Comment by cynicalsecurity
1 day ago
To everyone who wants to dismantle the EU: this is not the solution. Dismantling the EU is like burning down your own house just to get rid of flies. The UK left the EU and implemented its own version of chat control - Online Safety Act - without any transparency or real opposition. The right solution is the political fight. Europe is our home. We must keep it in good shape by getting rid of anything that makes it worse - like Chat Control.
Look at this other piece in the frontpage:
> Every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera (allaboutcookies.org)
the eu should never have been born. The above are its results - and just an example. How do we fix that disaster?
And the US wanted to install a breathalyzer in every car a few years back. How is this supposed to prove anything?
That was a law in France from 2012 to 2020 too (breathalyzer needs to be on board). It was not on European level and it has been removed.
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> [they] wanted
Did they? That makes a good amount of difference, you know. Especially when "they" may be a vocal exception.
> How is this supposed to prove anything
Prove what. Nothing seems to be disproven.
Edit: look, if you were trying to negate a "bad A" through an "(also) bad B", review and revise your logic. Which is important because that non-argument has been exploited to bend the political opinion of street-rubes to CEO-rubes for the past few years ("Bad Springfield hence [...] not bad Vernapool").
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by educating our fellow co-citizens about who to vote for. This is not an issue of the EU, but about the politicians in power and them caving in on lobbyists from economy side and fascists
That translates to "capillary education, to the point of fixing structural systemic issues", measure needed generations ago.
We have damages now. The car systems destroyed. How would we be able to fix that, to revert from that and the rest of the damages - which they are carrying on perpetrating as we speak, inventing new.
This is not any more a matter of prevention, it is a matter of fixing the past and preventing the future predictable damages.
The EU is beyond reform, this law targets exactly this: nascent political projects that threaten the status quo.
I believe that the EU will cause so much strife that the long peace we've enjoyed on the continent will be brought to an end, not because of the EU, but because of the wedges drawn between pro-EU and EU-skeptic countries.
Of course Americans want us to dismantle the EU, we are even weaker against US influence without it.
Isn't the EU rather like a single point of failure?
No, every country remains sovereign. Hungary's previous regime ignored the EU for over a decade. Many countries are instituting border controls again despite the Schengen agreement.
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I was a big EU federalist but now it seems just a tool for liberal authoritarianism pushed by the established parties.
>Europe is our home.
At the same time parts of my country feel less and less like home if at all and those politicians really hate adressing it.
>Dismantling the EU is like burning down your own house just to get rid of flies.
I don't like this comparison at all. Europe, the land that housed, fed and scarified my ancestors, is my house, not this supra-governmental corrupt bureaucratic institution called the EU that does not represent me nor speak in my name.
Empires, monarchies, governments and all such man-made institutions like the EU get torn down all time, when they become too bloated, incompetent, corrupt and cronyistic and lose legitimacy in the eyes of the people. See all human history.
Forests go through prescribed burns in order to be saved, for their own good, and so must political institutions. And when the rot is too big, it can't simply be "patched" anymore, it needs to be torn down and rebuilt from scratch with fresh new people, which in turn will get corrupted over time and get torn down, and so on, rinse and repeat because that's human nature.
Ironically, the EU has achieved its goal of uniting all Europeans, as in they're all now united via hating what the EU has become and what it's doing.
Let's stop the blut and soil BS right here. I am all for european panationalism but don't pretend that Europe is "your house" where "your ancestors" were. You come from a very specific culture inside it which has its own specific language and traditions and that has spent most its history warring with its neighbours, sometimes people in the next village speaking a different version of your lanuage. My ancestors and your ancestor probably scarified each other, the land didn't
Turns out unifying a lot of different countries that have different languages and interest is a hard problem and in order to satisfy everyone a little bureaucracy is the price to pay. You may find it too bloated, too slow or even too corrupt but burning it to the ground is a lunacy for people who entertain clean slate delusions: Whenever it happens, it is a catastrophy for everyone but a few opportunists.
Europe is imperfect but it has rejected the idea of war outside of itself. I don't think any European citizen would go to war with their neighbour. Just that is an amazing achievement. Now it can stay an economic union and big powers can pick and choose how to manipulate each one of us for their own purposes or it can strive to be a political union and have a standing on the international stage. We're not there yet but we will, eventually, we just need to hang tight. Things take time.
>Europe is imperfect but it has rejected the idea of war outside of itself. I don't think any European citizen would go to war with their neighbour. Just that is an amazing achievement.
Not really. South American countries don't go to war with each other and they don't have a union. Nor do central American countries.
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>Let's stop the blut and soil BS
do you feel the same way when Africans speak of Africa?
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>Let's stop the blut and soil BS right here
Would you also tell that to native American Indians? Or to the Japanese? Or to the Indians?
It's no BS unless you've been brainwashed and make massive efforts to ignore reality. Blood based belonging to a place is hardwired in every culture and society on the planet, from Asia to the Americas. NA, UK, AU, NZ, and the EU just have added a lot of PR paint on top to pretend it doesn't exist in their liberal societies, but it does, except it's much more under the table and subversive.
>a little bureaucracy is the price to pay.
Taking away people's privacy and freedom of speech is a little more problematic than just "a little bureaucracy".
>Europe is imperfect but it has rejected the idea of war outside of itself. I don't think any European citizen would go to war with their neighbour. Just that is an amazing achievement.
That WAS an achievement in the past, but if you dissolve the EU institution tomorrow, no former EU member state will suddenly got to war with their neighbour just because the EU doesn't exist anymore. So the myth that the EU is somehow preventing war in EU today is bogus. That was history, this is today.
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I agree on the base of the argument. EU after all was created because of one tragedy. I'm absolutely sure that there will be more gruesome wars on the continent and I even wouldn't rule out the collapse in the future because petty tribalism holding everything back as always.
But this is the hatred you are talking about?
https://www.politico.eu/article/europeans-embrace-eu-gloom-w...
"Eurobarometer by the EU shows Europeans love the EU"
seems legit lol
Probably because most Europeans are clueless and brainwashed by MSM pro-EU propaganda, and never hear about the nasty things the EU tries to do like chat control, age-ID, car surveillance, or taxing parcels.
To most Europeans EU just means going to Spain on vacation and going to work in Germany for more money, anything else stupid the EU does never reaches them directly until much later when the second order effects hit but then it must be because the fault of Putin or Trump.
Most Europeans are pretty detached from EU politics. If you ask them who their EU MEPs /representative are most have no clue without googling, they just know some of the ones in their own country, but EU politics might as well be on another planet.
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Exactly. This is ridiculous behavior. Simple solutions for complex problems are usually the wrong ones.
One griefer which promised prosperit fueled Brexit, which caused Britain visible stagnation and now he is a candidate for MP promising to fixing it all yet again.
I need to repeat, that Simple solutions for complex problems usually do not work.
the eu has always been an instrument of american imperialism. leader like ursula was casted away of german politics for corruption and most of the other big names had ties to american companies like goldman sachs or’other financial institution. the eu is a prison for all of us. for a moment germany thought they could use it as an instrument to win and crush its biggest competitors (france and uk) but now they dont have an energy sector (lost thanks to their dear american friend bombing nordstream and foreign countries financing an anti nuclear narrative) and as such they now also lost the heart of their economy : their industry. the final nail in the coffin is spain opening the gates to millions of mens from less developed countries while major european economies have record youth unemployment.
its a crime against what was not so long ago some of the greatest nations on earth. now were as citizen are living under a distopia of urss with the worst of capitalism combined with the worst of communism. mass surveillance, removal of all personal freedom (freedom of speech, right to own property and cars, right to inherit, right to have a nation for our people, harshnpunishment for any contestation’up to jail timz for memes while at the same time very lenient justice toward murderers, rapists and other criminals.)
we gave away our right to exist and be nations and we did that without even a fight
you seem to be from Russia. You do realize it's not in the EU right?
russia was indeed the ones who pushed germany to be reliant on their energy instead of going for nuclear. they funded green party to do that. and germany on their side then voted laws and pushed eu to remove nuclear from green energies list so that france wouldnt have an edge against germany shooting themselves in the foot
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I'm not an expert, but isn't "your own house" should rather be your country in this analogy? It ought to be still there without some bureaucratic institution on top of it.
Just think "neighborhood", no? This seems like splitting hairs... And to what end? to take a shot at EU supra-national structure? ("What, you don't ally to your country?" kinda shade.)
-- Canadian
more like an increasingly authoritative and retarded HoA.
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Maybe “your own city” would be a more precise metaphor than “your own house”. Your country is your house, but the EU is the city around it, with the roads, infrastructure, shared rules, market, security, and institutions that make the house function.
The concept of a modern nation is also relatively new. It emerged as an identity for groups of people who were no longer defined mainly by the monarchs ruling over them. That identity replaced the king as the symbol of belonging.
But now nationalism is often doing the opposite. Instead of freeing people from old power structures, it is holding Europe back.
So yes, maybe it is not literally “your house”, but the point still stands. Burning down the city around your house is not exactly a smart move either.
>the EU is the city around it, with the roads, infrastructure, shared rules, market, security, and institutions that make the house function.
If you measure "function" by the relative economic and military power of the country, then the EU has overwhelmingly degraded the function of its initial members compared to when they joined.
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