the Irish model (which I believe is also used by a bunch of other European and other countries, like Germany, etc).
Yes. The thing that Charlie calls the Irish model has become pretty much standard in countries that envision themselves as liberal democracies since 1945. There is ample empirical evidence today that liberal democracy is more stable and less likely to decay into authoritarianism if you have separation of powers between head of state and head of government.
On the one hand, a modern administrative state needs a chief executive able and willing to drive legislative agenda. This chief executive needs a certain ideological vision and a certain raw will to power to be effective. People running for chief executive also need to be free to openly communicate their agenda, i.e. to be brazenly partisan, so the electorate will have a clear idea of what its choices are.
On the other hand, a modern administrative state needs more than just an effectively directed legislature to be stable. There are judges and military officers to be appointed; there are formal diplomatic ties to be maintained; there needs to be someone who accepts ultimate responsibility for whatever it is the army does; there needs to be someone who can force the legislature to convene, or dissolve it and force general elections in the event of a constitutional crisis. These powers need to be exercised in a visibly and credibly non-partisan manner. They should not be held by the unusually-ambitious-by-definition person who just got themselves elected on the promise of moving fast and breaking things.
There is a pretty substantial number of current and historical governments, not all of which we can name here until after comment 300, that suggests you're probably headed for trouble if (1) the chief executive who campaigns on ideological agenda gets to appoint all the judges; (2) removing him or her is significantly harder than passing a simple-majority motion of no confidence in the first chamber.
]]>Written constitution: This is a red herring. You need to distinguish between (1) the statute that says "Constitution" in its title, (2) the body of constitutional law. There is no country in which the latter is not a true superset of the former. There is no country in which the entire body of constitutional law is written. There is no country in which the entire body of constitutional law is unwritten either.
Separation of powers: A complex subject because separation of powers has more dimensions than just the horizontal dimension of keeping "branches of government" apart. I agree that the UK approach could do with some gentle recalibration. The three-branches-of-government model you're probably thinking about, however, was inadequate and outdated the moment it was first explicitly adopted and has failed, often spectacularly, in virtually every polity that has tried it. Designers of modern (post-'45) constitutions are at pains to avoid it. (How many "branches of government" does my native Austria have? Depending on where you fall on the textualist-realist spectrum, answers range from "clearly two, just RTFC" to "anywhere from six to nine but who gives a crap.")
Judicial review: The glib answer is that there is no such thing as a democracy without judicial review anywhere on the planet. Judicial review e.g. of administrative acts exists even in places where it is technically unconstitutional. (Austrian tradition expressly rules out judicial review of administrative acts; we got around this by setting up special administrative courts that are technically not really courts, so the review they do is technically not judicial.)
Since what you probably actually mean is judicial review of legislation: On the one hand, there is very little empirical evidence that you need any. (It would be difficult to argue that e.g. the Dutch parliament has signed off on more voter suppression, police thuggery, torture dungeons, abusive expropriation, and assorted other human rights violations than the US Supreme Court.) In fact, there is a decent philosophical case to be made that the decision on whether a given statute is compatible with the constitution properly rests with the body that writes the constitution in the first place.
On the other hand, the difference in terms of long-term practical effects between the two different fundamental approaches to judicial review of legislation is as great as the difference between either of them and no judicial review of legislation at all. The answer to "why did the UK wait so long to take its meds" is "because they had find out whether they needed thinners or clotters first."
]]>Call it déformation professionnelle if you like. I've probably had a certain dweebery hammered into me over the years when it comes to, uh, source criticism of historical documents, especially the journal kind.
Start with the paperclip audits (which he dismisses as incomprehensible bullshit in "The Atrocity Archive" and then explains as a vital security countermeasure in "The Fuller Memorandum")
I can't say I've sampled every available edition, but in my copies of the books Bob doesn't do that. He thinks they're annoying and he seems to imply they happen with a frequency that borders on abusive. But he never says no justification is being offered, nor does he say anything else about them we later learn is wrong. When we got to see what the point of the audits was in Chart, I thought Bob's conspicuous-in-hindsight whingeing in Archive, Morgue, and Memorandum was just really masterful foreshadowing.
Look at how he perceives Mhari in TAA, and then who she turns out to be in "The Rhesus Chart", "The Annihilation Score", and "The Labyrinth Index". Look at how he thinks of Mo in the first five books, and compare with her unvarnished view of him in the sixth.
I know how you feel about your characters; I've seen the Annihilation Score crib sheet and some other instances of Word of God. I'm just wondering if I should have been able to tell from the books themselves that Bob is blinkered and unfair whereas Mo is telling the "unvarnished" objective truth.
It's clear they both press different emotional buttons in their respective significant others than they would have thought. But this happens to every person in every relationship. (Why yes, I am speaking from experience.) It wouldn't have made me dismiss either of them as unreliable, much less "horribly" unreliable.
Bob and Mhari don't seem to really contradict each other even on the emotional buttons level: if Bob can have become a different person in the years between Archive and Chart, then surely so can Mhari.
Or Bob's insistence that Cthulhu doesn't exist ("Equoid") or that vampires don't exist ("The Rhesus Chart")
Hold up, unawareness of vampires was also afflicting the two narrators we're being told are reliable.
As for Equoid, I have to admit I didn't know it was there; it's not in my copies of the books :/
]]>(Paraphrasing from one of the novels): "Read my lips. Ol' Bat Wings {Cthulhu} does not exist."
Really? I don't remember anything of the sort at all :/
Alternately, check TVTropes's entry for the Laundry Files for 'Unreliable Narrator'.
Thank you!
]]>Apparently fantasy.
Nope, it's always been on the table and as of this moment it still is.
(The fact that the backstop is potentially tantamount to a permanent customs unions is the very reason the UK doesn't want the backstop, right?)
http://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2019/03/27/can-you-just-stay-in-the-single-market/
This article is talking about the Single Market/the EEA, which is not the same thing as a customs union.
Customs union means no tariffs on goods between members plus an agreement regarding uniform tariffs on goods imported from the outside world – the block pretends to be a single country as far as customs barriers are concerned, but not necessarily any farther.
Single Market/EEA means the Four Freedoms, among other things.
]]>If you take the customs union and add EEA membership, you get a relationship that's basically Norway Plus minus the part that Norway won't permit.
]]>It has. Tusk just explicitly confirmed that until April 12 all options are still on the table; he specifically included the referendum option. It looks like the centrists have won again (for now): all member governments could be convinced that No Deal is still the worst possible outcome.
]]>FWIW, having sobered up I'm not actually super happy with my comment anymore and I probably sorta regret having posted it. The first half isn't telling anyone in this thread anything new and the second half is simplifying too much and too little at the same time.
(Austrian nationalists and Brexit, for example: The short version is that the Freedom Party knows there is no alternative to the EU but occasionally hints at wanting to leave because it's cheap extra turnout. Just like Cameron used to be, they're positive they'll never be in a position to have to deliver. No plausible Brexit outcome is going to affect their strategic outlook very much, so they only care about short-term tactical effects.
The long version is twenty thousand words and talks about 19th century German unification, Habsburg discrimination against Protestants, 1920s Austrian police brutality, the Sudeten question, British diplomacy in the lead-up to the Anschluss, British spies in 1950s Vienna, and the Nazi dogwhistles of the Haider era.
Anything in between is just muddying the waters without adding much of value.)
Credit to my username or "anon" or Random Inebriated Mediterranean or whatever suits you.
]]>Scott @44: "What are those 27 countries going to want?"
Nobody knows. There are at least three competing answers to the Brexit question in basically every EU member state. In most EU members states, at least two of these factions are part of (or can exert pressure on) the ruling coalition.
The mainstream political right tends to see the EU mainly as a means to promoting free trade, fighting graft, and preventing divide-and-conquer attacks on our economies on the part of the US and China. These people, generally speaking, want the UK to stay because its large GDP contributes materially to EU power and because it has historically been a strong and consistent force for good governance. If you're a fiscal conservative or a classical liberal, you see the clientelism of e.g Italy or Greece and the corruption of e.g. Romania and Bulgaria as one of the continent's main problems, and you want the UK at your side.
The political left is internally divided on free trade and fiscal policy questions but is broadly in favor of deeper political unification. Many on the left want the UK out because it has never really been on board with political unification and has regularly thrown wrenches into the works. Remember that the UK has demanded and received a large number of special exemptions, rebates, and perks that have been damaging EU cohesion in an equally large number of areas. The left is also unhappy about the way the UK has been conducting itself as an extension of the US. If you're a lefty Bulgarian, you don't want to feel like you got rid of the Russians only to be made a subject of a bunch of even angrier, even more foreign imperialists, and you especially don't want to be told it's only for your own good by a bunch of third-party concern trolls.
(Of course I'm oversimplifying here. There are some committed European Federalists on the right. There are some Corbyn-style Euroskeptics on the left who believe the EU too hopelessly neoliberal to be worth it. There are some people who want the UK out temporarily because they think the UK is an immensely valuable contributor but needs to lose its divisive exemptions, rebates, and perks. As a rough first approximation, however, the above is probably defensible.)
The far political right is horrifically complicated and basically impossible to summarize. Generally speaking, of course, the far right dislikes the EU... but:
Bottom line, just because someone theoretically wants the EU broken up doesn't guarantee they won't choose to punish the UK even at the cost of proving the EU correct in the process. (You know you have lost the plot when you have replaced the Germans as the avatar of anti-Slavic bigotry in the minds of a significant number of Slavic people within a whopping three generations of the Generalplan Ost.)
In addition to these ideological divides within each country, there is extra unpredictability due to power struggles between the member states. The current ruling parties in Poland and Hungary have a broad authoritarian streak; they are aggressively undermining the independence of their local courts and universities and are seriously endangering their respective opposition parties' ability to function. The EU looks poised to give these two governments a hard smack across the gob. What if Poland and Hungary decide to use Brexit to blackmail Brussels – leave us alone or we sink your precious deal for good? What if, on the other hand, they go about this clumsily enough to make it backfire?
Anyone who claims they can predict the outcome at this point is more confident than traveled.
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