Go to any bigger Eastern European city and these places are thriving. There's basically no crime, you can get shitfaced beyond recognition and nothing will ever happen to you even if you are a woman.
As a middle class german you must see the decay in german cities with everything becoming too expensive, out of order and decaying in front of your eyes while you are being told you live in one of the richest places on Earth.
I am an experienced Muay Thai fighter and don't feel safe anymore. I live in Düsseldorf, used to be the most beautiful city in Germany, and seeing this city decay is so sad.
Western values will be eradicated in a few years. It's pure mathematics if you look at the birth rates. You have to be extremely naive to think different.
We will move out of the country next year and never look back.
I have a lot of Turkish and other first and second generation migrant friends. A majority will vote for AfD.
It’s indeed a sad development and one of the reasons I emigrated to Thailand.
The Netherlands was a lovely place when I was young, in the 80s - 90s, but the country has been going downhill fast in the past few decennia.
I think most people at this time still don’t realize their pensions will be gone, social security will provide less as time goes on and cities will become unsafer. And since people don’t realize this, they keep voting the status quo until it’s too late. I don’t think at this point there’s a way to go back.
My girlfriend asked me to arrange a Dutch passport for our daughter, but I haven’t bothered as of yet. I think Asia has a much brighter future ahead compared to Europe (mainly EU), so I doubt my daughter will need the passport to study abroad. She’ll be able to create a good life for herself here in Thailand or perhaps some other ASEAN country.
> The irony of you two complaining about "values being eradicated" but yourself moving abroad and probably not assimilating very much.....
Those are assumptions, but my answer is the following:
- I make an effort to learn the Thai language. In shops and such I converse in Thai with staff.
- I try to follow cultural norms. For example when visiting government offices, banks and such I wear respectful clothes (long trousers, nice shirt). I greet officials with a high (nose level) wai to show my respect.
- Every now and then (e.g. birthdays) I visit the temple with my girlfriend to receive blessings from a monk - and I am not religious.
Have you taken potential higher risks of climate change into account? I mean more extreme weather events? Which seems to have a higher baseline from where to start, compared to the rather tame shit we're experiencing in europe, at the moment.
I don’t buy the climate change narrative, so not concerned about it at all.
As one investor stated in the past: if rising sea levels were really a problem, banks would not want to finance oceanfront property or under very strict terms.
Politics in the modern age requires you to have different views on controversial matters to avoid being commoditised. If 10 parties share the same view on some issue, they will be compared on competence, and no politician wants that. It is much easier to capture a subset of votes by taking a specific position, however good or bad it is, as long as you get a monopoly in that segment.
True. But then they should focus on one or the other and don't cause contradictions.
It is hard to understand how you can have 'Refugees welcome' and 'Full support for our LGBTQ' agendas at the same time.
Cologne and Düsseldorf were vibrant cities embracing an openly gay lifestyle. This has become impossible. You barely see rainbow flags and guys walking hand in hand or kissing each other on the streets anymore.
Sadly political alliances everywhere are built on such contradictory promises, be it either right or left wing. You have to pickup the remaining voter segment which your competitor has isolated, as long as it is big enough.
On New Year's Eve 2015 I saw mention of the Cologne mass attacks on women by refugees *as they were occurring* on, yes, 4chan/pol/, and checked /r/worldnews and /r/europe to find out more. I didn't see anything and assumed that it was another /pol/ "it's happening" dank maymayism. I did not imagine that those subreddits, as well as mass media in general, were collectively suppressing reports of the attacks until the sheer volume made it impossible to continue to do so.
(Cue "/pol/ was right" couplet)
>Western values will be eradicated in a few years. It's pure mathematics if you look at the birth rates. You have to be extremely naive to think different.
A minority does not have to become the majority to greatly affect the overall society. Hacker News, a quick pop quiz: What percentage of Americans is black? What would you guess based on American news and pop culture? Go ahead, guess; I'll wait.
I have been living in Germany my whole life and cannot, for the life of me, understand your viewpoint. Never felt unsafe in Germany or had the feeling that our 'western values will be eradicated' (which sounds like right wing fearmongering to me tbh).
It's not a wild statement for crime rates or that the cities are thriving.
Even the statistics show this.
Yes there's petty crime but not random, violent crime where you run into gangs of people trying to mug you.
If you are not a european you will not understand the disparity in wealth. Most traditional businesses all around Europe are owned by old Western-European businesses.
Banks, insurance companies, construction companies, supermarkets, energy companies all around Europe are in the hands of few major corporations. It's generational wealth and it's impossible for Eastern Europe to compete with that.
How many UIPaths Romania needs before it can catch up with Austria? Way too many.
Yeaaaah, totally, thriving... Like today and yesterday half of the cluj smelled like sh* bc they stole eu money for development of trash recycling and processing bc there's a trash landfill nearby the city, or when public central park is fully blocked for several days yearly due to a private event. Or Bucharest, most congested capital/city in Eu, with annual problems of hot water supply and annual problems related to trash burning by roma ppl Or iasi where organised crime by (some) roma ppl is pretty harsh. Also I can't imagine how safely a girl can feel walking alone in the night in any of these cities (maybe except cluj, but even here there are a lot of dangerous regions).
I would hardly call these cities thriving, compared to say Vienna, Budapest, Munich, Frankfurt, Zurich, Paris, Barcelona, Lisbon, etc...
I even remember a recent news that a drugged guy that was 'checked by police' several times, they found drugs but didn't want to test him for drugs, killed a bunch of ppl with his car. Or the case where a lot of ppl burned alive in a club bc of the way it was designed and till today nobody's imprisoned, or when a bridge collapsed right before a school bus(bc they've stolen the money), there wasn't tragedy, but it could have been, and still, nobody in prison. Totally thriving county!
The problem is it's not reflected in day to day life. In most part bc of the corruption. Cities are designed poorly, quality of services is poor(education, medicine) compared to other eu members, there's a big car dependency problem... I can't wait to emigrate (
Sad and kind of surprising given that Romania's economy looks good on paper. Maybe the per capita GNP is increasing because people are emigrating, therefore capital per capita is increasing.
I consider corruption and quality of services "easy" problems if your economy is growing and your democracy is improving, you just need time. The richer you are, the less likely are you to accept bribes.
City design can be a harder problem depending on the specifics
but ultimately still solvable with time.
Population decline due to emigration seems like the biggest problem but maybe it will naturally self-correct, I don't have a clear opinion on this. I live in the Czech Republic and I have to say we're lucky we evaded the emigration curse that's affecting most ex-Eastern Bloc countries.
1) Overly excessive bureaucracy combined with not enough civil servants.
2) A housing market that's essentially not a market anymore.
3) Several problems with governmental services that have been under-invested and not well managed in the past, e.g. schooling.
Sure, there's crime. There's also slightly higher crime-rates in cohorts of refugees/immigrants compared to the average but not compared to cohorts of of "German young men".
We see a lot of far right propaganda tho along with the delusion of "the mainstream opinion shifted to the left". That's an old fascist trick.
The real issue is that the far right is taking up the traditional points of the left. And I don't think it really needs to be explained by the CSU/CDU steadily loses voters in the 20th century.
1) limit immigration (so as to provide better wages, better working conditions for the workers already here). For the left it's not about race, it's about managing the availability of labor for the local market to improve living conditions. Even limiting emigration is on the table.
2) "common sense" policies influenced by the opinion of the "unwashed masses" or whatever you want to call them
3) protection of jobs and unions over things like "the economy". Bad (livable and even "livable") jobs for all takes priority over trade (so borders largely closed). This also means limiting the scope of EU membership.
4) very high policy priority for things that directly influence the life of common people. Things like medical care (and training new medical personnel), schooling and housing having absolute priority over "the economy", or over Ukraine or Climate change
The left does not work like this anymore, and hasn't for a decade or two at least, because this is not what they attract young people with. And that was fine, when the economy was doing well and the left could pretend they were providing jobs for all while giving priority to climate change, when they weren't really accomplishing anything, and it was really China getting lots of things to build itself up.
This is what they call the generational conflict. A LOT of traditional leftist voters are worried about their life, finances, pension, medical care, ..., and don't care about climate change, Ukraine, essentially any international problem. There was no conflict as long as both could be reasonably provided that was fine. But that only applies as long as the medical care, schooling, housing, ... situation doesn't seriously deteriorate. And it has. So they run to the only party that agrees with them, at least in rhetoric.
Maybe someone ought to create more extreme leftists parties, from a real leftist party to even an outright communist one, that would also get these voters in. A party that would build housing, right in the middle of cities, with ZERO care what it would do to housing values or bank balance sheets. That would make employees essentially unfireable. That would kill imports and exports (or heavily tax them) to support more personnel in schools. Etc.
Left/right is an oversimplification, and because people are unwilling to compromise at all (You aren't allowed to be leftist and anti-immigration. You can't be leftist and anti-EU. So if you get frustrated enough you find your natural allies for that: racists. Not because you're a racist, but out of shear frustration)
There is another under-addressed aspect, which is that mainstream left and right parties are lobbied (i.e. bribed) by the same groups. Coupled with a media that is also aligned with it all, and it is a perfect recipe for outsiders like the AfD to come along with all the points you state above.
I recently read some books on history of Postwar Europe, and they contains a lot of things which were counter to what I had previously assumed.
* Postwar European countries were almost all homogeneous, as non majority ethnicities were driven out either during the war (Germany) or during the immediate post war period (Poland, Czechslovakia).
* Before Europe became prosperous, it very not welcoming of other ethnicities, even Europeans of other countries.
* Apart from America, we have not seen evolution of prosperous countries which are both democratic and heterogeneous, and America faces it's own problems due to the same. Europe was not used to these, but the same thing seem to be playing out there.
* A lot of liberal European policies came into existence only after the prosperity. A slight dip in prosperity can easily turn things very ugly.
Given all this, the rise of far right in Europe doesn't feel surprising.
There were waves of migration within Europe before WWII, that sometimes created some tension but by and large it only took a generation to assimilate them because in general (1) they made efforts to assimilate and (2) cultures were close enough that it wasn't too difficult.
An example is Italian migrants to France (and other European countries) in the late 19th and early 20th century.
What has happened since and is still happening, is a combination of continuously very large numbers of migrants and lack of assimilation.
> Postwar European countries were almost all homogeneous
Where are you getting this from? From Spain through France to Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, with Belgium as the cherry on top, many countries in Europe had ethnic and religious minorities, sometimes quite significant ones, or flat out multiple main ethnic and religious groups (Belgium or Yugoslavia that had 4 main ethnic groups from 3 religions). Even Germany had two religious groups (Catholic and Protestant). Also it's exactly after WW2 that immigration from the colonies to France ramped up, both of pieds noirs (French people from the colonies getting expelled from the now independent countries) and not, with the associated building boom of new cities around Paris to have somewhat to house all the people.
Unless you're using "homogenous" as a racist dog whistle for skin colour, as if it matters, it's simply untrue.
Yugoslavia (and all the violence that happened during and post it's collapse) is not a good example of what happens in a heterogeneous countries once the dictator was out.
Belgium and the two main areas/languages of it only came to harmony after the prosperity, and it mostly functioned like two countries within a state with almost all the powers to the two separate regions.
Ethnic minorities did exist in Europe before the wars, but in the post war period most countries kicked their ethnic minorities out.
Catholic and Protestants had to endure centuries of violence (almost as long as the history of the USA itself) together before learning to live together. Sure, after a long long period of assimilation everything can become assimilated together like that.
> it's exactly after WW2 that immigration from the colonies to France
The immigration to France was almost entirely from Algeria, not multiple colonies. And that too didn't go well and the immigrants faced tons and tons of discrimination.
By homogeneous I mean culturally homogenous here.
You seem to use the word racist very casually, as if anyone whose opinions sound untrue to you is driven by racism.
You also state something as simply untrue yet cite nothing to back such strong claims.
> Yugoslavia (and all the violence that happened during and post it's collapse) is not a good example of what happens in a heterogeneous countries once the dictator was out.
But it is a perfect example of a highly heterogeneous society being quite prosperous (relatively for the Eastern bloc and their starting position, which was a pretty much destroyed country), held together by nothing but a dictator.
> Belgium and the two main areas/languages of it only came to harmony after the prosperity, and it mostly functioned like two countries within a state with almost all the powers to the two separate regions
It started functioning as two separate countries within a state to an extent only in the 1970s, which is hardly "post-war". Before that the Flemish were discriminated against quite heavily.
> Ethnic minorities did exist in Europe before the wars, but in the post war period most countries kicked their ethnic minorities out.
Yes, this is your premise, but as I said, it's flat out untrue. Spain didn't kick out Catalans; France didn't kick out Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, various colonial descendants, or the Corsicans; Belgium didn't kick out the Flemish; Yugoslavia didn't kick out the Bosniaks; Italy didn't kick out the Austrians in Tyrol; Bulgaria didn't kick out the Tatars or Turks; Romania didn't kick out the Hungarians, etc etc etc.
Your premise is somewhat true in a very narrow geographic region, namely Germany, Czechoslovakia and Poland, where mass population transfers occurred. But trying to generalise it to an European wide thing and link prosperity to it is wrong, and yes, does sound like a racist dog whistle, but not because I don't like it, simply because you're trying to link kicking the "others" out to prosperity which is what many far right parties and persons have promised.
> The immigration to France was almost entirely from Algeria, not multiple colonies. And that too didn't go well and the immigrants faced tons and tons of discrimination
It was mostly from the Magrheb, including Algeria, but also Portugal. And yes they did, so France wasn't homogenous yet was still hugely prosperous?
> You also state something as simply untrue yet cite nothing to back such strong claims.
The strong claims of basic demographics in multiple European countries? Wasn't aware a source was needed for them, here you go as a starting point:
I have to say I feel like there's a lot of comments in this thread that are just totally detached from reality. I moved from Toronto to Berlin in 2017 and a lot of comments in here about living in fear of Muslims is just ... I don't know what part of Germany you are living in, and I visited a lot of it. I went to Karnival in Köln, and small beer festivals in the Bavarian countryside, I talk to locals in every city I go to.
I do however distinctly remember that when I lived in Toronto my social media feed was absolutely polluted with hype about how refugees are taking over Europe and the migrants are everywhere and there are countless no-go zones and endless rapes and the end of Europe was imminent.
Then I moved here, and literally not even once have I seen or felt any of that. I have however seen the far-right media endlessly look for bad events and a way to pin it on migrants. I have seen AfD marketing to tell people they will somehow "fix things" by replacing burkas with burgundy wine.
I've also seen that the neo-Nazis try to overthrow the government (Reuß) and carry out domestic terrorist acts (Hanau for example), the constant planning for "Tage X" and stealing weapons from the army, and the arm of the government charged with constitutional protection constantly needing to stop Nazi activity or investigate problems with the AfD or the military or other important authorities.
There are multiple areas in Berlin alone that the police officialy declares as No-Go Areas, among them:
- Alexanderplatz
- Görlitzer Park and Wrangelkiez
- Warschauer Brücke
- Hermannstraße and Bahnhof Neukölln
- Hermannplatz and Donaukiez
- Rigaer Straße
- Kottbusser Tor
Görlitzer Park is officially lost to African drug dealers, they just group raped a woman in front of her boyfriend.
In other cities it's similar. I go to Hamburg and Dresden regularly, can't even befin to describe how much downhill St. Pauli and Alaunpark are going. No sane person goes there after dark anymore.
Do you live in Berlin? I do, right near Bahnhof Neukölln. I live or have lived in many of the areas you list, and have spent time in all of them. Neither myself, nor my wife, nor my friends have any fear about these areas, even if there are sometimes people we would avoid (like any big city). None of these areas are no-go zones for the police, the police are all over the place.
Alexanderplatz being a no-go zone? Are you joking? It’s full of tourist traps and has some pickpockets potentially, but that’s because they are popular areas full of people.
The gang rape in Gorlitzer is horrible, but is by no means a regular occurrence.
Your entire description reads like a farcical joke. I don’t expect to convince you of anything, but for anyone else reading this, it’s a laughable description.
It looks like there's a blatant contradiction between statement B:
> AfD supporters see Germany’s migration policy as a catastrophe
an statement A (made just before B):
> There has not been a general shift to the right
Used to have some respect for Tooze, I actually quoted one of his books in here twice or thrice, but people like him should get their heads out of the proverbial sand and look at facts straight in the face. If it quacks like a duck ("migration policy as a catastrophe") and whacks like a duck it most certainly is a duck.
If you are generally supportive of a migration policy, but consider the implementation a catastrophe, is that really a shift to the right?
Put yourself in the shoes of those designing, implementing and managing the migration policy. If you were in that position and the results of your incompetence were writ large, calling anyone who criticises you racist is one hell of a defense strategy.
It doesnt just shut down criticism, it also has a chilling effect on people even discussing your incompetence for fear of social ostracisation.
I guess for some people it's easy to become a duck. As someone with a passionate hatred for ducks, I want it to be said there has to be compassion for those who are tempted to become ducks in an effort to protect their environment. If there's no way to voice your concern for western and democratic values without being labeled a duck, should they just not quack at all?
Well I'm not German so I can't really speak about what the AfD is about, and I'm sure there's a lot of actual Nazis voting for them. What is a topic however that is taboo because of association with Nazis is the influx of people with non-western ideals and values from Morocco and Turkey. Things like women rights, democratic ideals such as freedom of speech are under pressure as a significant portion of the population does not hold them. This problem is exacerbated when freedom of religion laws makes it so that subsequent generations are also educated with anti-western values. Mainstream political parties won't burn themselves on these issues, and the alternative political parties are often caught with Nazi's at their dinner tables.
There is no contradiction there, many Former voters of christian democrats kept their anti-immigration policies, but the party has changed their positions. The AfD cashes in on the political void that this move left.
What contradiction? One statement refers to the entire population and the other refers to the subset of the population who are AfD supporters. There’s no problem with both statements being true.
"You might wonder how someone who, on account of their xenophobia was willing too support the AfD, could not be counted as at least far-right in their political views.
This is a reflection of the Allesnbach methodology which scores respondents on their responses to the 10 prompts. Only those giving 5 positive responses count as far-right and 7 as “rechtsradikal”. So if xenophobia, racism, Islamophobia are your thing, but you do not “otherwise” have right-wing preferences, you fall outside the Allensbach classification."
As the article says, other conservative/right-wing opinions have not seen concomitant increases in support, so the superficial contradiction is resolved.
We rather have an anti-democratic and populist surge in Germany (the article also confirms that there is no particular shift in opinion to the far right).
The interesting thing is that we will probably get another party on the far left next year (founded by Wagenknecht, a prominent member of the parliament for The Left party. It is probably only delayed to next year due to some party funding rules for new parties in connection with the upcoming election.).
People want more simple solutions and are fed up with complexities (like all over the world). The other parties particularly as part of the governing coalition only offer more confusion and no clear vision where to go with a lot of internal fights.
While Wagenknecht is a member of a party called "The Left", her political views are identical with far-right views. If she founds a new party, then I wouldn't consider it a party "on the far left".
Wagenknecht is anything but far-right. She has no far-right views, she is just very clever in appealing to the "rightish" anti-mainstream protest voters.
That's because the term "far right" actually does mean "far left". It's meant to be a synonym for the Nazis who were definitely not a conservative party in any sense of the word.
AfD positions: socialism is bad, smaller state, deregulation, strong law and order, no European unification, introduce Swiss-style referenda.
"Far right" (Nazi) positions: socialism is good (it's even in the name), state is totalitarian, run your own street army to destroy law and order, start a war to unify Europe and immediately abolish all voting.
These are opposing positions yet we are told they are the same. It is a rhetorical trick that renders people confused everywhere it is deployed.
The world is getting more complex over time but it seems the BILD-population does not change much. Social media conflate theses issues and create new ones but do not help solving them. I believe it’s high time for a number of changes:
- simple voting should be replaced by quadratic voting to take into account a small number of passionate voters
- more direct democracy like direct voting and referendum. And a smaller parliament.
- increase the rights of the states and weaken the federal government to facilitate social experiments and competitive solutions. For example, let Bayern experiment with a no-refugee policy but also let them face the consequences (like paying for other states which are taking in refugees). A decline in democracy could be counteracted by more involvement of citizens in the decision processes and grassroots movements.
- encourage kids to play more games like Democracy 4 :) Debates about politics and role playing of organizations like the UN and EU should be a part of the general education. Because if anything, only the youth could bring hope for the future.
It's funny to see it described as "simple" voting. I sometimes lose track of the number of parties here (I guess it's 6 over 5%?) and the interplay of their shifting alliances. It's a far, far, FAR better system than the USA or England. First past the post is cancer.
Not to mention the federalized system works pretty well.
Germany has to be at least in the top 10 for democratic systems in the world
That's a great lesson learned from strategy games (Democracy, Paradox series, Civilisation, etc.). At the country scale, nothing is simple, and therefore anyone claiming otherwise is either dumb and shouldn't be anywhere near power, or lying and thus shouldn't be anywhere near power.
Easily. For instance, if a movement portrays itself as being supported by the common people and against the elites, then one possible next step is to argue that the mechanisms of democracy have been perverted by those elites, and therefore must be "reformed" or even swept away.
(If you've been paying any attention at all to US politics in the last few years, this should sound pretty familiar.)
That doesn't make sense. No populist parties are arguing for the mechanisms of democracy to be "swept away". They usually want them strengthened with better security and less political censorship.
The Nazis were just anti-democratic full stop. They only went the political party route after Hitler ended up in jail for trying to bypass it the first time, they were doing things like beating up their opponents and they abolished it the moment he got into power.
Cause the average voter attacks his system if it does not work for him? The acid eats the stomach? Populists do degrade the host system all the time?
First the system degrades to the point it does not provide to significant part of the population. Then the populists arrive and attack the system. The excuse is usually: It aint no longer democratic anyway, as in a democratic system this whole affair could be altered by flushing the elites out. New faces time, but you still get the old faces.
Which ignores the real iceberg of the problem, situational physics, for which some elites are just a drive-through-workers handing it out. If a society gets energy poor, or for example a whole planet decides to life like usa, there is simply not enough to go around for the now and the longterm.
Can vote all you want against the rain, protest the sky gods, burn your leaky house down in protest, it still will pour on your head. Only thing changing the circumstances is science, by unlocking new pockets of riches.
Comp science is a tremendous waste in that regard. Physics and applied physics is were its at for longterm stabilizing society. Free Energy (gas) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process feed the world, not SV.
It's not just migration.
Many Germans I know are just not happy with the government.
And have not been for a while.
People feel like their lives are worse, they can't afford apartments or houses and feel like their wealth is slowly melting away.
They pay more and more taxes but feel the service they get in return is worse and worse. Cities are not kept clean, infrastructure from small too large is breaking apart.
On the other hand an expensive cluster fuck of a public broadcasting system is kept alive where recent scandals made it look like they are dishonest and try to teach moral lessons instead of neutrally informing the people.
Health care got worse, many doctors just not taking new patients and people having to wait for specialist appointments for months.
People that earn more are also desperate, because they usually live in larger cities where they cannot afford apartments or houses anymore.
Also retirement gets worse and worse every year. Why should someone work 45+ years in a low wage job only to then the same money as someone who always worked?
All this shines a particularly bad light on the fact that no politician takes the blame anymore.
There are scandals, people do a bad job...and then they end up leading the commission in Europe or some other large state agency (looking at you vdL and Nahles). They do not face any consequences anymore.
The people have the subconscious feeling that many things go wrong in Germany and the country needs bigger and radical changes but that those changes will not spawn within the current players.
Or shorter: whoever they vote for, it's always the same stupid faces and swamp.
And last but not least I'd say that for years and years voters for the right wing party have been called fascists and Nazis by the (mentioned above) public media , even if they were just conservatives. They were (maybe rightfully?) judged by who their peers are in those parties.
But this made many people being afraid to vote for those parties. Now they "had enough" and don't care about public opinion.
In my family there are some examples of definitely not racist people that will vote far right...
And I stopped judging them but started listening to them. And I think all of them are brought back by implementing the right policies.
This is a question I've been asking myself.
I honestly don't know.
The country feels...stuck.
You want more wind turbines? Nimbys will block it.
You want more infrastructure and build something? Someone's gonna find some rare protected lizard where you wanna build and this will take you years!
You want to shrink the public broadcasting stations?
Well there are pensions to be paid which is the biggest share of the cost so even if you shrink it you won't save much.
Personally, I'd start at digitalization and try to make processes more efficient.
Think of software, only adding features but never thinking about cleaning up or refactoring might break your framework.
In government, there was no cleanup. It grows monotonically and it feels like for every little thing ten Departments need to approve it.
Government is a good example of parkinson's law.
No one ever says they have enough people, every year when being asked for next year's resource needs they claim and use the max because having not used everything might make departments subjects to cuts...
An example: a family member worked in a company acquired by our town, so she became a public service worker. Some normal office stuff.
She has a great working attitude...basically her shit got done in half a workday and then she asked for more tasks. Instead of doing that she was told to not break the team spirit and atmosphere there...shed put everyone else in a bad light.
Also, political culture needs to change. If someone is bad...and obviously does a bad job...fire them, don't give them a promotion.
This is more to appease people.
Also, media culture needs to change. Media seem to fight a fight "us against the Nazis" and therefore end up supporting current politics too much.
Recently read an article that said "more than half of the 2015 surge immigrants are working! Yay!".
Turns out, it was SLIGHLTY more than 50%. After 8! years. Most women didn't work...because of culture. And out of those 50% a large part got state money to make a living. This is not a success. At first it was sold as refugees, then as workers we desperately need.
But to be honest, I don't think anything will be done and nothing of significance will change.
I try to work on my skill portfolio and think about jumping ship to some other European nation.
A very good question.
Switzerland? But I don't like their mentality too much.
Maybe the east will rise.
Maybe skip Europe and go to the US?
I have no clear answer.
My life will be ok. I'd be more worried about future generations.
What's wrong about migration policy? I am probably a fairly far-right person, or at least on the extreme right as far as programmers go, but what can be changed in migration policy to which will improve things without completely undermining the future of Europe?
We have experienced demographic change. Our birth rates do not, and never will, provide for support of our population numbers. We need immigration or we will live through "Japanisation" - with almost none of our cultures being as tight and homogenous from the beginning to do it as nicely as Japanese. The need for mass immigration - not only of qualified employees, but simply of "bodies" in numbers - is a fact. No amount of far-right wordplay can change that.
Nothing, but that doesn't stop people from not liking it. Turns out, when women have the option to turn off their reproductive capacity, people opt for "hmmm nows not a good time I think I'll do it later" often enough that the population goes extinct. It's never a good time to have kids. That's why evolution ensured we don't have a choice, made us irrationally horny and ensured that it happened by accident.
But people still see the drastic change within a single generation and don't like it. And you can't blame them, if you started settling white people in some African country by the million a year you can very much expect the same from the people who already live there. They'd call it colonialism. And they'd be right, and if they were facing a fertility rate crisis like the west is they'd be screwing themselves over, but you still wouldn't be able to convince them that they have to do it.
> Turns out, when women have the option to turn off their reproductive capacity, people opt for "hmmm nows not a good time I think I'll do it later" often enough that the population goes extinct.
Or we have a society and an economic system designed to push women into the workforce and makes having children an expensive luxury good? That is a policy decision that can be changed. If it were economically beneficial for a woman to have two to four kids instead of grinding 40-50 hour weeks in the office, a lot of women would reevaluate their choices.
And it's much better for us to figure out a sustainable solution now than to wait a generation or two for the world to have a general fertility crisis. Right now it is localized to first-world countries, so we have some time to figure out a solution before things get really dire.
The problem isn't localized to first world countries anymore, the process in all countries has already begun and cannot be stopped. Almost every country on earth has a replacement level or below fertility rate and every single country has a fertility rate significantly lower than 30 years ago. A generation has already grown with the lower fertility rate, which means a generation is already locked in that will age out of the workforce with barely enough young people to replace their productivity. It's done.
There might not be a sustainable solution, besides a brave new world, but I personally would like to preserve human dignity. It appears that steady state population sizes are a rarity in the natural world and that almost all populations are chaotic and fluctuate. https://fractalfoundation.org/OFC/OFC-6-1.html
This. Main point here: "this is not at all the failure of the West/Libs/Rich people/democracy/Jews/whoever else you want to blame. it's everywhere. don't look for culprits: it's just the natural process of economic growth and productivity improvement".
Well, that and the hostile response by natives to large migration is rational, to be expected, is naturally occurring and cannot be stopped either, regardless of the fact that it is unavoidable.
I don't know that the cause of reduced fertility is prosperity. It might even be the other way around: as population growth decreases people have more because less people to split the wealth with. Our father's dug the gold from the ground and only had 1 child between them. It's probably a bit of both, when you're prosperous you have more to lose by feeding hungry babies.
But it most certainly doesn't balance out. Either a population grows or it shrinks, when a population grows it can produce more but there are more to feed, when it shrinks it ages, at first you have prosperity from that but eventually you wind up poor and old.
For some people I know, the thought of more (mass) migration is negative because they think it will aggravate existing problems in other areas like a low wages (especially in low skill labour due to increased competition) or the FUBAR housing market in some cities (again, due to increased competition on an already strained market).
For the last part they're definitely right, IMO, and german politics must find a way to solve the housing problem in big cities. The government must find a way to break the "migrants take away part of your cake" narrative, and this is only possible by increasing the size of the cake.
In this case, we need to aggressively build (and incentivize to build) more housing. We're doing the opposite at the moment, if the german construction industry is to be believed, which is very very bad. Building a house became insanly expensive in the last 20 years, especially in the areas where it is needed most. Redistribution by moving senior tenants in big cities to suburban or rural areas will not solve the shortage, neither will "just go to rural east germany, there's enough housing".
We have to solve these problems and prevent the formation of zero-sum games where migrants are seen as (external) competitors, stat - it'll be an existential social question and a threat to the country (and the long-term perspective of migrants) if we do not, IMO.
A big issue with immigration in Europe is not about economics but about identity, society, and culture.
This is caused by too many people coming in from vastly different cultures. And so there is nothing wrong with being in favour of vastly reduced immigration numbers.
Your take is to accept high immigration numbers as an unavoidable fact and therefore to only look at how to deal with them, and still only in terms of economics.
This is the elephant in the room. I have two overlapping observations.
- The big one is Islam. Islam seems to be the only religion in modern times that is actually religious. The only religion that can muster up people to actually get really angry about defending it. It's also the only religion the locals are actually scared of in any meaningful way.
- Color. If you have a bunch of local-looking kids meeting up at the mall, nobody thinks anything of it. Get a bunch of brown kids, and people get scared. Walk around as a typical Polish person, nobody will think anything of it. Walk around while brown and people are alerted to the presence of someone who needs to explain themselves. This isn't always mean-spirited and aggressive, but if you're not white you will constantly be asked by curious people how on earth you ended up walking around Copenhagen. "Where are you really from?".
Put these together and many people constantly see that there's a pernicious foreign influence on their society. They feel it's visible, even though probably a lot of the brown folks aren't even religious.
I honestly don't think such analysis is really useful. It seems to me like the AfD voter base is a diverse "anti-mainstream" coalition. The AfD is strong in east Germany since it's traditionally more right-wing and more anti-mainstream.
The AfD is also strong in Baden-Würtemberg which is traditionally a place with a high population of... well... luddites(?).
These groups might not have the same goals or the same issues they are facing, but what unites them is the feeling that the AfD represents a true opposition to the mainstream political scene.
The crux of the matter is from where these "bodies" will arrive. There are relatively few problems with immigrants from Vietnam or Ukraine. They don't feel entitled and work hard. There are others, however, who just create problems. That's all.
It can't and won't help them. Unless you physically deprive women of rights and let them be married off against their will and others control their fertility, as it was in the "good old days" when the birth rate was sufficient.
It never worked in any country. Even in those with, to say the least, highly questionable human rights record and complete control of government over mass media: see China. Or with those with ample resources and willingness to spend them towards this goal: see Sweden.
Women are not having lots of children not because some evil forces are telling them not to, but simply because they can. They never wanted to procreate in "sufficient" numbers, they just didn't have a choice then. If we go as far as to deprive them of that choice, we will completely cancel everything we know as a civilised society - and also fail, because a huge emigration wave will ensue, and if we try to ban emigration, we will quickly fail into economic, technological and cultural irrelevance.
It's a choice between being Japan (controlled, predictable dieoff, slow but certain death), being Iran (nice population growth but...), and being America. To me it sounds like a no-brainer which one of the evils to choose.
Fertility isn't dropping merely because women have "rights", but it's also because women are being forced into labor markets where they never would have needed to work before, women are being told, over and over again, how horrible it is to be mutually interdependent with a man, be married, or bear children or have families, and how much happier they'll be as successful, college-educated empowered go-getters.
It's both impractical and unpopular for women to raise children and stay at home while doing it. These are the rights they've won; foremost of them is the right for their bloodlines to die out within a few generations.
Don't take my word for it, just look it up yourself, too tired to pull up the dozens of studies for you.
Clearly women want to have children. Nobody needs to force them to.
But rather, society is (indirectly) forcing them NOT to have them.
No need to deny human nature. Your caricature of a society that has children is complete and utter fantasy which has no bearing on real life. It is a product of aforementioned propaganda.
There is perhaps a survivorship bias in those studies, since divorce is so easy now, only people who are happy in marriage remain. i.e. reported happiness in marriage increases while everyone unhappy simply divorces and so the numbers would get swayed that way. Divorce rates have rocketed and women are very likely to leave marriages these days in many countries. So you end up with a tiny happy cohort that has no bearing on the wider population. So you should produce your sources to see how this is accounted for, ideally.
The problem with this is that women are of course happy when they have children, they love their children after all (father do too of course). But you don't love potential future unborn children do you?
Before having children they are a burden and a detriment to your lifestyle. After having them they are the best thing that could have happened to you.
On the last point, i am not even sure there is correlation let alone causation. Successful people i know hardly work a lot (or they do but in short extreme stunts, like 3 weeks of 80-100 hours a week and then almost idle at 0-10 hours a week for the next 6 months). They mostly just tuned themselves into ability to get "into right place at the right time" at a rate way more frequent than regular folks, by having and consciously developing right personality traits.
> by having and consciously developing right personality traits.
Which takes a lot of effort and hard work.
> They mostly just tuned themselves into ability to get "into right place at the right time"
Which takes a lot of hard work
> then almost idle at 0-10 hours a week for the next 6 months
You have been tricked into thinking so, they just work so much more efficiently at some point and delegate a lot - at which point they are already successful due to their previous hard work
I am not sure of thats really going to work. Another commenter here said it quite well. If you have the "choice" to have kids whenever you like, then you don't have kids because they are always inconvenient. And the time window for women is a lot smaller than they themselves often like to admit. The highest birth rates in Europe you always find in the "bible belts", in places where contraception is religiously prohibited.
Materialism has long been a driver of human behavior, and children are no exception.
The only thing that's changed is the migration of children from net capital assets for the family to net cost centers. The same thing has happened to animals. What used to be productive workers on the farm are now wholly decadent useless eaters, earning their keep only by being adorable.
Imagine how the calculus of couples saying "we can't afford children" would change if little Timmy could start defraying his own costs in only eight years by doing some basic bookkeeping, junior development tasks, running errands, cooking, personal assistant work, etc for the family. And then becoming a net capital asset from 12 to 20. That's how it was for most of human history, just with slightly less modern tasks.
About half of women never understand it having or not having children. They don't want to admit it because it's a shame to regret one's own children, but many of them do.
Vast majority of men never understand it (mostly because they are married off before they want it, if they married at appropriate age i.e. 45-50, they'd be ok with it, but this is not what women want, they want to take men before they understand they don't want it).
Key is choice. People are not having kids for one stupid simple reason - because they can.
This is why the problem is just the same in every civilisation or culture, it is not at all confined to "Western", "Christian", "Liberal" or "Rich" world. It's everywhere without exception, maybe (hopefully) except Israel. Because Haredim don't give their women a choice.
Have you seen the price and dearth of family housing these days? Why would you would think that propaganda is the main cause when just the economics are prohibitive?
What he's saying is incentives in these countries are just not aligned to creation of families and rearing of children. And it's true, when you expect women to go to school til they're 25, a home requires two incomes and then some, everything is taxed to the breaking point, and birth control is ubiquitously available, you can expect a decline in fertility to the point that you eventually have a demographic crisis.
Our countries resolve this by importing people from countries with more people than they can handle, but if you look at the situation globally, as countries become richer this appears to happen universally. It's a matter of 100 years until we can't play this population shuffling game anymore and we will experience a global fertility and demographic crisis. And what's more, it appears that it is unavoidable and it's not clear if humanity will stabilize to a population level or if these fluctuations are inevitable. See https://fractalfoundation.org/OFC/OFC-6-1.html
> I am probably a fairly far-right person, or at least on the extreme right as far as programmers go
In what way are you far right though? Based on what I read here (pro mass-immigration regardless of skill, against the family unit) I would classify you as far left.
I support gun rights (but also abortion rights), support criminalisation of homelessness, and support border walls/some other "hard" ways of regulating migration (simply put, illegal immigration should be punished severely enough to make people even from the most rundown places too scared to try). I don't think "asylum seekers" should exist (and government should be hard - "one bullet each" hard - with those trying to sneak in), unless it is in the interest of the country to invite them (e.g. Ukrainian refugees). "Choose your refugee" policy. I think it makes me pretty much right.
And no i am not at all against family unit. I only accept the objective fact that sustaining population through natural procreation is no longer possible in any halfway advanced society and that measures should be taken to do it otherwise. Anything that gives a chance of doing it through natural procreation will go way beyond acceptable for any Western political entity, no matter far left or far right. A simple proof to that is that it doesn't happen in any rich country anymore - except Israel because of a large chunk of their people bent on religion a lot more than any other free country could accept.
Most people who criticise immigration, housing or other policies in the view of demography, usually have their perception confined to one particular country and come to logical conclusion: "things are bad and getting worse and politicians seem to be moving them even further into wrong direction". If they looked at the world at whole they'd stop blaming their politicians, because same shit happens everywhere - and it is in fact mildest in Western, rich, Protestant, liberal countries.
Ok, more clear now on in what aspects you are more right-wing oriented and others in which you are more left-wing oriented.
Regarding your stance on immigration, I don’t know why we should try to keep replacement levels of population. Time will tell, but I suspect in the long run a country like Japan will do fine.
Keeping population always growing seems like a kind-of pyramid scheme to me. Especially if one wants the working populace to provide for the elderly (pensions).
Perhaps they favour small government and low regulations and taxes? The problem with left/right is that there are several axes of policy you can be on. Old school left can be socially conservative which is why a lot of left leaning people seemed to veer right. Free market + socially liberal folk that were previously right are now seen to be more central as the political gravity moves around.
Left/right is too simplistic, I am fairly left on many issues but I think making it so that people don't need to migrate is better than allowing unlimited migration which is not a good long term solution...
This is not weird at all if you ever tried to argue with the Left, making blatantly obvious false statements is their way to bait you into arguing semantics and accept the main narrative. E.g. in this case many went after the semantics of the "far-right" and not on the main claim of "birth rates can never recover".
The death won’t be natural or peaceful.
You can see this in current EU politics already — seniors expect pensions sufficient to maintain their existing standard of living, but this assumes that there exists the same amount of working people to sustain a sufficient surplus for the elderly to consume without meaningful contribution to the economy.
What your policy actually means in reality is a well-known pattern — increasing taxes on the young to shift their consumption power to the elderly, as the elderly become an increasingly larger voting bloc, perpetuating the cycle.
There’s only a few ways this can end — 1) retirees must have their living standards decrease as fewer working adults sustain them, 2) they maintain their standards at the expense of taking it from the young, who 3) will leave for other countries and make the problem worse, or 4) retirees exit retirement and actually work. You’re seeing the fight between options 1/2 happen in France, 2/3 in Spain, al four in Germany, etc.
The option that policy makers see is 5) bring in enough migrants to maintain healthy demographics and 6) making more domestic babies. 6 is, however, a mirage; no policy we have tried worked (see SK, HK, SG, TW, JP, and many more).
Awfully unlucky that ours is the generation that has to face the retirement pyramid scheme collapsing. But bringing in a horde of foreigners is like saying "fuck you, not my problem" to the next generation. It HAS to come crashing down at one point.
Do I have a solution to this problem? No. But there has to be a solution that doesn't include my country getting a Wikipedia article of it's own about a list of granade attacks commited, like Sweden has...
Going by current estimates, immigration can plug the demographics gap (by accelerating the problem elsewhere mostly) for a minimum of 100 years, probably 200 and maybe even 300+ depending on growth patterns and economic developments.
So yes, it’s going to be a solution for as long as America has been a country, France as a republic, longer than Germany and Italy united, more than many modern countries have existed. If that’s not a long-term solution, I don’t know what is.
There are no thousand year solutions here. We can only pass the problem to our (many-times) descendants and hope that they figure it out.
Only in the sense that there are enough people in aggregate, ie you don't care about anything other than the person being a person. It's not actually realistic to think European countries will just let in a bunch of people from another culture, forever, just to fix the demographic problem.
That’s why I’m, unlike most pro-immigration people, very pro assimilation —- language proficiency tests, an intentional strategy of educating immigrant young in public schools, dispersing large immigrant diasporas throughout the country, etc. I agree that immigration without at least some policy of assimilating them is a recipe for perpetual social unrest and instability.
In the US, successful assimilations look mostly like this. Kids go to American public schools, start forgetting their parent’s language and culture, leading them to look pretty much like every other American. The Chinese do it much more harshly without a drastic increase in efficiency, so the soft route seems to be the sweet spot. There’s no reason to think that you can’t assimilate them. Discourage mosques, try to disperse high concentrations of non-assimilated cultures, it’s not new and it mostly works.
No policy lasts forever. We’re not looking for the next thousand-year solution to the demographic crises; immigration is the 100-year plan, so to speak. We can’t — and shouldn’t —- try to write policy for the next thousand years. There is no other area in which we demand solutions for more than a century. Eventually this policy too will wear out and our descendants will have to go back to the drawing board.
Yup, and in almost every country in the world fertility rates are dropping. We will face a global demographic crisis within a century. We are either going to have to start having kids again or we are in for a brave new world type future, or extinction.
One solution few people mention but that can probably work, is direct solution: hire women to have children, and pay them a wage conditioned on the kids' physical and mental health. Put no limits on those children's numbers, accept that they will be half-literate, traumatised folks - ok they will make perfect post-industrial serfs, but at least they will be there.
This has never happened in history. If the land your people are on has resources and is accessible, you'll get subsumed and assimilated by another one, one way or another. If you want your nation to survive, you have to 1) have a healthy rate of admixture fast enough to prevent inbreeding but slow enough to protect the culture, 2) get to fuckin'. The latter may require some reorganizing of the labor and housing market to make raising more than one or two kids feasible. But if you think your people can fizzle out, you're going to be disappointed whether you like it or not. And it doesn't matter what the government does, they can try to stop it, at some point there's just not enough able bodied of you to utilize and protect your resources. Building a wall around fertile land and staving off migrants who want it til the last one of you dies out is just not going to happen.
War and genocide are options, even if they are horrible ones that shouldn’t be considered. Throughout history, however, cultures assimilating others have often been violent (either through great defense or great offense). European assimilation of the Americas was extremely violent and destructive.
True. Who would ever want to live in the US, with their abysmal GDP and lack of innovation. The US is a prime example that people of multiple cultures or ethnicities can't even be in the same city, let alone the same corporation or government.
The US has been the top performing economy for quite a while, yet only became truly multicultural about 50 years ago. Before that it was all European immigrants, assimilating to white american culture, and the native black people and some natives from the previous era scattered around. You had some cross border cultural transfer along the southern border and carribean, that's it. The amount of multiculturalism the US had until the mid to late 70s was about what you'd expect anywhere else in the world with land borders.
So we can say, the multiculturalism is not the cause of the wealth. The truth is, the causes of the wealth are the sizeable population, regardless of origin, and the vast natural resources it controls. The US is a westphalian state, run like a business. The European nations once were nation states, but have also adopted this model. It works, if your goal is economic output, and unfortunately your goal must be economic output because otherwise you can't compete militarily with a rival who's goal is economic output and you'll get subsumed.
It's also important to consider that the US, prior to the modern era, was a "melting pot" of a somewhat select group of immigrants. We routinely turned away handicapped, poor, sick, mentally deficient, or otherwise "unfit" potential citizens.
The "New Colossus" that adorns the Statue of Liberty is a fun little poem, but it does not in any way reflect the actual policies of the United States for much of its early and middle existence. We were a country that was happy to import wealthy people, scientists, conscientious hard workers, etc, while keeping the riffraff out.
Nyc is hardly representative of america, thank god. And plenty of racisim and inability to adapt by a few cultures endemic to the area. Take your accusations of racism elsewhere.
No one said anything about a conspiracy. From TFA:
"In addition to a base of far-right wing support, which makes up 15 percent of the population, the AfD is attracting a protest vote that takes it to slightly more than 20 percent support. This is driven by dissatisfaction with migration policy and a general fear of societal crisis."
I think he is commenting on the obvious fact that politicians do not like to blame themselves for the problems they create. It looks bad and is bad for polls.
I can't believe these things I'm reading. Who is driving the AfD? The SPD, CDU, Greens and FDP are. Decades of policies against the interests of their own citizens lead people to try to choose something different. As you said this is 100% establishment policy driven.
People tend to forget that one of the SPD members and former board member of the German Bundesbank wrote a book falsely interpreting data that was pretty racist and became a best seller. And judging from what I have seen it is by far not an outlier case.
Or the fact that the leader of the CSU appealed to the population to report people that suspicious languages in public like Arabic along with countless other extremely racist statements and policies.
The current Green foreign minister of Germany proudly talked about her Grandfather fighting in 1945 at the atlantic council[1].
Germany is as racist as it gets. That's why it has record emigration amongst the most educated population. Germany is one of the least attractive places for expats[2].
For people that like to respond, but Germany took "X" many immigrants. It's a policy that a) wouldn't have been necessary had Europe pushed against interventionism rather than support it, b) has created extremely unsafe environments even for previous Muslim immigrants, and c) was even advised against by the German Islamic council or whatever it's official name is in english as something unreconcilable in society at that pace.
As a result of the incompetence of leadership in the Healthcare sector for example and their outdated tech, they were forced to slip those millions of people into a special status that actually allows for bigger payouts for doctors when treating those people rather than a German retiree that has worked for 40 years(I know this first hand, because I spent time in both policy making and trying to modernize that broken system). Because most people don't know what happens behind the scenes their hatred is not directed towards the incompetent policy makers, but just plainly towards the recipients of the broken system, something that is by the way, entirely human.
It's just sad that the AfD has no coherent strategy of their own. They have no concept beyond keep the old nuclear power plants running; i.e. no concept to fund and develop nuclear energy. They support interventionism while at the same time being anti immigrant. Something other populist leaders like Le Pen have opposed for at least a decade given the strong correlation between the two.
It's also sad that while Germany's election system allows for a plurality of opinions in the parliament, 90% of them are basically an economic uniparty. Something which in theory could have been orders of magnitude better than in the US.
Decades of policies against their own citizens also includes increasing the cost of living and leaving a lot of people behind. This was happening before covid.
Berlin is a case in point. e.g. the story of someone's friend, a single mum, whose huge corporate landlord decided to renovate the apartment in order to double the rent and then force her out of her own neighborhood. Tough luck, people say, that is the price of progress and it is a free market. Well, people are pissed off, and justifiably.
Past history is (though not necessarily) a guide to the future.
If you're not cognizant of money flows, think tanks, and dark influence patterns continuously whirling and flowing around us, then ... congratulations, I guess. That must be a lovely place to be.
If we think it's impossible that the people that disagree with us have legitimate, organic grievances then we're never going to solve whatever the underlying issues are.
Actually yes, in Germany that is pretty much the talking point. Recently a prominent AfD politician spoke out against inclusion of disabled children in normal school classes. The media reaction was pretty much "just like in 1939!!!".
It is probably THE reason why there has never been a successful far-right political party in Germany (until now) after '45, while there have been in Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, etc.
Here in Spain we eliminated special classes for disabled children and put them in the normal classes.
The obvious result: everybody is worse off. Disabled children are not properly accommodated and the performance of the rest of children suffers because of everything going slower. And all the responsibility of dealing with the situation falls on the teachers, who aren't adequately equipped.
No need to be a nazi or anything to see why that's a bad idea. Of course, the left destroying public education is nothing new.
Anyway, back to your comment: we were talking about the perception of Germany from outside Germany.
Eh American here, German forever repentance is hilariously unnecessary and comical, and it gives a lot of people waaay more skepticism about Germans for a population to first flip to being so destructive to its own citizens and then be the most accommodating ever until its a political crisis. Like be for real. Everybody’s laughing.
I dont know everything but I resonate way more with Austria for this reason, it feels like that same level of re-education is kind of absent there and it feels more genuine.
A probably healthy way to look at the issue would be "terrible things happened throughout history, but how does that matter to me right now?"
It seems to me like most people here either fall into the camp "We must remember the terrible things that happened and do everything to make sure it never happens again!" or in the "I am sick of Nazis here Nazis there, I don't care about Nazis!!!!"
I don't feel like any of these extremes are healthy. I also don't believe the daily Hitler documentaries on TV provide much valuable information beyond sensationalism and keeping the narrative alive.
This doesn’t mention the biggest elephant in the room:
East Germany!
East Germany is the stronghold for AfD because the median income and wealth are still far behind West Germany. East Germans are fare less likely to support higher costs for fighting climate change. That is also why the Green party is so weak in East Germany. The Green Party should ask themselves why they are so weak in East Germany and explain their politics better there. Also they should make sure that the costs in the fight against climate change are not making the poor people in East Germany even poorer. Unfortunately they do the opposite and the „Klimageld“ for the lower class is not going to be implemented despite being promised:
But people in East Germany are not stupid. They know exactly when they are left behind and will vote for AfD until their problems are noticed and taken care of by the German government.
Why is this flagged and how can I vouch for it? I'm not German (Nigerian) but the leftist trend of unrestricted immigration will eventually push the European right and center so far away that we might see several strongman leaders across the continent in the next 20 years.
No matter how bad Africans and Syrians have it, you can't fail to admit that mixing people from incompatible cultures will lead to friction, and when that friction isn't addressed, eventually, extremism.
Or, have you asked yourself why it's often young African and Middle-eastern migrants raping and tearing up European cities at the slightest provocation? Yes, I say that as an African.
If European progressives don't take a hard stance on immigration and immigrant crime, I believe we might see a Hitler in Europe again, promising to bring order (like they always do).
Even in South Africa, millions of the locals (Xhosa, Zulus, Khoisan, etc.) still want to expel or murder the Boers who have lived there for centuries now. So, if you have millions of migrants in Europe, living off welfare, making society unsafe, and forcing their religion on others, better don't act surprised when the locals start fighting back by voting in law-and-order politicians to clean the mess.
> If European progressives don't take a hard stance on immigration and immigrant crime, I believe we might see a Hitler in Europe again, promising to bring order (like they always do).
I am Eastern European and I have exactly same opinion about this issue. The leftist governments are pushing their heads into the sand, labeling people who wants to tackle immigration or pointing at problem which unrestricted immigration does as xenophobes or nazis or even trying to go one step further and attempt to ban parties like AfD who are pointing at the issue, even though they don't have coherent plan.
And at the same time progressive parties are surprised that AfD is polling at 22% in Germany.
When I didn't have a job, I'd content for resources with refugees and migrants. There were some days, where I'd be the only white female on a room full of dark skinned ppl. I got high anxiety back then, this didn't help the situation.
In the mall, after 17 o clock the refugee/migrant youth would group together and hang out. That didn't feel safe either
In my town when you got money from the bank mashine you'd get robbed by the local eastern European gang.
Many post deliverers didn't speak any german.
I'm left wing but I understand why ppl want things to change. When I told someone that I don't feel safe and they proceeded to call me right wing and nazi.
Also got cancelled by my friends when I said that someone fleeing their country wouldn't throw away their passports, it's right wing propaganda.
The few refugees I knew where always kind and friendly. But the kids couldn't even draw a square correctly.
I buy in a Syrian supermarket and a Turkish shop and I vote left wing. All the propaganda tries to paint it black/white. That's the issue...
I feel lucky living in Prague. We as a country dodged the bullet by being poorer than the West, being more xenophobic and having a language that is hard to learn.
I am from South Africa, we are neighbors to Zimbabwe that has just "elected" the same corrupt government in that has been in control for 60 years, they claim to support redistribution and blame minorities and western governments for all their failings but in reality handing over productive land to peasant farmers has caused extreme poverty and starvation.
That is the outcome of redistribution, the same happened in China and Russia.
> In the mall, after 17 o clock the refugee/migrant youth would group together and hang out. That didn't feel safe either
Basically that's because there are no squares or other spaces where they CAN hang out.
I had a similar experience in sweden. In the end they are just meeting their friends. It feels weird I think because whites don't really meet their friends like that. At most they go into a cafè/bar, but you need money for that. And in sweden cafè are really expensive, and pubs… well require you to drink alcohol, so there really aren't many around migrant areas.
Yes, in the 90ies they closed all the gathering places for kids in general, there's nowhere to go for them. So they hang out at the train station or do drugs at the cemetery.
In places where kids could hang out there were kickers or you could paint or work with clay. That's all gone, so now lots of them do crime or dumb things when hanging out.
This is frankly very concerning. As an EU-foreigner, with a non-German name, living in Germany for 13 years now, this is for example one of the main reasons I'm not buying a house or making bigger investments here, not because I don't like it but because there are certain risks associated with being non-German which German people won't ever understand. It wasn't easy before, but Afd leading will be an existential risk despite the naive attempts to rationalize it.
I've discussed this development with some acquaintances who believe the Afd will be their salvation and suddenly fix the country but most of the rhetoric turns around getting rid of foreigners and feeling safer - as the article illustrates. They tell me "Don't worry" or "but you're almost German! You speak German, you're one of the good _ones_ yada yada", well tough luck, I don't look German and that's what they might not want to admit is an issue.
Why this matters? Take all the online/offline posts from that party and its supporters and run them through a classifier (an LLM if you're so inclined) and you'll see a few bad trends pop up, especially in the narrative they are pushing and who this is catering to. Very violent videos, images made with stable diffusion aimed to cater to and mislead a very specific demographic, crafted with an industrial & methodical approach. Topics like "light" nazism support become "salonfähig" again, meaning it is acceptable in group discussions... Now imagine a party like that, supported by the full weight of the military, police, financial sector. The classifier the Afd and their supporters will use to separate foreigner from non-foreigner will be much, much simpler though and will in essence give anyone a license and justification to chase the foreigners, because they won so they must be right, right?
There are not that many foreigners in Germany, it's just that they might be younger, thus more visible and any actions towards them will be visible: https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Society-Environment/Popula..., take those numbers and calculate some correlations like "how much 1 single non EU foreigner (let's be clear, those are who they call foreigners) contributes to the rise in the polls" and you'll see what I mean.
It is also no surprise also, that the "east" is siding with the far-right here, and many supporters/commenters/believers, when not German, have a couple of things in common. In this context, voting far-right doesn't strike me as complaining about the current government but rather looking for scapegoats, someone else to make accountable for the common failures.
The country was never really "safe" in the sense that you could do whatever and be risk-free, it's an illusion biased by the fact that looking back is always better (that image with plan and the red dots should illustrate my point), people who claim that "it was safer in the past" were quite certainly living a sheltered and utopic life and are more and more confronted and aware of the workings of the real world. There were always bandits, thugs, thieves, troublemakers. Perhaps the real issues are an aging population & the economical downturn/contractions we're currently experiencing aka: "the beer gets more expensive"-index to which there isn't really a concrete solution from none of the parties or that nobody really wants to address.
Germany is an amazing country, which is no surprise why many people want to live here compared to other countries in the EU or in the world. The future will show if a far-right party will make it better. Whatever happens and whoever leads, I think we now have the tools to keep anyone forever accountable for their words and actions which will directly contribute to our common future. No more 'we didn't know'. My main hope here is that this doesn't escalate into something extremely ugly, either way, I won't hang around to find out if things materialize.
German here. Really sorry about how the situation makes you feel. I'm with you on everything you said. I don't trust the Germans no more and the non-AfD parties are just absolutely destructive in anything they're doing. It all feels like the stuff you can read upon from the late Weimar republic. Thanks god, we have the EU and can freely move and work anywhere.
It's obviously true, but you will be karma-whacked on this forum for criticising the EU. It's full of people who think the EU is the solution to every problem, and never the cause.
I was born in Germany in 1987.
When I went to a middle class-y school in the late 90s and early 2000s, there already were big groups of migrants with a background in muslim countries.
When going home alone, there was a constant fear of being targeted.
A friend of mine got it bad, went home alone from school, ended up in the hostpital.
I was spat on and had to come to school through a wooded area and backdoor for a few weeks because I pushed back and called them names.
Fear of violence and sometimes violence itself was an everyday reality.
This is a shared experience of many of my adult-life friends.
Today, there are areas of big German cities where ambulances refuse to go like Duisburg-Marxloh where the state has essentially given up.
My elderly mother was subject of a gesture by a young muslim man suggesting that her head will be cut off when she was in Dortmund.
In the city next to my home village, 2 people were shot by muslim youth last year and this year. Something like that was totally unheard of.
Trash on the street and other reckless behavior has increased significantly.
Gang violence is on the rise.
The son of a friend of mine experienced a knife attack. In elementary school.
Another friend of mine became a teacher, and young muslim migrants at his school took one of their fellow students, hold him down while another one landed a kick on his knee, completely destroying it.
Public open air baths have become hunting grounds for testosterone driven primates.
And it's not just violence by itself, it's open disdain for the state and the native population by significant parts especially of young muslim men.
This is way, way, way beyond isolated incidents.
Almost all of these problems are completely nonexistent with Asian or other migrant groups.
OF COURSE not all muslim immigrants are that way.
I had multiple personal friends or coworkers from Turkey or Syria.
Good, kind folks. Often hard working.
My company even pleaded with the government to keep them from deporting one of the Syrians back to wherever. He was learning the language fast and was a good guy.
But of course they didn't care.
And that's while know migrant street thugs and gang bosses who are on the state's deportation list roam freely.
I suspect it's because the "good guy" has an official address registered with the authorities and tries to follow the rules, easy prey for lazy public servants.
It gets even worse: you can't complain about all of this loudly, especially the first part, without getting painted into a corner as a neo-nazi and racist.
And while all of this is going on, the public debate, led by state media and career politicians, tries to downplay or ignore the issue.
For example, they tried to blame the public baths thing on hot weather.
Or write feelgood articles about the local zoo.
Or debate about stuff that's completely detached from the needs and worries of the everyday people on the street, like gender-neutrality in munitions procurement for the army.
And I haven't even started talking about economical issues like energy prices.
I don't have any sympathy for the AfD or other right-wing idiots.
But career politicians will need to touch base with the common German again very quickly, or things will get out of hand.
I am not sure why your comment is flagged. Anyone familiar with the history of postwar Europe will recognise some important points that you mention. Others might disagree with your opinion, but I feel it deserves to be read and discussed. It certainly should not disappear.
Czech Republic has around 100k vietnamese and about 500k ukrainians which for a pop of 10m is significant numbers. Both of these nationalities have different cultural background and values and yet there's no problem with respecting rule of law and natural order in the country. Live and let live.
As a middle class german you must see the decay in german cities with everything becoming too expensive, out of order and decaying in front of your eyes while you are being told you live in one of the richest places on Earth.