The headline reflects some wishful thinking. This is a rift with America. Americans elected Trump twice. The mere possibility of someone else with similar policies being elected in the future has fundamentally shifted the relationship between the US and Europe. The US can’t fix this (if it still wants to) by electing a Democrat next time.
That's an option, but it takes a long time to train and recruit locally, costs a lot of money, and you'll probably have to increase salaries to get the required numbers. If there were an easy and cheap way to recruit all the required staff locally, that would already be happening.
So the solution is to import uneducated and non-certified individuals from other countries at lower pay and hope you can pay them less and teach them? As if that is any easier? Sounds like the only reason is so health conglomerates can provide lower pay.
No, you can import educated and certified healthcare workers, as many European countries, including Switzerland, have been doing for a long time. It’s easier and cheaper, which is why everyone’s doing it.
Fertility rates are low and people are ageing, like everywhere in Europe. There will be a moment that simply there won't be enough workers. The reality is that there is already a lack of healthcare professional even without a population cap that would only get worse given the case.
Sounds like modern slavery, import people from poorer countries to tend to the rich and elderly in countries that made short-term sacrifices to not build a future for themselves independently.
Import people from poorer countries with a salary of 100k CHF and wonderful life conditions. Anyway, what I mean is that it's nor worth it for Switzerland, in my opinion, to break the agreements with the EU to limit the population artificially to a random number.
> I’ve long complained that communists refuse to specify the details of how a communist society will work, or why it would be good.
Did capitalists do this in any comprehensive or satisfactory way prior to the advent of capitalism? I’m not a communist, but this seems like a fairly weak criticism.
I'm not sure why that's relevant. My point is that it's never really possible to provide a detailed plan for a complete changing of the social order. While it might be nice in theory to have such a thing, it's not clear that it's really a reasonable thing to ask for.
> My point is that it's never really possible to provide a detailed plan for a complete changing of the social order.
That's correct, but if the communist avantguarde says (as they did) "we have to completely change the social order by force, uproot everything, to build communism", there might be questions if it's at least going to be directionally good or bad. And if the answers can't be provided, then perhaps they shouldn't be doing it at all?
Yep, that’s the classic small ‘c’ conservative argument against revolutions or sudden changes. It’s a fine argument, but it’s not specific to communism.
Yeah it's not specific to communism, one just needs to look at the sudden changes the US admin is implementing to see it's broadly applicable, only they don't even pretend to be interested in societally good outcomes.
The fundamental issue isn’t that the police believed Person A rather than Person B when they first arrived at the scene - the police can be misled like anyone else. The issue is that they failed to properly check on someone who claimed to have been stabbed. That is something that they should do regardless of whether they find the claim credible or not. There is certainly no police policy which prevents them from doing this when the victim is white. And indeed, one could say that the British police are commendably balanced on this point, as (in flagrant contradiction to that one out of context sentence that people have been quoting, from a document that’s not even a policy document) they have also have a track record of ignoring the pleas of plenty of people of color, disabled people, etc. etc. who have appealed to them for medical attention.
> There's an outside chance you're correct that the police's treatment of Nowak was simply incompetence, but paired with the explicit policy to treat racial groups differently to one another, that is not how it will be perceived.
That’s how it will be perceived if Reform’s shit-stirring is ultimately successful. But actually, my sense is that Reform are out of step with the majority of the British public on this one. I don’t think a majority of British people will buy their narrative; it’s too openly opportunistic and divisive, and based on twitter-brained logic that only the terminally online could find persuasive. It’s telling that even Kemi Badenoch wouldn’t go along with them on this one.
>But they were acting on policies which require them to treat non-white members of the public differently.
There is no actual evidence of this. Some people apparently think they can read the minds of the officers on the scene. And, being serious for just a moment, even the most outré of the police policy documents that have been dug up following this event (allowing the dubious assumption that any serving police officer has ever read them) do not require the police to deny medical attention to white people who claim to have been stabbed.
The Nowak case is certainly a horrendous instance of police incompetence, but you have to marvel at the shamelessness of the people who are jumping to exploit it for nefarious political ends.
Yes, there is evidence of this. Are you actually from the UK? I actually struggle to believe that anyone who is from the UK and is aware of events in the UK over the past few decades would actually be unaware this is the case.
The Lawrence case in the UK led to a massive structural and cultural shift in policing across the UK, not just the Met. This involved both changes to guidance and changes in how police officers are trained. You can look into this in your own time because there are multiple bodies that are involved in this but the result is that people who the police interacts with have to be treated differently based upon their race.
Also, I can only assume that you are unaware of how police actually do their job. Police officers in the UK (again, I can only assume that you are not from the UK or are someone who lives here but has almost no connection with the society for some reason) go through extensive training to effectuate policy. People who run police forces don't just go: have it lads, go wild. There is extensive training that governs how the police are allowed to behave and that is enforced, ultimately, through sanctions that can result in the police officer losing their job. These aren't abstruse documents that central government creates either, these are created by individual police forces (often with reference to guidance from central government, though this is mostly indirect rather than legal) that are part of continuous training to carry out the job. And, again, one of those things is that police officers are required to treat people they interact with differently based upon their race.
In this case, your description of what happened is also not correct. The police did not deny anyone medical treatment because they did not know that the person had been stabbed. The reason they did not know was because someone who was not white told them that the person was a racist, and policy for every police force in the UK is to believe this. When Nowak said they had been stabbed, the response of the officer was "don't think you have mate" which was conditional on being told by someone who was not white that Nowak was a racist. This behaviour is in line with expectations as Hampshire and Isle of Wight police force confirmed after the fact publicly and on multiple occasions. The reason why is that is policy to take accusations of racial discrimination extremely seriously and arrest immediately, which is what the police did. You may also like to listen to the 999 call where the handler coaches a murderer to invent a specific racial slur, this is also inline with policy which suggests accepting all of this at face value...can you see the contrast with how Nowak's claims were handled?
I would also suggest that you possibly jumped to conclusions about what other people think based upon your personal opinions rather than actual fact. To be clear: you are saying things that indicate no knowledge of how police in the UK actually operate...but you are 100% sure that some evil people are manipulating this event for their own ends. Be clear: this isn't about fact for you (you don't seem to know any) but your own feelings. Other people care about the police doing their job correctly, that is all that matters.
That’s a very long comment that doesn’t provide any actual evidence that the officer in question was following a policy of not doing a basic medical check on someone if that person has been accused of being a racist. Clearly, no such policy exists. Police and other first responders are required to provide medical assistance to anyone who needs it, regardless of whatever crime they might be suspected of.
You refrain from linking to the actual “policy” (but not actually a policy) document that forms the basis of the wild claims that Musk and others are making about this. Perhaps you’re aware that it’s entirely innocuous when read in context.
As I explained, you should search for it. I said this because the process of searching for views that disprove your feelings would be beneficial for you. You seem to suggest that I intended to provide you with evidence...I specifically said that I would not.
https://www.hampshire.police.uk/police-forces/hampshire-cons... - this is a policy document from the police force, this is in the process of being reviewed because the police force involved reviewed the incident in question when it happened and said that the handling met their standards of policing in full (I don't think you understand that you are arguing with phantoms here, the police force has now acknowledged that their policy was wrong and led them to initially say that the incident was handled correctly...afaik, no-one apart from politicians is making the argument you are making, and the policing minister has also said that policy is likely wrong...not that the minister has control over this).
https://www.npcc.police.uk/SysSiteAssets/media/downloads/our... - this is a policy document from NPCC which is one of the many quangos that influences local force policy. There are actually quangos that just provide policy guidance on ethnic minority policy, you should look into these as they also provide extensive training to police forces on the specific situation that occurred and how to handle it (again, this is why the police force initially said that the incident was handled correctly, the key point was the accusation of racism and this is what the police said initially when they reviewed the incidence).
I would also repeat: the reason why I did not include these links is because you do not understand basic aspects of how policing works in the UK. I have answered your question about why a medical check was not performed...yes, that was fully explained (perhaps you see my issue with the way you come across, you come across as someone who has put effort into being misinformed). I have no idea what Elon Musk has to do with policing policy in the UK...that you would bring up this "Emmanuel Goldstein"-esque character unprompted comes across as very bizarre to someone who is unaware of whatever political game is occurring. It is very simple: the police should do their job correctly and treat everyone equally. That is it.
Neither of those documents is actually a policy document, and neither says anything particularly objectionable, or anything that could possibly be used to justify handcuffing someone who’s requested medical attention and then leaving them to die.
> I have no idea what Elon Musk has to do with policing policy in the UK.
He has nothing to do with policing in the UK, but he has a lot to do with the content of a lot of the comments here.
> the police force has now acknowledged that their policy was wrong and led them to initially say that the incident was handled correctly
Yes, it does. If you read it properly you will see that policy is to treat accusations of racism as accurate whenever they are made. The reason why the police didn't act was because he was accused of being a racist. Again, I am not sure what the argument is: everyone has accepted that this is the case, policing minister, the police force, everyone...apart from you and people who have some obscure political axe to grind.
The police issued a statement on Twitter, this was covered extensively...I am thinking that you are the type of person who is resistent to evidence that counters your opinion that you have just stopped being able to process information, you just loop through your feelings. In addition, it has also leaked that the statement they issued was dialled down significantly and the original line was to blame Nowak for being stabbed...again, this is because their policing policy was to accept any accusations of racism in full.
If you just read stuff properly, you would know all this and wouldn't find yourself backed into a corner arguing against all forms of reality.
Someone being accused of being a racist isn’t a logical reason to deny them medical care, regardless of whether or not you believe the accusation. There is no policy that could possibly be construed as requiring this. And your claims about what the linked “policy” says (again, not actually a policy) are becoming increasingly outlandish, as anyone can easily verify.
> The police issued a statement on Twitter, this was covered extensively.
I couldn’t find any statement that said anything like what you were claiming. Feel free to link it. This is the offical statement that I could find:
The Palestine Action ban was overturned by the courts. And putting this together with the Nowak case leads to an almost contradictory position. Whatever the issues with police handling of pro-Palestinian protestors, they're not instances of what the far right would call two-tier policing (i.e. the bogus claim that the police treat white people more harshly than other ethnic groups). For example, here is a poster who' all over this thread complaining about two-tier policing, but who supports the ban on PA: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48155504
The more nuanced reality is that the police are extremely imperfect and treat all sorts of different groups of people unfairly in all sorts of different ways. That's indeed a problem, but it's not a political conspiracy.
That's because there's a pending appeal. It may take a while for the situation to fully resolve, legally speaking, but I think it's unlikely that the ban will be sustainable in the long term.
How would you propose to immediately put an end to the bad thing? Checks and balances take time. Any system that allowed this to be immediately fixed would also allow a whole bunch of other things to be immediately fucked up.
>The Palestine Action ban was overturned by the courts.
Which is exactly what I said, courts generally do the right thing. The people were still arrested, and the dissent was still crushed, though. Israel is a strategic partner so all protests are equal, but some are more equal than others.
>they're not instances of what the far right would call two-tier policing (i.e. the bogus claim that the police treat white people more harshly than other ethnic groups)
While far-right popularized the term, the awareness is now, at least among the people I know, full-spectrum. The tiers are independent according to the issue at hand and the priorities of the powers and lobbies involved. Simply some camps were unaware until it was their turn, and become confused when they overlap.
>The more nuanced reality is that the police are extremely imperfect and treat all sorts of different groups of people unfairly in all sorts of different ways. That's indeed a problem, but it's not a political conspiracy.
Personally, I think that statement has a pass in many places, but not in the UK. The "policy projection of values" (to give it some name), with the growth of identity politics mixed in to make it worse, attempted to make everyone feel equally protected, but instead succeeded in convincing almost every demographic in the UK that the system is rigged against them.
We are not racist -> certain crimes by given little publicity or ignored depending on the background of who committed them. Two tier.
Israel is a strategic partner -> pro-palestinian/anti-zionist groups labeled as terrorists. Two tier.
Hate has no place here -> police dispatched for nasty online comments, but dragging their feet for actual physical crime. The fact that "Non-Crime Hate Incidents" is an actual term is just baffling. Two tier.
Net Zero -> right wingers complain about blockades of ecologists going unpunished. Two tier. Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and the Public Order Act 2023 passed, ecologist arrested (and sentenced!) for protesting against not doing enough for Net Zero. Pendulum swing, still two tier.
Directing mind and will -> individuals are fully accountable by their actions, for corporations one need(ed) to prove "directing mind and will" of the executives. Two tier. See the British Post Office Horizon scandal for extra depression, or how individuals are prosecuted for dumping, yet Thames Water can dump inordinate amounts of sewage but that's just "regulatory failure". While recent acts (Crime and Policing, Failure to Prevent Fraud) are in the right direction, criminal penalties for corporations remain financial, and swallowed into operating costs. Still solid two tier.
Russia is a criminal state -> Londongrad unbothered, alive, moisturized, flourishing. Two tier.
Protect the NHS -> partygate for some, fines for others. Two tier. Don't get me into the defunding of it.
Peace above everything -> the state actors that committed crimes (often acts of terrorism) with impunity in Ireland during The Troubles, were later prosecuted, while IRA members were secretly given out-of-jail cards. Just compare John Downey vs Dennis Hutchings. Since the topic has cooled down and the Hutchings' case fueled the fire, they passed the Legacy and Reconciliation Act to, 25 years later (!) finally providing immunity to British criminals. This is particularly damning because those following orders had been prosecuted, but no single commander, general, intelligence officer, minister actually giving or overseeing those orders had been, at any point. Two tier.
The UK is in a permanent state of "fake it till you make it" of the idea of the perfect state, and in doing so it routinely over/undershoots the mark, in an endless Samsara of overcorrections, because it is all still fake. The state sets the target, but it does nothing to get there. Ultimately the consistent application of the law is second to state, corporate and geopolitical interests, meaning the two tiers will be there no matter how correct the laws are.
Your comment perfectly illustrates that all sorts of groups of all sorts of different political stripes (or none at all) have been treated unfairly at times. All of the issues you raise are serious ones, but they don’t support the spurious narrative about “two tier policing” being pushed by Musk, Farage and their ilk.
There's a thought experiment in the philosophy of mind where your brain is gradually replaced, neuron by neuron, with artificial units that replicate the exact input and output mappings of the original neurons. The question, of course, is whether this change is accompanied by any change in your subjective conscious experience.
I notice that a variant of this experiment is now playing out on HN in real time, with various commenters having their neuronal mappings gradually reshaped to match activation layers trained on Elon Musk's twitter feed.
A few years ago it was possible to have conversations about the UK on HN. Now all you can really do is get into pointless arguments with biological instantiations of Grok.
Unfortunately, there are vastly more people outside the UK consuming this nonsense than there are British people who can flag it or correct it. So in contrast to conversations about the US, it is very hard for perspectives grounded in reality to break through. If you look into it, the vast majority of the users stirring things up in this thread aren't in Britain, and most likely have little to no first-hand knowledge of what the country is like.
What land did Tony Blair grab? You can disagree with the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq without making the exaggerated claim that this was part of some kind of long-term imperialist occupation. The UK currently has fewer military personnel in Iraq than it has in, say, Germany. And Britain doesn’t control the Iraqi government.
>What land did Tony Blair grab? You can disagree with the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq without making the exaggerated claim that this was part of some kind of long-term imperialist occupation.
Yeah, just a few decades years, to secure oil deals and/or keep control of the region. No biggie.
That this can be said with a straight face about invasions to two countries that created civil war, suffering, hundreds of thousands of deaths, displacement, etc, is telling of the ever-present colonialist mindset.
My post wasn’t defending the Iraq war. It was just pointing out that the war was not a land grab. Iraq is not now a part of the UK or US (in contrast to the situation with Russia and Crimea, for example).
For anyone else interested, negotiations that could lead to the US leaving Iraq and fully returning control to the Iraqi people are also going swimmingly, according to reports.
The US military presence in Iraq is already far smaller than its presence in Germany and many other countries. Certainly, the US is a global superpower (albeit a declining one) that exerts influence via its military strength. But Iraq is not occupied by the US any more than Germany is.
It’s hard to say. What would happen if Germany demanded that US forces leave? Germany undoubtedly has the right to do this. I don’t think anyone can say what would happen with any confidence, as it’s quite an outlandish scenario. My guess is that, ultimately, US forces would leave, NATO would collapse, and relations between the US and Germany would decline precipitously. But hey, actions have consequences. This does not mean that Germany cannot get rid of US forces if it wants to; it just means that it doesn’t want to because it would be a bad idea.
> Saddam committed crimes of aggression during the Iran–Iraq War
Which links to a page about the war:
> Iraq was aided by [...] the United States, the United Kingdom,
> After years of military and economic losses, decreasing morale, intensifying Iran–U.S. relations, and little international action against Iraqi attacks on Iranian civilians, Iran agreed to a ceasefire with Iraq under United Nations Security Council Resolution 598.
The question is completely different from the point I was making. "X did bad things on their own" and "Y had absolutely no relationship with X at any point" are two points so blindingly obviously different that I'm having a hard time accepting that you are genuinely confused about the difference.
It's a motte-and-bailey fallacy that starts with countries and leaders having relationships in a global, interwoven world and ends with excusing a blood-thirsty dictator as if they had no agency.
I think something Brits don't fully understand is the extent of our vassalage under the US.
We do, as you rightly note have quite the history of a policy of imperialist land grabs, now we just play a support function to somebody else's empire.
Ok, but you can say the same for the US. It also has vastly more troops in Germany than Iraq, and it also does not control the Iraqi government. And the less said about Afghanistan the better. So where is the land grab?
One does not need to dictate every item of policy to control a country, one just needs to ensure that there's alignment on strategic issues. I think this was America's key point of learning when it took over the reins of the European empires after WW2.
In Germany, historically the strategic issue was anti-communism, but now it serves as a military logistics hub; in Iraq, it's about trade in oil in dollars and access to Iraqi oil fields for US companies.
The UK is more complex and more total, ranging from support in the security council, to access to markets for US goods and services, to stationing of US troops and hardware. Most of our economy is geared up for the benefit of US investment funds.
Any government, whether it be Germany, Iraq or the UK, which tries to alter any of these fundamentals will quickly find out the extent to which their land has been grabbed.
Or, to put it more succinctly, Iraq is occupied by the US in about the same sense that Germany is. And while the US no doubt exerts influence over Germany in part via its military power, I think the position that the US military presence in Germany is part of a “land grab” would be a rather fringe one.
It depends where you're sat and when. It's almost certainly a fringe perspective in the US, because I don't believe American's really think about it that much.
Whether troop presence is viewed as occupation or not in each of the >50 [1] countries currently "hosting" troops is very much a matter of personal perspective, the fringeness of which will vary from country to country.
I don't believe that it really changes the fact that yes, US troops occupy the UK, Germany and Iraq, and many more. The most substantial deployments, e.g., Germany, Japan, South Korea, and until recently Iraq and Afghanistan, were very much the product of invasions. At the time of those invasions, many of those on the receiving end would have very much felt on the receiving end of a land grab. It's just their grandchildren have been conditioned to view this state of affairs as natural.
The general pattern is "bomb the bejesus" [2] out of a country. Plant base. Install a friendly government and ensure a favourable operating environment for US interests. The UK is an exception in that it wasn't bombed by the US, but the upshot is the same. We're a wholely-owned subsidiary of corporate America, and a giant aircraft carrier on the other side of the Atlantic -- as the US's latest adventure in Iran has clearly demonstrated.
You may quibble over the "land" in land-grab, but the strategic bits (e.g., oil fields, bases) are very much owned, and the territory as a whole controlled by pliant governments.
I don't think it's fair to compare US foreign policy to actual imperialism as practiced by the Soviets, the British, etc. The US does not maintain colonies, and, as you point out, does not even attempt to exert total control. Pursuing your interests and forcing total political and cultural domination are not equivalent. The US is more than happy for Germans to be German, Japanese to be Japanese, etc, as long as US interests are prioritized. This is clearly not the case for other major powers.
Nations (and people) exist in an ecosystem, and so will always behave accordingly, and always in their own interests. There are some emergent properties of ecosystems, one of which is that optimal behaviour is to acquire the maximum you are physically capable of defending, not the minimum that you need to survive.
It's perfectly reasonable for the US, the big fish in the pond, to leverage its advantages accordingly, and to the maximum. It would be a disservice to the US people if it did not. Smaller fish should indeed be glad that the big fish is as placid and strategically (rather than ideologically) motivated as it is, given the historically experienced alternatives.
> I don't think it's fair to compare US foreign policy to actual imperialism as practiced by the Soviets, the British, etc.
All empires function differently. The modes of empire were very different between the British and other recent European empires, which were very different to the Soviets, the Ottomans, the Romans.
Empires are heterogeneous even within themselves over time and across Geographies. The British empire took a very different form in Ireland, to the Americas, to India, to Kenya.
Similarly the Soviet experience was very different between the Ukraine, the Baltics, Georgia, Tajikistan; or in non-Soviet Warsaw pact countries, which were -- as for most countries in the American empire -- nominally independent, but practically not, see Hungary and Czechoslovakia for particularly pertinent examples.
Ultimately, this is a duck test thing. The American empire looks like an empire, acts like an empire, so to my mind it very much is an Empire.
> The US does not maintain colonies
This, I'm sorry, is categorically false. America has colonies in American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
I'd go further to suggest, that as Israel's most substantial economic and political backer, Israel could be considered something akin to a US colony in the Middle East.
I don't think you addressed my main point about ecosystems.
Following your argument, every major power could be considered imperialistic, which kind of defeats the purpose of the word. Aye the US maintains some minor, vestigial, colonies. However it does not engage in imperial conquest. South Korea, Iraq, and Afghanistan are not part of US territorial holdings, and it was never a US war objectives to make them so.
We have to draw some lines somewhere, otherwise "imperialist" just means "really big". If you disagree, name a non-imperialist world power.
At no point in this thread have I claimed there are no other countries with imperialist characteristics, I'm just highlighting the fact that the US is very much an empire, an empire which runs my country and many more besides, and is very much the biggest and baddest of them all today.
Territorial conquest here is very much a legal, not a practical distinction. To return to my previous point, different empires function differently. I don't think absorption into one's de-jure territory is is necessarily a defining characteristic here. Much of India under the British, for example, was run through vassals.
To address your question directly, I'd say India is a major world power, with about four times the population of the US, and you'd be hard pressed to describe them as an empire.
China, for its part, maintains three overseas bases, only one of which in a country it has sent troops into during a conflict (Cambodia). This is in comparison to over fifty US bases, the largest of which are all very much the result of invasions.
In the 21st century, China has had a few border skirmishes with India. In the 21st century alone, the US has fought in Afghanistan, Yemen, the Philippines, Iraq, Somalia, Pakistan, Libya, Uganda, DRC, CAR, South Sudan, Niger, Syria, Iran, Ukraine, Palestine, Lebanon, Venezuala, and Nigeria.
If you want to pin me down on a definition, I'd say an empire is a network of countries, controlled by and for the benefit of a central country, predominantly taken by force and maintained at least to some extent through the threat of force.
> An empire is a network of countries, controlled by and for the benefit of a central country, predominantly taken by force and maintained at least to some extent through the threat of force.
I tend to agree. The keyword is "control". The US does not control, it influences. The distinction is of kind, not of degree.
As a contrast I offer the former-Soviet empire, which was very much controlled from Moscow in a way Berlin is simply not controlled from Washington today. Much in the same way that Russia is attempting to control eastern Ukraine.
We need different words for these very different modes of existence. The Soviets controlled so they were an empire. The US influences so, despite being very large and powerful, and using that power to further its interests, it is not.
Empire is not defined by number of wars. China/Beijing exercises control over several nations that would otherwise be independent of it (Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, nominally Taiwan). Modern India is not an empire (though Mughal India very much was), neither is it exactly a major world power.
Assuming you're commenting in good faith, it has been looked into and it's a well-known behavior of those who are in abusive relationships. You can read more about it here:
The good news is that people have looked into it! And not just in a modern-slop-journalism kind of way, but in a serious, rigorous kind of way. And many of the resulting scientific papers are published online and available for you to read!
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