If you feel the need to take down capitalism then Tonight We Riot is out now

[quote=LungDrago]

Quoting: Solitaryto stop just bickering about the issue and start doing something about it.

And you think that putting people in house arrest is "doing something about it" ?
Open borders and, in the case of Italy, 300.000 Chinese immigrants is recipe for catastrophe.
What brought us here was too much government; only the fall of these so-called social democracies and the return to healthy individualism will return Europe to its former glory.

Quoting: DorritOpen borders and, in the case of Italy, 300.000 Chinese immigrants is recipe for catastrophe.
What brought us here was too much government; only the fall of these so-called social democracies and the return to healthy individualism will return Europe to its former glory.

I'm not sure you can realistically close borders effectively enough to stop a virus from spreading. So, I don't mean "doing something about it" as preventing an outbreak from happening, I meant it mostly as being prepared for it when it inevitably happens. Which we weren't. We were required to wear respirators even though there were no such respirators available for quite a while. We were caught with our pants down even though it has been coming our way for a long time.

Quoting: Dorritthe return to healthy individualism will return Europe to its former glory.

Can you be more specific? At what point in history exactly was Europe a better place to live? Just curious.

Or do you perhaps mean something else when you say "former glory"?

Quoting: tuubiCan you be more specific? At what point in history exactly was Europe a better place to live? Just curious.

1914 was a watershed.
After that governments never stopped absorbing more and more power, never let a crisis go to waste. We were finally left with crumbs of our former liberties, in exchange for sclerotic leviathans we call States, EU on top as a rotten cherry.
Now they're taking away even the crumbs, in the name of health security.
I pray for all to crumble back to that August, when Governments were small and people free to decide for themselves.

Quoting: DorritAnd you think that putting people in house arrest is "doing something about it" ?
Open borders and, in the case of Italy, 300.000 Chinese immigrants is recipe for catastrophe.
What brought us here was too much government; only the fall of these so-called social democracies and the return to healthy individualism will return Europe to its former glory.

Are you proposing 300k Chinese just happened to immigrate to Italy carrying COVID-19? Because I'm quite sure that is not the case. If you really want to restrict any disease from hopping from one country to another you need to totally isolate that country, meaning absolutely no travel, immigrant or otherwise. Immigration was not the issue here.

Also, yeah, putting people into "house arrest" is "doing something about it", since people won't flood the hospital capacity and leave tons of people to die in the streets.

Quoting: Dorrit

Quoting: tuubiCan you be more specific? At what point in history exactly was Europe a better place to live? Just curious.

1914 was a watershed.
After that governments never stopped absorbing more and more power, never let a crisis go to waste. We were finally left with crumbs of our former liberties, in exchange for sclerotic leviathans we call States, EU on top as a rotten cherry.
Now they're taking away even the crumbs, in the name of health security.
I pray for all to crumble back to that August, when Governments were small and people free to decide for themselves.

This I find extremely funny. It's not like in 1914 extremely powerful, centrally lead global superpowers existed. Even better, those superpowers usually had some kind of a king in control to whom your average individual was but an ant. And these kings had a nasty tendency to send these average individuals to fight each other in pointless wars. But I suppose since they never were encouraged to stay home for a few months in order to stop hospitals from overflowing, they must have had it so much better than us.

Socialism is a cancer to all who are motivated and self-sufficient. Their talents and productivity is harnessed against their will with the threat of force and/or imprisonment for noncompliance. Can't wait to live in a police state.

Quoting: Dorrit

Quoting: tuubiCan you be more specific? At what point in history exactly was Europe a better place to live? Just curious.

1914 was a watershed.
After that governments never stopped absorbing more and more power, never let a crisis go to waste. We were finally left with crumbs of our former liberties, in exchange for sclerotic leviathans we call States, EU on top as a rotten cherry.
Now they're taking away even the crumbs, in the name of health security.
I pray for all to crumble back to that August, when Governments were small and people free to decide for themselves.

Ah, the glory days back when European empires were still free to exploit their colonies, women could not vote, the majority of people were servants, peasant farm workers or factory workers who had no rights to speak of, and so on. Oh and my own country was still a few years away from winning its independence, but I guess your definition of Europe is quite specific and excludes large parts of it.

Sorry for being a bit meta now:

I must say, this thread has greatly restored my faith in humanity.
With a few exceptions people here manage to discuss such a sensitive topic in a very civil way, backed by historic arguments. I can find a lot of points I agree on with all sides in this discussion (with the aforementioned exceptions...).

That's something quite rare on the internet today. On most forums people just yell at each other, or make claims not backed by any actual data.

Thanks a lot, it is a pleasure following this discussion.

Rents are modern slavery. Shelter is a basic human right. No more proof needed than seeing workers ordered to stay at home, and unable to obtain a paycheck. Watch the capitalists defend their compensation at the cost of human suffering.

Quoting: LungDrago

Quoting: SolitaryI am not sure you or I understand each other. I think democracy works wonders... because it basically limits the aspect of "people problem" that I mentioned, because nobody is allowed to have too much power. The system is designed to limit, slowdown and prevent any radical changes.

Meanwhile with socialism, where you have strong government you get that problem, because you are governed by people that inherently have more power thanks to stronger standing of the state. People with too much power = abuse of power.

The other side of that coin is that when stuff happens and something needs to be done about it, democracy can be slow to react. Take the Covid situation here in EU. Essentially, Italy had to take the punch for most governments to stop just bickering about the issue and start doing something about it.

The whole Covid situation in Europe is often misconstructed as EU acting late or not doing anything. EU has its limited competency and countries healthcare systems are not part of it, critics often like to bash EU for not doing anything or the opposite accusing them of overstepping their competency. Solving the Covid situation is national problem, so EU really has no say in here. Problem of Italy is that they have oldest population in Europe and they have lower amount of ventilators per capita than other countries. Italy is not a victim that got left behind by bureaucrats in Brussels. Nobody knew what to expect and they were the first that got hit hard, but not the only one (Spain for example).

What EU did and did it well was rescuing citizen from abroad that got stuck thanks to travel bans. What EU can do is to prepare some more coordinated effort in the future, but till then it is up to the countries themselves and that is not EU fault. This whole situation is unprecedented and makes sense there was no master plan for it. No country in the world, democratic or not really knew what to expect and how to prepare themselves. If anybody claims they have the answer (if only they had the power) they are most likely lying, there is no simple solution here. Lot of countries in EU solved the Covid situation fine though.

If anything I would say the migration crisis in 2015 was more of an example where we saw problems of such nature, but even that is not that simple, because it was Germany that initiated that whole mess with invitation and then acted surprised when other countries refused to participate. That whole issue is more political than anything else, because the solutions are already on the table.