Will we ever see true Governance?

ScumLord

KyussBishop wrote: »

The Euro is increasingly regarded as a gigantic mistake

It's handy when you go on holiday though.

I like the euro in principle, if it needs to be fixed, fix it. I don't want to go back to having different money for different countries.

ScumLord

ScumLord wrote: »

It's handy when you go on holiday though.

I like the euro in principle, if it needs to be fixed, fix it. I don't want to go back to having different money for different countries.

There are only 2 ways to fix the Euro:

1) Get rid of it
2) The EU can cut to the chase, disband all national governments, and we become the United States of Deutschland.

Neither of those is going to happen anytime soon, and hence the Euro crisis is not over by a long shot. Right now I think we're in the eye of the storm, but it will kick off again in the next few years, I'm convinced of it.

gocompare346

seamus wrote: »

Of course, "true" governance is a philosophical question in itself. What is "true" governance? How would you measure it and define it and decide that it's "true"?

The theoretical purest and fairest form of society is of course an anarchistic one, where every person is in control of their own destiny. But unfortunately the nature of the animal and of existence is that this can never work in the way it's imagined.

The EU, for all its bloatedness, appears to me to be the closest thing we have to a good form of governance. Many of the major improvements to the lives of individuals in this country over the last 30 years have been down to the EU dragging Irish governments kicking and screaming into the modern era. The focus of the EU is largely on the preservation of the union and the improvement of the lives of the citizens therein. This is probably because the EU rarely has to get bogged down in the specifics of fixing the potholes or making sure that Jimmy Mac who runs the concrete plant is happy, so they can make much more general changes with less resistance.

The technocratic nature of the EU is not a bad thing. In reality, we should have experts making decisions and directions on things they know about. Otherwise you get idiots like Sherlock creating laws that are completely moronic and outside the scope of reality, because they're making decision they're unqualified to make.
Technocracy however obviously has some drawbacks (groupthink) and is as open to abuse any other form of governance. So a techno/demo-cratic hybrid seems like an improvement on a pure democracy.

Where is your evidence to back these unsubstantiated claims? This is pure hearsay and quite misleading.

gocompare346

seamus wrote: »

I mean, really? "Land of the free"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_States

Anyone who thinks that the United States was ever a democratic utopia is living in fantasy land. The US has for most of its life governed with social conservatism and economic liberalism.

Most people really want the opposite.

Cherry picking a single piece of evidence to support your claim, while ignoring basic Documents, like the US Constitution, to reach your conclusion, is illogical. Read the US Consitution, in particular, the United States Bill of Rights. Their Consitution derives from the English Bill of Rights and the Magna Carta in 1215, where John of England lost absolute control over his subjects, a monumental step in individual liberty, much to the dismay of crying eyed Liberals in the EU, who want to control every facet of your life, unlike the US.

What other countries, in particular, European, allow their citizens to bear arms, or speak freely their convictions, which expressed in Ireland or the UK, would land you in Jail? Where is your evidence, good Sir?

KyussBishop

lufties wrote: »

Its a bank owned by Elitest bankers, not the U.S government. The income tax that Americans pay is to pay interest on debt(I.E Fed loaned money). So I ask why is this. Why can't the U.S government kick this cartel out and make the Fed truly state owned, like JFK tried to do.

I agree with you that the monetary system is complicated and if you start going on about conspiracy theories you will be labelled a paranoid looney. From what I've seen happen in this world over the last 5 years, with regard to greed and distribution of wealth leaves me very skeptical.

I don't disagree with capitalism, It is better than the alternative. The thing is though the nature of capitalism is that if you gamble and lose, you do just that. What we have seen with regard to speculators and bankers being bailed out by governments at the expense of the taxpayer is not capitalism, but something very sinister.

I agree with you on the fed - I support it being merged with the US Treasury (effectively the same as making it state-owned), as a part of wider-ranging monetary reform.

I agree with most of that really, though just usually have the different focus, of looking at how money creation works in practice - which is very closely connected to all of that.

KyussBishop

mariaalice wrote: »

That may well be true, but you have to answer the question why do people both buy in to and not challenge the system, information is freely there for everyone in the days of the internet, and yet a large minority will believe the anti science anti intellectual why is that.

Why don't the vast majority want change what is stopping them.

Most people actually don't have a good picture of the scale of the propaganda, and are not able to find good sources of information (which can be found online, but is hard to find all the same), so people:
1: Find it hard to tell truth from bullshít, because they don't have an 'antidote' (better source) than the outlets putting out propaganda/semi-propagandized news

2: Get distracted by less consequential issues that are put out using 'divide and conquer' tactics, such as public vs private issues, rich vs poor, male vs female, pro-choice vs pro-life, etc. etc., instead of focusing on the more important issues of undemocratic power vs democratically-accountable power.

None of those issues are unimportant, but they demand more attention from people because they are less complicated - I suspect (though admit this is CT-worthy) that probably this is why some seemingly obvious social wrongs like anti-abortion/drug-criminalization/female-discrimination take so long to resolve: it is politically useful to keep them as distractions.


3: People don't have the time, either to figure out the full scale of the propaganda, or to figure out what to do about it, or to even spend any time doing something about it (such as protesting and being politically active).
People have high-working-hour jobs, and a social life, and many other time-constraints which prevent them really being active on any of this (they may also be cash-strapped, in a way that limits such activity as well).

I've put a lot of time into understanding these issues over the last couple of years (mainly on economics), and as much as I've learned (pretty much how to solve the economic crisis at this stage), I'll be decades learning still, because there's a hell of a lot to learn to get a proper grip on it all; given the large learning curve and time/intellectual investment, not many among the public will learn this stuff.

4: There are many attitudes instilled in our society, that promote deference to authority, a "mind your own business" attitude towards criminality/fraud/corruption, a "stop making a fuss" or "what are they on about?" or "shure it's always been like that, and it's always going to be - your wasting your time" attitude to protesting, the view that politics and economics are 'boring' subjects (not all wrong really...), among many other things, which help deter any real political challenge to power or corruption - this is hard to overcome.


There's a lot more I could add to that, but the basic point is that the propaganda on these topics is so wide-ranging, without any antidote or good source of adversarial journalism that really points out the real problems in politics/economics today - the conditions are so much like that, that the propaganda and muffling of important information is perfectly successful enough to keep the vast majority of the public placid and inactive.

This is all a part of why a lot of people generally really aren't interested in trying to be politically active and make a difference - and why the political movements (and parties) needed to foster this, don't seem to exist.

I'd like to see that change (be involved with it myself even), though it's hard to see how it would get started and build up momentum - I don't see any political parties/movements even remotely compatible with this (though many fringe ones which seem to have a habit of discrediting themselves), and am not sure how one would be started.

KyussBishop

ScumLord wrote: »

It's handy when you go on holiday though.

I like the euro in principle, if it needs to be fixed, fix it. I don't want to go back to having different money for different countries.

It's certainly possible to fix the Euro, and Yanis Varoufakis has an excellent proposal for doing that, but it looks like countries such as Germany will pretty much never agree to it - so Europe is deadlocked politically, and I've pretty much given up all hope of that ever being resolved.

MRnotlob606

Why do people keep talking about how bad the government is ?

KyussBishop

Deleted User wrote: »

There are only 2 ways to fix the Euro:

1) Get rid of it
2) The EU can cut to the chase, disband all national governments, and we become the United States of Deutschland.

Neither of those is going to happen anytime soon, and hence the Euro crisis is not over by a long shot. Right now I think we're in the eye of the storm, but it will kick off again in the next few years, I'm convinced of it.

There are some solutions in-between those two, such as the modest proposal I posted above, and ways of expanding local spending without Europe, such as Tax Anticipation Notes (our best bet, in my view - we can do this completely on our own, without consulting Europe or anybody), but yes - they are not permanent solutions, and we are almost certain to be facing more economic crisis before the end of the decade, because pretty much nothing has been reformed, to prevent another crisis (hell...the same uninvestigated fraudsters/criminals are still in place, at most of the banking/financial institutions that caused this crisis).