Elon should not be welcome in the EU. He should be seen as antithetical to what the EU should be striving for and it’s common values.
Anyone who says this should be removed from politics because they’re clearly willing to make a deal with the devil if it means a quick influx of cash.
The CDU will sell the German people’s future if it means they can increase their stock portfolios for a few extra years.
The stock market is not a marker of a good economy, the number of hours a person has to work to afford a home is. To afford healthcare and retirement and education and transportation an OLED TV etc.
Don’t vote for the CDU or the FDP ever again, they’ve proven they’re incapable of improving society more than they hurt it.
Guy works for Black Rock and then makes his main policies:
And then he talks about how people need to work more, as if he’s ever had a real job in his life or as if that’s some good marker for a person. A good man wants to improve society for everyone, and working more efficiently (aka less hours, not more) is improvement.
Merz is a classic conservative, he wants to make everything worse for everyone but the rich and wealthy and pretend it’s because he’s business savvy. He’ll sell this vision as necessary or for the economy or against the wave of invading foreigners, and all the while life will get worse for working Germans. For good people.
Don’t get fooled, Merz and the CDU are bad for Germany in the same way Trump and Republicans are bad for the US (or insert your local conservative party of choice).
Just attempting to understand what you wrote here, are you saying that German writing requires a massive number of references to past statements to be understood and that somehow makes it more precise?
As someone learning German right now, I can agree on complex but I’m not sure precise is very accurate. There seems to be a lot of assumptions based on context to know what one means. Maybe a more educated person could chime in, but I have not felt like the German language has made things more precise in communicating concepts (but full disclosure I’m at the A1 level going into A2).
The future can and should be about getting better! That means more efficient, that means more money for more people for less work, that means less hours spent working.
Merz and conservatives want a worse future for you and your family and your kids. They want to enrich themselves and their friends while asking you to work yourself to death. Don’t vote against your self-interests, don’t vote in the AfD or those that inevitably bring them to power like the CDU.
Vote for progress, vote progressives.
Merz is in power today because Germans feared the AfD gaining power if they voted for more extreme parties capable of change so they voted for safe choices. The catch is voting for the CDU guarantees things get worse, which then further cultivates the AfD.
Merz wants the AfD to exist because it helps keep him in power. People most vote progressive, must vote to tackle wealth inequality, or the AfD is inevitable. We either fix the root problems or we decline into fascism. The CDU are incapable of fixing the root causes because that is where they thrive.
Why would we want to increase working hours? That’s the opposite of progress in society. Why would we ever think this is necessary?
Conservatives will put our country in debt, they will make it less safe, they’ll blame the most marginalized groups as they enrich themselves and their friends, and they will ask you to work more and for longer.
This is why the AFD are succeeding, because what people see as the most safe options are also the ones destroying their country and worsening our lives.
Educate your friends, educate your neighbors, organize with your unions, don’t give an inch to the conservatives. Demand progress, not societal decline.
Again, you’re defending him under the notion that the ~3 political parties in this coalition couldn’t produce a single other valid candidate from among them. That’s unbelievable and if true should be punished by the voters. There’s just no way 3 massive political parties contain zero candidates as willing and as qualified as Merz (if not exceedingly more so) and if all of them can’t put the country first instead of their ambitions (which is arguably evident already) then we deserve chaos at the government level. And quite frankly I don’t know how much better we are with CDU in power vs no one in power. For most policies I’d argue the CDU in power means a decline in quality of life for Germans not an improvement.
The AFD grows not because of chaos at the federal level but because of the decline in quality of life for Germans. CDU is not fixing that they’re worsening it. I think there’s a solid basis to challenge the notion that a CDU government ran by Merz is better than any other candidate within those three parties and even a basis for argument on the notion that Merz over no one is better. I think the CDU actively harm this country based on their actions.
So no, I don’t think I’m misinterpreting what you’re saying - that only Merz exists as a viable option. And yes I do believe you’re defending him on the basis that it’s him or the AfD growing and I think that’s incorrect. The AfD will grow regardless because he won’t improve things and arguably faster because as corporate taxes go down and public services lose funding, quality of living goes down and more people become amendable to radical change which by their nature centralist parties don’t propose. I’m not seeing a left party capitalize on this in the same way the right is, probably because the funding for facism/racism is larger than for wealth equality but that’s off topic.
Well your original comment translates to defending Merz. To answer your follow up question, I don’t know the names of individual politicians in the CDU as I’m still new to German politics and learning as fast as I can. But I have no doubt the CDU has a handful of less ambitious people who could strive to produce some form of centralist policies. Will any of them be good in an absolute sense? No, if Merkel was the best they could do then no. But could someone be relatively better than Merz, who from what I can see would sell his mother down the river for more power and money, yes - most likely.
I’m looking at mailbox.org when mine ends.
Yes, really. My alternative would have been any progressive party and failing that any centralist party, and failing that the CDU with any centralist leader, but all of those failed and now we have Merz. He will damage the working class, exasperate the issues that promote the AFD, and he will normalize them. He is, and the CDU are, Republicans 20 years ago in the US. He will lead to Germany’s Trump and the decline of the standard of living for the common man.
Right! They got punished by the voters but they haven’t received the social stain that should follow them for a decade. They’ll be back next election and I fear not enough people will remember what they did. That’s not enough punishment for what they did.
Being new to German politics I was shocked how obvious it was that Merz was not someone working for the betterment of Germans but for political power - and he is still successful in his party.
I also don’t understand why the country has fallen into this belief that the squabbling of the last coalition has caused AFD to be successful. I think it’s incredibly clear that the FDP sabotaged the coalition from the start - people should be calling for the removal of the FDP at the federal level for what they did (and thankfully they were punished in this last election). But why we didn’t go back to giving progressives more power and another chance I don’t understand - it was the one conservative party that undermined them. Instead we gave more power to conservatives who are the real cause for the rise of the AFD.
The only cure to the AFD is to shrink wealth I equality and a continued push for pro-worker progressive policies. Improve the trains, improve our green energy, regulate our businesses so they have higher quality bars to reach, protect the workers, tax the ultra wealthy, tax landlords out of existence so a working German can afford their flat or their home, support farmers, hold media accountable for misinformation, and protect us from foreign interference.
We need more actions that Die Linke would endorse and less actions that the CDU would, because fundamentally the CDU are pro-corporation and anti-worker and that’s the heart of the rise of fascism - a decline in living standards brought on by corrupt politicians bleeding the public coffers for the betterment of their corporate friends.
And we just witnessed this, they paid for corporate contracts with debt when they could have paid for it with increased taxes on the ultra-wealthy.
Ya, happy to spread the word! I was hesitant for a long while for the same reason but then Steam Deck happened and I looked into it more and BAM here we are. It’s one of the more hopeful changes in this tech landscape - the growth of open source and/or free software that’s often equivalent to the paid software.
I know you’re getting a ton of replies already, but I switched to Arch Linux two months back or so and I just want to say nearly every game I’ve tried works great out of the box, a handful of games required me to go to my steam settings a flip a switch or copy and paste something from protondb, and no games have failed to work.
Gaming on Linux is so good that you end up flipping one switch in steam and get nearly perfect performance (with most games running identically or better than they did on Windows for me). It’s been such a surprise, I just played the Arc Raiders technical Alpha and I thought for sure Linux would fail me then. And it did. For the first day, then on the second day they patched proton and the game and I played all week and weekend with zero issues. It was fantastic!
I would highly encourage any gamer who’s thinking about switching to Linux but worried their games won’t work to not worry as much. Check protondb for your favorites, but you can safely assume most game work out of the box.
I can’t speak to that specific situation but I believe power should be held the shortest distance from the people it effects - balanced only by having more power for more people. I imagine health insurance owned and controlled by unions is less powerful than owned and controlled by the government but the distance is shorter. So ideally it would be held by a government to maximize the negotiating power essentially, but if the government is run by incompetent or immoral people (like I’d assert the CDU is) I could see union control being better.
Assuming you’re in Germany, where do you read/watch/ get your media from? I’m very interested in becoming more politically helpful in this country and creating simple messages explaining why some parties deserve your support and some absolutely don’t and I don’t know where Germans get there material.
I’m contacting some local parties to see how I can help and volunteer, but I’d also like to be putting out material on a YouTube or blog or discord if that was beneficial and discoverable by my neighbors and friends of friends etc.
I believe a core tactic of a conservative government is to lower the revenue base of the government so less services are effective and efficient. This leads to the ability to privatize those services. Remember conservatives fundamentally lack policies that would benefit the majority of the countries they lead, they are grifters. Instead of fixing problems or raising revenue through taxing the rich (their friends and donors) they cut services to fund tax cuts. When that becomes too unpopular they focus on deregulation until they can again cut services and lower taxes on the rich again.
Please, help educate everyone on the actions of this conservative government and the last - whatever - three decades of conservative government. They hurt people so they can give more money to the rich, don’t ever vote a centralist or right wing party ever again. Only political parties that work for workers, that’s who deserve your vote and support.
I’m in Europe. I would like to buy a folding smartphone as I want more screen space. They’re still too expensive and have too short of lifespans as far as I can tell.
When they’re… Oh idk… $1300 and last 5+ years I’ll pick one up.
If I could speak directly to the phone makers I’d also say I don’t want a front facing camera if there is a nicer camera on the back and a screen of almost any size. A front facing camera just feels antiquated for that design.