Politics German Politics

[Deleted member 1071]

Well,Well,Well. The rise of the Watermelons (green on the outside, red in the inside) was foreseen and inevitable.
Soon Germany will unveil its (Trump) card. Someone who values Germany's industry and German jobs.
Frau Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer?
Someone needs to send her Hilary's book.

The questions (among others) are:

Will the predicted heiress apparent Kramp-Karrenbauer actually succeed Merkel ? Her incessant, devoid of substance politbabble is leaving a large part of the electorate (myself included) patently unimpressed.

That The Greens will participate as a (at the least) junior partner in the next federal government coalition appears to be a fait accompli. This may or may not lead to total calamity. The CDU/Green coalition appears to work relatively well in the states of Hessen and Baden-Württemberg. The SPD/Green/Leftist senate in Berlin, on the other hand, produce nothing more than a never ending stream of calamities. Hamburgs' SPD/Green coalition senate does not fare much better. That being said, The Greens do have some quite acceptable politicians within their ranks (Kretschmann, Palmer, Aziz, Özdemir and even Baerbock-although I don't care for her, she appears quite competent). Then again...there are Habeck, Hofreiter, Roth,etc. who frighten me.

 

[klier]

Was it Albert Einstein that elaborated: "Only two things are infinite. The Universe. And the stupiditiy of mankind." ?

But for what it's worth, Einstein stopped at E=MC2, and that is 100 years ago. We have no idea about the universe other than the observable part.

He was right about mankind though.

 

[SCOTT27]

Watching the EU and their shills all tear each other apart today especially over Britain whose voters decimated the ruling parties in order to vote for Brexit. is far more entertaining than Alien vs Predator!



I have always said Macron will be gone by the Summer. At least he will get the chance to grow old(or older) with his wife.

 

[Deleted member 1071]

Wow, Austrias' Social Democrats (SPÖ) and far right national populists (FPÖ) are as far removed from reason as their German counterparts. The vote of no confidence against chancellor Sebastian Kurz will quickly end in tears-for them.

 

[SCOTT27]

So it looks like Frau Kramp-Karrenbauer is indeed the next Hilary.
Merkel is hanging on. Like a flea-bitten bat hanging onto the roof of a cave, she will cling on,shitting on those below.

 

[SCOTT27]

Stuttgart.

 

[KiwiRob]

Watching the EU and their shills all tear each other apart...

I believe the average Brit had and still has no idea what they voted for with Brexit. The idea of a free trade agreement with the US in the drivers seat dictating terms is far more frightening than being part of the EU where the UK was one of the prime movers ever was.

 

[Deleted member 1071]

Stuttgart.

An example of the dysfunctionality of a city council and a regional government-a shame since the Green/CDU coalition appeared to work well in many aspects until recently. Water on the mills of ultra-right wing radicals whom, as so many were hoping (myself included) pertaining to the AfDs' "Flügel", were on the verge of disappearing into obscurity. Alas, events such as those in Stuttgart and Göttingen could plausibly pave a path to their "comeback". Green fundamentalists as well as the far left fringes of the SPD and "faux" CDUers seem utterly incapable of understanding that the policies that they promote will eventually result in a rabid backlash. Finding ourselves on the threshold of a massive recession will only fan the flames of an impending rage. We are now witnessing nothing less than the emergence of "Weimar 2.0" with consequences quite possibly being similar to those of the original. A sad confirmation of what I have suspected for decades: " Folks are incorrigible numbskulls.".

 

[chonkoa]

I believe the average Brit had and still has no idea wha...

Why is that?
Do you think trade was their primary motivation or something else? Could be a confluence of factors as it tends to be with most people.

 

[David Brent]

Why is that?
Do you think trade was their primary motivation or something else? Could be a confluence of factors as it tends to be with most people.

Short answer: Newspapers. The continual drip-feeding of anti-EU propaganda, some of which was created by the PM himself, Boris Johnson, when he was a Brussels journalist in 1991 for the Telegraph making up stories about silly EU directives.

The simple fact is, before the Brexit referendum, the general public didn't regard Britain's membership of the EU as a main issue. In fact, it hovered between 1% and 10% in terms of Brits who regarded the EU as an important issue:

 

[KiwiRob]

Why is that?
Do you think trade was their primary motivati...

Nope not trade, the British did very well in the EU, it's where they sold most of their products. It's simply down to xenophobia, the press and anti EU politicians did a bang up job convincing the public that immigration and protecting the borders was important, they bought it hook line and sinker.

 

[Deleted member 1071]

Embracing drip-fed irrational narratives while actually not recognizing the irrationality is what is holding so many current societies hostage. The phenomenon appears to be expanding exponentially on both the left and right sides of the sociopolitical spectrum. This is as intimidating as it is ultimately destructive.

 

[David Brent]

Why is that?
Do you think trade was their primary motivation or something else? Could be a confluence of factors as it tends to be with most people.

The newspapers deliberately conflated the EU debate with the migrant crisis of 2015. With headlines like the ones below...

Even though being a member of the EU has no connection with migrants from Syria and other places, it didn't stop people connecting the two. I had many conversations with people who said "I see the benefits of the EU, but then we've got all these migrants trying to cross the Channel from Syria". It beggars belief.


Another point worth mentioning is the role of Cambridge Analytica and the illegal hacking of people's Facebook accounts. In a nutshell, Cambridge Analytica were paid by the Vote Leave campaign to harvest data from Facebook acocunts illegally and use it to sway the way people voted. Whistleblowers confirmed this.

But how did it work?

Well, there was no need to target people who were going to vote to leave the EU, as their minds were already made up. There was also no need to target people who were clearly going to vote to remain, as their minds were also made up. The target was that relatively small number of apathetic people who weren't engaged by the EU debate at all and didn't intend to vote either way. The key was to grab their attention with false stories about things that they WERE engaged with. So using the hacked data from Facebook accounts to find out that they were interested in, they planted lies in their Facebook feeds. So if they identified somebody was a horse lover, a story about the EU doing something bad for horses was planted in their timeline, and then all of a sudden this person is now engaged AND enraged, and may now be swayed to vote to leave the EU. And because these false adverts were only appearing in that person's timeline, nobody could refute the blatantly false propaganda.

One example of blatant lie. Turkey is NOT joining the EU:

Another example of a completely made-up story aimed at gullible people:

This BBC article has other examples:

Vote Leave's targeted Brexit ads released by Facebook

The social media ads that helped Vote Leave win the EU referendum are published in full for the first time.

www.bbc.com

 

[chonkoa]

Embracing drip-fed irrational narratives while actually not...

Totally agree. It is really scary.

 

[KiwiRob]

Sorry about going off the German track for a bit but I feel sorry for the UK population when the FTA with the US is completed, it's going to dumb down so many of the current standards to the absolute shite US standards its ridiculous, people won't know they're buying rubbish from the US because they refuse to to put country of origin markings on product labels. At least when the UK was part of the team working on the EU US FTA the EU were having non of that and had the market size and buying power to tell the US were to jump. Lucky for the everyone living in the EU Trump canned TTIP, so we don't have to worry about low to substandard US products reaching our markets.

 

[Deleted member 1071]

The newspapers deliberately conflated the EU debate...

It's quite interesting surfing through these U.K. tabloid headlines. Here in Germany, agenda-promotion by the print and television media is characterized by omission, denial ,theatrical displays of indignation, the frequent vilification of victims and the frequent absolution of perpetrators. This has once again reared its' ugly head following this past weekends' events in Stuttgarts' city center.

 

[Deleted member 1071]

While tabloids are hardly my foremost news sources of choice, I DO find that Bild Zeitung is presenting what should be glaringly obvious.:

Nach der Schande von Stuttgart: Diese 5 Dinge müssen sich JETZT ändern

Randalierer gingen auf Polizeibeamte los, plünderten Geschäfte, zogen enthemmt durch die Straßen der Innenstadt. BILD sagt, was jetzt geschehen muss!

www.bild.de

 

[chonkoa]

Sorry about going off the German track for a bit but I f...

The Canadian and Mexicans will disagree with your assessment. When they signed the original and updated NAFTA with us, the negotiators will tell you that the process was one of negotiations with lots of give and takes. So my take is that the same with go for the UK. We may not be perfect but we try to be fair. We have been the receiving end of the WTO, and the rise of the #2 economy was at our expense and all we want now is a fair trade based on reciprocity.

 

[chonkoa]

It's quite interesting surfing through these U.K. tabloid h...

I can say the same of Canada and the media. The future of western democracies in edging towards uncharted territory. There is an increasing tilt of views towards an angle that is devoid of realism but rather one of delusional utopia which will end up in dystopia.
Any attempt to counter this tilted narrative will quickly lead to attack from the faux morale superiority hounds. Free speech and liberties are slowly eroded away for what I cannot fathom.

 

[David Brent]

The Canadian and Mexicans will disagree with your assessment. When they signed the original and updated NAFTA with us, the negotiators will tell you that the process was one of negotiations with lots of give and takes. So my take is that the same with go for the UK. We may not be perfect but we try to be fair. We have been the receiving end of the WTO, and the rise of the #2 economy was at our expense and all we want now is a fair trade based on reciprocity.

The difference is, Mexico and Canada aren't ex-members of the EU, the biggest trading bloc in the World, and the NAFTA is an improvement for Canada and Mexico. Any trade deal between the U.S. and UK will be a huge downgrade compared to what the UK had as a member of the EU. And then we have the impact on the citizens. The EU has brought in so many standards that are beneficial to the average person, from working regulations, food standards, consumer law such as the EU261 ruling on airline compensation.

Make no mistake, any future trade agreement the U.K. signs with ANY country is going to be making the best of a bad situation. Nothing is going to come close to the benefits that were enjoyed being a member of the E.U., but that is the cost of "getting me c#ntry bak" (sic).


If there's any confusion regarding how dire the UK's future is due to Brexit, then this article published in the Financial Times yesterday makes it very clear:

"The pound is now an emerging-market currency in all but name, according to analysts at Bank of America, who say that Brexit has turned it into a mirror of the “small and shrinking” UK economy."

"In the four years since the UK voted to leave the EU, trading conditions in the pound and the big swings in exchange rates make it a better match with the Mexican peso than the US dollar, said Kamal Sharma, a currency analyst at BofA."

Pound is becoming an emerging market currency, says BofA analyst

Brexit has permanently altered investors’ views on sterling, warns strategist

www.ft.com