I wonder who’ll be next week’s Prime Minister?
Politics and Current Affairs
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This is terrible, the US is blockading Cuba and the world is not paying attention:
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You would hope that after voting Tory for 14 years that the English would have learned about voting for grifters. 😔
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You would hope that after voting Tory for 14 years that the English would have learned about voting for grifters. 😔
But the blue cyanide looks so tempting.
Yeah, they are that easily fooled.
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The gesundes Volksempfinden in the Netherlands is blaming the current government for the prices of petrol. Which are obviously so high because of the blockade in the Hormuz strait.
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Also saw that Tony “Baghdad” Blair lost over 1,000 council seats in 1999.
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Our democracies are failing in part because the public institutions are all chronically under-financed, and the reason for that is that about half of the wealth belongs to a handful of people who have managed to make sure that nobody will ever ask them to contribute.
I am seriously losing hope about politics in my country. Honestly I’m not letting it ruin my mood too much, because I’m doing pretty well atm. But the whole narrative is so fucked. Everything is moving to the right.
It all benefits Putin by the way. We could see a Europe with AfD en Front National in power. If that happens I think it’s unavoidable that Europe reconciles with Russia, the EU will cease to exist other than as Putin’s toy. We’ll see Putin do a victory speech in the EU parliament.
In the Netherlands after the next election, we could see Wilders, Eerdmans or Baudet as prime minister. They’re all jokers. They’re no serious politicians. These people are so dumb, it could be as bad as Trump.
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Both the UK and EU have significantly stronger employment protection than the US, but they’d still do some damage.
Another part of the problem is conservatives still in this burn down the status quo when they’ve had so much power for so long that they are the status quo. But much of pre-Thatcher UK conservatives really were about keeping the world as it was. A good part of that keeping the far right boxed up, hence the response to Enoch Powell going far right. He torched his political career and became persona non grata.
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They’re building a bicycle bridge in my town across a canal, that would make traffic between Alphen and villages in the vicinity faster, for some people at least. But the whole project has been terribly delayed, I think it should have been finished more than two years ago. The cost has also spiraled. They already built the pillars on which the bridge should be resting, which looks surreal in the landscape. It’s kind of symbolic for a lot of current day politics.
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Some psychos in the Netherlands came with this flag to an asylum centre.
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Bob Kagan, perhaps the most prominent neocon is American academics, has written an article in the Atlantic saying the US and Israel have utterly lost the war in Iran.
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Bob Kagan, perhaps the most prominent neocon is American academics, has written an article in the Atlantic saying the US and Israel have utterly lost the war in Iran.
And in other news, water is wet. ;)
In all seriousness, that was always going to be an unwinnable war. Benjamin Netanyahu has been wanting this fight for decades. Previous, US leaders always said no to him. Trump was finally in a susceptible enough state to say yes. Trump was told this was a bad idea, but he ignored his own military and intelligence people and pushed ahead with it. I saw something this morning where Bibi might leave Trump in the cold with the fight.
Meanwhile, Iran has been preparing for this fight for 47 years. And here’s the thing about Iran: They don’t have to have an outright military victory to win. All they need to do is endure and maintain pressure. Either the US taps out or the whole world collapses. Either is an acceptable outcome to them. Hell, they could have a fishing boat drag its anchor on the seafloor and destroy an underwater internet cable and several Middle Eastern countries lose 80% of their internet. The aftershocks from that would be global.
Make no mistake, Iran is in the driver’s seat.
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Bob Kagan, perhaps the most prominent neocon is American academics, has written an article in the Atlantic saying the US and Israel have utterly lost the war in Iran.
And in other news, water is wet. ;)
In all seriousness, that was always going to be an unwinnable war. Benjamin Netanyahu has been wanting this fight for decades. Previous, US leaders always said no to him. Trump was finally in a susceptible enough state to say yes. Trump was told this was a bad idea, but he ignored his own military and intelligence people and pushed ahead with it. I saw something this morning where Bibi might leave Trump in the cold with the fight.
Meanwhile, Iran has been preparing for this fight for 47 years. And here’s the thing about Iran: They don’t have to have an outright military victory to win. All they need to do is endure and maintain pressure. Either the US taps out or the whole world collapses. Either is an acceptable outcome to them. Hell, they could have a fishing boat drag its anchor on the seafloor and destroy an underwater internet cable and several Middle Eastern countries lose 80% of their internet. The aftershocks from that would be global.
Make no mistake, Iran is in the driver’s seat.
Yeah for a country that is playing the defensive side in a war scenario all they have to do to win is endure.
Iran has a terrible human rights record and I sympathize with Iranians who want regime change, but it’s an interesting country. It’s a sort of mix of theocracy and democracy. All the candidates and laws have to be approved by a council of religious leaders. (Although some people say the military has the ultimate power in the country. I don’t know about that though) Something I wonder about is if you have such a council who have to approve of the candidates, wether you would still get leaders like Trump, or Hitler. That said, maybe Khomeiny isn’t much better.
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Iran has a terrible human rights record and I sympathize with Iranians who want regime change, but it’s an interesting country. It’s a sort of mix of theocracy and democracy. All the candidates and laws have to be approved by a council of religious leaders. (Although some people say the military has the ultimate power in the country. I don’t know about that though) Something I wonder about is if you have such a council who have to approve of the candidates, wether you would still get leaders like Trump, or Hitler. That said, maybe Khomeiny isn’t much better.
Oh yeah, Iran is not a good place. And you can thank the US for this.
The US performed “regime change” in Iran and installed the Shah. To absolutely no one’s surprise, he turned out to be a bad piece of work. Cue the religious uprising that put the Ayatollah and his ilk in charge. And that’s where we are today.
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The demographics crisis is easy to solve. We all just need more migration.
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Wes Streeting’s resigned, now let’s see if he can 81 (or however many it is) Labour MPs to publicly admit they want him to be PM.
I saw polling earlier, of the Labour membership, which suggests Starmer would lose to Burnham, Rayner or Ed Miliband, but beat Streeting.
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We need to one hand help people get their lives in order and be compassionate to people who truly seek a better life, but also be tougher to the inveterate troublemakers.
I think the feeling that you have to be “tougher on” troublemakers is very understandable, but it’s not the way to success. Research has shown little effect in tougher laws warning people away from committing crimes, and prison is not good at getting people back on the right track. The desire to punish is completely human, but it’s not productive.
When you’re looking at the problem of gangs with immigrant backgrounds, research has shown that those come into being when you have large groups of people who have no option of participating in mainstream society. Who are stuck for years and even decades in a country that doesn’t allow them to find a job, to get an education, to support themselves and their families. This is when people turn to crime, when they have no stake in society. And that doesn’t just go for migrants, this goes for everybody, it’s just that migrants find themselves more often in this situation. Ironically, right-wing extremists often have similar origins; in Germany, the worst violent nazi gangs usually from in the most desperate areas in East Germany.
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For the record, I don’t mean all troublemakers are from other ethnic backgrounds than Dutch, Dutch kids very much also can be troublemakers. But we seem to have groups that hang out with people of the same ethnicity.
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Sure. There’s risk factors for becoming a criminal, and there are groups in society that have a lot of them. It’s just that ethnicity isn’t actually one of them, it’s a correlation.
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Wes Streeting’s resigned, now let’s see if he can 81 (or however many it is) Labour MPs to publicly admit they want him to be PM.
I saw polling earlier, of the Labour membership, which suggests Starmer would lose to Burnham, Rayner or Ed Miliband, but beat Streeting.
Burnham’s now found a Labour MP with a safe seat in Manchester who will stand aside for him. He just has to hope that a) he wins the by-election (everyone will be gunning for him) and b) it happens before any leadership election.
Not that I want to cheer on the further descent into chaos of the UK political scene, but it would be quite funny if Burnham lost his by-election and Streeting didn’t get enough supporters to enter the leadership challenge or went out in the first round.
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Man, some Chaos with Ed Milliband sounds good right about now.
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Not that I want to cheer on the further descent into chaos of the UK political scene, but it would be quite funny if Burnham lost his by-election and Streeting didn’t get enough supporters to enter the leadership challenge or went out in the first round.
I think there is a definite sense of voters being taken for granted when someone like Burnham gets dropped into a supposedly safe seat like this. As though his election as an MP is a foregone conclusion, regardless of the democratic process. For that reason alone it feels like it would be nice for him not to get an easy win.
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Man, some Chaos with Ed Milliband sounds good right about now.
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Politicians are idiots. A decade on from Brexit, when Cameron assumed everyone would vote remain, forgetting voters have a contrary streak a mile wide and Labour are engaging in the same arrogant bollocks.
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Still the ” they’re just poor kids who had bad luck in life” argument only goes so far.
That wasn’t my argument at all. It’s just that research shows that there are factors that contribute to people committing crimes, and that if you want to have less crimes, your best chance is to try and reduce those factors as far as possible.
You’re talking about criminal justice and punishment which, sure, go ahead and do that, if it makes you feel better. I suppose we have to do that, as well, because a sense of justice is important to our societies. But it doesn’t prevent more crime from happening. For that, you have to address those root causes.
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And now The Sun is claiming there needs to be a new General Election because the last two years have been so much more awful than the 14 before. And that’s with Farage now under investigation over that £5m donation.
There’s a directed effort to get RefUK in by hook or by crook. Will it work? Hopefully not but people are dumb enough to go with the idea that everyone deserves a go. RefUK don’t.
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Not that I want to cheer on the further descent into chaos of the UK political scene, but it would be quite funny if Burnham lost his by-election and Streeting didn’t get enough supporters to enter the leadership challenge or went out in the first round.
I think there is a definite sense of voters being taken for granted when someone like Burnham gets dropped into a supposedly safe seat like this. As though his election as an MP is a foregone conclusion, regardless of the democratic process. For that reason alone it feels like it would be nice for him not to get an easy win.
I think with Burnham, the fact that this constituency that’s been vacated is within Greater Manchester makes the move less odious than it if it was Kent or something. And I don’t think the aspiration to go from GM mayor to PM is that bad. I mean, obviously, it is self-serving and opportunistic, any attempt to become PM is, but I think it can plausibly be sold as “I want to do more for this area as PM, do for the rest of the country what I’ve done here” etc. And there’s an argument to be made that these metro-mayors not having any position in parliament (and thus necessitating these shenanigans) is a flaw in the system to begin with. Not that being PM and a metro-mayor seems particularly compatible, but then I don’t reckon many PMs get chance to do much MP work for their constituencies either. They can do blunt force stuff – “no, I don’t think we will have that unpopular landfill site built in my constituency” etc – but it’s not like they’re out there helping Sharon from down the road stop getting exploited by her employer or pushing the council to fix some bad potholes on the council estate.
EDIT: Plus, the guy moving aside for Burnham is Josh Simons, who was behind getting a PR agency to investigate journalists that looked into his Labour Together think tank and then reported them to GCHQ for pro-Kremlin activities. So no great loss to parliament and democracy, frankly.
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I don’t know why, but the guy on the right look far more competent and trustworthy.
It’s because he is, isn’t he?
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One of them is an inflated, artificial, not-really-human backup that you’d only call upon to take over if the situation was absolutely dire, and the other is OK it’s obvious where this is going but I couldn’t resist.
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Labour have done no shortage of self-inflicted wounds – trans rights, Israel, disability. On disability they may have learnt from their vicious disaster in 2025 but the jury’s out.
Outside of those they’ve been doing better – more renewable energy, more social housing, strengthened employment and renter rights, rejoining Erasmus.
Some see their comms as weak but they’re not doing much different from previous governments, press releases, some videos. Problem is the media, corporate and independent don’t want to cover it. They do want to cover Farage and do so at every opportunity.
Labour are deluded if they think changing the leader will change anything in these respects.
There’s nothing reasonable about the right-wing hysteria and calls for a new election. This whole business will likely be messy and no one comes out of it well.
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There’s working in government and there’s politics. I’m good at the one, terrible at the other.
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What are people’s main complaints about Starmer, concretely? Is it reasonable to expect another candidate from the same party would do a better job?
I’d say the main problem is the one Labour/middle-of-the-road-socialist parties always have, which is that once they’re in power for some reason they always turn to pretty conservative policies.
And Keir Starmer has gotten onto the “It’s all the refugee’s fault!” train, too.
Another PM from the conservative wing of Labour wouldn’t make a difference. Someone like Burnham or Milliband, who are from the more left-wing faction, might do quite a few things differently. I think switching PM and policies would actually be the best chance for Labour to stay in power, because Starmer’s mix of left- and right-wing strategies don’t send a clear message and nobody likes him.
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What are people’s main complaints about Starmer, concretely? Is it reasonable to expect another candidate from the same party would do a better job?
My problem with Starmer is that he is completely lacking in principles and backbone. He stood to become Labour leader on a very clear set of pledges, heavily playing on Corbyn’s existing platform and support, and immediately abandoned pretty much all of them. I’ve highlighted in green the ones he’s actually followed through on.
Then as leader of the opposition he went into the general election with a completely different set of pledges. He got elected with a massive, if fragile, majority which gave him the opportunity and ability to make big, meaningful changes to the country. Instead, he’s doodled around in the margins mainly, while spending most of his energy immediately courting Reform supports. Most of whom are never going to vote for him anyway, whose vote he wouldn’t need for five years anyway and, if he actually spent his time focusing on positive, meaningful changes that other people liked, he wouldn’t need because his own base would be stable if not growing.
While his Labour government have done some good things – removing non-dom status, the Renter’s Rights Bill, reducing NHS waiting times a bit – these are always pretty milquetoast in ambition and overshadowed by Labour’s own actions on largely meaningless distractions. For instance, renationalising the railways, the only bit of his leadership renationalisation pledge that’s stuck, has gone for the weakest, most drawn out option of just letting all the current private contracts lapse and then be handed to a publicly owned operator, but does nothing to renationalise the rolling stock, so there’ll still be a private entity involved unnecessarily hiking prices. His move to abolish hereditary lords has been walked back to letting some of them stay anyway. Some people give him credit for not getting us drawn into Trump’s war in Iran, but given we’re letting the Yanks launch missions from our military bases, it’s an entirely arbitrary distinction and one that the, crucially, the Iranians don’t accept.
Even the social housing thing; yes we’re building more houses (at the expense of green spaces, wildlife etc) but these are still developer led, not being built by councils. They’re cramming low quality houses in a tightly as possible, doing the bare minimum to meet regulations on things like sizes of rooms and solar panels (some new builds near me have two small solar panels inset into the roof, meaning that you’re not going to get much from them and there’s no ability to add more without completely redoing the roof) and then being put onto the already high market at a premium. The threshold for what counts as “affordable” is completely screwed up and we’re not replenishing our council housing stock properly (though right to buy is supposedly being scrapped, finally, which is a good move). So Labour have basically given housing developers the power to push through new developments on pretty much any land they want with no right of refusal to locals or even councils so they can put them onto a broken market with no hope of that ever driving prices down. It’s essentially state-endorsed participation for private companies profiteering in the tulip mania being sold as a chance for poor people to maybe get a bulb if they’re lucky,
Starmer has also proved himself to be a terrible politician. Farage and the right wing press constantly play him like a fiddle, dictating talking points and the narrative of the country. He is brittle and reacts terribly to criticism. He constantly comes across as a complete tool in PMQs and he is obsessed with shows of “strength” when dealing with dissent in his party – removing the whip from multiple MPs within weeks of getting elected over a minor revolt on the two child cap on tax benefits that he eventually lifted anyway – that are in reality total over-reactions that make him look fragile AF.
This comes with an authoritarian streak that surprises people who think his work as a lawyer was just human rights and ignore that he was director of public prosecution for years. His push for digital ID (which seems to be back again lately), the online safety act and the proscription of Palestine Action shows a contempt for personal liberty, privacy and freedom of expression. Rather than “review all UK arms sales and make us a force for international peace and justice” as he originally pledged, he has stamped out all dissent about our arms sales to Israel, who are engaged in a genocide and disingenuously frames all criticism of that as anti-Semitism. We have people who tried to sabotage an arms manufacturer’s facility, for which they were fairly convicted of criminal damage (and in one instance GBH) being sentenced as terrorists, despite this not being included in the charges, not being told to the jury that deliberated their case and kept from the media. We have defendants not able to present for parts of their own trial because witnesses are being allowed to present secret evidence that defence lawyers aren’t even allowed to tell their clients about.
The one thing his government seems to be actually focused on is eroding trans-rights. In the last few years, the UK has gone from the top of the most LGBT-friendly countries in Europe to 22nd. His government has pretty much revived section 28 (the law that prevented any positive acknowledgement of homosexuality in schools) but for trans-people and consistently failed to ban conversion “therapy”. Deaths of trans kids is sky-rocketing, due to both increased hostility and a health service that is now designed to intentionally fail and undermine them.
And that’s without getting into the nonsense with Mandelson and all the graft of freebies.
Ultimately, Starmer got the easiest landslide general election victory in history, it would have been impossible for him to not win that election. And yet two years in, the country is for the most part not better off for him being in charge. We’re not happier, healthier, wealthier or more secure.
Will any of the alternatives be better? Streeting won’t be, given he’s the architect of this trans-hostility and a Mandelson acolyte. Interesting that he’s saying the UK should rejoin the EU, because it seems a pretty transparent attempt to find a policy that might actually get people to like him. Rayner would probably be better, but is undermined by her tax snafu (even though she was cleared of intentional wrongdoing on that recently and I think it presents a good springboard from which to campaign for reform/simplification) and frankly general background misogyny and class prejudice. Burnham, might be better. He’s not as left wing as people are painting him, but he does seem to at least give a shit about people. Oh and Miliband… erm, don’t know really. He floundered quite a bit as leader last time, clearly letting himself be led around by advisors too much. But he’s seemed re-energised since that, so maybe he’d make a better go of it this time.
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Then as leader of the opposition he went into the general election with a completely different set of pledges. He got elected with a massive, if fragile, majority which gave him the opportunity and ability to make big, meaningful changes to the country. Instead, he’s doodled around in the margins mainly, while spending most of his energy immediately courting Reform supports. Most of whom are never going to vote for him anyway, whose vote he wouldn’t need for five years anyway and, if he actually spent his time focusing on positive, meaningful changes that other people liked, he wouldn’t need because his own base would be stable if not growing.
I agree with a lot of the above post but particularly this.
As well as this bizarrely cautious approach, one of Starmer’s big weaknesses is that he is a poor communicator and has struggled for years to really give a sense of what he and the Labour Party under his leadership really stand for. Very rarely have they been able to take a principled stand on something and show how policy decisions and changes they are making flow from that. Instead they have been very meek and unwilling to rock the boat, at a time when their majority gives them the rare opportunity to actually make big ideology-driven changes and get them through.
As a result, even natural Labour voters feel like they don’t know what he stands for and what his vision is for the country, which makes it very hard to feel enthusiastic for his leadership and for Labour more broadly.
While Streeting looks like he would be more of the same (but possibly even worse), I feel like Rayner, Burnham or even Miliband would at least be able to bring some vision and energy to the leadership role.
Ultimately though, at the same time I don’t think it’s good for the country to be throwing out yet another PM and changing course again so rapidly. Dysfunction and disruption has been a hallmark of the country’s politics since Brexit (arguably long before that in general, but when it comes to leadership changes especially), and it’s sad to see the trend continuing in a post-Tory government.
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I liked this summary:
But it doesn’t address another problem, despite laying claim to being leader, I’m not sure UK politics has ever had that. It’s had lots who treat the PM role as boss, do what you’re told. Bossing isn’t the same as leading. Leading is getting other people to go with you on things, even or especially when you have no actual authority to force them.
Politics remains a very macho environment, with so much emphasis on it the politicians don’t know or even understand how to work with others.
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What are people’s main complaints about Starmer, concretely? Is it reasonable to expect another candidate from the same party would do a better job?
The summary is he promised CHANGE as his major selling point and instead has run fairly status quo small incremental changes. Very few people are seeing any change so have shifted support mainly to the Green Party.
The things he has done which I think are good he has completely failed to sell and communicate. They’ve put in significant uplifts to the minimum wage for example and never talk about it.
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I find this debate needlessly complicated.
The UK did vote to leave the EU and those are meant to be generational decisions but during the campaign even the likes of Tice and Gove on the leave side said we wouldn’t leave the customs union or single market. Then a strange twist came in everyone accepting the ‘hard Brexit’ option was what everyone wanted and that was what was voted on.
The EU must be rightly pissed off with the UK and they may not even accept rejoining but the economic argument for a customs union is a no brainer either side, it just makes selling stuff easier. So start there.
The other thing is, and I say this from experience, is all these companies have to meet EU standards anyway to sell there, that’s why Apple switched to USB-C, so the ‘freedom’ from EU trade standards was always an illusion. A British company in 2015 could have done what they wanted if they didn’t want to sell to the EU and it’s the same now.
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For a change, a RefUK by-election candidate has been suspended in advance of the election, and not after.
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For a change, a RefUK by-election candidate has been suspended in advance of the election, and not after.
Speedrun record achieved.
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Colbert very succinctly spelling out what will happen with the Trump IRS slush fund.
Sweet jesus!
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“Ah was fired for being racist, but now Daddy Trump says I can be paid lots of money for it.”
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This justifying of Jan 6 is beyond words
https://abcnews.com/US/2-officers-defended-capitol-jan-6-sue-stop/story?id=133151726
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Booker says Democratic Party ‘desperately needs new leadership’
No shit, Sherlock.
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It’s pretty incredible that in the 50s, 60s and 70s most women didn’t have any job and yet people could afford to live in houses.
Back in the day, there was a nice equilateral triangle between the shareholders, company president, and employees. Shareholders got good dividends, the president was compensated well but not outrageously (the average was 16 to 1), and employees received good compensation with pension benefits. Overall, cost of living was lower as well. All parties benefited. Beginning in the 60s and 70s, women started entering the workforce in greater numbers as a way to establish independence and control of their own lives.
Then came Jack Welch and him becoming CEO of General Electric in the 1980s. He pushed for “maximizing shareholder value” and getting compensated greatly as a reward for doing so. This came at the cost of employees’ jobs and benefits. Sadly, this became the model we see today.
The fundamental problem of capitalism is that it pushes for growth at all costs. Unfortunately, this all happens in a closed system. Unchecked growth in a closed system has a name: Cancer.
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Early eighties is also when stock buybacks became legal.
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Cometh the hour, cometh the man! Back from the political abyss it’s Tone aka Baghdad Blair aka someone who can’t shut up.
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Cometh the hour, cometh the man! Back from the political abyss it’s Tone aka Baghdad Blair aka someone who can’t shut up.
You either die a villain, or live long enough to see yourself become even more of a villain
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The suspicion I have is that with couples having more money to spend, the prices for homes started rising.
Well, possibly to some extent, but the bigger factor is that this is an investment sector, and there are a lot of rich people who need to invest their huge heaps of gold somewhere. So housing prices rise.
Did the doubling of the workforce come with a doubling of GDP? If it didn’t, the rewards per individual worker will automatically be smaller.
What Ben said.
Or, this:
We live in a world in which a tiny number of people own too, too much. And while there’s a recession going on and everybody has less, this does not go for the richest, like, at all.
The Oxfam report An Economy for the 1%, shows that the wealth of the poorest half of the world’s population has fallen by a trillion dollars since 2010, a drop of 38 percent. This has occurred despite the global population increasing by around 400 million people during that period. Meanwhile, the wealth of the richest 62 has increased by more than half a trillion dollars to $1.76tr. The report also shows how women are disproportionately affected by inequality – of the current ‘62’, 53 are men and just nine are women.
https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/62-people-own-same-half-world-reveals-oxfam-davos-report
In Germany, everybody currently seems to agree that we won’t be able to afford our social securities for much longer anymore (due to dwindling population, economic stagnancy and whatnot), but nobody seems to draw the conclusion that we can’t afford the level of pure richness anymore that we are currently affording to a very few people. Which is weird, cause to me it seems fucking obvious. Instead, it seems like everybody wants to take support away from the poorest, for some reason. It’s strange.
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(due to dwindling population, economic stagnancy and whatnot)
Wikipedia says the population of Germany is growing.
edit: well looks like it grew till 2024, and now there’s a small decrease
We don’t have enough births. The population has been growing very slightly because of immigration, which the majority of the population apparently desperately wants to stop in spite of our needing even more population growth if we want to somehow support the coming wave of retirees and people in need of elderly care.
(This topic was also in the Kurzgesagt vid in the other thread, but I didn’t actually watch that one or the answer, I’m afraid.)
Anyway:
While the population is declining, the age structure is also shifting. Over the next two decades, the proportion of older persons in the total population will significantly expand. Today, the population group of children and young people under age 20 is roughly the same size as the group of persons aged 65 and older, and each group makes up about 20% of the total population. In 2030, the group of persons aged 65 and older will account for 29% of the total population; in 2060, every third person (34%) will be at least 65 years old.
[…]So yeah. Too many old, retired people and too few babies. The most important answer to that is immigration, but our politics is doing everything possible to reduce immigration and turn us into a completely xenophobic country. So… yeah. The other important answer is re-distribution of wealth, so old people won’t die in the streets because somebody needs their third yacht so desperately. Crazy, I know.
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There’s this total nutcase running for governor of Colorado and I found myself thinking: Wasn’t Colorado Miqque’s state?
We’re denied a likely withering assessment of a man claiming to have been forced to kill at 7 years of age and other dubious claims.
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Heh. Well, it’s both kinda true, isn’t it? From a climate change PoV, we’d need to shrink the population (or/and our consumption of goods). From a capitalist PoV, that’d be the apocalypse.
It’s almost as if we’ve built an unsustainable economic system that we’re now trapped in until it has killed us all.
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Also, those articles are written by two different people.
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Too many old, retired people and too few babies.
Based on what I have seen, immigration is only a short-term solution to declining birth rates. After about three generations, they have fully assimilated into the local culture, and the birth rates begin declining again.
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Too many old, retired people and too few babies.
Based on what I have seen, immigration is only a short-term solution to declining birth rates. After about three generations, they have fully assimilated into the local culture, and the birth rates begin declining again.
True for most groups, I think, but some of the immigrants we’ve received here don’t integrate. Some become more radical when they’re here. Even after three generations.
(I don’t want to generalize of course, many in those groups are well integrated. Especially the women.)
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Too many old, retired people and too few babies.
Based on what I have seen, immigration is only a short-term solution to declining birth rates. After about three generations, they have fully assimilated into the local culture, and the birth rates begin declining again.
Yes, and if we work under the assumption that Capitalism is meant to rise everyone to prosperity, as we are so often assured, then eventually all nations will have standards of living that reduce the need to have large families. And then where will the cheap, disposable labour come from?
Boy, I sure hope nobody’s lying about that constant rise in prosperity, or that there are parts of the world that are deliberately kept poor and war-torn in order to keep our lives comfortable and OH WAIT OH SHIT WHAT’S THIS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_countries
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Too many old, retired people and too few babies.
Based on what I have seen, immigration is only a short-term solution to declining birth rates. After about three generations, they have fully assimilated into the local culture, and the birth rates begin declining again.
Yes, and if we work under the assumption that Capitalism is meant to rise everyone to prosperity, as we are so often assured, then eventually all nations will have standards of living that reduce the need to have large families. And then where will the cheap, disposable labour come from?
Boy, I sure hope nobody’s lying about that constant rise in prosperity, or that there are parts of the world that are deliberately kept poor and war-torn in order to keep our lives comfortable and OH WAIT OH SHIT WHAT’S THIS
Let’s also talk about the “Permanent Underclass”:
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Based on what I have seen, immigration is only a short-term solution to declining birth rates. After about three generations, they have fully assimilated into the local culture, and the birth rates begin declining again.
Well, yes, but immigration won’t stop, after all. Nigeria currently has a population of 250 million people and is set to have 400 million by 2050, according to projections. We won’t run out of people globally, we just need to let them move around more.
True for most groups, I think, but some of the immigrants we’ve received here don’t integrate. Some become more radical when they’re here. Even after three generations.
Well, yes, and there are people who have carefully examined the reasons for this and shown how we could change this (mostly with proper integration policies), but most countries won’t do that because it’s more important to their politics to act as if this was a law of nature and some immigrants are just evil or dumb. Even though we desperately need immigration.
Sigh.
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Sure it’s true that people who immigrate won’t immediately adapt all cultural values of their new home; in fact, it’d not only be naive but also be counter-productive to expect them to do that. They can be as religious and conservative in their views as they want, as long as they respect the laws and are friendly. And then the next generation will be different, and as Todd says, usually by the third generation you can’t tell the difference. If that doesn’t happen, the reason is usually a failure of integration.
The long and short of it is that radicalisation tends to happen mainly when people are on the fringes of society and can’t participate.And dude, it’s not as if there aren’t millions of second- and third-generation immigrants these days who can tell you all about these experiences.
Here’s a suggested reading and watching list in the realm of fiction:
– East is East (movie)
– Hanif Kureishi: The Buddha of Suburbia, The Black Album (novels) and My Son the Fanatic (short story)
– Small Axe (TV mini series) -
Hard to believe the nerve of all this, but we are in that timeline:
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there is a distinct distance many of them still have to Dutch society
= failure of integration.
Look, two things about this:
– For one, you are looking at newspaper and TV reports and the like that by their very nature focus on stories that are about
conflict. I work at a school, remember? The vast majority of kids you’ll talk to are just kids growing up here. Yes, different lives at home to some extent especially if they’re second generation, but if things go well they can navigate that fine.
– When it comes to things like islamic schools, I don’t disagree that that can be a problem. But most of these problems could be solved with policy. I think we’re on different sides when it comes to cause and effect:
You seem to think that some migrants don’t want to integrate and want to have nothing to do with Dutch society.
While I would say that rejection by mainstream society leads to ghettoisation and isolation (and that, in turn, to extremism, sometimes).I do not think it is a realistic view that anybody who comes to a new country looking for a better life comes there with an attitude of not wanting to have anything to do with this country. It’s also not what history demonstrates. Look at the US and, say, the first Italian or Irish immigrants there.
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I would als question the common mantra that we need immigration to save the economy. Poland’s population has been shrinking for years, and their economy is booming. They’re doing something right that we are doing wrong.
You are looking at the short term. The problem is in the long term.
As the population ages and leaves the workforce, the younger generations enter and generate the tax revenue that supports and maintains the infrastructure. They also care for the older population. When the younger population is gradually getting smaller, the necessary revenues are not being generated to support everything. Smaller populations also produce less children, so eventually the system collapses.
Will every population decline. No, some will actually increase. But those changes will impact global dynamics.
This is a good video on population collapse:
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