Europe Puts Social Programs on Chopping Block to Appease Trump on NATO Funding
Europe Puts Social Programs on Chopping Block to Appease Trump on NATO Funding
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. [...] The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people." - Eisenhower
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. […] The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.” - Eisenhower
This is just ideologically ignoring that there are distinct-dimensions in the proper question:
IF you've got cancer, THEN does it make sense to stop "funding" your immune-system, because the ( 10% when you're healthy, probably 25% when you're sick, or more ) fraction of your calories which are going to violence ought be going, instead, to comfyness??
Idiocy.
Survival IS a basic-need, as Maslow understood, & exactly as enforcement is a basic-need within your organism, it also is within countries.
And between them.
"serial-murder, treason, terrorism, etc, all just need to be made to be nice, & we'll compromise with them, & everybody will be happy"
( I'm NOT accusing you of having spoken that, but it's a fundamental idea behind the utopian non-reality that your, & Eisenhower's, ignoring-the-different-dimensions-of-requirement is doing ) ignores that diversity-of-intent is an actual thing, & it ignores the greatness of that diversity.
Yes, some people actually butcher others for fun.
NOT enforcing against that, is morally criminal.
Yes, some factions, including countries, butchers others for fun/gain/profit/kicks/whatever.
NOT enforcing against that is also morally criminal.
Yes, WE ( all of our countries ) have committed evil, through our means, economic, through weapons, through selective-legislations ( ask the Indigenous people about that, sometime, if you've balls enough, oh readers, & the state-sanctioned slavery of Africans was only a subset of the world's slavery that the West was profiting from, including slavery of the Indigenous people in parts of the Americas ), & countering that means enforcing accountability on our own institutions
( good fscking luck accomplishing that: Rule Number Zero in institutions is NEVER tolerate accountability, & once that's done, then never tolerate responsibility is the next rule ),
& that requires ACTUAL Journalism, which no longer exists, among our world ( only ideological parodies of journalism remain, now. Sad as all fscking hell. "The Elements of Journalism" now in its 4th edition, NEEDS to be made a high-school requirement, xor our civilization won't have enough leverage to be able to survive The Great Filter, this century )..
but to declare that simply deeming all military/enforcement spending to be fundamentally contrary to social-support/education/etc, is DISinformation.
Whether an organism needs an immune-system or not is dependent on its context.
Whether a country needs military-investment is dependent on its context.
NOT an ideological-belief ( either militarist or utopian ).
Ukraine's need for military is not an ideological delusion: it is survival-requirement.
When Trump declares war on Canada, so as to take-possession of the entire-continent for himself, Canada's need for military will be identical to Ukraine's: extinguishment is the only alternative to fit fighting survival.
IF Trump gets through Canada ( he's getting old: there's a time-limit on his life ), then Putin & Trump are committed to butchering the hated woke EU.
There are many right-wingers working to butcher the EU from within, as Millei is in the process of butchering Argentina from within..
Those who are waging negative-sum-game ( mass-shootings are negative-sum-game, competitive-narcissism is zero-sum-game ) so that they can enforce that the "woke" are ALL butchered, lost, destroyed, shed, .. are warring for their ideology to be the final "ruler" of the world.
It is ideological/"religious", not objective, the real war we're waging.
ClimatePunctuation, however, couldn't care less about such ideologies: it's still accelerating, & all the bullshit "consensus" that that isn't happening is just helping obliterate more future-lives, a greater percentage of humankind. ( much of India, California, Texas, Saudi Arabia, etc, ought be uninhabitable before the end of this century: Trump's rampaging of Canada will be goaded partly by the continuing acceleration of ClimatePunctuation )
Once our world has divided into the 4-ish alliances/empires that are the max this world can sustain, in WW3, then the REAL beat-down will begin: a whole-planet deathmatch, beginning in the early 2030's. Only 1 alliance/empire/faction will survive, .. IF any do ..
NOT fighting for our lives IS obliterating our future-generations: obliterating THEIR lives, for sake of our complacent "status quo will save us" non-effort.
Anybody who pushes nonviolence against cancer/ebola/marburg/rabies/etc should be considered to be lethally-incompetent, at best ( how many lives did Typhoid Mary indirectly-destroy? There IS reasponsibility in both action & in inaction! ).
The same for any who advocate appeasing/accommodating those who are investing-in & are committed-to the annihilation of civil-rights from this planet, no matter what their "colors" or "stripe" or "flag" or ideology/prejudice/"religion" be.
Feel free to deem me evil for any/every point I put in this comment:
I expect that there will be either 0% survival of this century by our world's humankind, .. xor there will be between 1% & 2% survival, IF some faction grows enough spine to evolve, fast, relentlessly, endlessly, until surviving The Great Filter becomes for them possible.
All who reject that axiomatically put me in the dangerously-mentally-ill or the evil category, & that's fine.
I expect there to be about 8 billion fewer humans left alive by 2090.
All the ideological "you have to be in this ideology, pushing this group's dominion of our world" .. or that, .. or the other .. they're all idiotic, in my view: like idiots fighting-over which deck-chair won't drown, while in the sinking of the Titanic.
Totally-wrong frame-of-reference.
Species-extinguishment's the proper frame-of-reference.
Ideological-dominion cannot win, without snuffing this world's humankind.
Only hard-objectivity/global-(not-ideological)-pragmatism can win The Great Filter.
& nobody's accepting the evidence's framing of it that way.
Exactly the same as nobody is accepting that the proper framing of all the geopolitical major-players is in the 3 kinds of "games", positive-sum games ( win-win alliances, none of which are visible in the world, to me ), zero-sum games ( competitive-narcissism, which is presumed by default to be the only game in the world by us, for some delusional "reason" ), & negative-sum games ( mass-shootings, genocides, what Putin, the Republican Party, Millei, Orban, Musk, & many others are doing only matches this, or a mixture of this & zero-sum game ).. nobody is accepting the correct-framing, so therefore everybody is "not seeing the forest for the trees", & losing their perspective in the political-details..
& that is much of why I don't believe that more than 2% of humankind CAN survive this century, now..
IF you won't know that the thrumming in the rails is the oncoming train, AND you're sitting on the tracks holding your sprained ankle, howling for attention ( ideological-conforming/belonging/dominion, remapped ), THEN getting splatted throughout the sky is Universe's right to enforce on you, right?
IF, instead, you realize that the 200mph train's coming barely in time for most of you to survive getting out of its way, but all your friends die, aerosolized by the impact.. that isn't on Nature, that's on you, right? The telegraphing of what Nature was about to be doing was happening within your awareness's reach, but it was your belief that was vetoing it, right?
The geopolitical-shitshow we're embedded-in was set up centuries ago.
Our preventing this specific demise of the US of A would have required that education be nationally-organized/funded in the US for .. an entire century?
Read Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow" & understand that Kahneman & Tversky's "System 1", the imprint-reaction system, IS ideology/prejudice/"religion"'s basis.
Read "Top Brain / Bottom Brain" & understand that "System 1" is lower-forebrain.
Then understand that upper-forebrain requires LOTS of training to get it operating, its being allowed to "vote" in our world is dependent on its relative strength, compared with lower-forebrain, & that the 1st thing that Lenin, Rupert Murdoch, the Republicans, cults, religions, etc, ALL do, is they eradicate considered-reasoning from education, so as to prevent considered-reasoning/critical-thinking from gaining control, ever again..
It's FAR too late to save the US of A's life, now.
It may be too late to save humankind's life..
Pretending that "there will be time: Universe will pause & wait for us, because it revolves around us!" as we've been doing, means that, at this point in our evolution, we may deserve Universe's extinguishing us: if we WON'T think, then natural selection ought clean our kind off from the map.
Let some actually intelligent life evolve, instead.
Yeah, I'm getting bitter, in my old age, but humankind's WON'T think galls, & being gaslit about it, on top, only galls more.
shrug
_ /\ _
Kewl. If only there wasn't a country that invaded another country on our borders, that openly talks about invading even more, fucking about with our utilities and using spies, the internet and sabotage to fuck around even more.
A comfy life needs to be secured with military might, like it or not. Otherwise you get assholes in shitholes trying to forcefully take it from you. Rome knew that, the US knows that, the EU knows this (otherwise it wouldn't exist - since it is made to increase bargaining power and contains mutual defense clauses).
So until Russia stops being a militaristic shithole that invades its neighbors and starts building those schools, power plants, hospitals and highways, we need to spend taxes on military. And yes, Russia is a threat - Georgia shown us, 2014 has shown us, 2022 has shown us.
When did the US elect a COMMUNIST
Jesus fucking Christ. The fact that he is getting away with so much bullshit based solely on the fear that he might do something is absolutely infuriating. Like, I get it. I understand that it's a complicated issue and these people caving to him are trying desperately to appease him to save their own countries or themselves. But this man, and whoever is backing him and possibly pulling the strings, is purposefully destroying society for more money and power. So much shit going backwards because less than 1% of the 8 billion of people on the entire fucking planet felt like they didn't have enough.
And at the end of the day, when everyone is done appeasing a madman, what will be left? What kind of world will we create as we bend the knee to the man that wants us all to suffer? If you appease the madman to save yourself, the only thing you will get in return is a life of fear in a madman's world.
Hear hear!!
( that is parliamentary-speak for "Absolutely Right!", just in case anybody reading didn't grow up in a parliamentary town : )
_ /\ _
At this point, I'm pretty sure they're just using it as an excuse to wreck social services.
Oligarchic authoritarianism has been on the rise worldwide for the last 20 years at least and people go on about Trump like he's the cause not a symptom. He's about to be dead and these dumbasses will sit around wondering why everything isn't better now that bad man gone.
That would require them to use nato funding to invade the US. Not even if they just called it slavery straight up would that happen.
These are the same people that can't even hold Isreal accountable and you expect them to stop the US from hurting itself ? Considering this is not the first time the US has done this to it's citizens/legal immigrants Europe would be better off holding the US at arms lenth and hoping it implodes
Worse. More like less than 0.0001% of the humans on the planet.
Don't appease. Destroy. Did it work with you tied to appease any other dictators?
He can get fucked by a huge pine cone. He and those that back him are enemies of humanity at this point, willfully choosing to be cruel and sacrificing lives for money and power.
With or without Trump, I don't think Europe has a choice at this point. Yes, if they US held up their part against Russia, Europe would have to spend less. That's the one area where Trump screwed Europe, but that being the case, Europe needs to spend this much on defense. Trump can just be a convenient excuse.
The part that really gets me with this bending the knee shit is that he can have a dementia fit the day after they cut funding for their programs and they'll be in the same spot.
Why can’t we just distance ourselves from this? Why must we appease him!? 😡
We dont lol Americans think we are because we increase the military spending. We are also not cutting social spending
The fuck we are. This sounds like psyop
Well the UK just cut disability benefits.
France is cutting support for chronically ill people.
The swiss government is planning on removing disability benefits for young people…
Well Switzerland is hardly doing it to appease NATO "allies". Yeah I know they are sort of allied adjacent.
I am not saying that the countries are not doing these things. But are they doing it to curry favor with TACO Trump?
UKs government is weird. How that is labor no one knows. They also are introducing mass survailance. France and germany are trying to please the fascists inside their country. And both are having neoliberal leaders. And switzerland isnt in NATO lol
Neither the UK nor Switzerland is in the EU. And I don't see evidence to any of those claims beyond the UK going to shit either way.
100% psyop
I distrust this type of article as China and Russia have lots to gain from trying to stirr up opposition or protests in Europe, especially on this topic of defense.
It's about Russia and it's militarist expansionism, not about Trump.
Its both. But not to appease trump, but to be prepared in case of a standoff
Yeah, I suspect you're right.
Does it say anywhere in the article what social programs are on the chopping block? I've heard this claim hundreds of times, but so far it's on the basis of "it's got to come from somewhere". What if you build military hospitals, military infrastrtucture and military schools? Wink wink, nudge nudge.
it's not listed because this is not what is happening
italy for example put bridge construction in that military budget (as critical infrastructure)
also the subtext was "spend that defense budget in america" and this is not happening either for variety of reasons, so it's partial failure already for them
russia is gearing towards Europe.
The first stage of the war is sowing discontent.
Read up on Gerasimovs doctrine.
Hey European nations; Nice to know about how your sovereignty works.
Opinion article. Also they missed many NATO Top nuances, like the whole political game. But yes, NATO members in Europe have been spending more, and more defense is and was needed.
No shit Sherlock
I don't even know why my country is still in this cesspool. NATO is nothing more than an American subsidiary that forces others to buy its shit. My country has the atomic bomb, which is the only necessary thing to guarantee our sovereignty in the very long term. No reason to invest 5% of our GDP in additional death machines, especially when our debt is astronomical.
If we don't win this war now that it's limited to Ukraine, Putin will spread it to first Baltics and then Finland once he his army has regained enough strength. Unless we have developed our defense capabilities sufficiently by that.
We need to be ready for the event that France and Germany decide that Ukraine should fall. And if at that point the only countries that have a serious ability to defend against the Russia are Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, then the economy of northwestern EU will be in shambles. And that will definitely affect the rest of EU, including whatever country you are from.
If the whole EU is interested in repelling the Russia when it attacks, then it probably won't even attack. But if only the countries bordering it are interested in that, it abaolutely will attack the northeastern EU. And then your bread will get a lot more expensive.
A lot of countries got lulled into a false sense of security by USA being in the NATO and Russia not outright attacking anyone for a moment and let their defence deteriorate. And now they're paying for it
"Russia not outright attacking anyone"
Oh so we ignore that they also didnt free eastern europe and return their indipendence like they promised? Ignoring Afghistanistan, backing the communist rebels in greece, ignoring all the supression of any protest in their red empire, ehtiopia, blockading berlins supply. Okayyy.
And we arent paying for it because of the USA said so. We are because our politicians finally realise russia never was a peaceful nation and clearly prepares a war to invate the rest of europe
I mean those countries ignored those things. I'm saying they shouldn't have
ignoring Afghanistan
Stop right there. Your argument is over. Goodbye.
Don’t bow down to the psychopath! You know he’s going to just pull out of NATO anyway.
If the US dumps NATO, that’s all the more reason to increase defence funding. Either that or start learning Russian.
I'd rather he did that than abandon NATO by surprise the moment russia attacks Narva or the Suwalki gap and give "putin, the gambler" the illusion that he can win against the EU...
Just read the article, and did it feel as though it was written by 3 different people to anyone else?
But anyway, the EU undeniably needed to spend more on their collective militaries with a hostile, expansionist neighbor on their doorstep. This is literally one of two things that Trump has been right about in his lifetime.
These days you're lucky if there's even one person writing it.
That's not Trump being right, that's Trump hanging all of America's allies out to dry. A more serious effort to support Ukraine would make it functionally impossible for Russia to threaten Europe. More staunch support for NATO from the US would forestall any attempt at Russian aggression. The EU are setting military funding targets far beyond what Trump demanded, because this has nothing to do with Trump's demands and everything to do with his litany of failures.
Two things can be true at the same time. But I’ll dispute that this is citizen citrus’s fault. European appeasement created the enemy they’re currently facing. Particularly merkel’s germany.
Trump is a swindler who is currently swindling. Europe is a militarily complacent economic bloc wholly dependent on the US. Frankly, this is a terrible, short sighted move, as this removes US military leverage, but it’s a very Trump move.
I guess the camps for disabled are next on the list. The world is making its choice.
No please fuck no
where's all those Europeans that were mocking the Americans on here for the past seven months?
cmon guys! show us how to protest!
pokes with stick
do the thing!
Not European, but I hope too Europeans grow a spine, and hold their NATO diplomats accountable today.
Skip the protest, go straight demotion and enlisting antifascists.
Imagine your population having such a broom up their ass that they think learning about sex will turn their kids into free use sex toys.
Imagine thinking this is to appease the Imigrant Fellan Pedo Fasco President.
Imagine not knowing that this isnt 5% on military but 3.5% on military and 1.5% of set funding for the infrastructure.
Imagine thinking this actually impacts the social system of us. No germany currently isnt cutting down on it because of that but because the Union has always been stupid and has always been fucking over the poor and workers trying to appease the fasco voters of the AfD (it wont work)
Dont need to imagine it, just look in the mirrow :)
Hey, question. How is it going knowing that millions of your people now will die because of the new Tax and health rework because now they have to pay for their own medicine that keeps them alive, but cant afford it?
Its only been 6-7 months since and USA been fuuuck so hard internally and its position on the world stage. 3 years and 5-6 months still to go with this! And that is IF he volunteering gives up his power again.
Is it enought making fun of the USA? I can keep on going:)
I dont know if theres any point in replying as you may have already been abducted by ice, but are you really that incompetent that you cant even organise a protest yourself (if it wasnt clear enough before americans are the most incompetent, useless people on earth)
Trump's been committed to ditching NATO & allying with Putin, his sponsor/mentor, for years.
There's even a bill on the table, now, called NATO, about the US ditching NATO.
Chopping social-systems will please, but NOT appease, Trump,
& it won't change his strategic-course, to ditch NATO & piecemeal butcher it, taking Greenland as a means of strangling Canada completely, then waging war against Canada, because Canada stands in his way..
then once Canada's down, destroying the hated woke EU in a pincer between Putin & him,
so that in the end, only Putin, Trump, Millei, Orban, etc, get to be "kings" over the butchered West, & unlimitedly unaccountable..
It isn't a zero-sum-game they're playing: it's a negative-sum-game ( mass-shooting, except through legislations, instead of bullets, killing entire-populations, not mere-individuals ),
& the longer it takes for people to grok that, the greater the percentage of our countries' lives they'll succeed in shedding.