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MiddleOne posted:Greece really was the herald of the beginning of the end. A Brexit will do wonders for the internal cohesion of the EU, though it won't be nearly enough to make up for the last few expansion rounds. They weren't part of Schengen or the Euro anyway so who really gives a poo poo as a regular European. The economy will suffer but it will normalize after a while.
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Jun 24, 2016 07:16
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Mukip posted:How likely is it that the EU will now become more "cohesive"? There were people saying that brexit would be good because now the euro federalism can deepen, and those pointing out that anti-EU sentiment has grown everywhere. Donald Tusk seems to be in the latter category of viewing further integration as unlikely. Personally, I don't think it was Britain holding the EU back, or at least it isn't now. It won't 'deepen', as you rightly point out most people don't want it to, but you'll no longer have the English poisoning the well. They'll have to follow 75% of EU regulations by default while no longer having the chance to veto or ask for special snowflake clauses. It's good for the EU in the long term. Actually, I'm starting to think it was a bad idea to expand beyond the first six in general.
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Jun 24, 2016 07:35
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If the SNP is smart they'll announce a Scexit referendum to be held as soon as possible. This is the best opportunity they're going to have in decades. The trolling potential is off the charts.
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Jun 24, 2016 11:31
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PT6A posted:Why did so many people vote Leave when apparently they did not want Leave to win. Is there lead in the water in the UK or something, or is it congenital mental deficiency? Because 49% Leave would have been the ideal outcome, giving them even more blackmail leverage while still remaining in. They just overshot a little
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Jun 24, 2016 15:49
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I always thought Farage was a boorish rear end in a top hat even though I'm not a huge fan of the EU myself.
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Jun 24, 2016 16:38
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The status of English in Europe has very little to do with the UK, even though we politely keep up the fiction.
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Jun 24, 2016 17:36
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steinrokkan posted:Actually they mean "I'm afraid of strange people, and I don't want them and their inscrutable ways influencing my life. I can only trust my countrymen with the same stiff upper lip and disregard for my own personal dignity as me." lol stiff upper lip 
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Jun 24, 2016 22:22
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steinrokkan posted:The Brits would be good Slavs, if they weren't so drat stupid and inbred (sic). Let's not go too far. England might be 50% chavs in tracksuits and teenage mothers on council estates, but in Russia that's 90% of the population.
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Jun 24, 2016 22:28
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YF-23 posted:What do the Netherlands have to be mad about against the EU anyway. That's not the point. The EU is a stand-in for all the things that people are actually concerned or mad about - mass immigration, neoliberalism, the supposed disintegration of Western society.
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Jun 25, 2016 13:17
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Yinlock posted:Those Syrian immigrants ARE "your own citizens" but I think education should be free for everyone. Those people have been through the worst poo poo imaginable and deserve a second chance to actually have a life that isn't complete poo poo, but making others pay for education is pretty lovely too. This is a laudable sentiment, but the big problem with these nineties feelgood policies is that they're not sustainable in the long run. The reality is that we're importing a host of social problems for no good reason, regardless of what the causes are or who is to blame. After forty years of mass immigration it's no longer a blind experiment.
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Jun 26, 2016 12:53
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NihilismNow posted:Maybe not in your hellhole of a country. Over here we try to keep things civilised. Sometimes farmers try to treat their eastern european labour like serfs, then we arrest them and put them in prison. It's Germany, land of the minijobs. Austerity and refugees for everyone!
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Jun 26, 2016 18:51
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Pochoclo posted:You're not getting my point. Let me try and make it simpler: you know how if you put something hot next to something cold, they will eventually reach a state of equilibrium? People will go where things are better than where they are right now. It doesn't matter if you think jobs are running out, it's still infinitely more than the immigrants would get back home. It's all relative. This is exactly what people are afraid of, that given enough time and unlimited immigration, Europe will effectively reach a state of equilibrium with the rest of the world. Wealth is not a magical, inherent, fixed quality of certain geographic areas, it is the product of specific societies with specific cultures and institutions.
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Jun 26, 2016 19:27
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Private Speech posted:I don't know, I mean I'm not trying to steer it that way. It's the similarity that struck me Putting up barriers is the opposite of globalization.
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Jun 26, 2016 19:33
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9-Volt Assault posted:CETA failed thanks to half of Belgium I have no strong feelings about CETA but I don't see why Wallonia shouldn't have veto power. The UK gets four football teams and they're ten times as internally coherent as Belgium. Vive la Wallonie libre! 
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Oct 21, 2016 21:40
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Einbauschrank posted:The luddites couldn't turn back the weel, neither will some farmers and Socialists in Belgium be able to do it. Instead of facing change they want to embrace calcification. Foreign media love to point out how CETA is being blocked by a 'tiny region' of 3.6 million people, but that still puts it ahead of seven official EU member states. That's without taking into account the hundreds of thousands of Brussels francophones who are additionally represented by the Parliament of the French Community, which is obviously also blocking CETA. The so-called regions in Belgium have far-reaching competences which are only set to increase in scope as the country continues to dissolve. They're virtually nations, so I see no fundamental problem with Wallonia having veto power.
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Oct 22, 2016 11:05
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I said it was larger than seven actual EU member states, not that it was #7 (though Belgium itself is in the top ten). You are correct that it's a rather cumbersome system, but you mentioned earlier that you worried about the EU heading in a centralist direction. Surely this would be a good safeguard against that.
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Oct 22, 2016 11:22
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MeLKoR posted:Vietnam doesn't get the kind of access or influence this deal with the US will entail. And I don't view "productivity" as the ultimate goal but rather living standards of the working class so that's not a race I want to enter in the first place. Turns out that to redistribute wealth, it needs to be produced first. This was something communist countries understood very well, the Western New Left less so.
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Oct 22, 2016 12:53
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Am I to understand that they won't be breaking Belgium's record after all? I knew they didn't have it in them. In CETA news, Belgium has until Monday night to sign the agreement: http://www.standaard.be/cnt/dmf20161023_02533947 The only way it's happening is if Wallonia gives in or the Flemish liberals brute-force it through federal parliament. I hope the N-VA blocks the attempt in the latter case. This time it's Wallonia having a federal dictate pushed down its throat, next time it could be Flanders.
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Oct 23, 2016 15:32
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Riso posted:Brussels has now also decided to give CETA the finger. The coalition governing Brussels is almost the same as the one in Wallonia, so I don't know why this would suddenly sound the death knell.
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Oct 24, 2016 16:53
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GaussianCopula posted:Brussels does not have veto powers though. I don't really see why not. Belgian federalism is symmetrical. But it's a moot issue because both regions are controlled by the same two parties (with the FDF and some token Flemish parties thrown in in Brussels).
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Oct 24, 2016 17:37
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LemonDrizzle posted:Hollande's approval rating has fallen to 4%. That is not a typo, only four per cent of the French electorate approves of the job he's doing: http://www.lefigaro.fr/politique/le...time=1477398172 So we're almost certainly looking at a Juppé presidency X years from now (not sure when the next presidential election is).
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Oct 25, 2016 16:13
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Agreed <3
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Oct 25, 2016 16:40
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The traditional left is dead nearly everywhere in Europe, except perhaps in Wallonia, as we can see now. It's nothing new. It died along with the Fordist industrial model, and it's not coming back. I'm surprised people ever had such expectations for Hollande. Juppé will be more of the same. After everything that's happened in France over the past few years, I'm actually surprised they're not lurching further to the right. In almost every other country there would be a massive populist backlash. Phlegmish fucked around with this message at 07:16 on Oct 26, 2016 |
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Oct 26, 2016 07:14
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LeoMarr posted:I remeber when Francois hollande was SAs favorite communist. Like all communist scum, destined to the dustbin of history. Hollandr paved the way for fascism, Whether it happen now or in 4 years. France is in for a dark time. With cars burning every night, I'm surprised it took this long.
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Oct 27, 2016 07:03
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Toplowtech posted:I wonder what the Flemish surrendered to Wallonia to get their Canada Prime-Minister Ken barbie doll visit? We have to do the dishes for a month.
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Oct 27, 2016 15:52
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Toplowtech posted:That's far too much. More seriously it's mostly guarantees on public service in Wallonia and something about the court of arbitration part of CETA, right? As I just noticed, the French-speaking socialists took out a full-page ad in the francophone version of the free railway newspaper here in Brussels. I might scan it when I get to work. The big thing is no private courts, and then some vague promises about consumer and trademark protection. We have yet to see how much it will actually impact the implementation of CETA.
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Oct 28, 2016 07:15
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WilliamAnderson posted:Who determines what is or isn't a lie? The state, provided that the people in charge share my ideology, obviously.
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Oct 29, 2016 11:06
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You're confusing cause and effect. If the UK is awash with idiotic right-wing tabloids, it's because there's a huge market for it. They reflect British mass culture more than they shape it. The reason it's so extreme in that country is that they have a hosed up anachronistic class system.
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Oct 29, 2016 14:38
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LeoMarr posted:Its funny that countries that betrayed the East now have communism on the rise.western Betrayl karma What is this referring to? Raspberry Jam It In Me posted:Oettinger called Wallonia's government a bunch of communists. Specifically, a micro-region ruled by communists.
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Nov 1, 2016 12:29
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Ligur posted:The Guardian published a pretty good read, "The ruthlessly effective rebranding of Europe’s new far right". Great article, worth the read.
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Nov 2, 2016 17:14
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The problem of the left in this post or late modern world is that they want to regulate the flow of capital without regulating the flow of people. In the minds of many people, mass immigration is inextricably linked to neoliberal globalist policies and the gradual undermining of the welfare state. The left has no coherent answer to these concerns other than blanket dismissal or hollow slogans about a 'different kind' of globalisation and no one being illegal. And it's totally understandable that they do this - it's an ideological catch 22 for them. The populist right, as primitive as it often is, has no such contradictions, which is why it's so successful. That's not to say the left is dead, in a cultural and social sense it is in fact crushingly dominant. But the traditional economically-focused left is dead and buried. It has no place in a post-Fordist world, which is why it's lost much of its electorate to the populist right. The latter might not be able to bring the factories back, but at least they'll stop importing foreigners into their neighborhoods. My prediction is that the European left will eventually follow the extremely successful American model, with an almost exclusive focus on identity politics and symbolic/cultural issues. It will be the party for minorities and the white cultural bourgeoisie (in the sense that Bourdieu meant). In fact, this has already happened to a significant extent in most of Western Europe. Phlegmish fucked around with this message at 08:26 on Nov 3, 2016 |
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Nov 3, 2016 08:18
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Toplowtech posted:Thank you, UK, for shooting every European countries in the knee, devaluating the Euro and the Pound over your fear of polish people, energizing the far rights and then panicking when the foreign banks started of talking about leaving you and then suddentlyu politely saying "Oh sorry, my bad, it was a mistake, i want to stay now". That was totally worth it. I've never known a people to be as insanely xenophobic as the Brits. There are quite a few Poles in Belgium, maybe not as many as in Britain even proportionally, but still a respectable number. I've never heard anyone talk poo poo about them specifically. If they don't want them we should let them come over here. Balts too (hot chicks get moved to the front of the queue).
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Nov 3, 2016 16:54
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Jippa posted:Re posting from the ukmt. Even apart from the issue of social desirability making that map mostly bullshit, I said they were xenophobic, not racist. Would you even be able to tell someone was Polish just by looking at them, much less classify them as belonging to a different 'race'? There's a girl waiting for the train in my general vicinity every morning, I never knew she was foreign until I happened to hear her speak in Polish (?) one day.
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Nov 4, 2016 17:09
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get that OUT of my face posted:At least the UK has a prominent bona fide leftist. It's telling that the countries with effective left-wing movements and candidates are the ones from countries who have been dicked over the longest (UK, USA) or hardest (Greece even though theirs didn't work out, Spain) by neoliberalism. In the US class issues are completely obscured by the symbolic/cultural and in the UK capitalism can't be toppled because they haven't even reached that stage yet. It's still full-on Ancien Régime. They have an unelected upper house that only members of the aristocracy can be appointed to. I'm not making this up.
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Nov 5, 2016 15:21
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Didn't the PCF use to be wildly successful? I don't know how much they poll at these days, but given their history I can understand them not wanting to play second fiddle.
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Nov 7, 2016 08:04
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Still, they had more than 25℅ of the vote at one point, more than the SFIO/PS. There's probably some resentment at having to be subordinate to another minor far left party. Though perhaps Mélenchon doesn't mind too much, as the article seems to indicate.
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Nov 8, 2016 08:12
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caps on caps on caps posted:Reminder What Merkel is saying in 2015 is what the rest of Western Europe was saying in 1995.
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Nov 25, 2016 17:27
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Well, the Communists here in Denmark have more than trebled in votes Oh, they have 2% of the vote now? 
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Nov 27, 2016 13:52
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Flowers For Algeria posted:The difference between the electoral systems of the US and France means that the actual election here will pit Cruz vs. Trump vs. Clinton vs. Chafee vs. Sanders vs. Stein. It's gonna be gross as hell. Is the socialist candidate roster so insanely bad that it's a foregone conclusion that they will be beaten by the FN in the first round?
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Nov 27, 2016 22:50
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Cat Mattress posted:Seriously if merging regions together would really save money and make the country more competitive by some magical process, then I have a suggestion to make, merge all regions together into a single one, you could call it "France". That would be more honest, at least. I'm surprised you have Regions even nominally.
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Nov 28, 2016 18:01
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