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EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'

bbc.com

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Re: EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'

#911

Post by bryanlarsen »

enoint wrote: post #802
bryanlarsen wrote: post #791

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, it is a weird way of saying that. But it is basically what I'm saying. I used the word "endorsed", not "voted". The distinction does matter. Only about 25% of the voting age public voted for Trump. Almost 25% of the voting age public weren't registered to vote, perhaps some of them wanted to vote but couldn't, so let's use the registered voters as the denominator. 75.8% of them voted; roughly one third for Tr…

We usually rely on polling for those answers. When you encounter a randomly-selected American on the street, do you find it 50/50? I’m in Wyoming, perhaps the reddest state, and it’s close to 50/50.

The third of the people who didn't vote are culpable.

Re: EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'

#912

Post by nutjob2 »

gizajob wrote: post #676
jen20 wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a rather fantastical and revisionist version of why the Brexit referendum was called - which had more to do with a misguided attempt to put the crazy wing of the Conservative Party to bed rather than anything to do with the EU, where the UK had the best deal imaginable already.

Nevertheless when put to British voters 50% of them decided that best possible deal still wasn’t in their interests. And that 50% who voted No was more people than even voted in the EU elections (to elect MEPs) before that. So the EU was very much fine with their democratic process seeming like an irrelevance, while at the same time the Brexit vote was actually an example of a democratic process working as it should.…

> And that 50% who voted No was more people than even voted in the EU elections (to elect MEPs) before that.

This is ignorance or just plain bad faith. MEPs are not the main democratic mechanism of the EU, it's the national governments. This is on purpose, so that both national democracy and sovereignty can be maintained.

This is the typical of EU misinformation spouted by people who have a problem with the EU. Of course people can dislike the EU all they want, but people who constantly rail against it, with little or no basis in fact, I'll never know. It's not about the EU, it's some sort of bitter obsession or ideological idiocy. Somehow the EU means much more to them than they claim, otherwise they wouldn't spend so much energy complaining about it.

Re: EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'

#913

Post by gizajob »

nutjob2 wrote: post #912
gizajob wrote: post #676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nevertheless when put to British voters 50% of them decided that best possible deal still wasn’t in their interests. And that 50% who voted No was more people than even voted in the EU elections (to elect MEPs) before that. So the EU was very much fine with their democratic process seeming like an irrelevance, while at the same time the Brexit vote was actually an example of a democratic process working as it should.…

> And that 50% who voted No was more people than even voted in the EU elections (to elect MEPs) before that. This is ignorance or just plain bad faith. MEPs are not the main democratic mechanism of the EU, it's the national governments. This is on purpose, so that both national democracy and sovereignty can be maintained. This is the typical of EU misinformation spouted by people who have a problem with the EU. Of co…

But I was a supporter of the EU who noticed this. Like I comment elsewhere, the EU is like Teflon and resistant to critique - when there is an issue or a defect we get comments like yours “yes yes but this isn’t the actual process, that is a governmental/national/commission/parliament issue.”

It’s not misinformation - it’s a very basic fact about the democratic mechanism we had for electing who represents us in the EU parliament which makes and votes on our laws. The opacity of this process and the general lack of enfranchisement in it is a major flaw but one that the EU was content with, because a simulation of a democratic process is good enough, better even, because it avoids the scrutiny and can be defended by people like you. It’s a basic fact that people did get off their arses and vote to leave in greater numbers than even bothered to be enfranchised in the elections for MEPs. You don’t have to bleat about it or invoke ignorance or bad faith because all you show up is your own bad faith to a fairly basic fact.

And it remains that people had never been given the chance to vote on whether they wanted to be governed by the EUs mechanisms. It got decided for people by politicians that it was in their interests that a trading block rapidly evolve into a super-national government. It was decided by those politicians how it operates and politicians the ones with the control over its integration, and what kicked off my comments in this thread, that it has a president who speaks for the whole of Europe who only they choose. When put to the actual people for the first and only time, they decided they weren’t into it for myriad of individual reasons that can’t be usefully modelled. And now as we’ve seen endless times in these threads, the response from Europe hasn’t been to go back to the drawing board, there is a general tone of traitorship and casting it as entirely British issue caused basically by racists and idiots, when it happened within the EU and was also an EU issue. Nowhere else in the EU would 17 million people making a very clear decision be called a gang of fuckn idiots.

Re: EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'

#914

Post by gizajob »

jen20 wrote: post #845
gizajob wrote: post #829

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’ve fallen into the common trap in believing that there was a simple narrative which can be used to understand the Brexit vote, when the data shows there were 17 million different and varied reasons within a mass resistant to modelling.

There were a few categories of reasons. The ones that are persistent are "I'm going to vote for anarchy because politics does no good for me", "I'm racist and don't understand that this doesn't get rid of people I really want to get rid of but really want it to so whatever" and "I'm xenophobic and haven't accepted that there isn't a British Empire anymore". There may be fringe cases around specific regulations, but t…

You just repeated the same mistake but with more detail.

Re: EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'

#915

Post by bryanlarsen »

enoint wrote: post #877
WarmWash wrote: post #734

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know how despite climate change being very real, in day to day discussions with other level headed people, they still very regularly say stuff like "We ran the numbers for an EV, and right now gas is still cheaper, so we are holding off on the switch until it makes financial sense" Canadian oil would need to be shipped halfway around the world. It would be more expensive. Price is always the top factor for everyo…

The politically-important Alberta oil mostly goes to the mountain states down here. Coincidentally, those same states rely heaviest on coal for electricity. So, the choice is recharge an EV on coal (think arsenic and mercury accumulating somewhere nearby) or good ol gasoline (which is piped from Canada).

The heavy oil refineries are generally near the Gulf and in the Midwest, so that's where the Canadian oil goes.

Re: EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'

#916

Post by bryanlarsen »

softwaredoug wrote: post #58

I’m not sure this is a good thing for Canada. The EU feels like an incomplete experiment. Not strong enough to actually be a single market. But still able to create additional annoying regulations on top of nation level ones. The EU needs to be truly Federal to succeed economically. That might create uniform regulations with more uniform regulations and actually make Europe competitive.

It might not be a good thing, but it's likely the best thing. Canada does not have a lot of good options. Doing nothing is a far worse option.

Re: EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'

#917

Post by DeepSeaTortoise »

noir_lord wrote: post #865
Sammi wrote: post #856

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EU got stronger when UK left. Brexit proved the value of EU.

Honestly yes and I say that as a Brit who voted Remain who has an EU national missus. Our constant in/out wasn't great for the EU as a whole and it's now very hard to argue that pissing off your largest trading partner (by nearly a factor of 4 over the next one which is the US) was a catastrophic mistake. Still that's democracy, even when it doesn't go the way you wanted. Was/is the EU perfect, nope - it has all kind…

I'd say yiu should not confuse politicians taking revenge on their citizens for having voted wrong with Brexit leaving the UK worse off than if it remained.

The EU is one of the primary tools all these authoritarians use to push their agenda. In which functional democracy do parliaments have to vote AGAINST a bill? Which sane democracy establishes a literal ministry of truth? Which non-dystopian government introduces highly destructive laws (forcing every small online store to hire a legal representative in every single memberstate they want to ship to) and then telling desparate small business owners not to worry, because surely their countries wont enforce those laws?

And all of those happened AFTER the British people saw the writing on the wall and forced their rulers to downgrade their rank in the new aristocracy.

The decline is entirely by design.

Re: EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'

#918

Post by jen20 »

gizajob wrote: post #914
jen20 wrote: post #845

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were a few categories of reasons. The ones that are persistent are "I'm going to vote for anarchy because politics does no good for me", "I'm racist and don't understand that this doesn't get rid of people I really want to get rid of but really want it to so whatever" and "I'm xenophobic and haven't accepted that there isn't a British Empire anymore". There may be fringe cases around specific regulations, but t…

You just repeated the same mistake but with more detail.

I understand why you’d like to believe that, but it’s simply not true.

Re: EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'

#919

Post by gdilla »

sajithdilshan wrote: post #797
throwaway283737 wrote: post #481

This is the same EU who once reduced the Canadian trade minister to (literal) tears, and made her denounce the (accurate) fact that, and I quote, "Europe is not capable of signing a trade deal". Notably, the EU has never ratified the Canada FTA and everyone's just sort of pretending it did for convenience's sake. Nice symbolism, but this is merely being used as leverage in Canada's negotiation with the US. "See, we h…

I think a lot of non-europeans have this illusion that EU is this one big liberal, open-minded continent. It is mostly true if you look at certain cities like Amsterdam or Copenhagen, but in general most EU countries are way more conservative, and traditional. Not only abortion, some EU countries still have laws to discriminate people based on their sexuality. One recent example is that one of the prominent openly ga…

but it is compared to the US. It's not perfect or ideal but like... you can freely move to a place in the EU that's better for you?

Re: EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'

#920

Post by gdilla »

softwaredoug wrote: post #58

I’m not sure this is a good thing for Canada. The EU feels like an incomplete experiment. Not strong enough to actually be a single market. But still able to create additional annoying regulations on top of nation level ones. The EU needs to be truly Federal to succeed economically. That might create uniform regulations with more uniform regulations and actually make Europe competitive.

ok, but Carney has always said it's better than being continually threatened and betrayed by Americans. He's right. I agree that it'll be hard to be beneficial to the EU and Canada, will take decades, but the cost of doing nothing is higher. And people are forgetting this isn't just economic but there's security aspects as well.
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