Well, right now there's a odd vogue to think that a healthy democracy does things like ban political parties (currently an active debate regarding the AfD in Germany), or embrace indigenous apartheid movements (NZ, Australia), or to cede sovereignty to unaccountable transnational elites that promise to protect you from the ravages of political misinformation (the EU as a whole.) I don't think these notions will stand the test of time, but we'll see.
For those of people who are wondering about the "indigenous apartheid", the poster is talking about co-governance, i.e. giving certain "typically local", economic and political powers to indigenous organizations. This has become recently become on-vogue to call "apartheid" in right circles.
I guess the people opposing co-governance are not very fond of following contracts, because at least in NZ the founding document/contract the treaty of Waitangi guaranteed a co-governance (and arguably the commonwealth for a long time ignored those obligations).
If many people believe that co-governance is undemocratic, what does "following contracts" have to do with anything? Frankly, why should New Zealand be forever bound by the treaty? Parliament is supreme, if they didn't want to follow the treaty they don't have to.
How many steps between that and the Māori having a casus belli to engage in open warfare?
Stuff like this may have a certain level of "might makes right" (similar question for Hawaii, although there it's obvious who would win in a fight) but not always (Irish independence at close to the peak of the British Empire, the Cod Wars, that the US didn't keep all of Mexico after the war, just Texas, Arizona, California, etc.)
> If they don't want to follow a treaty they should rescind it. Until then it is the law of the land and it should be followed.
Or not, as parliament is free to decide. I think my previous statement on parliamentary supremacy stands for itself. If you have something specific to talk about from that Wikipedia page, it's best that you spell it out for us.
> Its privileging a demographic with greater power under the law based on skin color. Thats apartheid
It literally speaking isn’t based on skin colour. In Australia (I think the situation in NZ is similar?) indigenous status is based on descent, identification, and acceptance by the community. Unlike the “blood quantum laws” which apply for Native Americans in the US, there is no minimum percentage of indigenous ancestry required. So you have people, the majority of whose ancestors are European, and who look physically indistinguishable from other European-descended Australians, but who have some indigenous ancestry, who choose to identify with that ancestry, and whose identification is accepted by a recognised indigenous community - they are legally indigenous. An indigenous person can have any skin colour, and due to trends in intermarriage and indigenous identification (which is optional), the distribution of skin colours is changing over time.
That's even worse though, isn't it? A racist policy favoring indigenous by blood could at least be justified by saying it's correcting for past racism in the opposite direction - however weak that justification is. But what you're describing sounds like granting privileged status to a club, membership in which is dictated by whether you identify with it, and existing members identify with you. Similar to privileging a religious group, but sans religion itself.
> That's even worse though, isn't it? A racist policy favoring indigenous by blood could at least be justified by saying it's correcting for past racism in the opposite direction - however weak that justification is. But what you're describing sounds like granting privileged status to a club, membership in which is dictated by whether you identify with it, and existing members identify with you. Similar to privileging a religious group, but sans religion itself.
I'm not necessarily defending these policies–just attempting to describe them accurately–if one is going to criticise something, it is important to accurately describe the thing to be criticised. This is an issue on which I have mixed feelings and can see both sides of the argument.
But to clarify, at least officially speaking, it is based on blood–it is not enough to simplify identify as indigenous and be accepted by a recognised indigenous community as indigenous, you also have to actually be of indigenous descent – a person with zero indigenous descent is officially speaking not indigenous, even if they identify as such, and even if a recognised indigenous community accepts them as such. The difference from American "blood quantum" laws, is there is no requirement for any minimum degree of indigenous descent – officially it doesn't matter if a person's ancestry is 100% indigenous or 1-in-256 indigenous – but officially a person with zero known indigenous ancestry can't be indigenous. In practice, people with extremely remote indigenous ancestry are unlikely to be able to find a recognised indigenous community willing to endorse their indigenous identification, but standards vary from community to community, and also change over time – sometimes it becomes a very political issue, with certain factions within a community advocating for much tougher membership standards than others, and so it can depend on the outcome of the political battle between those different factions.
In practice, Australia doesn't have any central list of "who is indigenous". Every agency makes that decision for itself. For statistical purposes, the government just uses self-identification, and doesn't require any evidence of descent or acceptance by a recognised community. When it comes to "affirmative action" (reserved jobs, admission to educational institutions, scholarships, etc) and voting rights in representative bodies (such as the "land councils" through which indigenous communities own land), agencies usually require more than just self-identification: generally a letter or certificate issued by a recognised indigenous community body (often a land council), although sometimes other forms of evidence can be accepted instead.
> No way this could possibly go wrong.
There is a lot of controversy in the Australian indigenous community over so-called "box-tickers", who identify as indigenous, despite having only very remote indigenous ancestry, or even no such ancestry at all. The requirement for a letter/certificate issued by recognised community can be a big hurdle for such people, although given the political controversies over the standards for issuing such letters/certificates (and even occasional allegations of corruption), we can't rule out the possibility that some people with zero actual indigenous descent have successfully obtained such letters/certificates. Officially speaking, such people aren't actually indigenous, but the system will treat them as if they were. However, there was a case (in NSW) a few years ago where a woman claimed to be of indigenous descent, and had her claim endorsed by her local land council, which then accepted her as one of its members – a competing faction on the land council insisted her indigenous ancestry was bogus, gathered evidence of her genealogy, filed a formal complaint with the state government agency which manages land councils, and successfully convinced that agency to revoke her land council membership.
Which makes it a little odd to separate out 'indigenous' as needing a separate legal or advisory entity doesn't it? What is the position of the 1% indigenous? It is referring to a culture contextualised by skin colour.
It's all signalling. In Australia there are support and administrative bodies at all level of government interacting with aboriginal communities (often failing for different reasons, mostly budget). A 'Voice' (which is still vaguely defined as having influence but no power) does not magically create harmony between the past and future, it only continues the divide.
We are stuck in a world of trying to simultaneously give back the 'old past' while carrying on as-is otherwise. That is impossible. We must work towards a common, prosperous and respectful future for all inhabitants that recognises and admits the things we can't undo or change. We are trying to have it both ways, and it will leave the divides strongly in place.
>Which makes it a little odd to separate out 'indigenous' as needing a separate legal or advisory entity doesn't it? What is the position of the 1% indigenous? It is referring to a culture contextualised by skin colour.
Weird how you seem to recognize what culture is, yet in the same sentence it means nothing more than sharing a skin tone
That's not what I said. I said the culture (for the sake of the referendum) is contextualised by skin tone, because if they showed lots of 'white' people as those they're bringing a voice to people would be confused and it gets messy. Which is my follow-on point about how they're trying to pretend it will somehow bring back a past that can't be brought back.
I'm not sure if skin tone really plays as big a role in the referendum as you suggest. If you look at who the biggest Indigenous spokespeople on each side are, some of them have darker skin and others paler skin, but most of them look like they have varying degrees of mixed Indigenous-European descent.
The idea that pale-skinned people can't be Indigenous is mainly one that exists on the political right. In 2011, conservative Murdoch newspaper columnist Andrew Bolt was found (in a civil, not criminal, proceeding) to have violated the Racial Discrimination Act by authoring a newspaper column arguing that pale-skinned people couldn't "really" be indigenous. [0]
By contrast, my local federal member of parliament is Dr Gordon Reid MP [1]. He identifies as Indigenous, but his skin tone is pretty similar to my own, and (as far as I know) my own ancestry is purely European (mostly Irish, with some English and Scottish too). But, Dr Reid belongs to our main centre-left party (Labor), and the Australian Labor Party has zero objection to pale-skinned people identifying as Indigenous
I don't think you are getting the point, which is how it is analyzed whether someone "is or isn't" 'indigenous' and a necessary element of that was the requirement that they have indigenous blood. So I don't get where you are coming from when you say you can't "identify" as indigenous - in the law, you needed to do both.
Ok I get what you're saying now. Still though, you can't exactly identify as such without the blood...
But this is the whole ludicrous thing; what are they actually identifying as?. Traditional landowners? Cultural martyrs? 'Aussie?' 'Neglected outsiders? It gets really tricky if they start to actually really dig into the problem.
It's like the argument is saying they're disadvantaged because they're not living their 'full modern Western life' while also supposing somehow 'we' will give back the old ways and apologise. Which is it? Hence I've been saying we need to work out what future 'Australian' is and all head towards that, as best we can. I don't even know what Australian culture is now, it's a mess of trying to be all cultures to everyone.
I don't think anything you asked follows logically. They seem like your personal political grievances, and I don't see why they are necessary questions to ask at all
I do see a potential problem: being accepted as Indigenous requires no minimum amount of ancestry; identifying as Indigenous is increasingly seen as a social benefit rather than detriment, and hence people with that ancestry (or even without it) will seek that identity out; some Indigenous community groups will try to limit access to an officially recognised Indigenous identity, but those who seek it will gravitate towards those community groups which are most generous in recognising it, and those groups will grow in power and influence as a result, producing a feedback loop which encourages lowering those barriers over time; intermarriage rates between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people are high (over 50%) – isn't the likely result of this that, in the long-term, more and more of the population will be Indigenous? It is one thing to argue for "affirmative action" for a minority which is only 2-3% of the population - what happens as it grows to 5%, 10%, 15%, 20%, etc?
It also potentially results in two groups of Indigenous people – one group with majority Indigenous ancestry, found mostly in remote/regional/rural areas, who experience a great deal of social deprivation; another group with minority (in some cases even only slight) Indigenous ancestry, found mostly in urban/suburban areas, who experience far less social deprivation. With all this talk of "closing the gap", counting both groups as "Indigenous" makes "the gap" seem smaller than it actually is, and if the second group is growing, that growth can create a false sense of progress of the gap being closed, even as little or nothing improves for the first group.
Meanwhile it creates stigma around Indigenous = disadvantaged which a) is a terrible way to label a group and b) ignores all the other disadvantaged people for the sake of signalling empathy the 'right' way.
When I said "no minimum amount of ancestry", I meant "minimum" as excluding "zero". So, a person with literally zero Indigenous ancestry, cannot be Indigenous by the official definition. However, if a person has non-zero Indigenous ancestry, the official definition doesn't care how slight that ancestry is.
Furthermore, the official definition is not phrased in terms of DNA, only descent. Many Indigenous communities object to the use of DNA testing in determining Indigenous status, and as a result it is mostly not considered in deciding these questions.
The official definition is ambiguous in using the word "descent" – while most commonly that is interpreted as "biological descent", it isn't clear that merely legal descent (as in legal adoption) is actually excluded. If an Indigenous person legally adopts a biologically non-Indigenous child (or has such a child through IVF, surrogacy, sperm/egg/embryo donation, etc), and the child is raised to identify as Indigenous, and their Indigenous community accepts that child as Indigenous – there is an argument they officially are Indigenous, and given the unresolved ambiguity in the official definition, I don't know how one can say that argument is incorrect. In practice, if the elders of their Indigenous community write a letter declaring them to be Indigenous, the government will very likely accept them (and their descendants) as such.
It has little to do with politics except how political parties (yeah both) will manipulate it. It's a societal issue. It's a pity everything is politics and polarisations these days.
If you mean ethnicity, why not just say "ethnicity"? Why call ethnicity "skin colour" if by that you actually mean ethnicity?
And if by "race" you mean something which is neither ethnicity nor skin colour, then that is a concept with very unclear applicability to contemporary Australia.
Finally, your needlessly hostile attitude is obnoxious.
were having a convo on a internet board, not having an academic debate. People say “skin color” colloquially when they mean the general concept of race/ethnicity. Is it not used like this in Australia?
The hostile attitude is because you decided to focus on a hyper-specific nuance that nobody cares about. And then write an entire essay about a non-point.
Its like if I were to focus in solely on you purposely misspelling “color” using non-American and then steer the convo into an endless quagmire about semantics. Can you see how obnoxious that would be?
> were having a convo on a internet board, not having an academic debate
I come to this website because it provides an opportunity for a level of discussion which is closer to an "academic debate" than a "convo on an internet board". If you find that obnoxious, maybe there is some other "internet board" out there which is more suitable for you.
> People say “skin color” colloquially when they mean the general concept of race/ethnicity. Is it not used like this in Australia?
You speak as if the "general concept of race/ethnicity" was identical in every country – it isn't. There are significant differences between how "race/ethnicity" is understood in Australia, and how it is understood in the US-to speak of just two countries. Do you understand those differences?
> The hostile attitude is because you decided to focus on a hyper-specific nuance that nobody cares about
Just because you don't care about a nuance doesn't mean nobody else does. Indeed, the comment you are complaining about was upvoted. And, I've posted many other comments just like the one you are complaining about in the 8+ years I've been here, and many of them have been upvoted as well.
> Its like if I were to focus in solely on you purposely misspelling “color” using non-American
There is a big difference between spelling differences between different Anglophone countries – which are trivial – and differences in how "race/ethnicity" is conceptualised in different countries – which are far from trivial.
> You speak as if the "general concept of race/ethnicity" was identical in every country – it isn't. There are significant differences between how "race/ethnicity" is understood in Australia, and how it is understood in the US-to speak of just two countries. Do you understand those differences?
Are you or are you not the one who misunderstood that distinction when you responded to my post using an American understanding of the phrase "skin color" (note the American spelling)?
> I come to this website because it provides an opportunity for a level of discussion which is closer to an "academic debate" than a "convo on an internet board". If you find that obnoxious, maybe there is some other "internet board" out there which is more suitable for you.
lol mate. An obsessive focus on a netcode assembly doesn't make people experts on political matters.
The political conversations on HN aren't deep. Actually, they're very superficial.
What's the phrase? "Performative erudition". You aren't having anything closer to academic debate than anywhere else. Let's call it "performative academia".
> Are you or are you not the one who misunderstood that distinction when you responded to my post using an American understanding of the phrase "skin color" (note the American spelling)?
Your comment was talking about Australia. There are significant differences in how Australians and Americans understand issues such as ethnicity, race and skin colour, and trying to apply American understandings of those topics to Australia doesn't make much sense – which is part of what my comment was trying to convey. But, rather than using this as an opportunity to learn about those differences – about which you don't appear to know anything – you just dismissed it as "irrelevant". If you aren't interested in understanding race/ethnicity/etc issues in another country, why are you commenting about them?
Well, to clarify, your comment did not explicitly mention any country. However, in the context of the conversation, it seemed to be primarily talking about institutions such as the proposed Indigenous Voice in Australia, and the Maori electoral roll in New Zealand; I don't think it was primarily talking about the US since "co-governance" is much less on the agenda there (and the existing institution of tribal governments would seem to cover much of the demand for it anyway). As such, you were talking about race/ethnicity issues in other countries, without appearing to have any understanding of the differences between how those issues are understood in those countries as compared to your own.
When they were actively blocked from governance for a long time and effectively blocked for most the rest, is it really apartheid to have Māori represent their views?
It’s also what was guaranteed in our founding document - depending on how you read it. That dubious piece of legal work managed to botch the key term ‘governance’ such that interpretation is required and it may, or may not guarantee Māori governance of the country.
Comparing NZ to apartheid South Africa is darkly funny. The oppression I face is underwhelming.
The word "harem" is derived from Arabic/Persian for "forbidden"; it was a place where men were not allowed, and thus a considered a safe space for the women within.
Little Boy turned actual little boys into carbon ash imprints on the concrete where they sat and ate lunch; it probably saved many more children from burning up in a sustained campaign of carpet-bombings.
To create a new power group to balance rights? It's unstable, but it also leads to things like "women, as well as men, get to vote" and "workers can organise their labour via trade unions, just as owners can organise their capital via shareholdings and loans".
That's quite a strong statement to just present as an axiom without even any evidence or premises leading to it. Can you justify this statement, or do we have to just accept it as an axiom?
It's one of the most common divide in philosophy and morals, and I think nobody is capable of changing their opinion, because this one question is fundamental in how a person sees the world.
Should you punish the children for what the fathers did wrong? Because whoever wronged the people are dead since long. The people who were wronged are dead since long. Do the children inherit the sins or the victimhood of their ancestors? Some say yes. They say to the youth: "Look how bad these people were treated long before you were born! Now it's your responsibility to settle the score and pay back."
Others say no. They say that nobody can be held responsible for the wrongs that other people have done, even if those people were their ancestors, or are considered their ancestors by modern measurements. The question is if somebody is to be seen as an individual and judged as an individual, or seen as a member of some tribe and judged as a member of that tribe.
It's worth to mention that things are usually seen in another way. What we're seeing right now is the end of christian morality, where a victim is held in high regard. This is not common through history or through the world. Once these kind of victim-revering morals don't exist anymore, the attitude will instead be: "Your ancestors were slaves, therefore you deserve to be a slave" or "My ancestors conquered your ancestors, therefore we have the right to treat you as we wish" and such awful things.
Comparisons with apartheid South Africa are not to be made lightly. Anyone who makes the comparison in this case is either extremely ignorant or simply trying to stir up pointless controversy. Any serious argument against the policy described in the linked article can only be weakened by such an absurd comparison.
Not really, because I wasn't arguing against the poster's opinion (as I don't know much about, or have strong opinions on affirmative action in New Zealand), but only the absurd comparison being used to support their argument. It's the sort of wild comparison that gets thrown around on hotheaded internet message boards but that would get you laughed (or heckled) out of the room in any serious discussion of the issue.
It's like a schoolboy calling their teacher a Nazi for putting them on detention. There's an abstract point of comparison (authoritarian behavior), but the differences in scale, severity and underling motivation are so vast that the comparison is absurd. If someone seriously wants to argue against this particular form of affirmative action – and knows what South African Apartheid actually was – then they don't make this comparison.
(Similarly, if you think a teacher is being too authoritarian with their students, you won't make your case any more convincing by making comparisons with crazed dictators.)
Unsurprisingly, we did try this for a decade or two. It was an extensive and expensive failure and is widely researched and written about [1].
A minor boost to Māori in a waiting list point scoring system for list prioritisation has caused a knee jerk dismissal of the scheme as we see here. Absent from the shouting has been a solution to Māori living shorter lives with worse health [2]. The new scheme also reduces the impact of race on list priorities, as noted at the end of this article [3]. Race is a couple of points out of 100, most being clinical.
The point scoring system is a small part of the large changes underway in the system at the moment. The moves are primarily towards more autonomy for Māori within the healthcare system [4]. The background to this is a recognised failure in the system after a successful court action claiming Treaty of Waitangi obligations were not being met. They weren’t and aren’t [5].
With knowledge of the situation and what’s going on, ‘apartheid’ is a pretty radical take. To my knowledge even the dog whistle politicians in an election year haven’t called new the scheme apartheid.
Update: yes, our dog whistle politics have gone there.
You need stronger arguments than misusing the term "racism".
Consider two hungry kids at lunch. Consider the difference between stealing the fruit from one kid's plate, and giving extra fruit to the other kid. Both are special treatment. Think about what you can see that's different in these two situations that you would call the same thing.
Actually, no. Treating people differently based on race, is by definition racism - discriminating against people on the basis of their race.
And your analogy is a poor one for what is happening in NZ with regards to healthcare. Healthcare is a limited resource, and what NZ is doing is letting race be a factor when triaged patients in an environment of limited healthcare resources. You could literally be sicker than someone else, but if you're the wrong race, the other person get treatment first.
So for your analogy, it's more like there are two kids. One hasn't eaten in 3 days, the other 2 days, but the one that hasn't eaten in 3 days is a member of an "oppressive race" (without having committed any oppression themselves mind you, just their ancestors), so the other one gets to eat first.
Patients are triaged for medical care, it's always been that way - it's based on medical need, with the sickest treated first, and those who are less sick wait.
The new system now prioritized people based on race. You could be sicker than someone else, but if you're the wrong race, you wait.
This doesn't "even up" anything. It penalizes people for being the wrong race.
You don't solve racism, by being racist. It's an absurd idea.
Your link echos exactly what I'm talking about. This is a statement from one of the hospitals.
“Capital & Coast and Hutt Valley DHBs are prioritising Māori and Pacific in our surgical scheduling processes. The patients’ ethnicity is taken into account along with their level of clinical urgency and the number of days they have been on the waiting list within a given clinical priority band. It is unlikely that any other patients will be significantly affected as a result of this work.” - media statement, May 2020
The last statement "it is unlikely any other patient will be significantly affected" is laughable.
The goal is to affect patients - prioritize a specific ethnic group, so either the change does nothing (then why do it at all?), or it prioritizes certain patients (and if it does it must deprioritize others).
You appear to have missed the bit about clinical need again. It’s in your quote.
It’s a points system, with something like 2 out of the 100 points relating to ethnicity, per the links.
No one is penalised for their race. Groups are promoted due to their race. This isn’t the same thing, though from the perspective of your ‘score 70’ patient, I do agree that it’s splitting hairs.
What’s important to the scenario though, is that at present, Māori and Pacific Islanders get seen less by specialists, less clinical tests, less treatment and then worse outcomes. They die several years earlier than their Pakeha peers. It’s incredible that this is acceptable, but here we are.
Māori and Pacific Islanders are being discriminated against by the system, it’s just that their race demerit points are not nicely documented.
So getting promoted on lists by a couple of points is an attempt to even it up via forced functionality.
I don’t think you and I are ever going to agree that positive description should be used.
Other things are being tried. Part of the massive and overdue restructuring that’s underway to our healthcare system is going to be interesting to watch. “In each local community, partnerships between Iwi-Māori Partnership Boards, Health New Zealand’s regional and district teams, and the wider community will ensure Māori voices are heard, embedded in plans and services, and that health equity for Māori is non-negotiable.” [1].
We will see how it goes. The structural changes so far have been rather painful and seem clumsy when viewed from my adjacent seat.
No one is penalised for their race. Groups are promoted due to their race
Promoting one group by very definition penalized other groups. You can't have one without the other.
What’s important to the scenario though, is that at present, Māori and Pacific Islanders get seen less by specialists, less clinical tests, less treatment and then worse outcomes. They die several years earlier than their Pakeha peers. It’s incredible that this is acceptable, but here we are.
That's fine, then fix those issues. It's bizarre that a lack of medical care in one group is solved by reducing access to medical care in other groups.
We aren't going to agree on this.
As I said, that's been attempted for decades, and zero progress has been made over decades with billion spent. If you have an idea that hasn't been tried or isn't being tried, Im sure they'd love to hear it.
I'd not come across this term before. Odd (for me) to see a special term used to describe something that I see in almost any story reported across a range of publications on any one day.
> right now there's a odd vogue to think that a healthy democracy does things like ban political parties (currently an active debate regarding the AfD in Germany)
this is based on the idea of streitbare demokratie[0]. Which basically states that the foundation of the state (bundestag, bundesregerung and courts) has the right AND duty to defend itself against parties/elements who wish to abolish the "freiheitlich-demokratische Grundordnung" (freedom/democratic foundation/order).
This concept actually is worked out in various different laws in the Grundgesetz.
It solves the problem of the paradox of intolerance quiet well in my opinion, and considering germany's history it is a very, very good system to have.
A parliament that cannot initiate legislation and not even completely refuse legislation introduced to the session. Very weird.
In UK analogies it's more like the house of lords except it has less revision power on the legislation before it.
First: this is still direct influence by the people.
Second: UK parliament theoretically has this power, but in practice private members bills are either trivial, filibustered, or both ("nurses should have free parking at the hospitals they work in"). In practice this is up to the government, and given how much of the uk government is "convention" rather than constitution, it's almost impossible to untangle it without at least a politics degree.
Third: can you name literally even one other trade agreement that tries? If there is one, and there may be, I've not heard of it.
It's a trade agreement; the democratic part is unusual, one of the rare (IIRC unique) examples where one has a mechanism for self-updating by the people of the counties in that agreement rather than by the government of whichever country happens to be biggest and most able to throw its weight around.
You're welcome to not like the details of the democratic mechanism within the EU; ironically this is in part because some of the member state governments thought that making the EU more democratic would usurp the sovereignty of the member states.
• The Vatican (a "country" on paper; but seriously?)
• The Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta (not to be confused with the country of Malta; this lot have no territory)
• The Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific States
• The African Development Bank
• The Andean Community (another free trade area)
• Both the Commonwealth of Independent States (former soviet bloc) and the Commonwealth of Nations (former British Empire)
• The International Olympic Committee
…
The list of organisations sending delegations is pretty big, even just limiting to the ones important enough to get into Wikipedia; you can probably find a whole bunch more of small ones.
The EU itself stopped pushing the "just a trading zone" lie a long time ago, back when they renamed from the EEC to the EC and then the EU. It literally advertises itself as a project to unify Europe into a single country ("ever closer union"), which unfortunately would be the death of democracy in Europe because the EU is a totalitarian system in which the civil service controls Parliament rather than the other way around.
It is also a FTA. And unlike most (all?) other FTAs, it has democratic elections. All the funky stuff it can do is tied into that democratic process, because that is what the member states wanted.
> into a single country ("ever closer union")
The former is not the latter.
> which unfortunately would be the death of democracy in Europe
Bothering with elections and MPs is a bizarro mirror-world way of doing that.
That aside: Turning the EU into a country would require a massive treaty change; there's no way at all to forecast what this might look like given it's not even on the horizon yet.
They weren't even able to give UK citizens in the EU a way to claim EU citizenship despite several politicians wanting to make it available, because "EU citizen" is really just a shorthand for "citizen of an EU member state" rather than a coherent thing in its own right.
> because the EU is a totalitarian system
I work near to Checkpoint Charlie, I've been to the DDR and Stasi museums; if you think the EU is "totalitarian" you don't know what those words mean.
The way you're using the word, I think 100% of all treaties would fail, given they are not (generally? Ever?) negotiated directly by parliaments.
The EU has elections and MPs, but doesn't have democracy. Same as a lot of non-democratic societies throughout history.
MEPs are pretty much powerless, which is why the EP fills up with joke candidates who think the EU should be abolished or who don't even bother turning up at all.
Turning the EU into a country would require a massive treaty change
Why? Since Lisbon was rejected the EU treaties have been "self amending" (i.e. worthless). The EU routinely goes beyond its treaty-granted powers without pushback. It just gave itself powers to censor things globally, a power that appears in no treaty.
Also the EU already has: borders, taxes, a civil service, an army, a spy agency, a diplomatic corps, law making powers that override all others, a flag, a national anthem, a president, a cabinet, a central bank, a currency and dozens of other country-like things I'm forgetting. It's already more than half way there.
if you think the EU is "totalitarian" you don't know what those words mean.
The EU is a totalitarian system; the freedoms you have today that didn't exist in the DDR are because the EU has not yet been able to completely subsume the post-war countries and institutions put in place by the allies.
Nonetheless the fact remains that the EU is not a real democracy. In a real democracy, elections mean things. Elections to the EU Parliament don't because the MEPs aren't empowered to change anything. This reality was made brutally apparent when the self-proclaimed Parliament was entirely cut out of the process of choosing the leader of the government. Instead you got vDL, someone with no history as an MEP and who didn't campaign. Why did she get the job? Nobody knows! The tiny number of people who theoretically made that decision point-blank refuse to tell anyone how it was made. That's way closer to DDR style leadership than democracy.
Who gets to decide who is a Nazi or a Communist? Maybe one day you'll be declared a Nazi for disagreeing with something the government in power decrees or even because some social group disapproves of your lifestyle. Definitions are powerful and recently, quite flexible to achieve desired goals of those who make themselves the arbiters of definition.
It's actually not very difficult to distinguish who nazis are.
I see all these arguments waxing poetic about how dangerous it is to... I don't know, give anyone power? As if we haven't had these debates before. We have concrete examples of policies and behaviors that are harmful on fascist/Communist (big C is important) levels. We can compare someone's rhetoric and actions to those of people who have done the kinds of harm we want to prevent. We can use reasoning to parse their arguments instead of reacting emotionally. People do this every single day.
If it's really your concern that we can't define what dangerous ideologies are, then educate yourself, because we can.
>It's actually not very difficult to distinguish who nazis are.
It's very difficult because calling someone "Nazi" means you get to attack the "Nazi". So people who want to attack others just call them Nazis to justify it.
It's happened a lot in US politics, but for an example everyone here can agree on, "Ukraine is infested by Nazis" was one of the excuses for Russia invading Ukraine.
> It's very difficult because calling someone "Nazi" means you get to attack the "Nazi". So people who want to attack others just call them Nazis to justify it.
Yeah, that's not true. That isn't something that happens.
I'd be surprised if you can find even one news article about a non-fascist being called a Nazi and then attacked and everyone being ok with it. Nazis don't get punched as often as they should.
Russia invading Ukraine is not a good example. Much of the rest of the world said "No, you're full of shit and we're sending Ukraine missiles." I don't think anybody has actually supported Russia's "anti-Nazi" justification, even those countries economically bound to Russia and unwilling to resist them. It's just something Russia said, that doesn't mean it worked.
Further, international invasions are extremely different from internal politics are extremely different from personal/public interactions. You're painting broad strokes as if the entire planet of 8 billion people has the same mindset that "you can call anyone a Nazi and attack them." That doesn't even make sense. We are talking about US culture.
Finally, I shouldn't even be replying since it doesn't seem you read the majority of my previous comment. I've already said this: we know what Nazis are. You can call anybody anything, but whether or not they're a Nazi depends on if they hold Nazi beliefs.
In some countries (Germany and Austria, for example), Nazi propaganda is illegal. And in those countries much stronger evidence is necessary to convict someone of it. Baseless accusations on twitter are unlikely to work.
The Communists invaded and occupied my country for 45 years. The Nazis invaded and slaughtered almost all of our Jews. We know very well who is a Nazi or a Communist.
We don't want another Holocaust or Gulag camps here ever again. I'm fine with restricting some speech. It's a small price to pay.
What if the billionaires behind those parties, who funded those "nazi" or "communist" parties, funded a party and gave it a different name. Would it be ok then?
Because of criminalizing "deadnaming" or in spite of it?
For those that don't know, so-called "deadnaming" "is the act of referring to a transgender or non-binary person by a name they used prior to transitioning, such as their birth name."
At this point, there's lots of books and CDs out there with 'deadnames' on the cover, and movies and games with them in the credits.
"Who directed 'The Matrix'?" probably shouldn't be a controversial question, let alone one with potential answers that are considered offensive or even illegal.
I guess the idea is to provide some shields to people making a transition, as they could suffer ostrisation or threats from people who have animosity against transgender.
Not everyone is a world famous artist that certainly can hire a whole team of body guard h24 all year around if they feel like it's appropriate.
I'm not aware of the the law in question. It seems strange to me to target specifically naming the person with this or that name, rather than cover the case in a more generic way like creating threats on someone's life or social integrity through public release of intimate information.
Intentionally insulting someone already is a crime under German law, so the only real question is why deadnaming is not already covered?
And these kinds of laws also exist in more extreme "free-speech" countries like the United States (where the guarantee of free speech doesn't cover, for example, libel).
Not to say that the US is a country of unrestricted free speech, but the standard of libel/slander is extremely strict in the US relative to most other countries.
You must make intentionally untrue statements with the intent to harm that causes harm.
The truth is a perfect defense. Even if you thought you were lying, you are protected. If you believe what you are saying, you are protected. If you did not know for certain that you said a lie, you are protected. If you did not mean to cause harm, you are protected. If no harm occurred, even if you tried to cause harm, you are protected.
The standard is extremely hard to reach, possibly even too hard, and it is clearly qualitatively different than most other countries.
I agree that the US is different from most countries in terms of how difficult it is to prove slander and libel. But I don't think your description is quite accurate. Then again, I'm not a lawyer.
> The truth is a perfect defense. Even if you thought you were lying, you are protected. If you believe what you are saying, you are protected.
IIUC the truth is a perfect defense in most states, but in some states maliciously stated truths (insults, more or less) can be defamatory. For example, see Johnson v Johnson in Rhode Island, where one Clifford Johnson was required to pay compensatory damages for (more or less accurately) calling his ex-wife a "[redacted] whore" in public. (He was also initially ordered to pay punitive damages, but that was reversed on appeal.)
> If you did not know for certain that you said a lie, you are protected.
I don't think this is the case in most states. If you say something with reckless disregard for the truth, it can be defamatory.
> If you did not mean to cause harm, you are protected.
I think this is typically only true of defaming public figures.
libel and "insulting someone" in the sense of using slurs of defamatory remarks aren't obviously the same thing as referring to them by a previous name.
I'd be very surprised if the German law (if actually policed) expands to anything an individual might be insulted by, especially if the offense is one of self image.
Fixed that: "That should not [need to] be a criminal offence."
Much like many other things. But, alas, we do not yet live in a world where people treat each other with even the simplest basic respect and we have to force the issue via laws.
Should it be a criminal offense to call someone a useless layabout who will never amount to anything and should have been aborted?
I worry that we've started to use the ponderous blunt government legal system more and more widely for things that used to be resolved via society and community censure. The law should be restricted to the most serious and large scale community disrupting acts, not for policing every bit of cheating, insults and lying. It's very unsuited for the latter.
Worth noting that kiwifarms only negatively harms people who don't read it via the statoshistic terrorism mechanism.
Which would also apply to places like pre-Musk Twitter, reddit, tumblr and Facebook (and indeed every social media site), all of which have lead to targeted and sustained harassment of people, often for things they didn't actually do.
What is the 'community' in this case? The entire globe, all Internet users?
On a local scale, 'community censure' may work well. But not so much on a global scale, where a few determined activists anywhere in the world have the power to get a person fired, take away various online accounts or services, or maybe even have their banking services removed, all over issues of 'speech', with no due process.
The community of network operators exchanging routes over BGP. Get yourself an ASN and some IP space and join us! At the end of the day, the Internet is a collection of independent networks, interconnected voluntarily when there is mutual benefit to doing so.
And I think I agree that is the right level for this sort of thing to take place, even if I might disagree with both the specific decision and whether this sort of entity (monopoly level ISPs) should be able to make that decision.
Community standards cannot exist in a diverse multicultural society because there no longer is a broad agreement on what those standards should be. Even things as basic as prohibitions on murder have various different "well, in this particular situation" exclusions that differ by culture. So anything that used to be community enforced now has to be elevated to legal enforcement, with some cultures disadvantaged and others favored by the choice of what the government will enforce on all regardless of individual cultural standards.
Or we can let different communities and cultures keep their different social norms and accept a bit of friction/"injustice" when people from one culture interact with another.
I think it depends on where (or even if) you draw the line on free speech when it comes to verbal harassment.
Here's a quick test. Let's say Bob goes for a walk, but Bob's neighbor, John, is a complete dick and whenever Bob leaves his house to go for a walk, John follows him and just hurls non-stop insults at Bob.
Should John's behavior be illegal? You could argue that as long as he's not trespassing anywhere, and he has the right to free speech, then John should be legally allowed to do this. In that case, it makes no sense to make deadnaming a criminal offense. There's no discussion to be had, as we've decided that asshole-ish speech is not illegal.
If you say no, it's verbal harassment, and should be illegal, then you're saying free speech does have limits, and we just gotta decide if deadnaming is bad enough to be illegal.
John's behavior already is illegal in most Western jurisdictions. Your example does not demonstrate why deadnaming in particular needs to be a criminal offense.
Political harmony is a problem if forced, but a common vision shared by much of society is a strength if arrived at through healthy, intellectually honest debate.
Political debate is fine and healthy, but it should not be possible to end a debate by being louder, more obnoxious and more ready to do violence than the other debaters.
Of course, but having lived in a lot of “politically harmonious countries” I’ve noticed it’s not harmonious due to some universal belief in the political system, but a combination of political apathy, learned helplessness, political oppression (often subtle) or some cultural belief that you don’t question leaders or that they possess some special attributes that no one else does.
