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We Need A Strong United European Union
Eurosceptics try to put down the European Union. But we need a strong united Europe for geopolitical reasons.
History and the present day shows what happens to weak divided geopolitical regions. Look at Africa, South East Asia and the Middle East. They become proxy battle grounds for the superpowers.
The European Union has brought Western and now most of Eastern Europe decades of peace, prosperity, freedom, human rights, democracy and geopolitical stability.
Look at how some countries get treated when they are on their own.

We need less corrupt politician, that all.

Corrupts politicians are not good. Bur democracy is the best.

The European Union should be economic union only to promote prosperity through free trade between its member states. What it shouldn't be is a centralised political union that tries to enforce common policies upon its many diverse member states. Europe has always been a very diverse and fractured continent, and policies which may be favoured by the peoples of some member states may be severely opposed by others (e.g. migration policy during the refugee crisis).

We need a European Union run by an alliance of Euroskeptics because the people running the current one are idiots for all of the reasons that the Euroskeptics have been citing over the years. The Euroskeptics can dump the EU leadership into the North Sea and then they'll find out that there are a lot of things they agree on and they'll have a new union up and running in a short time.

You mean the Euroskeptics who embraced shitty conspiracy theories when the coronavirus pandemic began ?

"Conspiracy theory! Far Right! Discard anything they say and ostracize them for all time"

So says the majority consensus. The majority said you should; after all the issue is settled, the majority has never been wrong before. Thus all dissent must be motivated by subversive intent, so the majority keeps telling me.

"Heretic" in new clothes, defending the fragile core of dogma. Question not lest ye faithfulness be doubted. So we continue our course, smothering ourselves to not wonder if our acts were wasted.

The EU didn't bring Western and Eastern Europe decades of peace.
The US military aegis did.
Nor was there peace. Are we going to forget the horrific atrocities and wars in the Balkans during the 90s?
The EU provided an economic union for the European countries that were in it, at the gradual cost of increasing loss of individual state's sovereignty. This came to a head with the refugee crisis that critically shook the EU.
The belief that the Europeans can mold together a continental single-state country, similar to the US, is an absurd idea. At best they can maintain an economic union, and that's all it ought to be.

Some of the countries who handled the pandemic the worst (notably USA and Russia) were literally run by governements most of the right-wing Euroskeptics in Europe (N.B.: left-wing Euroskeptics also exist, but are much less represented) were looking up to when the pandemic began.

Even though the current governements in Europe did some major mistakes for the past year in handling the coronavirus crisis, at least they didn't sweep it under the rug in the names of identity politics and economy, causing excess deaths in the process. So yeah, stating something along the lines of "we should kick the current EU officials and let the EU be run by Euroskeptics, everything will be better then" sounds ill-informed if not ill-intended. Besides, said Euroskeptics have other plans during pandemics.

In fact, even the mistakes of the current governments aren't always benefitting Euroskeptics like they used to do prior to 2020. Lately, Merkel's party in Germany has slumped in two major elections where AfD also lost traction, with the winner being the German Green Party… which is pro-EU.

Alright OP is probably gone by now, so I can share whatever I found. On the same day this user joined KYM, they had registered on at least 3 other forums to write similar stuff. I've no idea what was the point of this since their arguments are all pretty much agreeable and don't contain any advertisements/agenda, but it all feels off

The ones who handled it the worst were the ones who clung to lockdown far past the point of uncertainty and condemned thier fellow countrymen to a year of futile isolation and stagnation.

Sadly such stupidity refused to conform to ideological divisions nor position on the desirability of superstate-hood.

Yeah, I found it kinda sus that OP just registered to open those two, non-meme related threads.

You cannot fight a unknown highly infectious disease with ideology. The previous US government chose this latter path and this resulted in excess deaths and the then POTUS losing an election that he might probably have won otherwise.

Besides, if countries across the world (including European countries) have to implement new measures at the moment, it's not because the previous measures were inefficient but because they were lifted a bit too soon and/or too many at the same time. The current debate is more about which measures are the most able to curb the infection rate while allowing citizens to come back to normal activities (e.g. children going to schools again, even partially), until the vaccine coverage is large enough for the population to progressively come back to a normal life.

You should have a quick read of this article published in Nature last November (especially the Discussion section). This is an extensive study on how efficient the measures against COVID-19 are, complete with a commentary of what could be done next to avoid strict lockdown measures in the future. Here are some extracts.

The most effective NPIs include curfews, lockdowns and closing and restricting places where people gather in smaller or large numbers for an extended period of time. This includes small gathering cancellations (closures of shops, restaurants, gatherings of 50 persons or fewer, mandatory home working and so on) and closure of educational institutions. While in previous studies, based on smaller numbers of countries, school closures had been attributed as having little effect on the spread of COVID-19, more recent evidence has been in favour of the importance of this NPI; school closures in the United States have been found to reduce COVID-19 incidence and mortality by about 60%.

Governments may have to look towards less stringent measures, encompassing maximum effective prevention but enabling an acceptable balance between benefits and drawbacks.

[…] the national lockdown encompasses multiple NPIs (for example, closure of land, sea and air borders, closure of schools, non-essential shops and prohibition of gatherings and visiting nursing homes) that countries may have already adopted in parts. From this perspective, the relatively attenuated impact of the national lockdown is explained as the little delta after other concurrent NPIs have been adopted. This conclusion does not rule out the effectiveness of an early national lockdown, but suggests that a suitable combination (sequence and time of implementation) of a smaller package of such measures can substitute for a full lockdown in terms of effectiveness, while reducing adverse impacts on society, the economy, the humanitarian response system and the environment.

We find strong support for the effectiveness of border restrictions. The role of travelling in the global spread of respiratory diseases proved central during the first SARS epidemic (2002–2003), but travelling restrictions show a large impact on trade, economy and the humanitarian response system globally.

(btw, New Zealand is basically COVID-free thanks to this and the fact that the country consists of several large islands far away from continents)

We also find a number of highly effective NPIs that can be considered less costly. For instance, we find that risk-communication strategies feature prominently amongst consensus NPIs. This includes government actions intended to educate and actively communicate with the public. The effective messages include encouraging people to stay at home, promoting social distancing and workplace safety measures, encouraging the self-initiated isolation of people with symptoms, travel warnings and information campaigns (mostly via social media). All these measures are non-binding government advice, contrasting with the mandatory border restriction and social distancing measures that are often enforced by police or army interventions and sanctions. Surprisingly, communicating on the importance of social distancing has been only marginally less effective than imposing distancing measures by law.

Government food assistance programmes and other financial supports for vulnerable populations have also turned out to be highly effective. Such measures are, therefore, not only impacting the socio-economic sphere but also have a positive effect on public health.

TL;DR, preventive measures are efficient when combined wisely, and national lockdowns can even be avoided if they are properly chosen and combined, but implementing such measures efficiently requires politicians to at least understand the problem (with or without the help of experts). Something I wouldn't expect from right-wing populists (who make up most of current Euroskeptics), who usually reject science and prefer to either throw large gay sex orgies either call for Dr. Fauci to be beheaded.

>You cannot fight a unknown highly infectious disease with ideology.

> The belief that the Europeans can mold together a continental single-state country, similar to the US, is an absurd idea. At best they can maintain an economic union, and that's all it ought to be.

This. It's not even working particularly well for the USA.

The universal killer of empires is entropy. You can have a large union or a centralized one, but if you have both it will inevitably cause the thing to tear itself apart.

I do think that there should be some kind of European economic union but it should look more like APEC than the USA.

Yeah, a strong united EU would be great
but first we need to get rid of the current, incompetent corrupt one

Bravo!
Magnifico!

To be fair, I'm not 100% sure what you mean by entropy. My understanding of a universal commonality in Imperial decline through history is that by it's nature, Empires are in a constant state of pressures from within to separate, the pressure is maintained by a largely strong state, and it is when such a strong state weakens that the pressure breaks out. Empires by the very definition are single-state polity that has numerous ethno-cultural groups within it that have, often, different views of how to best govern themselves, and that puts pressure on the state to address the those grievances. When grievances become too large, and the state is unable to contain them, Imperial decline begins, often, rapidly.
Saying that, I think the US (and to an extent Canada) is a super unique element of Human History. Before the US, imperialism manifested itself as one particular power would come to dominate several regional ethnic groups – but maintain supremacy over those ethnic groups in their geographic areas. For example, the Roman Empire conquered the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Levantine kingdoms, Gauls, etc, but many of these ethnic groups already had long established their regional presence for centuries, and maintained that under the Roman Empire (largely, the expulsion of Jews from Judea, and renaming to Palestine was ethnic cleansing). This pattern is similar to many Empires throught the ages.

The US is unique, because instead of conquering groups of people and incorporating them into the Imperial order, the reality was that the US, as a nationality is composed of multi-ethnic groups, that were not conquered, but largely, immigrated to. The Americans with Italian ancestry, were not conquered by the US. The Americans with French or German ancestry were not conquered.

The fundamental diference between the EU and the US is that the EU is composed of numerous nation-states that have entirely unique and very entrenched ethno-cultures. A Frenchman is different than a Spaniard, and in turn is different than a German, or a Hungarian. Not only do they speak fundamentally different languages, they have entirely different cultural views. Someone from Poland to move to Spain would have a hard time adapting to the new country they are in, they would need to first learn the language, then they would need to get with the local cultural vibe, and nuances. Someone from Los Angeles can move to New York, Texas, Florida, Washington, or even Portland Oregon and already speak the same language, largely have similar cultural values and rules.

The biggest divide in America today is not ethno-cultural division, despite what we make it out to be. The biggest divide in America today is between the demographic changes of Metropolitan versus Non-Metropolitan areas. This is also the reality in many places such as the UK. And this is going to come to serious political head in the next several years.

I leave this.
By 2040 30% of the American people will be represented by 70% of the Senate. 70% of the American people will be represented by 30% of the Senate. If you think this a long ways off, keep in mind, 2001 was 20 years ago. We are coming up to the halfway point from the 9/11 to when this political crisis will occur.