5 ms·

So the EU has fucked up, hence we abolish it completely? As the UK has fucked up the porn stuff, should we abolish it as well?

by sveme 8y ago

raxxorrax 8y ago
It has fucked up so many times I stopped counting to be honest. They are very valid advantages and goals that are worth to defend and indeed some very good policies. But it just doesn't seem to work as a vehicle of democratic formation of will. Lacking any form of real opposition withing its organs, it should be reduced in scope to a large degree.
- derefr 8y ago
  Honestly, every government is going to “fuck up so many times” that most people stop counting. The pragmatic reality is that you have to keep counting anyway, because it turns out that a million fuck-ups in a term of office really is better than a billion fuck-ups, and if every other party/multilateral org is making a billion fuck-ups per year while the one you’ve got is only making a million, you should vote to keep them, because voting them out would just mean voting to hand their decision-making power to a sibling or to a higher/lower level where more fuck-ups would happen. (At least, this is true in an elected democracy, because of the required elements of politicking and bureaucracy that make democracies go. For the same reasons dictatorships can be worse than democracy, they could also—presumably—be better: a benevolent dictator could exactly express the will of a united people with no politicking or bureaucracy fucking things up. Though I don’t think that we’ve ever actually had an historical example of this.)
  - raxxorrax 8y ago
    I can make my government responsible for the work it does. That is less true for the EU parliament. Heck, we don't even have european parties that could be elected directly. And yes, my government does fuck up plenty and I really don't need an additional layer with minimal democratic input to add to that. It is a good vehicle for corporation for european nations. It should get restricted to that. The currency and economic policies for example doen't really convince me. The bulk of many far-right parties we see today, were from parties a lot more moderate 10 years ago. Those were the people that were proved correct with a lot of their criticism at that time. They were chastised and radicalized by this shit-show we see today. We really should think about if it is worth salvaging the current union or search for better alternatives.
  - zpeti 8y ago
    I think the more local the government, the less likely the fuck ups. The more the government actually knows what people wants and can align with them. This is why the EU is cracking, power is more and more centralised, which is creating more and more bad rules, which might work for a small part of the EU but not for everyone else.
    - timrichard 8y ago
      I agree with you. In the UK at least, 'U-Turn' is a classic part of the political lexicon. Sometimes focus groups will indicate that a policy direction might be a non-starter. Or something will be perceived to be so unpalatable to the public that it wouldn't even make the manifesto and be campaigned on. Sometimes, proposed government legislation makes it a bit further and it comes under the scrutiny of the media. Backlashes from the media can amplify blacklashes in the populace, leading to the proposed laws being toned down or abandoned completely. Not always, not even frequently, but enough. In one particular case, the public backlash was enough to depose a PM with a reputation for an iron grip on power (Thatcher and the Poll Tax). I think this contrasts with legislation proposed by the EU Commission (motivation: unknown, perhaps in a significant part to the 300,000 paid lobbyists in Brussels), which seems at the public level to come out of nowhere and inevitably be approved by an obedient EU Parliament as a formality. This particular instance might be used as an example of resistance being futile anyway, but I think it's a slightly different case. You're not going to get 500,000 people being photographed marching past Parliament with placards displaying "hands off my filth".
  - dingaling 8y ago
    > Honestly, every government is going to “fuck up so many times” But why has the EU become a government? This scope creep and the enormous bureaucracy it has established has passed ao gradually that few people remember when it really was just a trade community. The EU should not exist in a form where fuck-ups impact the private lives of individuals.
    - derefr 8y ago
      The EU is an illusion; the constituent bureaucracies that encompass it already existed (just with different and mostly-random 80% coverage of the Eurozone) as treaty organizations before the EU was formed. The point of the EU agreement was essentially to establish a meta-treaty of "if you, as an EU country, want to have a treaty with another EU country, then it has to be with all the other EU countries" (the "if you're going to bring chewing gum you have to bring enough for the class" rule), and then to retroactively apply that to all existing treaties within the Eurozone, either expanding, merging, or discarding those treaty organizations that enforce those treaties to match. It looks like the EU is a lot of things now, but it's not like those treaty-ratified government departments and organizations didn't exist before the EU. They were just illegible, because they were doing things like "UK-France Treaty of Lausanne Naval collaboration", which wasn't obviously an attempt at protecting the entire continent (because it wasn't run by multilateral agreement, but rather just... oligolateral(?) agreement of a few parties interested in mantaining peace in the area), even though peace for the entire region was the treaty organization's stated goal. Likewise the thousand trade agreements that were flattened down into the Eurozone trade agreement, each of which was—at the time—between all the interested member nations that they could get to the table, but where that membership hadn't since kept up with changing borders. If you want to hate the EU, you have to hate it for the things the EU itself does, that wouldn't exist if we never made an EU. That's mostly "a rationalization of multilateral treaty membership." Few people really hate that. I suspect that what people who dislike the EU really dislike, is treaty organizations themselves. The EU "puts a name to a face" for many of those organizations, so to speak, but they've been there pushing governments around (at their own behest, as sovereignty-level precommitment strategies) since at least 1815, when the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Commission_for_Navigation_on_the_Rhine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Commission_for_Navigat... was founded.
sparkling 8y ago
Yes. While i am in favour on many basic ideas of the EU, in in current state it is doing far more harm than good and i do not see that changing. The bureaucrats in charge seem incapable of reforming the institution. Therefore: abolish and rebuild. Honestly for me this looks like history repeating itself, i see many parallels to the USSR: * Unaccountable bureaucrats with names largely unknown to the public are in charge. 99% of EU citizens could not tell you who the presidents of the EU council, commission or parliament are -- or even what the difference between those three entities is. Hell, even many political commentators couldn't tell you. * Anti-EU fores within the EU are "bullied" out (think about the european constitution referendums in France, Ireland etc.). There is a "make them vote the right way or change the rules" mentality. * Pumping out a vast number of laws, rules and regulations. Dairy farmers have been subjected, in the last few years alone, to 1,100 separate, specific new laws. * In the former USSR the citizens of individual countries were told that they should forget about their former national identities. They should, they were told, consider themselves members of the USSR rather than citizens of Ukraine or Estonia. Exactly the same thing is happening in the EU superstate.
Grue3 8y ago
It seems an easier job to un-fuck UK specifically than the entire EU. It's easier to convince a relatively small island that a certain law is stupid than the entire continent.
- sparkie 8y ago
  As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, it is not just about convincing people, but also having an avenue for repair once they are convinced. The UK can mend existing laws by voting in a new parliament who pledge to carry it out in their election manifestos - unless of course, they are lying sods like they current government who are betraying people by doing the opposite to what they pledged. EU citizens have only one option: To beg. They do not have an avenue for repealing laws because the people who make the laws are not accountable to them. They are not elected, and they can't be voted out. The people elected by EU citizens are merely a defense mechanism who can reject bad laws that the unelected might propose, however, bribes can certainly solve that problem. What the commission wants, the commission gets.
sparkie 8y ago
In the UK, laws can be repealed by a newly elected government. The elected MPs can put forward proposals and create new legislation on which the parliament can vote. In the EU, new legislation are only put forward by the commission - who are not elected by the citizens. The MEPs who are elected merely vote on the proposals put forward by the commission. They have no power to contest or put forward legislation which could repeal existing laws. The only remedy for bad laws is that 1 million citizens can petition the commission to consider a change in legislation, which they have no obligation to carry forward for the elected representatives to vote on.
tomjen3 8y ago
For the EU, a reform should be more than enough. Get us back to a single market and expand that to include the US. For the UK, if the genocides, empire building etc isn't enough, this won't matter either.

So the EU has fucked up, hence we abolish it completely? As the UK has fucked up the porn stuff, should we abolish it as well?

by sveme 8y ago

So the EU has fucked up, hence we abolish it completely? As the UK has fucked up the porn stuff, should we abolish it as well?

raxxorrax 8y ago

It has fucked up so many times I stopped counting to be honest. They are very valid advantages and goals that are worth to defend and indeed some very good policies. But it just doesn't seem to work as a vehicle of democratic formation of will. Lacking any form of real opposition withing its organs, it should be reduced in scope to a large degree.

derefr 8y ago
Honestly, every government is going to “fuck up so many times” that most people stop counting. The pragmatic reality is that you have to keep counting anyway, because it turns out that a million fuck-ups in a term of office really is better than a billion fuck-ups, and if every other party/multilateral org is making a billion fuck-ups per year while the one you’ve got is only making a million, you should vote to keep them, because voting them out would just mean voting to hand their decision-making power to a sibling or to a higher/lower level where more fuck-ups would happen. (At least, this is true in an elected democracy, because of the required elements of politicking and bureaucracy that make democracies go. For the same reasons dictatorships can be worse than democracy, they could also—presumably—be better: a benevolent dictator could exactly express the will of a united people with no politicking or bureaucracy fucking things up. Though I don’t think that we’ve ever actually had an historical example of this.)
- raxxorrax 8y ago
  I can make my government responsible for the work it does. That is less true for the EU parliament. Heck, we don't even have european parties that could be elected directly. And yes, my government does fuck up plenty and I really don't need an additional layer with minimal democratic input to add to that. It is a good vehicle for corporation for european nations. It should get restricted to that. The currency and economic policies for example doen't really convince me. The bulk of many far-right parties we see today, were from parties a lot more moderate 10 years ago. Those were the people that were proved correct with a lot of their criticism at that time. They were chastised and radicalized by this shit-show we see today. We really should think about if it is worth salvaging the current union or search for better alternatives.
- zpeti 8y ago
  I think the more local the government, the less likely the fuck ups. The more the government actually knows what people wants and can align with them. This is why the EU is cracking, power is more and more centralised, which is creating more and more bad rules, which might work for a small part of the EU but not for everyone else.
  - timrichard 8y ago
    I agree with you. In the UK at least, 'U-Turn' is a classic part of the political lexicon. Sometimes focus groups will indicate that a policy direction might be a non-starter. Or something will be perceived to be so unpalatable to the public that it wouldn't even make the manifesto and be campaigned on. Sometimes, proposed government legislation makes it a bit further and it comes under the scrutiny of the media. Backlashes from the media can amplify blacklashes in the populace, leading to the proposed laws being toned down or abandoned completely. Not always, not even frequently, but enough. In one particular case, the public backlash was enough to depose a PM with a reputation for an iron grip on power (Thatcher and the Poll Tax). I think this contrasts with legislation proposed by the EU Commission (motivation: unknown, perhaps in a significant part to the 300,000 paid lobbyists in Brussels), which seems at the public level to come out of nowhere and inevitably be approved by an obedient EU Parliament as a formality. This particular instance might be used as an example of resistance being futile anyway, but I think it's a slightly different case. You're not going to get 500,000 people being photographed marching past Parliament with placards displaying "hands off my filth".
- dingaling 8y ago
  > Honestly, every government is going to “fuck up so many times” But why has the EU become a government? This scope creep and the enormous bureaucracy it has established has passed ao gradually that few people remember when it really was just a trade community. The EU should not exist in a form where fuck-ups impact the private lives of individuals.
  - derefr 8y ago
    The EU is an illusion; the constituent bureaucracies that encompass it already existed (just with different and mostly-random 80% coverage of the Eurozone) as treaty organizations before the EU was formed. The point of the EU agreement was essentially to establish a meta-treaty of "if you, as an EU country, want to have a treaty with another EU country, then it has to be with all the other EU countries" (the "if you're going to bring chewing gum you have to bring enough for the class" rule), and then to retroactively apply that to all existing treaties within the Eurozone, either expanding, merging, or discarding those treaty organizations that enforce those treaties to match. It looks like the EU is a lot of things now, but it's not like those treaty-ratified government departments and organizations didn't exist before the EU. They were just illegible, because they were doing things like "UK-France Treaty of Lausanne Naval collaboration", which wasn't obviously an attempt at protecting the entire continent (because it wasn't run by multilateral agreement, but rather just... oligolateral(?) agreement of a few parties interested in mantaining peace in the area), even though peace for the entire region was the treaty organization's stated goal. Likewise the thousand trade agreements that were flattened down into the Eurozone trade agreement, each of which was—at the time—between all the interested member nations that they could get to the table, but where that membership hadn't since kept up with changing borders. If you want to hate the EU, you have to hate it for the things the EU itself does, that wouldn't exist if we never made an EU. That's mostly "a rationalization of multilateral treaty membership." Few people really hate that. I suspect that what people who dislike the EU really dislike, is treaty organizations themselves. The EU "puts a name to a face" for many of those organizations, so to speak, but they've been there pushing governments around (at their own behest, as sovereignty-level precommitment strategies) since at least 1815, when the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Commission_for_Navigation_on_the_Rhine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Commission_for_Navigat... was founded.

sparkling 8y ago

Yes. While i am in favour on many basic ideas of the EU, in in current state it is doing far more harm than good and i do not see that changing. The bureaucrats in charge seem incapable of reforming the institution. Therefore: abolish and rebuild. Honestly for me this looks like history repeating itself, i see many parallels to the USSR: * Unaccountable bureaucrats with names largely unknown to the public are in charge. 99% of EU citizens could not tell you who the presidents of the EU council, commission or parliament are -- or even what the difference between those three entities is. Hell, even many political commentators couldn't tell you. * Anti-EU fores within the EU are "bullied" out (think about the european constitution referendums in France, Ireland etc.). There is a "make them vote the right way or change the rules" mentality. * Pumping out a vast number of laws, rules and regulations. Dairy farmers have been subjected, in the last few years alone, to 1,100 separate, specific new laws. * In the former USSR the citizens of individual countries were told that they should forget about their former national identities. They should, they were told, consider themselves members of the USSR rather than citizens of Ukraine or Estonia. Exactly the same thing is happening in the EU superstate.

Grue3 8y ago

It seems an easier job to un-fuck UK specifically than the entire EU. It's easier to convince a relatively small island that a certain law is stupid than the entire continent.

sparkie 8y ago
As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, it is not just about convincing people, but also having an avenue for repair once they are convinced. The UK can mend existing laws by voting in a new parliament who pledge to carry it out in their election manifestos - unless of course, they are lying sods like they current government who are betraying people by doing the opposite to what they pledged. EU citizens have only one option: To beg. They do not have an avenue for repealing laws because the people who make the laws are not accountable to them. They are not elected, and they can't be voted out. The people elected by EU citizens are merely a defense mechanism who can reject bad laws that the unelected might propose, however, bribes can certainly solve that problem. What the commission wants, the commission gets.

sparkie 8y ago

In the UK, laws can be repealed by a newly elected government. The elected MPs can put forward proposals and create new legislation on which the parliament can vote. In the EU, new legislation are only put forward by the commission - who are not elected by the citizens. The MEPs who are elected merely vote on the proposals put forward by the commission. They have no power to contest or put forward legislation which could repeal existing laws. The only remedy for bad laws is that 1 million citizens can petition the commission to consider a change in legislation, which they have no obligation to carry forward for the elected representatives to vote on.

tomjen3 8y ago

For the EU, a reform should be more than enough. Get us back to a single market and expand that to include the US. For the UK, if the genocides, empire building etc isn't enough, this won't matter either.