European Politico-economics QA Mega-thread - Page 940
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sc-darkness
856 Posts
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Nyxisto
Germany6287 Posts
On September 15 2017 05:55 IgnE wrote: you didnt address my primary question which is one of determining whether the relative advantage of stock appreciation over home prices more than compensates for the cost of rent less mortgage interest. do you have evidence, for example, that the average person paying a rent and investing the remainder in a mutual fund has a higher net wealth gain than someone who paid off a mortgage equivalent (the rent + investment)in the last thirty years? the principle behind natural resource dividends is nothing like personal investment of wages into stocks instead of homes, and for that matter neither is japan's etf buys distorting the nikkei. if you are going to go down this share-the-wealth road why not go all-out Meidner Plan? Concerning the comparison, here's an older article from 2005 throwing some numbers around, this was before the crisis, too. Stock does outperform real estate significantly. Of course you can go into discussions about how you can live in a house, or you are more mobile if you rent and you don't have to pay maintenance in a flat etc... On the utility side nowadays you're probably better off with a flat because you've better access to social services and can respond to changing job markets better. The return on real estate are extremely uneven too and geographically dependent. And what I'm saying is essentially a version on the Meidner plan, the difference mostly being that I'd like to see it at a national level rather than on a per company basis, both because the overhead is probably lower and because it doesn't disadvantage people who are not unionised, or self employed or part of a small business. | ||
{CC}StealthBlue
United States41099 Posts
Germans should be proud of what their soldiers achieved during the first and second world wars, the top candidate of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has said in the run-up to elections on 24 September at which the party is expected to enter parliament. Opinion polls show the anti-immigrant AfD iwinning up to 12% of the vote, meaning it could become the third largest party in Germany’s lower house behind Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Social Democrats (SPD). “If the French are rightly proud of their emperor and the Britons of Nelson and Churchill, we have the right to be proud of the achievements of the German soldiers in two world wars,” Alexander Gauland, 76, said in a speech to supporters on 2 September that has since been uploaded to YouTube. “If I look around Europe, no other people has dealt as clearly with their past wrongs as the Germans,” he said. The Nazis ruled Germany from 1933 to 1945, during which time they killed 6 million Jews in the Holocaust. “People no longer need to reproach us with these 12 years. They don’t relate to our identity nowadays,” Gauland said. He said the battle of Verdun during the first world war belonged to German history, as did Erwin Rommel, the second world war field marshal celebrated as the Desert Fox and the army officer Claus von Stauffenberg, who led an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Hitler in July 1944 with a bomb hidden in a briefcase. Gauland said Germany needed to reclaim its history. The AfD did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In January, Björn Höcke, the AfD’s chief in the eastern state of Thuringia, provoked outrage by describing the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin as a “monument of shame” and demanding a “180-degree turnaround” in the way Germany seeks to atone for Nazi crimes. Source | ||
LegalLord
United Kingdom13774 Posts
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Artisreal
Germany9227 Posts
On September 15 2017 12:58 LegalLord wrote: I would actually be somewhat sympathetic to the idea of evaluating in perhaps a less emotional and more political-historic context the contributions of Wilhelm and Hitler, et. al., to the development of modern Germany. Though it's easy to discount them as individuals of pure evil, truth is that that doesn't really cover the reality. Frankly Germans more than just about any culture have this tendency to want to run away from their past and almost pretend that either it didn't happen or it has nothing to do with them. And as much personal disdain as I have for the Nazis and their military actions in the past, and those of their successors today (my own family had plenty of its own casualties as a result) it almost seems like Germans chose to replace one holier-than-thou fantasy with another. Now I'm not saying or not saying that that's what AfD is doing here, but Germany's inversions of their actual past is quite harmful as well. Germany started two World Wars in the span of twenty-five years. Between 1914 and 1945 we had all out war in 10/31 years. Instead of a weekend, we have war (including a bit of friday to warm up for the weekend). How do you reevaluate that? "Hitler did some goods things" is revisionist. Him giving people jobs to build the famous motorways cannot be observed in isolation to everything else, this is a ridiculous thing to do. If you say he did help the development of modern Germany then pardon me asking whether you could elaborate on that. Because I see a country so profoundly destruct and shaken to the core as to how we ran into war with blaring trumpets. TWICE. Saying there is something good to be found in his actions is akin to saying slavery was good for some. Probably true in isolation but with such massive and broad consequences it's simply revisionist and to be frank quite dumb to do so in my book. In case I totally missed your point, please elaborate :p | ||
LegalLord
United Kingdom13774 Posts
Hitler's economic contributions could perhaps be seen more positively, helping to take a Germany that was falling apart and revive its industrial strength. This post lists a lot of the less consequential things he did right. And perhaps, less so to his credit than to the demerit of others in his place, Hitler can hardly be said to be the cause of fascism as it has and continues to exist in East Europe, a factor to which modern Germany seems remarkably blind. Nothing wrong with saying slavery had benefits either. It did. Not to say we should bring it back any more than I'm saying Hitler wasn't so bad. But if you take the common German approach of being unable to properly put the good, the bad, and the ugly of your past into context rather than just write it off as a black mark to forget, you're just replacing one dangerous ideology for another. | ||
Artisreal
Germany9227 Posts
Hitler wanting to protect his citizens' health can be attributed to him wanting a strong army to conquer the world. Him having the health of his people in mind is a rather slippery mountain to climb. Same as to the NSADAP telling mothers not to smoke or consume alcohol. Many healthy kids = strong army. As to animals. Everyone loves their dog. WOW. And that kosher butchering was a main concern to Nazis is rather unsurpising. Given they had no scrupel to experimenting on humans it's rather safe to assume the same for animals. From the wikipedia page: Although various laws were enacted for animal protection, the extent to which they were enforced has been questioned. The law enacted by Hermann Göring on August 16, 1933 banning vivisection was revised by a decree of September 5 of that year, with more lax provisions, then allowing the Reich Interior Ministry to distribute permits to some universities and research institutes to conduct animal experiments the rest I have not looked at in detail because it's too much for now. e: it is also very common for Nazis to take a movement and put their ideology over it to lure innocent bystanders that agree with the superficial movement but not necessarily with the camouflaged part. Conservation is a wonderful example of that. Green Nazis. Yep, they exist. We want to preserve our motherland for our spouse, and kill all the foreigners and Jews because they're the cause of mother nature's misery uaaargh!!! What a whole lot of bollocks. | ||
Yoav
United States1874 Posts
There's a reason why they get remembered as the worst of the worst. You don't get to count "oh, some nice public housing projects" if something like that happened to you. Also, Germany hardly "forgets" it's crimes... it reckons with them and more directly than any country I can name. They just have also quite thoroughly rejected and repented of them. | ||
Big J
Austria16289 Posts
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PoulsenB
Poland7686 Posts
Also saying that Hitler/Nazis or slavery had some good sides to them is like saying "Stalin was a great guy, he defeated Hitler and ended WW2! He did it by sacrificing about 30 millions of his own people in the war and was a murderous maniac who had countless people killed and maintained a gulag system to oppress his own citizens, but it doesn't matter, after all no more Hitler right?" | ||
TheDwf
France19747 Posts
Gotta love the far right's capacity to start the most obnoxious debates. | ||
Artisreal
Germany9227 Posts
Also it is kinda ridiculous to say we don't commemorate the fallen soldiers. Of all wars Germany fought, there's like 100,000 places of commemoration. Because you can't be proud of what they've done. There's a big difference between killing for self defence or for hegemony. | ||
[DUF]MethodMan
Germany1716 Posts
€: To second the post above, on almost every regular cemetery in Germany you will find memorials to fallen soldiers in both wars. There not being any huge monuments to military achievements is just logical, when the same military actively or passively contributed to the crime that was the genocide. | ||
Artisreal
Germany9227 Posts
Where the London and Paris arches look back only to moments of high success, presenting a comfortable, if selective, narrative of national triumph, the Munich arch speaks both of the glorious cause of its making and the circumstances of its later destruction. Unlike the other two, its original celebratory purpose is undercut by a very uncomfortable reminder of failure and guilt. It proclaims a moral message: that the past offers lessons which must be used to shape the future. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the role of history in Germany today is that, like this arch, it not only articulates a view of the past, but directs the past resolutely and admonishingly forward. All major countries try to construct a reading of their history that leads them, reassured and confident, to their current place in the world. The United States, strong in its view of itself as a ‘city on a hill’, was long able to affirm its manifest destiny. Britain and France in different ways saw their political evolution as a model for the world, which they generously shared through imperial expansion. After Bismarck had welded the different constituent states into the German Empire in 1871 and then into the leading industrial and economic power of the continent, Germany might have been able to devise some similar national myth. But defeat in the First World War, the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the murderous criminality of the Third Reich have made any such coherent narrative impossible. German scholars have struggled in vain to piece the different parts of the jigsaw together, but none has been able, convincingly, to fit the great intellectual and cultural achievements of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany and the moral abyss of the Nazis into a comprehensible pattern. This is in a profound sense a history so damaged that it cannot be repaired but, rather, must be constantly revisited – an idea powerfully visualized by Georg Baselitz’s tattered and confusedly inverted national flag. + Show Spoiler [Images to the monuments talked about] + From top to bottom: London Paris Munich Munich (back) I found the BBC4 series on Germany quite compelling | ||
Jockmcplop
United Kingdom8727 Posts
Iceland could face its second snap election in a year after one of the three parties in its ruling coalition said it was quitting because of a “serious breach of trust” over an alleged cover-up of a scandal involving the prime minister’s father. The Bright Future party said on its Facebook page that it had “decided to terminate cooperation with the government”, effectively bringing down Bjarni Benediktsson’s administration barely nine months after it was formed. The walkout follows reports that the prime minister’s Independence party tried to conceal a letter written by his father, Benedikt Sveinsson, to help a friend convicted of child sexual offences have his criminal record cleared. The justice minister, Sigridur Andersen, of the Independence party, told Benediktsson of the letter in July but the government did not publicly disclose its existence until forced to do so by a parliamentary committee this week. Sveinsson’s letter recommended that his friend Hjalti Sigurjón Hauksson, sentenced to five years in prison in 2004 for repeatedly raping his stepdaughter for 12 years since the age of five, should have his “honour restored”. Wow. | ||
Nyxisto
Germany6287 Posts
On September 15 2017 12:58 LegalLord wrote: I would actually be somewhat sympathetic to the idea of evaluating in perhaps a less emotional and more political-historic context the contributions of Wilhelm and Hitler, et. al., to the development of modern Germany. Though it's easy to discount them as individuals of pure evil, truth is that that doesn't really cover the reality. Frankly Germans more than just about any culture have this tendency to want to run away from their past and almost pretend that either it didn't happen or it has nothing to do with them. And as much personal disdain as I have for the Nazis and their military actions in the past, and those of their successors today (my own family had plenty of its own casualties as a result) it almost seems like Germans chose to replace one holier-than-thou fantasy with another. Now I'm not saying or not saying that that's what AfD is doing here, but Germany's inversions of their actual past is quite harmful as well. Wilhelm rejected Bismarck's idea of a 'saturated Germany' that was supposed to pose no threat to Europe and as a result turned the continent suspicious and against Germany, not to mention his willingness to jump into useless colonialism, bombast, absolutely ridiculous comments and ineffective decisions. There's a reason this here is an illustration that everybody knows. + Show Spoiler + And no, there's no "political-historical" revisionism to be employed about Hitler either. Started another world war, killed millions of people for no reason, turned our own country and everything around it into rubble. Leading in the end to the country being split, countless of people fleeing and it taking Germany decades to recover from it. This is not an "emotional" reaction. | ||
Sent.
Poland8967 Posts
Orbán wins the migration argument Suddenly most EU leaders echo the Hungarian prime minister. + Show Spoiler + No one in Brussels wants to say it out loud, but Viktor Orbán is winning the migration debate. The Hungarian prime minister may be much maligned in European capitals for his anti-immigrant rhetoric, his opposition to the EU’s refugee relocation policy, and for building a border fence. But look closely at how EU leaders now talk about the issue and the policies they’ve adopted since the 2015 crisis, and it’s clear Orbán’s preference for interdiction over integration has somehow prevailed. There was an echo of Orbán’s long-standing call for tougher border controls in Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker’s claim in his State of the Union speech this week that “We are now protecting Europe’s external borders more effectively.” At other points in the speech, it could easily have been the Hungarian premier speaking, as Juncker emphasized efforts to stop migrants before they leave Africa and return those who reach Europe’s shores. “When it comes to returns: People who have no right to stay in Europe must be returned to their countries of origin,” said Juncker. While Hungary and Slovakia recently lost their fight against the EU’s relocation scheme at the European Court of Justice, the facts on the ground show that the legal victory for Brussels was hollow. “Nobody will admit it in this town, but yes, Orbán’s narrative is prevailing,” a senior EU official said. From French President Emmanuel Macron gathering the leaders of Germany, Italy and Spain for a migration conference in Paris at the end of August, to Juncker’s shout-out to Italy’s “generosity” in his speech this week, the EU has made great efforts to emphasize solidarity, particularly with Rome and Athens, which bear the brunt of migrant arrivals. But the actions by European governments, including Italy’s effort to crack down on NGOs and the EU’s push for accords with African governments, fit neatly with Orbán’s long-stated positions. He has called for stronger protection of external borders as well as for opening up migration reception centers in Africa and a tough line on NGOs, especially foreign ones. At the meeting Macron hosted in Paris, the four EU leaders — who were joined by EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini — gave their blessing to a shift in the way Italy has been dealing with migration, which critics say also goes Orbán’s way. After the closure of the Western Balkan route last year, migrants kept on arriving in Italy. But figures this summer were unexpectedly low as Italians outsourced the solution to Libyan political powers and accused NGOs of colluding with smugglers, forcing them to accept an EU backed code of conduct. “For a center-left government like in Italy, this is dangerous because what they are doing is not different from what the far-right is asking for,” said Gerald Knaus, chairman of the European Stability Initiative, a think tank. Because an alternative plan has not been agreed, he said, “The debate is completely moving in Orbán’s direction.” Applause from the right That the migration debate might shift toward Orbán’s view is not necessarily surprising. German Chancellor Angela Merkel faced a brutal political backlash in September 2015 after she decided to accept hundreds of thousands of refugees. In many ways, European leaders have been backtracking and side-stepping ever since. With Orbán and other Eastern European leaders resisting the compulsory relocation policy, EU leaders found it easier to agree on toughening control of external borders, which had grown lax over the years. Answering the calls for stronger border protections from the Visegrad Four — Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic — offered a way to bridge the deep divisions and project unity at a time of serious discord, said Milan Nic, senior fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations. “Germany was quietly looking for common ground with the Visegrad and several aspects of what they were proposing were incorporated into the discussion,” he said. Orbán’s stance was even more hard-line, calling for refugees to be allowed to request protection only from outside the EU. Two years later, at the Paris meeting, Macron pushed for the creation of migration centers in Niger and Chad. The proposal is opposed by humanitarian groups who insist it will not work, but whether it is implemented or not, it’s hard to dispute that the French president has partly adopted Orbán’s approach. Rights advocates also fear that migrants will be treated badly, as is the case now in migration centers in Libya, where humanitarian groups have documented terrible conditions. The far-left GUE group in the European Parliament called the plan “racist and a fundamental breach of human rights.” By contrast, the same plan was immediately greeted with satisfaction by the leader of Brothers of Italy, a far-right party. “Wasn’t it a xenophobic idea?” Giorgia Meloni, the leader of Brothers of Italy, wondered on Facebook. “Time has proved we were right.” ‘Managing flows’ EU officials and diplomats insist that the apparent alignment with Orbán is just a case of the Hungarian prime minister’s views reflecting basic common sense in certain areas. But, they said, the EU leadership remains committed to policies of openness, and especially to encourage legal migration — a point Juncker stressed in his speech. “Europe is and must remain the continent of solidarity where those fleeing persecution can find refuge,” he said. One EU diplomat noted that Hungary had taken actions that were in violation of international law or EU policy, while Brussels was working to develop legal solutions. And the diplomat insisted that any seeming agreement with Orbán was temporary at best. “It’s not a matter of being in line with Orbán,” the diplomat said. “It’s just that first we had to show things are under control, then we can work on better ways of managing flows.” Orbán has been insisting for months that he’s winning the argument. When discussion of opening refugee camps in Africa resurfaced among EU leaders last December, he told journalists: “Earlier this was seen as a proposal which could have come from the Devil himself.” He added: “Our position is slowly becoming the majority position.” http://www.politico.eu/article/viktor-orban-migration-eu-has-won-the-argument/ Spoilered because it's a long article. | ||
Big J
Austria16289 Posts
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TheDwf
France19747 Posts
On September 16 2017 19:50 Big J wrote: Yeah, we are going to get a guy cutting corporate taxation to 0% based on migration voting in Austria, that we can't even influence because we are not a fucking mediterranean state. All hail neoconservatism. My admiration for Stalin is growing by the hour. Cutting off some heads seems to be the only way to stop the burgoise economical-political complex of self-enrichment. Hahaha When are the results of your election? | ||
Big J
Austria16289 Posts
On September 16 2017 20:10 TheDwf wrote: Hahaha When are the results of your election? Election is at 15th October, results probably will be delayed a day. Conservatives are leading with 35%, Freedom party and soc-dems are around 25% each, Greens, Liberals and green-populists are all around 4-6%. 4% is the limit to get in. I swear, if they are going through with their hidden wage cuts (wage labor cost cuts) and I don't get my employer to pay me the difference directly I will leave this fascist shithole of country. We're discussing 1-2 billions of social costs for refugees up and down and then they present 8 billions of corporate cuts over night in addition to billions of wage tax cuts that go to the middle and upper class. (Granted, I would "profit" - as if money would just vanish in a hole if given to the state - too quite a bit at least) Not that this will actually happen, it is simply not affordable. Our conservatives and far-right are promising the same volume of tax cuts as the CDU does in Germany. Kind of ridiculous if you compare the sizes of the countries. | ||
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