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Post about European (mainly EU but not only) politics ITT. Please remember to leave your sexism, racism, etc. at the doorstep. modedit: new rule: no fascism allowed!!! Somebody fucked around with this message at 09:56 on Mar 7, 2016 |
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Mar 7, 2016 07:56
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 00:49 |
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There is a summit in Smyrna/Izmir today that these proposals are related to. We'll see what comes out of it. Identity politics are fine as long as they are in relation to European politics, and as long discussion is kept civil and does not derail everything else.
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Mar 7, 2016 09:23
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GaussianCopula posted:Please stop using your Revanchist names for all your neighbors, maybe not being hostile to them would improve your own situation, just a hint. But what kind of summit is that? IIRC it's the EU-Turkey summit on immigration that was postponed after a terrorist strike in Turkey a couple weeks back.
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Mar 7, 2016 09:37
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GaussianCopula posted:Nope, that's in Brussels too. My bad, it looks like the thing I was referring to is a Greco-Turkish thing that will take place tomorrow.It remains relevant in the context of the refugee crisis and Tsipras and Davoutoglu will meet so it's something to keep in mind.
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Mar 7, 2016 09:49
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Friendly Humour posted:I want to discuss feminism Do you want to discuss feminism in the context of European politics? Then this is the thread for you! Do you want to discuss feminism in a more general context? Then I'm afraid this is not the thread for you.
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Mar 7, 2016 13:21
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R. Mute posted:How can you discuss feminism in the context of European politics without wandering into feminism in a more general context? Especially considering the types that frequent this thread. If I had to think of specific categories, I'd say you can discuss feminism in the context of current European events, in the context of the current status quo in parts of Europe, and in the context of European history. Further discussion can stray from those contexts as conversation develops into more general ones, but one of these has to be the catalyst for it, and ideally the more general discussion will remain relevant in the more specific context. If it's not, then we probably have a derail which should have its place in a different thread.
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Mar 7, 2016 13:41
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GC, since you've been paying attention to the newsstream on it, I heard some reports that mentions of a closure of the Balkan route have been refuted, did you catch anything on that? Do not do this.
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Mar 7, 2016 18:17
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CrazyLoon posted:I've never understood as to why working with Erdogan is seen as the 'better, more humane' way of going about this in the public eye, rather than dedicating ourselves on unfucking Greece already. Because Merkel says so? This is the same EU that tolerates Orban in Hungary, and in the name of opposing Russian imperialism accepts working with a neonazi-backed government in Ukraine. The whitewashing of right-wing authoritarianism is an ongoing process that has been going in full-swing in the past 8-10 years. In less ideological terms, Turkey is not in the EU, so the refugee situation being dealt with there resolves all EU NIMBY kneejerk reactions (except for where resettlement is concerned). Moreover, the sea border between the EU and Turkey is impossible to wall off, which acts as a weapon for Turkey. Just as our defence minister Kammenos said that/"threatened" that Greece would turn into a gateway for terrorists if it's allowed to collapse, Turkey can dickwave in a similar manner. Turkey is in the best position to control migrant flows into Europe, and thus also in the best position to permit them. Do not do this.
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Mar 7, 2016 19:06
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I am not disputing that Russia is a shithole, and my previous statement was not meant to cast the Russian government in a favourable light.Cat Mattress posted:You're buying in Putin's propaganda if you think that the neonazis in Ukraine are offering a significant support to the government, or exerting any sort of influence on it. I know they dropped out of it somewhat recently, but they were part of it before (in the aftermath of Maidan), and the EU was backing Ukraine's government at that time also. I don't doubt that there have been frictions prior to the breakup given how wide a coalition that was.
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Mar 7, 2016 19:34
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steinrokkan posted:The Right Sector or any other extreme right never held any significant posts at any point during the Maidan, and they lost all their regional power which they gained under the Party of Regions government!!! in the first post-Maidan elections, dear grossly misinformed poster. I will admit that I have not been following Ukraine very closely since the Maidan aftermath, and did not know about the exact conflicts between Right Sector and the Ukrainian government. That said, hindsight is 20/20, and the EU supported a government that included Right Sector at the time. Just because they were dropped from the coalition doesn't mean they were always destined to. CommieGIR posted:So what are you suggesting they do? Selectively support Ukraine's government? Not support a government that included Right Sector.
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Mar 7, 2016 19:47
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steinrokkan posted:As I said, there was no coalition, they were never invited to form a government in any capacity, they just happened to also be against Yanukovich at the same time as other parties... My apologies, I seem to have been mixing up Right Sector and Svoboda. For a while I forgot that Ukraine had multiple fascist/far-right political movements rise to prominence on that period. GaussianCopula posted:Renzi would make a great D&D poster, trying to scuttle every realpolitik deal. He's trying. I don't think he'll make it but he's trying. 
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Mar 7, 2016 20:08
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Tesseraction posted:2003: US + allies invade Iraq, German unemployment rate goes down Donald Trump will become president and when he glasses the middle east, our European unemployment woes will finally be over.
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Mar 8, 2016 11:03
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In Greece near 100% of private media was in favour of a Yes in the July referendum, and that backfired utterly. There is probably some correlation with how trustworthy the media are popularly considered, the latest Eurobarometer (I think) polls show that Greek media have pretty much no trust with the people.
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Mar 8, 2016 11:34
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To make a more serious post wrt labour laws/unemployment: Of course labour laws will have an impact on the labour-related figures, and you know what, neoliberal reforms just might bring unemployment down. The problem is that, whether they achieve that, and regardless of the scale of their effect on unemployment, they do it by actively changing what having a job means. Having a job gives you a certain amount of things such as monetary remuneration, contributions towards you future pension, a varying degree of job security, and those things form the gap between being employed and being unemployed. These reforms that GC loves so much attempt to reduce unemployment by closing the gap between being employed and being unemployed. That's loving rear end-backwards and ultimately hurts everyone as a whole, and it's thanks to stuff like that in spite of much lowered unemployment figures in a lot of countries since the crisis blew up, it still feels like the same crisis is still ongoing or that things are still worse than they were 8 years ago.
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Mar 8, 2016 13:06
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Geriatric Pirate posted:How is it "backwards" to enact reforms so that a country produces as much as it consumes? Wages aren't just some arbitrary number the government controls but instead a measure (admittedly not a perfect one) of the productivity of employees. If for whatever reason an employee isn't producing enough value any more, why should they still be entitled to remuneration for the old value they produced? Companies aren't firing people because it's fun to fire people, they fire people because they're not making money any more. In many European countries the problem is that the truth is too difficult to accept, so instead of making any hard decisions, or let high unemployment dictate these decisions, governments try to cover the gap between productivity and wages itself by hiring a lot of people, taking on too much debt in the process. If wages truly were relative to productivity, you have to explain the wage stagnation from the '70s onwards somehow. I'm not buying the narrative that there's just less money to shuffle around, that is only true if you exclude the massive gains in relative wealth made by the rich (which the political establishments in most countries are glad to do, since you cannot really become part of that establishment without making friends with those sort of people).
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Mar 8, 2016 14:38
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Unfortunately I think the zombiEU will stick around for quite a while, not realising it is really dead. Nevermind Brexit, the current refugee fuckup, where there is no single unified response but several sides claiming to abide by the established rules and plans while working on the exact opposite actions is doing the most harm. The EU is unable to effectively enforce EU policy, and "EU policy" can mean whatever the gently caress you want it to. And maybe this isn't anything new, but it's never been more important or high profile.
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Mar 13, 2016 00:27
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I'm not sure where you got that from my post.
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Mar 13, 2016 00:32
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So that is our continent's "why do you hate freedom", huh.
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Mar 13, 2016 00:43
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There was a momentum towards greater integration and unification in the '90s and maybe the '00s which halted and which we're seeing reversed now. Reducing the EU to just "freedom of movement" is incredibly lovely and narrowminded, and if you think that that was the point all along, then if that were the case the project was doomed from the get-go to be a failure that could only last for as long as it could put up a façade that it was more than that. This goes without mentioning that freedom of movement for people is currently being challenged big-time by the member states themselves.
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Mar 13, 2016 01:27
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steinrokkan posted:You do realize that the Eu is the product of three pillars, the most important of which promoted common market of goods, services and persons, based on a 1980s policy agreement of all members: THe Single European Act. I really cannot understand the way in which you think that anything you are saying is mutually exclusive with anything I said.
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Mar 13, 2016 01:44
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GaussianCopula posted:PSA: The polls for Germany's Super Sunday election will close in 10min. Please discuss the results in the Germany thread, to keep it in one place http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3439500&pagenumber=183#lastpost This thread is fine for discussing regional elections in European countries if people want to do so.
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Mar 13, 2016 18:25
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27 dead and 75 wounded in new Ankara bombing.
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Mar 13, 2016 19:23
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It looked like a plurality of AfD's voters are people who had not voted before and their surge was in correlation to the prevalence of poverty rather than immigrants. Nothing surprising about the latter, the former is somewhat interesting.
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Mar 14, 2016 02:51
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LemonDrizzle posted:What are you basing this conclusion on? The overwhelming majority of AfD voters consider their personal financial situation to be good, and while they are slightly less economically satisfied than people voting for other parties, the differences are so minor as to be basically irrelevant: Pictures of a TV man presenting graphs I got from twitter:   For unemployment, I didn't see stats but I assumed it was referencing state unemployment relative to AfD results, and this graph shows AfD voters' issues being refugees at (only?) 56%, with social justice a close second (though it's a wonder what the average AfD voter imagines that to be), and a good amount being worried about jobs. 
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Mar 14, 2016 12:11
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I didn't say that refugees were not important to it, they obviously were the catalyst to AfD blowing up like it did, but the point is that there have been other factors bubbling underneath the surface that got a lot of people to think they're a viable choice when it started to gain momentum. 56% that care about refugees means 44% that don't, and that's a whole lot. Like I said, that's not a surprise. It's a viable protest party and people who want to protest will vote for it even if they don't care for its flagship issue.
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Mar 14, 2016 12:29
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That cannot be the single primary reason they've voting for AfD because then the total goes over 100%. And I have no doubt that at least some of the non-refugee responses were dogwhistle, but I also believe (as a personal assessment) that the great majority of them were not.
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Mar 14, 2016 12:48
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As a protest party you don't have to have a program for the poor to get protest votes from the poor. That is why, for example, in Greece, Golden Dawn drew a sizeable number of voters from KKE. There are votes that are not based off ideology or policy, but off protest.
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Mar 14, 2016 13:03
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Riso posted:We could also just put all Germans into a place called Germany and then force them to not let in foreigners and protect their borders all the while paying France a lot of money to keep their nukes pointed somewhere else. That's a great idea, we could then use the reclaimed lands in Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg and Liechtenstein to host the refugees.
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Mar 15, 2016 13:35
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We can just use the Rhine as a moat and work from there.
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Mar 15, 2016 15:12
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Libluini posted:I think you're confusing drowning with death through deep sea water pressure there If you're going to put up a wall around Germany, and fill it with water, and you want to submerge all of Germany at least 10 meters deep, the wall will need to extend to an altitude of 10 meters above the highest point in Germany, otherwise you'll get spillage.
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Mar 15, 2016 19:25
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I think we can make a safe assumption that the idea to sumberge Germany like that is not meant to cause damage to neighbouring countries, so spillage would have to be limited to the north sea at a safe distance from Dutch/Danish/Polish coasts, so the wall would have to be about that tall on the land borders at least (unless you gently caress around with variable waterline altitudes depending on what part of the country you're in, which would be rather convoluted).
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Mar 15, 2016 19:32
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This is the stupidest poo poo ever. e; Government spokesman denies that a resignation has been submitted. YF-23 fucked around with this message at 14:05 on Mar 16, 2016 |
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Mar 16, 2016 13:59
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With how close the centrist parties have become we are observing a reallignment in European politics in general. Traditional differences fade as austerity, immigration, etc. become the more polarising issues on which the traditional government parties are of the same opinion. This should surprise absolutely no-one. Also, minor post formatting request: if you're quoting a post with a tweet in it, please remove the tweet unless it's the specific thing you want to comment on. When the page loads it doesn't take into account the height of the tweet embed so loading pages with tweets in them ends up with them getting off-centred when the page finishes loading, which isn't so bad if it's one or two tweets but it becomes annoying if there's a bunch.
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Mar 17, 2016 18:35
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Are these sort of relocations even legal?
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Mar 18, 2016 16:32
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When you cut out safe passages of entry for refugees you're only leaving unsafe passages for them, resulting in deaths that would have been avoided otherwise. Sure, it may not be a zombie apocalypse, but don't pretend these deaths are not the result of the border policies. So many people have died trying to cross the Aegean in rubber dingies because the land border with Turkey was fenced by the Samaras government, and the Tsipras governments have either lacked the political will or capital to reopen it.
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Mar 18, 2016 18:59
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GaussianCopula posted:Hint: Not every human has the god given right to live in central Europe. Breaking the law involves certain risks that others are not liable for. That in no way means Europe can wash its hands clean of the deaths that result from its border policies. Even if the migrants are illegally trying to enter that does not mean their dying in the process is acceptable. At all.
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Mar 18, 2016 19:10
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GaussianCopula posted:While that is true, the solution can not be to open all borders and let everyone in, because not only would it lead to a very fast collapse of the welfare state but moreover it would give rise to nationalistic movements, as in the end, the demos of most (all?) European nations will decide that they would rather keep their welfare state, even if that means a few humans have to die. I might have agreed if 1. I thought Turkey is a trustworthy party in this arrangement, 2. if the scheme didn't include lovely provisions like the quote for legal entry being tied to the number of illegal entries, 3. if the whole arrangement didn't mean the more dangerous boat ride to Lampedusa becomes more viable. Even if those things weren't an issue it would still be a supremely lovely deal that includes most probably illegal returns to Turkey and does not actually address the EU's inability to handle the influx of refugees in the first place. It might "help" by making things somewhat less of a logistical nightmare, which I will grant you will smooth down the way things are handled a bit, but it does dick-all about the insufficiencies that meant the problem is a logistical nightmare, and it manages to treat the refugees even worse than they've been treated so far.
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Mar 18, 2016 20:02
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Cat Mattress posted:Greece could start by reopening its land border with Turkey instead of forcing asylum seekers to take a boat to Lesbos. Yes, it could, but either the government is keeping pro-migrant talk to rhetoric only because they don't actually care, or because opening the land border would open up a gigantic can of worms from the rest of the EU countries who want migrant flows to be reduced. It's probably a mix of both, and I think it's more the latter than the former, but it's still horrible and there's intellectual dishonesty involved in it either way. I think there's also some legal issues obfuscating things (I think the border control on the Evros river where the fence is is a Frontex project and so not purely Greece's thing? not 100% sure). But boy if the Visegrad countries are throwing a fit because of the sea border and trying to close the Balkan route, imagine how much they'd react if Greece opened the border.
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Mar 18, 2016 23:49
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GaussianCopula posted:It looks like there was at least passive support for the ISIS terrorists in Molenbeek I'd like to think the primary motivation here is fear rather than support.
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Mar 19, 2016 11:55
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 00:49 |
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Kurtofan posted:Afraid of who? Of the people in their community that have ties to/are members of ISIS.
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Mar 19, 2016 19:12
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