BF2S Forums Where are all the whiny peaceful "Enlightened" European now?

I'm not a UK citizen and you left regardless, what do you want me to say about it? Apparently not illegal enough to convict anyone or overturn the result. Has there even been a court case?

It was deceitful, it was morally bankrupt, perhaps it was illegal. They still won, and yes, evidently, to the victor went the spoils. In the internet era the left has been hopelessly behind. Whether that be through failing to notice the influence of social media and regulate these platforms or through the failure to effectively use them for their own ends. They fucked up.

The guardian is liberal left leaning and open about it. It wasn't an indictment of the guardian as a publication, they're good.

yes there were court cases, several.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/dark-m … erent-way/

for various quasi-constitutional and legislative reasons the electoral commission which headed the findings of wrongdoing is effectively a powerless bauble and the UK prime minister is welcome to ignore them at his/her will.  but wrongdoing was found in the UK high court and by parliamentary committee.

i'm not of the view that any referendum should be reversed or repeated, but calling the campaign 'genius marketing' and 'winning by simple rhetoric alone' is an absolute joke. acknowledge it for what it was and for what the courts said about it.

Last edited by uziq (2021-01-17 08:37:57)

It's unbelievable how any criticism of the left is in your eyes an implicit defence of the far right. Do you ever step back and consider that, perhaps, you yourself have fallen way down a rabbit hole of what the yanks call partisanship? In literally any political argument I have to underline again and again that I have no love for the far right. I'm a 'eurocrat' ffs it's like the complete opposite end of the political spectrum. The argument is starting to bore me. You're remarkably consistent in utopian idealism though, I'll give you that.

uziq wrote:

oh so i guess that makes illegal behaviour okay.

What 'illegal behaviour'?

also, the left in this period built one of the largest grassroots movements in europe, via momentum. they had far more door-to-door political canvassing, far more 'traditional' politics, brought onboard those annoying old archaisms like the labour and union movement, etc.

Unfortunately Labour never got around to formulating a policy on Brexit. Historically Labour was anti-Europe as they saw Europe taking low-level British jobs.

So against a background of the Tories being pro-brexit and Labour being um-not-sure-yet-lets-think-about-forming-a-committee-to-have-a-look-at-it-sometime is it really a surprise brexit went through?

OK, so Vote Leave marginally exceeded their spending cap.
Wow this is earthshaking stuff.

Meanwhile Labour didn't have any kind of position on Brexit, and they might well have come out pro-Brexit.
Data analytics or not this is probably a much bigger issue.

Well once again I'd put their heads on pikes but there'd need to be a change in the law for it to happen.
Hopefully it'll be easier to push through without the ECJ looking over people's shoulder on everything.

uziq wrote:

i didn't vote for jeremy corbyn and i didn't support momentum. hardly 'partisan'.

triumphalism over the latest generation of populist right-wing tactics seems, to me, misguided.

haven't you bemoaned how half of europe is falling into the snares of this stuff? i swear to god you've been on here moaning about how 'lost' some people seem to online fake news, misinformation, parroting talking points planted in their heads by no-gooders?

now it's just great that unaccountable, shadily funded big data analytics companies are turning the course of elections by ... really craftily disseminating misinformation?

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/23/cambrid … tions.html

'remarkably consistent in utopian idealism' lmao. ok larssen. 'the EU is the best invention in the history of politics and will survive forever, continually improving itself, until we perfect liberal democracy. oh but also the right-wing are just really genius at lying online, really, master operators!'.

I'm a 'eurocrat' ffs it's like the complete opposite end of the political spectrum.

last time i checked, most of european-level politics takes place under similar conditions of closed-door secrecy and through similarly unaccountable, unelected elites. it's why i'm not surprised that you're so cavalier about the way these groups won their victory. there's something slightly machiavellian about the way you eurocrats regard elections and democratic processes, isn't there?

Honestly I don't think this argument of democratic unaccountability in the EU is true at all. The autonomous power of the European Commission is rather limited. They have a privileged position providing the chair of the working groups and council meetings in the EU allowing them to set the agenda, but every vote is cast by a member state. Countries that have democratically elected goverments. Every decision needs to be signed off by national ministers and/or heads of government. Then there still is the scrutiny process of the European Parliament to go through. Conceptually you can find that there definitely is democratic accountability, though the process is convoluted and may be less transparent than it sometimes should be. A difficult issue as there are many perfectly sane reasons to keep negotiations between governments behind closed doors.

I also feel we should highlight the positives in the system. The greatest being that the EU as an institution has an unparalleled capacity for very long term planning. This is ensured both through its budget cycle and decision making process. No other governmental organisation can mobilise and actually enact policies in a stable manner for stretches of decades, unmoving in the face of political upheaval in any one member state. There's pros and cons to this too but considering the long-term issues we're faced with these days (such as climate change), that long term planning capacity and resistance to the public's bipolarity is sorely needed. 

None of what I've said about the EU is utopian, it's reality. I've also never been unquestionably faithful or positive about its future. In a less succesful future I can see the development of the EU running parallel to the history of the HRE. It's possible, though not desireable, the project just plods along unsuccesfully from crisis to crisis and countries slowly chip away at its foundations. So far (though ever so slowly) the trend has thankfully been the other way around, though it will never be this superstate that some people imagine it may become. That's simply impossible and would require changing the system and founding laws of the EU entirely, if that happens I don't think you can call it the EU anymore at that point.

Yes uziq you're an idealist through and through. You showcase a permanent discontent with the way things are and there's no patience to work towards change. Everything is flawed, and there are endless appeals to moral behaviour and fairness in a world that is anything but. Maybe you should read a little more Machiavelli.

As to the Brexit and cambridge analytica fiasco, I said all that needed to be said about it in my post at the top of the page: deceitful, morally bankrupt and perhaps illegal. But they won nonetheless and the better judgment of many didn't seem to help much.

we are a very long way away from ‘top notch marketing’ and ‘farage and trump winning with rhetoric and ... nothing else’, dilbert. a VERY long fucking way.

I think I found the whiny europeans

The EU has urged pharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca to supply it with more doses of its Covid-19 vaccine from UK plants, amid a row over shortages.

The company has infuriated the bloc by saying it can deliver only a fraction of the doses it promised for the first quarter of the year.

It blames production issues at European plants, but the EU says doses made elsewhere should make up the shortfall.

...

At a news conference earlier on Wednesday, Ms Kyriakides said UK factories, which have not experienced problems, were part of its deal with the company and had to deliver.

"The 27 European Union member states are united that AstraZeneca needs to deliver on its commitments in our agreements," she said.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-55822602
LMAO

Larssen wrote:

What happened to utilising state power to turbocharge production here?

Erm what are you talking about? Its not as if the 'EU Govt' owns any drug factories any more than they owned Messerschmidt production.

I've seen plenty of speeches by EU officials ranting about Astra Zeneca and saying as the Belgian factories have failed (yield issues, bad batches etc) the EU should have the right to take production out of UK factories and leave the UK short.

There's a lot of wrangling about exactly what contract the EU signed with AZ, if it were watertight I'm guessing they wouldn't need to go on TV and rant about the evil Britischers.

All being well this doesn't affect me, the EU took great delight in shafting Britain and officiously enforcing things on their side, bad luck if the roundabout has now swung against them.

I don't think brexit was to anyone's great delight but the incompetent managing of the process by successive UK governments created quite a bit of frustration and possibly some bad blood.

What the EU is simply saying is that astrazeneca has a contractual obligation and it's not bound to production in specific facilities. So they're asking the company to make good on its contract by drawing them from elsewhere or, something which is in the EUs power, by redirecting exports of required materials back to within Europe to stimulate more production here.

I suppose astrazeneca has a contractual obligation to the UK as well which the EU isn't asking them to break, important difference there.

Define best effort

The EC has a ginormous legal affairs department. I'm sure they were very much aware of what they signed.