German Politics Thread

I also find the complaint about the SPD "sliding left" hilarious, considering the SPD has been bleeding voters because they refuse to actually be a politically left party ever since Schröder and the working class' been fed up with their bullshit.

I said that before- the SPD acting like a red-painted CDU is not a good thing.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Apr 19th 2021 at 4:14:04 PM

I mean can they be worse than having the CSU in the Federal Government at this point? That'd take some dedicated work.

If centrism were the true problem of the SPD, than why are they still doing badly and why is the Left Party also currently bleeding voters accirding to polls? The problem of the SPD is that it is prioritizing left topics like identity politics that have little resonance among their core voter base over other issues. No doubt that there are people who go for that, but those are more likely to vote for the Green party, not SPD. But this something the SPD will hopefully finally learn after this election.

I hope you are joking. All ideoligical differences aside, the CSU has a remarkeable track record in governing Bavaria, unlike the disaster that is say, the current state government of Berlin. At least with them, we know that they won't put a Maduro admirer and Putin apologist in charge of our foreign policy, or someone who thinks that the GDR was the better Germany in charge of our children's education. And if you think I am exaggerating, look up who the leading politicians of the Left party in those area are.

That being said, a far-left government would also be interesting in a way since they would also have to face the realities of governance. The Green party had to do this with the Kosovo war when they first formed a coalition and who knows, maybe they can force the Left party to do the same before they form a government. A little quid pro quo might result in a sound compronise, as in the Left stops undermining NATO and the EU, and the Green and SPD adopt a greater reluctance in sending soldiers to places outside of Europe.

Edited by Zarastro on Apr 19th 2021 at 4:59:21 PM

The problem of the SPD is that ever since Schröder they refused to be a proper working class party - which is incredibly stupid when your main voting bloc is the working class.

So yes, "centrism" is absolutely their problem. Turns out people want a working class party to, you know, actually represent the working class?

I very much think there's a need for a political stance between Schröderism and whatever the heck the Left is up to this week.

Also, the CSU? Really? The guys who at one point tried to make Christian symbols in government buildings mandatory?

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Apr 19th 2021 at 5:11:01 PM

They also have a remarkable track record of FUCKING UP in the Federal Government. How much has Scheuer alone cost the German Tax payer?

And lets not forget the friendly police bill which puts everyone who ever sought psychiatric help under general suspicion if remotely associated wit a crime, thats really a warm and fuzzy feeling.

Or you know when our Interior Minister celebrated his birthday by kicking out a foreigner for every year he's old.

But then, this sort of argument from you is hardly surprising given that you within the same 24 Hour Span defended the Afd as "Having a point" and then went full blown "BUT THE COMMUNISTS" on the Greens.

I mean, there's subtext and there's 30 meter tall neon pink letters on where your head is stuck exactly.

Edited by 3of4 on Apr 19th 2021 at 5:21:29 PM

A dumb question on the age of criminal responsibility. Why is it not viable to simply have a child being allowed/pushed/enabled to commit serious criminal acts be an offence of child abuse/neglect? That way the child can receive help and if need be be removed from the environment without putting them through the criminal justice system.

If a child commits a criminal offence and you can’t find an adult to blame then I’d argue you’re not looking hard enough.

Also to retouch on another point, there was something mentioned about the social/child services system being opt in? Is that accurate?

I think that assumes far too much control/influence from parents/adults and doesn't help with picking up the pieces, either.

Yeah the basic problem with such a system is that you’d quickly overwhelm the child services system, unless you boosted funding for such services dramatically.

That's not quite the issue. For one thing, while children are inexperienced/easily influenced by their environs they aren't zombies or animals and you can't shift all responsibility onto someone else. Second, a kid does not automatically change their ways because their parents went to jail.

Speaking of, most places I know of are short of foster families and not just social services money. Even with more funding that system will likely get overwhelmed if you expand the definition of "bad parent" too much.

Oh there’s a big shortage of foster families, but I’d argue that that itself is something that can be addressed with proper funding increases.

Yes there is the basic problem that systems are generally underfunded such that they can’t properly address things under our current definition of child abuse, expanded funding is needed regardless and would need to be scaled up even more if we expand the remit.

Oh completely. I’ve lived in the kind of therapeutic community needed to turn a ‘bad’ (but not yet criminal) kid around. You’d be looking at something even more expansive, expensive and tailored then that for the most extreme cases.

For that you would have to prove that this family is actively enabling the child to be a criminal, which is next to impossible, even if those parents are noted criminals themselves. The system we have now is fine for most cases, but it struggles with the extreme ones and those are the ones who grab attention and impede peoples' sense of security. It is also a matter of common sense. If you have someone who starts stealing at the age of 9, and has commited dozens of offense when he turns 12, you want to be able to intervene in some sort of way, preferably before the child starts to commit serious crimes.

Which is no doubt more deplorable than trying to rehabilitate the GDR, or other pet projects of the Left party.

More than enough, but the level of incompetence shown there was less than what the state government recently did in Berlin and it at least did not affect some peoples' personal life to such a degree. It is one thing if you are convinced that your lawyers are better than others and push through your agenda, it is quite another if your own lawyers advise you before that what you are doing is most likely against the constitution.

Foreigners who had no claim for political asylum and in many cases were either criminals or potential security risks. Imagine we could have done so with a certain Syrian who by all logic should have been deported, but thanks to our foreign ministry was not. The result was the murder and attemped murder of a gay couple in Dresden. There might be people out there who are still alive thanks to Seehofers' efforts. Making sure that those who abuse the system are deported is his reponsibility, it will be interesting to see how a ptential Green Interior Minister will handle those issues. They could criticize him while they were in opposition, but I doubt they will rush to open the border the next time Erdogan tries to blackmail Europe with the refugees, because they obviously know the consequences.

For all his bluff, Seehofer was on many instances far more generous on e.g. taking in refugees from ships or children from camps than literally ALL of his counterparts from the other large European countries.

I detest the Af D and the Left party, but unlike some I am not up for underestimating either side. There seems to be some sort of complacency that the Af D is finished, but I suspect that this will be put to the test once Germany experiences really difficult times. I also prefer a more realistic take on the demands, because what makes them so dangerous is that they often push a good point way beyond it is feasible, thereby taking voters with them. Security has become an issue with which the Af D has been rather succesful over the years and it is a possible vote winning issue. The SPD lost NRW and their former heartland in the Ruhr Valley because they failed to adequately adress those problems.

I am mostly commenting here to give this discussion a more balanced view point. It seems redundant to point out why the Af D is bad after several users have already done so, however there is a tendency to turn a blind eye towards other problematic elements in our political system which are similiarly dangerous.

This is not necessarily true. There are not enough foster families, but there are many who apply for it but are rejected after examination or have to wait a long time. A relative of mine is regulary taking in children from unstable families and despite having a clean record and working as a teacher, it took him a long time to be approved off. Which is understandable, because you want to be extra careful with whom you trust children with, and you have to make sure that they are up to a job. Because taking in certain children can be extremely taxing, especially when they have some sort of trauma and medical condition.

Edited by Zarastro on Apr 19th 2021 at 10:05:43 AM

Ahh so why not change the law from requiring active enabling to requiring negligent oversight? We don’t let people get away with failing to train/contain dangerous animals on the grounds that they didn’t actively enable the animal to be dangerous and were simply negligent in their oversight.

Sorry, I’m confused again. Are you saying that Germany has no invention at all if a child under the age of criminal responsibility does something that would be a criminal act if they were above the age?

That seems like either a very dramatic claim or a case of gross negligence on the part of the Germany government.

Because I thought we were discussion if the intervention should be done as a criminal process (what you’re advocating for) or as a social well-being/child-welfare process, but you’re making it sound like there’s none of the later and that the former is the only option available.

Its the former.

Which is a very wordy way to say you are bothsidering and think punching at anything to the left of the Union as "far left" is somehow balanced instead of just being basically FOX News in OTC.

Edited by 3of4 on Apr 19th 2021 at 12:24:28 PM

Okay, rarely do I get so angry that I come out of hibernation to have to say something on the record, but congrats.

Firstly..

This is patronizingly sexist. And I cannot believe I have to explain this already.

So...you're saying...that the issue with the SPD...is that it talks about social issues like queer rights and racial inequality? I'd love to be corrected if that's not what you meant by "identity politics", but that's generally how its used, so I'll presume you're using the conventional definition. If so, wow. Just...wow.

Anyway, to cover the last bit, you're seriously going to defend the CSU, the hard-right party that's made a laughingstock of Bavaria, the one that keeps focusing on Christian politics, the one that's uncomfortably close at times with the AFD, and say its better than the Greens, because the Greens sometimes march alongside people further to the Left than them?

First off, this is classic victim blaming. Secondly, you missed the forest here, which was the performative cruelty of how he went about it and why.

I hope you realized you just compared the Greens, a Center-Left party whose main beef you have is again, sometimes working with people further to the Left than they are, to the fascists.

Honestly, you're not being "balanced", you're using a worrying amount of far-Right talking points with a Far-Right framing while being willing to work with the far-Right and blaming social democrats for being willing to work with the Left. I don't know what's more damning, that, or that you genuinely seem to believe you're representing a centrist point of view rather than one skewed pretty rightwards from the median.

Edited by AzurePaladin on Apr 19th 2021 at 6:27:48 AM

It is quite amusing how the prospect of the Left Party becoming part of a coalition government is the death knell of democracy while the CSU skating by on a Union ticket at the most rat-fuckingly racist it's ever been, not so much saying the quiet parts out loud as blaring them out of a megaphone is just democracy working as intended.

Did I say amusing? I meant profoundly stupid.

I’m rather curious as to why when the SPD talk about their view of racial and gender issues it’s “identity politics”, but the fact that the AFD have a huge focus on racial and gender issues (just from a different perspective) goes without comment.

What is the AFD if not a party driven by identity politics? White, male identity politics.

And the CSU by Christian identify stuff, hence it trying to break Church and State separation.

Not to mention the undertones about "Identity Politics" usually boil down to being annoyed at marginalized people for being loudly there.

Yeah wait a second, isn’t trying to mandate religious symbols in government building pretty peek identity politics?

Yes.

Okay, as a coda, Gay people suffer far more violence from white people in Europe and America than they do from refugees. Get the plank out of your own eye before you start ranting about this splinter.

I've said it before but "identity politics" is just a snarl-word for politics that dares to cater to marginalized identities. Identities that are from dominant groups (cis, het, male, Christian, etc) are just the mainstream and thus "can't possibly" count as a form of identity politics.

It's a profoundly irritating double-standard.

Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Apr 19th 2021 at 3:57:39 AM

I'll write a longer reply tomorrow, just a quick point though.

Calling the brutal murder of a man in front of his lover "a splinter" is a poor choice of word. The story is incredibly tragic, and maybe even worse, completely preventable. The culprit was a known Syrian islamist who everybody knew was a ticking time bomb, yet could not be detained after serving his time. He was supervised by the police yet he was able to evade them for a few minutes and commit his crime. The police can't be blamed since it is impossible to observe all potential culprits at all time. However there was no need for this to happen. If he had been immediately deported after serving his time, like he would have been in pretty much any other country (even Scandinavian countries have apparantly started doing the same), none of this would have happened. It is true that there are many Germans who are hostile or worse towards the LBGTQ-community. But there is no similar easy solution to them, since we can't deport them to another country nor would I demand of others to take care of them. I remember watching Kevin Kühnert of the SPD trying to defend his partys' conduct of this incident a few months ago. He is very eloquent, but all he could do was bring up deflections. Though to his credit, he did realize that his party and the political left has a blind spot on this issue.

Sorry, I don't see the sense in allowing incidents like this to happen.

Edited by Zarastro on Apr 19th 2021 at 2:32:33 PM

You really don't understand what I meant by "splinter", do you?

In the book of Mathew, Chapter Seven, it is said, "Stop judging, that you may not be judged. For as you judge, so will you be judged, and the measure with which you measure will be measured out to you. Why do you notice the splinter in your brother's eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, 'Let me remove that splinter from your eye,' while the wooden beam is in your eye? You hypocrite, remove the wooden beam from your eye first; then you will see clearly to remove the splinter from your brother's eye."

In this case, the piece of wood is homophobia, and transphobia. The splinter is the attacks that refugees and immigrants have made, and the plank is those that natural-born Germans, especially white Germans, have made.

Do you see? You focus on the one incident because the attacker is an immigrant, but you bring it up as if that is the salient point, and not the homophobia. You bring up the gay couple's status to pit gay folks and Syrian folks against each other, while ignoring that there is far more danger from white people for us. I say to you, do not be a hypocrite! Don't ever, ever, use Queer people as a shield for why we should distrust refugees! Take our names out of your mouth when you talk of immigrants being a threat! I am far more unsafe around people like you than I am around refugees!

Edited by AzurePaladin on Apr 19th 2021 at 9:14:32 AM

Speaking of chancellor candidate selection, it seems like it's utter chaos in the AfD.

Good.