European Politics
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@Frank said in European Politics:
@antipodean said in European Politics:
@Frank said in European Politics:
OMG- this is a YUGE admission on the part of the queen of the liberals - Merkel.
Who would have thought?
Has common sense prevailed or is she just trying to protect her and her party's position?
Probably the latter.Did you check the date on that article?
Ha ha....fuck......no
had to get the outrage post as quick as possible aye!
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@Frank said in European Politics:
@antipodean said in European Politics:
@Frank said in European Politics:
OMG- this is a YUGE admission on the part of the queen of the liberals - Merkel.
Who would have thought?
Has common sense prevailed or is she just trying to protect her and her party's position?
Probably the latter.Did you check the date on that article?
Ha ha....fuck......no
It does make you wonder what made her change her tune on immigration so much. Douglas Murray talks about her initial anti-immigrant stance at the start of his 'Strange death of Europe'. What makes someone go from that to 'Lets bring in all of the third world..what could possibly go wrong?'
Controversial opinion but I don't like the idea of childless politicians calling shots as big as that.
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@Rembrandt said in European Politics:
@Frank said in European Politics:
@antipodean said in European Politics:
@Frank said in European Politics:
OMG- this is a YUGE admission on the part of the queen of the liberals - Merkel.
Who would have thought?
Has common sense prevailed or is she just trying to protect her and her party's position?
Probably the latter.Did you check the date on that article?
Ha ha....fuck......no
It does make you wonder what made her change her tune on immigration so much. Douglas Murray talks about her initial anti-immigrant stance at the start of his 'Strange death of Europe'. What makes someone go from that to 'Lets bring in all of the third world..what could possibly go wrong?'
Controversial opinion but I don't like the idea of childless politicians calling shots as big as that.
What has being childless got to do with it?
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@JC Skin in the game. I'd like to think when you have kids you get a different perspective on what sort of world you would like to leave behind when you are gone. Your life becomes less about you and more about them right at an almost instinctual level. Controversial I know because had she had kids I'm sure they'd be totally fine in some sort of upper class gated community.
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@Rembrandt said in European Politics:
@JC Skin in the game. I'd like to think when you have kids you get a different perspective on what sort of world you would like to leave behind when you are gone. Your life becomes less about you and more about them right at an almost instinctual level. Controversial I know because had she had kids I'm sure they'd be totally fine in some sort of upper class gated community.
So on top of the heartache that goes with our not being able to have kids I should tell my wife she is not to be trusted with making good and altruistic decisions?
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@JC Nicely put and sorry that you don't have the choice.
I chose not to have kids, partly because it was altruistic and the planet is over populated, also because I don't like them (kidding, sort of). It was also altruistic in that one of me is enough, I am told quite regularly.
Red Beard made a similar comment about "selfish" people who chose not to have kids on here about a decade ago, and I have never forgotten it. Some of the most self absorbed people that I know are parents, and really shouldn't have been allowed to be.
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@JC obviously this isn't a personal insult to you or your wife or anyone else who can't have or don't want kids. I'm also not saying everyone who does have kids is altruistic and everyone who doesn't is selfish. I'm also childless, I recognise in myself that the overwhelming driver in my actions is for myself (and there is nothing wrong with that), sometimes that driver is to do good things for others which might be looked at as altruistic however often that results in appreciation from others or a good feeling within myself which in turn could be looked on as ultimately self-serving..I don't know for sure. When I've seen my close friends have children I see a huge change in how they look at life and their priorities, also just to note my friends are not young parents nor are they crackheads etc.
Merkel made an extremely suspicious total U-turn on an issue which has changed the course of Germany perhaps negatively and perhaps forever, I'm questioning her motivation here.
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You chose not to have kids because of over population? I wish more people like you made choices like you..... I fully support your choice. The world needs more little me's than little you's.
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@Baron-Silas-Greenback said in European Politics:
You chose not to have kids because of over population? I wish more people like you made choices like you..... I fully support your choice. The world needs more little me's than little you's.
Yes, as I said, partly. Comprehension not your forte?
Insulting type aren't you. How are your kids manners?
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@Snowy said in European Politics:
@Baron-Silas-Greenback said in European Politics:
You chose not to have kids because of over population? I wish more people like you made choices like you..... I fully support your choice. The world needs more little me's than little you's.
Yes, as I said, partly. Comprehension not your forte?
Insulting type aren't you. How are your kids manners?
Jeez.... I was just supporting your choice not to breed. I appreciate you sharing your virtue and doing your bit to save the world. So many people don't have kids due to not being able to, or because they just don't like kids. Someone choosing to not breed to save the world is just so much more virtue signalling and interesting.
I guess some people just think having kids or not having kids is not a virtue.. -
@Baron-Silas-Greenback said in European Politics:
@Snowy said in European Politics:
@Baron-Silas-Greenback said in European Politics:
You chose not to have kids because of over population? I wish more people like you made choices like you..... I fully support your choice. The world needs more little me's than little you's.
Yes, as I said, partly. Comprehension not your forte?
Insulting type aren't you. How are your kids manners?
Jeez.... I was just supporting your choice not to breed. I appreciate you sharing your virtue and doing your bit to save the world. So many people don't have kids due to not being able to, or because they just don't like kids. Someone choosing to not breed to save the world is just so much more virtue signalling and interesting.
I guess some people just think having kids or not having kids is not a virtue..Fair enough to sentence one.
As for virtue fck off, not my style.
Saving the world? Yeah into that, in spite of not wanting the kids that I would leave it to.
I actually like animals more than people (which is being proven to be correct by this conversation), and would like some of them left before I die, but I guess that is virtue signalling.@Baron-Silas-Greenback said in European Politics:
I guess some people just think having kids or not having kids is not a virtue..
Do you have an opinion on that? I don't, people can do whatever they like. The whole virtue thing is bullshit.
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@Snowy said in European Politics:
@Baron-Silas-Greenback said in European Politics:
@Snowy said in European Politics:
@Baron-Silas-Greenback said in European Politics:
You chose not to have kids because of over population? I wish more people like you made choices like you..... I fully support your choice. The world needs more little me's than little you's.
Yes, as I said, partly. Comprehension not your forte?
Insulting type aren't you. How are your kids manners?
Jeez.... I was just supporting your choice not to breed. I appreciate you sharing your virtue and doing your bit to save the world. So many people don't have kids due to not being able to, or because they just don't like kids. Someone choosing to not breed to save the world is just so much more virtue signalling and interesting.
I guess some people just think having kids or not having kids is not a virtue..Fair enough to sentence one.
As for virtue fck off, not my style.
Saving the world? Yeah into that, in spite of not wanting the kids that I would leave it to.
I actually like animals more than people (which is being proven to be correct by this conversation), and would like some of them left before I die, but I guess that is virtue signalling.@Baron-Silas-Greenback said in European Politics:
I guess some people just think having kids or not having kids is not a virtue..
Do you have an opinion on that? I don't, people can do whatever they like. The whole virtue thing is bullshit.
I think having kids or not having kids is absolutely NOT a virtue. There is never anything virtuous about having kids, there is never anything virtuous about not having kids.
Not having kids does basically nothing to save the planet, in fact a strong argument could be made towards the opposite. -
@Baron-Silas-Greenback I'm fine with that.
Just think that too many more people in the world isn't great.
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Wow, this from a Green politician who is likely to be kingmaker in Germany. Are you listening Shaw, Genter and the rest of you?
Form The Times:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/world/greens-won-t-tell-germans-how-to-live-says-robert-habeck-wbd2cgtbrThe figurehead of Germany’s high-flying Green party has disowned the moralising tendencies of the environmental movement and said that people should be free to make their own choices in their private lives.
Robert Habeck, who is likely to play the role of kingmaker and possibly even chancellor in the next government, also levelled strong criticism at Russia and China as he set out a muscular foreign policy agenda in an interview with The Times.
Over the past year his party has emerged as the rising power of German politics, doubling its share of the vote to come second in May’s European elections and at times overtaking Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) in the polls.
He said the Greens had “a stronger claim than ever before” to govern the country. “The people sense there is a situation of political upheaval in Germany. The space and the hunger are emerging for a new political offer, for a new political culture. We have received an enormous vote of trust to deliver just that. The environment has gone from being a marginal, nice or feel-good topic to the dominant issue. Rightly so.”
While green parties have struggled to make much electoral headway in most other European countries, the German Greens are now the main voice of the opposition.
This is partly because they have skilfully channelled a wave of public concern about climate change, positioning themselves as the only sizeable party with bold answers. But it also owes a good deal to deft branding, with the fervid idealism and sanctimonious lectures of the past largely discarded in favour of campaigns that are heavy on positivity and pragmatic liberalism.
Mr Habeck, 50, shudders at the memory of “Veggie Day”, his party’s attempt during the 2013 election to withdraw meat from public-sector canteens every Thursday. He argues that it is not the state’s place to tell individuals how often they can fly, or what they can eat. “I personally find all intrusions of the state upon private lives highly undesirable,” he said. “When it is a question of bringing bureaucracy into the private sphere, I’m out. I don’t like it.
“It would be conceivable that you could have a personal travel budget, or perhaps a personal meat budget. Each week you could eat so many calories of meat but no more, and we would control that somehow; or you would be permitted to fly three times a year, but not four — all that is awful. I believe in freedom in the private sphere, and in that sense I am an absolute liberal.”
Unless the polls shift significantly before the next election, due in the autumn of 2021 at the latest, it is hard to see how Germany’s next federal government can be formed without the Green party, which commands more than 20 per cent of the vote.
There is much conjecture that it will supply the next chancellor. It has two plausible leaders in Mr Habeck, a charismatic novelist and literary scholar from the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein who serves as the party’s public face, and Annalena Baerbock, 39, a career politician from Hanover who is its strategic and organisational brain.
Mr Habeck is studiously coy about his ambitions. “The question of who will run for the chancellorship is a serious question, and we’re not going to get into speculation right now,” he said.
Yet his party is clearly drawing up a serious programme for government. Where his predecessors might have leapt gratefully on an opportunity to lambast President Trump, Mr Habeck emphasises the importance of the transatlantic relationship, in the diplomatic tone of a man who may soon find himself managing it.
He is less guarded on other questions of foreign policy, urging Mrs Merkel, 65, to exclude Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications company, from Germany’s new 5G mobile network, and denouncing Russia’s “aggressive, quasi-expansionist” conduct.
He regards the German government as a “prisoner of daily events”, too busy reacting to ephemera to think deeply about how the country should position itself. “Frankly the way we deal with China demonstrates Europe’s political weakness,” he said. “Through the Belt and Road initiative China has an active influence over Europe, even [reaching] partly into critical infrastructure such as harbours and tram lines. It is actively working to divide Europe, seeking to forge contacts with the east European states against the EU, and Europe is doing nothing about it.”
Mr Habeck, however, is not an uncontroversial figure in Germany. In April he was heavily criticised by conservative commentators for suggesting that property speculators could be stripped of their flats to ease the housing crisis. He also withdrew from Twitter and Facebook in January after a gaffe in which he said the Greens were trying to turn the east German state of Thuringia into a “free, liberal and democratic” polity, prompting critics to question why he did not believe the state was already free and democratic.
The next central battleground in German politics could be the “black zero”, an informal rule against the state borrowing money that was introduced at the height of the financial crisis. It is a hallowed principle for the CDU, but Mr Habeck views it as a foolhardy anachronism in an era of negative interest rates and moth-eaten infrastructure.
Germany, he believes, is falling behind its competitors due to its stubborn refusal to borrow and invest in schools, railways, scientists, broadband and the electricity grid. “Germany is saving to make its own budget healthy at the expense of its European neighbours,” he said. “At a time when the global economy is weakening, that’s not clever.”
The Green party wants to do away with the black zero and instead give the state up to €100 billion of firepower for eco-friendly technology.
Even this may not satisfy the zealous young generation of climate activists whose votes it courts. Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old founder of the Fridays for Future movement, has accused Europe’s green parties of being inadequately green.
Mr Habeck counters that his party’s policies are as ambitious as the country can afford.
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@JC Sounds super reasonable. I do wonder what the 'bold' climate policies are though. Kind of a genius move calling yourself the Greens campaigning on climate to keep the extremists from calling you Nazis while at the same time having libertarian and conservative policies. Hard to imagine a Green party interested in preserving the environment as opposed to creating a gulag archipelago.
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It's amazing that the massively influential long term prime minister of Malaysia called for the murder of millions of French people, but it's barely covered. The garbage ny times made it sound like he was being moderate.
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@Tim Australian is behind a pay wall, and I can't read French, but I assume this is about the stabbings and decapitation in the church in Nice?
Amazed this is getting ZERO coverage. Much like the poor French teacher who was killed a week or so back.
Is that because this sort of Islamic terrorism is now the norm and we're not shocked by it any more.?
Or has this year has just turned into an shitstorm of historic proportions and three random dying on the other side of the world doesn't phase us any more when competing against COVID and BLM and US Elections?
Or is there some truth to the conspiracy theory that MSN want to suppress and excuse these acts?