The thing about Europe: it’s the actual land of the free now
The thing about Europe: it’s the actual land of the free now
www.economist.com
The thing about Europe: it’s the actual land of the free now
Paywall? https://archive.is/Tq3KD
82 comments
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The thing about Europe is its economy is permanently stuck in the doldrums, a global cautionary tale. And no wonder. Europeans enjoy August off, retire in their prime and spend more time eating and socialising with their families than inhabitants of any other region. Oddly, surveys show people in countries both rich and poor value such leisure time; somehow Europeans managed to squeeze their employers into giving them more of it. Even as they were depressing GDP by wasting time playing with their kids, the denizens of Europe also managed to keep inequality relatively low while it ballooned elsewhere in the past 20 years. Nobody in Europe has spent the past week looking at their stock portfolio, wondering if they could still afford to send their kids to university. Europeans have no idea what “medical bankruptcy” is. Oh, and no EU leader has ever launched their own cryptocurrency.
This whole paragraph had me on edge, a little unsure of whether The Economist, (edit for clarity: from presumably) an American publication (wing), legitimately thought these were good things or not.
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an American publication
According to Wikipedia, its mostly written and edited in London, and was started in Britain in the 1800s (to raise support for abolishing import tariffs in fact)
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I kind of got both that impression and its exact opposite, like the whole paragraph feels like a long wink and a nudge, like the author would like to say "maybe fixating on 'line go up' distracts you from all that is good in life" but that would negate The Economist's entire raison d'être.
It's like Schrodinger's argument.
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The Economist is a very Neoliberal British magazine (I should know, I had a subscription for almost a decade) and as such they have the vices of both:
- The magical thinking of Neoliberals, were the solution for the social and economic problems caused by deregulation is even more deregulation.
- The almost universal practice amongst the British Press and Political class of claiming everywhere is a shithole compared to Britain, especially Europe (and by that they mean Continental Europe).
So yeah, of course for them America sliding into Fascism isn't the fault of the explosion of inequality and total freezing of Social Mobility there, which was the direct consequence of 4 decades of Neoliberalism and the destruction or defanging of all powers in the land (including Unions and the State) except for the Power Of Money, and of course Europe is "problematic" because they haven't destroyed enough Unions, Worker Rights and other non-Money powers and workers are still entitled to things like a month of vacations, retiring before they're dead and time for activities other than sleeping and working (oh, the horror!).
These guys have basically the ideology of the Democrat Party leadership, but only on Economics and with a British twist, possibly even harder Neoliberal (so, even more Rightwing, though towards Oligarchy rather than Fascism), and they certainly see it as their mission to "make opinion" (not Journalism) so their stories are almost invariably spined in some way to sell their ideology.
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the bar for what is considered free now is just lower
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Already was. While the us was occupied with cosplaying as freedom freaks and destroying countless democracies for the sake of freedom, europe actually became free.
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It's a different idea of freedom. In the US it's about freedom to X, in the EU it's freedom from X.
For example, in the US you have the freedom to say just about anything you want. In the EU you're free from people making you unsafe by misinformation, lies, etc. In the US you're free to take pictures of anything you want that can be seen from the street. In Germany you're free from having pictures of your property posted online without your consent. The result is that Google's Street View covers everything in the US and almost nothing in Germany. In the US people or companies are free to take public information and hold onto it or publish it as they see fit without interference. In the EU, you're free from having that information out there forever beyond your control. You're free to demand that it be deleted under certain circumstances.
In the end, the European way is more about regulating things. It asks what kinds of things prevent people from living their lives freely and without worries, and tries to regulate those things. The American way is more about removing every regulation and rule possible and saying the end result is freedom so it must be good.
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It's not that they're free. It's that they're exceedingly privileged from exploiting the global south. And then racist against their victims. Basically the same as USA. It was never about "freedom" but rather genocide, slavery, exploitation, etc.
- Deported From Europe, Murdered by Israel
- Germany Turns to U.S. Playbook: Deportations Target Gaza War Protesters
- Nearly 9,000 migrant deaths recorded last year by UN migration agency, real death toll likely higher
The Economist is an imperial rag promoting pseudo-scientific capitalist ideology. They only care about pale skins.
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When you look at GDP per hour worked then Western Europe is at about the same level as the US. It is just that Europeans work a lot less then Americans, hence they earn more money.
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People with a loving and supportive family are wealthier than Elon Musk
And they'll never have to wonder if they're truly loved for themselves or because they're rich. At a certain level of wealth, you'll never know for sure if someone likes you for who you are vs. your wealth. At Elon's level of wealth, he can't even trust that his family is being honest with him.
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At Elon’s level of wealth, he can’t even trust that his family is being honest with him.
Well… his trans daughter probably is.
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France should take the statue of liberty away from us tbh
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It’s now a monument to how things used to be
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from this article: "somehow europeans managed to squeeze their employers into giving them more of it"; it's called a union, not "convinced to grant" (like an "ottriate constitution" from a king). we (others before us) work politically with political subjects through conflict (strike, demonstrations, public debate and parliamentary discussions). anyway we don't do it enough, but we still have the remains of the communist, socialist and social democratic parties of the second after the war, despite the fact that anglo-saxon neoliberalism tried (and partly succeeded) to eradicate the welfare state (both from a regulatory point of view and through the culture of consumption and overabundance). however, we hope that in the future we will work less and we live better :)
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You can express a controversial view on any European campus (outside Hungary, at least) without fear of losing your tenure or your grant.
You can freely express any controversial view on Hungarian campuses, nobody cares at all. Most people in Hungary don't care about the whole Gaza situation one way or another, with a slight exaggeration if you asked the average university student in Hungary where Gaza is, they would think you're looking for some nightclub.
The only people who care about Palestine in Hungary are the far-right, Orbán's far right being pro-Israel because kleptocrats stick together, while the extreme far right is pro-Palestine because they hate Jews. They usually won't be university educated either.
As faculty, you can also express whatever views, a lot of people were straight up protesting the government at one point, but there is not much they can do with them legally and Orbán's gang didn't care enough to alter the laws for that.
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Now? Always has been
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Uh, we historically had some rather repressive regimes, and some countries were ruled by dictators until the 90s. People like Franco and Ceausescu and Tito weren't that long ago.
But it's generally been pretty good in the millennial lifetime.
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This guy thinks stuff happened before the war.
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Europe has had the ability to change one’s station in life - what people might equate to the “American Dream” - for a long time now, and has had it better than America has. You can go from poor to a middle class life more easily. However going from rags-to-riches is far more rare. Unfortunately, here in America we’ve equated the Dream and Freedom to mean going from middle class to Fuck You Money, having a personal arsenal, and breaking every social contract we possibly can. The only ones trotting out The American Dream ™️ as still existing are politicians and the people fighting any restrictions on getting richer while the rest of us are crabs in a bucket all stepping on each other trying to keep from drowning. Now, with trump, we have the basic Constitution under attack and what few freedoms that guaranteed we had left being eroded. Well, except 2A, but he’ll get to that eventually.
Yeah, Europe has absolutely been “free-er” and better in multiple ways for a long while now. The only reason most Americans don’t understand this is because guns and chasing fuck you money.
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Anglo leftists will be like: "No." Because hatespeech and racism is only good when they do it. And many EU countries ban hatespeech.
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wat? nobody on the left supports hate speech.
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Except when it is against Jews and minorities they feel are collectively complicit in being counterrevolutionaries.
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I'm waiting for the haters to give negative comments about the title and article.
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Look back at my posting history. There's no shortage of bad or dumb comments. But also a lot of good ones. I tend to focus on those. Well reasoned responses, even if they don't agree, I read and engage with.
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Chat control and any similar proposal should be killed once and for all before such big statements are made.
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In the land of the blind, the one eye is king.
Sure, it could be better, but it isn't better anywhere else.
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"The best in the world" but with a footnote describing how low that bar actually is.
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Nice article, I like how it is basically a list of things about Europe that aren't that great but then ends with "But in their own plodding way, Europeans have created a place where they are guaranteed rights to what others yearn for: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
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Yeah... For now. It's a fatal mistake to think what's going on here in the US hasn't already been spreading.
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I disagree. Hungary and Poland going utterly authoritarian came before America. If anything, they are parallel processes going on in Europe and the US.
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As an American it's wild to me that there are people in other countries who have seen what he did in his last term, are seeing what he's doing now, seeing the effects of that, and thinking to themselves "I want that in MY country!"
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Nah.. Europe's countries still have their own laws so you can't just "take control of europe" like Trump took control of the US. You can't just appoint a European leader that just destroys everything the predecessor has done.
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Stares at chat control, anti-end to end encryption stuff and crackdowns on pro-Palestinian protesters I think Europe has a bit of a way to go before claiming that title.
No detention centres await foreign students who hold the wrong views on Gaza; news outfits are not sued for interviewing opposition politicians.
Immigrants are getting deported for those wrong views, though, so... yeah.
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Immigrants are getting deported for those wrong views, though, so… yeah.
Ah, good old Germany and their good old ways...
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Those 4 people which are very loud in the media right now are being deported for being part in a violent occupation of a university where staff was threatened with axes and crowbars, property damage of 100.000€, and trying to liberate people arrested by the police.
They always forget to say this, in their news stories.
The only thing criticworthy about this, is that the authorities didn't waited for the legal proceedings to finish. Otherwise if found guilty, that will get you a prison sentence and/or deported in most countries as a foreigner.
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Those 4 people which are very loud in the media right now are being deported for being part in a violent occupation of a university where staff was threatened with axes and crowbars, property damage of 100.000€, and trying to liberate people arrested by the police.
Yeah that's not a crime unless they did these things themselves, which isn't the case; they were just peacefully taking part in the protest where these things happened, but they're not even accused of taking part in these actions. Here's the same event by the Intercept.
None of the protesters are accused of any particular acts of vandalism or the de-arrest at the university. Instead, the deportation order cites the suspicion that they took part in a coordinated group action.
And from the (machine translated version of the) article you linked:
These only contain brief descriptions of the crime and with regard to what happened at the FU, the contributions to the crime are not individually assigned to the people affected.
To repeat: These students are not even accused of committing the crime for which they're being deported.
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It always was.
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The last dictatorship in Western Europe was 50 years ago. Eastern Europe was between 35 years ago and today.
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Always is a stretch. Lol
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You can drink an open container of alcohol outside. You can legally be outside without Money on you, you can be safe outside without worrying of being shot. All basic necessities of Life are cared for. You don't have to worry of starving, being homeless, or having a health condition that doesn't get cared for.
Modern Europe has always been free
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Depends on what you define as "Europe". Soviet Russia, its satellite states and Franco Spain weren't really more free than the USA, even while they were legally segregating races in the south. EU was definitely more free from the start, though.
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We really should unironically and systematicaly slap all the Yankee slogans about freedom and democracy and being a beacon and stuff on pictures of EU flags and photos of our parliaments etc.
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They don’t. That’s a far-right talking point as they try to enshittify the public discourse. Arrests are made when the objective of the comment is to cause harm to the subject. Encouraging a vulnerable person to suicide, racial abuse, threats and so on.
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82 comments