|
It looks like the setup for a knockoff US civil war, with the post-Soviet bloc states trying to maintain their fiefdoms and serfs or some poo poo. I certainly wouldn't be surprised if the right-Eurosceptic parties re-allign themselves into a kind of "states' rights" kind of bloc as outright exit from the EU becomes more and more clearly unfeasible.
|
#
¿
Nov 4, 2019 12:42
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 14, 2024 18:06 |
|
|
Honj Steak posted:Then again, Fascism is also growing in plenty of places that are not in the EU. For the same reasons. The EU is not special in its pursuit of a bourgeois political agenda, and therein lies the problem.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 15, 2019 19:47
|
|
|
Tesseraction posted:He more meant the ones in Africa, Central Asia and Latin America... but you are aware that leftists were executed en masse after the Bolshevik revolution right? And it's not like the Soviet Union didn't happily partake in the violent suppression of communist movements that weren't alligned with Moscow. As much as they use it to dunk on the USSR, people forget that the Hungarian uprising and the Prague Spring were both socialist revolts.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 24, 2019 15:38
|
|
|
Ghost Leviathan posted:Also literal millions of 'suspected communists' were murdered in Indonesia or kept in prison camps for decades long after everyone forgot about them. Greece had its own history similar to that, with the state breaking its promises to the Communist side of the civil war, and sending communists and other such political dissidents to prison islands. The Junta itself was the child of anti-communist animus.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 24, 2019 17:44
|
|
|
AceOfFlames posted:My main worry about a EU collapse are 1) All former member states immediately descending into ethno fascism and 2) all former member states immediately ditching all EU environmental regulations due to the prisoners dilemma. Those around me think I am being "apocalyptically pessimistic". Am I really or am I just surrounded by idiots? The EU is no real impediment to ethno-fascism so you don't have to worry too much about that happening after a potential collapse.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 25, 2019 23:02
|
|
|
Speaking of the migrant camps, there was a planned expansion of the migrant camps on the islands. Islanders are constantly protesting the camps (a mixture of racism and reaction to the appaling conditions there), so to maintain peace the government sent the riot police to Chios and Lesbos three days ago. Which prompted clashes between protesters on the islands and the riot police. Dozens of police and protesters injured, two cops took injuries from hunting rifles, and some protesters broke into one of the hotels that was housing the riot police and started beating them up and trashing their poo poo. Yesterday the government announced that they are pulling the riot police from the islands.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 27, 2020 12:01
|
|
|
Junior G-man posted:Next step being the army? The islands are next to Turkey so there's military stationed there anyways. Fun fact, I did my term of army service in 2018, on Samos, which has similar migrant camp issues. The army hospital unit there has one or two people (including conscripts) doing shifts at the migrant camp to help out with health issues. I don't know if that's still the case or if it's standard for the units on other islands though.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 28, 2020 12:03
|
|
|
This would have been a literal non-issue if the EU followed a humane immigration/refugee policy. It's only an issue because we've been convinced that foreigners are bad and that the state is fundamentally incapable of undertaking any serious crisis management project. Seriously, the fact that these are the same states that built the Suez canal and were able to materially prosecute wars that killed millions, that are now acting as though re-settling a few hundred thousand people is some kind of impossible issue is blowing my loving mind. Same countries that at some point were considering the feasibility of maybe damming the entire loving mediterranean.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 2, 2020 14:40
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:I mean perhaps the politicians and the rich influence the people through the media and then the people vote for the politicians, and it all cycles in on itself. Yes, this isn't just racist people voting for racist things. It's a complete lack of faith in the ability of the state to undertake large-scale projects. It's the same reason that our response to the climate crisis is bullshit like tax incentives for installing solar panels rather than a direct construction of renewable (or nuclear) infrastructure.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 2, 2020 15:32
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:The idea that germany needs to subjugate the rest of europe because the rest of europe is full of inferior races who are too fascist is certainly a funny one. They've been doing it throughout the debt crisis for the countries that are too poor anyway, it wouldn't be anything new.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 2, 2020 15:42
|
|
|
V. Illych L. posted:nah the money multiplier of people spending money is much higher than that of banks getting to offer cheaper debt. there genuinely is an inflation-based argument for quantitative easing rather than massive social spending, but it's a profoundly ideological one Junior G-man posted:I'd be very very happy with a bunch of inflation eating my debt. Hasn't inflation in the Eurozone been consistently below target levels for the past like decade or more anyway?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 3, 2020 14:43
|
|
|
Cat Mattress posted:The modern way of living, all crammed in high-density cities where you have to commute four hours in your car every day to work and back, where food and goods are imported from abroad on bunker fuel-burning giant boats, is so much better for the environment than quaint rural villages. This is proved by how we damage the environment a lot less today than we did even just a century ago. I'm sure that's entirely due to urbanisation and not a population/consumption boom. Isn't Japan one of the least polluted post-industrial countries because everyone lives in Tokyo?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 15, 2020 15:37
|
|
|
Doctor Malaver posted:I understand the cashless trend and in 2023 it's nearly achievable. But in 2002 I don't think they had that in mind, and there were no €1 and €2 bills then either... Carrying like a couple dozen low-denomination Euro bills sounds like it'd be more of a hassle than having a small amount of 5 or 10 euro bills and the rest in coins. What's the fear, that a store will refuse your 3.5 Euro purchase with a 5 Euro bill because they don't have change? I'd say that's absurd... but then I'd say the same about stores refusing 50 euro bills. That's stupid.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 4, 2023 09:43
|
|
|
Greece had its deadliest rail accident in history a few days ago - more than 50 deaths in a head-on collision caused by human error (a stationmaster ended up sending two trains on the same track) that shouldn't have been possible. There is a shitstorm rightfully raised over this - rail monitoring equipment purchased two decades years ago but never installed, the (state-owned) rail management company being short-staffed, the railworkers' union raising a fuss over rail safety just weeks ago, the train companies operating on those lines regardless. Politically it is the endgame for a state that has learned to act as a client to capital and where austerity has destroyed its ability to provide services.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 4, 2023 09:37
|
|
|
Russia sadly holds a lot of institutional influence on the European left, leftovers of connections made during Soviet times. The good thing about that is that those people are slowly but surely aging themselves out of political relevance, and I don't know if the anti-Americanism of younger tankies is enough to sustain them in actual politics.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 4, 2023 15:32
|
|
|
SixFigureSandwich posted:Just to clarify the rail operations in Greece were privatized some years ago, and the line in question was operated by the private arm of the Italian state railroad company. The trains are private as you said - the railways themselves are under public ownership though.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 5, 2023 00:04
|
|
|
Even if there is an honest desire to switch over to EVs it is going to be a risky move. These corporations have heavy institutional experience in making ICEs and have every capitalist incentive to not abandon that investment.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 11, 2023 10:08
|
|
|
That is correct, I can forget literally everything about Eurovision but the Turkish manboat will forever be etched in my memory.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 15, 2023 21:54
|
|
|
I'm sure the car lobby itself wants the EU to not invest/underinvest in public transport. I probably wouldn't say that the EU policymakers themselves are doing it consciously themselves, though. Which says nothing about systemic biases, which fellow poster V. Illych L. laid down nicely.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 17, 2023 10:17
|
|
|
Tesseraction posted:Would you say that Syriza has itself undergone PASOKification? There will be lots of historical analysis to write on this, but the way I see it SYRIZA has managed to induce voter fatigue extremely rapidly through its handling of its governmental term and by not really adjusting following the 2019 defeat. It is very hard to sustain the mid-crisis heightened, polemic rhetoric about the present state of affairs when a. things are no longer in freefall and b. you bear some responsibility for the present day of things. Mitsotakis has somehow managed to make a government term that includes one of the worst state performances against covid and a major wiretapping scandal feel like a return to normalcy. Add to that a handful of pre-election gaffes and the fact that SYRIZA's voterbase are political tourists - the long-term voters of PASOK and ND that make up the electorate didn't suddenly turn into radical leftists or forgot about the more stable years of those two parties trading power - and it isn't hard to see why SYRIZA's vote dispersed as radically as it did, even though no-one expected it. SYRIZA's primary mistake imo was the fact that Tsipras didn't step down as party leader after 2019. The U-turn on debt renegotiation did immeasurable damage to his trustworthiness and it pushed the rest of SYRIZA's high profile figures into the background. They could have used those 4 years putting the spotlight on other figures that were less tainted or more capable organisationally instead of putting their bets on the charismatic figure that had long burned his own reputation down.
|
|
#
¿
May 23, 2023 17:01
|
|
|
I personally think he meant well, in that he was unprepared to actually cause the kind of chaos that a default and a possible return to the drachma might involve. But in so doing he accepted a role as a steward of EU-imposed neoliberalism. And there's limitations once you're in that position. You cannot agitate against a corrupt system when you have accepted said system's premises. It is incoherent and arrogant.
|
|
#
¿
May 23, 2023 17:25
|
|
|
Second Greek elections yesterday, participation rate dropped by about 10%, expected for an election in vacation season with relatively low stakes (New Democracy's May performance basically assured they'd get a majority in parliament this time). Things of note: -New Democracy, PASOK and KKE all received similar vote shares to May, all under half a percent point difference. -SYRIZA went down another couple percent points, from ~20% to ~17.8%. -Three separate far-right/fascist parties individually received between ~3.7% and ~4.7% of the vote which is the biggest change relative to before. Notable that the biggest one of them, Spartiates, seems to have functioned as a proxy for Golden Dawn's Ilias Kasidiaris. And important to remember that even as parties get persecuted and movements fizzle out their base of popular support is still people who do not disappear with their institutions and continue to exist afterwards, you cannot defeat the far-right by simply putting legal obstacles against them. -Zoe Konstantopoulou's party barely makes it in, Varoufakis does not. Konstantopoulou was president of the Hellenic Parliament during SYRIZA's first few months of government and was among the splitters when Tsipras bent the knee to the EU and IMF. She has a kind of charisma to her but she has also exhibited authoritarian behaviour as president of parliament and as party leader so I'm not happy that her party is the left-of-SYRIZA opposition in parliament (aside from KKE, who are stalinists). -Noteworthy that in spite of the 40 seat bonus for the first party being back in this election, because 8 parties made it in parliament and a lower share of the vote fell short of the 3% cutoff for parliamentary entry, ND's share of MPs only went up from 146 to 158. It's still considered a very comfortable majority, but there were legitimate fears that a large enough supermajority would let New Democracy push through constitutional reforms that would gut public education and who knows what else.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 26, 2023 11:54
|
|
|
The EU migrant policy is meant to appeal to reactionaries, not oppose them. It is an effort to win them over by adopting their sensibilities about migration controls. The result isn't the reactionaries meeting the EU in the middle, it is the EU shifting to the right.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 6, 2023 19:20
|
|
|
That's what decades of unopposed neoliberal thought does to a motherfucker. Though admittedly I don't know if the Nordic socialdemocratic model tried to assert itself ideologically or if it was just limping along trying to cut its losses where it could in the past 30 years.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 20, 2023 13:13
|
|
|
Fascism is making a comeback because economic liberalism is failing the working class and fascism is what capital turns to as a bulwark against socialism, as the final defender of property rights. Social media has nothing to do with it, aside from being just another vector through which they can deliver their propaganda. You'd see the same things if we relied exclusively on traditional media.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 23, 2023 15:22
|
|
|
Doctor Malaver posted:Fascism was dead in the water because back then it still meant fascism. Today all kinds of right wing politics routinely get branded as fascism so naturally you see more of it everywhere. If you think that liberal use of "fascist" to describe any brand of right-wing authoritarianism is a recent invention I have to assume that you bought your SA account as a toddler. quote:Immigrants were and still are a major issue. From one side of the continent to the other, from elections to elections, voters want less immigration. It's the immigration, stupid.* The left has perfectly good answers to anti-immigration sentiments (such as that the mass waves of immigration following 2011 are a result of interventionism, economic exploitation and imperialism in the middle east and africa). The point that was being made that you missed is that the left is not competing on a fair playing field in the marketplace of ideas, but in an environment that capital has every incentive to mobilise its resources to present the left in a negative light and promote other alternative answers to anti-immigration sentiments, such as ethnonationalism, that will oppose the left and preserve property rights.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 24, 2023 15:08
|
|
|
It doesn't matter anyway, both democrats and republicans are right-wing parties. The US capitalist class didn't need to support Trump in 2016 because the alternative to him was practically synonymous with the bourgeois establishment. If the democrats hadn't been able to silence left-wing dissent and it was a Trump vs Sanders contest, you'd have definitely seen capital polarise towards Trump - and I say this as someone who doesn't consider Bernie as anything more than a centrist social-democrat, not as a left-wing candidate.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 24, 2023 17:31
|
|
|
Doctor Malaver posted:That's not an answer, as in something actionable that would make a difference to the voter. It's an explanation, at best. It is absolutely actionable to oppose the causes of issues. It is harder and requires an international effort as one country not supporting the war on terror or intevention during the arab spring isn't going to stop those things from happening, but it is the actual honest answer as to how you avoid impoverished refugees from war-torn countries fleeing to greener pastures: you avoid creating war-torn countries.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 24, 2023 19:02
|
|
|
At the same time social media makes it a lot easier to be exposed to left-wing objections and counterarguments to all of those things, where in the past you'd need to be buying socialist papers (and, depending on where you lived, end up on a list because of it). And to the extent that right-wing narratives lean on disinformation, social media's mass enabling of citizen journalism is actually a huge problem for them; it's a lot harder to spin police brutality in a positive light when it gets uploaded on video from multiple angles by people that just happened to be there, for example. I would say that social media is far from a net positive for the right; it's an arena that it has used effectively in the past, but I don't think it is structurally built to favour them.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 26, 2023 11:37
|
|
|
It is incumbent on socialdemocratic and centrist parties to ensure that socialdemocratic and centrist policies are not functionally indistinguishable from neoliberalism. If they open themselves up to criticism from the left because they keep betraying their supposed political space, that is well-earned and necessary.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 27, 2023 13:52
|
|
|
Blut posted:"current German nativist tendencies need to be solved on a cultural level and through sensible social media regulation" - is absolutely the exact kind of refusal to engage with reality nonsense that was being debunked on the last page. You could completely ban all of Twitter, Instagram and Facebook tomorrow and the far-right would still keep rising in Germany, and the rest of Europe, because of the opinions of the working class being ignored on migration. Blaming populism on social media for right-wing support levels is a total cop out for the modern left's economical, social and cultural abandonment of the working class over the last 40 years. You've taken what was said in the last page, that propaganda exists and is utilised with or without social media, and decided that the consensus instead was that propaganda doesn't exist. Yes, the right has been successful at employing propaganda to make people irrationally mad at immigrants and appeal to some kind of ethnonationalist pride. To accept that framing as fact isn't the right response, that is just ceding the playing field. I am not saying that the European left has done a good job at its own messaging - it very clearly has not! - but if your response to that is to surrender basic human empathy and the promise of a brighter future to those that need it most, and adopt regressive stances with regards to ethnicity and nationality, you need to stop and start reflecting a bit on what values you actually stand for.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 28, 2023 01:38
|
|
|
A whole month without a government sounds like a very long time for every election, do Dutch interim ministerial posts retain enough authority for the bureaucracy not to grind to a halt in the meantime?
|
|
#
¿
Nov 28, 2023 12:05
|
|
|
Exactly, claiming that the left adopting a nationalist stance on immigration has "defanged" the right is like saying that Brexit has successfully defanged UKIP. As if the goal of UKIP was to get a party named UKIP in government in the UK rather than achieving Brexit.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 28, 2023 21:54
|
|
|
Blut posted:I'm not refusing to state anything, I would have thought I've been very clear in my stance that the modern left-wing parties need to have policy platforms that actually reflect the fears/desires of working class voters. Or else stop being surprised when working class voters decide not to vote for them. The point of a left-wing party isn't to represent the working class's opinions, it is to represent the working class's interests. If the working class's opinions are contrary to the working class's interests (as is the case with bigotry and xenophobia which drive the working class away from material class-based politics and into identitarian infighting), it is the left-wing party's job to course-correct against that and work towards promoting class consciousness and a politics that advances the interests of the working class, providing an alternative away from the mainstreamed identitarianism.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 30, 2023 02:43
|
|
|
Blut posted:"The point of a left-wing party isn't to represent the working class's opinions" yeah this is some bourgeoisie paternalistic bullshit. The point of an elected representative is to represent the interests and wishes of their constituents, not to decide whats best for them. This exact philosophy of "you poor people don't know whats best for you, I'll decide for you" is what has caused the left to wither on the electoral vine across Europe over the last 30 years. You are not conflating two separate things, what political parties are ideologically supposed to stand for and what elected representatives' duty is. Boiling down the role of political parties down to "policies supported when in government" is extremely short-sighted, especially in the context of leftism where socialist parties' participation in bourgeois republicanism has always faced structural obstacles. In this exchange you've been consistently coming across as arguing in bad faith, trying to use rhetorical sleights of hand to assert that left-wing parties should abandon their values, become more right-wing and implement right-wing policies, while avoiding the obvious consequence that such a thing would be a victory for the right rather than the left, and I am getting tired of arguing with that.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 30, 2023 14:19
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 14, 2024 18:06 |
|
|
jaete posted:Yeah, this. The problem is, once again, accepting the framing of immigration as something necessarily bad for the native population. It is absolutely not - it can be if you drop the ball on integration (which you would do if you wanted to court the knee-jerk racist reaction to it, as we've seen) and if you drop the ball on providing services and regulating important economic sectors like the housing market (as we've also seen). Adopting a "fortress europe" mentality creates a feedback loop, where you prime people to see foreigners adversarially, and now you've got racist attitudes mainstreamed and people like blut telling you that you are stupid or paternalistic if you don't let yourself get sucked into that feedback loop.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 2, 2023 01:57
|
|