The Sam Spade Memorial Good Post Gallery

[Sol]

Posts like these are why I keep coming to the Atlas:

Okay, I'm going to address Vosem's interpretation of the Mines of Moria scene, because this is going to bother me if I don't.

What Gandalf is saying in that scene is not limited to a commentary on the relationship between Frodo specifically and Gollum specifically. 'Even the wise cannot see all ends' is a remarkable statement coming from Gandalf, who, we read in the Silmarillion, is the wisest of the Maiar, a class of beings that also includes such luminaries as Melian and Uinen. The point is that the sort of knowledge that would be necessary to say whether somebody 'deserves' to live or die is practically impossible to obtain!

I would never claim that the Tolkien canon is a pacifist set of texts, or even a death penalty abolitionist one. (It also has...uncomfortable racial and sexual politics.) But what it does say is that killing is to be understood as something that one sometimes does to make a problem go away NOW, not because one has come to some sort of certain, enforceable conclusion about what the person one is killing 'deserves'. (Again, in the Silmarillion we see that if somebody were to have just up and killed Maedhros and Maglor after the first couple rounds of Kinslaying, which they would have richly 'deserved' by most metrics, things would actually not have gone so well towards the end of the story! Elwing would have had no reason to throw herself into the sea, et cetera.)

tl;dr what Gandalf is saying is basically, as Tony Abbott might put it, that nobody, not even Gandalf himself, is the suppository of all wisdom, and that only somebody who was would be qualified to say whether or not killing somebody would be altogether 'just'. In Tolkien's worldview, this is nobody but God. In the worldviews of most forumites, it'd be either nobody but God or nobody at all.

[Sol]

Greece, because while their government(s) are/have been dishonest and got themselves into this mess, I don't believe in gutting a government's basic services to appease banks/creditors in a way that only makes the problem worse by putting the country back in the Great Depression.

The Greek healthcare system has completely imploded. Diseases that haven't been a problem since for 50+ years are coming back hard. Poverty and unemployment are through the roof.

I am no fan of the Eurozone, but I don't know how Greece is supposed to repay its debts by destroying its economy (tax base, y'know, where the money to pay those debts is supposed to come from) and enabling radical reactionary politics.

If SYRIZA fails, that probably means the rise of Golden Dawn, which I'm sure the vast majority of people desperately want to keep out of power, because they're literally a fascist, neo-Nazi party.

Yes, painful economic reforms and restructuring will have to happen across the southern tier of the Eurozone, but austerity is not the way to do it. Greece should not be allowed to become the Argentina of Europe with the way it doesn't honor its debts, but punishing average people accomplishes nothing except making the problem worse. You're not only ruining their lives, but embittering them for the rest of their lives. Making enemies of whole countries is not something you want to do. The only people truly benefitting from this are Euroskeptics and thier political parties, which doesn't help the pro-austerity crowd one bit.

I don't really have a solution (personally I'd like to the see the Eurozone just break up), but the measures being demanded by Germany and the Eurozone elite have failed. Contracting the money supply/fiscal policy didn't help in the Great Depression, it didn't help during any recession, so why the hell is it supposed to work now??

If the ECB and the various European governments had chosen fiscal stimulus in 2008-2010 when the recession was happening and bottoming out, these countries could be growing again and then you could enact milder austerity to get the money back without ruining everyone's lives and causing this political backlash in Greece, Italy, Spain, etc. The U.S., the UK, and Germany all chose stimulus during that time, and are growing again. The U.S. enacted austerity through the sequester and tax hikes starting in 2013 and it didn't wreck the economy but still closed the deficit (though the sequester could've been handled better), and balancing our budget is a pretty easy goal if it weren't for vested interests. Obviously the differences between the U.S. and the troubled Eurozone nations are pretty vast (we can manipulate our own currency, our debt was not as large compared to GDP, our political system still works, we don't have deep structural problems, etc.), but the point is still the same: austerity is counterproductive to the goal of paying off debts.

I don't know what the endgame of austerity is supposed to be, other than a Grexit and a possible domino effect across southern Europe. In all seriousness: can anyone tell me where this is supposed to end? I have yet to hear a concrete answer that has positive results for all involved.

Extreme austerity isn't working, so I reluctantly vote Greece.