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Is Europe Disintegrating?

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Re: Is Europe Disintegrating?

#161

Post by dogma1138 »

alphonsegaston wrote: post #151
hollerith wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you believe that Britain and France would submit to being swallowed up without using their nukes against whoever is trying to swallow them?

Why do you presume that this has to be done militarily? The Russians have been funneling money and influence into the UK for decades. They're loaning money to Le Pen in France. There's no need to risk confrontation if you can get your politcal allies to cede everything to you that stands in your way.

And how is this different than US foreign policy?

Re: Is Europe Disintegrating?

#162

Post by gambiting »

stale2002 wrote: post #125
gambiting wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh. No, it's like a group of people deciding to do something together. Sometimes you don't like what the group is doing,but it's usually better to be in it than outside of it. I personally would love for EU to unite even further,just call it United States of Europe and stop saying that it's German people telling Polish people what to do or vice versa - it doesn't matter, or at least I wish it didn't. And I'm sure yo…

"it doesn't matter, or at least I wish it didn't." It doesn't matter to you, but I am sure it matters a whole lot to the people of Poland (but fuck them, I guess?). Apparently they've changed their mind about this deal, and just want to be left alone. The EU isn't a suicide pact. People can and will change their mind, and will change the deal along with it. "You just can't send people back to active war zones, and th…

>>It doesn't matter to you, but I am sure it matters a whole lot to the people of Poland (but fuck them, I guess?).

Well, I am Polish, and "a whole lot of people in Poland" want things that I absolutely disagree with(prohibition of gay marriage, abortion, they want the church to meddle with politics etc etc). So while I wouldn't say "fuck them", I would say that I disagree with their opinion strongly.

>>Then send them to Germany or Sweden. They love the refugees!

There's no need to go from one extreme to another. Basically the options are:

1) Send them back where they came from

2) Try to house them where they arrive

3) Try to distribute them around the EU evenly so that the burden on each country is minimal

Option 1 is probably what most people would want, but that doesn't make it feasible. Even if we assume that we know exactly where they are from, which is not always true, we could probably send back people to countries which are not torn by war. But that still leaves you with people who are genuienly fleeing war, and if you are advocating sending them back there, then well....I think we can finish the discussion here.

Second option is terrible, because neither Italy nor Greece have the capacity to handle this many immigrants. The best they(or anyone) could do is built a huge camp for them, but as you can imagine that would be a distaster very quickly, if done at that scale.

Option number 3 evokes a lot of negative emotions, but unless someone comes up with a better solution, it seems like the best way to go.

Re: Is Europe Disintegrating?

#163

Post by BerislavLopac »

matt_wulfeck wrote: post #36
ComradeTaco wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see an overall trend of of authoritarianism and nationalism as a response to immigration and an increasingly changing world. There's also a pretty heavy streak of anti-intellectualism as voters were encouraged to fundamentally reject experts that gave (IMHO well-founded) warnings about the ill-effects of Brexit and Trump. In short: Nationalism in, Globalism out.

Even the idea of experts is being rightly criticized. Look at the flip-flopping recommendations of the US health dietary guidelines. What's true to the experts this year will be rejected some point later. Not only that, but when you have centralized power it becomes much easier to corrupt and politicize. There's wisdom to decentralization.

Actually, the US dietary guidelines had very little to do with the "experts" and had everything to do with the government structures who based their recommendations on an incomplete set of research. [0]

[0] From http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/magazine/what-if-it-s-all-...: "In the intervening years, the N.I.H. spent several hundred million dollars trying to demonstrate a connection between eating fat and getting heart disease and, despite what we might think, it failed. Five major studies revealed no such link. A sixth, however, costing well over $100 million alone, concluded that reducing cholesterol by drug therapy could prevent heart disease. The N.I.H. administrators then made a leap of faith. Basil Rifkind, who oversaw the relevant trials for the N.I.H., described their logic this way: they had failed to demonstrate at great expense that eating less fat had any health benefits. But if a cholesterol-lowering drug could prevent heart attacks, then a low-fat, cholesterol-lowering diet should do the same."

Re: Is Europe Disintegrating?

#164

Post by [deleted] »

dogma1138 wrote: post #133
muninn_ wrote: post #7

You can't have short-term, mass migration without having something happen or change. We will see a huge change in European political landscape within the next few years. People have to slowly assimilate into a culture in order to allow for a gradual, peaceful change in that culture. Shocking these types of systems with any sort of migration is a recipient for instability. Please keep in mind that this isn't any sort…

The problem is that you assume they will assimilate, based on the current 2nd and 3rd generation MENA immigrants in Europe that might not be the case. Europe isn't a good place for assimilation, you can be a 3rd generation "immigrant" living in France but you will not be French regardless of how PC they might appear to be. European nationality is very much based on blood ties to the land, ethnic nationality was the d…

[deleted]

Re: Is Europe Disintegrating?

#165

Post by kuschku »

dkb wrote: post #134
kuschku wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, no thanks. Then we can just scrap the EU and replace it with TTIP. The entire point of the EU as an entity is that it allows people to move everywhere that companies and services can move to. Additionally, the entire problem of the refugee crisis was that countries controlled their own border – and everyone refused to do anything, instead telling Greece to prevent them from entering, and Greece said they’d just o…

Yes, the entire point of the EU is to allow people/companies to move everywhere. To that point, I think this explains why richer countries from the West of Europe have seen so many company relocations to Eastern countries, for many years now, as the labor is less expensive over there...

At the same time, people relocated from Eastern Europe to Western Europe.

A union needs free movement of goods, people, and resources; or a resource-sharing system, to ensure it stays fair.

That’s why free-trade agreements usually contain lots and lots of limitations to prevent it being actually free trade – and why the agreement Britain wants can never happen.

Re: Is Europe Disintegrating?

#166

Post by dogma1138 »

mattm wrote: post #159
dogma1138 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that you assume they will assimilate, based on the current 2nd and 3rd generation MENA immigrants in Europe that might not be the case. Europe isn't a good place for assimilation, you can be a 3rd generation "immigrant" living in France but you will not be French regardless of how PC they might appear to be. European nationality is very much based on blood ties to the land, ethnic nationality was the d…

> the moment you arrive regardless of who you are or where you come from (to some degree) you are an American Unless you were Irish, Italian, Jewish, African, Middle Eastern, Muslim, Japanese, Mexican... Don't pretend that the US is somehow morally superior in the way they have treated immigrants in the past and tidy.

Don't confuse individual racism with national identity. To be a French or Dutch is very different than being an American.

No one is pretending that the US is some paradise without prejudice but once you take the oath of allegiance you are an American regardless of your background.

Re: Is Europe Disintegrating?

#167

Post by ralfn »

dogma1138 wrote: post #166
mattm wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the moment you arrive regardless of who you are or where you come from (to some degree) you are an American Unless you were Irish, Italian, Jewish, African, Middle Eastern, Muslim, Japanese, Mexican... Don't pretend that the US is somehow morally superior in the way they have treated immigrants in the past and tidy.

Don't confuse individual racism with national identity. To be a French or Dutch is very different than being an American. No one is pretending that the US is some paradise without prejudice but once you take the oath of allegiance you are an American regardless of your background.

As a dutch person ive heard this complaint as well. Although we dont really understand how it comes they dont feel like Dutch, the remark is common enough that there has to be something there.

I do want to add that strong social security doesnt seem to help with integration. I think part of the success of the US together with generational patience, is that to make a living you have to play along. So any economic mismatch is corrected by "force". Whereas here you can get a situation where the cultural values and habits that do not econonically fit (like raising your daughters to be housewives) are essentially supported by the welfare state, creating the opposite effect of how it is intended.

Re: Is Europe Disintegrating?

#168

Post by badwulf »

> What Orbán has done, for example in his takeover of the media, undermines democracy itself.

Those of us who actually lived in Hungary know that the media needs to be regulated to prevent the media from picking our next president.

Orbán was the first politician who had the balls to call out the West on their irresponsible immigration policy, while everyone else was too busy being politically correct. The Austrian media blasted him, however when Austria started doing the same exact thing, they reported it differently.

Look at the Buzzfeed "reporting": they knew the document was most likely fake, yet they decided to publish it anyway.

Re: Is Europe Disintegrating?

#169

Post by majewsky »

akjainaj wrote: post #130
vivekd wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My own country, Canada, seems to be doing a good job, and I'm not sure but I think we have even higher immigration rates than Europe or the United States and we're still a fairly liberal, progressive and integrated society. I think our secret is selective immigration, we are much more selective than Europe in regards to who we let into the country and we don't have the illegal immigration issue on the scale that Amer…

Of course if you cherry pick your immigrants, you can claim immigrants are not problematic. If all your immigrants turned into Muslim refugees overnight, what would happen? I'm sure you guess it.

Canada is in a comfortable position: It might be tenable to get from the Middle East or North Africa to Europe in a raft, but not to Canada (or the US, for that matter).

Re: Is Europe Disintegrating?

#170

Post by majewsky »

ZenSwordArts wrote: post #87
muninn_ wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did those immigrants come from? What is their socio-economic background? Are they refugees, or perhaps tech workers? What about those coming to Europe?

Perfect questions.. and also Europe consists of many countries.. Are the immigrants evenly distributed between them? I doubt it.

> Are the immigrants evenly distributed between them?

No. There was a hot debate about this in 2015, with countries that take more refugees than average [1] arguing for quotas that would implement a more even distribution. I distinctly remember that a compromise was made, and in the end, some 50 refugees were actually relocated to a different EU country.

[1] Relative to population size.

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