OfCourseNot

An organized, disciplined military is more effective at defending against an organized, disciplined military.

That’s true. The thing is: defending what? The country? The government? The king? Going to war is trading my (relative) safety for theirs, and I’ve never been too fond of them really.

Defending myself and going to war sound like complete opposites to me.

Be my fucking guest! You and your children can go enlisting, I just have to do this thing and will be right behind you…

Remember that unemployment rate here counts only people inscribed in the unemployment services. I don’t think half of them are working illegally, at best that would be a rounding error.

Downsizing the bureaucracy would take many years, since public servants ‘cannot be fired’ (bit of an oversimplification, but the reality in practice), and would take some strong political will, which we lack in Spain.

And about the armed forces, I know some ex-military that are kinda left-leaning, but the average is absolutely right leaning (from straight up nazis, to ‘apoliticals’ that if you talk with them for a short while will let go some racist, homophobic, or generally reactionary comments very casually). And that’s the rank and file, if you go to the higher ups you’ll find, well, as many fascist as you can expect from a military that wasn’t purged or rehabilitated after a fascist regime.

Even then, when a coup was attempted, the majority of the armed forces shut it down

Do you mean the coup that the king himself organized so he could stop it afterwards to come out as the hero that saved the day while also putting some fear in the population?? That coup d’état ‘attempt’??

I don’t think that’s right. This other link (from another commenter in this thread), also euronews, says 47%. Anecdoticaly I get €1800 in my bank account every month, but cost my employer €3200.

Kinda tricky to compare taxes from one country to another.

Spain’s budget is ~21% of its gdp (with >10% unemployment you can imagine how bad they fucking bleed us with taxes, the poor I mean, for the rich is the same as anywhere else), but more than half of it goes to pensions, and we have a huge ,dense, and expensive bureaucracy that takes a good chunk of the rest (I don’t have numbers sorry).

So, I think you are right, there’s just no more money: touching the pensions is political suicide (and very unfair), scaling down bureaucracy is just impossible, rising taxes would suffocate us (even more), taxing the rich is as much of a fairy tale as it is in any other country…

On top of that, if you read a history book you will see that the Spanish military is a much bigger threat for Spain than the Russian. I don’t think it’s in the best interest of the Spanish people to give them more money.

I’ve been pirating since Napster, never have hidden shit. It’s usually not a crime, except in America it seems, to download content, or even share it freely. What is a crime is to make a business distributing pirated content.

I’m not sure it’s possible to bankrupt a city like LA, they can go into massive debt and you and your children will end up paying it. They can also take the money from elsewhere in the budget: a shepherd will stop feeding the sheep but not the dogs.

Thank you!

Do you have a bit of info on these Linux mobile OSs? The FP5 didn’t convince me as a main phone when I needed a new one last year, but if it can take a real Linux distro it could be a cool toy.

No amount of primaries can solve it either, imo. The problem is parties. One party, two parties, many parties… they all end corrupt. A politician loyalty is not to the voters, or the people, or country. It is first and most to the party, because the party put them in that place, and it can take them away if they don’t stay on their lane. Parties can be, and so most have been, easily infiltrated and corrupted since money is what wins elections.