The Politics Thread (PLAY NICELY!)

omg, the "Nazis are not bad"-faction is here again.

In your dreams maybe.
In reality they need to be taken more seriously and talked to. Established parties refusing to talk to them is what got them a big "we're the poor victims here" bonus. As painful as it is to talk to people who will turn discussions randomly into "the holocaust wasn't so bad" or "Hitler attacked Poland only first, because Poland would've attacked us first otherwise", we need to do it.

You've clearly either not looked at the actual positions of their leaders, as spoken out in various instances, or you're just so far right you don't even notice anymore.

Yeah... what? Strawman arguments? Out of you again? What a surprise!
Well I did expect you to show up and defend the AFD. I would've expected you to defend the 3rd Reich just for the sake of it.

And you're such a big expert on who the AFD is that you just HAD to spread your wisedom, huh?

I am trying to demonize them? There is no need to demonize people who are trying to forget about the Holocaust. They're doing that themselves. Those sentences I wrote just describe what their leaders said. Publicly.

Also posting cases of immigrants being bad guys doesn't mean a thing.
I could easily post cases of Nazis/general xenophobes doing a bad thing as well.
Lots of bad things to go around. Not tracking down criminals for "uh no we can't point at immigrants" obviously is stupid. No argument there. Has little to do with the reasons why supporting a party like the AFD is bad.

@cola_colin

Just watch if you don't believe me. This falsehood narrative of "oo the scary AFD far right neo nazis gonna destroy Germany" is going to give rise to an actual far left. The rise of the AFD is already a response to the traditional Merkel center leaning left in the first place.

As far as i can tell the inertia of this narrative is far too great now and it will stick. From there the pendulum will swing, swing away until either the actual far right or the far left (both authoritarian socialists btw) will rise up with a charismatic leader and plunge your country into another repeat of history.

Heck, your center is already crumbling because Merkel is terrible. That's always the first symptom of turbulent politics ahead. The funny thing is, all of this could be avoided if only people told the truth.

It's not like I have a dog in the game though. Don't fundamentally care whether you believe me or not. What's that saying, the earth moves irregardless of what you decree from Rome.

That we can agree on. Maybe for different reasons. But we agree. I never voted for that woman. :s

I find your "this rise of the right clearly will end with a rise of the extremist violent left resulting in much violence" a little amusing at best though. No matter what happens, you always see a risk by the violent left.

I see the risk of violence from both the actual far right and the actual far left. Wasn't too long ago that I said the same about Charlottesville where both were clearly present. Don't pretend like there isn't a huge black bloc presence in Europe. This is nothing but newtonian physics - every action has a reaction. Politics is king of the hill to these people and they will find a reason to fight a "defensive" war in order to claim the throne.

AFD is literally more akin to an american evangelical conservative party without any of the religion. Uncertain times always lend bias towards conservative policies. Close the borders, conserve family values, stop experimenting, play it safe etc. But ofcourse, as I already said, a single lie will spark this off: "Conservatism is racism". This will provoke (already has) the actual far leftists into greater frenzy. Which will in turn incite the actual far right into greater action. Swing away.

At this point there isn't much distinction between the two (far left/right). They're both racist authoritarians trying to bait a race war. Childish fools both, following destructive ideologies from last century.

Antifa Leader scolds green Antifa member for not punching a Nazi.


Antifa Leader:

White Antifa member:

Antifa Leader:

White Antifa member:

Antifa leader

Yeah not a fan of what Kretschmann is doing there as well, but ... meh. What else to do. The Left is weird, the SPD is just washed out, no profile, and the CDU is the CDU.

Oh yeah. That's actually gonna be the the question. Will Green, FDP and CDU/CSU find a common ground and whose voters will be unhappy with that common ground. If any of them gives up too much on their cores concepts they'll lose voters quickly. Kinda the story of any party working with the CDU so far.

Chaos from day 1. Not surprised.

blah blah blah, sloppy word soup with no substance. Exactly the same false narrative building drivel being repeated all over the place by low energy thinkers who don't actually give a hoot about what might be true. Everyone gets what they want. The smart propagandists get support for their political intentions, and the useful idiot gets their red meat in the form of a cause they can feel righteous about that gives them meaning in life. The exact same thing used to happen in Roman politics with their optimates vs populares parties. Read history, free yourself.

And even if i gave you the benefit of the doubt, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. AFD will destroy Germany? Extraordinary. Show me the proof. What are they doing to "destroy democracy"? All i see from you are chicken little claims of fact the exact same way religious fundamentalists say the earth is 6000 years old just because. The sky is falling the sky is falling!

If you want to say that i'm wrong, you better do more than "you must have read an RT article and RT is the spawn of the devil". It's genuinely funny how objectively childlike your thinking is. I didn't even look at an RT article. why would you assume that? Oh that's right because they are evil russians, 'they're the bad guys and i'm part of the good guys'.

You're being used and manipulated, whether knowingly or not, by people way smarter than you with dishonest intentions. Cui bono. Who benefits from your propagation of unsupported lies? Hrm, could it possibly be the people trying to artificially prop up the EU?

Funny how preserving national sovereignty is "destroying Germany's democracy" but somehow being for the EU is "preserving Germany's democracy". I would be feeling quite sad about the absurdly high level of brainwashing you present with if not for the fact that none of your lies affect me down under (thankfully).

I looked at AFD policies as well as their policy history from the horses mouth. Why trust some middleman to tell me what someone else said when I can just listen to them directly in the first place? I've said it before - to any clearheaded thinker it's obvious the AFD have the same values base as the typical run of the mill christian conservative party.

In a nutshell, they are all about order, clearly defined borders, and don't take kindly to chaos. And they mean that figuratively as well - it isn't just about literal national borders as a geographical feature. They want to turtle down and go back to the traditional, root meaning of words and categories. That's exactly what conservatism is and it always rises in response to tumultuous times, especially when caused by the unrestrained overexertion of liberal minded category dissolution.

No gay marriage, trying to enforce the traditional conservative definitions of marriage. No islamic immigration, trying to enforce traditional definitions of liberal western culture. No EU, trying to enforce the traditional identity of a sovereign nation.

It's funny too. For all your clamouring for "democracy", you don't even know what that is or should be. An actually healthy democracy needs both conservative and liberal thinking and free dialogue between the two (order and the exploration of chaos). You can't have just order, and you can't have just chaos.

The typical run of the mill christian conservative party of Germany disagree with you.
I guess if you instead compare to the American Republicans, then yeah. They might be similar, including the tendency to racism found in some (or even many?) of their members.
Which is the part we're not happy with, as so far we've had no racist anywhere near a government position.

But it fits that you defend the AFD. They're a little like Trump and you seem to like Trump as well. So you're consistent at least.

Man1: I don't like people illegally immigrating to my country.
Man2: You know most of them are from what I call a different race, so you are racist and I won't listen to you any more
Man1: But there are legal ways to immigrate and It's bad that they break the law rigth from their first day here and...
Man2: Racist! Racist! Racist!

By the way a nice video on something that affects some people in this thread, taking comedians for political analysts...

no bias here leftists are the ones who would acknowledge racial construct /S

you know he brings up valid points about it being an echo chamber a bubble and a lot of it having no spine and an exercise in futility.

I feel that myself when I watch them ...alot. I've felt it since the beginning.

Ideally they wouldn't go into any form of bias at all and then I'd be it's most perfect form I'd enjoy the most.

that's why John Oliver's the best one IMO : because he's careful and self-controls himself when it comes to bias making him the least biased of these shows (and at the same time most skillful at bringing a point home and making it stick you gotta give the man points for his mental juggling skills).


But let's be honest they know how to handle rationale... look at stuff with a global, third-person eye and expose it for what it is and that's the good part that I ascribe to.

And the video is pretty comical in it's revealing subconscious projections :

Uhhhhhh WHAT ? by what metric are the left few..... wait scratch that start from the top : By what metric is the left diminishing in number?

talking globally average (and through history) the right (as it stands and is defined today) has been dominant for AGES and left only started getting to power in in the 21st century.

and by Trump's election's metric's are more than half in the US.

So the left has increased to the point of winning out from time to time in the elections and now is bigger than the right

and so he sais that the left is lashing out in panic at the loss of the centerpiece foothold it had had???

that's ODDLY specific to something that applies perfectly to the right.

just sayin : /

So it is confirmation bias now to laugh about the failures of Trump and co. ?

ummm okay.

He might have a point about the care the combination of comedy and serious news needs, but that's about it.
No further analysis is provided on how well this care is typically taken. Very few examples are named, clearly cherry picked.

As @tatsujb notes, there is clearly an aggressive agenda he has against the typical political views the Comedians represent and he mostly just baffles around without all that many examples. Hell looking over his other videos I find exactly what I expect: Typical Right wing topics with typical right wing views.

So yeah. A but hurt right wing guy shittalking people who shittalk his dear President?!

If he wanted to actually discuss the quality of the information provided in these shows he should probably use ... a lot more examples. A lot. Specifically show examples of relevant political topics being badly misrepresented.
How about a complete deconstruction of a whole episode? One that is talking about current political things?

As far as I have noticed the information provided in these shows matches many other reputable news sources and is spot on. The jokes are either absurd offtopics or abuse the absurdity of the situation as a joke. Which is easy since Trump took office, as he is absurdity personified.

EDIT:
Also in one of his videos that guy is talking about refugee-stuff, opening somewhat like this:

"The problems of taking in people from an inherently violent and misogynist country"...

A perfect example of somebody who will probably go "how dare you call me a racist for just being critical about taking in so many people", while the real reason why people like that get stamped racist is for saying actual racist things. Calling everybody from a whole country "inherently violent"? Yeah. Racist.

It's fine being critical. But if you reveal your racism like that, you kinda defeated yourself.

admit that in a certain sense they are doing the world a favor :

A clearly biased, rightwing youtuber commenting about biased comedians. I mean, does he see the hypocrisy himself?

what's going on in spain?

Catalonia (a region of Spain) wants independence from Spain. The Spanish government doesn't want them to go.

There was a referendum organised by the Catalan regional government for independence. The Spanish government declared it illegal and attempted to prevent people from voting by dispatching riot police.

they've been pretty dictatorial about this whole thing

Wouldn't it be more like oligarchic?

Also, isn't this attempt number 3 or 4?