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On May 16 2017 00:05 xM(Z wrote:
why is the irony overlooked there?: a democracy where people have no choice in exercising their power ...
what is that scam men?.
You act like it is utterly impossible to create a new party and get votes in most European democracies. Just take the various green parties or the more recent pirate parties. It isn't like the US with a first past the post system where there is just one winner and thus extremely few parties of relevance.
It is not easy but far from impossible if people are too unhappy with the current parties.
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On May 16 2017 00:24 Yurie wrote:Show nested quote +On May 16 2017 00:05 xM(Z wrote:
why is the irony overlooked there?: a democracy where people have no choice in exercising their power ...
what is that scam men?. You act like it is utterly impossible to create a new party and get votes in most European democracies. Just take the various green parties or the more recent pirate parties. It isn't like the US with a first past the post system where there is just one winner and thus extremely few parties of relevance. It is not easy but far from impossible if people are too unhappy with the current parties. when green parties will be able to gather the majority of votes you'll have a point else it'll always be framed as a choice between communists, fascists and the center so the center will always win.
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You do realize that if a court rules something, then the law was there all along and nothing was "gained".
Edit: Oh fuck, I'm with stupid.
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On May 16 2017 00:05 xM(Z wrote:
why is the irony overlooked there?: a democracy where people have no choice in exercising their power ...
what is that scam men?.
Our democracies in Western Europe never were laid out to permit undemocratic or extremist choices. You still have plenty of political choice within the liberal democratic spectrum though and there's plenty of room to facilitate political change.
What TheDwf calls TINA is simply people exercising their democratic rights and there is obviously plenty of room between the centre-right and centre-left.
Of course if you're standing on the north pole every direction leads south. This is why the radical left calls everybody right-wing and "the same" while the extreme right does the reverse.
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On May 16 2017 02:58 Nyxisto wrote:Show nested quote +On May 16 2017 00:05 xM(Z wrote:
why is the irony overlooked there?: a democracy where people have no choice in exercising their power ...
what is that scam men?. Our democracies in Western Europe never were laid out to permit undemocratic or extremist choices. You still have plenty of political choice within the liberal democratic spectrum though and there's plenty of room to facilitate political change. What TheDwf calls TINA is simply people exercising their democratic rights and there is obviously plenty of room between the centre-right and centre-left. Of course if you're standing on the north pole every direction leads south. This is why the radical left calls everybody right-wing and "the same" while the extreme right does the reverse.
Once you have defined something "the center" you can also only move away from it. This is why the people who believe they have found the perfect balance call everyone with a different opinion extremist.
The thing with spheres though is that they have no center, no poles and also no other extraordinary points. It's where you want to be and how you get there from where you are that matters.
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I'm not talking about some arbitrary center. In the German constitution for example the term "freiheitlich demokratische Grundordnung" which means something like "free democratic social order" is mentioned about a dozen times and provides legal basis to outlaw parties who oppose it. It's supposed to mean the basic social order we've established after the war.
That's not news, it's not some new dogmatic 'centrism' that greedy capitalists have invented so we probably should just drop the term. It's basically an immune system for democratic countries.
And many countries have it too. Imagine a party in France would try to abolish secularism or introduce federal states. We'd have a lot of French TINA opponents in this thread turn into supporters pretty quickly.
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Maybe I'm wrong here, which is why I didn't use TINA in my other post, but isn't TINA a term that brands very liberal economical policies coming from very liberterian ideologies? Aka the kind of liberterianism that is just as utopian as marxism in the societies we have and which has been a disaster everytime it has been tried, yet far-right conservatives keep pushing for it over and over again, regurgitating the same old dogmas until the center picks them up again and envokes them.
As far as I understand it has little to do with the open society and its enemies which is what you are talking about. Which quite frankly are hardly outlined in the constitutions of the world and which is why newschool conservatives and the far-right are opposing this view in many countries nowadays quite openly.
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
In a strict sense I suppose we could use TINA specifically as it was used in the context Margaret Thatcher used it. I personally think it's also a good term to describe the form of faux pragmatism that is used to defend unpleasant and troubling elements of the status quo (trade, globalization, advancements that harm workers) in a way that seems to imply "we can't do it any other way." Since while that is only somewhat related to the old TINA statement, it is still saying "there is no alternative" to the same form of economics that Thatcher was defending.
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Please give me an example of an attempted libertarian utopia...
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On May 16 2017 02:58 Nyxisto wrote:Show nested quote +On May 16 2017 00:05 xM(Z wrote:
why is the irony overlooked there?: a democracy where people have no choice in exercising their power ...
what is that scam men?. Our democracies in Western Europe never were laid out to permit undemocratic or extremist choices. You still have plenty of political choice within the liberal democratic spectrum though and there's plenty of room to facilitate political change. What TheDwf calls TINA is simply people exercising their democratic rights and there is obviously plenty of room between the centre-right and centre-left. Of course if you're standing on the north pole every direction leads south. This is why the radical left calls everybody right-wing and "the same" while the extreme right does the reverse.
Henry Ford: “You can have any color as long as it's black” ...
Came across some Mr. Moderate Guy like you the other day, and he literally said: “Democracy is choosing between liberal-conservatives and social-liberals.”
Bipartism can make sense when the programs between the two main parties are significantly different. When those two “fighting” parties agree on 90% of the critical things, and mostly fight over labels or details, bipartism is void of any substance. (Unless most of the population is cool with statu quo.)
When social-democrats reduce the working time, allow gay marriage or extend health care, I don't call them right-wing. When they govern to the right of Sarkozy, I won't call them left-wing because their party nominally belongs to the left; especially when then do so on the back of 30+ documented years of an increasing shift to the right. No one will dispute that Sarkozy, a right-winger, led a right-wing policy; yet when Hollande's policy is even more to the right, I should call it left simply because Hollande claims to be “socialist”? But if we accept that, words don't have any sense anymore. This is what “forced” Mélenchon to abandon the word “left”—social-democrats had made it too confuse… Voters weren't completely fooled anyway, since about half of them fled to the left howling after Hollande's mandate; others who voted Macron will now gradually realize that they were actually centrists. People have the right to be liberal centrists, it's their problem—as long as they don't pretend to be “socialists” or that they're “left” while anything left of them would be “extreme-left”. The problem is that most of them don't want to admit this simple truth: maybe they have some left-wing values, but they sure have a right-wing wallet too…
You have a completely “naturalized” view of things, you don't take into account power balances. Governmental parties of course make sure to lock up the political game to their advantage: see the USA for the caricature; in France, the voting method for the législatives is built to create an artificially high majority for the winner, with the chamber being a grotesque distortion of reality: the 24-21-20-20 at the presidential might, for instance, turn into a 45-7-35-10.
Then there's media time:
+ Show Spoiler +![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/eQSQ97S.jpg) ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/RZ88MZG.jpg) (First: when media talk about candidates; second, when candidates and their supporters talk.)
Then there's money:
+ Show Spoiler [campaign spending for the 2012 edition] +
François Hollande : 21 769 895 euros ;
Nicolas Sarkozy : 21 339 664 euros ;
Jean-Luc Mélenchon : 9 514 317 euros ;
Marine Le Pen : 9 095 908 euros ;
François Bayrou : 7 042 962 euros ;
Eva Joly : 1 812 947 euros ;
Nicolas Dupont-Aignan : 1 237 636 euros ;
Nathalie Arthaud : 1 022 159 euros ;
Philippe Poutou : 824 097 euros ;
Jacques Cheminade : 498 674 euros.
The 2017 figures are not known yet, but naturally Macron only had to lift his little finger to raise millions of euros from his super-rich friends…
Then there's public party funding. Every party gets 1.42€ per voice and 37k€ per elected MP. Out of the 63 millions of euros for 2015, the PS and the UMP/LR got 43.5 millions—70% of the total sum, while they were to score only 26% at the next presidential election. Fair?… “Yes, because they got the most MPs”. But the voting method heavily favors the two already dominant parties! So we have a “winner takes all” system which leads to a “rich get richer” system—how sweet…
Naturally, I pass on the ideological consensus among columnists/pundits and the various newspapers ranging from the center-left to the right. There's a reason the vast majority of the press was bought by capitalists and concentrated in a few hands: they sure know where and why to invest. Even if they actually lose money (the sector is not in the best shape…), the ideological strike force is just too good to ignore. You get to choose the director, then you simply leave it to cultural/social mechanisms: ô magie, any radical critique of the established order is spontaneously banned to the margins…
“Journalist, I depend on those who own newspapers. To await from representatives of the capital that they freely offer you weapons—that is to say newspapers—to protest against a type of society which suits them, and the moral which goes along, it bears a name: idiocy. But the vast majority of those who work in big newspapers are, roughly speaking, in agreement with this society and this moral. They are not bought; they're convinced. The nuance is important.” — The quote is from 1960 but didn't age.
For the 2005 TCE referendum, 70% of the media time was for the “yes” and 30% for the “no”. Final result was 45:55. Three years later, 76% of the MPs vote for the Treaty of Libson, a clone of the rejected treaty. Perfect example of the massive disconnection between the society, dominant/mass medias and MPs from the two main parties.
The world is not a “level playing field”; or rather, even when rules are the same for all, they're not neutral for all that. The ruling class only plays when it masters the rules and controls the flow of the game. If rules don't allow to stay dominant anymore, then screw rules: direct coercion and authoritarian measures are back in town. You will witness this if it gets too hot in France in the following months/years. Greece is another textbook example: when it became clear that democracy was becoming an obstacle, it was instantly tossed overboard.
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Sorry, I should have written "everytime it has been pushed in that direction" or something like that.
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On May 16 2017 04:14 Big J wrote:
Maybe I'm wrong here, which is why I didn't use TINA in my other post, but isn't TINA a term that brands very liberal economical policies coming from very liberterian ideologies? Aka the kind of liberterianism that is just as utopian as marxism in the societies we have and which has been a disaster everytime it has been tried, yet far-right conservatives keep pushing for it over and over again, regurgitating the same old dogmas until the center picks them up again and envokes them.
As far as I understand it has little to do with the open society and its enemies which is what you are talking about. Which quite frankly are hardly outlined in the constitutions of the world and which is why newschool conservatives and the far-right are opposing this view in many countries nowadays quite openly.
TINA is used to describe the hegemony of neoliberal policies (not libertarianism), though the original meaning is more like “there is no alternative to capitalism” (with things like free market, free trade, globalization, etc.).
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At least an alternative hasn't been successfully demonstrated.
Adding to the free market part, there's also no alternative to social democracy and civil liberties. The right won the economic war of ideas and the left won the social war of ideas, they've now arrived at the same place. The fringes will continue to be stuck bellow 30% unless they try to pretend they're something they're not. In the extreme case they venture into power they'll be forced to conform (see Syriza, or even the difference between the rhetoric of Hollande and the actual presidency), for the economic destruction of venturing out is too great and the social upheaval of cutting current programs with the west's aging populations too politically costly.
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So what is gonna happen in the Netherlands now? New elections? Is Wilders gonna end up in government? Minority government?
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Most likely VVD, CDA and D66 will start negotiating with the Christian Union (cu) for a coalition. They'd have a one seat majority in both chambers. If that fails I'm not sure everything you mentioned except Wilders is on the table.
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On May 16 2017 15:04 RvB wrote:
Most likely VVD, CDA and D66 will start negotiating with the Christian Union (cu) for a coalition. They'd have a one seat majority in both chambers. If that fails I'm not sure everything you mentioned except Wilders is on the table.
I think they'll feel forced to talk with Wilders if it doesn't work out with the CU, but I don't see how it can work. That most likely means a new elections, although VVD, CDA and D66 might try a minority government.
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With Wilders you're never going to get a majority. I doubt D66 is willing to negotiate with Wilders even if CDA and VVD want it.
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On May 16 2017 15:21 RvB wrote:
With Wilders you're never going to get a majority. I doubt D66 is willing to negotiate with Wilders even if CDA and VVD want it.
You're right. I thought they had a majority in the tweede kamer with FvD, but they're still short. Meaning it'll never happen.
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EPT
