It’s not my job to offer solutions. It’s not your job either. It’s not the job of anyone on this forum. It’s up to politicians and bureaucrats.
Most states in the US have changed their constitution, in many cases multiple times because of how poorly they were written, issues stemming from their being originally written before the modern era, or various other reasons. States in the US don’t even operate the way the US as a whole does.
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Get back to me when New York and New Jersey can build a fucking bridge or dig a tunnel between each other. I mean… fuck.
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Only working within your system for change? It’s like you have Stockholm Syndrome.
Of course I’m being facetious, but the point is that that’s how the UK does things, within the confines of it’s system. Who’s to say, say from another place where they can do even more change than the UK that they wouldn’t say the same as you about the UK?
Like as a hyperbolic example, the Demarchists from Alastair Reynolds universe. They vote on every minor decision via magic (neural implants but whatever)
They would level the same criticism at the UK as you do at the US, and they’d be just as correct.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, because you’re not, but there’s no fundamental difference, it’s a matter of degrees. The US and UK exist on the same spectrum.
I agree it certainly sounds pathetic arguing the position I’m arguing, so despite being right, I’d like to take the other side for a moment.
I think with the modern world, people in the states see other people elsewhere in the developed world and see that their quality of life is about the same. Place to live, place to work, park to go to, hobbies to have, beers to drink, cars whatever. All pretty much the same in other places.
They then hear that they get more than 14 days a year off, childbirth doens’t wreck a carrier, they don’t live in constant fear of bankruptcy, and they go to the doctor pretty much whenever they want and it’s affordable. I think most people in the states then see that and go… WTF mate.
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See, and all those things work because there are documented processes for doing those things and they’re all done within said processes.
There are processes to do the things lots of us would like to see in the United States as well. The problem is that a significantly large enough portion of the population does not want to make those changes relative to those who do and those who just don’t care, hence those changes are not made.
The US is actually closer to the EU in operation than it is to being a monolithic country. You complained about the difficulty of getting New Jersey and New York to build a bridge between them. That would be akin to getting say France and Germany to build a bridge between them. Sure it can be done, but it involves two levels of bureaucracy in both countries even with the common framework of the EU around them. Hell, Frenchmen and Germans working for the same company couldn’t even get their shit together when working on the Airbus A380. They used different software with different measurements for designing the wiring of their respective components. The end result was incompatible wiring and a multi-month delay in the project.
Nah, because change is actually possible and actually happens.
When I first started traveling in Europe, driving with my family from the UK to Romania and back, we had to wait HOURS at every border. And pay bribes to get through sometimes. And we changed our money at every border. And all kinds of bullshit paperwork and oh my god what a pain.
Now I can drive to Romania and not even stop at the borders. I can drive in the other direction and not have to change money until I hit the ocean, six countries later. My cellphone data works across every country in the EU, without paying any more than I do at home. There’s no such thing as international roaming!
This isn’t Stockholm Syndrome. It’s a political system that just keeps making my life better and better.
That 19 countries would all give up their own currencies and use just the Euro is incredible!
In the USA, all the different denominations are STILL THE SAME SIZE AND COLOUR AS EACH OTHER I MEAN COME ON JUST FIX THE MONEY omg what a pain.
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There’s also a lot of FUD about that in the US as well, though. I was just talking with someone the other day who was convinced that Canada’s healthcare system has death panels that will deny necessary health care to someone over 90 years old because of how old they were and not being able to contribute much to society based on their expected time left to live.
You do realize that Romania only joined the EU after a bloody revolution and cleaning up the mess left behind after decades of authoritarian leadership and said revolution.
The Demarchists are able to do things in minutes that it takes the entire UK months to thy and do.
They’d rightfully say, ok so the US is like a rock, can’t change ever, but the UK is like the climate before humanity, changes so slowly that why bother. They’d complain about you the way you complain about us.
In fact, I think the Demarchists DID a Brexit style thing in minutes in the novels, where they pulled out of a federation and did so in days. The votes and how it’d get done happened in minutes. Who’s slow to change now, Britain, with their multi year garbage fire?
Um… okay? I was in Romania in 1992. I kinda know what the country was like. Are you trying to tell me that this was caused by the failure of the European Union’s political processes? Because if not, I’m not sure how you think you are disproving my point.
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Yup. Like I said, there’s whole other levels of discussion to be had about America before you start fiddling with the dates of different primaries in different states.
Well, the revolution was in 1989. 3 years isn’t much time to fully transition from a closed, authoritarian society to a more open one. Heck, Romania didn’t even join the EU until 2007.
The EU’s processes, for all its warts, do seem to work for the most part for most of Europe (their economic policies are particularly warty and heavily skewed to the benefit of the larger countries like Germany, France, and to a lesser extent Spain), so I’ll give you that.
My whole thing is that it’s difficult to achieve major change outside of the processes that are set up. Romania would’ve never joined the EU and opened up without ditching its authoritarian government and, frankly, the way that country was set up pretty much required it to be done via bloody revolution.
Using the example of the EU, when countries joined it, they joined it agreed to follow its processes. Changing to the Euro? The EU had a process that countries followed to do that. Opening borders? Again, a process that all the members agreed to.
Does that mean that every member of the EU is suffering from Stockholm Syndrome by insisting on working within the existing processes to achieve change?
Well, that’s life in a democracy, even if a large number of the people in said democracy are stupid and/or evil.
Stop using this phrase against me. This is my phrase to use against America. It can’t be used against my example of something working for the good of the people, when I’m using to illustrate how American people are held hostage by the problems with its own country, and are playing apologetics about those same problems.
You don’t get to use the same phrase back at me and still think you have a cogent argument. You don’t.
Right. If I return to Romania now it would be completely different to how it was in 1992. This is my point. What point are you trying to make now?
Again, there’s so many layers to your choice of the word “bloody revolution”.
For one, are you using the fact that Romania “required” a bloody revolution to argue that the same thing is needed for America to start putting in place the processes to improve things more easily? If so, that’s really weird.
Second, if this isn’t your point, what is? Romania was the ONLY soviet block country that transitioned with a violent revolution. Surely East Germany and Hungary and the like needed a bloody revolution too? Turns out… nope. Really not sure what point you are making about Romania that proves that the EU hasn’t made it so I don’t pay for data roaming in the country if I visited.
Third… bloody? Only Americans can call about 1,000 people dying “bloody” and not start screaming out loud due to irony.
“The total number of deaths in the Romanian Revolution was 1,104”
Hmmm, let me just check how many people have been killed by guns so far in 2019…
2019
Total Number of Incidents 8,932
Number of Deaths 2,449
Number of Injuries 4,184
Number of Children (age 0-11) Killed or Injured 93
Number of Teens (age 12-17) Killed or Injured 386
Mass Shooting 51
Officer Involved Incident Officer Shot or Killed 50
Officer Involved Incident Subject-Suspect Shot or Killed 371
Home Invasion 327
Defensive Use 221
Unintentional Shooting 260
Extra irony points for the USA invading Iraq and installing a democracy. How many people have died because of that? Oh no idea oh well.
And what political system did they install in Iraq? Something suspiciously unlike the American system of democracy.
Again, I don’t want to say I have the answers here. I’m just expressing wide-eyed amazement at the kind of discourse Americans have about American problems. From outside it’s so crazy sounding! I’m not blaming anyone either. It’s difficult to see from outside the system when you’ve grown up inside the system.
Yet you seem to think that none of the existing processes work for the good of the people in America. Some may be slower than what’s in the EU or UK or whatever, and yes, there are warts as well, but by and large they’ve mostly worked. If they didn’t, the country wouldn’t have been stable for 200-odd years, minus the civil war in the middle (and the processes did at least keep the northern part of the country together during said civil war). Have they worked perfectly? No. Could they work better? Of course. Are they as bad as, say, North Korea (to pick an admittedly extreme example)? Hell no.
The point was that the only way they could change outside their existing processes (which were pretty much geared to the benefit of the dictatorship) was via bloody revolution because of just how bad it was.
Romania required one to work outside of its processes. You seem to be arguing that America’s processes are so broken that they need to be completely torn apart and started over from scratch. While I’m picking on Romania because you mentioned it, history has shown that in general, the only way to get any sort of nation state to completely change its processes wholesale and in an instant tends to be via some sort of revolution, bloody or otherwise. And most revolutions tend to be of the bloody sort, again, based on history. Sometimes, especially in recent history, we can see some bloodless ones (India’s independence, Portugal’s Carnation Revolution, most of the fall of the Iron Curtain), but they were the minority and often were a result of one or both sides involved tiring of other bloody messes they were either involved in or feared getting involved in.
FWIW, I don’t pay for data roaming either in any state in the US I visit, over a comparable, if not larger (I haven’t looked up the exact numbers) geographic area than the EU.
I can play the numbers game too. By percentage of the population (though admittedly the current ones, I don’t have 1989 numbers), 0.05% of the population died in Romania’s revolution. The numbers you gave added up to 0.02% of the US population. Oh, and just about none of those incidents were in the process of overthrowing a government.
The Iraq War? Ugh, I’m against it and always was. It was a clusterfuck on all levels and I’m not going to argue with you on that seeing as how we’d probably be mostly in agreement. Then again, the UK also participated in that war, so it’s not entirely just the US here…
I’ll give you that when the US tried to establish democracies in the post WW2-era, they’ve always gone for European-style parliamentary democracies.
And I can see lots of crazy (admittedly a different sort of crazy) in the European system if I chose to spend the time to actually look at it in detail. Like how Portuguese fishermen and olive oil producers were fucked over by the Spanish. Or how Greece was fucked over by the European Central Bank by forced austerity. And I generally like Europe. I have close family there. I think the US should adopt at least some of what most of Europe does. I’m a couple bucks and a few sheets of paperwork away from dual citizenship with the EU. I have a last ditch bug-out plan (okay, more of a concept than a plan as I haven’t worked out any details) to move to the EU if things get insanely bad in the US. However, the EU has its own problems, albeit of a different sort than the US.
All the systems have warts. It’s sometimes easier to see those warts from outside the systems than inside the systems. It’s also sometimes harder to understand just how the system works if you’re an outsider.
I’m not saying the US system is perfect or the end-all be-all. I’m just saying that the existing processes can be used to create the necessary change if enough people are in favor of making that change. The problem is that a significant number of people are stupid and/or evil and would be dead set against making that change, and there is no way short of some kind of revolution, bloody or otherwise, to overrule those people in the US. Even if it’s not bloody, all revolutions are inherently very messy.
One thing that’s kept the EU working is that it seems like less of the relative population is stupid and/or evil when compared to the US. However, even that’s not a guarantee to last that way. Look at Brexit. Look at some of the shit going down in Italy, and Poland, and what almost went down in France with Le Pen a couple years back.
So it works except it doesn’t. Okay got it.
New Jersey specifically refuses to do it. Even when New York arranged federal funding.
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Yeah, it would have been pretty hard to build the Chunnel if France was uncooperative.
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Don’t tell me that as though it goes against my point!
This is not what I’m arguing. It’s orthogonal to what I’m arguing. I specifically said I’m not arguing for one kind of change over another, or how one approach is better than another. I’m not saying I have the answers either.
What I’m talking about is what I tried to say in my very post on this subject. And that is this:
“See Americans discussing how to go about fixing problems with their country, looking in from the outside, is a weird and crazy experience.”
That’s it. And EVERYTHING you’ve gone on to discuss with me has only served to strengthen that feeling.
It’s hard for me to counter your points one by one, because each one of them is brought up by someone inside the American system and grown up with that mindset. I could talk about each one, and try to show how you think you are arguing against my point, but that just isn’t working.
But let’s try one more time with Romania. I brought it up, because when I traveled there in 1992, the experience of crossing borders in Europe was a pain.
Okay, forget about the Romanian Revolution for a minute, because that wasn’t my point. Okay? Thanks. My point was that we drove from England to France then through Belgium, Germany, Austria and Hungary, got to Romania, and added Switzerland and Luxembourg on the way back. That’s a lot of borders and a lot of currencies.
And now, when I travel in Europe, and cross borders, all the pain has disappeared. In most cases (though not Romania) I don’t have to change money! And my data roaming is free too!
That’s it! That was my point! Get it? I wasn’t making a point about Romania transitioning from dictatorship to democracy. Nope.
Also you saying “I don’t pay for data roaming in the USA” isn’t my point either.
My point is this: Crossing borders used to be a pain. Now it is completely pain free. This is an example of how the European Union is constantly improving my life and the lives of other people.
I’m making a point of steady progress over time. Not that you don’t pay for roaming in California and I don’t pay for it in France. It used to be that we had to pay roaming elsewhere, and the EU said that wasn’t allowed, and now we all get data included all over Europe. Did the telecom companies like this? Nope! But the change was made for the good of the entire continent.
Again, the exact details of how this is different to America doesn’t matter. My point is: steady progress by political processes that work and by bureaucrats just doggedly getting shit done.
Now I’m sure you’re able to counter this with examples of progress in the USA. That’s fine. I don’t mind that at all.
What’s crazy-making is I make this point about political and social and economic progress within the EU, and you immediately jump to “BLOODY REVOLUTION IN ROMANIA!”
How do I even respond? It sounds crazy! And yet, from the outside, that’s what so much discussion within the USA looks like!
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This is, I’m sorry to say, the best example of the Stockholm Syndrome I mentioned earlier. There are so many different ways I could approach this! To pick but one:
“Yet you seem to think that none of the existing processes work for the good of the people in America.”
Oh no, the processes are working perfectly… if you understand that they are not in place “for the good of the people”. It’s really really really hard to look at healthcare reform in America and make that conclusion. And I’m not talking about the healthcare system in place right now, I’m talking about healthcare reform. As in, ObamaCare seemed to be structured almost perfectly to funnel more money into the pockets of insurance company shareholders. From the outside it’s real, real difficult to reach another conclusion.
Of course some of “the people” have benefitted from expanded healthcare coverage, but “the existing process” worked perfectly for the insurance companies. The money is still flowing in the right direction, and in increasing amounts. Job done!
The rest of that paragraph is so fraught with issues I’m not even going to bother. “At least we aren’t North Korea” isn’t the kind of sentiment that makes me doubt my Stockholm Syndrome claims.
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