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This doesn't automatically invalidate things like healthcare, consumer rights and protections, environmental protections, free/affordable education, etc that ar

This doesn't automatically invalidate things like healthcare, consumer rights and protections, environmental protections, free/affordable education, etc that are strong in Europe and people generally care about (to varying degrees though). There are no perfect countries, and you could argue e.g. New Zealand is setting the standard pretty high nowadays. But it isn't like those ideas aren't in some way useful - not just to Europeans, but also for other countries to cherry-pick or iterate on. Anyway, pretty off topic, but the argument bad things = everything is tainted doesn't hold for me, especially since people born after the 1960s now includes 50 year-olds and below

tuatoru 6y ago
> you could argue e.g. New Zealand is setting the standard pretty high nowadays. Only until you look closely. NZ has very high levels of inequality (children living below the poverty line, and Maori and Polynesian people are incarcerated more, receive less medical care, and have poorer health and shorter lives than the colonisers and recent immigrants. More qualitatively they are also systematically discriminated against both by government institutions and by employers. Me, I'm a child of Dutch immigrants in the 1950s, so I just see this among friends, it doesn't affect me personally. It's sad if NZ is the gold standard.
coldtea 6y ago
>This doesn't automatically invalidate things like healthcare, consumer rights and protections, environmental protections, free/affordable education, etc that are strong in Europe and people generally care about (to varying degrees though). No, but China has those too in some degree -- and improving in some of those aspects. But the original argument was that we European somehow have more ethics than others...