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Why is it that whenever the far-right seems to experience a surge, nobody ever asks "hmm what could the establishment be doing wrong that causes this" but rat
by jdthedisciple 3y ago
Why is it that whenever the far-right seems to experience a surge,
nobody ever asks "hmm what could the establishment be doing wrong that causes this"
but rather everyone jumps to "hmm what could be the conspiracy behind this"?
- theparanoid 3y agoThe article is a nicely illustrated analysis of the issues (migration policy) driving the increase.
- anovikov 3y agoWhat'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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Simon_O_Rourke 3y ago[flagged]
- jdthedisciple 3y ago> Our birth rates do not, and never will, provide for support of our population numbers How about stop propagandizing against the family unit and children in the name of climate protection and freedom for starters? (This is obv directed at the German Political Landscape (minus AfD), not you personally)
- anovikov 3y agoIt 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.
- jdthedisciple 3y agoThe happiest women are married women. The happiest among them are those with children. 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.
- hnhg 3y agoThere 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.
- no_time 3y agoI'd rather have my country die out naturally and peacefully than to have anything a "multicultural" society has to offer.
- meowface 3y agoTrue. 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.
- locopati 3y agoHave you been to NYC? Take your racism elsewhere.
- no_time 3y ago>True. Who would ever want to live in the US, with their abysmal GDP and lack of innovation. Not me for sure. If your utmost measure of value in life is GDP, then I feel like we won't understand each other. Worst part is I can't escape this mindset here, thanks to US billionaires generously bankrolling "NGO's","think tanks" and "independent news outlets"
- Ekaros 3y agoIt is pretty clear that immigration ruined Americas. Just look at the outcome for them, it is absolutely horrid.
- 3y ago
- veavo 3y ago[flagged]
- meowface 3y agoAnd if that immigrant is more merited than the unemployed native? (Meritocracy for me, not for thee.)
- jdthedisciple 3y agoTo your typical immigration-advocates, this very argument would never hold up in the context of unequal employment chances between men and women. Classic leftist hypocrisy.
- meowface 3y agoClassic "well someone else who holds the position you espoused probably believes [X] (because I say so) therefore you're a hypocrite".
- Zardoz84 3y agoperhaps the real problem really is those who are paying depressed wages to desperate people.
- stormfather 3y ago> Our birth rates do not, and never will, provide for support of our population numbers. Extinction. What a strange thing to resign oneself to.
- locopati 3y agoWhy is change bad? Strong institutions enable rights, yes? For all people, yes?
- fit2rule 3y ago[dead]
- wsc981 3y ago> 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.
- jemmyw 3y agoPerhaps 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.
- anovikov 3y agoI 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.
- schroeding 3y agoFor 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.
- mytailorisrich 3y agoA 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.
- lordnacho 3y agoThis 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.
- friend_and_foe 3y agoNothing, 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.
- throwaway290 3y agoPeople have many kids when their life is unstable. That's why improving quality of life across the world is how it balances out?
- friend_and_foe 3y agoI 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.
- pseudo0 3y ago> 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.
- hdjjhhvvhga 3y agoThe 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.
- rtz121 3y agoKinda weird to consider yourself "far-right" and be in favor of mass replacement migration in the same sentence.
- throwaway290 3y agoLeft/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...
- pandaman 3y agoThis 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".
- rtz121 3y agoI interacted with that guy in another comment and well... You are probably right, even though you are getting downvoted.
- kozzz 3y ago[flagged]
- bennyhana 3y ago[flagged]
- jdthedisciple 3y agoThis whole "right-left-shift" paradigm is nonsense. If the base moves so far left that their original position is now considered far-right, then you still have a relative right-shift. Howcome nobody ever questions said extreme left-shift of the base?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- yungporko 3y agobecause left is "correct" and right is evil
- jdthedisciple 3y agoRight, sums up the political discourse of our time.
- living_room_pc 3y agoBe nice. 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.
- yieldcrv 3y agoPeople only care about German politics because they wonder if the population is going to turn the ovens back on Theyre really never going to live that one up But Germany’s far right immigration policy demands would be pretty left in the US, not far left, just left
- veavo 3y ago[flagged]
- yieldcrv 3y agoOnly reason German politics blog is even front page news on this site But okay, what is European consensus?
- rtz121 3y agoActually 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.
- veavo 3y agoHere 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.
- rtz121 3y ago
- prairiedogg 3y agoNo 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."
- LightBug1 3y agoPast 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.
- jdthedisciple 3y ago> money flows, think tanks, and dark influence patterns continuously whirling and flowing around us Name me one example for such that drives right-wing thought, and I'll name you 10 that pull the opposite way. This is ridiculous, all key power positions, NGOs, and think-thanks are overwhelmingly left-biased.
- stormfather 3y agoIf 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.
- LightBug1 3y agoI agree with that. I'm not sure what it has to do with my comment though.
- rjzzleep 3y agoI 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. [1] https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/news/transcripts/annalena-baerbock-on-a-transatlantic-green-deal-and-german-strategies-in-facing-russia-and-china/ https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/news/transcripts/annalena-ba... [2] https://www.exberliner.com/english-news-berlin/germany-slips-down-expat-ranking-unfriendly-complicated/ https://www.exberliner.com/english-news-berlin/germany-slips...
- znpy 3y ago> nobody ever asks "hmm what could the establishment be doing wrong that causes this" Because nobody likes accountability for themselves or for their favourite political establishment. And because fixing mistakes involves admitting them first, and that’s not something “the establishment” is ever keen on doing.