EU immigration row / time to get out

[emordnilap]

happy christmas to you biff and all you powerswitchers

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... m9iS2tcRZE



Terrible but it'll make you smile.

[UndercoverElephant]

A longer break may have been required, UE.

I doubt I'm ever going to be able stomach what BV posts.

And I apologise to everybody else for the ranting.

In the context of Europe and that nasty North American trade / copyright treaty that's coming in nationalism certainly seems to be on it's may out.

If so, it will be replaced by globalised corporate fascism, not BV's fluffybunnyland, as your post goes on to recognise.

Preaching on a fantasy version of the new paradigm seems to me to be engaging with reality and suggesting how it may be made to work.

Barring a global communist revolution which isn't going to happen, the only way to defeat the power of the transnational corporations/banks is to re-assert control over them at the national level, as has happened in Iceland. Perhaps this is a fantasy too, but I see the seeds of a rebellion in parts of the eurozone. Places like Italy and France have more of a history of rebelling against forces like these.

BiffVernon: Once upon a time there was a website that provoked a global peak oil movement into existence by alerting all of us to what was about to happen. That website was called "Life After the Oil Crash", and its slogan was this: "Deal with Reality, or It will Deal with You." Somewhere along the line, you didn't get the message. It is a very important message, because it doesn't actually matter whether you are in denial of the physical reality of peak oil (and the other environmental/sustainability issues) or whether you are in denial about the way human beings and human organisations operate, so long as you are in denial then everything else you say and do ends up being a complete and utter waste of time. The reason I get so angry with you is that you, blissfully in denial of the way human realities actually work and why, end up morally condemning people like myself and SteveCook who are actually trying to deal with reality. You are attempting to present us as immoral when in fact we are simply acknowledging where we are actually starting from (this reality here and now) instead of basing our worldview on a fantasy. You are morally condemning us for facing up to extremely difficult real-world moral dilemmas while you swan about in a fantasy world.

Happy Christmas to you all. I may or may not return at some point next year.

[UndercoverElephant]

happy christmas to you biff and all you powerswitchers

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... m9iS2tcRZE



Terrible but it'll make you smile.

LOL

[AndySir]

.... the only way to defeat the power of the transnational corporations/banks is to re-assert control over them at the national level, as has happened in Iceland.

Not at the European level, which might, by dint of being the largest economy in the world, have the power to exercise some control as opposed to an isolated island nation sticking two fingers up in defiance? A local revolution seems a little too similar to Stalin's 'socialism in one country'.

ETA: LATOC's founder's idea of reality now involves analyzing the astrological charts of Star Trek movies.

[UndercoverElephant]

ETA: LATOC's founder's idea of reality now involves analyzing the astrological charts of Star Trek movies.

I know. I am guessing he must have had some sort of breakdown.

[clv101]

..too many people are still stuck in the tribal/national paradigm and wars will continue until more people have compassion for the stranger.

You are a total f*****g idiot, Biff Vernon, and this post sums up the problem perfectly. "Too many people are stuck in the national paradigm", are they? No, Biff, the REAL WORLD is "stuck in the national paradigm". You know...that REAL WORLD that YOU AND I AND EVERYBODY ELSE ACTUALLY F******G LIVE IN.

Is there actually much difference between what you've both written? Isn't the comment "Too many people are stuck in the national paradigm" a observation of the REAL WORLD?

[woodburner]

UE still being his pleasant self I see. I thought he was leaving forever, some hope.

[jonny2mad]

ETA: LATOC's founder's idea of reality now involves analyzing the astrological charts of Star Trek movies.

I know. I am guessing he must have had some sort of breakdown.

Matt kinda got it, he didnt get the dates but the general direction I think he got .

Now if you have a really grim vision of the future what do you do, well to a degree it depends on your outlook .

what do you do if your sure your approaching "The Road " world

I remember he said he went to see jay hanson to hear his advice on the best thing to do to survive and jay said marry someone with a big family or something like that

apart from that what do you do if you think your approaching massive dieoff

build a nuclear shelter some people have done that and moved to remote places .

I think hes just sitting doing stuff to take his mind off things doing his astrology, like a bloke playing solitaire

[biffvernon]

I'm really sorry to have upset UE so much and think that much of the problem is that he has misunderstood my views. Yes, I like to take the moral high ground and don't understand why any right-thinking person should want to hold the moral low ground. I hope for fluffy bunny land but expect war, destruction and chaos, followed by mass-extinction.

In this thread about Europe I've pointed out that my views are in accord with the majority view of Europeans that are part of the Schengen Agreement and I'm pleased to be aligned with the President of the United Nations who said, yesterday:

"Let us make migration work for the benefit of migrants and countries alike. We owe this to the millions of migrants who, through their courage, vitality and dreams, help make our societies more prosperous, resilient and diverse."

Ban Ki-moon
Message for International Migrants Day,
18 December 2013

http://www.un.org/en/events/migrantsday/

[emordnilap]

UE still being his pleasant self I see. I thought he was leaving forever, some hope.

Rather ten UEs than a certain other...

[UndercoverElephant]

..too many people are still stuck in the tribal/national paradigm and wars will continue until more people have compassion for the stranger.

You are a total f*****g idiot, Biff Vernon, and this post sums up the problem perfectly. "Too many people are stuck in the national paradigm", are they? No, Biff, the REAL WORLD is "stuck in the national paradigm". You know...that REAL WORLD that YOU AND I AND EVERYBODY ELSE ACTUALLY F******G LIVE IN.

Is there actually much difference between what you've both written? Isn't the comment "Too many people are stuck in the national paradigm" a observation of the REAL WORLD?

That is a good question.

If you want to make a change in the real world, then you have to start from you/we are actually are right here/now. You can't start from anywhere else. Biff says he "hopes for fluffybunnyland but expects war, destruction and eventually extinction." How about, instead of hoping for something possible and expecting the opposite, he just starts from where we actually are right here/now and tries to find a way forward? Maybe then he can narrow the gap between what he says he hopes for and what he says he expects.

The important question (IMO) is this: are there fundamental reasons why we are "stuck in the national paradigm"? I think there are. How would it be possible, for example, for China and the UK to become governed by the same global authority/government?

Human beings have been experiencing cultural evolution for thousands of years, and an important part of that process is the evolution of the way we are governed. In the UK we have an archaic, deeply flawed type of representative democracy. In China they have an authoritarian, non-democratic communist one-party system. In sub-saharan Africa they have something only one or two steps removed from primitive tribalism, scaled up to a national level (with disastrous results). The fundamental reason, IMO, why we are "stuck in the national paradigm" is that "nations" are, by default, the largest units that have managed to evolve a unified cultural system of government. These have nearly always been forged out of a collective desire for protection against outsiders, or about a single strong man or group unifying a disparate range of groups in close geographical proximity which then benefited from strength in numbers and grew together as a cultural unit (this is how the England formed, for example, in response to the threat of being conquered by the Scandinavian invaders).

The reason why we are "stuck in the national paradigm", as previously discussed, is that without some sort of threat external to the whole human race, such as hostile aliens, there is no cultural pressure - or in terms of evolution no selective pressure - for this to change. There is no reason to make the step from the largest national units we have at the moment, to a global system, because it will always be in the interests of the most powerful existing national units to try to maintain that power in order to have a greater say in what happens to the human race as a totality. It is NEVER going to be in the interests of, say, the US, to relinquish national power to a global body. And we have seen repeatedly this in their total disregard for the authority of the UN. It is only in the interest of much smaller national units to relinquish authority in this way, and that is because they hope that in doing so it will reduce the power of the larger units. That's why the SNP want an independent Scotland that is part of the EU (preferably using the euro, although that is now impossible), but the nationalists in England see the EU in exactly the opposite light, and want to leave instead.

When this was discussed previously, people have suggested that maybe climate change or peak oil could represent the external threat required to force people to work together globally. It is at this point that we abandon realism and enter fluffybunnyland, and when J2M starts talking sense while the idealists here talk abject nonsense. It ain't gonna happen, and the reason ought to be obvious. Peak oil, climate change and all the rest of the sustainability issues pose a threat to the whole of humanity, but one look at history, or at the way politics works, or at human psychology, tells you that when people's living standards and future is threatened in this way then the very last thing they do is choose to relinquish authority to a higher power which they trust to sort out the problems in the "fair" interests of all. What they actually do is the total opposite. What they do is try to protect their own interests in an increasingly desperate scramble for resources, especially usable land, but also energy, food, fresh water supplies and all the other things people need to survive.

So that, I think, is the bottom line. Biff Vernon, and to a certain extent yourself, are advocating trying to get the whole of humanity to work together to face these immense problems, and while this is a nice idea, the reality that is actually going to play out is much closer to the one described by Jonny2Mad. There IS going to be a fight for the remaining resources and it is already too late to stop catastrophic climate change happening (so no meaningful international action is ever going to be taken). It serves no purpose to "hope" that this is not going to happen. All it does is provide people like J2M with ample opportunities to take the mickey out of the idiotic fluffybunny thinking of a certain brand of "powerswitcher". And it might make the fluffybunny thinkers feel a bit better.

My opinion is that if we want to make a real difference in the world then we MUST start from the reality we actually live in. That means we have to accept that the global benevolent government BV and yourself "hope" for is nothing but a pipedream and stop basing our ideas for future policy on what are increasingly-ridiculous false hopes. That means that when we are discussing the sort of issues being faced in this thread, people like BV think before they post "too many people are stuck in a national paradigm", and actually try to respond to J2M with a level of realism which matches his own. For if you do not - if you respond to his reallism with fluffybunnyland thinking - then J2M wins the debate by default.

The realist response to the current state of the world is itself up for debate. It does not have to be ultra-right wing like J2M. It can be left wing. But that left wing response is represented on this board - or at least it has been up to now - by people like myself and Stevecook. I suspect BiffVernon will not actually have read this post, but if he is then I would like him to think about this. Because it is HIS posts, primarily, that are driving people like myself and Steve out of this community. He might mean well, but what he is actually achieving is the alienation of those people who are trying to find the most left-wing solution that are realistically possible. In other words, his "idealism" is causing real damage to the movement he sees himself at the forefront of. He's harming his own side (the political left) and helping his enemies (right wingers like J2M). This has been explained to him before, but he's too damned stubborn to understand it or incorporate it into this thinking and behaviour.

I might also add that the above paragraph describes a position very similar to that taken by Paul Kingsnorth. He's said almost exactly the same thing - that false hope is worse than no hope and that the idealists within the green movement are actually causing more problems than they are solving. THEY are the roadblock to real change, at least from the point of view of the realists within the green movement. Precisely the same frustration has driven Derrick Jensen even further, to the point of advocating accelerating the demise of industrial civilisation. Jensen sees BiffVernon as an unwitting agent of the true enemy, and I'm sorry to say that so do I.

So, BiffVernon, the problem is not that I have misunderstood what you are saying. I understand it all too well. I just happen to think it is a load of dangerous nonsense and that if you want to help instead of hinder the environmental movement, then it is time to grow up, stop the fluffybunny thinking, and face reality as it actually is. Alternatively you can go on posting nonsense and J2M will continue to benefit from it.

[biffvernon]

Thanks for taking the trouble, UE, to write a long post. I'm really busy so haven't read it all yet, But I will do.

First bit, for now:

The important question (IMO) is this: are there fundamental reasons why we are "stuck in the national paradigm"? I think there are. How would it be possible, for example, for China and the UK to become governed by the same global authority/government?

I'm quite keen on the idea of subsidiarity. Not, perhaps, the way it's turned out in some aspects of EU governance, but as a principle, i.e. that government happens at appropriate levels. So the placement of dog-pooh bins can be left to the parish council while emissions of global pollutants should be governed by the United Nations. This is, of course, exactly what does (almost) happen. Fingers firmly crossed, we may have a global treaty of carbon reduction agreed in Paris at COP21 in December 2015 and the dog-pooh bin placement is already at the discretion of my parish council.

There are many global treaties already in existence, an international court, trade agreements, the Law of the Seas, the Antarctic Treaty, the protocol on CFCs, CITES etc, so we do already have a certain amount of global governance with China and the UK signed up. It's far from perfect, full of holes and anomalies and nations that sometimes don't comply with what they've agreed to previously and nations not agreeing to some things, but it's a start. I would like to see a much strengthened UN with greater effective control over things that have to be controlled globally. I guess a very large proportion of the world's population would agree with this view.

So, to answer your question, "How would it be possible, for example, for China and the UK to become governed by the same global authority/government?" directly, It already is possible and happening, imperfectly (like most things in the real world), and I would campaign for more of the same and extensions to UN powers. I think I'm pushing at an opening door. The global climate treaty that the Conference of the Parties is working hard to achieve is currently the most important such aspect of global governance on the agenda. There are some global trade agreements currently making their way to settlement, some aspects of which look pretty bad, effectively giving corporations powers over government, so there are great dangers. And let us not take away from local government that which can best be regulated locally.

An international Law of Ecocide may be an unrealistic pipe-dream, but I'm campaigning for it. The campaign itself draws attention to the problem so the journey may be worthwhile even if we don't reach the destination.

[AndySir]

So that, I think, is the bottom line. Biff Vernon, and to a certain extent yourself, are advocating trying to get the whole of humanity to work together to face these immense problems, and while this is a nice idea, the reality that is actually going to play out is much closer to the one described by Jonny2Mad. There IS going to be a fight for the remaining resources and it is already too late to stop catastrophic climate change happening (so no meaningful international action is ever going to be taken). It serves no purpose to "hope" that this is not going to happen.

It seems that bottom line is that UE and J2M's version of reality is based on their certain knowledge of future events. Rather reminiscent of Beria's having predicted for some time war in Iran, which once seemed inevitable but increasingly unlikely now. As time goes on I see a fight for the remaining resources increasingly unlikely as those resources are far too remotely distributed to be worth the cost of acquiring and holding them.

The trend already appears to be away from nation states, as Biff and others have noted. Even the US and China are part of larger economic co-operation areas now. I think it safe to say I do not agree with your idea of what 'reality' is.

[biffvernon]

next bit

"nations" are, by default, the largest units that have managed to evolve a unified cultural system of government. These have nearly always been forged out of a collective desire for protection against outsiders, or about a single strong man

The EU is larger than a 'nation', it is evolving a unified cultural system of government, was forged out of a collective desire for protection against insiders, and in the fresh memory of a single strong man whose experience was not wanted to be repeated.

[Little John]

I'm really sorry to have upset UE so much and think that much of the problem is that he has misunderstood my views. Yes, I like to take the moral high ground and don't understand why any right-thinking person should want to hold the moral low ground. I hope for fluffy bunny land but expect war, destruction and chaos, followed by mass-extinction.

In this thread about Europe I've pointed out that my views are in accord with the majority view of Europeans that are part of the Schengen Agreement and I'm pleased to be aligned with the President of the United Nations who said, yesterday:

"Let us make migration work for the benefit of migrants and countries alike. We owe this to the millions of migrants who, through their courage, vitality and dreams, help make our societies more prosperous, resilient and diverse."

Ban Ki-moon
Message for International Migrants Day,
18 December 2013

http://www.un.org/en/events/migrantsday/

Your views are not misunderstood by either UE or myself