7 ms·

Call me a pessimist but this is one of the main reasons I'm really disappointed about Brexit, whatever the EU's drawbacks.

empath75 10y ago
Yeah, just watching the news, it's becoming more and more apparent that people are so far removed from the horrors of WWI and WWII that they don't understand why we created the international institutions we did. The UN, WTO, EU, etc, are ineffective, bureaucratic messes, but no matter how bad they are, they're a better way of solving international disputes than the historical alternatives. Western nationalists like to talk about how the cultures of the middle east are inherently violent, but seem to forget that the history of europe was a centuries-long bloodbath that eventually engulfed the entire world in horror and put us nearly on the brink of the extinction of all human life. It's those alliances and international organizations that allowed us to step backwards from it. Solving our problems in courtrooms and at negotiating tables rather than on the battlefield.
- valkea 10y ago
  The UN and WTO are not political unions though.
  - bluejekyll 10y ago
    The WTO wields a lot of power as a trade broker, though.
- mikeash 10y ago
  Now that you mention it, some of the rhetoric about the Middle East really is weird. The last time Europeans tried to go out and kill everybody with the wrong religion is still in living memory. And they were a lot more effective at it, too!
  - lostlogin 10y ago
    Don't be forgetting Bosnia (I assume you were referencing WW2). And while the war crimes were nowhere near the same scale, Bush did make a few uncomfortable remarks about evil, crusades and the Middle East.
    - mikeash 10y ago
      Good point, I'm afraid I did forget, and your assumption is correct.
  - im4w1l 10y ago
    ISIS is committing genocide against Christian minorities right now.
- nixos 10y ago
  But did the UN ever stop a World War from breaking out? Practically, even had the UN been built instead of the League, World War 2 probably would have still happened (Italy was on the Detente side in World War 1 and would have vetoed any anti-Germany resolution). I think it's just that: 1. A weakened Europe has nothing left to fight over, and any war between two European countries would have resulted in the Soviet Union sweeping through, swallowing them all up 2. Even the "winning" side would be devastated due to Nuclear weapons. 3. Land has much less importance in a service/technology economy. Look at Singapore, for example.
  - jcranmer 10y ago
    The Marshall Plan, the ECC (predecessor to the EU), NATO, and the Warsaw Pact were designed in large part to bind the European countries into alliances to make war between them unthinkable. This did result in the Cold War, where both NATO and the Warsaw Pact lived in fear that the other side was ready to invade across the Iron Curtain any second, but MAD probably played a big part in restraining tensions between the two sides in war. The other thing that happened after WWII, which probably has a bigger impact on the lack of war, was that, rather than deciding which countries gets which land by plebiscites, the people who lived on the wrong side of the borders were simply deported en masse. Deportation of the Poles from Lwów, the Germans from Stettin, or the Finns from Karelia did a lot to dampen irredentist claims to those lands.
  - yk 10y ago
    What about the Cuban missile crises, Kennedy did emphasize the UN security council framework as means to verify withdraw of Soviet missiles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis#Crisis_ends https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis#Crisis_en...
- Grishnakh 10y ago
  What they really need is a way of reforming these things (namely the EU), instead of it being a "love it or leave it" type of affair. This is one of the big problems with human-created bureaucracies: there's no easy and effective way to reform them, so people end up either abandoning them (e.g. Brexit, various independence movements or revolutions) or they become usurped by some better competitor (e.g. IBM being pushed out of the PC business, American automakers losing to foreign competition) or they end up collapsing (e.g. DEC being split up and sold in chunks, or the Roman Empire falling apart). It seems to be a constant that larger human organizations are simply impossible to reform effectively, so we're stuck with chaos. I don't think there's a solution for this, short of genetically-engineering humans to work better together, or else we would have found it over the past couple of millennia.
  - sabarn01 10y ago
    The roman empire Lasted 600+ years so I have trouble using it as a comparison.
    - swasheck 10y ago
      they just don't make these things like they used to, do they?
    - specialist 10y ago
      In name only. The Roman Empire constantly reinvented itself.
  - yuhong 10y ago
    Sometimes they are flawed even beforehand. Notice how fast US manufacturing declined after Japan beat them. I think part of the problem in this case is arrogance.
  - specialist 10y ago
    I anticipate that Brexit will be used to initiate overdue, broadly agreed upon reforms. Then everyone can save face and kiss and make up. Introspection driven change is hard for every organization. Sometimes you just need a tantrum or external stimulus.
- EliRivers 10y ago
  Is the EU that ineffective? Some of its greatest triumphs are invisible because they don't exist. I know someone who used to handle transporting goods around Europe and experienced the reduction of paperwork and inspection and costs and delays and so on, until he ended up with basically none. He says all the troubles he used to have that no longer exist utterly dwarf anything new. I don't have much actual evidence, though.
  - 7952 10y ago
    The current hostility to standardisation and regulation seems a little strange to me as a programmer. Everything we do is dependant on having a reliable standard of how things are supposed to work. Obviously compulsion is bad, but without the EU we would still have compulsion. Instead of one required standard we would have hundreds which would need to be checked at borders.
- googletazer 10y ago
  These international institutions are not visibly working for the vast majority of the electorate though. The British working class finally voted for their interests and of course they've been vilified from the top for it. All these institutions have allowed for is centralization of power under one ruler/representative instead of dozen smaller ones.
  - tormeh 10y ago
    You don't understand how the EU works. There is a parliament and a central bureaucracy, yes, but 80% of it is just leaders of national governments sitting in a surveillance-proof room hashing out deals. There are legitimate complaints against how the EU is structured, but this is not one of them.
  - notJim 10y ago
    > These international institutions are not visibly working for the vast majority of the electorate though. This is cleary true, but it doesn't follow that the right solution is to quit the union rather than reforming it. There are more options than rabid nationalism vs total financialization.
  - __jal 10y ago
    > British working class finally voted for their interests That's a funny way of defining 'interests'.
  - 7952 10y ago
    The raison d'etre for these kind of institutions is precisely to centralise power. So that matters of wider community importance can be agreed upon collectively and standardised. And we absolutely do have issues that need to be solved at a continental level. The problem is that sometimes those institutions overreach into areas that should be handled at a lower level. Arguably the British Parliament is more guilty of this than the EU and has control of things that are much more important to everyday life.
- krylon 10y ago
  > Yeah, just watching the news, it's becoming more and more apparent that people are so far removed from the horrors of WWI and WWII that they don't understand why we created the international institutions we did. It is sad it only takes such a short time for people to forget. I have met a couple of people who have experienced World War II, although most of them were only children at the time. I listened to stories of being woken in the middle of the night by sirens, and then spending the rest of the night in a bunker, unable to sleep, constantly being shaken by explosions. I cannot imagine what that must be like, but I know that I would not wish that on anyone. Somebody once said that the only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. So far, it looks like whoever said it was right.
bluejekyll 10y ago
I'm not really concerned that UK and the EU will start some WWIII against each other. What I'm more concerned with is that they will have differing policies for dealing with rogue states, and/or create competing interests in different regions of the world, especially the Middle East and Africa. WWIII will probably start with what will look an awful lot like the Forth Crusade. Edit: obviously I meant fourth, and I don't mean this from the religious perspective, just the European involvement in conflicts in the Middle East.
- claystu 10y ago
  Is this where people march out and demand we program in Forth? More seriously, I don't see the West responding to a call from the Pope to reconquer Jerusalem.
  - xrange 10y ago
    I shudder to think of the infighting between the colorForth and ANSI Forth groups.
  - rfrey 10y ago
    It doesn't have to be a literal re-enactment of the crusades, it just has to rhyme. Current US political discourse has a lot in common with religious fervour, and at least one of the candidates seems OK with turn-the-middle-east-to-glass type rhetoric.
tajen 10y ago
You can't equate the Brexit to war. British politic elites haven't been listening to the lowly for ages - They've done many things against the countryside English people for long, for example importing new workers in London and forcing multiculturalism on people who don't want it. I don't care whether it's good or bad for England to welcome extremely good Indian talents - If the People didn't want that, then don't do it, because it's how the democracy works. The Brexit vote is just a vote against the elites. The cause of the war, if any, is not the Brexit as you pretend, but the divide between the People's opinions and their elites certainly causes a war. Another thing. It's all a democracy theater. In France I'm persuaded the police is not doing its job. In a single day I could find cocaine and photograph a hundred of traffic infringements. A trained reporter could buy a gun. So why can't the police? We have police everywhere but I don't see them working, they sometimes kick a thief at 10 policemen against 1 civilian, or they themself jaywalk or use their sirens. Terrorism is the result of the police letting things go. It's a theater, they just have to wake up and do something to find criminal networks, but they want people to vote more extremist, so they'd rather not work. Next time you have an opinion on which vote is right and which one is war, please also consider that the people only vote among a limited set of options. For example, in France, the next vote is for the president. No-one is asking the French people whether they want to limit the family visas, extend the refugee visas, add more education in poorer areas or get the police to work. No, the French people are just asked whether they want the same president (the one who didn't listen to 6 months of demonstrations, didn't improve economic results, created new taxes and searched 3200 Muslims without due diligence the week after the Bataclan attack), or whether they want to switch to someone (Le Pen - extreme right) who will bark against immigrants. It's an extremely narrow choice. I'm not sure whether an incompetent president is a good thing.
- anonymousDan 10y ago
  Sorry what the hell have 'Indian talents' got to do with the EU? Futhermore, to me your claim that "The cause of the war, if any, is not the Brexit as you pretend, but the divide between the People's opinions and their elites certainly causes a war." is beside the point. The EU reduces the chances of wars between European countries because it makes them much more interdependent economically, meaning both 'elites' and the general population have much more to lose from war.

empath75 10y ago

Yeah, just watching the news, it's becoming more and more apparent that people are so far removed from the horrors of WWI and WWII that they don't understand why we created the international institutions we did. The UN, WTO, EU, etc, are ineffective, bureaucratic messes, but no matter how bad they are, they're a better way of solving international disputes than the historical alternatives. Western nationalists like to talk about how the cultures of the middle east are inherently violent, but seem to forget that the history of europe was a centuries-long bloodbath that eventually engulfed the entire world in horror and put us nearly on the brink of the extinction of all human life. It's those alliances and international organizations that allowed us to step backwards from it. Solving our problems in courtrooms and at negotiating tables rather than on the battlefield.

valkea 10y ago
The UN and WTO are not political unions though.
- bluejekyll 10y ago
  The WTO wields a lot of power as a trade broker, though.
mikeash 10y ago
Now that you mention it, some of the rhetoric about the Middle East really is weird. The last time Europeans tried to go out and kill everybody with the wrong religion is still in living memory. And they were a lot more effective at it, too!
- lostlogin 10y ago
  Don't be forgetting Bosnia (I assume you were referencing WW2). And while the war crimes were nowhere near the same scale, Bush did make a few uncomfortable remarks about evil, crusades and the Middle East.
  - mikeash 10y ago
    Good point, I'm afraid I did forget, and your assumption is correct.
- im4w1l 10y ago
  ISIS is committing genocide against Christian minorities right now.
nixos 10y ago
But did the UN ever stop a World War from breaking out? Practically, even had the UN been built instead of the League, World War 2 probably would have still happened (Italy was on the Detente side in World War 1 and would have vetoed any anti-Germany resolution). I think it's just that: 1. A weakened Europe has nothing left to fight over, and any war between two European countries would have resulted in the Soviet Union sweeping through, swallowing them all up 2. Even the "winning" side would be devastated due to Nuclear weapons. 3. Land has much less importance in a service/technology economy. Look at Singapore, for example.
- jcranmer 10y ago
  The Marshall Plan, the ECC (predecessor to the EU), NATO, and the Warsaw Pact were designed in large part to bind the European countries into alliances to make war between them unthinkable. This did result in the Cold War, where both NATO and the Warsaw Pact lived in fear that the other side was ready to invade across the Iron Curtain any second, but MAD probably played a big part in restraining tensions between the two sides in war. The other thing that happened after WWII, which probably has a bigger impact on the lack of war, was that, rather than deciding which countries gets which land by plebiscites, the people who lived on the wrong side of the borders were simply deported en masse. Deportation of the Poles from Lwów, the Germans from Stettin, or the Finns from Karelia did a lot to dampen irredentist claims to those lands.
- yk 10y ago
  What about the Cuban missile crises, Kennedy did emphasize the UN security council framework as means to verify withdraw of Soviet missiles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis#Crisis_ends https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis#Crisis_en...
Grishnakh 10y ago
What they really need is a way of reforming these things (namely the EU), instead of it being a "love it or leave it" type of affair. This is one of the big problems with human-created bureaucracies: there's no easy and effective way to reform them, so people end up either abandoning them (e.g. Brexit, various independence movements or revolutions) or they become usurped by some better competitor (e.g. IBM being pushed out of the PC business, American automakers losing to foreign competition) or they end up collapsing (e.g. DEC being split up and sold in chunks, or the Roman Empire falling apart). It seems to be a constant that larger human organizations are simply impossible to reform effectively, so we're stuck with chaos. I don't think there's a solution for this, short of genetically-engineering humans to work better together, or else we would have found it over the past couple of millennia.
- sabarn01 10y ago
  The roman empire Lasted 600+ years so I have trouble using it as a comparison.
  - swasheck 10y ago
    they just don't make these things like they used to, do they?
  - specialist 10y ago
    In name only. The Roman Empire constantly reinvented itself.
- yuhong 10y ago
  Sometimes they are flawed even beforehand. Notice how fast US manufacturing declined after Japan beat them. I think part of the problem in this case is arrogance.
- specialist 10y ago
  I anticipate that Brexit will be used to initiate overdue, broadly agreed upon reforms. Then everyone can save face and kiss and make up. Introspection driven change is hard for every organization. Sometimes you just need a tantrum or external stimulus.
EliRivers 10y ago
Is the EU that ineffective? Some of its greatest triumphs are invisible because they don't exist. I know someone who used to handle transporting goods around Europe and experienced the reduction of paperwork and inspection and costs and delays and so on, until he ended up with basically none. He says all the troubles he used to have that no longer exist utterly dwarf anything new. I don't have much actual evidence, though.
- 7952 10y ago
  The current hostility to standardisation and regulation seems a little strange to me as a programmer. Everything we do is dependant on having a reliable standard of how things are supposed to work. Obviously compulsion is bad, but without the EU we would still have compulsion. Instead of one required standard we would have hundreds which would need to be checked at borders.
googletazer 10y ago
These international institutions are not visibly working for the vast majority of the electorate though. The British working class finally voted for their interests and of course they've been vilified from the top for it. All these institutions have allowed for is centralization of power under one ruler/representative instead of dozen smaller ones.
- tormeh 10y ago
  You don't understand how the EU works. There is a parliament and a central bureaucracy, yes, but 80% of it is just leaders of national governments sitting in a surveillance-proof room hashing out deals. There are legitimate complaints against how the EU is structured, but this is not one of them.
- notJim 10y ago
  > These international institutions are not visibly working for the vast majority of the electorate though. This is cleary true, but it doesn't follow that the right solution is to quit the union rather than reforming it. There are more options than rabid nationalism vs total financialization.
- __jal 10y ago
  > British working class finally voted for their interests That's a funny way of defining 'interests'.
- 7952 10y ago
  The raison d'etre for these kind of institutions is precisely to centralise power. So that matters of wider community importance can be agreed upon collectively and standardised. And we absolutely do have issues that need to be solved at a continental level. The problem is that sometimes those institutions overreach into areas that should be handled at a lower level. Arguably the British Parliament is more guilty of this than the EU and has control of things that are much more important to everyday life.
krylon 10y ago
> Yeah, just watching the news, it's becoming more and more apparent that people are so far removed from the horrors of WWI and WWII that they don't understand why we created the international institutions we did. It is sad it only takes such a short time for people to forget. I have met a couple of people who have experienced World War II, although most of them were only children at the time. I listened to stories of being woken in the middle of the night by sirens, and then spending the rest of the night in a bunker, unable to sleep, constantly being shaken by explosions. I cannot imagine what that must be like, but I know that I would not wish that on anyone. Somebody once said that the only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. So far, it looks like whoever said it was right.

bluejekyll 10y ago

I'm not really concerned that UK and the EU will start some WWIII against each other. What I'm more concerned with is that they will have differing policies for dealing with rogue states, and/or create competing interests in different regions of the world, especially the Middle East and Africa. WWIII will probably start with what will look an awful lot like the Forth Crusade. Edit: obviously I meant fourth, and I don't mean this from the religious perspective, just the European involvement in conflicts in the Middle East.

claystu 10y ago
Is this where people march out and demand we program in Forth? More seriously, I don't see the West responding to a call from the Pope to reconquer Jerusalem.
- xrange 10y ago
  I shudder to think of the infighting between the colorForth and ANSI Forth groups.
- rfrey 10y ago
  It doesn't have to be a literal re-enactment of the crusades, it just has to rhyme. Current US political discourse has a lot in common with religious fervour, and at least one of the candidates seems OK with turn-the-middle-east-to-glass type rhetoric.

tajen 10y ago

You can't equate the Brexit to war. British politic elites haven't been listening to the lowly for ages - They've done many things against the countryside English people for long, for example importing new workers in London and forcing multiculturalism on people who don't want it. I don't care whether it's good or bad for England to welcome extremely good Indian talents - If the People didn't want that, then don't do it, because it's how the democracy works. The Brexit vote is just a vote against the elites. The cause of the war, if any, is not the Brexit as you pretend, but the divide between the People's opinions and their elites certainly causes a war. Another thing. It's all a democracy theater. In France I'm persuaded the police is not doing its job. In a single day I could find cocaine and photograph a hundred of traffic infringements. A trained reporter could buy a gun. So why can't the police? We have police everywhere but I don't see them working, they sometimes kick a thief at 10 policemen against 1 civilian, or they themself jaywalk or use their sirens. Terrorism is the result of the police letting things go. It's a theater, they just have to wake up and do something to find criminal networks, but they want people to vote more extremist, so they'd rather not work. Next time you have an opinion on which vote is right and which one is war, please also consider that the people only vote among a limited set of options. For example, in France, the next vote is for the president. No-one is asking the French people whether they want to limit the family visas, extend the refugee visas, add more education in poorer areas or get the police to work. No, the French people are just asked whether they want the same president (the one who didn't listen to 6 months of demonstrations, didn't improve economic results, created new taxes and searched 3200 Muslims without due diligence the week after the Bataclan attack), or whether they want to switch to someone (Le Pen - extreme right) who will bark against immigrants. It's an extremely narrow choice. I'm not sure whether an incompetent president is a good thing.

anonymousDan 10y ago
Sorry what the hell have 'Indian talents' got to do with the EU? Futhermore, to me your claim that "The cause of the war, if any, is not the Brexit as you pretend, but the divide between the People's opinions and their elites certainly causes a war." is beside the point. The EU reduces the chances of wars between European countries because it makes them much more interdependent economically, meaning both 'elites' and the general population have much more to lose from war.