How many EU beaureaucrats got their training in East Germany, I wonder?
Or is it rather that they are too young and do not know about/remember what constant surveillance does to trust in a society?
Believe it or not, the late USSR bureaucracy was anything but left-wing. It only held onto the name through inertia, greatly muddying the definitions of left- and right-wing.
I believe the most accurate description is that left-wing are ideas emphasizing equality and right-wing are ideas emphasizing hierarchy/inequality.
On the extreme end one way you have anarchist ideals (everyone is equal because everyone has full ability to do everything they want) but you also have some failed states (everyone is equal because everyone ekes out a miserable existence). On the other end you have, well, Hitler, dictatorships, and yes, literal bureaucracy, which is just a dictatorship hierarchy by another name.
It was highly collectivist and little private property. It was also working hard on building the new homo sovieticus. And the idea of world domination never really went away. It was also equally poor, especially if you skip party elite. Capital was not a thing. Well, social capital did play a big role :)
I can’t agree that left wing is for equality while right wing is anti-equality. Unless you’re talking about equality of outcomes, which is madness IMO.
I’d rather say that left is for equality and right wing is for fairness. Equality leads to unfair outcomes for better-equipped. While fair treatment leads to unequal results. Both has pros and cons.
Left-wing is not collectivism, it's not low private property, it's not world domination, it's not poor. The NSDAP was highly collectivist - they all had to work together to build the master race, no? I imagine North Korea doesn't have very much private property.
The original right wing were monarchism apologists. Hitler's right wing set up a hierarchy based on race. Mussolini's right wing set up a hierarchy based on nationality, and later race, and was also explicitly collectivist, by the way, speaking of "the debacle of individualism" and "collaboration between the classes". And capitalism makes a hierarchy based on the number next to everyone's name in the bank's spreadsheet (which is also what a social credit score is, by the way). How many more examples do you want?
The right wing usually defines fairness as some kind of meritocracy based on the hierarchy du jour. For example the current right wing thinks it's fair that people with higher numbers get more stuff. Hitler thought it was fair the German empire would belong to Aryans. Mussolini wanted to expand the Italian empire. And the monarchism apologists thought it was fair that a king's children would have special rights. Sure, they support fairness, by defining it their way, in ways that most of us actually wouldn't call fair.
Hitler was national socialist for a reason :) Mussolini roots are in left wing too and was sort of socialism without internazional element.
And yes, ultimately left wing is collectivist.
It is fair that people who contribute more get back more. Otherwise we have USSR style mess where people ain’t incentivised to contribute. Because people were getting same compensation regardless of their contribution. Although at the end of the day it did became fair - nobody contributed much.
CCTV? I would also be extremely surprised to learn that European agencies don't have access to the Five Eyes program, or even their own analogue.
Face it, every state wants a hand in the big data gravy train. Especially organisations like the EU that believe their regulation, centralisation and bureaucracy is an unquestionable good.
they can't use it unless authorized and no, there is no single evidence that EU is engaged in massive surveillance on their citizens.
Also because, for those who don't know, EU cannot do it by itself.
It depends from the legislation of every single member.
So I'm sure in Poland and Hungary they are trying to do it against political opposition, but I'm also sure that in my Country it is not happening (I know people working for that department, it's mostly because incompetence and laser focus on other threats like terrorism and organized crime, which we are pretty good at preventing)
And most of all as European I support the idea that EU should protect interests of EU, where 450 million people live.
It's bad enough we have to witness and pay the consequences of a war at our borders because Americans did nothing to prevent it, that we have to allow them to have their military bases on our soil, that they are now sending more troops to said bases, let's at least have our own regulations created by, let's remember this fact too, elected representatives of the European population.
Silly fear of communism/socialism? :) Why would we be afraid of the thing that messed up with us for 50 years? :) It's funny when Westerners who have no practical experience talk down to us how we should throw away our practical experience...
Born & living in eastern europe... Well, technically born in USSR... Maybe that makes me unqualified to talk europe and socialism :)
> because it's silly American paranoia, there a lot of socialism in every political platform and State politics, social welfare and labour in most of the EU members.
What silly American paranoia in eastern europe? And social democracy has nothing to do with socialism.
> Yeah like my country is not at the border with the former Yugoslavia or hadn't the stronger communist party in all the west.
There's a massive difference between cosplaying commies in communist party in a free country and living under socialismus-communismus regime. As our own communists learned after being annexed into USSR.
> What silly American paranoia in eastern europe? And social democracy has nothing to do with socialism.
A relatively high percentage of Americans believe that getting health insurance from the government will lead to a Stalinist like era in America. We can't even make simple improvements to our bureaucracy like a federal ID system instead of having all 50 states issue seperate IDs because of this.
Many Americans cannot differentiate between the social programs of Marxist countries and the anti-democratic single party systems which concentrated state power and made them repressive and corrupt.
It's a bit like thinking that because a country starts building an interprovincial highway system it is going to become fascist Italy or Germany.
I know that part. But in this case another user, who seems to be european, calls my experience in Eastern europe „American paranoia“.
It feels like some people have such a strong irrational love for certain political system that they can't accept that some people dislike it for valid reasons.
Maybe actual American paranoia is when people blame US of A for whatever when their arguments run out.
