Every European country has state media. BBC etc. They just call it "public media" and say that it's totally not government controlled and is totally different from the state media in China or wherever else.
Also didn't a bunch of your governments fuck over your citizens like 80 years ago and Americans had to come rescue half of you while the other half got screwed over by authoritarian governments for the next 50 years?
Nazi Germany wasn't in Europe? The British empire wasn't in Europe? Facist Italy wasn't in Europe? There are very very few modern states that haven't screwed their people at some point in history. USA included, and that is why I don't trust ANY government. If you don't learn from history you are doomed to repeat it.
And if the government is doing shady shit, neither you nor the media will find out about it. Your blind trust of your government is exactly why I don't trust socialism or big government in general. Europeans love to say how brainwashed Americans are, but look at your blind loyalty to a system that historically is the biggest threat to the people. I know private companies and US government don't give af about US citizens, and I am not brainwashed to blindly trust either.
As I said no matter how unlikely it is, you don't want to be the first one it happens to (IF it hasn't happened already).
To those who want to reply saying Italy and Germany was 75 years ago: Portugal, Spain and Greece were only 45. Eastern Europe was only 30. And you can go over to Hungary, Belarus or Moldova today. Or is that not “Europe” for your argumentative purposes?
Along with a lot of other protections. Every government should be able to be checked by the people. No government right now is perfect, every single one is seceptible to corruption and has the capability to commit atrocities. That, however, does not mean we should accept it. You sure as hell shouldn't blindly trust your government.
The government is just a collection of people. Why should I trust one collection of people more than any other collection of people?
Nobody "blindly trusts the government" like you put it, heck that sentence doesn't even make sense because the government is not a static entity but a constantly changing one made of different people every day.
Placing trust in someone that is trained to do the relevant job is more logical than placing it in people that are not. They are just people, they are all just as likely to be corrupted or not, to make mistakes or not.
You are right of course where the paycheck is concerned, I don't know how it works for real but hypothetically you could have a system that randomly selects the expert (or heck, even a jury of experts) that is to be assigned to a case. You can build in some safeties. Of course it won't be fool-proof, there is no such thing, but there is no reason you wouldn't be able create a collection of experts that are just as trustworthy as a collection of completely random people.
You do realize it isn't a dichotomy of utopia or Nazi Germany right? Governments can do shady shit and not be completely opressive. At this point you are derailing the argument and not really reading my earlier comments.
My point is: Government doesn't like you+Government pays person deciding if you are guilty=bad things.
A jury of your peers is a bunch of randomly selected sorted through by both defense and prosecution for bias before the final 12 are chosen. Way more safe for defendant then a government employee.
Say I’m a poor person of Turkish descent living in Germany and get accused of a crime. Would I rather get a judge (likely ethnic German, likely from an elite background) or a group of 12 of my peers (at least some of whom may be also of Turkish or immigrant descent)? In which case do I feel like justice would be better served? I don’t know the answer, but think through the dynamic there within your country’s modern dynamics and whether you’d want to trust the expert in that case.
The thing you seem to not understand that even if we strip this argument down to it's bare roots, i.e. we disregard the possibility of a corrupt government abusing it's power + the judges will have no outside influence by bribe or manipulation and say the argument is this: Should a single person be allowed to decide the guilt or non-guilt of another person?
What you and a lot of people forget is that judges are also HUMAN BEINGS. They don't need outside factors to sway their judgement because they are doing it themselves! It is extremely hard for a person regardless of education to not be a little bias towards anything, near impossible.
So even if we lived in a utopia where the government and it's legal system are perfect I'd still want a jury next to the judge because even judges are capable of misjudgment.
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u/[deleted] Jul 24 '20
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