Same goes for your countries own election cycle.
Now I know some nations within the EU have proportional voting but I have to ask, how difficult is it to unseat a politician? How difficult is it to do so within their party, are there the equivalent of the US primary system?
For the US, unless they are not running the chance of reelection is very high so without some sort of political shift not governed by one of our two parties is near impossible.
To be honest in France almost nobody knows who is seating at the European Parliament, we have absolutely no visibility to what is being voted, even less who voted what.
A commonly accepted view (at least around me, I might be biased) is that our representatives there are useless, whoever they are. We had about 60% abstention in 2014's elections, I think that says it all.
It should be available on the site of the european parliament as well.
Isn't it nice that the people deciding about the future of internet are doing that by passing around word documents like it's 2001? I wonder how many people here can imagine a more readable presentation of such data...
To quote J-Cole's BRACKETS
I'll write a check to the IRS, my pockets get slim
Damn, do I even have a say 'bout where it's goin'?
Some older nigga told me to start votin'
I said "Democracy is too fuckin' slow"
If I'm givin' y'all this hard-earned bread, I wanna know
Better yet, let me decide, bitch, it's 2018
Let me pick the things I'm funding from an app on my screen
Better that than letting wack congressman I've never seen
Dictate where my money go, straight into the palms of some
CDU/EPP does not help with that
> much stricter control of my country's borders
Do I need to remind which party Merkel is from? CDU
> better support for entrepreneurs
If you're a big German industrialist you'll get all the help from them, anything else? Nah
Have fun with your totalitarian nationalist utopia: if you think anything referencing technologies like "upload filters" (their simple EXISTENCE!) is about anything then enabling tools of totalitarian mass control of sheeple.
In a normal open society people are free to put whatever they want up online. Now if someone else realizes afterwards that it violates their copyright, they can ask for it to be taken down in a certain interval of time, and if you or the platform don't agree about this, you proceed to settle the dispute in court. Even DMCA and such kind of work this way: after something ends up online you can solicit it to go down!
Same with people: you allow people in, and if they do illegal stuff (this may include whatever your laws want to say, including staying too much without holding a job or creating a business, whatever, write it in your laws) you kick them out or throw them in jail.
If go the other way, it's easy for the "Overton window" to slide over you and you'll go from "innocent until proven guilty" to "guilty until you can prove innocence (or racial purity or whatever)" in a jiffy...
Once you're talking "walls" and "upload filters" you're on the path to some kind of fascism or natzysm, regardless of how you call it, and whether it's state or corporate powered (yeah, Google and Facebook will be more than happy making profits selling "upload filters" or "border control people screening technologies" just as well, they don't care where the $ comes from)...
Sorry, but you have it backwards. It isn't some "totalitarian nationalist utopia" that passed those laws, but the "European union".
And nation states are not by any definition "totalitarian". If anything, the rise of democracy in the modern world came along with the rise of the nation states.
What we had before was feudal kingdoms and autocratic empires. People revolted, spilt blood, and fought, to have their own nation states and be able to govern themselves directly, according to their will, custom, and local interests.
European Union, which nobody asked for, wasn't a grassroot movement, but a high-level top-down project (from rich industrialists, diplomats, and others post WWII) that was imposed upon Europe's nation states step by step. It has met longstanding popular reaction long before today (from the late 70s, onto Maastricht and Lisbon treaties, the Euro-constitution being discarded by popular vote again and again, referendums from different countries ignored or repeated (repleat with propaganda) until EU bureucrats got the results they wanted, etc, and so on, to today's Yellow Vests.
EU is a bureaucratic regression to empire-dom, only instead of an emperor there are private interests and bureaucrats ruling it.
And the popular vote is so removed from the actual decision making, and so diluted among dozens of states with different interests (some of which have big economies and influence, bribe, or threat a number of satellites and dependents for their political alliance) that might as well not exist.
That's what we're "enjoying" today with this vote, not some "dark" national dystopias...
(A united Europe under common government was, incidentally and ironically, the dream of a famous German firt-half of 20-th century state figure...)
Empires bring civilization and prosperity - from The Roman Empire to The British Empire and The French "Empire(s)", to the decades of "American imperialism", if you objectively weigh the good and the bad, they've all brought humanity together and pushed it further in science and technology and integration.
A combination of "empires" or "federations-of-federations", whatever you'd want to call then, and "swarms of city-states" (depending on the preference for more anarchy or more centrallization of each region) would be the ideal way to organize and develop humanity in my way.
"Nations" and "national culture" are an illusion that only brought pain and suffering: the great genocides of the first and second world war were precisely the result of thinking in terms of nations, and of distorting this concept to become "race-nation" or something else. If you just wipe the N-word form conceptual landscape and dictionaries, there's simply nothing left for evil authoritarian dictators to distort... humanity falls back to "an organic order" that naturally leads to micro-tribes and micro-city-states that organize themselves inside empire-federations ("anarchy in the small" + "hyper-integration in the large", "order powered by chaos" in a way) bringing greater freedom for us isolated individuals, because and imperial authority's hand is always far away, easy to hide from it when it threaten's your freedoms if you're smart enough and know how to dissimulate what you're actually doing (and "more freedom for the cleverest" is what you'd want anyway), whereas local power is always close and inescapable.
The whole idea of "direct democracy" and "local decision making" above micro-level (province-size tribe, city etc.) is bad imo. These "local decisions" are always crap. They only satisfy local power hungry manipulative psychopaths. You can't solve planetary climate-change and ecological destruction with local decision making!
And EU's latest legislative decisions are crap precisely because they are made from a point of weakness, the bureaucrats have retreated in a small "holdout" and they started thinking like a "nation"! If they would think more like an empire, they would think at the technical efficiencies of how exactly technically a law impacts at the scale of an empire and the timeframe of centuries (because, at least in spirit and produced knowledge, empires and imperial cultures are meant to last thousands of years) the economy, and they'd realise that a strong EU doesn't need to "squeeze some petty cash" from corporations in the short term, it plans to out-grow and out-power any imaginable corporation (because it could operate beyond the "sandbox" of monetary economy and because it would be something people could believe in, like in a god, and be 100x more motivated / loyal / "fanatical" maybe than any profit driven corporate drones).
Anyway, I just hope that once humanity gets over the current "bottleneck" with some technical breakthrouhgs (let's say... going multi-planetar and developing self-replicatable intelligent technologies), we can get our heads out of our asses and reinterpret history in a more sensible way and refashion politics accordingly. The current worldview is "OK & safe for keepings us all alive and not killing each other" in this delicate phase, but utterly suboptimal, nonsensical, and hardly worth living for imo.
No, Empires destroy regional governments, customs, and cultures, and bring upon them iron peace, of enforcing the will and customs of the winners. It's the peace of the graveyard.
And while the Roman empire is too far back, the crimes of the British, French, and other modern empires are too close for anyone to have the gal to call them "peace".
That's what jingoists and racist creeps called them in their time -- doing their "white man's burden" to bring civilization to those pesky Africans, Indians, and so on.
There have been lots of turf wars in History. None where more unjust, more unwarranted, bloodier, and more sick than the colonial wars and enslavement of over a billion people.
After the peoples in Europe fought to bring down the old empires and feudal kingdoms, and establish their own nation states, the ruling classes went for colonialism to expand their rule and build new empires, this time by exporting the exploitation globally (not that they gave up domestic exploitation completely, until the collapse of colonial empires after WWII reduced the power of the elites, and forced them to content -and deal with- their own population).
From the Belgians, who killed millions in the Congo, maimed kids, slaughtered whole villages, to the French, who killed thousands of protesters asking for their country's freedom as close as the 1960s, to the British, who gauged out prisoners eyes with spoons, and exhibited the last native survivors of their atrocities as museum pieces...
Hitler, even numerically, had nothing on those people. He just did those things to Europeans. Had he done them to Africans, Native Americans, Asians, Indians, etc, there would be people still applauding his empire and "peace" today.
And unlike the wars of the long past history, the people who ordered and performed the colonial "imperial" atrocities didn't have any excuse of not being well educated and well bread "gentlemen" of means...
The appraisals of empires is because history is written by those who killed, not the killed. And the people doing the appraisals are the descendants of the murderers.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/22/britis...
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/apr/18/britain-destroyed...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/worst-atroci...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocities_in_the_Congo_Free_S...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/belgiums-genoc...
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/inglorious-empire-w...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/08/india-britain-...
https://www.history.com/news/native-americans-genocide-unite...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_of_indigenous_peoples
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/mar/04/the-k...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truganini
Some "peace"...
Agree, the colonial empires did unimaginable horrors, you're probably right on this, probably they should never be praised. ...my bad for ignoring the part of their history that happened outside Europe. Maybe the word "empire" is a bad one to use, too many bloody connotations for non-europeans.
But there is to be said that the industrial revolution and its consequences would likely not have happened without the colonial empires. And, as much as we want to consider our society the consequence of the French Revolution and the independence war and all those etc., I think our true culture we live in (not the one we imagine when we go to theatre or read some lofty philosophy) that brought us the current comforts, including the laptops we type from, is the (incredibly bloody) product of industrial revolution and industrial capitalism that was fuelled by imperialism. There's where we come from, and it just is, guild / shame etc. are practically useless with respect to a past longer than a lifetime, water under the bridge etc. We just need to be wise enough to not repeat the mistakes of the past. And honest enough to take ownership of the true foundations of our society. And to use the fruits of the spilled blood as much/best as we can and make them plentiful to all - the only thing to do about spilled blood is to make bloody sure it wasn't spilled for nothing!
And:
> reduced the power of the elites, and forced them to content -and deal with- their own population
...that's another issues. I'd rather have whatever elite crops up at the top of an empire fan out and dilute their exploatation as much as possible. Modern informational society will make it much harder for far off acts of bloody exploitation to go ignored and unnoticed anyway, with a globalist culture of social responsibility, call it a "global-PC-2.0" (hopefully less ridiculous than the 1.0 version of "political correctness") in lack of a better word.
These are the challenges I care about: (1) how to create a "globalism 2.0" that economically works (maybe the whole dystribute-everything and crypto things can be put to good use here) for the best and also produces "global culture" (the 90's brought some mildly successful examples of this), and (2) how to create some "global-PC-2.0" or "distributed global eco social responsibility" (this will need some true innovation, and it will need truly un-censorable and anonymous communication infrastructure too as a substrate to work on - think "global channels that could broadcast live and no nation state have the power to shut them down even if they discover it breaks their (local) laws").