[Non-US] News That Makes You laugh/cry/neither...

[DSMatticus]

Pop quiz, maglag: when was Nationalist Spain founded? Is that before or after the start of the WW2?

You do not know enough about European history to contribute to this conversation, but since you seem so keen to try I'm more than happy to embarrass you in the hopes that next time you will remember that ignorance ought beget silence.

Francisco Franco started his revolution in 1936 with military support from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, formally declaring victory in 1939. During WW2, Nationalist Spain remained "technically" neutral, and by technically neutral I mean they gave materials, munitions, and soldiers to the Axis Powers. Yes, soldiers - they allowed Spanish volunteers to join the German army on the condition that they would only be deployed to the eastern front to help fight the communists. Francisco Franco was very anti-communist, you see.

Which brings us to the next part of Europe's shameful history - that ultimately once the cold war got rolling along, the fact that Spain was a surviving Axis Power in all but name whose authoritarian regime remained intact stopped bothering European leaders all that much, because clearly being anti-communist makes them one of the good guys. Nationalist Spain survived until the mid 1970's, but was a "friend" of the U.S. in the war against the commies almost as soon as the war ended, and significantly open to both trade and investment with other European states by the early 1950's (despite your claims that Franco was all about "fuck that international trade noise").

You are blaming a fascist regime which predates WW2 - and therefore predates the debate about a supranational Europe entirely - on the post-war treaties of Paris and Rome not being supranational enough. Tell me, do you usually read history books backwards, or is this a one-off mistake?

Now shut the fuck up. You're a dumbass and it annoys me.

[Maj]

Single Payer is better and National Health Service are better if and only if you have a legislature that will fund them.

Keep an eye on Colorado. The state is voting to replace the current system with single payer. I know my state has tossed around the idea, but if CO passes, I think other states will either follow with their own plans, or try to join in order to make the system stronger.

And then half the country will have single payer, and the other half won't have much of anything at all.

[Username17]

The calculus on this is very simple. The EU is radicalizing Europe. The further Europe is radicalized, the larger the voting bloc the Boris Johnson's and Nigel Farage's of Europe have to draw on. By making Brexit a left-wing vs right-wing issue, you are making the Johnson-Farage coalition inevitable.

Brexit is a left wing vs. right wing issue. It always was. It can't not be.

Because the left wing is never ever ever going to fully embrace stripping all the Poles, Romanians, and Spaniards living in England of their residency, healthcare, and voting rights as a precondition for renegotiating trade and tax policy. They are never going to do that, because that is monstrous and insane.

The reality is that the EU has been a force for growth of both wealth and democracy for most of its existence. When Franco's Spain applied for membership in 1967 they were rejected for being a creepy dictatorship. Spain wasn't allowed into the proto-EU until they were democratic, and that was used as a bludgeon to help democratize Spain. Same for Portugal and Greece. The reality is further that while Ordoliberalism is destructive and insane, and it is written into the Maastricht Treaty of 1991, that it was also not actually enforced by the European Union until after the 2007 crisis. EU countries ran Keynesian deficit spending all the fucking time. And what's really important as far as Brexit is concerned is that the EU did not force their Austerity on them. Not after the 2007 crisis, not ever. They had an election in 2010 and the nihilist caucus won and chose to devastate the economy for no reason.

Before the Christian Democrats of Germany got veto power over the economy of Greece, the EU was associated with growing economies and improving standards of living. The GDP per capita of Spain in 2007 was nearly six times what it was in 1986 when it joined. The GDP per capita in Portugal had increased nearly eight-fold during the same period. If you think you can get a majority of people to throw that away and start over from scratch you're insane. And if you think you can get people to throw that away with a campaign that isn't based on hatred and fear of foreigners, you're completely divorced from reality.

From 2008 to 2016 the Germans have done enormous damage to Europe. But actually dissolving Europe over that makes as much sense as dissolving the United States because the Bush administration was a bunch of cocks. There is no argument that the EU has to keep flogging austerity bullshit in the future, just as there is no argument that that austerity would actually stop if the Eurocrats were not in power. In the United Kingdom, which is actually having the Brexit referendum, the austerity bullshit was implemented by the local government with no arm twisting from the Eurocrats at all. Why would leaving the EU be expected to make that better? How is banning Syrian refugees from entering the England or deporting all the Portuguese nurses supposed to help anything?

This basic baby and bathwater argument is why there is not and never will be a significant leftist movement to dismantle the EU. You simply cannot rationally get to the position of dismantling the EU rather than reforming it unless you buy in to nationalism, and that is always always always going to be part of the right wing wheel house.

• Step One: Deport eight million foreign-born people working in your country.
  Step Two: ???
  Step Three: Enact Socialist Utopia.

Obviously, you're going to find some leftists who are going to buy into that, but equally obviously you're never going to get a majority of the left to follow you if that's your plan. It's basically Trumpism, which is why if the measure passes it will be seen absolutely everywhere as a victory for the local equivalents of the Republicans.

-Username17

[MGuy]

So what reforms are in the works that don't look like they have a snowball's chance in hell?

[Username17]

So what reforms are in the works that don't look like they have a snowball's chance in hell?

The next European Parliament elections are in 2019. The next German Parliamentary Election is in October of 2017. The next UK parliament elections are in 2020. All of those legislatures are controlled by conservatives who are blocking progress in various ways.

Of those, obviously the one that has the soonest chance of improving the outlook in Europe is the one in Germany. The CDU has been losing a lot of ground in the polls, and it is very plausible that they could lose power. Unfortunately, the biggest gainer is the Alternative For Germany. And that's basically a Neo Nazi party that wants to shoot asylum seekers for the crime of looking too Muslimy. But the second biggest gainer is the Greens. So you could imagine a coalition of the Center Left, the Left and Greens pulling a parliamentary majority. Even a coalition of the CDU and Alternative for Germany, while it would be a horror show for the 80 million people actually living in the Bundes Republik of Deutschland, might be a lot better for the other 320 million people of Europe because Alternative for Deutschland is an isolationist party and the less Germany successfully meddles in the economic affairs of other countries the better things are.

-Username17

[DSMatticus]

So what reforms are in the works that don't look like they have a snowball's chance in hell?

None, Frank is basically full of shit. The EU is fundamentally a compromise between two incompatible truths: 1) Europe wants to be politically unified, and 2) European member states do not want to submit to a federal government. And on that basis, the entire fucking thing is written in such a way that the efforts of the many can be derailed by the obstinance of the few - sometimes "a few" as small as a single member state. From there, you need only remember that merely by saying no at every opportunity, conservatives can achieve a substantial portion of their agenda, block the virtual entirety of the progressive agenda, and through that sabotage spread exactly the sort of dissatisfaction that drives voters to conservative causes in the first place. When the institutions people need grind to a halt, conservatives win. It's the fucking U.S. Senate turned up to 11.

Frank is banking on the fact that a center left-wing coalition will sweep into power across Europe and magically fix everything. And when I say across Europe, I genuinely do mean across Europe. It's equivalent to asking us to wait until the Democrats have a two-thirds majority in the U.S. Senate. It's not going to happen, it's a fucking fairytale. The fact that Frank thinks a radical right-wing Germany would be an improvement for the rest of Europe is really all you need to know about how deluded he is. Germany is getting what it wants right now by simply saying no to every proposed solution until the only things left on the table are the things it wants. A radical right-wing Germany would do the exact same fucking, except instead of it being part of some neoliberal scheme to pillage foreign countries on behalf of German banks, it would be a principled stand against the EU doing things in the name of insane economics and hatred for those Other People (with a side of the aforementioned neoliberal schemes), and Europe would probably be slightly more fucked than it already is.

The dissolution of the EU wouldn't be pretty, but the fact is that the EU as written is deliberately broken and virtually impervious to repair. But it gets even worse than that, because the factions leading the charge to "fix" the EU through greater unificiation are currently the neoliberals who brought us this crisis in the first place! That's a trojan fucking horse if the world's ever seen one. What actually happens if the Brexit referendum passes is that a bunch of European governments will be forced to sit down and negotiate new treaties to go into effect overtop the old ones. Brexit isn't some instantaneous chaotic upheaval - it's a year (or more) long diplomatic process akin to replacing the Articles of Confederation with the Constitution. Or more accurately, since in this case the anti-federalist sentiment outweighs the federalist sentiment, replacing the Articles of Confederation with a bunch of free trade and free movement agreements. That will be better. It will be a lot better if we do it before the right-wing radicals are guaranteed to be a significant part of the ruling coalition, which is where we're headed (if we're not already too late).

[Username17]

A radical right Germany would have no pull in the ECB or the IMF, and thus the Troika would be a lot more sane. It's not a thing to hope for, because the Alternative would literally try to get the military police to shoot brown people, but Germany having less of a say in the internationalist community by being run by a bunch of anti-internationalists who have no idea how these agencies work or what they do would be a serious upside.

The real damage that Germany is doing is that the CDU are internationalists who are also dangerously wrong about how things work. They are very committed to the European project and to growing international relationships, but they are also anti-Keynesians who believe that austerity in the face of economic hardship is expansionary. They really believe all those Swabian Housewife stories they keep telling. If they either weren't so evangelical about fiscal consolidation and deficit reduction or were less committed to growing their international influence, the damage they'd be doing would be much less. As it happens, Alternative For Germany is both of those things. They want to recall all German "support" for international institutions and their economic platform is the same sort of irresponsible mishmash you get from fascists everywhere. But here's the thing: if Germany started running inflation because Germany started playing fast and loose with the economy like Hungary's Fidesz does, that would be a good thing! The rest of Europe has been fucking begging Germany to run some fucking inflation for nearly a decade. Some good old fashioned irresponsible nutbars in charge of the Bundesbank would be just what the doctor ordered. At least, for people living in Europe but not in Germany.

In any case, you really have to explain how we get from dissolving the EU and replicating Idi Amin's Expulsion of the Asians in 1972 all across Europe to "things being better in any way." Because the first thing that happens when you end the EU is that all the Latvians living abroad are stripped of their right to live and work outside Latvia. They lose their houses and their jobs and are forced to move back to Latvia where they join the ranks of the unemployed. All of the jobs held by Latvians are instantly unfilled, and while that means that there are a lot of jobs for people to apply for, many of them will go away because GDP and demand just dropped by a significant amount. Structural unemployment will rise significantly because of skills mismatch. In the UK you just expelled 100,000 people who mostly had jobs and in Latvia you just brought in an additional 10% of the population from around Europe who mostly had jobs and now all don't.

Now repeat that for every other country in Europe. Half a million Poles live and work in the UK with their EU rights of free movement (there's another 200,000 Poles who have residency because of WWII based claims and we can presume they would not be forced to leave). So ejecting them all reduces the GDP of the UK by about 20 Billion dollars. Tax revenues and demand drop accordingly, so the year on year multiplier effect would be about fifty percent more than that from the lost Polish workers alone. And then in Poland, with all their European diaspora repatriated as job seekers their unemployment rate would go from its current 7.9% to a staggering 13%. And so on and so on.

Now having inflicted unimaginable suffering on literally tens of millions of people, your plan is... what? What exactly is the mechanism for things to stop being shitty? Because as far as I can tell, the "Step Two" here is exactly as unicorn fart powered as the Ordoliberalist delusion that cutting government spending can raise GDP through the power of the confidence fairy. Certainly when you push Latvia's unemployment rate back to 20% only this time Latvians aren't allowed to leave the country in search of work it is difficult to imagine how the Latvian people wouldn't be at the complete mercy of international corporations forever. Falling standards of living and corporate rule would be their lot for the foreseeable future. How long are you asking the Latvian people to suffer? Ten years? Twenty? What exactly is your proposed mechanism for ever getting them to full employment or even equaling the standard of living they enjoyed in 2008?

Yes, things are going to be bad in countries like the UK that have large immigrant populations. Polish people make up a large percentage of the contractors like plumbers and electricians compared to their percentage of the population. The expulsion of European Union citizens wouldn't just gutpunch the treasury and send the economy into a tailspin by wiping out large amounts of production and demand overnight, it would also leave the country with massive and peculiar skills shortages that would make re-expanding the economy a tortuous process. Your model really is Uganda in the seventies, and that is not a model you want to have. But for the smaller countries that have large diasporas it would be an absolute catastrophe. You're talking about jacking up their unemployment rate massively and cutting out the negotiating position for labor in those countries from both sides. A race to the bottom like Europe hasn't seen since the 70s.

-Username17

[DSMatticus]

A radical right Germany would have no pull in the ECB or the IMF

Uhh, the ECB's legal mandate is to maintain price stability, and do nothing else. Member states - any individual one - would be completely within their rights to sue the ECB if it began pursuing the sort of aggressive monetary policy which would ease Greece's pain, and barring extrajudicial shenanigans from the court they would win, because the ECB would demonstrably be stepping outside of its legal mandate. That is one of the many, many reasons why the EU is a steaming pile of shit: the institutions were written to be conservative, and as a result they offer only conservative non-solutions to crises.

Because the first thing that happens when you end the EU is that all the Latvians living abroad are stripped of their right to live and work outside Latvia.

Because that's not the first thing that happens. What actually happens when a country exits the euro is not that they immediately tear up their copy of treaty and begin fiddling while Rome burns. Instead, the treaty stays in effect while the counties involved negotiate a bunch of new treaties to supercede it, and the specifics of the new treaties will reflect the values of the coalition doing the negotiating, which is why it is objectively better to dissolve the EU before the right-wing radicals are an influential enough force in EU politics to get to decide what goes in those treaties. Which in many cases may already be too late, but that's specifically because the centrist shitstains convinced the left-wing to cling to a sinking ship while the radical right-wing was the only party offering anything that even looked like a correct solution; tear it down. The fact is that the dissolution of the EU is inevitable - or rather, it's non-dissolution is unthinkably tragic. This isn't going to stop. The failure to respond to this crisis reflects catastrophic faults in the underlying design of the EU; it's not a one-off thing caused by who happened to be in power at the time. There will be more crises, and the EU will fail to resolve those too. In fact, at this rate we will roll along into the next massive economic crisis long before Greece recovers from this one. This is unsustainable, and there are only two ways to make it stop:

1) The Treaty of Maastricht 2.0. All of the member states realize the current system is broken, and get together to write and sign a new treaty with a much stronger and much more democratic federal government, and this new treaty supercedes the old. Current members who don't sign onto the new treaty are essentially kicked out of the old one and have to renegotiate their treaties piecemeal, and the end result is the United States of Europe. This isn't going to fucking happen. It's not. Germany doesn't want to be the EU's Texas. France doesn't want to be the EU's California. People's opinions of the current EU range from cautious to contemptuous, so even if the polical elite had the desire to expand the union in the ways it actually needs expanding their voters would tear them apart for trying to do so.

2) The Treaty of Rome 2.0. Individual member states realize that the current system is broken, and they fucking leave. They renegotiate their treaties individually. It's messy, it's ugly, and some member states will have their treaties written by actual fascists because we dragged our heels and the fascists were the only ones offering a path forward - however fucked up that path may be. But instead of having Germany inflict fascism on the rest of Europe through suffering-induced rage at the current political elite, we get a legitimate chance to shut that shit down before it's too late.

You seem to think this shit will get better before it gets worse, and in the long run you are wrong. The EU genuinely is the problem, and as long as the radical right are the only people admitting that they will continue to attract voters into their chamber of madness until flailing, desperate mainstream conservatives put them in power.

[Mask_De_H]

DSM, are you aware of the phrase "cutting off one's nose to spite one's face"? Because that's basically your political views on this shit.

[PhoneLobster]

The problem is, whether it's rational desperate action or cutting off your own nose it is entirely possible that Brexit will happen, or that regardless that the EU will collapse.

I've said it before and I will say it again. Greece is effectively suicide for the EU. Once you remove any pretence that the EU is a progressive force, once you hammer that into the ground again and again like they did and continue to do in Greece that drives away any and all progressive grass roots support you ever had.

And what the fuck grass roots support does that leave you with? The grass roots right never wanted it because they are xenophobic fuckers. The neoliberals don't HAVE grass roots worth mentioning.

It doesn't really matter if the EU should stay or go, it already cut it's own feet off and it keeps on chopping away with the axe, so it doesn't look stable no matter what you might want from it.

And no, you DON'T get that progressive grass roots back with a round about argument that MAYBE if you chuck out the neoliberals the nazis get to be in charge for some reason. It doesn't matter how likely that outcome might be. It just doesn't work like that, you don't pull a Greece and then turn around and pull a "lesser evil" argument and expect to get any significant traction out of it. Sorry, it might not be fair, but that's just how things are.

[Username17]

Uhh, the ECB's legal mandate is to maintain price stability, and do nothing else.

The fact that you hold this up as a trump card means you do not know very much about how the institutions of Europe work. Yes, the Maastricht treaty is nuts. It was really written by Helmut Kohl's Ordoliberalist flunkies who make Art Laffer look like Karl Marx. The ECB is charged with doing things that would only hold the economy of Europe together if recessions never happened and capitalism was self regulating. But in the real world, the actual ECB performs Quantitative Easing, bids on Italian bonds, and waves its Outright Monetary Transfer dick around to stop self perpetuating crises. It does these things glacially slowly, and over the objections of whining German crazy people, but it does do them. And now that the precedent has been set it will do them faster and with less bullshit in the future.

The ECB has no official mandate to keep unemployment from spiralling into the stratosphere, but it behaves as if it does because even the people running the bank understand that their Ordoliberalist mandates are stupid and unworkable.

Similarly, the Orwellianly named Stability and Growth Pact offers neither stability nor growth. It demands that the nations of Europe engage in fiscal consolidation in response to economic downturns, which is of course both destabilizing and contractionary. But you know what? Countries don't follow it. It's an empty piece of paper that in practice has no enforcement mechanism because the countries that are "breaking the rules" by doing sensible things to stabilize their economies also sit on the panels to vote what their punishments should be for doing so. France ran a fiscal deficit of more than 4% for most of the nineties and has been missing the 3% target every single year since the financial crisis. The Stability and Growth Pact says they "can't" do that, but that doesn't mean they won't or don't. It just means that red faced Germans bluster about how everything is shit because nobody follows the rules.

The truth is that you don't even need to rework the treaties, you need to pack the institutions with people who will do what needs to be done or at least get the fuck out of the way when other people do. The Ordoliberalist tirades in the European Union charter only have teeth when Ordoliberalists have institutional leverage to enforce them. Get the Ordoliberalists out of power (either by removing them from power in Germany or defanging Germany's institutional influence), and it goes away like a bad dream. If German Ordoliberalists stop having partial veto power over European monetary policy, then all that shit about price stability becomes like those British laws about being able to kill Scotsmen with crossbows the next day.

-Username17

[DSMatticus]

DSM, are you aware of the phrase "cutting off one's nose to spite one's face"? Because that's basically your political views on this shit.

The Treaty of Maastricht went into effect in 1993. The notion that returning to a set of treaties like those that came before it - the ones that carried Europe from the end of WW2 until the fucking 90's - would constitute "cutting off one's nose" is fucking absurd. Here's a fun quote from Frank in 2014:

That being said: Blade is basically right that the EU is basically designed to be unshakeable and to ignore democratic mandates altogether. So the fact that the parliament and the commission are essentially locked, just means that the technocrats who got us into this mess in the first place will continue ramming their failed policies down everyone's throats until violent revolutionaries have them guillotined.

The fact is that 2014 Frank was right. In order to actually get European states to sign the Treaty of Maastricht, the supranational faction had to make too many compromises. The end result is genuinely unworkable. It is fundamentally incapable of solving these crises, and it is fundamentally resilient to change through democratic mechanisms. It was designed that way; Europe's leaders wanted unity, but none of them wanted to pay the price for it by handing over their sovereignty to an external political body.

This continues until someone stops it. I would rather that not involve guillotines. I would rather that not involve fascist takeovers of more than the two member states which have already had fascist takeovers. But like it or not, that's where things are headed right now. Frank is not preaching stability and gradual progress. Frank is preaching complacency on the path to ruin. The EU is the problem, it realistically cannot be fixed from within because it was designed to prevent exactly that, and as long as the fascists are the only ones with a real solution more voters will turn to them every election cycle - until things get as ugly as they could possibly be.

Frank is genuinely more moderate than he used to be, but the moderates haven't stopped being wrong more often than not.

But in the real world, the actual ECB performs Quantitative Easing, bids on Italian bonds, and waves its Outright Monetary Transfer dick around to stop self perpetuating crises.

In the actual real world and not the one you made up, Italy has 11.4% unemployment - down less than a percentage point from their crisis peak. In the actual real world and not the one you made up, Greece and Spain exist and are wholly fucked. In the actual real world and not the one you made up, the ECB has done the minimal necessary to keep the EU from dissolving without solving any of the underlying problems that put pressure on it to dissolve, and has failed the people of Europe almost as hard as it possibly could have. The ECB at no point stood up for the people. It did only what it had to in order to convince them that the light at the end of the tunnel might not be a train. Spoiler: it was a train.

[Username17]

If you want a revolution in the EU, I understand. But it has to be an internationalist revolution. "Italy For Italians!" is not a rallying cry that ends well for anyone. Chopping up the EU ends badly: all the Latvians are locked in their borders and corporations travel freely across exploiting the fuck out of everyone. Blaming relations with foreigners for the the failures of the European Council involves nationalists beating brown people and corporations shitting on foreign nationals who have no rights all across Europe.

The solution to Mississippi being a shit hole is not to cut the United States into a bunch of tiny provinces and locking all the southerners in their impoverished hellpit. That does not help anyone.

The solution to Spain having really high unemployment is not deporting the entire Spanish diaspora back to Spain and putting up border fences. That, again, does not help anyone.

It is not unreasonable to want to literally put Wolfgang Schäuble on the chopping block of a guillotine. That would not be the worst possible outcome of this situation by a long ways. But dividing up Europe into a bunch of warring states is pretty close to the worst possible outcome.

-Username17

[sandmann]

Now having inflicted unimaginable suffering on literally tens of millions of people, your plan is... what? What exactly is the mechanism for things to stop being shitty? Because as far as I can tell, the "Step Two" here is exactly as unicorn fart powered as the Ordoliberalist delusion that cutting government spending can raise GDP through the power of the confidence fairy.

"Step Two" isn't delusional or irrational, "Step Two" does not exist. The entire business plan of people like UKIP or the AfD is "Step One: Dissolve the EU, that's it, no Step Two, end of story". The best you can get out of these people is talk about "New treaties" and "consolidation", but that is entirely language placebo on the level of "Something will be done somewhere with someone". There is no coherent idea what to do when the EU actually ends, or even to what level it should be reduced to. Some want to stop the EURO, some want the whole thing to end. But there is no plan. "Step Two" is a lie.

[sandmann]

2) The Treaty of Rome 2.0. Individual member states realize that the current system is broken, and they fucking leave. They renegotiate their treaties individually. It's messy, it's ugly, and some member states will have their treaties written by actual fascists because we dragged our heels and the fascists were the only ones offering a path forward - however fucked up that path may be.

Aka: "Something will be done somewhere with someone"

[DSMatticus]

The United States and the European Union are not actually similar structures, and that's the entire reason the U.S. can (probably) be fixed and the EU almost certainly can't. We bitch a lot about the undemocratic nature of the senate, but Democrats actually have hit the 60 seats they needed to unilaterally push progress past Republican obstructionism. We bitch a lot about gerrymandering, but if Hillary Clinton wins in 2016 then we will have a liberal majority on the Supreme Court and, that will probably put a lot of sanity checks on the 2020 redistricting, and that in turn will likely put the house back up for grabs. Even if the situation is far more precarious than anyone wants (having seen Trump's shortlist for the Supreme Court, a Trump win is a game over screen for U.S. democracy), the degree of power it requires to fix the U.S. is realistically attainable. But the EU is not the U.S. The really important magic numbers aren't 60%, they're often 66%, 100%-1, and 100%, and the procedural bullshit ingrained into the process makes the senate look like a well-oiled machine. The degree of power it requires to fix the EU is not realistically attainable.

Your argument for why we should stick with the EU is "mass deportation and war!" Which is exactly why the correct solution is to dissolve the EU before the fascists are in power, because a progressive government won't fucking do those things, and the fascists will. And yes, we are on a timer - you said it yourself, the EU is radicalizing European voters. If we don't do it now, eventually the fascists will be in power as the largest part of a conservative coalition and they will do it on their own, and it will be exactly as terrible as you're claiming it must be. We have a chance to tear this horrible institution apart while the people running the show are varying degrees of sane. If we miss that chance, it's still going to be torn apart. The EU isn't going to stop fucking up, and anti-EU sentiment isn't going to stop growing. And if the only political outlet for people to express dissatisfaction with the EU is the fucking fascists, we're fucked.

[MisterDee]

Incidentally, fucking Austria is about to elect a far-right-wing leader.

I mean, I know Austria isn't a quake-in-your-boots country like it is in EU4, but still, you'd think that the possibility of literally electing Hitler 2 would make the news.

[maglag]

Your argument for why we should stick with the EU is "mass deportation and war!" Which is exactly why the correct solution is to dissolve the EU before the fascists are in power, because a progressive government won't fucking do those things, and the fascists will. And yes, we are on a timer - you said it yourself, the EU is radicalizing European voters. If we don't do it now, eventually the fascists will be in power as the largest part of a conservative coalition and they will do it on their own, and it will be exactly as terrible as you're claiming it must be. We have a chance to tear this horrible institution apart while the people running the show are varying degrees of sane.

You still completely fail to present a single valid* shred of evidence that the european countries will hold hands and play along just fine after shredding the first treaty of mutual cooperation in the story of fucking ever that didn't degenerate into bloody war, secret polices hunting people and/or death by famine for different regions of Europe.

The only reason why there are so many progressive governments in Europe right now is precisely because the EU worked decades to promote that. If you remove the EU, whatever progressive governments are left will be swiftly replaced by Franco MK II and Neo Salazar like it's always happened before their countries joined the EU.

*As in, something that actually happened, and not your delusional hallucinations of dictatorship Spain having ever been accepted by the EU.

[Kaelik]

You still completely fail to present a single valid* shred of evidence that the european countries will hold hands and play along just fine after shredding the first treaty of mutual cooperation in the story of fucking ever that didn't degenerate into bloody war, secret polices hunting people and/or death by famine for different regions of Europe.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Yes, the 1993 treaty is the first ever mutual cooperation treaty to not degenerate into bloody war. It also apparently used magic powers to retroactively time travel back in time to convert governments.

Or, in the meantime, it is at best the second or third mutual cooperation treaty to no degenerate into war, and it will probably only not degenerate into war for the same reason the last 2 or so didn't over the 40 years they didn't, and certainly not because the EU will continue to fuck everything up until fascists take power since there are already two fascist dictators in the EU right fucking now.

[DSMatticus]

The only reason why there are so many progressive governments in Europe right now is precisely because the EU worked decades to promote that.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

HAHAHAHA

HAHAHAHAHA

I DON'T KNOW WHY I'M LAUGHING

WHAT'S HAPPENING TO POLAND AND HUNGARY RIGHT NOW IS ACTUALLY A HORRIBLE TRAGEDY

BUT FUCK YOU THAT'S FUNNY

Maglag, I'm about to blow your fucking mind. You ready? The National Front is doing better in elections now than it has at any point in the past 43 years it has existed. Hurrah! Praise Schauble, for he hath deliver us from evil! Fascism is on the retreat!

Honestly I'm not really surprised that you get the size of numbers backwards. This is entirely consistent with previous observations that you get the chronological order of dates backwards.

I think I found my new tussock, but I can't help but worry that I've peaked. Do I have enough siggable burns left in me to capitalize on this opportunity?

[Username17]

The Scandinavian socialist democracies that we are all so justifiably proud of exist and can exist because they have their defense needs taken care of and are in no danger of being blockaded. If they were not able to depend on Germany allowing trucks bound for Denmark through their territory day to day, month to month, and year to year, they would not be able to function.

Small countries are only viable if there is a hegemony surrounding them that permits them to exist. If Italy felt the need to annex San Marino tomorrow, they would just do it and no one would stop them. For the middle third of the century, the Soviet Union and the United States created a hegemony that permitted the existence of small states in Europe. As the European alliance took off, it gradually became a thing that created a state protecting hegemony of its own. But remember that when the Soviet Union withdrew from enforcing a hegemony in Eastern Europe in 1989, Yugoslavia fell apart in bloodshed within 2 years.

If you want to cut up the EU you have to acknowledge that the Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore and NATO wasn't able to stop Greece and Turkey from going to war over Cypress. You had better have a fucking plan to keep the small countries from being dominated, torn into pieces, and destroyed. If you complain about Germany throwing its weight around now - and you should! - what are you gonna do when Germany can tell Belgium what they can and cannot ship through their lands and name any price they want for them to do it?

So far, the best and only plan I've heard is to go crying to Aunt Hillary and have a hawkish and interventionist United States bully all the countries in Europe into doing things the American Way. That's... probably better than letting Merkel remain Queen Europe, but what happens when the American president is Donald Trump or even Bernie Sanders? The United States could easily elect some Republican that would take bullying of the disparate states of Europe to a horrible level that would rightly be called exploitation and oppression. The United States could also just elect some dovish president who didn't feel the need to spend American blood and treasure to keep a bunch of European fuckups from collapsing into warring duchies, and then they promptly would. But even a velvet gloved warmonger like Hillary has got limits. She'd use a mix of soft and hard power to keep Spain from committing literal piracy on Portugal, but would she send troops to keep Russia from annexing all or part of Finland? What about the Russian majority regions of Latvia?

There simply is no division of Europe plan in the present day that does not end horribly. If step one is "give the craziest elements of the hard right everything they want," you'd better have a fucking epic step two. And you don't.

-Username17

[Stahlseele]

Right now, it seems like all major western european countries are moving to the right.
England: Check
France: Check
Poland: Check
Switzerland: Check
Austria: Check
Germany: Check

Not sure but would not be surprised by Italy going right. Or Greece.
Hungary? Maybe?

[Koumei]

Hungary maybe? Last I heard it had gone full hardcore fascist dictatorship in a really scary way.

[Stahlseele]

Hungary maybe? Last I heard it had gone full hardcore fascist dictatorship in a really scary way.

somehow, hungarian politics don't make the news in germany.
and i don't care enough about any politics to spend more time with it than listening to the news on radio.

[nockermensch]

Meanwhile, in Brazil, a leak made the coup totally explicit:

https://theintercept.com/2016/05/23/new ... is-a-coup/

Globo is trying their hardest to make this into a non-issue and I wonder what will happen now. If there was ever a time for a torch and pitchfork carrying mob to take our streets, this time is now.