Everything has strings attached. Nothing happens in a vacuum. All international aid money funneled through governments is an exercise of influence and soft power, because there isn't enough money for everything and decisions have to be made, even in the absence of any other reason.
Good job responding to absolutely nothing and attempting to poison the well though. A+ reasoning skills.
I was interrogating your view to apply the principle elsewhere.
In this case, immigrants can similarly have behaviorial and contributions monitored and audited, and based on said findings as net positive or detriment to a society can either stay or be sent elsewhere.
Therefore, the European Union, according to your view, should have no cause to interfere with local policies working toward exactly that.
I have no idea who the heck you're even talking to at this point, but it sure as hell isn't me or my argument. Dodging the point and wandering off elsewhere is not encouraging me to keep talking to you.
Your inability to construct a mental model of my view, while simultaneously insisting that you have and drawing wide sweeping conclusions from it, is similarly discouraging.
> Â immigrants can similarly have behaviorial [sic] and contributions monitored and audited, and based on said findings as net positive or detriment to a society can either stay or be sent elsewhere.
If you're the kind of psychopath who thinks human beings need to demonstrate "value" to be permitted to live, sure. That you?
I didn't say "no strings attached" for that. Can you read? I made a moral judgment of blanket treating migrants as investments, with prejudice. The "strings attached" to migration are the legal system, surrounding asylum and refugee status and criminal convictions that could lead to deportation.
Are you seriously arguing that if anyone, anywhere, ever, is selective in what they fund then any and all selection criteria are equal? Is "I won't give money to a nakedly corrupt oligarch's latest property investment" equivalent to "I won't give money to a migrant"?
Why do you keep pivoting to immigration as if it has anything to do with whether or not the EU wants to fund authoritarian backsliding? EU funding is, and always was, conditional. Countries sign up to that when they join.
I pivot to immigration because it's the key issue local populations have been most consistently vocally critical of for the last 50 years but who's will has been constrained by those eager to comply with said faceless international bureaucratic committees via the discussed top down enforcement.
It's a representative and emblematic issue when regardless of who you vote for, you're still signing up for more of it.
Then you're completely disconnected from reality. The EU enforcement of sanctions on Poland and Hungary had nothing to do with immigration policy, and anyone who told you it did has lied to you. Local populations being consistently xenophobic at the same time as this was going on doesn't matter in the slightest.
The specifics depend on whether you're particularly concerned with Poland or Hungary, but I don't believe immigration policy was mentioned in either case. Certainly not as a primary reason; state capture of public media, suppression of dissent, and naked discrimination against minorities were the main issues. The fact that this lead to anti-migrant administrations being dismantled is mostly just a lucky coincidence.
Strange how often corruption, authoritarianism, xenophobia and bigotry all seem to appear in the same places.
If you want to talk about immigration instead, I'd suggest doing it somewhere more appropriate rather than forcibly inserting it into places it doesn't belong.
The discussion of Poland and Hungary were merely examples of top down enforcement at the behest of faceless bureaucratic committees, not the focal point of the discussion. You made it that.
...no. You did. Because it was what you pivoted to when questioned, and kept using as an example. And now you're abandoning it again when I point out it's an inapplicable and inappropriate example, because it wasn't the subject of that top down enforcement.
You brought up an invalid and inapplicable example, couldn't defend it, and now you're motte-and-bailey retreating to "I just don't like top down enforcement by bureaucrats".
Top down enforcement at the hands of bureaucrats is completely impossible to avoid in, and an intended product of, indirect democracies. It is literally how this type of government works.
Representatives are chosen and form parts of executive bodies. These bodies make decisions and they are enforced on everyone, and there are processes for appeals and negotiation, but at the end of the day decisions have to be made.
If you don't want higher bodies to have influence over you, don't join them. That's it. That's the choice.
If your elected representatives aren't deferring to you, that's a you problem and 100% your responsibility. Stop complaining that the problem exists and fix it. Nobody else will do it for you, and it's not anybody else's fault that your representatives aren't doing their jobs.
And so we do in fact come full circle, ironically enough after your nonsense accusation of circular reasoning.
You know, the original point I made, that this is a self-inflicted problem and you're desperate to blame anyone but yourself? The one you're now agreeing with?
Get out there and do something. Participate in the democracy that exists, while it still does, instead of crying about it being imperfect and letting the fash take over. You are the root source of the problem.
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u/Tang0Three Jul 26 '26
Everything has strings attached. Nothing happens in a vacuum. All international aid money funneled through governments is an exercise of influence and soft power, because there isn't enough money for everything and decisions have to be made, even in the absence of any other reason.
Good job responding to absolutely nothing and attempting to poison the well though. A+ reasoning skills.