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Why Canada Should Join the EU

economist.com

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Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#711

Post by stuaxo »

adammarples wrote: post #666
rayiner wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Labour won the election, but Starmer’s approval rating is already down to 27% after just six months. https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/dissatisfaction-starmer-reaches-... . That’s not surprising given that Labour got half a million fewer votes than it did in 2019, when it lost in a landslide, but won anyway because of infighting among the right wing. That’s what I meant when I said nationalists have rendered ruling parties…

This is nonsense. Labour have a huge majority, there is no coalition, and their fall from popularity is 100% their own making and largely down to their own left wing policies (increased taxation, lying about it, bungs to unions, increased workers rights) and perceived corruption due to freebies (clothes, glasses). Labour basically ignore the right wing as irrelevant, Reform are only currently a problem for the Conser…

This version of Labour has been against the left of their own party and trying (unsuccessfully) to court the right.

They would call it centrist "practical" "adults in the room" or whatever, while those 'left' behind simply see it as a slide to the right.

It looks like they want to be more like the Democrats in the US who are roughly where the UK conservatives used to be before everything shifted rightward.

(Of course left/right is a simplification we can substitute ordinary folk vs vested interests).

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#712

Post by camgunz »

Jensson wrote: post #687
camgunz wrote: post #681

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 mo…

If you were right about this; countries never would've fallen apart when the human population was much smaller than it is today, but it happened a lot, so you're not.

Another thing that disproves this is long lived empires. Japan's been around what like, a millennia and a half? Rome was almost around a thousand years, etc.

(Are you gonna argue Japan's a monoculture? Definitely not! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_of_Japan)

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#713

Post by grecy »

crote wrote: post #590
SolonIslandus wrote: post #35

Canada should join the European Free Trade Association instead of the EU! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Free_Trade_Associatio...

I don't think this is an attractive option for Canada. The main downside of EFTA is that you are required to follow a lot of single-market legislation, without getting any say in it. Considering how tightly Canada is currently coupled to the US, this would be an absolute nightmare for many businesses. Yeah you'd gain a hypothetical overseas market, but in turn you're losing alignment with an absolutely massive market…

Sure, but if the threatened tariffs come in, that nearby market will drop considerably. The EU is also a bigger market than the US. 440mil vs. 340mil.

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#714

Post by mike_hearn »

franga2000 wrote: post #664
mike_hearn wrote: post #657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> conditional on things like only voting in left wing parties Thefuck? The EU has been making everything conditional on privatization, deregulation and generally adopting more capitalist models in practically every aspect of government. You're calling this left wing?? A few examples of the demands: sell off our largest and state-owned bank; decouple, deregulate and privatize electricity generation and sale; open the…

The EU isn't exactly famous for its love of deregulation, you know. Quite the opposite, especially when it comes to tech.

But I'm referring to the withdrawal of cohesion funds from countries like Poland and Hungary under newly invented rules like needing to share "EU values". These values aren't defined or written down anywhere, but the only countries that seem to violate them are those with conservative parties in power. The moment the conservatives are no longer in power, suddenly the country is in compliance with "EU values" again.

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#715

Post by fweimer »

Stevvo wrote: post #685
fweimer wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I had not thought about it that way. It's not such a great deal if you feel you belong wherever you are living now in Europe, and view yourself a quasi-citizen and European (even in case if there's no realistic path to citizenship due to your personal circumstances).

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#716

Post by izacus »

_7acn wrote: post #670
gmueckl wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Yes, outside the areas where EU has sole responsibility. 2. Yes, within the areas where the EU has exclusive responsibility and to some extent when it shares responsibility with member states. 3. Yes. Any country is free to leave the EU at any time. See Britain.

In that case, I suggest taking a closer look at the definition of "sovereignty". When it comes to lawmaking, if you say that your country can basically do "almost everything" without the EU's permission, "BUT with certain exceptions" it simply means that it is not sovereign. This is not a matter of opinion but of facts. It's binary — either it is sovereign, or it is not.

You just made up a definition of sovereignty that no nation state on this planet fits.

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#717

Post by Stevvo »

fweimer wrote: post #715
Stevvo wrote: post #685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I had not thought about it that way. It's not such a great deal if you feel you belong wherever you are living now in Europe, and view yourself a quasi-citizen and European (even in case if there's no realistic path to citizenship due to your personal circumstances).

What's a "quasi-citizen"?

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#718

Post by jampekka »

xqt40 wrote: post #577
bpodgursky wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to shoehorn the Sami into this comparison because they really only colonized the Nordic countries contemporary with the majority "European" populations. They weren't, in the same sense, indigenous, just... less western.

No. What you are refering to might be in regards to Uralification, while 50% of Saami undeniably have been indigenous population and were there before Uralics arrived there. And Nordics encroached on lands where even partly Uralized Saami were first. No one is arguing that Saami are indigenous to Oslo, but they were first in 80% of Scandinavia.

Sami are part of the uralic people although they arrived to Fennoscandia some centuries before the Finnic. There were people in the area before the uralic people came but very little is known about them.

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#719

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

femiagbabiaka wrote: post #702
3vidence wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to say Quebec is an enclave.... It is quite literally the founding half of the country.

It’s an immigrant community that refused to integrate into the culture that existed there before them. If that sounds ridiculous it is because this entire conversation is ridiculous.

> It’s an immigrant community that refused to integrate into the culture that existed there before them.

Wow. Wow, wow, wow, you're in need of a major history lesson, like how the British first basically committed genocide with the expulsion of the Acadia French, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_the_Acadians, and then when they realized that was a collosal fuck up they explicitly put policies in place to not expel the rest of the French in Quebec and deliberately treat them as second class citizens.

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#720

Post by jampekka »

bpodgursky wrote: post #589
xqt40 wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. What you are refering to might be in regards to Uralification, while 50% of Saami undeniably have been indigenous population and were there before Uralics arrived there. And Nordics encroached on lands where even partly Uralized Saami were first. No one is arguing that Saami are indigenous to Oslo, but they were first in 80% of Scandinavia.

I don't think that 80% is true in either the geographic [1] or more practical sense. It's maybe 50% by landmass. But more significantly, it's not the arable or densely inhabited parts; the vast majority of Scandinavians do not live on land where Sami ever lived. This is just a vastly different than Canada where every square inch was native land at one point. For example, Vancouver has Squamish-owned and developed lan…

At least in Finland Sami lived in the southern parts as well, some still in the 17th century. Most southern Sami probably assimilated with the Finns.
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