791–800 of 1001 posts
It's amazing that such deep constitutional change will be achieved with such a slim majority. 48% of British people will be ejected out of the EU essentially against their will. The UK has always embraced first past the post voting, but it really shows here how it creates very discontinuous inflection points.
A very sad day for everyone in Europe. The EU is not only about trade regulations, but about a continent who had a not very peaceful history finally growing together. The freedom of movement for European citizens was not only "convenient" but in fact an important civil right. When you live or have a business in one state of the US, you are bound to local regulations of course, but being part of the US granted you a l…
My conclusion is that current day democracy does not work at the scale of hundreds of millions of people. The US, the EU, Russia and China are all examples of that in different ways.
We need a new form of democracy which scales better than the one we have today. Only then can we try to build sustainable unions on this scale.
I have no answer to what that would look like though. I can only guess at some of the components.
A very sad day for everyone in Europe. The EU is not only about trade regulations, but about a continent who had a not very peaceful history finally growing together. The freedom of movement for European citizens was not only "convenient" but in fact an important civil right. When you live or have a business in one state of the US, you are bound to local regulations of course, but being part of the US granted you a l…
Agreed. As an aside, for me this is a sterling example of the dangers of "direct democracy", that many see as the solution of all evils that plague the political process. The majority of UK lawmakers (democratically elected by the same people that voted the referendum) were in favor of staying in the Union: even a large number with conservative and traditionalist background (including the PM). Yet the future of the U…
A very sad day for everyone in Europe. The EU is not only about trade regulations, but about a continent who had a not very peaceful history finally growing together. The freedom of movement for European citizens was not only "convenient" but in fact an important civil right. When you live or have a business in one state of the US, you are bound to local regulations of course, but being part of the US granted you a l…
That's what's different monetary-policy-wise. California, for instance get's like 10 cents on the dollar back from its federal tax burden. Those 90 cents are used to shore up economically (and perhaps other kinds of) backward states like Mississippi. Nothing like this happened in the EU. Germany keeps a lions share of revenue and sends a tiny trickle back to the EU. This was never going to last long. Britain has probably only hastened the inevitable.
That's a very strange, and in some cases inaccurate, portrayal of history. * The British were not an external enemy. That would have been the French. For the most part, even the people leading the revolution were proud of being British subjects and would have liked to remain so, but could no longer tolerate the conditions being attached to that status. Our enemy was recognized to be our own cousins, not some external…
The French were the external enemy of the English and subsequently the loyalists in the US. At the time of the Revolutionary War, the French were instrumental in winning it by bombarding English ships en route to the US. At the time of the Revolutionary War, the English were the common enemy of the revolutionaries. It wasn't cut and dry, there were many English loyalists in the colonies at the time of the war. After…
A very sad day for everyone in Europe. The EU is not only about trade regulations, but about a continent who had a not very peaceful history finally growing together. The freedom of movement for European citizens was not only "convenient" but in fact an important civil right. When you live or have a business in one state of the US, you are bound to local regulations of course, but being part of the US granted you a l…
That's a very strange, and in some cases inaccurate, portrayal of history. * The British were not an external enemy. That would have been the French. For the most part, even the people leading the revolution were proud of being British subjects and would have liked to remain so, but could no longer tolerate the conditions being attached to that status. Our enemy was recognized to be our own cousins, not some external…
The way he very broadly sums it up was the South didn't have a reason to revolt until Lord Mansfield's ruling on slavery in the empire sparked fear and uncertainty of slavery's future in the South. That's what united the Northern and Southern states against the British. The book also goes on the explain the critical role slavery played in molding our constitution because it was the most contentious piece. It suggests that once the states reached a compromise on slavery, the rest of the pieces fell into place.
I think that's a better characterization than "The US united to commit genocide." My story at least tries to flesh out how the interests of real humans leads them to commit atrocities. Your obtuse characterization paints them as villains with the depth of a comic book character. You will never learn from history if you paint people like comic book characters, because they'll never resemble the complex real people you're trying to compare them to.
Being selfish here, wonder how this affects US. Even though on the surface EU and UK are alies and trade partners, it is not all black and white. I believe US will benefit because they will be able to play UK against EU and vice-versa to gain somehow. Say if EU doesn't allow import of US chicken they can go and try to persuade UK to not allow some import from EU in exchange for some other favor and so on. Also, I wou…
Afaik the US barely exports to europe (especially your example sounded odd to me, i never saw american food on the shelf except cookies). I dont think it will affect the US a lot.
(Total US->UK ~$55bn, about 4% of total US exports, top categories: aircraft, oil, cars, machinery, electronics.)