EPTEuropean Politico-economics QA Mega-thread - Page 519
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SK.Testie
Canada11084 Posts
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Nyxisto
Germany6287 Posts
On August 13 2016 08:45 MoltkeWarding wrote: There is an interesting book written by a journalist a few years ago, "The Geography of Bliss," in which the author visits numerous countries which rank highly on subjective happiness surveys (and in one case, Moldova, extremely lowly) in order to discover whether there is any unifying catalyst behind human happiness. As you would expect, "there is not," is the conclusion, and the word happiness itself, which derives from the concept of "good fortune," is an imprecise noun which could be applied to numerous mental states. In certain societies, happiness is wearing a social mask, which is so strictly enforced by cultural norms, that the "social self" that one projects becomes indistinguishable from an "inner self." In that sense, the pursuit of material wealth does form a palpable quest for happiness among certain people; its realisation grants people the momentary happiness of attainment, but not any kind of enduring happiness, because happiness in th e generic Western conception is linked with the belief in one's own good fortune, but is at heart a contradiction, a contradiction which reminds me of that gorgeous poem by Rupert Brooke: I THINK if you had loved me when I wanted; If I’d looked up one day, and seen your eyes, And found my wild sick blasphemous prayer granted, And your brown face, that’s full of pity and wise, Flushed suddenly; the white godhead in new fear Intolerably so struggling, and so shamed; Most holy and far, if you’d come all too near, If earth had seen Earth’s lordliest wild limbs tamed, Shaken, and trapped, and shivering, for My touch— Myself should I have slain? or that foul you? But this the strange gods, who had given so much, To have seen and known you, this they might not do. One last shame’s spared me, one black word’s unspoken; And I’m alone; and you have not awoken. A sensitively insightful poem; in which the poet recognises the contradiction at the heart of his demands for happiness, for that longed-for "success" would make him more miserable than failure. To this, all the materialist and sociological chatterboxing has nothing to offer. Wagner's "Tristan Chord" had more to say about the nature of human happiness than all these weird inhuman indices put together. What you and WhiteDog are talking about is actually side-stepping the point; the alleviation of physical suffering does not contribute to human happiness in the long run. Okay, I give up. When you go into these six months slumbers you're preparing this stuff right? You've broken me, you're the TL version of this | ||
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Makro
France16890 Posts
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cLutZ
United States19574 Posts
On August 13 2016 13:33 Nyxisto wrote: Okay, I give up. When you go into these six months slumbers you're preparing this stuff right? You've broken me, you're the TL version of this I've never seen a better analogy. Thank you, just, thank you. | ||
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RvB
Netherlands6236 Posts
On August 13 2016 07:37 Dangermousecatdog wrote: I am sure that based on Nyxisto references to developing countries, he is refering to countries where the GDP per capita is below that certain degree where standards of living do increase when GDP per capita rises. In any case GDP per capita is a poor indicator of standards of living after a certain point especially in recent years in most rich countries simply due to rising inequality. GDP is an inadequate indicator for multiple reasons but inequality isn't one of them. The economist had an article on it. www.economist.com Looking at wage disparity and concluding that standards lf living aren't increasing is wrong. An innovation like google almost certainly increased the standard of living for everyone (more so the poor than the rich I would say but that is debatable) but it doesn't show up in GDP or wage statistics. The same can be said for a lot of innovations. Life can (and does) get more comfortable even without rising wages. | ||
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WhiteDog
France8650 Posts
On August 14 2016 21:06 RvB wrote: GDP is an inadequate indicator for multiple reasons but inequality isn't one of them. The economist had an article on it. www.economist.com Looking at wage disparity and concluding that standards lf living aren't increasing is wrong. An innovation like google almost certainly increased the standard of living for everyone (more so the poor than the rich I would say but that is debatable) but it doesn't show up in GDP or wage statistics. The same can be said for a lot of innovations. Life can (and does) get more comfortable even without rising wages. Inequality is a major problem for GDP per capita. I don't really understand why but somehow the decision to ban burkini was accepted by the administrative tribunal of Nice - I was sure that it was going to be rejected. Maybe the state council will refute this. Either way, this is a clear indication that the current tolerance towards muslims is going down in France, now I don't know the specific of Nice so maybe the burkini was a real problem at the beach. But considering the arguments used (that the burkini was some kind of indirect support for isis) it clearly shows that people are less tolerant. | ||
Koorb
France266 Posts
On August 14 2016 23:43 WhiteDog wrote: I don't really understand why but somehow the decision to ban burkini was accepted by the administrative tribunal of Nice - I was sure that it was going to be rejected. Maybe the state council will refute this. Either way, this is a clear indication that the current tolerance towards muslims is going down in France, now I don't know the specific of Nice so maybe the burkini was a real problem at the beach. But considering the arguments used (that the burkini was some kind of indirect support for isis) it clearly shows that people are less tolerant. « No freedom for the enemies of freedom » © Louis Antoine de Saint-Just The decision of the court makes sense given how the ban was motivated by the city council. | ||
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Nyxisto
Germany6287 Posts
"We are not talking about banning the wearing of religious symbols on the beach ... but ostentatious clothing which refers to an allegiance to terrorist movements which are at war with us" quote from the administration, a burqini is a pledge to ISIS? | ||
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Koorb
France266 Posts
On August 15 2016 02:53 Nyxisto wrote: A burqini is the enemy of freedom? Have we reached the freedom fries level? "We are not talking about banning the wearing of religious symbols on the beach ... but ostentatious clothing which refers to an allegiance to terrorist movements which are at war with us" quote from the administration, a burqini is a pledge to ISIS? This is disingenuous Nxysto. "Ostentatious clothing which refers to an allegiance to terrorist" is a quote from an unelected official who is not a decision-maker. The legal argument brought forward by the mayor doesn't mention anything of the sort, it is based on public order concerns, hygiene rules, and the 1905 law on the separation of the church and the state. EDIT: as for this freedom thing, I recommend you read about Saint-Just. Even 220 years later, he is quite spot on on the issue of how a republic must deal with an anti-republican system of belief that tries to undermine it | ||
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Nyxisto
Germany6287 Posts
http://www.thelocal.fr/20160812/french-mayor-bans-burqinis-in-riviera-beach "I don't have the time, nor the desire to stir up trouble. We have not banned the Muslim headscarf, the kippah, nor a crucifix , I have just banned something which is the symbol of Islamic extremism." And regarding the public order claim, has there really ever been disorder concerning this kind of attire in France? This seems like a really, really cheap shot at scoring political capital which is not what should determine state bans. | ||
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TheDwf
France19747 Posts
I don't really understand why but somehow the decision to ban burkini was accepted by the administrative tribunal of Nice - I was sure that it was going to be rejected. Maybe the state council will refute this. Either way, this is a clear indication that the current tolerance towards muslims is going down in France, now I don't know the specific of Nice so maybe the burkini was a real problem at the beach. But considering the arguments used (that the burkini was some kind of indirect support for isis) it clearly shows that people are less tolerant. Islamophobia is thriving. Not a week goes by without some kind of dumb controversy around islam. It's absolutely disgusting, and the presidential election campaign will be obnoxious. | ||
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TheDwf
France19747 Posts
On August 15 2016 03:04 Koorb wrote: This is disingenuous Nxysto. "Ostentatious clothing which refers to an allegiance to terrorist" is a quote from an unelected official who is not a decision-maker. The legal argument brought forward by the mayor doesn't mention anything of the sort, it is based on public order concerns, hygiene rules, and the 1905 law on the separation of the church and the state. EDIT: as for this freedom thing, I recommend you read about Saint-Just. Even 220 years later, he is quite spot on on the issue of how a republic must deal with an anti-republican system of belief that tries to undermine it 1) “Public order concerns” = the usual vague excuse used when authorities want to arbitrarily forbid something. It's also perverted logic since it goes like, “wearing those clothes is theoretically fine but some people might hate it, so we forbid it”. 2) The hygiene excuse is absolutely laughable. 3) The laïcité doesn't prevent people from dressing the way they want in public space; it's neutrality from the State and its agents, not from random people. Even the anti-burqa law wasn't done in the name of laïcité. | ||
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MoltkeWarding
5195 Posts
On August 13 2016 13:33 Nyxisto wrote: Okay, I give up. When you go into these six months slumbers you're preparing this stuff right? You've broken me, you're the TL version of this I do not see what is so difficult; the point was a simple one. Human happiness exists in the pursuit of that which can never be achieved. The more sacred our feelings towards an object, whether it be a beautiful woman or a political vision, the greater our distance to it. Man can never be united with what he worships. That identity of the ideal and the real is only possible within certain intellectual systems, such as the Christian afterlife in which "then shall I know, even as also I am known." Which makes it all the most insightful, when someone like Whitedog writes: Your poetry is the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments. There is of course the irony of his statement, because his own mental reality is highly symbolic and abstract, (social sciences create a mental universe almost completely dependent on symbolism) and while poetry can involve a tangle of symbolisms, this is not the case with the poems I cited here, which are far more impressionistic than symbolic. Nonetheless, there is a kind of tension in the way that he juxtaposes his ideas and mine, in which he derides the "out of touch vision" represented by myself, and his far greater connectedness with the reality of the world: "Reality is most migration waves comes from people who lost their position in the society" WhiteDog sees the world in the framework of a realist painting (I will here pass over my own belief that Realism was not really Realism, but a sort of negative idealism), minus the imagery, hence the repetitive banality of his analysis. However, if you had any sympathy with his world view, you can appreciate the way in which he is a product of his cultural background. How was it, asked Thomas Mann in a speech, in 1943, that the German mind, more preoccupied with metaphysical imagery and symbolism than political activism ("tatenarm und gedankenreich,") was the same which produced an amoral Realpolitik in the 19th century, and culminated in the anti-intellectual philosophy of action in the Third Reich? The answer, he maintained, was that Germans, who thought of the world in idealistic terms, were by their same idealism inclined to juxtapose and place the purity of culture above the corruption of politics, the lucidity of the inner mind above the pretense of society. As such, whereas other nations were willing to accept the corruption of the idea the moment it was converted into positive political action, Germany was never able to come to terms with that necessary hypocrisy. And as such, politics, recognised as something essentially divorced from morality, was not, as Aristotle prescribed, an extention of ethics, but rather a science divorced. Hence the National Liberals admired Bismarck and praised him as a genius because he was a successful politician, and since the essence of politics is power rather than ethics, it is not only irrational but hypocritical to judge it in terms of the latter. Whether Mann's characterisation of German political history is accurate interests me less than the fact that his analysis of political cynicism in Germany anticipates someone like WhiteDog, who would occasionally break out of his perpetual frown of ideological disapproval and express the essentially amoral view that politics is a battle of the gods. We need to think about this more carefully, because while Mann's characterisation of the "German mind" may be protested at with all sorts of qualifications, his speech in 1943 gave an excellent analysis of someone like WhiteDog. But back to the question of the "real," because after all, WhiteDog is French, not German. For him social realities, even in his sociological abstractions, is still a different tier of reality from personal realities, and indeed, for him the social takes precedence over the personal, whereas German culture and especially German literature is inclined to teach the reverse. In Berlin Alexanderplatz, a dim-witted man like Franz Bieberkopf could stare at a wall after a personal crisis in which he had been betrayed by friends he trusted, and say such German things as "reality is not real," lines unimaginable from similar characters in a French or English book. Therefore we must take WhiteDog seriously when he seriously says and believes that he is a "realist" who sees the "real world" in contrast to my "imaginary" approach to the world of my own mind. We must take him seriously because he is a prisoner of his own mind, and like the aforementioned Chinaman nostalgic for the bygone happiness of poverty, he prefers to bear the ills he has, than to flee to others he knows not of. | ||
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Koorb
France266 Posts
On August 15 2016 03:09 Nyxisto wrote: The mayor also drew the connection to extremism. http://www.thelocal.fr/20160812/french-mayor-bans-burqinis-in-riviera-beach "I don't have the time, nor the desire to stir up trouble. We have not banned the Muslim headscarf, the kippah, nor a crucifix , I have just banned something which is the symbol of Islamic extremism." And regarding the public order claim, has there really ever been disorder concerning this kind of attire in France? "Is the symbol of Islamic extremism" =/= "refers to an allegiance to terrorist movements (ISIS) which are at war with us" And yes there have been public order concerns with ostentatious display of orthodox muslim faith in France. The latest occurrence happened yesterday when tourists in Corsica where viciously attacked by the male relatives of veiled women (including the use of machetes and harpoon guns, and the beating of a pregnant woman) | ||
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TheDwf
France19747 Posts
On August 15 2016 03:09 Nyxisto wrote: The mayor also drew the connection to extremism. http://www.thelocal.fr/20160812/french-mayor-bans-burqinis-in-riviera-beach "I don't have the time, nor the desire to stir up trouble. We have not banned the Muslim headscarf, the kippah, nor a crucifix , I have just banned something which is the symbol of Islamic extremism." And regarding the public order claim, has there really ever been disorder concerning this kind of attire in France? This seems like a really, really cheap shot at scoring political capital which is not what should determine state bans. A part of the French political class and “intellectuals” are on a crusade against Muslim food/clothes/etc. for a decade, this is just the sad continuity. There was a ridiculous controversy a few days ago around a “burkini day” because some association had (legally) bought one day of private use of some aquatic park. Some far-right and right politicians created a national outrage out of this, which resulted in the event being cancelled. Then they decreed that the Republic had been saved because some Muslim women had been prevented from enjoying a day at the swimming pool. You also have to factor in the fact that racism is widespread in the Southeast (this is one of the areas where the Front National makes its biggest scores, and the right-wing politicians from there are barely distinguishable from them). | ||
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SK.Testie
Canada11084 Posts
On August 15 2016 03:47 TheDwf wrote: A part of the French political class and “intellectuals” are on a crusade against Muslim food/clothes/etc. for a decade, this is just the sad continuity. There was a ridiculous controversy a few days ago around a “burkini day” because some association had (legally) bought one day of private use of some aquatic park. Some far-right and right politicians created a national outrage out of this, which resulted in the event being cancelled. Then they decreed that the Republic had been saved because some Muslim women had been prevented from enjoying a day at the swimming pool. You also have to factor in the fact that racism is widespread in the Southeast (this is one of the areas where the Front National makes its biggest scores, and the right-wing politicians from there are barely distinguishable from them). Do you think the natives should have anything to worry about as the demographic, the % that are Islamic changes? We know that birth rates are vastly different overall. At what % is it a cause for concern where an Erdogan type can take power? At what % is it just silly and unmanageable? Or is it no concern if an Erdogan type can take power? That's just a change that came naturally to France? Is it funny at 3% but dangerous at 50%? Or is it too big to do anything about at 25% and the natives must gradually see it become 30% etc? Is there a country that has not had Islamists be exploited for the net gain of another country? Does it not seem like a weak chink in the armor of a country that others may exploit to cause civil strife? As I watched Turks get shredded by helicopter fire and run over by a tank, I genuinely wonder at what % does it cause a concern? What % is a concern for you? Is there absolutely zero reason for concern? | ||
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Koorb
France266 Posts
On August 15 2016 03:28 TheDwf wrote: 1) “Public order concerns” = the usual vague excuse used when authorities want to arbitrarily forbid something. It's also perverted logic since it goes like, “wearing those clothes is theoretically fine but some people might hate it, so we forbid it”. 2) The hygiene excuse is absolutely laughable. 3) The laïcité doesn't prevent people from dressing the way they want in public space; it's neutrality from the State and its agents, not from random people. Even the anti-burqa law wasn't done in the name of laïcité. 1) : As shown by the recent events in Corsica, burkini-clad women are likely to be accompanied by short-tempered male relatives who won't hesitate to resort to violence if passers-by merely look at their sisters/GF/whatever (up to and including the use of deadly weapons). So yes,there are public order concerns with muslim women wearing symbols of radical islam in France. 2) and 3) : it is not uncommon for coastal cities to ban swimming with regular clothes for hygiene purpose. And if it is forbidden for the general population, then the muslims can't argue that their particular beliefs justify that the rule don't apply to them - that is the very meaning of the 1905 law. On August 15 2016 03:47 TheDwf wrote: A part of the French political class and “intellectuals” are on a crusade against Muslim food/clothes/etc. for a decade, this is just the sad continuity. There was a ridiculous controversy a few days ago around a “burkini day” because some association had (legally) bought one day of private use of some aquatic park. Some far-right and right politicians created a national outrage out of this, which resulted in the event being cancelled. Then they decreed that the Republic had been saved because some Muslim women had been prevented from enjoying a day at the swimming pool. You also have to factor in the fact that racism is widespread in the Southeast (this is one of the areas where the Front National makes its biggest scores, and the right-wing politicians from there are barely distinguishable from them). Nope. A significant part of the muslim population is on a crusade (well, on a jihad) against the very concept of secular, liberal republic. And the French society is increasingly fighting back, which rubs the regressive left the wrong way. | ||
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Nyxisto
Germany6287 Posts
On August 15 2016 03:36 Koorb wrote: "Is the symbol of Islamic extremism" =/= "refers to an allegiance to terrorist movements (ISIS) which are at war with us" And yes there have been public order concerns with ostentatious display of orthodox muslim faith in France. The latest occurrence happened yesterday when tourists in Corsica where viciously attacked by the male relatives of veiled women (including the use of machetes and harpoon guns, and the beating of a pregnant woman) Then punish the male relatives, because they're the ones committing a crime in that case. This is the same victim blaming logic that happens when people say "I want to ban the burqa because it oppresses women". how about punishing the people who actually oppress the women? And hygiene reasons? Am I not allowed to wear a wetsuit and a bathing cap at a French beach? Because that's essentially what it is | ||
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TheDwf
France19747 Posts
On August 15 2016 03:52 SK.Testie wrote: Do you think the natives should have anything to worry about as the demographic, the % that are Islamic changes? We know that birth rates are vastly different overall. At what % is it a cause for concern where an Erdogan type can take power? At what % is it just silly and unmanageable? Or is it no concern if an Erdogan type can take power? That's just a change that came naturally to France? Is it funny at 3% but dangerous at 50%? Or is it too big to do anything about at 25% and the natives must gradually see it become 30% etc? Is there a country that has not had Islamists be exploited for the net gain of another country? Does it not seem like a weak chink in the armor of a country that others may exploit to cause civil strife? Nope, the birth rates are actually similar. There are only 3-4% observant Muslims in France, max 10-11% if you factor in all those who have a “Muslim background” (whatever that means). There is literally no islam-based movement in the political landscape, laïcité is defended by 99% of the political spectrum and 2/3 of the population are either atheist or non-religious, so I'm fairly sure your French Erdoğan will have to wait a few centuries before being a threat. | ||
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OtherWorld
France17333 Posts
On August 15 2016 02:46 Koorb wrote: « No freedom for the enemies of freedom » © Louis Antoine de Saint-Just The decision of the court makes sense given how the ban was motivated by the city council. Great thing about that quote is that you can hardly apply it to reality, unless you have a really strict definition of freedom or want to end up with a self-destructive state. It is also based on a wonderful black/white world view where you're either an ennemy of freedom (whatever that means) or a "freedom supremacist". On August 15 2016 04:08 TheDwf wrote: Nope, the birth rates are actually similar. There are only 3-4% observant Muslims in France, max 10-11% if you factor in all those who have a “Muslim background” (whatever that means). There is literally no islam-based movement in the political landscape, laïcité is defended by 99% of the political spectrum and 2/3 of the population are either atheist or non-religious, so I'm fairly sure your French Erdoğan will have to wait a few centuries before being a threat. Well, there's a quite high chance that we end up with a French Erdogan, but it'll be a Christian Erdogan, not a Muslim Erdogan. | ||
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