I am, by most metrics, an ardent globalist; I advocate absolute free trade and absolute free movement. However, it's not very hard to recognize that many people's definition of globalism effectively includes such things as forced immigration, cultural erasure, and overburdening of welfare states, which are conducive to increased conflict rather than increased cooperation.
Generic ideological tangents are not interesting in HN's sense. They don't gratify intellectual curiosity. They merely retread the well-trodden, and a few people get hot and bothered while the rest of us yawn. This site is not for the hot and bothered to hijack; therefore we don't want generic ideological discussions on HN.
I was going to ask you to stop, but since you went into full-out ideological flamewar later, I'm banning your account instead. Please don't create accounts to do this with.
>forced immigration, cultural erasure, and overburdening of welfare states, which are conducive to increased conflict rather than increased cooperation.
We have had all of those things for over a century in the US. You don't even have to be a citizen to be able to immigrate to any state in the union from any other state. "Cultural erasure" is even more nonsensical than "cultural appropriation". Overburdening of welfare states has been fine for the entire history of the US. These things made the US the most powerful nation in the world.
The EU is less than half the size of the US. The problems you are describing are ridiculous and irrelevant.
edit: not to mention, the EU takes in even fewer legal immigrants than the US does, per capita. "Cultural erasure" doesn't mean tearing down maypoles and shit, it just means a kebab place opens up down the street. Who could possibly give a shit about that? NOBODY. except racists, obviously.
The US has never had a welfare state remotely comparable to that of the western European majors. It's one of the reasons we're able to take in immigrants without caring historically, and the more recent increases in our welfare system, which I think are directionally a good thing, have the unfortunate side effect of making it necessary to be more careful about who you let in and how long before they can become a full citizen, with all the entitlements that come with it. The European countries also have much more uniform cultures than the US has ever had, and a vastly longer history and tradition. It's nowhere near as simple as "Who doesn't want more kebabs? Clearly, racists." Europe is not currently well set up structurally or culturally to take in large numbers of people of different cultures.
You're conflating two completely different things with welfare. In the US they are the same- poor states get immense amounts of Federal assistance to help poor citizens. In Europe individual states may have welfare systems, but EU "welfare" is economic assistance to members eg Italy. It has nothing to do with refugees and immigrants and is just a base factor in the difficulty of holding together the difficulty of a state, and in that way the member states of the EU are FAR closer together in economic power than states in the US are. ie the EU would be much, much easier to run, but as it turns out it takes more than 25 years for a country to find its feet.
It is as simple as "who doesn't want kebabs", because the number of immigrants is stupid low. One in 300 does not cultural destruction make, unless your culture is "no brownies". These cultures have coexisted and coimmigrated for the better part of a thousand years. The ottomans aren't new. Europeans are used to muslims. Having a stronger and longer culture makes you MORE resilient to outside change, not less.
Edit: the us has ten times the number of immigrants in Mexicans alone. The effect they have had is well described as adding a few ethnic restaurants. Maybe a few places have chosen to put up bilingual signs. If you consider that "cultural Erasure", the BASE STATE of Europe is to have a half dozen languages being spoken in one place. Muslims are simply "the wrong kind", which is ridiculous as they are just the next country over and always have been. If anything has contributed to "cultural Erasure" it has been the US, which has helped impose a monoculture on every nation in Europe.
You're arguing from the arrogant point of view that the USA is the pinnacle of civilization and other nations should strive to emulate it.
European countries, and most other nations in the world, have/had native populations that enjoy cohesion through a common culture, history and ethnicity. Being American is a loose concept that a newcomer can easily adopt. Being Japanese or German carries with it more than just having the appropriate passport, and for that reason the integration of immigrants in Europe has failed completely. Turks in Germany identify as Turks despite being born on German soil. Who is to blame - the Turks, for sticking to their tribe, the Germans for sticking to theirs, or the people who forced this idea of multiculturalism on them both?
A quarter of the population in the Netherlands is of non-Dutch origin and that number will grow significantly in the foreseeable future. That change happened in a mere 30 years or so. To say the Dutch people (and Belgians, Swedes, etc) should not worry about being displaced and made a minority in their own country is to tell them to stick their heads in the sand.
Reducing peoples' thoughts and emotions to "they don't want immigration because they're racist proletarians" is inflammatory, intended to silence opposition to failed social experiments. Keeping immigration at a level that doesn't cause unnecessary friction does not mean you want to shove people into ovens. This whole debate is a battle between ideology and pragmatism.
I'm arguing that it is incredibly hypocritical to criticise the EU without calling for the immediate dissolution of the US, just based on the arguments people use. The EU is a similar system that doesn't go nearly as far and has many things that make it more likely to be successful.
>A quarter of the population in the Netherlands is of non-Dutch origin and that number will grow significantly in the foreseeable future. That change happened in a mere 30 years or so. To say the Dutch people (and Belgians, Swedes, etc) should not worry about being displaced and made a minority in their own country is to tell them to stick their heads in the sand.
Has the EU forced this on them, or did they and their leaders want this? In Germany and Sweden it was their choice. The problem of immigration in the EU as a whole is a nonissue- that's what I'm saying. The problem of immigration in specific places is a direct result of choices made in those places.
By land, obviously. Meaning that immigration is much easier to control if they want to, culture is much more concentrated and therefor much harder to "erase", and that there aren't giant empty rural unprofitable flyover states like there are in the US. Inequality in the US is much greater and has always been much greater than in the EU. The only difference is that in the US nobody gives a shit.
This is a good example of how relatively small populations can have huge cultural effects.
Another example is how migrants from Islamic countries can carry out terrorist attacks and completely change European and American culture for the worse. The loss of American travel culture post 9/11 is tragic, and I can't think of a better word to describe it than "erasure".
Paris is now building a wall around the Eiffel Tower, thanks entirely to recent massacres committed by strongly religious immigrants for religious reasons.
Heavily Muslim neighborhoods in the U.K. have volunteer "sharia police" that harass women for dressing "immodestly".
Swedish officials removed traditional Christmas displays from Muslim areas, and then blamed the structural integrity of lamp posts (yes, really) when asked why.
Cultural erasure doesn't take a huge influx of people; it just takes a small population with aggressively viral cultural memes and a host culture with insufficient memetic defenses.
But, of course, I must be a racist for preferring European culture over throwing gays off buildings, women being unable to drive or show their faces, etc. etc.
>But, of course, I must be a racist for preferring European culture over throwing gays off buildings, women being unable to drive or show their faces, etc. etc.
Muslims are people, not culture-destroying machines. Bowing to them and throwing away a much larger group of people is wrong WHOEVER they are. It's wrong to destroy tradition, its wrong to allow vigilantes, and its wrong to turn away refugees. You're defining a huge group of people by the worst of them. If you're calling for a halt or reduction to immigration, you're denying the rest of them even a chance. That is certainly racist.
But... shops carrying halal/kosher food? Living with different cultures and religions? There's nothing wrong with that. The author is unconvincing.
>Another example is how migrants from Islamic countries can carry out terrorist attacks and completely change European and American culture for the worse. The loss of American travel culture post 9/11 is tragic, and I can't think of a better word to describe it than "erasure".
That is an alarming distortion of facts. Instability in the middle east is not the same as muslim immigration into the US. The attacks were carried out by men on visas, not immigrants. Immigration is never easier than getting a visa, and halting immigration doesn't make it harder to attack a country.
>Cultural erasure doesn't take a huge influx of people; it just takes a small population with aggressively viral cultural memes and a host culture with insufficient memetic defenses.
Tripe. The existence of other cultures does not destroy culture. This assertion is insane. When a store chooses to carry kosher meat, they make that choice. When a mexican store opens, they buy the land and their customers choose to shop there.
>Swedish officials removed traditional Christmas displays from Muslim areas, and then blamed the structural integrity of lamp posts (yes, really) when asked why.
Do you not see how the middle ground is disireable...? Muslims should not force Swedes to wear hijabs, but muslims in sweden should at least be free enough to choose to wear one. Likewise they cannot force the government to act secularly, but maybe muslim-majority areas also shouldn't be forcibly decorated for christmas. It's a small kindness, and not an extreme one. Do you get mad if your jewish neighbors don't put up stockings?
>Heavily Muslim neighborhoods in the U.K. have volunteer "sharia police" that harass women for dressing "immodestly".
Had. From 2013-2014. Those men were arrested and imprisoned. The Muslim community condemned them as "utterly unacceptable". "Christian patrol"s sprang up in response and are just as morally disgusting. You're taking an incident that everybody hated and blaming it on some mysterious them. This is the exact propaganda technique used by the KKK and pretty much every racist hate group. In short- you're being racist as fuck.
I get that. There's some give and take, and people view things differently. Previously, we've agreed that having a stable economy is something that's in everyone's best interest. I'm not sure whether or not people still find agreement about that.
People on all sides are asking what their country can do for them, not what they can do for their country.
During the next economic crisis, will we allow another TARP, or will we vote to do nothing and sink into a depression for a few years until we decide to dig ourselves out, possibly allowing an aggressive international power to gain a military edge?
One can move for economic opportunities or cultural opportunities. The two can co-occur but they are different needs. If we're talking about integration of Muslims, the ones who aren't soft on their own beliefs, i.e. not raised in the cosmopolitan West, are likely moving simply for economic opportunity or to avoid danger, not necessarily because they like the West.
Given that in most countries that are purely Muslim have reason to resent the West and see their struggle as being in part ideological, as Western materialist culture is antithetical to Islamic theocracy, should we not be a little bit wary?
I don't think culture is the only variable, but even if it was, there is still cause for concern.
One wonders what it could be about Africans that enabled Europeans to progress so far past them in the 19th and 20th centuries. Perhaps it's their cultures, or their religions, or their DNA, but something sure painted a bulls-eye on the backs of all those people. The French, the British, the Germans, even --- christ, especially --- the Belgians.
We in the US have little trouble acknowledging the legacy of slavery in our country. That happened over a century ago. Rwanda didn't gain independence from Belgium, which engineered the sectarian divisions that produced the Rwandan genocide, until 1961. Apartheid didn't end in South Africa until the nineteen nineties.
It takes some kind of --something--- to suggest that the Europeans have something to fear from the Africans.
The simplest explanation for why America is successful [...] where you think my argument falls apart factually
It doesn't even come together factually, let alone fall apart. The same exact things were said of the Italians, Jews, Poles, Irish and many others that poured into the US. Far worse of immigrants from East Asia. Entirely inexplicably, the country thrived and continues to do so.
"The same exact things were said of the Italians, Jews, Poles, Irish and many others that poured into the US."
This bears repeating. Exactly the same arguments were advanced by (otherwise) fairly intelligent people about whichever was the latest group. Those arguments were wrong, and this argument is wrong.
No, which is exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about. "Free movement", to me, means that you are free to travel wherever you'd like on your own dime. It doesn't mean that you get to show up somewhere and demand citizenship, housing, medical care, or other free stuff. But obviously some people conflate these things.
While I think health insurance shouldn't be attached to employers, I don't really have an objection to insurance companies using genetic testing. This is certainly an unpopular opinion here, but as someone who believes that medical care is a service, not a right: I think it's unfair to force people to subsidize the healthcare of other people, regardless of the mechanism used.
When you have car insurance, the insurance companies are allowed to use statistical techniques to predict how much you are going to cost them. Competition between insurance companies involves treading the line between beating the price of other insurance companies while charging slightly more than the customer is expected to cost.
If we let health insurance companies do this, then yes, healthcare would get substantially more expensive for very risky/unhealthy people. Of course, it would also get drastically less expensive for healthy people. From a moral perspective, I think this is preferable, but obviously not everyone will agree.
Now, from a utilitarian perspective, these two possibilities seem roughly equivalent at first glance. However, I'd argue that the latter (where insurance companies are allowed to set prices like car insurance) has a number of (significant) positive side effects.
The largest side effect is that it incentivizes customer health improvement. A lot of health risks, including at least the top 6 causes of death worldwide (heart disease, stroke, lung infections, COPD, respiratory cancers, diabetes) can be substantially mitigated by personal choices such as diet and exercise. If you had to pay an extra $200/mo to your insurance company because you were morbidly obese, one would expect that this would encourage a lot of people to start eating better. Let the market do the heavy lifting! This is exactly the sort of thing that the market excels at. Society benefits from healthier people, but in almost all countries rich enough to have insurance (including the US and nations with socialized healthcare), there is no mechanism to incentivize this! An actual insurance market would do the job.
> I think it's unfair to force people to subsidize the healthcare of other people, regardless of the mechanism used.
This is literally car insurance in the United States. You buy insurance, put money up front for your own health, or risk paying a penality. It's also literally the ACA.
> If let health insurance companies do this, then yes, healthcare would get substantially more expensive for very risky/unhealthy people.
Unaffordable. My mother in law died from cancer recently. Coverage was impossible before; in America's free market that constantly pays out dividends. The ACA was the first time any insurance was affordable.
I'm sorry, but the views you've put forth appear to diminish the plight of others who aren't young and healthy. Those views and policies would kill my friend afflicted with an autoimmune disorder.
I can't imagine how people have such an incorrect view of how insurance works.
No, car insurance is not you subsidizing other people. Car insurance is you paying in proportion to your own estimated risk. That means if your expected costs are 5x higher (nicer car, young driver, etc.) you pay 5x more.
Medical insurance in the US emphatically does not work this way. More expensive people don't pay proportionately more than cheap people, meaning that the expensive people are being subsizidized. You should be alarmed at the fact that you apparently fundamentally misunderstood the way insurance works in an open market, or what the ACA is. The only part of the ACA that is even reminiscent of car insurance is the individual mandate, which is actually way worse than car insurance because you don't need to buy car insurance just for being alive. You only need car insurance if you drive on public roads.
It's too bad that your friend has a disease, but I'd rather have them pay for it than pass the bill off to a bunch of innocent people who aren't sick. If you choose to have tunnel vision and focus on health alone, it's worth noting that the second-order effects of making other people's lives more expensive will also include worsened health from poorer nutrition, increased stress, less frequent medical consultation, etc.
"It's too bad that your friend has a disease, but I'd rather have them pay for it than pass the bill off to a bunch of innocent people who aren't sick."
His friend can't pay for it, so what you're essentially saying is you'd rather have his friend, and people who can't afford their medical care in general, die rather than have others subsidize healthcare through their taxes (or any other way). In other words, because of the current cost of healthcare, only the obscenely-rich get to live while the rest die off. That's just incredibly cruel, vile, and disgusting, but sadly, hardly a minority opinion.
> If you had to pay an extra $200/mo to your insurance company because you were morbidly obese, one would expect that this would encourage a lot of people to start eating better.
That homo economicus myth is still going strong? Mental issues and addiction don't exist?
> Let the market do the heavy lifting!
What if the market decides it's not worth the risk and costs to cover the unhealthy? What do we do with the disabled that need more medical supervision?
> This is exactly the sort of thing that the market excels at.
...in some idealised simplified textbook version of reality with simple linear algebra.
Before transplant they have low quality of life. Their treatment is very expensive. They struggle to get an organ. They go through extensive support to help them realise that after the new organ they'll need to take meds for the rest of their life.
They have a very expensive operation that usually requires someone else to die and donate an organ.
After the surgery they need to take medication for the rest of their life.
This medication is the thing that prevents their new organ from being rejected; the thing that stops them going back to that expensive and painful life with a failed organ.
Currently the biggest caused of failure in transplanted organs is that people do not continue to take the meds.
This is the case in the UK where people don't pay for the surgery, and it's the case in the US where people pay considerable amounts for the surgery.
The money that people pay or the consequences for non-compliance don't seem to do much to change behaviour.
A lot of health risks, including at least the top 6 causes of death worldwide (heart disease, stroke, lung infections, COPD, respiratory cancers, diabetes) can be substantially mitigated by personal choices such as diet and exercise
That's true, but genetics is literally the opposite: it's the one thing you definitively can't choose to change. So your argument doesn't work in the case being discussed.
If you had to pay an extra $200/mo to your insurance company because you were morbidly obese, one would expect that this would encourage a lot of people to start eating better.
One would expect that all the existing drawbacks of being morbidly obese would encourage a lot of people to start eating better. Why would this specific drawback work when others haven't?
Because spending $200/m hits you more than just the thought of future illness.
I don't support this bill, I do want this idea explored / discussed - as in, why should healthy people subsidize costs of insurance for the unhealthy? (as in, is not fair is it?)
Many would argue that IP itself is inherently anti-capitalistic, because it imposes artificial scarcity where it would not otherwise exist and, relatedly, because IP "theft" doesn't actually deprive the "victim" of a scarce resource they created or purchased. Ideas have (effectively) zero marginal reproduction cost.
That's not to say there aren't some good arguments for IP, but they sort of inherently have a planned-economy bent.
I recommend that everyone use an extended-length PIN for your phone. Both Android and iPhone support it. Mine is 12 digits; a bit of extra time, but vastly more difficult to brute-force or shoulder-surf.
Doesn't this depend on how worried you are about brute force and shoulder surfing? I am pretty sure in 99.9% of the time that someone is trying to access my phone for nefarious purposes is going to be someone who stole my phone when I left it somewhere. I have no reason to worry about an advanced attacker.
In this case, why would I make the trade off of convenience for security? I have to do 3 times the work to try to defend against an insanely rare attack.
The size of the alphanumeric keyboard is a real problem for me when trying to enter a password to open my device.
Sure, I can do it, but it really slows me down, and makes the value of the password a lot less to me.
I'd rather use a longer and more complex PIN on a much larger keyboard. Preferably one that re-uses at least some of the numbers, so they might have an idea of how long the PIN is, but they might have a harder time figuring out what the correct order of the numbers is.
At least, that's my current view. That might change tomorrow. ;)
You realize there's actually a severe gender imbalance in who chooses to go into STEM fields in college, right?
Privige has nothing to do with it; for whatever reasons, women don't actually want to study tech fields. I actually find it pretty ridiculous and patronizing that people like you insist that there's something wrong with the world because women don't make the career choices you think they ought to.
This approach may work (I say "may" because most of the time it's not actually backed up by hard evidence free of confounding variables), but it's also lazy; there are vastly more accurate predictors of a priori success rate than race or gender. It's especially lazy for organizations that have access to those more accurate predictors, like universities, to use race and gender instead.
More accurate predictors include parental education, family wealth, social connections, etc. Mostly what people would describe as social class.
You don't have to pick just one though, right? Gender clearly has an effect even if it's less predictive than other factors, so why not try to account for every factor you know of?
It's interesting that in certain subcultures, including a large portion of the tech community, things that are non-racial are now considered racist. Not only do you have to be "racially aware", as they say, but you have to be racially aware in the right way. Being "colorblind" isn't enough anymore. Even the emoticons have to express race!
Perhaps predictably, this has backfired and will continue to backfire quite spectacularly; it turns out that when you force people to start thinking along racial lines, they might not end up with the exact same ideas about race that you have. I suspect this may be a large contributing factor behind the recent resurgence of ethno-nationalism (see the Alt Right et al.).
The ADA is an example of a regulation that's entirely well-intentioned, but has tremendous second-order costs to society that very plausibly outweigh any benefit it's ever provided.
Hopefully this serves as a lesson. Next time we hear a "common sense" law proposed, take a few minutes to think about how people are going to abuse it, or what market mechanisms it's going to break, or how much it's actually going to cost society when you multiply the cost it introduces by the number of people it hurts.
Now, thanks to excessively litigious hard of hearing people at Gaulladet University and the ADA, society is objectively worse off. No one has benefitted from this action, except perhaps a few spiteful people with the attitude "If I can't have it, no one can." It truly disgusts me.
To see how horrible your words sound to some of us, replace ADA with 'elderly healthcare'.
It's not always about efficiency, and that slippery slope you are calling for, historically, ended bad.
What should disgust you is the university looking forward to save money with centralized courses that are only for updates and not re-creation; and instead yanking off the project the moment it looked like they'll have to attend more money.
>What should disgust you is the university looking forward to save money with centralized courses that are only for updates and not re-creation; and instead yanking off the project the moment it looked like they'll have to attend more money.
Why? Money's a finite resource. If, as appears to be the case, a lot of this is older and not frequently viewed content, it's not clear to me why the university should spend a lot of money updating just "because." Especially if it's mostly Creative Commons and will continue to live elsewhere.
Well UCBerkley is/was providing the educational content free of charge for the public at it's own expense. I would liken it to a free public service. If the service does not work/apply for you, do you sue the entity/entities in charge to make it work for you, or do you just move on? And how is the university's choice to pull its content behind a UCBerkley login a disgusting move? In my opinion, it's well within it's right to do so and also well within it's rights to not make the material publicly available in the first place. I also think that it is totally understandable move considering it would have to incur additional costs to keep the material publicly available.
>It's not always about efficiency, and that slippery slope you are calling for, historically, ended bad.
I disagree. In a world with finite resources the optimum outcome is one that best applies those resources to serve the greatest possible good.
Berkeley is a publicly funded institution, anything that increases their costs either A: increases the tuition they are required to charge, thus lessening the availability of education. or B: Increases the tax burden, lowering the total net income of the populous.
Now many argue that we can raise taxes in order to pay for these types of things. They say that the costs of this individual mandate is minimal, thus it is common sense to implement it. What they miss is that each percentage raise in tax will render a certain number of businesses non-viable. This will in turn increase unemployment, and lower overall tax revenue. At the same time the demand for public assistance grows. Thus necessitating further increases in taxation.
It doesn't stop there. As this common sense regulation is implemented, more follow, and more still. There is an endless stream of things under the heading of "wouldn't be nice if", where do you draw the line?
The impact of these regulations are hard to measure. How many business owners who now find themselves bankrupt will commit suicide this year? How many teenagers will be unable to find summer jobs, and thus be unable to save for college? How many families will fall apart due to constant frustrations regarding money? You can never say, but all of the data I have looked out shows that poverty cuts wide and deep having negative effects on the lives of children exposed to it well into old age.
So lets take your example of elderly healthcare. Is it worth extending the life of someone in their 80's a few years if it means that a non-zero number of young families will be pushed below the poverty line? I never see this aspect considered. When I search for data I am offered an appeal to emotion. I think regulation needs to be more thought out than that.
Yet to see how accurate his words sound, replace "elderly healthcare" with "banning books".
If I want to ban a book, lets say, "Huckleberry Finn" for having the n-word in it, or it doesn't even really matter why, then all I need to do is not locate a braille or audiobook version, file ADA, and they either have to remove the content completely or provide whatever ridiculous format I request until they cave in and remove it or go bankrupt trying which also removes content. I can harass any institution providing service to the public that incidentally contains content that I dislike for political or religious reasons or any reason of my choice. I can deny service to millions using theoretical lack of service to hypothetical individuals as my weapon.
Why, I could go after HN for presenting your comment itself in textual form instead of braille or audiobook format. They could fix that technologically, but I'm sure it would be easier to delete your comment entirely. The fact that I'm only bringing up deletion of your comment because we disagree politically is mere coincidence, I assure you its solely for ADA compliance that I must ask for HN to delete your comment ... surely you must agree with my reasoning that your comment must be deleted, right?
> If I want to ban a book, lets say, "Huckleberry Finn" for having the n-word in it, or it doesn't even really matter why, then all I need to do is not locate a braille or audiobook version, file ADA, and they either have to remove the content completely or provide whatever ridiculous format I request until they cave in and remove it or go bankrupt trying which also removes content.
Or hire a lawyer that defends ADA cases, since "reasonable accommodation" does not, in fact, mean "whatever anyone demands", successfully defend the case, and move on. And, if the instigator has a pattern of doing meritless ADA cases for extortion or political suppression, possibly tack on some nice counterclaims in the process. While they aren't perfect, the justice system does have tools to deal with the kind of abuse of process you describe.
You can come up with all sorts of examples where complying with the ADA imposes costs that are out of proportion to any possible benefit. (e.g. handicapped accessible ramps on mountain cabins only accessible by a steep rocky trail) However, the legitimate concern is that, if you start allowing for a lot of exceptions, before you know it, organizations start finding reasons why just about everything should be an exception.
I'm not saying that I necessarily agree with the decision in this case but there are sometimes good reasons to have hard and fast rules even if they lead to arguably bad outcomes in specific cases
The economics of the ADA were known from the beginning. By definition, it addresses a situation where business owners weren't implementing the changes necessary. Practically across the board, it was cheaper and easier to say "oh well" to the disabled than to make accommodations for what was a small percentage of their customers. It was before my time, but the business community was aggressively against the ADA back when it was being drafted.
From a societal perspective, the entire idea behind the ADA is that the right to equal access for the disabled--including the public accommodations necessary for them to actually make use of that access--is something we value beyond the initial cost of implementing it.
> Feel free to actually try to refute anything I said.
Refute right-wing propaganda?
> It is according to Avraham Burg, and I'm not sure there is anyone more qualified to make such a claim.
Point me to a recording where Schulz said anything like that. On the contrary, Schulz has a decade long track record working for Germany and the European Union.
I'm not right-wing by any stretch of the imagination (pretty hard left, actually), so the fact that instead of actually thinking about my arguments you just slap a label on them and dismiss them out of hand should disturb you.
Perhaps what's confusing to you is that I'm capable of considering the thought process of people I disagree with.
> Point me to a recording where Schulz said anything like that.
You understand that not everything politicians say is recorded? That said, Burg has literally no reason to lie about this.
> You understand that not everything politicians say is recorded? That said, Burg has literally no reason to lie about this.
So all you have is that?
Let's sum it up: there is no recording of that, there are no witnesses, there has been no transcript, Schulz himself has never acknowledged it, there are no other sources where Schulz has said anything like that, ...
All you have is a sentence which is circulating in right-wing groups.
It's actually obvious that Germany in its current form exists and that Martin Schulz aims to be its next chancellor.
> All you've done is prove my point
Sure not.
> even people who work for the EU for a long time appear to have plenty of conflicting non-EU interests.
So what you're saying is that a direct claim from a high-ranking Israeli politician about a conversation he had, with no apparent benefit to lying about its contents, is not enough?
> right-wing groups
Haaretz, a liberal Israeli newspaper, is a "right wing group"?
> What does it have to do with Martin Schulz?
I feel like I'm chatting with a bot; do you remember the course of our conversation?
Yes, Schulz has been working for the EU for a long time; he also, apparently, has had strong interests outside the EU for as well. Why do you think many Europeans feel betrayed by the EU?
> So what you're saying is that a direct claim from a high-ranking Israeli politician about a conversation he had, with no apparent benefit to lying about its contents, is not enough?
Exactly. Random people can claim anything. There is no credible source and Schulz never said anything like that on record.
You might want to listen to what Schulz actually says.
> Haaretz, a liberal Israeli newspaper, is a "right wing group"?
Repeated only by right-wing groups.
> he also, apparently, has had strong interests outside the EU for as well.
"... Among the newspapers Haaretz is definitely left leaning, with some columnists in the radical left. ..."
Claiming that Haaretz is 'Repeated only by right-wing groups' is rather unbelievable, they'd be undermining their own arguments by doing so. That is, unless the 'left and radical left' in Israel is actually 'right' when compared to other countries. I don't think this is the case.
Burg's comments put Schultz's ability to support pro-Israeli policies at risk; if he's known to be an ardent supporter of Israel for ideological reasons (to the exclusion of concern for Germany), people will be more critical of his motivations when it comes time to e.g. send military aid to Israel.
Calling out your supporters, when being a supporter is politically contested, isn't a good idea. If Burg was lying, he'd be better off saying that Schulz doesn't give a shit about Israel.
Stating that Germany only exists for the sake of Israel is controversial, however. (At least, I hope it is! I hope most Germans have enough self-interest to dislike the idea of being a vassal state.)
