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EU vote-Brexit...what will it mean to us?

Deacon923 said:
Assuming arguendo that your assertion here is correct, in the current political setting I'm not sure it matters. There is a large group of people in Britain and America who want something, anything, to change because they perceive that they are getting screwed under the existing system. The experts and smart people tell them over and over again that the thing they want changed will actually hurt them in the long run, but it falls on deaf ears. They've been screwed and marginalized for so long by experts and smart people that they just want to break some windows for the sake of changing the scenery. That is what has led to Brexit and to Trump being the GOP nominee, and to Bernie's very unexpected strength.

The point is that the elites in the US need to figure out how to address these issues before something truly harmful happens to us. David Cameron let the genie out of the bottle in Britain and a whole generation of people is going to suffer as a result. The analysis you just posted may actually be true - but it won't make Bernie or Trump supporters feel better or change their votes.
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I have zero confidence that this will ever happen, because these people are supremely confident that they have the political strength to continue to marginalize anyone who would challenge them. And, unfortunately, they most likely still do have that political strength. Brexit, Trump & Bernie have shown that the peasants are getting ever angrier, but I doubt that we have quite reached the final battleground yet.....but when we get there, it isn't going to be pleasant for anyone.

Power doesn't not easily relinquish its power....and never voluntarily. You are about to witness the most vicious multi-front effort to discredit Donald Trump that you have ever seen. There are many entrenched power sources....The Media, elites in both political parties, financial institutions, etc.... who are threatened by Trump, and they will mount an onslaught to the death against him to destroy him and tighten their grip on the power that they have long-held.

I saw just an inkling of the awesome capability of their massive destructive power when it looked as though Howard Dean might have challenged these institutions' grip on the country 12 years ago.....but they barely had to break a sweat to destroy Dean. Trump is a much bigger threat to them today, but he cannot survive what lies ahead of him in the coming months as these evil forces unleash what will be an unprecedented campaign to destroy him.
 
TuffaloDeac10 said:
The problem with this post is that Trump and Brexit are bad, but Bernie is actually good
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In many ways Bernie is just the non-racist flipside of the same coin.

His protectionist, nationalist politics are cut from another section of the same roll of cloth.

The world isn't going to become less connected and interdependent in the future. It's hurtling down that track and we're just getting started.

We need to start totally rethinking western society and coming up with new ideas and new solutions and so far that's not happening. There's a huge gap in recognizing the issues we are only now starting to face and how to adress them head on.
 
vadimivich said:
In many ways Bernie is just the non-racist flipside of the same coin.

His protectionist, nationalist politics are cut from another section of the same roll of cloth.

The world isn't going to become less connected and interdependent in the future. It's hurtling down that track and we're just getting started.

We need to start totally rethinking western society and coming up with new ideas and new solutions and so far that's not happening. There's a huge gap in recognizing the issues we are only now starting to face and how to adress them head on.
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Meh I don't think trade agreements in which capital mobility is increased while the labor movements of member states gain nothing are a worthwhile and praiseworthy sort of cosmopolitanism.
 
2&2 pretty much just had multiple posts I actually agree with, you get an A+ for today, not just your participation trophy.
 
TuffaloDeac10 said:
Meh I don't think trade agreements in which capital mobility is increased while the labor movements of member states gain nothing are a worthwhile and praiseworthy sort of cosmopolitanism.
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I don't disagree. I also think that pretending relatively unfettered international trade isn't the future of humanity as a whole is ignorant, backwards looking and detrimental.

I want to write a long post on here sometime, but I think it's time for us to start looking beyond 19th century nationalism and again build bigger groups of "we". The groups of "us" in the world are too small and cause tons of needless friction, but we remain tied the creations of the 19th century instead of starting to look at building and supporting larger groups of shared identity (the EU is a spectacular failure in this area - maybe a few youngsters give lip service to being "European" but the existing - in many cases fairly new and artificial - national identities are intensely strong).

You don't have a large issue with the freedom of capital mobility within the United States because you have a shared common identity with someone from Washington state, even though you likely have very little in common in terms of even very recent family histories. That's a national identity we work very hard to create through symbols, education, events, etc ... it's not something that happens by accident. In recognition of the larger world we now belong to, we need to work harder to create a larger shared system of identity that helps us to work through complex issues such as freedom of capital, mobility, disaster relief, healthcare, retirement, etc ... things we have fairly well established on smaller national scales. The EU project is really the first to attempt to function as a "post-nationalism" body, and it's failures (again, at it's core it hasn't established a larger shared identity or provided measures for working class individuals to share in the spoils) are lessons we should be looking at extremely carefully and learning from
 
I like reading arguments about Brexit on here because posters don't have "political" and partisan talking points from which to argue and just speak from the heart. Seems to lead to at least as much agreement as it does disagreement.
 
vadimivich said:
I don't disagree. I also think that pretending relatively unfettered international trade isn't the future of humanity as a whole is ignorant, backwards looking and detrimental.

I want to write a long post on here sometime, but I think it's time for us to start looking beyond 19th century nationalism and again build bigger groups of "we". The groups of "us" in the world are too small and cause tons of needless friction, but we remain tied the creations of the 19th century instead of starting to look at building and supporting larger groups of shared identity (the EU is a spectacular failure in this area - maybe a few youngsters give lip service to being "European" but the existing - in many cases fairly new and artificial - national identities are intensely strong).

You don't have a large issue with the freedom of capital mobility within the United States because you have a shared common identity with someone from Washington state, even though you likely have very little in common in terms of even very recent family histories. That's a national identity we work very hard to create through symbols, education, events, etc ... it's not something that happens by accident. In recognition of the larger world we now belong to, we need to work harder to create a larger shared system of identity that helps us to work through complex issues such as freedom of capital, mobility, disaster relief, healthcare, retirement, etc ... things we have fairly well established on smaller national scales. The EU project is really the first to attempt to function as a "post-nationalism" body, and it's failures (again, at it's core it hasn't established a larger shared identity or provided measures for working class individuals to share in the spoils) are lessons we should be looking at extremely carefully and learning from
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You will be unsurprised to read here that I think socialism is the answer to creating trans-national solidarity. Capitalism cannot do the job, the bourgeoisie are always and everywhere destroying existing social relations and any attempt to create a new solidarity under bourgeois norms will lead to stuff like this: http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/05/28/fast_and_furious_economics.html
 
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knowell said:
Working well in Venezuela. What could go wrong.
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One thing that could go wrong is if the military man who takes control of the state embeds corruption and terrible management in the state oil company and endorses a clown while dying. Important to not do that, I agree.
 
TuffaloDeac10 said:
One thing that could go wrong is if the military man who takes control of the state embeds corruption and terrible management in the state oil company and endorses a clown while dying. Important to not do that, I agree.
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Do you have any examples of socialism where the men who take control of the state do not embed corruption and terrible management in the primary activities of the state?
 
TuffaloDeac10 said:
One thing that could go wrong is if the military man who takes control of the state embeds corruption and terrible management in the state oil company and endorses a clown while dying. Important to not do that, I agree.
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That kind of thing never happens in a coercive system with all power in a centralized government.

Free markets are just as the name implies, free. Socialism requires forced participation and unwieldy centralized planning. It has always ended the same.

Socialism can only be enforced through absolute power, and we all know what that causes.
 
2&2 Slider To Leyritz said:
Do you have any examples of socialism where the men who take control of the state do not embed corruption and terrible management in the primary activities of the state?
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The country I currently live in which is routinely ranked as one of the highest qualities of life in the world and also has stunningly low corruption rates and terrific management? There's terrible democratic socialist nations, and there's terrible democratic capitalist ones.
 
knowell said:
Socialism can only be enforced through absolute power, and we all know what that causes.
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That's the same as capitalism though - they are both enforced through strong central authorities. Capitalism without strong central control is anarchy, and that benefits no one. The differentiation between the USA and somewhere like here in Austria isn't "strong central control v. no central control" - it's just variations on where the boundaries of that control are.
 
vadimivich said:
The country I currently live in which is routinely ranked as one of the highest qualities of life in the world and also has stunningly low corruption rates and terrific management? There's terrible democratic socialist nations, and there's terrible democratic capitalist ones.
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What country do you live in?

I think Tuffalo was talking about actual socialism, at least that is how I interpreted it. Pretty much all capitalist systems today are some hybrid with a certain amount of socialism mixed in.

The stronger the economy, the more socialism it can handle. Push it to far and you may be looking at Greece.
 
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