Two small island economies blew up in 2008. Iceland and Ireland. Their names differ by one letter, and their handling of the crisis differed by everything that matters.
Iceland's three big banks, Kaupthing, Landsbanki, and Glitnir, had grown assets to roughly ten times the country's GDP by 2008. Pure credit-fueled madness. When the music stopped, the Icelandic government did the unthinkable: it let them fail. Bondholders ate the losses. The state refused to socialize private bank debt onto 320,000 citizens who never signed up for it. Capital controls went up, the króna collapsed, and the politicians actually prosecuted bankers. Twenty-six of them went to prison. Sigurður Einarsson and Hreiðar Már Sigurðsson, the men who ran Kaupthing, served real sentences.
Ireland took the opposite road. In September 2008, the Irish government issued a blanket guarantee covering the liabilities of its major banks, including Anglo Irish Bank, a property-lending casino that should have been allowed to die in peace. The taxpayer absorbed the bill. By the time the rescue ended, Ireland had poured around 64 billion euros into its banks, roughly 40 percent of GDP. The state took on private gambling debts, then went to the Troika in 2010 hat in hand for an 85 billion euro bailout, and accepted years of austerity to pay for losses it had no business owning.
Both economies recovered. Both eventually grew again. The difference is who paid and who learned. Iceland made creditors and reckless bankers bear the consequences of their own decisions, which is the entire point of capitalism: profit and loss, not profit and bailout. Ireland protected the people who made the bad bets and handed the invoice to schoolteachers and shopkeepers.
You will hear economists call Ireland's GDP rebound a triumph (much of that "growth" is multinational accounting fiction, Leprechaun economics, but that's another lesson). What they skip is the moral architecture. When you guarantee bank liabilities, you abolish the discipline that makes markets work. You tell every banker in the country that downside is optional.
Iceland jailed its bankers. Ireland reimbursed theirs.
Patients who share their antidepressant withdrawal experiences get cast as fringe—anti-establishment types who always refused the medical system.
But the system spat us out.
Anyone who went on medication once trusted it deeply. That's why we're here.
Western Civilization didn't flourish because "white males" stopped other groups from succeeding.
The West thrived because of rational thought, individual rights, and free enterprise.
"White males" that invented the steam engine, electric generation, the combustion engine, flight, and space exploration did not do so because they "stole" the ideas of minorities.
These inventions helped lift mankind out of ignorance and hardship, improving the quality of life for all of humanity.
"White males" didn't oppress the entire world, they helped make it a better place.
"White males" didn't oppress everyone's rights, they invented the idea of rights and paid in blood to liberate tens of millions of people.
"White males" didn't invent slavery, they ended it.
"White males" didn't invent tyranny, they devised a form of government to end it.
Destroying Western Civilization isn't about empowering groups that were "oppressed." It is about tearing down civilization itself so that globalist parasites can rule over all of us.
@EamonMelia Just good old parish pump politics that's all. There isn't enough of votes to keep 2 FG TDs in the Dail come the next GE. On a funny note it was an opposition party that got him elected