eyeofthestorm's endorsement in the greek elections

i believe if i were voting tomorrow in greece, i'd vote for syriza, the left party that might end up taking greece out of the euro. first of all, i'd certainly want fresh young faces. second, even if there's more pain in this direction, i'd be thinking that my country needs some sort of return to self-determination, instead of being a tributary state to germany. you know there is a lot to be said against political consolidation and centralization, and the bigger the political/economic unit, the further any piece in it is from freedom or democracy, for example. the greeks are in a situation in which they essentially have no input into the decisions that affect their lives; but that's true in various dimensions of all of us who live in a modern mega-state. this is why the idea of world institutions - banks or environmental regimes, for example - gives me the willies. honestly, once you give up the fiction that the institutions are all of us, you see that every actual person loses any sort of autonomy; that distant bureaucracies into which no single person can have much input control the environment of every single person. indeed it's gotten to the point that whole nations have no inout: a kind of post-colonialism. this is why you should think about what 'progress' means for actual human beings. your own currency might not be worth much, but it might be a sign that you intend to run your own life.