Politics Discussion Thread December 2012

OrphanWilde

I skipped October and November owing to election season, but opening back up:

Top-level comments should introduce arguments; responses should be responses to those arguments.
Upvote and downvote based on whether or not you find an argument convincing in the context in which it was raised. This means if it's a good argument against the argument it is responding to, not whether or not there's a good/obvious counterargument to it; if you have a good counterargument, raise it. If it's a convincing argument, and the counterargument is also convincing, upvote both. If both arguments are unconvincing, downvote both.
A single argument per comment would be ideal; as MixedNuts points out here, it's otherwise hard to distinguish between one good and one bad argument, which makes the upvoting/downvoting difficult to evaluate.
In general try to avoid color politics; try to discuss political issues, rather than political parties, wherever possible.

As Multiheaded added, "Personal is Political" stuff like gender relations, etc also may belong here.

I skipped October and November owing to election season, but opening back up:

Top-level comments should introduce arguments; responses should be responses to those arguments.
Upvote and downvote based on whether or not you find an argument convincing in the context in which it was raised. This means if it's a good argument against the argument it is responding to, not whether or not there's a good/obvious counterargument to it; if you have a good counterargument, raise it. If it's a convincing argument, and the counterargument is also convincing, upvote both. If both arguments are unconvincing, downvote both.
A single argument per comment would be ideal; as MixedNuts points out here, it's otherwise hard to distinguish between one good and one bad argument, which makes the upvoting/downvoting difficult to evaluate.
In general try to avoid color politics; try to discuss political issues, rather than political parties, wherever possible.

As Multiheaded added, "Personal is Political" stuff like gender relations, etc also may belong here.

Preposition: Despite both reactionary and communist obsession with the Right-Left axis, throughout modern (post-Berlin Wall) Europe, political forces are best (most predictively) divided NOT between Left and Right, but rather between those forces that look up to Brussels, vs those forces that look up to Moscow. Independent-ist forces exist, but they're largely irrelevant as by nature they are isolated and thus weak.

Example: 2012 elections in Greece saw both the far-left and the far-right parties rise to far greater electoral heights than before. Did Greece's Overton window dramatically widen in both directions? No -- what led these political parties to such success was not widely different positions, but their common position against the European Union. Greece didn't move towards both directions, it moved towards the single direction represented by both Communists and Neonazis: the Moscow direction, the direction of hating the EU.

It sounds incoherent to argue that Greece lies politically both to the leftmost of the rest of the EU, and to its rightmost. But one could coherently argue that Greece is both the least Universalist nation in the EU (least concerned about human rights/democracy/equality) -- and also the EU nation that looks up to Russia.

The Orange Revolution in Ukraine was another case where the political forces in question were best divided between pro-European and pro-Moscow, rather than between Left and Right.

How well does that explain politics in Western Europe, where for the most part there are no pro-Moscow political parties? It certainly appears that Russian influence on politics is negligible in Western Europe - is this incorrect? Why is hating the EU necessarily a pro-Moscow position?

Please explain how the political parties map onto your axis in, say, Britain.

8

Politics Discussion Thread December 2012

8

8

8

Politics Discussion Thread December 2012

8

8