actually accomplished. During the Brexit I heard that large parts of the nature conservation program Natural England is funded by the EU. Yet no one knows, because it's in nobody's interest to point these things out. Local politicians will either not talk about it or pretend they did it. EU politicians have almost no media platform. A direct election would change that. We might benefit from similar institutions on a UN level or similar as well as more and more decisions are being made at those levels.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Funny thing, your comment reminds me of a reflection I had some time ago - that EU should IMO invest much more into propaganda. Not to paper over its deficiencies, but because people invent anti-EU messages on their own accord, and it dominates the conversation. Similarly with Natural England program you mentioned, EU is doing good work in many other places too - but people don't know it, because nobody cares to highlight it. So it feels EU is all about bureaucracy and creating another USSR - because that's the only thing people are talking about. (It pisses me off in my country in particular, because a lot of people complain about paying to EU not realizing that we're still a net beneficiary, and just how much infrastructure around them was built or upgraded by EU money. The playgrounds they take their kids to. The roads and bridges they drive over. I mean, given how much money our local "entrepreneurs" steal from EU grants all the time, people should be at least a little bit grateful.)
    - ajmurmann 10y ago
      I think investing in "propaganda" would be a good start. However, we don't need to do that for any other part of the government which really is a smell.
- kaonashi 10y ago
  Private organizations cooperating across borders is what's driving this.
- sliverstorm 10y ago
  The internet is rather borderless in nature though.
- cscurmudgeon 10y ago
  Amazing. The western world was all pro "internationalism" when it came to exploiting the east and Africa (centuries of colonialism), but now, want to go back into their shells. Can't have it both ways.
  - Turing_Machine 10y ago
    You are confusing colonialism with internationalism. They're not really related concepts.
    - adrenalinelol 10y ago
      No he isn't, the trade deals which allowed near slave labor in SE Asia and exploiting for natural resources in Africa (by foreign actors) is from the same economic doctrine that allows sweatshops in Mexico (NAFTA) and will be the same ideology that passes TPP.
      - Turing_Machine 10y ago
        You haven't actually studied mercantilism much, have you? No, they were not the "same economic doctrine", or anything like it.
      - twblalock 10y ago
        Near slave labor exists in SE Asia because the national governments in that part of the world are willing to tolerate it. There are plenty of countries with free trade agreements that don't have poor working conditions. Near slavery is not a necessary consequence of trade deals -- it is a consequence of bad government. It existed long before free trade agreements. Similarly, resource exploitation occurs in countries whose governments are willing to allow their resources to be exploited. It happened hundreds of years before any free trade agreements were signed, and it will continue to happen until those governments change their practices.
        aleh 10y ago
        What about Opium wars?
FireBeyond 10y ago
For governments. For individuals wishing to immigrate, not so much.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

This is what you get when you embrace internationalism. You break down borders between countries, and now you not only have to deal with your own corrupt and/or incompetent bureaucrats, but everyone else's too. There's no kumbaya scenario where there are no borders for the proletariat but governments still mind their own business.

hyperbovine 10y ago
I notice that "internationalism" has acquired a pejorative connotation of late, particularly in the right-wing US media. I'd just like to put in a good word for internationalism, which has successfully staved off a land war in Europe for 70 years now, and is the best / only hope we have of preventing WWIII going forward...
- Natsu 10y ago
  While I certainly hope we keep peace with each other, but I think what people want is for it to be easy to choose which sort of government they live under, but what we get is other governments "forcing" our government to do things our country doesn't want. (I put "forcing" in quotes because quite often it's more of an excuse than a reason.)
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Reminds me of the "Archipelago" idea Scott Alexander used to play with[0] - the concept that takes the assumption that people, given freedom of association, eventually form into groups they feel good in, and follows it to a logical extreme. You'd have a word formed into "countries" and a central body that basically enforces two rules: 1) no aggressive actions of one country against another, and 2) freedom of movement for all - so if you don't like your group, you can migrate freely to a different one. There are some caveats in that thought experiment, but it does strongly resemble what you said - that "what people want is for it to be easy to choose which sort of government they live under". [0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-communitarianism/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-...
- wcummings 10y ago
  This. Perspective is important, especially in light of recent events in Europe.
- killerpopiller 10y ago
  so, the price for peace is to further the international 1% and give up democracy in exchange for plutocracy?
- marcoperaza 10y ago
  I'm pretty sure that the massive presence of American troops in Europe (which amazingly outnumber all European troops combined) and nuclear deterrents are what's keeping the peace.
- Teever 10y ago
  Are you sure it wasn't the development of nuclear weapons that has staved off another major war?
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Given how close we were to launching them at each other during Cold War? I guess we'll never[0] know. Human societies are a very complex system, so it's hard to pinpoint the real, exact cause of a particular geopolitical event - a cause that if it was hypothetically removed from the timestream, would change the outcome of that event or prevent it from happening. [0] - for a practical, pre-singularity definition of "never"
    - dexterdog 10y ago
      Something about horseshoes and hand grenades.
      - TeMPOraL 10y ago
        I'm not sure what you mean. Could you elaborate? I could only find references to a song, a musical band and a videogame. EDIT: I guess you mean the phrase "Almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades"?
    - zarriak 10y ago
      I think all the examples of times in which the situation demanded the launch of nuclear weapons but they were not launched demonstrates how far away humanity was from ending it all.
      - fapjacks 10y ago
        This is totally off-topic, but your point can't be emphasized enough: Both sides of that potential nuclear war went to great lengths not to fire their missiles. Up to and including insubordination by missileers in the silos. Having spent most of my adult life serving in the infantry in various warzones, I have a pet theory about why this happens. The reason we don't start a nuclear war is because that would bring the war from the front lines to grandma's house. War is a thing that plays to the male psyche of being a kind of exciting grand adventure. This may seem hard to believe for those of you that haven't been shot at or shot at other human beings. But after a while, when the urgency of mortal concerns begins to wear off, you can see things for what they really are. I think that war is a very male extension of childhood play. It's exciting until faced with one's own mortality, and indeed nobody thinks they'll be the ones getting blown to pieces. There's a great quote by Winston Churchill about being shot at. But I think nuclear war is such an existential thing that transcends conventional warfare to such a degree that no one wants to "play" with destroying the everything. As proof of my theory, I predict that the person that actually employs more than one-off nuclear weapons (and escalates a conventional war to a full-scale nuclear war) will be widely seen as being a total psychopath, legitimately insane.
- MicroBerto 10y ago
  You act like WWIII isn't inevitable but for other reasons. The fear of nationalism thanks to WWII has caused the pendulum to swing way too far in the other direction. And it's okay to call it "globalism" like everyone else does.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    It's a scary thought - one that I end up thinking more and more often. It seems that while memories of WWII were fresh in Europe, and the destruction still clearly visible, people were very much into peace and cooperation. But now, with new generations for which WWII is a story told by dying or dead grandparents, who were born into wealthy world and take it as a given - not realizing how much work of several past generations it took to build it anew after the World Wars - I fear we'll be facing another huge conflict here in Europe in the coming decades.
    - intrasight 10y ago
      Liberal democracies can have political conflict, but never in history have they gone to war.
      - TeMPOraL 10y ago
        There's first time for everything. I don't see anything in liberal democracies that would make them unable to wage a war. Not to mention that regimes change, and their names even more often. Today it's a democracy, tomorrow it gets called fascist, day after tomorrow it goes to war.
        intrasight 10y ago
        But it's never happened - let's hope it never does
      - MicroBerto 10y ago
        Odd that right now we're living in an era where the "liberals" have become intolerant and aggressive, criminal war hawks as well as enablers for criminal activity. It might be time we started qualifying what liberal really means anymore.
- Shivetya 10y ago
  Internationalism has become the you cannot escape the state no matter where you reside. either because you pissed off some politician over tax or spying issues. a land war hasn't occurred in Europe simply because the US and the USSR stalemated each other. Once the USSR ceased to be trade had a tendency to convince people having stuff was fun.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  There are different flavours. There's the League of Nations / United Nations model, which tends to be fairly constructive. There's the "citizen of the world" / cosmopolitan model, which has tended to have egalitarian and idealistic overtones. There's the Mont Pelerin Society / Atlas Network "Free Trade / Invisible Hand" globalisation model, which seeks benefits for transnational corporations and the plutocracy, without any safety nets or provisions for the mass of the world's population. This viewpoint is strongly adopted among many who align as "right", contrasted with left. Generally, neoliberalism. See Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, George Monbiot, Naomi Oreskes, or Bill McKibben as among its critics. The populist conservative mode of xenophobic / nonalignment / isolationist tendencies is another element, and among the few which are specifically opposed to international engagement. It's hardly specific to any one nation -- you'll find it expressed among the populist conservative factions of the UK, France, Germany, much of the Islam world, Japan, Russia, and the United States, just off the top of my head.
  - iofj 10y ago
    Unfortunately, as illustrated here and in many other places: http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-obama-anti-business-president/ http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-obama-anti-business-p... The democratic party belongs to the 3rd category and the republicans can't pick between 3 and 4. For most parties worldwide the same goes. 1 and 2 only occur in the movies. Also, worldwide, a majority wants : criminal punishment for non-standard sexuality non-equality between the sexes no free speech (a large majority is against free speech as it exists in America) and very significant minorities want to kill freedom of religion equality between people of different religion ... The obvious problem is very simple: internationalism/globalization is a slight benefit in the short term, and a long term disaster.
- berkut 10y ago
  This. Obviously having massive troop presence prevented war with the soviets, but it can't be overestimated what stuff like the European Coal and Steel Community, the EEC and other following integration steps did after WWII in terms of getting France and Germany to "need" each other, instead of wanting "revenge" and repayment.
  - Semiapies 10y ago
    Revenge is an excuse to get citizens whipped up for the wars the governments already want. The problem with Europe is the concentration of powerful and aggressive nations jockeying for advantage. The world wars were just the latest examples of cyclic major wars in Europe, exacerbated by the empires many of those countries still had. The EEC and the EU haven't kept Europe from having another two or three major wars since the fall of Nazi Germany. (Whether they could have started more world wars after the end of their empires is less clear). Outside powers imposing alliances that prevented the usual suspects from going to war with each other kept this from happening. Today, NATO keeps this from happening.
    - berkut 10y ago
      I suggest you read up on stuff like the European Coal and Steel Community and the Schuman Declaration. Some of their implicit goals were harmonising French and German interests so they wouldn't want to go to war again.
      - Semiapies 10y ago
        I suggest you read up on stuff like the League of Nations.
    - nl 10y ago
      What are the two or three wars you speak of? There have of course been wars in Europe outside the EU (the former Yugoslavia and various wars in the former Soviet states), but within the EU or even involving a EU member? The closest I know of is the Cyprus conflict in 1974, but Greece wasn't an EU member then.
- SturgeonsLaw 10y ago
  There's still war being waged, but it's being done using lawyers and banks rather than troops and tanks.
- Crito 10y ago
  Are you trying to use the thought of world war to scare people into accepting absurd IP law bureaucracy?
  - ra1n85 10y ago
    Yes, that's the argument.
  - hyperbovine 10y ago
    Absolutely. Neither you, nor I, nor anyone reading this has ever lived through anything even remotely approaching the sort of privations that were routinely experienced by people everywhere in every century up until the last. "IP law bureaucracy" pales in comparison. Again, I say this not as someone with any sort of firsthand knowledge, but simply as a student of history.
    - Crito 10y ago
      Absolutely disgusting.
      - hyperbovine 10y ago
        The feeling is mutual.
- ra1n85 10y ago
  Citation needed. Quite a limb to claim that internationalism is the lone reason that Europe hasn't imploded again.
- johnnyhillbilly 10y ago
  Completely depleted economies[1], a general anti-war movement, a cold war + nuclear weapons surely mean there is no credit left for "internationalism". 1) barring the US' selective rebuilding of the West German economy after the war.
tarikjn 10y ago
There are two (or more) dimensions around these issues: (1) is being open to commerce and immigration for law-abiding entrants, and nurturing friendships with other nations while respecting their sovereignty. This is considered a good thing by moral standards and economic theory. Also the George Washington school of though: "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none" (2) is starting with closed borders to the detriment of a country's citizens but giving more power to leaders and creating a system of favors and alliances, interventionism, adventurism etc. this is what create wars in the first place. Let's call it the Trump school of thought. Looks like this kind of deal is more (2): giving up sovereignty though alliances, for no benefit to the common citizen, but increased power for the powers at play.
- marcoperaza 10y ago
  It's amusing that you've somehow attached Trump to a bunch of positions that range from things he's never said to things he's said the exact opposite of. Looks like he's the boogeyman of the year.
  - tarikjn 10y ago
    If you judge Trump by what he says, you're in for a big surprise. It is true he claim to be non-interventionist, but on the other hand he nurtures antagonization, so what good does it do if he ends up forcing interventions through provocations? He has also openly proposed creating systems/actions on trade that correspond to (2) (e.g. comments on Ford).
  - Turing_Machine 10y ago
    It's pretty much a given that any Republican candidate is going to be HITLER!!! in the eyes of the opposition. Reagan was HITLER!!!, Bush I was HITLER!!!, Bush II was HITLER!!!, heck, even a mild-mannered nebbish like Mitt Romney got the HITLER!!! treatment. Given that, as far as I know, none of the above ever launched a global war of domination, nor murdered millions of people for belonging to a specific ethnicity, I'm pretty sure that none of those guys were Hitler. The problem is that the opposition has cried Hitler so many times that no one (other than their fellow rabid partisans) pays the slightest bit of attention any more. Certainly I don't. Nor does Donald Trump. A nice guy like Mitt Romney gets upset when people call him a Nazi and tries to prove that he isn't one. Trump doesn't give a shit. He's the honey badger of candidates. That's going to suck pretty bad if an actual Hitler ever comes along. I think there's some kind of old fable about that, isn't there? Note: I do not like Donald Trump and am not planning on voting for him. I expect him to win handily, though, so we'd better hope he's not, you know, actually Hitler.
revelation 10y ago
It seems there should be a strict ordering here though. Why yield official privileges to country X that your own plebs can't even enter without inquisition-level interrogation? There is police cooperation in Schengen countries because yeah, you can pretty much just stroll over the border. But the timing was open borders, then interpol.
ajmurmann 10y ago
What you are saying is of course true. However, I believe we also are getting the worst of both worlds right now. The state of the EU is a good example of this. On one hand more and more things are regulated on an international level. In the case of the EU these decisions are being made by representatives who were in many cases indirectly elected. If we had something like a European president people would have a much better, direct way choosing what and whom they want. It also would give a platform for previous representatives to point out what good they actually accomplished. During the Brexit I heard that large parts of the nature conservation program Natural England is funded by the EU. Yet no one knows, because it's in nobody's interest to point these things out. Local politicians will either not talk about it or pretend they did it. EU politicians have almost no media platform. A direct election would change that. We might benefit from similar institutions on a UN level or similar as well as more and more decisions are being made at those levels.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Funny thing, your comment reminds me of a reflection I had some time ago - that EU should IMO invest much more into propaganda. Not to paper over its deficiencies, but because people invent anti-EU messages on their own accord, and it dominates the conversation. Similarly with Natural England program you mentioned, EU is doing good work in many other places too - but people don't know it, because nobody cares to highlight it. So it feels EU is all about bureaucracy and creating another USSR - because that's the only thing people are talking about. (It pisses me off in my country in particular, because a lot of people complain about paying to EU not realizing that we're still a net beneficiary, and just how much infrastructure around them was built or upgraded by EU money. The playgrounds they take their kids to. The roads and bridges they drive over. I mean, given how much money our local "entrepreneurs" steal from EU grants all the time, people should be at least a little bit grateful.)
  - ajmurmann 10y ago
    I think investing in "propaganda" would be a good start. However, we don't need to do that for any other part of the government which really is a smell.
kaonashi 10y ago
Private organizations cooperating across borders is what's driving this.
sliverstorm 10y ago
The internet is rather borderless in nature though.
cscurmudgeon 10y ago
Amazing. The western world was all pro "internationalism" when it came to exploiting the east and Africa (centuries of colonialism), but now, want to go back into their shells. Can't have it both ways.
- Turing_Machine 10y ago
  You are confusing colonialism with internationalism. They're not really related concepts.
  - adrenalinelol 10y ago
    No he isn't, the trade deals which allowed near slave labor in SE Asia and exploiting for natural resources in Africa (by foreign actors) is from the same economic doctrine that allows sweatshops in Mexico (NAFTA) and will be the same ideology that passes TPP.
    - Turing_Machine 10y ago
      You haven't actually studied mercantilism much, have you? No, they were not the "same economic doctrine", or anything like it.
    - twblalock 10y ago
      Near slave labor exists in SE Asia because the national governments in that part of the world are willing to tolerate it. There are plenty of countries with free trade agreements that don't have poor working conditions. Near slavery is not a necessary consequence of trade deals -- it is a consequence of bad government. It existed long before free trade agreements. Similarly, resource exploitation occurs in countries whose governments are willing to allow their resources to be exploited. It happened hundreds of years before any free trade agreements were signed, and it will continue to happen until those governments change their practices.
      - aleh 10y ago
        What about Opium wars?

FireBeyond 10y ago

For governments. For individuals wishing to immigrate, not so much.

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