It's actually democracy that's fragile if the majority of the people gets below a certain standard and also lose hope that its going to be better by current politics.
This doesn't start wars but it makes it easier for a power shift where few people hold most of the power in a country and then the treshold for war starts to get low.

Europe have been going in this direction since the economy crisis and there's no end in sight for common people. Nations might be recovering but they're doing so on the expense of said common people. That's a dangerous road our politicians are going down.

I'm not talking about constant or even big wars but instead of a mindset. Europe seems to breed megalomaniac leaders and whole nations that actually let all this out once in a while like a volcano. Sure all continents have these too but they seem to not go kaboom against their neighbours in as grand ways as we here in europe.

Besides haven't recent cross science studies pointed a finger at weather, as in weather changes dropping crop production and triggering aggression in many forms in ancient South America?

You realise this know ? We've been denouncing these pseudo-rationnal pseudo-negociations as a hypocritical sham for pages. Of course the demands were absurdly dishonest, and those who justified them as "required" (and who blamed greek people for rejecting them out of "bad will") were just manipulative.

On the other side, you have the consensus on the catastrophic impact (for Greece) of a greek exit suddenly denied by the foreigners who want the EU to get rid of Greece now that they can. All the previous years, when this exit would have been inconvenient or the rest of Europe, nobody denied it would have been devastating for Greece. Until recently, it was even openly instrumentalized as a doomsday threat. But suddenly, "hey guys, it would do you good, you know".

Anyway. While we're at it.

"In some areas yes, in other areas not." ? Cool. Your lungs are about to explode, but let me pressure more, cause, hey, your digestive system works fine, so stop worrying.

So you really didn't get the point. "Complexity" for you still stays at the nose-on-calculator technocratic level, while it is precisely about the necessity to take other factors in account. Factors that cannot be "simply" compressed by more technocratic diktats.

What I attempted to explain to you twice already, is that colonial imposition of a conqueror's system (no matter how "logical" this system looks like in the eyes of those whose society is already so much shaped around it that it became internalized as "common sense") does not work better or faster with "more dakka". Human lives, cultural representatons, traditional systems, endure. Unless you simply genocide and repopulate, you cannot simply replace one culture with another. And you cannot replace one society with another without replacing the culture.

I gave the exemple of that fake "oh noes the greeks they refuse to reform land property" argument. They don't "refuse" to do it. But shifting from one coherent system (even if it doesn't make sense to rational-legal europeans) to another coherent system (that doesn't always make sense locally) is a hellish, difficult, tedious, problem - a problem still unsolved in many regions on the planet where this transformation has been imposed these last decades. It is not a matter of sending enough cops and bureaucrats. Regardless of the propaganda, in Greece this "reform" has been undergoing for ages, at the cost of much injustice (deadlines after which unresolved properties had been arbitrarily requisitionned by the State). I don't know how to breach your ethnocentrism in few words, because that would require to explicit a lot of false obviousness and implicit "goes without saying" that do not go without saying, but... Wherever you have centuries of "customary law" informally defining blurry lots (because strict frontiers were not particularily useful) owned by blurry collectives (such as a "family"), in a system that was efficient in itself for what it was being used for, the transition to individual strictly defined land partitions raises many issues for all those involved : the power that one person ends up having on the land (being able to sell it away against the will of the rest), the fleeting consensus about the plot's boundaries being challenged by the need to formalize it ("i always thought we agreed it went as far as that stone ? - no this stone"), etc. Families, communities, get torn apart. Representations of the man-land relationships are forcefully redefined. Unanswered questions (that used to stay unanswered when they didn't need precise answers) become disputes, which cannot be solved. Unwritten (flexible) agreements (based for instance on family memories) turn to bureaucratic violence. It's the hell of a rabbit hole. And far from this, their ass nailed on their seat, Schäuble-like technocrats, completely oblivious of the very existence of enduring alternate systems, shrug and go "hey, all they have to do is to solve that shit, why isn't it done yet".

That is one exemple, but many other sub-systems to reform are deeply rooted in cultural values and everyday life definitions. This includes many aspects of "corruption" (perceived, from afar, as a mere criminal transgression of obviously brilliant and sound regulations and enlightened "bureaucratic indifference"), that are rooted in enduring networks of solidarities, some region-based, some history-based, some based on the definition of self and family links (the importance of extended family as opposed to the western individualism and restrictive "core family" vision), etc. Again, ethnocentric ignorance make it all look simple and straighforward. "Make a new law". But laws precisely weight little in front of enduring cultural values (and their own set of morality, guilt, duty, mutual responsability). Even when (as in Greece) opposing moral systems are clashing and tearing families apart, you cannot expect the country to switch, at the snap of a fingers, to the full univocal endorsement of the logics of the dominant foreign power. Especially as different logics, no matter how mutually incompatible they are, and how much dysfunctional when forcefully overlapping, are grounded in independantly valid moral worldviews.

These are the levels of complexity that are entirely ignored (worldwide) by the ethnocentered, technocratic, colonial, "suffices to make new laws" wordlviews. You can wave as many "speed is of the essence" arguments, but sociocultural transformation (if even desirable at all in the absolute) are not something that can be enforced and quickened with righteous might and legal threats. The planet does not work like that. "Doing cuts faster" or "imposing more complex rules" is not what tackles these issues. And a lot of other domains than these exemples raise the issues of "what is really at stake for the people" (what -culturally- the military means, what the church means, what the state means, etc). Skip the right and wrong aspect of any of it : you simply cannot invert social representations by shouting loudly enough, and you cannot enforce changes without popular endorsement and legitimacy.

I really strongly advise that you do some research on the issues of colonial administrations and cultural resistances. Especially in countries where the contrast of logics (between locals and colonists) are even more clear-cut than within "europe", as more directly readable situations can serve as a good starting point to apprehend closer, more ambiguous contexts (closer contexts that can also include regional problems withing a given european country). Or else, it's like... dunno. Need an analogy.

Like playing kerbal without any consideration for stuff like symetry, stability, air friction, weight distribution, etc. And looking only at one parameter (add MORE ROCKETS! why does it whirl and explode? ADD MORE!!). That is exactly what finance maniacs are doing. That is the insanity of economic reductivism. And as it ails, tables are eventually flipped in the name of cultural reductivism (mere culturalist "they are like that, they are inherently evil and absurd, nuke them") which is another denial (of the complexity, ambivalence, and rationalities of cultural variations). Another facet of the same incompetence.

There are simply parameters that have to be taken in account. And they set limits to the colonial expectations of instant sociocultural convergence. If demands (and schedules) are not adapted to it, of course it'll be either perpetual disaster or ragequit.

And as we are so trained to either overlook these aspects (in favor of exclusive financial logic) or naturalize them as monstruosities (beh, greeks are just greeks anyway), an actual european integration is really far from the horizon. The irony is that the presence of Greece in Europe was often presented as an important opportunity for the inclusion of a cultural interface to the "eastern world". I guess more intermediary interfaces would have been needed between Greece and Germany...

I didn't read all of what you said and don't know the discussion you're having with Trilarion and eRe4s3r but I take it your gist is the inertia in cultures. That's a very well known historical phenomenon. One I have been thinking about a lot when reading news about the Greek crisis.
It feels like european countries are doing the same mistakes they did during the colonial era.

I personally don't care what the creditors want either, and they have definitely made a mess of things by looking too short term- they really needed a far more long term approach from the time of the first bailout, the worst thing is giving Greece money but not enough to actually fix the problem, just prolong it. In essence, that approach spends (wastes, really) money while not actually fixing things.

However, the creditors care what the creditors want, and they want quick money. Much as I (or you) may wish it were different it isn't, and they give every indication that they won't accept anything other than outright, near immediate, privatisation and screw any long term consequences. It's a bit ironic that that is the same philosophy, in reverse, that got Greece into the mess, but politics is politics.

Schauble said that even prior to the agreement, that they didn't want the bailout, and I don't think anyone anywhere with a grip on reality expects this deal to work, not just in Germany. The only people who want it are those who value the political ideal of a united, federal Europe over reality. I really wish Germany had put their foot down, understandable they didn't given the reaction they'd get but it would be best, ultimately, for all involved if someone just made the cut instead of half arsing solutions every few years- and I think everyone knows that even if Greece III goes through there will need to be a Greece IV a few years later unless there's a massive debt writedown, not just the IMF.

I wouldn't be surprised if the agreement falls apart anyway, if the IMF are serious about not contributing it's basically dead in its current form and all the votes about it are window dressing. Best realistic case is probably that Greece gets bridging finance while the agreement falls apart and uses any time until then to prepare for a grexit and nudrachma, sadly given the popularity of the Euro in Greece that seems politically untenable for Tsipras unless he is able to say that he was forced into it.

Informing myself and forming opinion is a process.. one where I have no qualms to admit I was partially or entirely wrong. ;)

And learning such things changes how I view other things. Had I known Germany explicitly favors a Grexit and THEN debt cut it makes a lot more sense why a debt cut without that condition was so harshly rebuked in the negotiations for the bailout. It also makes me completely flabbergasted why Tsipras canned Vourafakis. Probably the only person in the Greek government that knew that a Grexit would lead to debt cut negotiations with support from Germany but anything else would not. So in the end, all sides lost because the worst possible compromise was agreed on.. sigh

IMF participation is not mandatory in how the treaty is worded (so far, anyway).... ;)

And I think Germany would definitely negotiate a debt cut.. once Greece is no longer in the Eurozone. And not a single second before. While France wants these absurd bailouts (likely with a lot less strings attached) to become "the thing" that the Eurozone does in these situations. But Germany putting the boot down is really hard (not just for historical reasons) when we have far more severe problems at hand with refugees. Where such a power (use/abuse?) would definitely backfire....

And yeah, Schäuble was pretty clear he considers these bailouts a waste of time. So this 3 year extension is to get to elections.. and beyond.

It's politics alright... and I still think this is a historical relevant event. Not the referendum this topic has in title though. That was just.. a tiny note in this. The Greek people may have had more foresight than the Greek government in the end... what a mess.

Yeah. Although without culturalist essentialism (there are a lot of tensions within greece between different clashing and transforming values : moral dilemmas for individuals, and complex -contradictory- contextual endorsement of conflicting values... which is also the case, to various extents and in various ways, everywhere else), without universalist evolutionism (It is not a matter of one society being "late" on some natural evolution axis upon which another is more objectively "advanced", it's only a matter of mutual compatibilities and one-sided adaptations demands) and without condescending paternalism (the cultural representations that clash with the externally imposed logics are not flaws of morality and rationality : many make sense within the historical context of Greece and in particular its last century).

But yes, these issues are exactly what we should have already learnt from our history of (external and internal) colonialism. Well, lessons we did learn, but "we" does not include politicians and trash journalists...

And of course, the technoratic reduced-to-finance narrative being, itself, riddled with manipulative lies, does not help either.

You're aware it was a recurring demand from the eurogroup, right ?

Media, democracy and networks. Add to that lobbying from all kinds of capitalistic parts of our society. It's strange our politicians aren't raving Reagans all of them.

Though truly I see this Greece dilemma in two ways.
1: It's great they had a vote and brought the actual people that is the physical EU (The people is EU. Not the free market and its Capital.) to the front. That was needed for EU.
2: Let them loose from EMU. They need that for their economy. If not give Greece a epic steel bath BUT give greece people food, medicin and other necessities of life. That much EU owns them.

Asian history is filled with wars, strife and rises and falls of empires. Some empires went as far as to drive certain people and cultures extinct. Even a good part of the middle east could be considered part of Asia too.

I disagree. With the exception of the Crimean crisis and what's happening in the far right of Eastern Europe (an argument could be made for a few small incidents in recent history), European citizens haven't known true war in almost an entire century. Newer generations barely know what a conflict looks like. It's a matter of culture now and willingness to go to war is lowering in every country in Europe.

Of course, I merely don't understand why a sovereign nation would accept such a (surely only populist) demand... And in reverse such a "demand" would only earn you laughter. So why? Just for fear of a Grexit that is only not accepted currently because elections are closing ?

Seems to me with Tsipras not kicking Varoufakis the austerity/bailout would have been stopped.

Yeah as I said my Asian history is really lacking so I'll not go googling and stuff to continue discussing that. I'll take your word for it.

Wait what? Slow down a bit and get your chain of facts more...apparent.
So you're saying europes new generation barely knows what a conflict is like, they don't understand what a war is and culture is the main thing.

...

Well Hello there Great War to finish all wars and to be so deadly that no other wars will have no point in being started.

Your argument is like a document taken straight out of before World War 1.

Yeah, it isn't mandatory in a literal sense since they're still negotiating/ about to negotiate the details. But, the IMF are slated to provide a significant amount of funding (16.4bn suggested) which would need alternative sourcing, and the bailout would be left politically out on a limb if the IMF does not contribute, especially after their on the record opposition to a no/ minimal debt restructuring approach. That leaves them very exposed politically if (likely when) something goes wrong, because opponents can say that even the IMF opposed it. It is hard to see the IMF's and Germany and pals positions being reconciled either, they seem to be mutually exclusive.

At some point the political cost of continuing the same course must overtake the political cost of Greece leaving, even for someone like Hollande whose country has staked a lot of prestige on the Euro project.

I'd hope that a debt cut could be negotiated after a grexit, but I do worry that there will be a sort of role reversal where France and pals want to 'punish' Greece for grexiting and fight any debt reduction to prevent anyone else thinking they'd get the same 'reward' for leaving.

Edit: Read the rest of your post to Trilarion, and want to add in here a positive note. I might disagree with you a lot, but your intent is commendable. Interestingly, I could summarize your message as almost anti-progressive: caution and conservation of traditions as the normal, change should be done gradually and carefully. Funny huh? :) Anyway, I can't stop myself from adding a friendly jab, that whenever folks (like me) try to argue the deeper ethical aspects of cultural or economical topics, you guys (yes, it is a generalization, because I don't want to single you out for this) are the ones that refuse to engage at that level, as if the morality was so neatly and clearly defined a priori.

Now my inital post follows, on comments you made to Eraser (sorry, I'm not checking the exact spelling of that nick):


You're simplifying somewhat the dynamic: the timing element matters, Grexit would be bad for Greece in short term and potentially good in the medium term, etc...

Anyway, I really want to highlight again your othering dynamic, which is imo the big moral difference between us. Do you see how your attribution of dishonesty and manipulation completely precludes the possibility that some sincerely believe the propaganda? I'm not even disputing the factual phenomena, which is a completely different discussion... still it is apparent to me that there is a conflation done here where a wrong choice must imply a bad person.

This is the root of intolerance, as you have so eloquently expressed earlier. And I'm singling you out here, precisely because this blind spot of yours strikes me as very, very tragic.

Ah, I see.
yes, there is huge layer in the European mindset, which originates from not very rich on resources and limited in housing area. Europe is like a fish pond, big fishes can't live long without outside feeding.
It resulted in easy dehumanisation in European population to feed European empires even after Renaissance.
For comparison, Russia developed in very rich for resources, not very hospitable area, somewhat scarce for food.
For us there is no point in capturing land - we have enough of our own, there is enough for everyone. Russian nobles owned territories comparable to modern France in size.
There is no point in pillaging - mining own resources is safer. Plus, befriended neighbours can help during problems caused by climate.
And scarce food made us dependant on trade, we respect fair deals