Live data from Hacker News

Why Canada Should Join the EU

economist.com

681–690 of 823 posts

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#681

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This could be seen as a EU-nationalist framing. Just like the United States has shifted from being a federation of states toward being a singular entity.

You need a common culture to govern a country, and that culture needs to be deeper than watching the same movies and consuming the same flow of cheap Chinese products. If you don’t have a common culture, you need real federalism so people can self-segregate into more homogenous cultural groups and efficiently govern themselves. The U.S. suffers greatly from the demise of federalism and it’s insane that anybody would…

> If you don’t have a common culture, you need real federalism so people can self-segregate into more homogenous cultural groups and efficiently govern themselves.

This whole thing is disproved by the whole Emo Philips "Die Heretic" joke [0]. If you don't believe pluralism can work, you will divide (usually violently) into smaller and smaller groups of people--smaller even than families--until everyone either dies or lives by themselves. Politics is how groups of 2 or more people make decisions; in order for humanity to advance we have to believe we can work together despite our differences.

> People in both California and Alabama would be a lot happier if they didn’t have to care about what each other were doing except to coordinate national defense and foreign treaties.

Both States would suffer greatly because of lessons we learned while we were governed by the Articles of Confederation.

> Look at the Scandinavian countries. Look how effectively they have been able to implement major policy reforms because their electorates aren’t divided along dozens of cleavage lines.

There really are no homogeneous cultures--for example Sweden has 25 provinces with "their own cultural identities, dialects and folklore" [1].

The reason Congress has ground to a halt is the George W. Bush administration killed the Republican party by invading Iraq and Afghanistan and presiding over the financial collapse of 2008, but rather than adapt it doubled down on its (admittedly successful) politics of demagoguery, using wedge issue after wedge issue to divide the electorate while also pursuing anti-democratic electoral strategies like gerrymandering and restrictive voting laws. This lead to leaders who succeed not by appealing to a majority of all Americans, but by proving their bona-fides to a small subset of increasingly radicalized voters on the right (Republican primary voters), largely by "not compromising their values" to work on legislation with the Democrats and instead obstructing and grandstanding. An unfortunate byproduct of this is there's no longer any governing expertise or even impulse in the party, so even when they're in the majority Republicans have a difficult time providing effective governance.

But that's just Congress, and I wouldn't say we've not implemented major policy reforms--the Supreme Court (an intensely anti-democratic institution dominated by the far right and largely appointed by non-representative Senate cohorts) is working hard to reshape the US.

Anyway, Christians would say we're all God's children. I don't know why people on the right are so taken with this idea of balkanization and segregation (I, of course, have some ideas), but it's not the path forward.

[0]: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Emo_Philips#Die,_heretic!

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provinces_of_Sweden

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ireland springs to mind, and in fact has strong ties to Indigenous nations in the Americas for their similar struggles

That doesn't make any sense to me (as an Irish person). A hundred years ago, sure. But modern Ireland is one of the richest and most privileged places on earth. The problems we have in modern Ireland - wealth inequality, housing crisis etc. - are decidedly problems of our own causing, and do not in any way equate to or reflect the struggle for rights and recognition of indigenous peoples around the world. We do have…

It’s odd to call Travelers “indigenous” because they don’t predate the settlement of Ireland by the current majority group. They’re Irish people who culturally diverged around 1600. It’s like calling Appalachian Americans Indigenous.

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Having a lot of cultures smooshed together is a culture. This reads a lot like "everything is a social construct". A culture is a property that's shared by the population. The absence of such a shared property is not its presence.

A monoculture is the least healthy kind of crop. We thrive the most when we incorporate the best ideas from the largest volume of idea space. We pay a price for this, in that we have to undergo the messy process of separating the good ideas from the bad but unless we're dead and stale as a culture we're doing that anyhow. New is good, anything else is death. Anyone pining for a 'good ol days' culture is chasing a mir…

> A monoculture is the least healthy kind of crop

Are you making the analogy because it sounds poetic, or because it actually makes sense? Humans are not plants, and they're not grown or raised to be killed for someone else's benefit.

If you insist on the analogy anyway: livestock are homogeneous just fine. Also you seem to be forgetting that weeds and invasive species are also things that can destroy ecosystems.

> New is good, anything else is death. Anyone pining for a 'good ol days' culture is chasing a mirage

That's what a melting pot is. It creates something new. You seem to be struggling to understand what people are actually arguing for or against.

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#685

> Canada’s inclusive treatment of its indigenous peoples, at least in recent decades, could be emulated by Europeans (though First Nations Canadians might fairly object to closer ties with ex-colonists) I really wonder what the author meant with this line. There's very few populations in Europe that bear any similarity whatsoever with the relationship between First Nations people and most Canadians, since most popula…

Most peoples in Europe do not have their own nation state. In fact, pretending that those peoples with their distinct languages (often called “dialects” despite lack of mutual intelligibility) and cultures do not exist is a key part of the establishment of nation states in the 19th century. In most of Europe, the nation state project was so successful that this hardly matters today (but of course there are exceptions…

Not sure how you can lump Romani and Jews together like that. Jews have a nation state, with "right of return"; a much better deal than the Romani get.

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't make any sense to me (as an Irish person). A hundred years ago, sure. But modern Ireland is one of the richest and most privileged places on earth. The problems we have in modern Ireland - wealth inequality, housing crisis etc. - are decidedly problems of our own causing, and do not in any way equate to or reflect the struggle for rights and recognition of indigenous peoples around the world. We do have…

It’s odd to call Travelers “indigenous” because they don’t predate the settlement of Ireland by the current majority group. They’re Irish people who culturally diverged around 1600. It’s like calling Appalachian Americans Indigenous.

[deleted]

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#687

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need a common culture to govern a country, and that culture needs to be deeper than watching the same movies and consuming the same flow of cheap Chinese products. If you don’t have a common culture, you need real federalism so people can self-segregate into more homogenous cultural groups and efficiently govern themselves. The U.S. suffers greatly from the demise of federalism and it’s insane that anybody would…

> If you don’t have a common culture, you need real federalism so people can self-segregate into more homogenous cultural groups and efficiently govern themselves. This whole thing is disproved by the whole Emo Philips "Die Heretic" joke [0]. If you don't believe pluralism can work, you will divide (usually violently) into smaller and smaller groups of people--smaller even than families--until everyone either dies or…

> This whole thing is disproved by the whole Emo Philips "Die Heretic" joke [0]. If you don't believe pluralism can work, you will divide (usually violently) into smaller and smaller groups of people--smaller even than families--until everyone either dies or lives by themselves.

This is provenly false, as countries do stabilize when small at around a few million or so and people no longer feel the need to split up more.

Its just dumb to try to argue that there is no optimal country size, so trying to make it smaller will only lead to single person countries, that is clearly not true in reality.

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#688

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your assertion is that the Scots, the Irish, and the Welsh are treated less fairly in the UK today than the First Nations people are in Canada? Because the article was claiming that EU countries have a lot to learn from Canada today. I personally very much disagree with the concept that First Nations people in Canada are afforded more rights and are freer to practice their cultural identity than the Scots, Welsh, and…

Whether they are or they aren't treated fairly today is beside the point. They were treated badly in the past and now their descendants want recompense for those past wrongs. The wounds in Canada are likely a little more fresh, but many peoples in Europe still remember wrongs done to grandparents.

> They were treated badly in the past and now their descendants want recompense for those past wrongs.

They (we?) do? This is the first I hear of this. Where did you read about this?

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#689

Another potential union that gets the occasional mention is CANZUK - a union of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK. [0] Practically, and legally, they all share the same head of state and similar cultures (although culturally Quebec is the outlier) so perhaps it would be an easier fit. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANZUK

I’ve been a proponent of CANZUK for 20 odd years now. My support comes from the cultural side of things. I spent 15 years working and living at ski resorts in Canada, Australia and New Zealand (and worked with a lot of young adults from the UK and Ireland). You can basically swap out anyone from the CANZUK+IE countries and get someone similar in language/culture/work ethic/etc and only have a slightly different accent.

I also know dozens of international couples who met and fell in love with someone from one of the other countries and have seen countless relationships forced to part ways because of stupid visa issues.

I’d like to see the free movement of people come first, a military agreement second (a la NATO) and then whatever free trade agreements that make sense.

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't make any sense to me (as an Irish person). A hundred years ago, sure. But modern Ireland is one of the richest and most privileged places on earth. The problems we have in modern Ireland - wealth inequality, housing crisis etc. - are decidedly problems of our own causing, and do not in any way equate to or reflect the struggle for rights and recognition of indigenous peoples around the world. We do have…

It’s odd to call Travelers “indigenous” because they don’t predate the settlement of Ireland by the current majority group. They’re Irish people who culturally diverged around 1600. It’s like calling Appalachian Americans Indigenous.

I don't think the semantics of the word indigenous are the important thing here, although I will say that officially, according to the Irish government, Irish travellers are an indigenous minority and attempts to discredit this are usually a thinly disguised attempt to discredit the credibility of the Irish travellers as a distinct ethnic minority - or, to put it another way, it's one of the more common ways that Irish people are racist towards travellers.

Instead, it's the racism and discrimination against an ethnic minority that we should focus on.

Post reply on HN