4 ms·
TL;DR: America is failing as a state because it is not a good European welfare state. School shootings, lack of public investment, lack of nationalized healthca
by splintercell 9y ago
TL;DR: America is failing as a state because it is not a good European welfare state. School shootings, lack of public investment, lack of nationalized healthcare, opioid crises, income inequality, extreme capitalism, oligarchy. We need more Europe, less America in order to save America.
EDIT: Here [1] is more by the author on how making America more like Europe is the key to solving all of America's problems.
1. https://eand.co/the-american-dream-is-over-this-is-the-age-of-the-european-dream-71c668bef945 https://eand.co/the-american-dream-is-over-this-is-the-age-o...
- lafar6502 9y agoEurope will collapse much faster and in much more spectacular ways. Remind me, how many years have passed since last war in Europe vs America?
- mdekkers 9y agoRemind me, how many years have passed since last war in Europe vs America? Make no mistake, America's main export is war. Europe? Central Europe has been at peace since WWII - thanks mostly to the EU. America on the other hand hasn't stopped waging wars since WWII
- shillno1138 9y agoThis comment is ahistorical to an extreme degree. The EU was not founded until 1993. This is not a 'rah rah America' statement, however, the European continent after WWII was rebuilt via the economic engine and output of the United States. You can take a look at the rebuilding post-war effort of Western Europe vs Eastern Europe to see the clear delineation of success. Does no-one remember the Balkan wars, and post war scarcity that existed to a more extreme detriment in Eastern Europe than Western? I do agree with the statement that America has not stopped waging wars, this is a factual statement.
- shinryuu 9y agoWhile the european union was formally established 1993 it was built on European Economic Community which was established 1951. In other words the European countries have worked on coming closer and closer over the past half century.
- mdekkers 9y agoThis comment is ahistorical to an extreme degree. The EU was not founded until 1993. You could not be more wrong. The EU was built from the ashes of WWII: https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/history_en https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/history_en the European continent after WWII was rebuilt via the economic engine and output of the United States. This has nothing to do with the discussion at hand, so I'll take that as a "rah rah America" statement. Does no-one remember the Balkan wars, and post war scarcity that existed to a more extreme detriment in Eastern Europe than Western? Well, everybody that survived the balkan wars are sure to remember, and so do their offspring. Again, nothing to do with the subject at hand.
- refurb 9y agoYou act like Europe played no part in the first gulf war, the second gulf war or Afghanistan. That's not true at all.
- zip1234 9y agoAlso, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo, Georgia, and Ukraine...
- dang 9y agoCould you please not use HN for ideological battle? These disputes are always all the same, which makes them off topic here. On HN only the diffs count as interesting. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- lafar6502 9y agoAre you disagreeing with what, exactly?
- IanDrake 9y agoThat seems like an accurate TL;DR to me. Somehow the author wants to tie school shootings to lack of healthcare, I assume he thinks a single payer system would fix this. However, it's not as if we went from a national healthcare system to a market based system and things disintegrated, the opposite is true. Healthcare regulations and government intervention has increased of the last 50 years and things have gotten worst, and by worse, I mean expensive. Having a family member with mental issues, I can assure you of what the real problem is...and you're not going to like it. The real problem with mental health in the US is the institutions have been shut down and we no longer commit the mentally ill in mass. Instead they get forcefully drugged for a few weeks in a hospital, then they start behaving better, then they're released with a prescription, then they stop taking their meds. Wash, rinse, repeat.
- mcphage 9y ago> Somehow the author wants to tie school shootings to lack of healthcare, I assume he thinks a single payer system would fix this. You're making a common error—Correlation does not imply Causation. The author is correlating these phenomenon, but not implying a causal relationship. Instead, he's positing that there's an additional cause to both—that America is in the midst of a societal collapse.
- ken 9y agoI didn't get that at all. The author doesn't mention Europe in this article, except for noting that the UK in the only other country with a declining life expectancy. Asia and Africa are mentioned, a couple times, as examples of places that don't suffer from the same problems as America.
- splintercell 9y agoYou must be new to the author, but check out his other articles, nearly every article is written the same way. And plenty of them mention Europe.