The reach of any one person without an amplifier of sorts (traditional media, facebook popularity, etc), is essentially zero; Even in the extremely unlikely case that you've changed the minds of 1,000 people you talked to (because to change 1,000 people's mind and vote, you need to speak to 20,000), it's still a rounding error.

It will make you feel good that you tried while you're at it, yes. It will also demonstrate how powerless you are if the results go against your wishes (or falsely make you think you contributed if they go your way).

It's the same as fighting the centralization of the web, the big brothering of facebook/nsa, etc - you have to mobilize people to act, many of them. And sadly, it's very rarely possible or within one's power.

If you don't frame your life in a way that whoever wins matters to you very less, you are doing something wrong. If that is already the case, your vote doesn't count at all. It's one vote. The chance of your vote actually affecting the outcome of the election is so small that you might as well buy a lottery ticket instead.

If however, you have the power to convince a large enough group of people to sway the election to one side or another, you should sell some of that influence to whoever is offering more money or favors to you.

The answer is it does matter, and that you have such little influence is a failure of the system. I'm not talking about one vote, it's that some individuals have more influence over politicians due to their campaign donations. That is unacceptable.

The answer once again is get money out of politics.

You can only take money out of politics after you've taken money out of politics

The answer is not to suppress the leftist vote and care about the working class' concerns.

We are seeing failure of trust in to EU because its terrible at PR. Its successes are taken as local governments successes ("our govt is awesome, it snatched the money from those bureaucrats for new architecture!") which failures are easily blamed on Brussels ("We wanted to rescure our failing Shipyards and coal mining, but Brussels tells us we can't because its unfair competition! In meantime French and Germans have no issues like that! This is unfair competition and favorism of west-dominated Union!").

Then you have usual of their weird decisions that are brought as example of overgrown bureaucracy without attempt to understand the reasoning behind it. "Hey, did you hear? Idiots in Brussels decided that snails are fish, what an idiots" the popular saying goes, meantime nobody cares that such decision saved EU from making up separate legislature for seafood farming and trade.

Then we have refugee crisis which is generally something considered result of poor decisions beind done in western EU side that it is trying shift the blame on across all of the union. The situation where in Poland is explictly named amongst the countries that show no solidarity while at same time we've accepted one million people from UA doesn't help neither.

With all of this going on, its easy for populist guys to gain widespread support. However situation in Poland where traditionalistic-populistic gov gained enough of majority to rule on its own is (IMHO) primarily the result of weak opposition, whose entire idea and programme was "we are saner than those other folk" but instead we've got liberal party apparently become traditionalist one with leaks after leaks of them doing disappointing deals with each other or private business. This effectively sank primary opposition party in polls.

They've also made some harsh steps to improve the grim future of our social security system via bumping retirement age as well as forcefully relocating bulk of private savings to the public fund.

http://www.reuters.com/article/poland-pensions-idUSL6N0H02UV...

Apparently there's trend in the polls going on for few weeks now giving them growing support, but its most likely the wave of popular disgust for current gov, which would be story from 2006 repeating itself. I'm unsure if they are capable of fixing things.

The problem with this is that these hacks will continue to be used against the EU even when trying to reform them: It's easy to argue against handing sovereignty to an organisation with such a baroque decision-making process.

A lot of effort has gone into transitioning more powers to the EU parliament, but ultimately, it will be impossible to get where the EU ought to be in terms of which organs have which powers without very difficult processes in most of the member states.

Deeply direct democracy is self-sustaining - people would agree to move over to a new system because it would give them more power than they have in the current parliamentary systems.

The problem as far as I see is the current political class (parliamentarians and people in the executive branch), which would lose power. And since this is who currently has the power, and it's always nearly impossible to make somebody give up power, that's the reason why this won't happen.

But Europe is in a state of crisis now, and maybe this crisis is great enough to motivate this class to move to a more open system.

If you think about it, the current indirect democracy (with parliaments and the electoral college etc) is a remnant of a time when a decision took days to travel through the whole land, and to be reasonably fast and decisive, you had to have them. Thanks to the internet, we could even go past such direct democracies like Switzerland and allow each citizen to vote at each bill, or if she didn't want to spend the time, leave that decision to a parliamentarian of her choosing, but with the option to take power again or give it to a different parliamentarian at any moment. Now that is true democracy. No back-hand deals, and no favoritisms anymore.

Switzerland was always an okay model of how to run a federation.

Ceding sovereignity always leads to less democracy and more central control, not the other way around.

The EU is starting to look a lot like a modern day Austria-Hungary, only bigger. We all know what happened to Austria-Hungary: WWI.

As it stands, the Treaty of Lisbon went about as far as it could in handing additional powers to the EU Parliament while triggering the minimal number of constitutional changes for member parliaments, and look at the circus that turned into. And that was first after the attempt at a constitution failed.

The centralisation you worry about already happened many years ago, and the sovereignty issue is now largely the blocker to devolving more that power to the EU parliament, and after the trouble getting the Treaty of Lisbon through there's little appetite to take another round anytime soon.

That Lisbon has given substantially sharpened teeth to Parliament has been demonstrated repeatedly, with both the Commission and Council of Ministers having been forced to backtrack or compromise in areas where they previously would have been able to do what they wanted.

I think Poland's decision to stick with the zlot is a good one on the long term. Once you switch to the Euro you've surrendered control of your currency to Bruxelles and there is no going back.

Poland is post-communist country. During previous system it maintained many companies that weren't economically viable. Shipyards weren't build because it was economically viable to have shipyard there or there. They were build because Communists knew it was easy to guarantee mass employment by expanding heavy industry. This means that any polish city on our coastline with population required to staff shipyard got one. This shipyard would then employ between 20 to 50 thousand people on its own, as well as give employment for countless other people working in the region in shops supplying those shipyards or their workers. People from nearby smaller towns would then flock to larger towns to work here.

When system changed, so did the need for our fleets (in old system we've even maintained the Pacific Trade fleet and Pacific Shrimpfishing Fleets!) and in result the shipbuilding and maintenance services plummeted. It was same all across the board. Coal mining, steel mills, farming, weaving. Millions of people had to find their place in new reality. It wasn't surprise that people elected those promising heavy donations for what was left from first democratic's governments mass privatization, closures and sales. This meant polish taxpayers were keeping nonprofitable remnants of heavy industry in meantime being fed promises next governments about reforms coming in that will reduce the burden and sitting down by TV after work to watch in the news how our coal miners or shipbuilders strikes made current govt cave in, postpone cuts and offer another "mobilisation package" of millions of taxpayer money for keeping those industries alive.

This was business as usual until the year 2004 happened and Poland entered EU, which has changed the rules of the game and started hammering our govts for dishing so much taxpayers money at non-profitable private companies, that thus don't have to really care about being competitive with others.

How is this judged? Depends on region you are from. Some areas judge this in plus for EU because "apparently EU respects our money more than our own government".

But for other this is proof that EU wants to kill our heavy industry. Occasional news of EU letting same slip for some company in Germany or France is then blown out of proportion by the media to whole shipbulding in the west being taxpayer funded being allright while suspiciously its wrong when its polish govt helping polish companies.

I find this ironic since they are not part of the Eurozone. Their economy is much less at risk from mismanagement in Greece than France, the Netherlands or Germany.

it's democracy, you need to wait for next elections

In a representative democracy, you need to wait for the next elections. In a parliamentarian democracy, a vote of no confidence can trigger elections (like Canada in 2011) or the Prime Minister can ask the Crown to dissolve parliament and call elections (like the UK in 2010). This can lead to situations like 3 elections within 5 years (Canada 2006, 2008, 2011). In the US, federal elections are every two years, with the whole House being up for election and 1/3 of the Senate while the President is up every other Congressional election.

It's better to allow people liberty than to take it away in the name of safety. It's better to realize that anyone can make highly damaging weapons at home (looking at you Boston Bomber).

Also, the US government wouldn't nuke their own people. If they did, they won't target Florida. Since those are off the table, we're talking about a traditional war. As we've seen with Afghanistan, the US military doesn't know how to fight an asymetric war. Good luck trying to get people that live in the hundreds of square miles of swamp.

Arms are a big factor. Europe is at far greater risk of authoritarian regimes because their people are effectively disarmed. A few single shot shotguns won't do much. If only their population had ready access to AK47s, AR 15's or event bullpups out of Israel.

I think this bears emphasis: Pretty much every crime report provided to or made by the police within Florida, silly or sublime, is available to the public [1]. This is a gold mine for people who want to run a "stranger than fiction" web site. It could distort one's view of what Florida is like.

[1] http://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/how-floridas-proud-open-go...

Have you been to Okotogon or other protests? I have and it was really inspiring to see that many young faces around. I Support all efforts of making Fidesz the least appealing party. That's probably all we can do if violence is not considered.

I think spending time to think about how to best answer that question is probably the best thing one can do to prevent similar events.

We are in the middle of this strange global event and you can tell from the profusion of explanations that no one knows what the reason is.

-- loss of confidence in institutions?

-- wealth gap?

-- tech enabled cultural sabotage?

-- "globalization"?

And so on. I think people don't even know why it is happening yet. There is a lot of cognitive labor ahead.

The left refuses to acknowledge the problem while the right (and far right) does, so guess where that leads?

However, in the context here, you think that:

Erdogan swept into power because the working class in Turkey has been "weakened" by immigration and globalization?

Second, the parent of your comment was about right-wing parties rising in Hungary and Poland.

I am asking because I think most writers think of these as part of a larger global movement, but your comments suggest you think they are different.

In Turkey and the Middle East Islamism has been rising, partly due to the collapse of Arab nationalism and partly due to Saudi Arabia's worldwide propagation of Wahhabism.

Then take an economics course. Realise that globalisation outsources manufacturing, agriculture, services, etc..., lowering costs, but also lowering wages. This is by design. The 'Information' industry in the west was supposed to make up for the loss of blue collar jobs. Except it hasn't.

And then also realise that immigration increases the size of the workforce, especially the uneducated workforce. Again, downward pressure on wages.

Personally I think progressive economics provides a better solution than the regressive protectionism of the right. Except the left pretends there's no problem, and here we are.

The "no alternative" is a lame excuse, Momentum is coming up and even giving a vote to MKKP would be better than staying home.