Quote from: o48o on Today at 09:58:55 AM

Quote from: caroasi on April 16, 2025, 11:34:33 AM

-cut-
Look at Europe, they have better voting systems than the USA, but they fail at respecting people basic human rights to own property, own weapons, and speak freely. Europe is by an authoritarian and hostile place to live in comparison.

That's just hilarious.

Property:
In EU we own property, i am not sure if i even want to know where you heard otherwise.

But let's consider land/housing as a property for a moment. Major problem in the world with housing is wealth inequality, meaning that wealth accumulates to few. Rest of the people who aren't rich will have trouble to buy anything, (no matter how hard they work), as rich famiies have pretty much already have acquired the best areas and control the pricing. They have no incentive to lower the prices, and prices go up faster then people can grow their wealth, so rest of the people rather rent.

Btw: Current administration is US is removing safeguards to prevent next housing crisis in there.

Weapons:
In Finland for example, roughly over 1/3th of the citizens owns a firearm. They say it's for self defence / hunting, but only small fraction of the people actually hunt anything.
But as they are country of rule and law, so they don't like to carry them. They pretty much trust on police, which basically never shoots anyone.

Freedom of speech:
What part of the world are we comparing EU citizens to exactly?

https://rsf.org/en/map-2024-world-press-freedom-index

That report is from 2024, and considering what trump has said that he is planning to do with freedom of speech in USA, i might rank them heavily down. Hell, he tries to ban words used in UN official reports.

If it's platforms you speak about, then we get censored by saying cis-gender in twitter. And (non-violent) posts about removing trump from the office gets removed now. Meanwhile it's non-issue to wish that Ukrainians would die.

And i haven't even started about the usa becoming total authoritarian state, starting by trump sending people to El Salvador without due process, refusing to return one send in mistake & planning to send "home grown" US "criminals and terrorists" to El Salvador as well (Not his fans though, those he will pardon or hire).

I don't find human rights violations by Europe to be funny at all. People under North Korea, Stalin, and Mao also thought they owned property. No, they didn't own property. The state owns the property and allows citizens to borrow it at their "good grace".
It is difficult to say who respects property more and less especially with the bad data available, but you can see European countries have revoked property rights with their tax rates well above 15% of GDP:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_tax_revenue_to_GDP_ratio

No country that taxes above 15% could consider anyone to be the owners of "their" property. And of course there is the outright criminal mindset of taxing a house. If you have to pay property tax on a house, you don't own it, you rent it. Sorry to have to be the bearer of bad news on that topic! So no even the USA doesn't properly respect property rights, but they do so dramatically more than Europe.

As for gun rights, its common knowledge that gun rights are respected more in the USA than any other major country. I need not provide any sources on that.

Home schooling is more or less outlawed in Germany, making it a totally unlivable place for any family.

Free Speech is openly disregarded in Europe and many people go to jail for sharing opinions on social media.

"3,395 people were detained and questioned for online speech alone in 2016, a rate of nine per day. Nearly half of those questioned were prosecuted. Typical was the case of Lee Joseph Dunn, who last July posted three memes suggesting that Asian men possessing knives might move into British communities, possibly after immigrating illegally. Dunn deleted the memes and apologized; he was therefore sentenced to only two months in jail instead of three. The same judge, however, gave Billy Thompson the full three months for a heated Facebook post that included emojis of an ethnic minority and a gun."
Source: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/free-speech-wobbles-uk

There are laws against hateful speech in Europe. Of course hate is a human emotion, and expressing our emotions towards others is a human right. In the USA, the supreme court has ruled hate speech is a protected right.

There are dramatically more rights and freedoms in the USA specifically in part because Trump appointed judges are protecting gun rights more firmly, though they have a long way to go to properly protect weapons rights.

People who specially move for freedoms and liberties often choose places like New Hampshire, Wyoming, and to a lesser extent places like Florida for it's tax policies. In Europe there are not many options as Switzerland is no longer all that respectful of liberties as they were, especially with their brazenly anti-freedom weapon policies.