[Non-US] News That Makes You laugh/cry/neither...

[Username17]

The EU is clearly a dire economic threat to some of its members, and you can make the case that by pushing the EU closer to dissolution the UK can give those members both a better bargaining position and a precedent to leave the abusive spouse the EU has become.

DSM, I asked you to name a single progressive goal that was actually advanced by Brexit. You failed. This discussion is over.

Brexit removes minority protections. Brexit removes consumer protections. Brexit removes financial, industrial, and environmental regulations. Brexit cancels portions of the safety net. Brexit does lots of bad things that progressives should oppose. You were not able to name one fucking upside. All you were able to do was to point out that Brexit would spit in the eye of the status quo.

Well guess fucking what? The status quo has two eyes, and if you're going to spit in one of them, you'd better pick the right one. And Brexit doesn't get any spittle in the eye we want to spit in. At all.

As PL pointed out, that is literally a specifically named Fallacy.

Bandwagon is not a fallacy in politics. Since literally the entire argument that DSM is putting forward for Brexit is that it is something that people he doesn't like don't want, I feel that the fact that literal fascists who he presumably like even less do want it to be particularly relevant.

-Username17

[DSMatticus]

DSM, I asked you to name a single progressive goal that was actually advanced by Brexit. You failed. This discussion is over.

"Sorry, I had fingers in my ears, you lose."

Substanceless smuggery is not going to get you very far. There are quotes of you admitting that the EU cannot be democratically fixed and will continue to stomp on the people of Europe until the guillotines come out. There are quotes of you admitting (in this thread, not ones years old) that the EU is empowering radical far-right political parties. Basically every single point against that I listed is something you have admitted is true either in this thread or another. To turn around and suggest that they aren't even worth considering as marks against the EU is... exactly what I've come to expect from the quality of this discussion so far. If your defense of the EU includes statements like "center-left monetary policy by 2062, possibly," dissolution is very obviously worth considering, and the best choice is going to come down to a very complicated, very much not perfectly knowable guestimate of which causes the most long-term harm. You are more optimistic about the EU than I am (or even your past self was), so you disagree with my guestimate. I'm not going to claim my magic crystal ball is shinier than your's, but I am going to tell you to take your non-rebuttals and shove them up your ass. That is a much more appropriate place to keep such shitty posts.

[Korwin]

There are quotes of you admitting that the EU cannot be democratically fixed and will continue to stomp on the people of Europe until the guillotines come out.

So what?

Frank says Brexit is worse than the status quo. (If I understood him correctly.)
Your argument looks like, "It can't get better with the EU, so get out of it and hope it gets not worse." (If I understood you correctly.)

Did I get that right?

[Omegonthesane]

for the express purpose of cutting social services, doing bad things to ethnic minorities, and deregulating corporations

for the express purpose of cutting social services, doing bad things to ethnic minorities, and deregulating corporations

for the express purpose of cutting social services, doing bad things to ethnic minorities, and deregulating corporations

Besides which, if Brexit is agreed NOW, any replacement treaties will be negotiated by neoliberal traitors, not by left wing critics. Because the neoliberal traitors are the ones in power.

[maglag]

There are quotes of you admitting that the EU cannot be democratically fixed and will continue to stomp on the people of Europe until the guillotines come out.

So what?

Frank says Brexit is worse than the status quo. (If I understood him correctly.)
Your argument looks like, "It can't get better with the EU, so get out of it and hope it gets not worse." (If I understood you correctly.)

Did I get that right?

Pretty much.

Kaelik posts about his fanfiction where CETA has already been fully operational for the last 6 years.

[Blade]

Some years ago, when UK was (some say under influence of the US) switching the focus of the EU from politics (with a distant goal of a European Federation) to economics/trade (seeing the EU mostly as a free-trade area), a Brexit could have had a good impact on the EU.
Today I doubt it would change much of the political landscape of the EU.

[DSMatticus]

Besides which, if Brexit is agreed NOW, any replacement treaties will be negotiated by neoliberal traitors, not by left wing critics. Because the neoliberal traitors are the ones in power.

For the UK, France, and Germany, the exact same political parties are in power who negotiated and signed the Treaty of Maastricht. John Major's Tories campaigned against taxes, inflation, and immigration. That story should sound oddly familiar.

The question isn't whether these assholes write shit treaties - of course they do, and that's why we're in this mess. The question is whether or not weakening Europe's treaties is a net good right now. Considering the EU has a nigh democratically uncorrectable neoliberal bias, kicking it in the balls and rolling back to something weaker sounds incredibly appealling. It's a lot harder to find mean things to say about the European Union before we started calling it the European Union; it's never been a particularly democratic institution, but there was a time when its powers matched its legitimacy and it served its purpose. It isn't doing that anymore. The highest state unemployment in the U.S. is 6.6%; the highest member unemployment in the EU is 24.2%. A union built on exploiting the weakest members is not going to last, nor should it. This entire clusterfuck reeks of imperialism, which should make you uncomfortable enough on its own, but it is also inflicting a great deal of suffering and instability upon the entire region.

[Omegonthesane]

If my country gets some new shit treaties written on the basis of bailing on the whole EU project, then there is no "leave the EU" based escape from that. Ever. No matter who takes power later, no matter how bad things get under the new pact. Things can only get worse if we pull the plug now. Shit show though it is, the EU is an obstacle to the Tories' thousand year kingdom. There's at least some hope that a sane government will take power if we remain.

[Kaelik]

If my country gets some new shit treaties written on the basis of bailing on the whole EU project, then there is no "leave the EU" based escape from that. Ever. No matter who takes power later, no matter how bad things get under the new pact. Things can only get worse if we pull the plug now. Shit show though it is, the EU is an obstacle to the Tories' thousand year kingdom. There's at least some hope that a sane government will take power if we remain.

Uh what the fuck? Literally no part of that made any sense.

[Username17]

Considering the EU has a nigh democratically uncorrectable neoliberal bias, kicking it in the balls and rolling back to something weaker sounds incredibly appealling.

There is so much wrong with that statement that it's going to take some time to unpack.

First of all, "neoliberal" doesn't mean what you obviously think it means. Neoliberals are often the bad guys in leftist economic discussion because Neoliberal policies give power and wealth to corporations and one percenters at the cost of the government. But that doesn't mean that the neoliberals are always the bad guys or the only bad guys. Indeed, the primary villains of the EU's structural failures are not Neoliberals at all! German Ordoliberals are the ones that are fucking Greece and preventing countries from running countercyclic fiscal and monetary policy. Neoliberals don't object to expansionary fiscal policies, they just prefer expansionary policies that funnel money to rich people.

So the Neoliberal answer to a depressed economy with massive unemployment is to give out huge tax breaks and hire a bunch of private firms, and then pay for it all with loans and the privatization of public properties. And you know what? That's not a good answer! It's bad. It would keep the economy gurgling along, but transfer all the benefits of growth to the already rich and leave robber barons owning things that by right belong to the public trust. But you know what else? That's a shit tonne better than what the Ordoliberals and Conservatives have been shoveling down peoples' throats for the last six years. I'd take stagnant mean incomes and a growing wealth share for the 1% if it meant a rapid return to full employment. It's not my first or even fifth best scenario, but it's massively better than what Queen Europe has actually given us.

When Ronald Reagan rammed neoliberalism down the throat of the American people, it was a disaster. Increases in poverty. Massive debts. Huge increases in inequality. Deregulation that left the country vulnerable to numerous financial collapses and tremendous rewards for criminals who defrauded people out of millions and got off with limited reprisals. But you know what it didn't do? It didn't deliver persistently high unemployment. When the unemployment rate crested over 10%, it came back down to single digits inside of a year (in time for Reagan to declare "morning in America" and get re-elected despite the fact that we only had to recover in 1984 because of his own mismanagement). There are things that are worse than Reaganism, and some of them are actually quite powerful in Europe right now.

So when you say that you want to throw your lot in with a Fascist proposal so that you can really stick it to British Neoliberals because you are just so mad about how German Ordoliberals are fucking over Greece... I believe you. I also believe that this makes you a rebel without a clue that everyone should ignore. You are standing with one group that is worse than Neoliberals because you are angry about stuff that another group of people who also are not Neoliberals are doing. That's genuine rage. That's blind, ill-focused, completely retarded rage. And it should be given exactly the same consideration as those mouth breathers with the "get your government hands off my medicare" signs.

Back here in reality, when Germany forced the Fiscal Compact (basically Maastricht II) down everyone's throats, there were two dissenting voices that refused to sign. One was the UK's Cameron, who is a Conservative. And the other was Nečas, the then prime minister of Czechia, who is a Neoliberal shit stain. Also he was indicted for an unrelated bribery case in 2014. Neither of those assholes opposed the Fiscal Compact for noble reasons, but oppose them they did because not all villains are the same.

Canceling the EU, or even just canceling the UK's membership of the EU, involves canceling the health insurance of millions of people. That alone is going to kill tens of thousands of people and bankrupt tens of thousands more. If you take that step, you're basically committing an act of war. You are launching a revolt that is going to leave tens of thousands dead. You had better have a fucking plan for how you intend to get from there to a place that is better than where we are now. If you just want to feel righteously angry why thousands of real people pay in blood to make you feel like you've "sent a message," then FUCK YOU.

• We Must Do Something.
• This Is Something, Therefore We Must Do It.

If that's all you got, you ain't got shit.

-Username17

[PhoneLobster]

So. Looks like Frank just redefined a completely bullshit minor subtype of neoliberal as... somehow NOT neoliberal, then actually claimed essentially orthodox neobliberal policy is NOT responsible for unemployment in the EU and would instead rapidly bring the EU to full employment IF it were applied.

That's like several rather obvious lies compounding upon each other there.

[Username17]

PL, Ordoliberalism is not Neoliberalism. It is not a subtype. It is a different school of Liberalism (by which we mean the European pro-Market Liberalism, and not the American anti-Conservative Liberalism). It also isn't minor, it's the dominant school of economic thought in Germany. Germany is the dominant country in the European Union, and the European Union is the biggest common market on Earth.

Ordoliberalism is very fucking important. And the fact that it's basically not understood or even discussed much in Anglophone countries is a big reason why all y'all keep talking absolute bullshit whenever you try to talk about the economic concepts of the EU.

Ordoliberalism isn't even always bad or always wrong. It's just very importantly very very bad in the case that you have a country with a depressed economy and a large structural deficit. Because in that circumstance, Ordoliberalism demands that you do... basically exactly what Germany demanded of Greece. And even the most basic Keynesian analysis will tell you exactly what would happen. Which in turn is exactly what did happen.

But Keynesian analysis is English. And just as Ordoliberalism has no purchase in English economic thought, Keynesianism is basically a foreign concept to Germans. The most horrifying part about Germany's totally insane behavior is that it's actually totally normal within the intellectual traditions they actually have.

-Username17

[PhoneLobster]

I notice not a single mention of any specific differentiation in economic policy between ordoliberal and neoliberal. I notice you (non-specifically) invoke what they did in Greece, which was ALL fucking text book neoliberal agenda.

Ordoliberal my ass, it's just German for neoliberal you dope.

[DSMatticus]

Firstly, the difference between neoliberalism and ordoliberalism on a good day is "hello" and "guten tag." I am being slightly flippant, but both neoliberalism and ordoliberalism are procyclical, anti-inflation economic ideologies. No matter the illness, both philosophies prescribe misery for the poors.

Secondly, if you think the CDU are really any different from other mainstream right-wing political parties you are an idiot. Under Angela Merkel, the CDU has put forward such "fiscally responsible ideas" as a flat tax, paying for the loss in revenue from that flat tax with a VAT, savaging Germany's unions and then pissing in the wounds, and deregulation for everyone yaaay. When it comes to economics, Angela Merkel is Sam Brownback with a different accent. Insofar as there are genuine differences between ordoliberals and neoliberals, it would have been generous to call the CDU ordoliberal back when Kohl was calling the shots; under Merkel it's just fucking absurd. I don't care what the duck told you, you should know what a duck sounds like and that's a fucking duck. In truth, ordoliberalism is not "very fucking important," because no modern right-wing political parties (in Germany or elsewhere) are actually ordoliberals and ordoliberalism has nothing to do with why we're in the current crisis. Ordoliberalism is the answer to the question "why is Germany's left-wing so far right?" and nothing else. Angela Merkel is not the continuation of German ordoliberalism; Sigmar Gabriel is, and yes, he's an asshole too. You really have no idea what you're talking about here. It's painful and you should shut up.

Thirdly, I meant exactly what I said. I did not mean an ordoliberal bias, I meant a neoliberal bias. I did not even mean a German bias (though there certainly currently is one), I meant a neoliberal bias. The Treaty of Maastricht was written by neoliberals, and there are lots of little gems packed in there to sweeten the deal they were writing themselves. But the institution is also fundamentally designed to make no an easier answer than yes, which makes it considerably easier for the neoliberals to get their way. Remember, "going broke" is the neoliberal solution to an economic crisis, for both the victims and the government. That is what happens naturally in an economic crisis. Obstruction is far more likely to advance the neoliberal agenda than any other, so the fact that the EU was designed to be easily obstructed is in fact a painful neoliberal bias.

Fourthly, are you seriously attributing the recovery in unemployment to Reagan? Holy shit. Time for a history lesson. It's 1979. Carter is still president, and unemployment is 5.8% trending downwards. Volcker is declared chairman of the fed, and begins his holy war against inflation. Over the next three years, interest rates will nearly double - as will unemployment. Eventually, 1982 rolls around. Reagan is now president, and unemployment is 9.7% trending upwards. Volcker relents. It will be six years before the country's unemployment recovers from the damage he managed to cause in three, and returns to its 1979 low. Reagan did not solve an unemployment crisis. Volcker did that (shortly after creating it) while Reagan looted the country. That's it. That's the whole story. There is no compelling evidence that Reagan's policies were unemployment-positive. There is no compelling evidence that Reagan's polices were even unemployment-neutral. Volcker drove unemployment up and then let it drop, and it is essentially impossible to quantify the effect of Reagan's policies in Volcker's shadow. Meanwhile in Europe, Thatcher takes power and unemployment soars to ~12% from ~5%.

EDIT: Fuck it, I have more to say.

Canceling the EU, or even just canceling the UK's membership of the EU, involves canceling the health insurance of millions of people. That alone is going to kill tens of thousands of people and bankrupt tens of thousands more. If you take that step, you're basically committing an act of war. You are launching a revolt that is going to leave tens of thousands dead. You had better have a fucking plan for how you intend to get from there to a place that is better than where we are now. If you just want to feel righteously angry why thousands of real people pay in blood to make you feel like you've "sent a message," then FUCK YOU.

You realize Greece's healthcare system has been in on-and-off again collapse for six years and is today barely functioning and heavily rationed? Where the fuck is your righteous anger for those pointless, preventable deaths? Where the fuck is your righteous anger for a generation of children growing up starving? If you're only going to get angry when it's convenient for your argument, shut the fuck up.

• We Must Do Something.
• This Is Something, Therefore We Must Do It.

If that's all you got, you ain't got shit.

This is what I've "got."

That being said: Blade is basically right that the EU is basically designed to be unshakeable and to ignore democratic mandates altogether. So the fact that the parliament and the commission are essentially locked, just means that the technocrats who got us into this mess in the first place will continue ramming their failed policies down everyone's throats until violent revolutionaries have them guillotined.

The EU cannot be democratically fixed and will continue ravaging Europe until someone tears it down. Two years ago, you agreed with that sentiment. Today, you don't. I don't know what happened in the past two years to increase your confidence in the idea that the EU could be fixed democratically from within. I asked, but you dodged the question with some non-sequitur bullshit like "maybe guillotines wouldn't be the worst possible outcome," and have since then been refusing to engage with the topic in any substantive way. But if the choice is between violent uprising (or even the non-violent rise of fascism) and the dissolution of the EU, I will choose the dissolution of the EU everytime. You'd be fucking crazy not to. You don't want to engage with that argument because... you're an asshole and it's easier to stick your fingers in your ears and just pretend you're the only one who ever makes any sense, but it's still there.

[tussock]

DSM, you should use your extensive knowledge of Ordoliberalism to fix the wikipedia article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordoliberalism

Because it disagrees with you. A lot. In every way, basically. Ordoliberals are pro-state intervention and regulation, for a start. They just believe the goal of the state intervention is to make the economic cycle boom and bust like it's supposed to. Putting people out of work during recessions to make the recessions more real is an explicit goal of their operations.

That the state must work to oppose rapid recoveries, because that's not the natural order of things. Might sound crazy, on account of how awful that is, but that's them. Greece and Portugal have unemployment because Ordoliberalism says the state should make sure they do right now.

It's where the whole "Greece had a big party and now they've got a hangover" story comes from. That's state enforced policy in Europe, because Ordoliberalism is a thing which is quite different to the Neoliberal movement's ideas that the state shouldn't really do anything at all because business is magic.

PS: Before the trade treaties that you're suggesting be abandoned were written, for Britain, they used to pay us down here in the colonies a stupidly high amount of money for basic foodstuffs. NZ and Oz were very rich countries (top 10 per capita) because without open trade treaties we robbed them blind. And we would totally do that again. Not a problem. You might notice countries not part of the big trade treaty networks, like, say, North Korea, are sort of fucked.

[PhoneLobster]

So what. German neoliberals say some slightly different gibberish while applying exactly the same policies and functioning as an identical interchangeable part of the same neoliberal consensus and international alliance of neoliberal consensus that dominates the entire western world.

Seriously. The neoliberal plan for Greece is deficit hawk, austerity, small government, destroy welfare, privatize, deregulate, loot "because gurbleburble". The "ordoliberal" plan for Greece is deficit hawk, austerity, small government, destroy welfare, privatize, deregulate, loot "because gurblyburbly"

Protip the whole THING about the neoliberal consensus it that it offers very slight variations (and nothing else) to democracies around the world, but in the end is every damn time STILL a consensus of the same fucking insane cleptocratic policies with minor variations in the rate of negative progress and the flavor of the language gurbleburbled over the top of it by incompetent aristocrats.

So what the Germans like their neoliberalism with slightly more moralizing and inevitability language. It's still the same fucking thing, and pretending otherwise isn't just founding your bad argument in worthless semantics, it's being a gullible chump falling for and perpetuating a fucking obvious and pretty fucking half arsed attempt at rebranding.

[Username17]

Firstly, the difference between neoliberalism and ordoliberalism on a good day is "hello" and "guten tag." I am being slightly flippant, but both neoliberalism and ordoliberalism are procyclical, anti-inflation economic ideologies. No matter the illness, both philosophies prescribe misery for the poors.

You will never ever make any progress if you cannot differentiate what your different groups of opponents are proposing. To oppose any bad thing you have to be able to understand not only what it is but also why it's bad. You have steadfastly refused to even acknowledge the first part as a thing you should look into.

Neoliberals and Ordoliberals both see no role for governmental fiscal expansion in times of crisis. That means that they are both objectively wrong and dangerous, because the best response to economic crises of the kinds we have seen in the West since World War II are all some flavor of fiscal expansion (being balanced budget fiscal expansion, debt financed fiscal expansion, or money financed fiscal expansion depending on circumstances). That both Neoliberals and Ordoliberals reject those first best options makes them collectively part of the cat food lobby during every recession.

But when it comes to Monetary policy, the difference is night and day. Neoliberals pretend that the economy can be smoothly managed with simple monetarism, and for periods with small shocks, steady inflation, and moderate base interest rates they are actually right. Neoliberals can indeed produce rapid recoveries with their interest diddling magic. And while it does not actually work the way they claim it's going to when interest rates are very low or shocks are large, it does help some. It is still better than nothing, and nothing is what the Ordoliberals offer.

Under Ordoliberalism, the central bank does nothing whatsoever to stabilize the economy. Economic stabilization is the job of collaborative efforts between capital owners and trade unions. If that seems totally insane and woefully insufficient, that is because it is. It's so insufficient that people who spend all their time living in English speaking countries literally cannot believe that this is the actual plan. But it is.

Note that this bizarre reliance on labor union negotiations puts Ordoliberals on the same side as good people under certain circumstances. In boom times, Ordoliberals support labor unions asking for and getting higher wages, and even the passing of minimum wage laws. You won't see Neoliberals supporting that kind of common sense proposal, they hate labor unions and worker wages all the time. It's just that their actual plan for recessions and rising unemployment is to force all the workers to get a pay cut until the invisible hand of the market gives everyone a job. And not only is that a humanitarian disaster, but because of compositional effects on demand it doesn't even work on a large scale. The reason we're in this "Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves" thing is a specific intellectual failure of Ordoliberalist theory. And no, kicking countries that don't have a significant Ordoliberalist intellectual tradition out of the EU is not going to make things any better for anyone still in.

The bottom line is that just shaking your fist at the status quo doesn't make you a visionary, it makes you Clan Brujah. It's pointless and destructive rebelliousness for the sake of it. The status quo has many horrible things in it. But it also has many good things in it. Human existence is, over all, better than it has ever been at any time in history. Which doesn't change the fact that many things are still super awful, but does mean that merely rolling back the clock is making things worse more than it makes things better. In order to make positive change you have to identify what is actually wrong with what we have now and identify concrete means by which you could improve things.

Fourthly, are you seriously attributing the recovery in unemployment to Reagan?

Stop fucking that chicken. I already pointed out that the reason we had to recover in time for 1984 was his mismanagement. Unemployment crested above 10% because of his bad policies. But it also came back down quickly because monetarism isn't completely insane or always wrong. Neoliberalism gave us a huge and short economic downturn. Southern Europe would sacrifice a goat to get a short economic downturn.

You realize Greece's healthcare system has been in on-and-off again collapse for six years and is today barely functioning and heavily rationed? Where the fuck is your righteous anger for those pointless, preventable deaths?

Righteous anger and 25 Korun will get you a glass of beer. The entire population of Greece is 11 million. There are more than 15 million people in the EU today who have health insurance exclusively because of their EU rights. If you take down the EU, you will have taken the healthcare away from almost half again as many people as actually exist in Greece for you to be fighting for.

Yes, what has happened and is continuing to happen in Greece is a tragedy. And you should be angry about it. And you are, and that's good. But being mad about a bad thing should not cause you to panic and do a worse thing.

Again and still, your entire argument boils down to:

• We Must Do Something.
• This Is Something.
• Therefore We Must Do It.

The first and second part of your argument is true. But the conclusion is false because you have an legitimate substitution to connect your two premises.

-Username17

[DSMatticus]

DSM, you should use your extensive knowledge of Ordoliberalism to fix the wikipedia article.

No, no it does not "disagree with me a lot." Ordoliberalism is neoliberalism that believes competition, unions, and maybe, maybe (but only if you're all good little boys and girls) a minimalistic welfare net are sufficient concessions to make neoliberalism a legitimate economic philosophy. Ordoliberals would never phrase it that way, because their entire brand is/was based on being third way centrists who found the One True Solution to economics was in the middle all along, but that is what they actually are - neoliberal crooks attempting to swindle idiots.

Angela Merkel's CDU is anti-union, anti-pension, anti-minimum wage, anti-deficit, anti-inflation, pro-privatization, blah blah blah blah. There are very few remaining differences between the CDU and your typical neoliberal party. That's not accidental. An asshole on a high horse is still an asshole, and these are the sorts of things the CDU actually cared about all along. The most significant remaining ordoliberal influence in the CDU is in their lukewarm love of anti-monopoly regulations. It hasn't been particularly effective, but considering the neoliberal stance is "do nothing at all" it is at least one difference.

Meanwhile when Merkel declared that she wanted to weaken the unions because they kept going on strike everytime she told them to go fuck themself, Sigmar Gabriel's SPD was working with those same unions to push for an increase to the minimum wage (the thing that Merkel was telling the unions to go fuck themselves over). And as part of the ruling coalition (yes, the CDU and the SPD are part of the same ruling coalition), Sigmar Gabriel has helped protect the pension system from Merkel. But he's still anti-deficit, anti-inflation, lukewarm on progressive taxation, and ultimately sided with Schauble against Greece. The closest thing to ordoliberals in Germany are the SPD, and the differences between the modern CDU and a neoliberal party are mostly branding at this point. They spend a lot more time pretending to be reasonable centrists than your average neoliberal party and that's the gist of it.

Neoliberals pretend that the economy can be smoothly managed with simple monetarism, and for periods with small shocks, steady inflation, and moderate base interest rates they are actually right. Neoliberals can indeed produce rapid recoveries with their interest diddling magic. And while it does not actually work the way they claim it's going to when interest rates are very low or shocks are large, it does help some. It is still better than nothing, and nothing is what the Ordoliberals offer.

I'm sorry, but the neoliberals kicked the monetarists out of the movement more than a decade ago. It's not clear they were ever really more than a prop for legitimacy to begin with. Remember: the ECB's mandate is price stability. John Major (neoliberal Tory) was the architect of Black Wednesday (1992). Neoliberals will sign onto monetary insanity with little to no regard for the (limited) wisdom monetarism has to offer because they do not actually give a shit about monetarism. That is a scam more than two decades old and you should know better than to listen to them by now when they tell you what they believe in. They are liars and their pants are, in fact, on fire. If what they want and what monetarism suggests ever intersect, it is purely by accident. The right-wing does not have a coherent legitimate philosophy - not in the U.S. and not in the EU. It is a corrupt grab-bag of terrible and sometimes conflicting ideas and on any given issue they reach for whichever ones will best further their "money for billionaires" agenda. Monetarism is one of the dustier ones by this point.

Stop fucking that chicken. I already pointed out that the reason we had to recover in time for 1984 was his mismanagement. Unemployment crested above 10% because of his bad policies. But it also came back down quickly because monetarism isn't completely insane or always wrong. Neoliberalism gave us a huge and short economic downturn. Southern Europe would sacrifice a goat to get a short economic downturn.

I am not sure you grasp the timeline here. Okay, let me rephrase; I am positive you don't.

The upward trend in unemployment begins during the very end of Jimmy Carter's presidency and continues into Reagan's, arguably peaking before any of Reagan's policies would have had time to effect the economy. That same upward trend in unemployment begins when Paul Volcker declares war against inflation, peaking and falling back down when Paul Volcker ends his war against inflation. Volcker did not alleviate the pain caused by Reagan's policies. Volcker alleviated the pain caused by Volcker's policies. Reagan did not cause that unemployment, and monetarism did not save us from that unemployment. Paul Volcker deliberately tossed unemployment under the bus in the hopes that it would get inflation under control (and you can still have heated arguments about how much he was right versus how much he was lucky), and when inflation stopped unemployment was allowed to crawl out from under the bus. That's it. It's not really a story about neoliberalism or monetarism. It's a story about self-inflicted monetary harm, and then not doing that anymore.

Righteous anger and 25 Korun will get you a glass of beer. The entire population of Greece is 11 million. There are more than 15 million people in the EU today who have health insurance exclusively because of their EU rights. If you take down the EU, you will have taken the healthcare away from almost half again as many people as actually exist in Greece for you to be fighting for.

If you are going to make the argument that your righteous anger is better because it has bigger numbers, you're going to have to make an argument that shows at least some level of understanding that you even know what to start counting. Greece isn't the only country whose healthcare has been savaged by austerity. Spain's emergency rooms have turned away patients dying of tuberculosis. Who later died. Of tuberculosis. Spain has a population of 46 million. Ah-hah, now my numbers are bigger! Similarly, while "uninsured patients are causing a health care cost spiral and suffering crippling medical bankruptcies" is a very serious problem that needs addressed, it is far less fatal than "the country literally cannot afford to import medical supplies or pay doctors, so people just die a lot." An economically healthy nation can roll along for quite a long time with a shitty healthcare system and minimal casualties, but the instant you run out of life-saving medicines or surgeons the death toll starts building up quite quickly.

Again and still, your entire argument boils down to:

We Must Do Something.
This Is Something.
Therefore We Must Do It.



The first and second part of your argument is true. But the conclusion is false because you have an legitimate substitution to connect your two premises.

That being said: Blade is basically right that the EU is basically designed to be unshakeable and to ignore democratic mandates altogether. So the fact that the parliament and the commission are essentially locked, just means that the technocrats who got us into this mess in the first place will continue ramming their failed policies down everyone's throats until violent revolutionaries have them guillotined.

The EU cannot be democratically fixed and will continue ravaging Europe until someone tears it down. Two years ago, you agreed with that sentiment. Today, you don't. I don't know what happened in the past two years to increase your confidence in the idea that the EU could be fixed democratically from within. I asked, but you dodged the question with some non-sequitur bullshit like "maybe guillotines wouldn't be the worst possible outcome," and have since then been refusing to engage with the topic in any substantive way. But if the choice is between violent uprising (or even the non-violent rise of fascism) and the dissolution of the EU, I will choose the dissolution of the EU everytime. You'd be fucking crazy not to. You don't want to engage with that argument because... you're an asshole and it's easier to stick your fingers in your ears and just pretend you're the only one who ever makes any sense, but it's still there.

[maglag]

To show how much DSM is hallucinating, allow me to point out that both Spain and Greece have less rate of tubercolosis death than France, Japan and Finland plus 141 other countries.

Yeah, one hospital failed to treat one guy. Statistics happens. Human beings commit errors. Their healthcare systems are still doing a pretty good job.

As another remainder, Turbercolosis death rate in Spain back in 1993 was 1.83.

During glorious golden age Franco rule Spain enjoyed a magnificent 10.28 tubercolosis death rate in 1970.

So DSM, tell me more how Spain's healthcare system was so much better before the EU and the germans ruined everything by their austerity resulting in a death rate by tubercolosis that is two whole orders of magnitude lower than before.

[Blade]

I've seen the following explanations to the EU's economic policies:

1. It's the German (and generally European) mindset: debt is bad, inflation is bad. The people in charge are just too dogmatic

2. The basis of the EU's economic policies were put in the 80s, when inflation was a problem, and everything has been locked down to make sure countries didn't try to weasel out of it.

3. Germany benefits from having poor countries around it: their economy is based on paying small wages to people there and then add a "German Quality" on top and sell the products at premium in and out of the EU.

4. It's part of the neoliberal agenda to crash all the state-owned stuff (healthcare, public companies, etc.) and put them in the hand of private companies, because all this healthcare and public services money is too good to be left in the hands of states and mafias.

To me it looks like it could be a mix of all of the above, but I have no idea if some are more relevant than others.

[DSMatticus]

Maglag, you couldn't be assed to actually read that article, could you? What it actually says is that there are just shy of a million people in Spain (who will be disproportionately poor) who will not be able to receive any non-emergency treatment. It describes a bunch of upcoming (upcoming in 2013, they have since gone into effect) cuts to the health-care system. That specific, preventable, and expensive death is not the argument. It is an example of the sorts of specific, preventable and expensive deaths caused by denying people preventive treatment.

But also I am going to call you out on being generally ill-informed and pulling your numbers from shit sources or not really understanding them. Here are WHO statistics on Greece's tuberculosis situation. Compared to France, Greece has about half the incidence rate but about twice the mortality rate. There are less tuberculosis cases in Greece, but there are are more fatal tuberculosis cases in Greece. Not a higher percentage of cases which are fatal (though obviously that too), just more fatal cases period. More people (per 100,000) die in Greece of tuberculosis than in France, even though less people ever actually catch tuberculosis. That's a recent development; in 2010 the mortality rates were roughly equal. There is probably not enough statistical weight to declare that cuts to the healthcare system are absolutely the cause, but man isn't that a coincidence?

I'm not going to try to figure out why or how your sources mislead you. I clicked that link, it gave me a bunch of geocities flashbacks, and I immediately went to the WHO and World Bank instead. I honestly don't even know how you found whatever the hell that was.

[Koumei]

Seeing as the argument isn't going anywhere meaningful, let's move on to Georgia, which is still a shitty place but now has war waged against vegans.

We need a good "CSI Miami" line to cover this attack, I think.

[maglag]

The EU-currently so terrible that angry people rage by throwing delicious grilled meat at the ones they don't like. It's clearly another sign of the population's inhuman living conditions.

Reminds me of that time some years ago when french farmers started to break 100 000 eggs a day because the prices were "too cheap".

[Username17]

DSM, stop digging. Just shut the fuck up and admit you kicked a hornet's nest out of ignorance. You don't know what you're tlaking about here, you're just googling numbers and cherry picking ones that sound like they support your position, even though they really really don't. Here's the thing: I am a fucking doctor and I just spent 3 months on a respiratory ward and I have actually treated tuberculosis in several countries in patients who were natives and patients who were immigrants from marginalized ethnic groups. I had to get a Tetum translator so that I could explain treatment protocols to East Timorese migrant workers.

And here's the thing: there are in fact protocols for when you simply deny treatment to tuberculosis sufferers and let them live or die according to the whims of their immune system. And it's not specifically because tuberculosis treatment is expensive, although it is. It's because Tuberculosis treatment takes half a year and the bug already has so many resistances that we already have to use quadruple therapy. Tuberculosis acquiring complete broad spectrum immunity is totally within the realm of possibility, and if that happens that would be bad. Like, maybe killing five percent of the population of the planet type bad. So patients who for whatever reason are unlikely to complete treatment regimens for TB, do not get treatment for TB. On account of the fact that we would rather not have an unstoppable plague that kills more people than World War 2.

The fact that people died of TB, or even died of TB at a higher rate somewhere than some other country or whatever, doesn't actually prove or even suggest that the big bad austerity fairy has fucked you. Even Nordic communist paradises have people die of TB. And beyond that, they have people die of TB after being denied treatment for TB. There are probably Swedes right now who have access to communist Nordic healthcare who have TB and aren't going to get ethambutol pills or streptamycin injections or fucking anything. And they are going to die. Probably because they started treatment and just decided to stop after having it all explained to them and now responsible healthcare professionals do not feel that trying to treat them again is worth the risk.

But the point of all this is that you've been going off about shit you don't understand for several pages now. Just. Shut. Up. You're wrong. I mean, look at this shit:

What it actually says is that there are just shy of a million people in Spain (who will be disproportionately poor) who will not be able to receive any non-emergency treatment.

You remember that you brought up Spain because it was supposed to be a bigger number than the over fifteen fucking million Europeans living outside their home countries who will be denied non-emergency treatment when they lose their EU rights for healthcare, right? Right? And how some number less than a million is very much smaller than more than fifteen million and that you are still very much failing to make a coherent case.

Fifteen million is a tremendous low ball, by the way. It doesn't include, for example, me. I'm an American, which means that I'm not included in the numbers of EU citizens living abroad within the EU. Nevertheless, the health insurance I get as a result of being married to a European is ultimately regulated and insured by the EU. No EU, and I don't have insurance either. I have no idea how many people are in situations similar to mine, where they are not EU citizens but nonetheless have health insurance because of EU regulations, but it's almost certainly less than thirty million.

You've flailed around quoting various statistics that don't mean what you think they do, but the bottom line is still that so far Austerity in Europe has been estimated to have actually killed about forty thousand people. That's a lot! That's a humanitarian crisis! We should definitely do something! But your plan of "ending health insurance for over fifteen million people" is not a plan that is in any way acceptable. For comparison, in 2009, the United States had fifty million uninsured people. And also in 2009, the United States had an extra 45,000 preventable deaths attributable to a lack of health insurance. If we just do crude ratios, we can estimate that the act of cutting the health insurance guarantees for EU citizens living abroad will by itself be expected to kill about 13,500 people a year. Which will be a bigger pile of corpses than the last six years of austerity in just three years.

And that's not the only thing that would cause needless deaths in Europe should the EU collapse. There is of course the personal note that of those 15+ million people losing their health insurance, I am not counted despite the fact that I also would lose my health insurance and so would millions of others. But there isn't a single country in Europe that produces all its own food and medicines, and it is not at all obvious how any of that shit would be delivered should the EU collapse. Further, the EU provides regulation for food purity and environmental standards and regional development funds and all kinds crap like that which also would result in the needless deaths of thousands were they to cease abruptly.

For example, there's the small and dramatic case of Eurotransplant. It covers a region within the EU that runs from Slovenia to the Netherlands, and it provides shorter waiting lists and better transplant outcomes for the 15,000 people on waiting lists in countries whose total population is 135 million. It pools transplant lists and donor organs from a large area so that better matches can be given more quickly. And Czechia is not a part of it, because the countries that are in Eurotransplant use some form of "opt in" organ donation, while Czechia uses an "opt out" organ donation system and thus has many more available kidneys per million inhabitants than the Eurotransplant area does. But for the areas that are in the Eurotransplant coverage, it's a clear improvement over what they would have without. And without the European Union, it would clearly be impossible to do that because cross border live organ shipments would not be a thing.

You're simply wrong. Your proposals are still about cutting programs that would pointlessly end the lives of tens of thousands of people because... you are mad about cuts in programs that pointlessly ended the lives of tens of thousands of people. That's ridiculous. Fuck. You. Get a plan that improves the situation or shut the fuck up.

-Username17

[Kaelik]

The EU-currently so terrible that angry people rage by throwing delicious grilled meat at the ones they don't like. It's clearly another sign of the population's inhuman living conditions.

maglag, so committed to whining about how great the EU is, that he forgot that Georgia isn't in the EU.

I assume tomorrow we will find out that Canada is such a great place because it's a member of the EU as well?