@Carcer So uh, Brexit party. Do they have an actual agenda in the European parliament or are they more of a "vote us to show your commitment to Brexit" movement?

that last one

though off the back of this roaring success Farage has announced they intend to contest whenever the next GE is as well, and might actually make a proper manifesto

Hmh, i've been worrying about this phenomenon

Farage's personal agenda in the European Parliament has always been to get paid in order to not turn up or do any damn work

There's anti-EU movements who deliberately advance unpopular policies in the EU in order to shift public sentiment, it feels silly and contrary to the ideals of democracy

he and his ilk are definitively right wing nationalists though and they're a short walk from nazi ideology

:I can't comment on that, not really knowing them. Our nationalists are a bit more respectable in some matters but the two that got into the European parliament are a drunkard who complains about the EU despite European money literally keeping his sawmill business afloat, and a young earth creationist with a seriously anti-scientific agenda.

I haven't paid enough attention to what he and UKIP did in the EP last time to know if they get up to those kinds of shenanigans but I feel I can probably confidently say that they would deliberately vote to be frustrating

I think being committed, in good faith, to improve EU should be a requirement for serving in the European Parliament. If you want to see the EU gone or at least your country out of it, you should have some other means to express (eg. national parliament)

I don't agree

MEPs are supposed to be representative of the interests of their people. If the interest of their people is that they don't actually want to be in the EU, that should be represented

I think it's a dumb position but it's too difficult and dangerous to start putting criteria like that on representation

at best you're only going to strongly fan the flames of dissent by declaring that people who feel that way don't get to be represented here

it would be nice if parties who pulled the type of sabotage crap where they advance unpopular policies just to make the EU look bad at home would get called out on it

@Carcer It's not concretely enforceable, I agree

But I don't think they should not be represented, I think they should not be represented in that particular place.

It's like if someone joins your barn-raising despite thinking it's a stupid idea, torches the whole thing just to say "hey I told you it was a stupid idea".

@kviiri the distinction is that you and everyone else has to live in the barn you're building whether they like it or not

if it was genuinely something which didn't affect them then sure - your club only lets in people who actually want to be in the club, that makes sense

but this is not that

No, I think this is the same thing that the radical communists around here did back in the days

encouraged by the Soviet Union, they opposed Social Democratic work to improve worker rights because that would postpone the revolútion they wanted.

I agree that that kind of sabotage is bad

So in their quest for labor rights, they opposed improving labor rights. It's not in the spirit of democracy, it's political plays that I would like to see gone.

So why is that not the case for EU?

It's still bad in the EU

where I don't agree is that trying to prevent it by imposing restrictions on who is allowed to stand is acceptable

Yeah, I agree any restriction in actuality would be silly and non-enforceable

Maybe what I mean is, this should be talked about more and it should be condemned more openly.

it's a crap thing that we have to deal with, or find some other way to deal with, because denying representation to people is undemocratic and will make the situation worse

yes, definitely

when they do this kind of stuff it should be exposed and laid bare and ideally voters would punish them for it

though to be honest I don't have enough faith in the media and the electorate to really see that happening

Denying representation to people is a different thing, though. Denying a particular person from office because they are suspect of acting in bad faith is different than from depriving people (the voters) of representation

yeah, but what you said was "If you want to see the EU gone or at least your country out of it"

having a politically anti-EU stance is not the same thing as using underhanded methods to sabotage the project

@Carcer Yeah, basically there's so much going on that the best source for truth is the political opponents of whoever is being dirty, but that's always a partial source

you can be anti-EU in the EP and campaign/vote for measures that reduce centralised control, etc. etc. without it being deceitful or malicious

@Carcer Yeah, I concede that, but I'm not exactly sure what the anti-EU people actually oppose. The union itself, or particular rules or regulations that they could easily target in an honest manner consistent with their ideals

@kviiri column A, column B

And I see trying to deregulate EU and reduce its influence as a possibly good faith attempt to improve EU

@kviiri but that's also a legitimate first step on the road to dissolving the EU entirely

@Carcer Yeah, and I think that's a legitimate way to pursue dissolving EU

okay

Alternatively, deciding that in your national system

I mean, that one's country wants to leave

that system doesn't seem to work so well

based on my subjective experience

:-( yeah

anyway I gotta go shopping

there is that old quote from Robert E. Howard

> “Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.”

I was kinda hoping to Brexit to dissuade "Fixiters" (and it's a relatively fringe viewpoint here) but some still cling to the fantasy that the process could've been easy if Evil EU hadn't <mumble mubmle> to sabotage it

call this a over simplification, but I think that many of our problems sprout from the fact that some politicians apparently must think they are playing a football game and therefore think it is fine to act like football hooligans.

@Derpy Hehe

Btw neat tidbit I learned a few days ago

Boris Johnson's great-greatgrandfather was Ali Kemal, foreign minister of the Ottoman Empire

(for just a few months IIRC, but still)

@kviiri see this old message of mine

ew.

as you may guess, nothing has changed over the year.

Our mainstream-ish anti-EU party PS has gotten, worryingly, more extreme and frightfully good at their advertising.

"haha just a joke but hey if you took that seriously it's your problem"

please don't remind me that boris johnson exists

we are only short months away from him likely being the next prime minister

But anyway they had this advertising video which was staged like the typical "iterated nightmare"

A guy wakes up to a minaret where morning prayers are being called because EU has made Islam the state religion, screams, wakes up again seeing it was just a nightmare, goes to prepare his sauna, gets caught by EU agents who have forbidden wood-heated stoves, wakes up screaming next to another man because EU has made gay marriage mandatory...

Basically it's utterly stupid, but works well with people's emotions: being "funny" while also poking at their fears at the same time. No matter how totally ungrounded those fears may be.

The gay marriage thing in particular is just completely absurd. People keep repeating these "kids aren't allowed to be girls or boys anymore, nothing can have a gender so no one feels bad" meme for years and I still don't understand where they get it.

Or that "oh now gays want special rights" (=exactly the same rights straight couples have had for ages...? Special, how?)

At least it's plausible there'll be a minaret here someday.

(fun fact of the day - just to relax a little during the ongoing argument. I was writing an unit test method to check if the current implementation of an "IMO NUMBER" validity check I have added to an app was working as expected. I added a failure test with a fake IMO Number and the test didn't pass. Why? Because out of sheer bad luck the fake invalid number I used apparently is actually valid. "1234567" is a valid IMO number ^_^' )

oh woe x)

and on an unrelated notice, seems that most of the EU Amazon sites are currently plagued with bootleg anime figures.

I mean, the prices do not match.

Kotobukiya Nanachi figure is about 8k Yen, this one can't realistically cost 25€ :P

And no wonder.... the myanimefigure database claims there is a bootleg version of the figure ^_^'

oh, hi @trogdor

hi