They are not. I was born in socialist Czechoslovakia and it was hell. Not the most brutal hell socialists have created on earth, but close enough. It was also very dysfunctional and the society was deformed and sick.
Todays democracy in the west is waaaaaay better in every sense. No question about it. But at the same time I start to see the same tendencies the communists in our grey and falling eastern block had. My bullshit sensors are blinking red. More and more of them.
I think this is where people get quite confused. People point to the illiberal and undemocratic things in liberal democracies as proof of the problems with liberal democracy. But the point is, we have a standard by which we can measure against, that our societies are supposed to live up to. We can point out an example of government censorship, and recognize that's illiberal. The philosophical ideal isn't the problem. The problem is we're not living up to it.
The good news, is we have a bunch of people jumping up and down demanding we do live up to those ideals. And the push back does work, when the voices get loud enough.
So far, those of us who push back and yell, are not being disappeared and sent to re-education camps. Which is a pretty important thing to think about, when idiot libertarians claim we're supposedly living in a totalitarian states now.
I guess that's some guys version fo kicking and screaming.
I'd be a very moderate and silently doing my thing, if EU didn't make a lot of stupid decisions directly impacting me. All the chat control proposals, kyc, cash limits, dumb energy, agricultural and industrial policies etc. It's pretty much an attack on a lot of things I care about or need. Making me pretty radical.
Voting harder won't help. The current Czech members of the EU parlament vote in what I see mostly reasonable way.
Democracy is about screaming. Organizing. Protesting. Operating through civil society organizations. It's not merely about voting.
Not my kinda schtik.
"Leave me alone! Do what you like, as long as it doesn't involve me and harm to me". That's my prefered state of things (pun intended).
BTW Czechoslovakia split to Czech Republic and Slovakia a few years after the iron curtain fell. It was a relatively painless process and probably it led to much less tensions later on. It's something like 10 and 5 million people. Probably could split even further and I'd be very curious where is the optimum for 21st century.
EU? I wish it was just a fee trade union, nothing more. At this point it feels more like a government for governments, where my vote means absolutely nothing.
Yeah. I agree the EU is deeply in need of serious structural reform. But I think political disintegration in the form of more Brexit-like secessions is a likely scenario if that doesn’t happen. Which is how it *should* work.
I actually had a fairly intense "European Studies" class during my masters degree and it was quite eye-opening to me at the personal level.
The articles and texts the professors gave us very explicitly said that the EU has been leveraged by state-level politicians from the very beginning to bypass democratic controls and implement policies that they'd never be able to implement otherwise.
As I said, they are explicit about it, as in boasting about how clever they are in finding a smart way to implement their benevolent tyrant ideas, for the people, without the people.
I've heard about it for a looong time and either didn't care at the time or dismiss the critics of EU as alarmist. At that time I was building my biz and it was all I could think about. Not that there was anything I could do to change the direction that EU took (other than becoming career politician - maybe - but again, not my schtik).
It's probably one of the most successful examples and a case I had in mind when I wrote my note above. 5-10 million people is quite maneageable in today's terms. I would like even smaller communities, but I'm not a maximalist and this is a size I could compromise about.
5m is prob good, 2m maybe better, but of course this is not really applicable to bigger cities which are already much bigger than this.
10m is still a bit too big, you still get several regions with different needs and center-edge disconnects. I'm sure Slovaks would say the same thing, "Bratislava vs the east" etc.
Who knows if it's a good idea anywas? Would it create some very poor countries next to a rich ones just because of some geographic features? Honestly, I don't know even if I like the general idea.
