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Anon searches for normal politics
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this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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I dunno but northern European socialism is looking pretty ok to me lately.
They're voting in anti-immgrant right wing politicians. Same with Germany, Spain, and France
That's not a fiscal policy. A country or block of countries can be right about 1 thing and wrong about others.
It is though. Guess what the number one Argument made against migrants is.
The number one argument made against migrants is whatever that person thinks sounds the least like "I'm just xenophobic"
Right but the politicians argument is always "our social system cant afford it". A fiscal argument.
That doesn't make it a fiscal policy
If it relates to the governments expenditures then it is a fiscal argument. If the policy is based on such a fiscal argument then it is a fiscal policy.
And if I spray paint some stripes onto my dog, a tiger I did not make. they can claim its about fiscal policy all they want, it rarely is
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy/
Right so you agree that the fiscal policies and anti-migration laws targeting specific races are inextricably linked?
This is "states rights" levels of pedantic, incorrect stubbornness.
What they wrote down into law was fiscal, but just saying "fiscal policy" completely ignores the whole context to an absurd abstract degree, and this is intentional.
The discussion originally was about how the fiscal policies in European countries are good even though they have racist migration laws, I wanted to show that this is a fiscal policy too, as in they absolutely have racist fiscal policy.
I believe we are on the same side here.
If we're on the same side, stop taking the other side at their word by calling it "fiscal policy".
If someone says to me that the racist policies and the fiscal policies are different, when they arent, I think its important to stress that some of the racist policies and in fact most of them, are fiscal.
I am not trying to diminish a racist policy by calling it fiscal, I'm trying to highlight that some of the fiscal policies are racist. And that that the European liberal model is inextricably tied to racism, because some people here want to export european fiscal policies to the US in the hopes of fighting injustice but they would be copying racist policies that would still perpetuate injustice.
Seems to be that they're not integrating here and creating a parallel society and increase in crime.
If there's one thing the right are good at it's indoctrination. They co-opt spaces and then use them to infect people with their mindset.
And damn is it ever effective. Someone close to me is normally a leftist – she proudly supports her union (and unions in general), is strongly in favor of LGBT+ rights and environmental protection, mistrusts most political parties as they're too much in bed with big business etc.
However, she also hangs out on 9GAG, which apparently has been pretty much taken over by the right. This has greatly affected her views on immigrants since she's exposed to unchallenged right-wing drivel every day. It was "fun" when she told me how refugee facilities are hotbeds of violent crime and then it turned out that the unspecified statistics she was basing this on were mostly about violence against refugees.
(Not that those camps perfectly safe by themselves but not in the way right wingers make it sound like refugees and immigrants (who are conflated) are all violent anarchists who are above the law.)
Recently she just had to share this "joke" with me. The whole thing consisted of two police officers with Turkish names finding a generic German name exotic. That was it; I couldn't find any punchline in there, just a "the immigrants are replacing us" message. I'm just writing for the day when I hear the word "Überfremdung" ("overforeigning", a standard term of the far right) out of her mouth.
It goes on like that. Politically she's convinced that the Greens are completely unviable as a party and the worst part of the current government – the FDP (our liberal party for rich people) gets no mention despite being diametrically opposed to most of her core views. Ricarda Lang (a Green politician) being fat is much more important and will never get old.
I have no idea how to counter this but I'm afraid that she'll drift off into the hard right with time. She seems unwilling to accept that her main source of funnies is also chock full of right wing propaganda.
My old working class neighbourhood used to be relatively safe, now it isn't. A major demographic change occurred. It's not hard to see what happened.
This chronic inability by some on the left to acknowledge that mass immigration does at least some damage to the social fabric, is part of why the rightoids are winning. People on the ground can see it, and shouting to the contrary from ivory tower PMC liberals who consider themselves lefties is not going to change that.
In Canada we are undergoing a collapse of the healthcare system and a shortage of housing.
But if you say "maybe bringing more people into the country when we can't house or care for the people who are already here is a bad idea," suddenly you're a racist.
Immigration policy has real effects on the lives of current citizens, and it is not racist to acknowledge those effects.
That is part if the problem. The other part, at least is my country, is that the left is failing to present a believable alternative. Idealistic rhetoric from an ivory tower doesn't convince people their practical problems will be solved.
Yeah this seems to be the case all over.
Something about a fence and the colour saturation of the grass
Denmark is tearing itself apart, we have a total right-wing government tearing down public infrastructure and institutions. Mere days ago, pensions for lower class workers, which were promised by the last government in 2020, have been cancelled and 60 year-old people who are falling apart have been told to go back to work. 2 years ago we lost a national holiday under the guise of 'the economy' but the 'the economy' was just rich people wanted lower taxes and they got it. Our PM us a US puppet, or at least acts it. Car infrastructure reigns supreme, gets all of the funding. Rail projects are cancelled for being 'too expensive', despite being a fraction of highway expansion projects. Jobcenters (and consequently all people who are too sick to work or work under special circumstances) are being handed over the municipalities who are completely unequipped to handle the burden, and have only so far been doing it because they had to by law and even then did a really shitty job of it. Our entire public healthcare sector is bombed, there is no help to get. If you get cancer, tough luck, roll the dice. GPs generally just don't care and will diagnose you with anything to make you leave. Emergency lines are staffed by old farts who can't speak properly and will tell you that no, actually, it's totally normal for a person of your age (25 then) to spontaneously bleed from the anus; don't worry about it!
A Ukrainian refugee wrote a lengthy blogpost on r/Denmark about how he was met with nothing but contempt and racism at every step of the process here, and the comment section was full of "No; our institutions treat citizens like that, too. Welcome to Denmark."
Can't speak for the others, but Sweden is definitely doing better than us at this point in time, but I am hearing it is also on a similar decline.
It feels like the internet paints Scandinavian countries as a social paradise when in reality they have extreme problems with racism & require you to conform to the norm to a high degree, have a massive issue with wealth inequality & corporatism (although unlike the US you're not completely ruined if you're poor), and a lot of other things people complain about when referring to America (but obviously they don't come even close to being as ass backwards as the US in most regards).
Seriously, Sweden has the 12th highest wealth inequality of any country in the world, it ranks worse than Russia, the US, India, etc. Denmark and Norway fare far better in this regard, but they're still the highest in Europe along with Germany and the Netherlands (excluding Ukraine, Russia, and Turkey, which are completely fucked in their own right).
If you want country that actually comes close to meeting "social" criteria, go to an eastern European country like Poland or Czechia or Slovakia or Albania. Now, you'll get shanked if you appear even slightly gay, but otherwise it's pretty great; people don't steal (theft/robbery rates are EXTREMELY low, the lowest in the world probably), sexual crimes are low, there's not a culture of fearing for your safety constantly like in other places (you can walk alone at night in Albania!), eastern European countries are often ranked as some of the safest in Europe (shocker) and people in those countries generally feel safer, it's a lot more equal due to all that communism and stuff that happened, everything is inexpensive (although your income will be a lot lower too), it's very easy to find employment if you're skilled due to shortages. Poland has especially been growing economically and now getting better politically. Plus, Albania only has the third highest rate of cocaine use (behind the US and England/Wales, of course)!
But generally internet people don't even consider eastern Europe as a viable option to move to because it's too poor and nonwhite for them lol. Oh and I guess not being able to be gay in public is pretty bad.
I mean it's not like most people wanting to could move to the EU regardless, they'd be lucky to get in anywhere (yes, even Hungary). It's extremely hard to get in unless you're a highly skilled worker or you have a claim to citizenship/residence by descent from having e.g. Italian/Lithuanian/Hungarian ancestors or recent German/Slovak ancestors or the likes.
No country in Northern Europe has Socialism. They have a strong social welfare system on top of a capitalist economy. Aka Social Democracy. Not even close to socialism.
Socdem countries are great for the people living in them but they rely heavily on the exploitation of the global south. The devastation of capitalism was simply exported to people who had no other choice but to accept it
This is the talking point anyway. I'm not convinced that it's necessarily true however. The underlying assumption is that you can't have Nordic-style socdem countries without the exploitation of other poorer countries, but I don't think this has been shown at all.
It has definitely been shown. Have you ever seen a capitalist country (which socdem countries are ultimately) that relies entirely on its own local resources. One that does not do business with exploitative global corporations? You can't find one because it doesn't exist and can't exist. Capitalism relies on constant growth and you cannot constantly grow when your resources and labor force are limited so they find more resources and labor forces elsewhere eventually.
Think of it like this, if a business does not grow it stock value stays the same and investors gain nothing. So the business must grow or investors might pull out or invest in the competition that is growing causing the business to fail. So when a business cannot grow because it lacks the local resources and labor force to do so it must find it somewhere else. Usually this happens when a business realizes it can profit more of it finds cheaper (more exploitable) labor from more desperate people in order to outcompete competition. It is inherent to capitalism that it must expand it must grow or it fails.
So from this you can extrapolate that a capitalist country run within its own means will eventually stagnate and either give into the capitalist push to expand beyond its means or economically collapse.
Classic leftist wall of text I know but these things are hard to explain in simple terms without making them inaccurate in some way or making them too unclear.
Related but a bit off topic for those who are interested:
Socdem countries are also doomed eventually stop being socdem at some point. There's this thing big capitalist do where when the government does something they don't like they'll just stop investing in things as a form of protest causing huge economic dips. Eventually as these capitalist under a socdem society realize their profit margins are thinning and they have less to gain from exploiting the global poor they will look for more local ways to increase profit such as repealing workers rights, crushing unions, and involving themselves in government because it's always cheaper to change the law than it is to change the business.
Eventually all socdem countries will reach a point where their capitalist will either leave because they can profit more elsewhere or threaten to leave as leverage for "making business more profitable" by throwing away everything that makes a socdem country a socdem country. The reason this happens is because capitalist will always have a motive to reduce workers rights as well as the privatization of government works such as healthcare in order to profit more. It is inherent to the system
That's sorta the whole job of a country afaik
except for China, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, and many African countries
Not sure what you think their job is if not make the lives of their citizens better.
Not that all of those are doing a very good job
Northern Europe is Capitalist with safety nets, not Socialist. Regardless of how well or poorly they are doing (they seem to be declining in many metrics they lead the rest of the world in), if you want to advocate for adopting some of their successful policy, call it Social Democracy.
Socialism isn't "moderate safety nets," it's an economic system based on Worker Ownership of the Means of Production.