I’m from germany and I’m scared about the future. The far-right is getting more and more voters. It’s not just the USA who is fckd.
Thanks for sharing our pain. I don’t understand how people pretend that Europe isn’t going thru the same stuff like we are in the US.
Inflation, migration debates, cost of living crises, rise of authoritarianism, income inequality, all of this is and has been global. Some places affected more than others depending on what you look at.
I am also from Germany. Political and cultural developments that happen in the US will in some form arrive in Europe with a delay of about 10 years, at least that is how I often felt.
Income inequality is not a huge problem in many parts of Europe. The distribution of wealth is. A fine, but important difference, because the effects of this are much worse.
Far right is hoping for civil wars, and people in the center or left of center think everything is business as usual. One side is going to go vote in greater numbers than the other.
Also Europe:
“Let’s do this obviously good thing for the sake of the whole continent.”
“No, because it would help France.”
Haha sounds about right!
Is this based on actual event or is it a general joke?
A quote I heard from a Greek minister (from memory). “If Germany had a choice between doing the right thing and hurting France, they will hurt France.”
So? Where is Your punchline?
Let’s not forget brexit. Americans aren’t alone in their dumbassarry
Or the recent wins of fascist parties in Europe.
I fear the outcome of the three “state” elections in Eastern Germany later this year.
Literally facist? I know about a few right wing ones, but none of them seem actually facist
Musolini’s grand daughter sends her regards:
I stand corrected! Didnt know they are self-proclaimed fashists… Thats a bold marketing campaign and terrifing that she got the seats she did.
Although the policies she supports are not really Musollini-like.
Giorgia Meloni is Italy’s current prime minister and also happens to be a proud founding member of the Neo-Facist party, and is the granddaughter of Benito Mussolini.
The fascist parties that want to stop immigrants on the borders? Remind me who was the previous president in US and who’s controlling the house now…
Initial comment about dumbassery not in the USA.
Reply back about additional dumbassery not in America.
You: bUt WhAt AbOuT aMeRiCa?
I’m just saying that the “fascist” parties in Europe are no more “fascist” than American right wing parties. People support right-wing parties for different reasons. Calling it dumbassery is weird.
Why so sensitive?
Do i need to make a nesting meme in this thread to show you mooks that you’re literally doing the meme right now?
Stopping immigrants at the border would actually be a horrendous policy and have devastating economic effects. Literally advocating for a terrible US policy that could be seen as inhumane and unethical.
Who’s advocating for it?
“I’m not saying we actually do it it’s the implication that we will do it”
Who’s saying that? Who’s we? I think you’re confusing mentioning something with endorsing it.
i hate these memes that group entire countries or continents into one homogeneous blob and assumes that one is inherently better than the other
It’s the best way to sow division. Put everyone into discrete groups and tell them that the other groups are bad.
Cops as a group is formalized by their own work choice.
Yep. I can remember not too long ago that French police blinded people when dealing with the yellow jacket riots. Also the president’s bodyguard being there dressed as a cop and hospitalised someone instead of protecting the president. There’s also the murder of Stephen Lawrence in the UK and every year here there’s multiple cops charged with raping women or using excessive force against a minority.
Cops are shit everywhere.
Also in Finland, on 6th day of December (2023), on our independence day, the bastards prohibited the Helsinki ilman natseja (Helsinki without nazis) protest, beating the antifascist protesters and ramming into them with fucking horses, but they welcomed the nazi parade with open hands. Interesting.
Me too. I just don’t understand why so many people think that these “ok boomer / millennials, gen x,y,z does this and that” things don’t work on the same principle tho. I think it’s just as stupidly stereotypical…and I’m not even a boomer.
France burns down annually hahaha
Not sure about you, but I’ll take workers reminding everyone who is in charge and how democracy works over cops constantly shooting the innocent - people, dogs, whatever, and generally carrying on like thugs.
For a people that keep reminding the oligarchy who is charge they sure seem to have the same wealth gap as all the other liberal nations
They’re still a capitalist country like most, but worker rights are pretty strong there and they have much better social services and consumer regulations. I’m always blown away by how much higher quality French food is despite costing less, and I mean like from the grocery store not just nice restaurants.
Lol as if all of Europe has no problems of their own.
Like, yeah, I’m American and shit is really fucked up here in some specific ways… But let’s not pretend Europe is some sort of utopia.
Certified European here, can confirm individual member states and EU as a whole as not being a utopia.
Especially us Dutch folks who have been fucked over and held hostage by a waaay to large upper middle class for years. To the point where we’ve managed to abolish the ministry of housing, open up the housing market to foreign investors, replace a functioning healthcare system with a healthcare market where insurance firms rule with an iron fist and demand more bureacracy than actual care being provided.
… and the list goes on.
It’s a worldwide symptom of economic unequality and the decrease in social skills stemming from the fact that we live our lives increasingly isolated in our own online social bubbles. We’re turning increasingly hostile towards each other because we’re no longer confronted with all people and perspectives in our surroundings, but just the ones we like.
The United States, being a large country filled with very diverse people, despite all being taught to “love America”, still deals with Nebraskan farmers having wildly different wants and needs, and way different social standards than the Californian yuppies.
You’re a large country, with 334 million people spread out over a vast amount of land. Meanwhile, we’re 18 million living on a patch of marshy land roughly 3/4th the size of West Virgina, and we’re further from being united than ever before. The fact that you’re even holding together as a country is nothing short of amazing considering the fact that your political systems probably cause way more chaos than ours do.
A lot of Europeans probably mean it when they say “How are you even a country?”. And it’s not so much an attack on the American people as a whole (though some of y’all deserve to be made fun of), but geniuine amazement at the fact that it has more or less held together since 1776.
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As another European, I do blame the US’ hegemony for a lot of this, but yeah, we’re basically all getting fucked.
I think the root cause is the deregulation/privatisation of everything that started in the 80s. It slanted the playing field towards those with capital at the cost of workers and the cash has been flowing into their pockets and out of ours ever since
It’s a global phenomenon, caused by infinite growth based economic modeling (you know, where you base your whole economy on extracting increasing amounts of value from finite resources).
This type of modeling has been proven wrong and debunked early in the previous century, but it is still practised because it works very well for those gaining most of the profits.
You’ll usually hear the politicians promoting policies that help the larger companies argue that such policies directly create jobs and thus economic value for the people. But this is more of that trickle-down economics bullshit that doesn’t apply in the real world.
Because politicians worldwide have been so fixated on financial gains as a measure of the economy, they fail to measure and correct on (mental) healthcare, housing, education and equality.
Just some context on how large our housing problems have become: There is currently a deficit of 450 000 homes, which is projected to grow past 500 000 by the end of 2024.
The time we stop running countries like we do companies is when we’ll see things improve.
All about comparisons, man.
You gotta give credit to the fact that in the time the United States has had it’s 1 republic, France has had 5 of them.
Or the fact that Europe tears itself apart like every 50 years
It’s probably because French citizens are smart enough to put their own well-being before their governing powers well-being.
Yeah we’ve been together for 200 years, but it’s not going well at all.
The French literally placed an emperor into power just shortly after a proletariat revolution. Let’s not go sucking their dicks just yet.
and Germany did that one thing…what was that again?
You talking about the time they decided to start a war with the entire world, or the time they decided to start a war with the entire world?
the one with the whole “there’s one acceptable phenotype and everyone else can be either worked to death or put to death” thing. Holly-something…
Whatever happens in politics, i will stay away from it – is the mentality of people. So no revolution or whatever we live the way goverment lets us
It’s probably because French citizens are smart enough to put their own well-being before their governing powers well-being.
In what way do they do this?
Chopping heads
“Everything is so bad. Yet they set nothing on fire? How do they expect to fix?” —some twitter lady’s french husband, commenting on the state of American politics
From this extremely boring Finnish perspective, you guys in America set things on fire all the time. If that happened here once, we’d give the event a name and would talk about it for decades.
fair, but we only set things on fire if the local american football team wins. or loses. or ties. or the game is cancelled. or at parades.
what’s wild is that we party like the french protest but we don’t really protest.
Guy’s, let’s put aside our minor differences and remember - fuck Russia.
Pretty bold for a region that can’t last more than a generation or two before devolving into a police state so severe that it plunges the entire globe into armed conflict.
“How the fuck have they lasted this long as a country?”
Applies to Belgium far more than the US.
We’re younger than the US though.
French cops are perfectly normal, just don’t google “ici on noie les Algériens” and why it keeps being graffitied on a specific bridge in Paris.
What, you think acab vs notallcops is a usa thing ?
It’s not a thing where I live. There’s going to be other countries where the police operate like a gang, but it’s just not the case in almost all OECD countries. In authoritarian states like Russia and Iran, sure, but in functional democracies, it’s just not the case. The USA is a big exception, it must be part of that american exceptionalism thing.
So the rise of authoritarian policies in OECD countires mean nothing and aren’t being enforced?
Sure they do, and sure they are. But most people in functioning democracies with decent to good police forces understand that they’re just the messengers and hate the politicians that came up with the policies instead.
The policies of politicians and the humanism of police are not the same thing. A new party in power will also not change the culture of the workforce of an established service overnight, such a thing takes time. Time that those politicians usually don’t get in a functioning democracy, because in far less than a generation, another coalition of parties will be in the majority.
You wish. I don’t know where you live, but go ask your local queer militants or racial minority, you may have a different answer. Also, yeah, they are here to defends the system, they’ll be nice only as long as the system isn’t too challanged. Which won’t last for much longer anymore, with climate change, rarefaction of resources and all that.
I live in Belgium. There are police officers who are racist, which is to be expected since a lot of Belgian non police officers are racist too. But they are not allowed to be openly racist on the job, because that can have consequences for them.
Are our police fed up with the inner city street youth in Brussels, who mostly have an immigrant background? Definitely, but that doesn’t mean they are any more racist than the immigrants who are also fed up with the with thay inner city street youth. The root cause of those persisting problems is also a failing judiciary, not cop culture.
But the thing is, the conditions, that make it so that “acab” is a thing with many police agencies, are not present in Belgium.
Our police does not have qualified immunity, there are no no knock raids, there is no “we investigated ourselves and found nothing wrong”, there is no systematic omerta to protect each other when crimes are committed. People aren’t even afraid of dying or getting their dog killed when they call the police.
There are isolated scandals obviously, police people are human after all and there are all kinds of humans and all kinds of circumstances.
There have been a few police scandals in recent years, but unlike with the USA police we keep reading about, those had consequences for the police officers involved. There is a very recent one of a group of police officers sharing racist memes in a private Whatsapp group and guess what, they got reported by colleagues and after an investigation, several police officers were fired.
Is the Belgian police perfect? Far from it. But are all Belgian cops bastards? Certainly not. Our cops are not a gang that stands apart from society, they are very much part of it.
ACAB
Actually braindead 😂
Ratio’d
Oi you got a loicense for this meme?
This may not apply everywhere in the US, but my understanding is that most cops aren’t paid terribly well. Perhaps it’s ok if compared to a standard job, but when you account for the danger, required over time, and work schedule it becomes very not worth it.
A buddy of mine is a true believer type, he signed up to be a cop, went through a year of training and another year paired with another cop. PreCovid starting pay was $40k, 12 hr work schedule and every 28 days it flipped (so 28 days day shift followed by 28 days of night shift). One day he gets a call and his boss had switched him to a different district with 3x the commute without any communication. Finally a buddy of his caught a bullet in the head (and lived) from some guy who was on drugs and stole a car. He said he thought about it and for the money it wasn’t worth the emotional cost.
Strangely the problem with underfunding cops is who the fuck wants to be a cop? Yeah, after 25 years and multiple promotions you might make an ok or even good salary, but being a new cop is absolutely shit. In a system where the pay isn’t good, the hours are shit, and the risk to your life is high, who wants to be a cop?
The answer is either self sacrificing good guys or people who get a power trip on carrying a gun and using it. Add to it that this system is perpetuated by the type of people who pursue the job you end up with a whole department full of the type who hire these types.
So while you can defund the police, you can send them through training, you can institute new policy, but if you don’t attract a better quality of person then you’re gonna have the same problem over and over again.
Theoretically you could make the hours better (but that will require hiring more police to cover the same amount), you could reduce the danger (similar to London banning guns so beat cops don’t carry them either), or you can pay them more.
“Defund the police” doesn’t mean salaries. It means stop outfitting them with weapons of war.
I see why you thought that’s what I meant, but immediately following that I list several other potential solutions to overall bad policing. You can certainly defund the police, aka stop outfitting them with weapons of war, but it will not solve the fundamental problem of hiring bad candidates to make bad cops.
Indeed is reporting that the average starting salary is like $50k, and the average in the US is $60k. Policing also isn’t even in the top 25 most dangerous jobs. That link is also talking base salary, but even in the situation you’re describing, you’re talking overtime in the $20k+ range.
The problem with bad cops comes down to two main things:
- they’re not here for public safety or here to protect and serve, they’re here to protect capital.
- well, it’s really just the first one, but keeping that in mind, the system is setup in a way that the only outcome can be a corrupt police force. Legal civil forfeiture, qualified immunity, overly powered police unions (the only time I’ll complain about unions), deliberately low standards in hiring, deliberately not require the police to even know the law they’re supposed to enforce and probably a dozen things I’m forgetting. Police aren’t there for us, they’re there for capital.
Finally, police funding and increasing the number of cops has almost nothing to do with crime rates which is what calls to defund the police actually mean. Police are basically systematized violence where pretty much the only tools in their literal and metaphorical toolbelt are increasing levels of violence. The call to defund the police is more about funding the things that actually reduce crime – better education, economic outcomes, and people trained to deal with the types of issues that police are probably less qualified to deal with than the average retail worker like mental health crises. Advocates for defunding the police are instead advocating for spending to be allocated to people who are qualified to actually deal with these problems.
Anyway, tl;dr – if we offer cops better pay and better hours, we’re just going to be getting more expensive cops stealing our shit, incarcerating us at one of the highest rates in the world, and murdering people with less consequence than the cashier at Target gets for not upselling credit cards enough because while plenty of good people* become cops, policing as an institution in the US is corrupt.
* “Good” people and “bad” people are mostly a result of the systems and culture they exist in and very few are truly “good” or “bad.”
Of the responses I have gotten I feel like you have the closest response to the truth. Having good cops comes down to trust. If we had a police force of non-opportunistic saints who will go through anything to do the right thing then we might have something which meets the public’s expectation of the police. Short of that they are people who put their own lives and well being above that of the public. Police aren’t out there to save you, they aren’t really out there to stop crimes. They are out there to charge people with committing crimes. I feel like some understanding should be out there for the public though, police aren’t there to save you, they are there to charge people for having committed a crime. Ideally they will stop a crime as it is occurring or by their presence prevent a crime from occurring, but if you think the Police are there to save you then you’re wrong.
That’s the average scenario. That’s the Uvalde cop looking on as a school shooting occurs. The idea of a cop running into a school shooting is the “BEST” scenario.
Unfortunately the norm for police is far less than that, because the pay doesn’t incentivize better people to want to be police. It comes down to those the factors: pay, work life balance, and danger. Pick 2 of 3, low danger, high wages, or good work life balance.
Just for clarities sake, there is one big sticking point here that I want to make clear. Pay, hours, etc cannot incentivize a fix to this system because it’s not about attracting good people or bad people or dumb people or smart people, it’s about the system. If cops made $120k starting with 5 weeks of vacation and only had to work 32 hour weeks, we would not see significantly different outcomes because it is simply the institution and systems and culture that are the problem. Honestly, that would probably only increase the problem since it just further removes police from the normal humans they’re policing. Probably also instead of attracting people that are mission driven, it attracts mercenaries, basically. This is how we get billionaires; they’re mostly not evil, just so far removed reality and doing one of the most human things possible – rationalizing our own behavior for our benefit.
The idea that there are purely good or purely bad people is mostly a myth. There are people that we could objectively define as purely good or purely evil, but they’re the outlier. Nazis for example. The truth is even scarier than the myth. In most of our depictions, nazis are homogenous blob of pure evil. While nazi’s certainly had some purely evil people, the truth is the vast majority were just average people exposed to a system that creates an evil outcome. Of course, there were also purely good people in that as well, but the system often led those people their graves, or they had to be the right combination of good/smart to resist and stay alive. But most people just participated or closed their eyes and went about their day.
The problem is not the people, it is the system and pay and benefits aren’t going to fix it.
Now all that said, the Uvalde cops clearly over-index on little tiny dick bitch ass cowards and kinda blow a hole in my thesis. I wouldn’t call them evil, but just speaking statistically you would think even one of them out of the scores of cops there would have had even an underdeveloped backbone. The cowardice shown here should be something that lives into myth and legend and the way people say “Benedict Arnold” to mean “traitor” they should say “Uvalde cop” to mean “coward.”
It doesn’t help that cops are expected to do so much. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not an excuse to do fucked up things to people, but it is probably a contributing factor. Like mental health for being a police officer can’t be good. This is part of the reason so many people want to defund the police; it isn’t about giving them less money, it’s about moving funding to programs that are more focused so police can focus on their job and not try to be a mental health counselor as well.
You’re right though, being a police officer comes with an expectation that doesn’t match your pay. If you’re on the subway, there is a police officer in uniform standing nearby, and a guy attacks you, the expectation is that the cop would save you. However, in 2011 Maksin Gelman had a stabbing spree in NYC that culminated in an attack on Joseph Lozito. The attack occurred on a subway, with Lozito being stabbed in the head and face while police watched from the conductor’s booth. It wasn’t until Lozito had wrestled his assailant to the ground and detained him that the police helped him.
Lozito sued the NYPD for not helping him and the judge decided that it wasn’t the police’s duty to save his life. On the day of the assault the police didn’t even perform first aid on Lozito, it was another subway goer that save his life.
EDIT: I’ll be the first one to say fuck the police, but if you want actually good police then the first step is to pay them to match what you expect of them or else you’ll end up with a bunch of gun toting assholes who won’t do shit.
There is no danger!!!
They aren’t even in the top 10 most dangerous jobs in the US. Pizza delivery is more dangerous.
Please stop with the copaganda talking point about danger.
There is a difference in danger, Construction tends to be one of the most dangerous jobs there is, but getting injured in a construction accident is fundamentally different from getting shot as a cop. Other jobs might be more “dangerous,” but the nature of the danger is pretty important.
Pay is definitely not the problem and there’s plenty of places in the US where I’d argue they’re overpaid, in fact.
Care to elaborate? I won’t argue that funding for the department isn’t a problem, but at least in my own anecdotal relation of an individual experience that seems to be the problem.
There’s lots of places in the US where cops are paid significantly above median wages for the region as their base pay and then they’re also eligible to earn time and a half in nearly as much overtime as they could possibly want on top of being allowed to work extra side jobs in uniform for third parties.
They’re also typically one of the largest parts of most major cities’ budgets.
Fuck cops. They are overpaid if anything for what little they fucking do.
I took some time in thinking about your response, I want you to know that. That said, “There’s lots of places in the US where cops are paid significantly above median wages for the region as their base pay,” doesn’t mean much in the context of my original statement. My original statement said very much the same in fact. Cops, on paper, get paid above average and have tons of opportunity for overtime. What your response misses is the danger associated and the expectation of overtime.
It’s one thing when you can have unlimited overtime and another when you are expected to take unlimited overtime. There is also a disconnect when that overtime comes with an expectation of being shot and killed. With those expectations it’s no surprise that police are the largest portion of a city government. If you have a group of people that you expect to work long hours, work extra overtime, meet the municipality’s needs, and potentially die in their duty, then they should command a large portion of the budget.
If you don’t want to pay people to do these things then you can’t be upset that they don’t do those things. You get the cops that you pay for. I’ll be the first to say Fuck the Police, but I’ll also be the first to say we get the Police we pay for.
I disagree that the overtime is expected. It’s a benefit available to them that isn’t available to the general public.
I also strongly disagree about the relative “danger” of their job.
My dad was a firefighter for 30 years. He got paid less than most cops and faced significantly more danger on every shift than most cops.
Fuck the police. They were shitty since their inception.
Full stop
The pay only sucks at the start, then you learn how to exploit overtime and pick up detail shifts.
Yeah, but that comes back to the same point where pay incentivizes bad cops. It’s not quite that clear cut, but it’s not far from the truth. I don’t begrudge someone working a second job, and assuming we’re talking about good cops not getting kickbacks, police shouldn’t have to work two jobs to make ends meet.
