Time to stop the Israeli white colonialist land theft - FTFY.

Trauma my ass.

Literally only a handful of people alive today in Israel experienced the Holocaust and most aren’t even descendents Western European Jews: their parents and grandparents came from Russia (especially people from the Settler Movement).

Nah, this is the same kind of thieving and murdering white colonialism as in the US back when their were genociding the Native Tribes, Appartheid South Africa and the worst of the White occupiers in Africa (such as Belgium in Congo) - as can be seen by the way the Zionists treat Ethiopian Jews - which just happens to be associated with an unusual overwhelmingly white religion other than the usual overwhelmingly White religion.

These people have the same kind of “Western Values” as early XX century Germany.

The real anti-antisemitism is the genociders who are mass murdering children because of their ethnicity claiming that their actions represent all Jews and hence criticizing them is anti-semitic.

Even in their use of “If you criticize what you do you’re criticizing our race” arguments the Zionists are the closest to Nazis there is in the present day.

Spain will side with them.

Also the biggest losers in a tit-for-tat “veto war” would be Germany as the EU is still mainly a Mercantilist organization and they’re the ones who gain the most from it.

In this the Republic Of Ireland is a shinny example of Humanitarianism and shames most of the rest of Europe (I know I’m ashamed of the government of my own country).

Unlike the Republic Of Ireland not that many European countries will be able to say in the Future when people talk about the XXI century version of the Nazis that they were on the right side of History.

Just gotta wait for the imaginary plane.

But people do stop believing money has value, or more specifically, their trust in the value of money can go down - you all over the History in plenty of places that people’s trust in the value of money can break down.

As somebody pointed out, if one person has all the money and nobody else has money, money has no value, so it’s logical to expect that between were we are now and that imaginary extreme point there will be a balance in the distribution of wealth were most people do lose trust in the value of money and the “wealth” anchored on merelly that value stops being deemed wealth.

(That said, the wealthy generally move their wealth into property - as the saying goes “Buy Land: they ain’t making any more of it” - but even that is backed by people’s belief and society’s enforcement of property laws and the mega-wealthy wouldn’t be so if they had to actually protect themselves their “rights” on all that they own: the limits to wealth, when anchored down to concrete physical things that the “owners” have to defend are far far lower that the current limits on wealth based on nation-backed tokens of value and ownership)

And further on point 2, the limit would determined by all that people can produce as well as, on the minus side, the costs of keeping those people alive and producing.

As it so happens, people will produce more under better conditions, so spending the least amount possible keeping those people alive doesn’t yield maximum profit - there is a sweet spot somewhere in the curve were the people’s productivity minus the costs of keeping them productive is at a peak - i.e. profit is maximum - and that’s not at the point were the people producing things are merelly surviving.

Capitalism really is just a way of the elites trying to get society to that sweet spot of that curve - under Capitalism people are more productive than in overtly autocratic systems (or even further, outright slavery) were less is spent on people, they get less education and they have less freedom to (from the point of view of the elites) waste their time doing what they want rather than produce, and because people in a Capitalist society live a bit better, are a bit less unhappy and have something to lose unlike in the outright autocratic systems, they produce more for the elites and there is less risk of rebelions so it all adds up to more profit for the elites.

As you might have noticed by now, optimizing for the sweet spot of “productivity minus costs with the riff-raff” isn’t the same as optimizing for the greatest good for the greatest number (the basic principle of the Left) since most people by a huge margin are the “riff-raff”, not the elites.

Just spreading the ground beef around rather than keep it in the form of meat patties would’ve yielded something more pizza-like whilst using the exact same ingredients (though it would probably still be an excessive amount for a non-cheese topping).

On my world account which I left a while ago I have various posts with like 20+ votes for and 20+ votes against because they were insulting/hurtful for the political tribalists but did actually make sense for those whose love for the tribe did not overrode their thinking ability.

Way too many people grow a purely emotional relationship with a politial party so never actually analyse what they do and have knee-jerk reactions to criticism of their beloved party, which paradoxically leads that party to become worse over time because in the absence of criticism of it, the shit done inside the party by the sociopaths than naturally seek power, goes on unchallenged and festers.

Granted, it’s easier to analyse US politics from the outside, but I actually behave the same when it comes to the politics of my country and even the leadership and membership of the political party I’m a member of here.

The Theatre Of Identity on both sides of the aisle in the US was always bullshit to try and get more votes, if done differently:

• Most of the Democracts don’t really care about Equality (especially not in the Wealth domain, though they pay lip service to the fight against a few non-Wealth inequalities), they care about themselves and the ultra-rich.
• The Republicans don’t care about America or The American People, they care about themselves and the ultra-rich.

Mind you, this is a pretty common pattern in other countries with electoral systems that boost a pair of “center” parties - there will be a “Right” one preaching some kind of nationalist pro-nation message and a “Left” one preaching anti-discrimination along racial/gender/sexual-orientation (but never wealth) lines, but they both serve the interest of the same people and will even get together to pass legislation that increases their own salaries, reduces the effectiveness of the fight against corruption or benefit some large well entrenched “regime” corporations who (by an amazing coincidence) employ in highly paid positions lots of politicians when they retire.

There are wankers everywhere and it doesn’t take that many wankers as a proportion of the population to screw things up for everybody else.

By that definition all “Industrial Associations” would not be capitalist.

Personally I would be wary of telling people they should trust the words of the spokespersons of most of them.

There are more than one way in which the elites and near-elites organise to advance their interests and IMHO The Guardian is very much The Voice Of The English Upper Middle Class.

The Guardian absolutely is capitalist (neoliberal, even). Just go check back on their campaign against Corbyn (a leftwinger who won the Labour Party leadership from the New Labpour neoliberals some years ago) which included such memorable pieces of slander like calling a Jewish Holocaust Survivor an anti-semite because of him in a conference about Palestine comparing some of the actions of the government of Israel with those of the Nazis, this done in order to slander Corbyn by association since he was in the same panel in that conference.

Also you can merely go back a few months to see how The Guardian supported Israel well into their Genocide (though they seem to have stop doing it quite as eagerly in the last few months).

Last but not least they very openly support in British elections the Liberal Democrats (who are neoliberals) and the New Labour faction of the Labour Party (also neoliberals) and very often have pro-privatisation articles on UK subjects and are never for bringing things back into public ownership even when privatisation has failed miserable to give better services or lower prices.

I lived in Britain for over a decade and read The Guardian for most of it, so maybe The Guardian’s political slant is clearer for those familiar with British Politics.

I do agree on The Intercept and Democracy Now! though.

Can’t really speak for the others with any knowledge.

Maximum profit for Healthcare companies comes from people being chronically sick as soon as possible and remaining in that state (so, alive and uncured) for as long as possible.

As it so happens, American food quality (in terms of nutrition) is horrible, the regulatory environment when it comes to approving substances for contact with humans and even human consumption is appalling (it follows the “accepted until proven dangerous” principle rather than the precautionary principle followed in Europe) and pretty much anything goes when it comes to car pollution, so people end up with cardiovascular diseases and/or type II diabetes and/or all manner of cancers of the digestive and respiratory tracts quite early, so all the Healthcare sector needs to do is keep them alive as long as possible to extract the maximum amount of money from them.

Whilst that is indeed true for the population in general, politicians are a bunch of people self-selected on being the kind who wants power.

That kind of personality is generally less trustworthy (and more on the sociopath side of the spectrum) than the general population.

There’s actually a study published ages ago in the Harvard Business review about corporate CEOs (so, not politicians but in many ways similar) which found that the ones who got the job not because they sought it but because of other reasons (for example, the CEO died and they were the next in line) actually performed better (as measured by the performance of the companies they led compared to the rest of their industry) than CEOs who had sought that position and, even more interestingly, the most self-celebrating showoff CEOs were the worst performing of all (from my own participation with politics I would say those would be the closest in personality to top politicians).

Further, there are various pretty old sayings (back from the time of the Ancient Greeks and the Romans) about the best person to get a leadership position being the one who doesn’t want a leadership position.

So I would say that most politicians in parties with higher chances of getting power (so, in most countries, the two largest parties) are crooked (not specifically corruption - such as getting money to pass certain laws of using certain companies for government contracts - but more generally using power, privileged information, influence and connections to benefit themselves even to the detriment of those who voted for them: a good example of crookedness but not corruption is how some US Congressmen use insider information they get in some Congressional Committees to profit in stock market trading).

The UK NHI doesn’t work well because the neoliberal parties in successive governments (both the Tories and New Labour) have been defunding it so that they can - like Thatcher did with the railways - once its quality has fallen due to lack of funds claim that it’s bad because of Public management whilst it would be much better if it was Private because the Private Sector is much more competent, and privatise it.

Just like the US has fatcats that are perfectly happy to mass murder people for personal profit, so does the UK (and the British Political System is almost as bad as the American, so it’s definitelly sold to the highest bidder) and plenty of those jhave wet dreams of the country having 13% of its GDP flowing through a Private Healthcare sector like the US were they can make billions of pounds doing exactly the same as the fatcats do in US Healthcare.

Source: I lived in Britain for over a decade.

By the way, you “read that the UK NHI doesn’t work very well” is exactly because the UK media is overwhelmingly owned by tax avoiding billionaires who are part of the above mentioned fatcats who see themselves as profiting massivelly from Britain having a Healthcare System like the US. It’s not by chance that the level of trust of Britons in their Press is one of the lowest in Europe.

The exact same kind of tactics were deployed by Tatcher back when she wanted to privatise the Railways with the result that satisfaction with the Railway system in the UK is now even lower than when there was a public operator even after Thatcher defunded it to claim “Public is Bad, Private is Good” to amass enough public support to privatise it.

From what I’ve seen, treatments not being covered are only the case were those treatments are very expensive and there are other effective treatments (though less effective) which are much cheaper.

There’s also often a delay between a new and very expensive experimental treatment coming out and it becoming covered because it won’t be covered if it doesn’t demonstrate that it’s advantages over the other available treatments are sufficient to justify the additional cost.

Mind you, I’m talking about Public Healthcare Systems, not the so-called Mixed Systems that have mandatory Health Insurance (usually highly regulated and with a Public Insurance option for the less well off) - Mixed Systems have some of the same problems as the US System at least in my experience living in countries with one and with the other kind of system.

I’m talking about Universal Health Care systems (for clarity: totally free healthcare for residents in that country), not Public Health Insurance systems.

Europe is unfortunatelly also riddled with the latter system and having lived in countries with one kind and countries with the other, they’re quite different and the system with Insurance is invariably worse in terms of denials of coverage as well as cost (also because nowadays they all have laws that force every resident to have health insurance, which as result is more costlier than before those laws - as I saw first hand when I lived in a country with such a system when such a law came into effect), whilst UHC tends to have longer waiting lists (think 1 or 2 years of wait for some cirurgical procedures).

Absolutelly, some of the absurdities of the US system are also present in the so-called “Mixed” Systems (i.e. the ones with healtcare insurance but more regulated and with a public option for some) and if you look at the kinds of governments in those countries for the last 3 decades, you’ll notice they’ve been invariably neoliberal mainstream parties (setting up such systems is part of the broader tendency in Europe to privatise just about everything that has been going on since the 80s and was copied from the US).

IMHO, except for the long waiting times, the problems with Healthcare systems in part of Europe are the result of them having been transformed to become more like the US system in the last 3 decades.

Fair enough.