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992
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2 yr. ago

  • I’m sorry, but are you serious? That is quite literally what the AfD does!

    I was asking quite specifically "who" because it is not an official policy of the AfD. There are certainly large racist elements in AfD but I do not believe all of their voters are frothing at the mouth irrational xenophobes. The voting public are generally less ideologically committed than the parties they end up voting for (again, notwithstanding that there are certianly racists among them). And this is the tragedy of the current discourse; one cannot currently question the wisdom of allowing conservative islam populations into the country without being accused of being "extreme" and of being far more to the right than one actually is. The result is that moderate politicians find the discussion unsafe and have deserted the popluation who are, in no small measure, concerned about the unchecked immigration of those who favour violence as a response to criticism of the prophet muhammad and would in large part remain silent if an associate expressed the desire to engage in terrorism (The research in this area is UK based but I don't think it's unfair to consider muslim immigrants to the UK and Germany as being largely similar)

    The shunning of any talk of "cultural superiority" in polite, liberal, university educated society is what results in the only people talking about it being the far right, and then in exaggerated, fantastical terms. It is trivial for them to pull a veneer of respectability over their possible true intentions (as the AfD are no doubt doing), the result of which is they win votes. And a country that could have had more moderate solutions ends up sliding into insanity.

    All because there is an overreaction any time someone suggests that immigration should be controlled on the basis of a persons views or religion or that ones ongoing immigrant status should be conditional on one's behaviour or assocation. Instead a country ends up with little control in this area and the rise of extreme parties that begin to suggest the only solution is to deport generations of migrants..

    Banning such parties will not change anything. Starting to talk in moderate terms about how immigration might be far slower and more discriminating is the only thing that will rob the far right extreme parties of their saviour narrative.

    https://www.channel4.com/press/news/c4-survey-and-documentary-reveals-what-british-muslims-really-think

  • those are words that you putting in my mouth

    apologies that wasn't my intention

    But there has to be a difference between worrying about who comes to this country and calls to expell every brown person from Germany.

    who actually is "calling for the explusion of every brown person in germany?" isn't casually referring to this whole block of complex views in such an offhand way part of the problem? can people not express a desire for some who have entered the country with repugnant views to now leave without this being taken as a pogrom against all of a certain ethnicity? i don't think this is what you are saying. i'm just pointing out how easy it is to generalise and mask views that might be different to our own liberal laissaz faire ones but are not in themselves that extreme.

    In the world of today, don’t you worry about democracy,

    i do. but it survived when the country was dominated by people listening to the pulpit every sunday. and it survived when everyone decided to dispense with "christian" morality at all in the 60's and 70's. it survived when literacy was below 50% in the early 20th century. and it survived when your only news from a handful of paper broadsheets and radio stations controlled by press barons. the problems we have now are definitely problems but they are not entirely new, just a different kind.

    there have always been ideologues and fascists. what has played into their hands is refusing to allow very common and very popular concerns to a part of moderate political discussion. when a good proportion of immigrant muslims will express a desire for homosexuality to be illegal and also express a willingness to stay silent when others support terrorism then wanting their to be some discerement at the border is surely something that should be discussed. instead we fret over the kneejerk reactions of do-gooders who cry racism. which leaves the problem unsolved and the only people talking about it the exaggeraters and fantasists of the far right.

    https://www.channel4.com/press/news/c4-survey-and-documentary-reveals-what-british-muslims-really-think (UK based)

  • The world is trending towards atheism bud.

    this really doesn't have anything to do with the concerns caused by a minority of culturally conservative islamists

    the same people who don’t like the conservative values that stem from Christianity or Catholicism

    it's ok to dislike religious fascism in all its forms though? right? one might take the view that it's ok to limit it coming from abroad as it's hardly going to improve the situation.

    It’s just smoke screen for blatant racism and xenophobia

    this is patronising. there are racists and there are xenophobes and there are people who would prefer that immigration be slower or just less. these are overlapping groups of people but they are not the same. by making it impossible for moderate politicians to talk about immigration control on the basis of values, it leaves only the more exteme ideologues

    I bet if we looked at immigration statistics for the US

    we are talking about Europe..

    but I’m probably more likely agnostic at this point. Now tell me what my values are?

    are you homophobic? do you think being gay should be illegal? think gay teachers should be fired? want to see sharia law implemented? support violence against people for drawing offensive cartoons? stay silent when others express support for terrorism? i expect you would answer 'no' to most of this. it is not unreasonable to express some discernment over people who would answer 'yes' to any of these when they are seeking to enter the country.

    Immigrants bring skilled labor that societies need to survive

    the necessity of immigration is a consequence of class warfare. only immigrants will accept the poor conditions fostered by neglect of the working class. global capitalists want to shift workforces wherever it is profitable, urban elites agree because it's unfashionable to express any discernment over an immigrant's values. meanwhile it's the working class whose struggle is masked by all this and who bear the brunt of social problems when immigrants are funneled into underequiped areas of the country.

  • Have you been formally diagnosed by a psychiatrist or other qualified healthcare professional?

    Undoubtedly ADHD (especially ADD variant) went underreported for a very long time as until only relatively recently we'd have blamed its symptoms on other things. The increase in people being diagnosed is real.

    But it needs to be done by a qualified professional because some ADHD symptoms overlap with other neurodiversity or other conditions. So a portion of self diagnosed people will, in fact, not have ADHD but something else.

  • I simply thought that employees in the software industry were essentially at equal parity in terms of their departments

    Oh boy that would be a nightmare.

    Don't get me wrong, I can easily imagine a working environment where everyone is a professional and everyone is making well reasoned responsible decisions with their hardware. Such workplaces exist.

    But in reality there are any number of reasons why individual workers shouldn't have unlimited access to their machines or others in the pipeline. I've worked mostly in corporate (financial) software environments, but many of these things apply to all workplaces though many places will be far more relaxed (or disorganised)

    A few off the top of my head:

    Data loss - irrespective of who anyone is, they shouldn't be able to plug removable media into a machine and download the production database without being noticed. Likewise, for everyone's safety, no-one should be able to plug a usb stick they found into a machine connected to the network. Exceptions can be sought, and granted, as part of an audited process. Anecdote: I worked one place where we were due to continue working over the weekend and a business analyst took client data home with them on an unencrypted usb stick.

    Verified software - people shouldn't be able to download and execute whatever they feel like as this offers a huge attack surface. Many companies maintain a list of verified software and install this centrally rather than allowing people (even developers) to download it and install it themselves. Again exceptions can be granted. Anecdote: one place I worked, an member of the infrastructure team had installed bitcoin miners on company servers.

    Stability - developers generally do not have access to the production environment, running deployments is the responsibility of a dedicated team, this is because the temptation to meddle when in a pressured situation is too great. Anecdote - at one bank I worked at I made a mistake in a package of changes I'd prepared. The person running deployment came and told me and - because of a particularly time sensitive issue - we went and figured out the issue at the point of production deployment and fixed it manually. This worked but was exceptionally irresponsible. At a different place I worked, early in my career, I made a similar hacky fix and took down the public website of a major UK utility provider for several days

    Quality - the software development process has many checks and balances between areas of expertise designed to bring out the best even if it's more frustrating getting there. Want to change the indexes on the DB? Got to convince the DB admin that it's the right thing to do, can't just do it myself. Want to close that ticket that's way overdue? Can't unless QA / testing approved else I'm just marking my own work. Want to make changes in the integrated dev environment because that's far easier that developing against the out of date mocks in my own sandbox? Nope. Want to expose a new endpoint for my services to talk to unilaterally? Nope, need architectural sign off, network security signoff, and the infrastructure team. Anecdote: All of these have been areas where I, a reasonably skilled developer, would have compromised in various points in my career when my back was against the wall and I was under pressure to deliver.

    Some corporate environments can be suffocating, other software places can be so lax as to be alarming. In my experience there's a sensible balance in the middle and the best places to work have been where management is sensitive and reactive to the needs of developers to get the job done in as reasonably a safe way as possible.

  • Not to mention the difference between top down colonization and bottom up immigration being fundamentally different.

    If they are fundamentally different, why bring it up at all?

    The Afd, nor the people who vote for them, advocate the colonisation of Africa. Correct me if I'm wrong.

    One can acknowledge evils in the past, even be in favour of redressing them financially. That doesn't invalidate the preference that conservative Islam be prejudiced against at the point of immigration.

  • No. This is the fundamental of democracy, it's weakness we have to bear with (but only because all the other options are worse). Despite all the bullshit (and there is a lot of bullshit) democracy has to rest on the fact that a population of adults can make a decision. That en masse their bullshit detectors work good enough. Else we become anti democratic ourselves and start favouring a vanguard of the insightful, educated, tasteful, moral, high thinkers "such as ourselves!" that get to patronise everyone else and disregard their opinions.

    A lot of people thoroughly dislike conservative Islam. Both as a concept and from firsthand experience. There are other things wrong with the country too. But acting like people have no right to want there to be greater discernment at the border, and in fact call them churlish and mentally deficient for expressing anything of the kind, is what leaves them (and the are many of them) disconnected from the political process, frustrated, and open to the rhetoric of more extreme ideologues.

  • There is absolutely a class war going on but it has many fronts. Globalised capitalists acting like one can simply pour population from here to there to satisfy the economic machine creates exactly the kind of cultural tension we see. Many people don't like the conservative values that come with Islam. That's ok. Moderate politicians acting like that's a totally invalid (even evil) opinion only patronises people and leaves them disillusioned with the democratic process altogether. In a democracy people will have different values to oneself, they'll even have a different idea over what's important. The idea that it would be ok for the country to be poorer by have less immigration is a democratic choice and urban elites acting like you can't even think like that is ultimately undemocratic.

  • While I don't disagree that there's a serious class battle going on people are also allowed to want there to be less immigration, especially of islamic culture, no? That's democracy. Steamrolling over this, as if it's a totally invalid thought to have, is what leads to the disconnect between urban elite politicians and the mass of people who are frustrated that the border seems to be porous to objectionable social values. You could have a moderate solution, but by ignoring people you end up with them feeling they're only understood by more extreme ideologues.

  • While I personally don't agree with them, what you are doing here is exactly the kind of patronising I was talking about. The choice between poorer services and immigration should be a democratic choice. People should be allowed to be ok that the country will be poorer but less culturally diverse. If that's important to them. That's that point of having democracy at all- it's not obvious which matters are the more important ones. You may have you own opinions, they may in fact be thoroughly based on data and utilitarian greater good, but as soon as you say 'this whole mass of people must be thick because of what they value and I'm going to ignore them' you're engaging in the exact kind of behaviour that you think you're fighting.

  • The afd is not the root problem and won't go away if it were banned

    The problem is moderate politicians persistently ignoring (and patronising) the working class over serious reservations they have over immigration and cultural dilution

    Same as everywhere else..

  • A lot of people misunderstanding you I think.

    So you, a regular person, is only attracted to very attractive people, maybe a small number of which you've seen in real life and most through media. What to do?

    Welcome to the 21st century unfortunately. Your brain was trained on potential mates who were likely accessible, near by, and likely within the realm of being a good pair with you. You were not designed to be exposed to the "best" humanity has to offer on a global scale of billions. You have been spoiled so to speak, your sensitivity is all out of whack.

    Solutions? First, don't lie in a relationship, especially if you already know you'd feel like a fraud. One option is to follow your conscience of not lying and so not entering into intimate relationships at all (because the other almost certainly needs you to appreciate them in that way). Another is to fast from media a while. All of it. You're in an unnatural situation (biologically speaking) the solution is going to seem extreme but essentially reducing your horizon back to potential relationships of 'ordinary' people and nothing beyond. Therapy helps too. Might not work, but you could be surprised.

    Are 'average' people attracted to their 'average' partner. Yes. Attraction works in very different ways in many people. They know celebrities are more 'attractive' but the reality and closeness of the person they're with is what's more important to them and makes that attraction more 'real'. Did cavemen find cavewomen attractive? Yes. It was all they'd ever seen. Your brain is on the same hardware version.

    It sucks really but, to take an analogy, you're stuck with your regular food at home with Michelin star chefs serving up masterpieces on TV 24hrs a day. You feel dissatisfied with what your kitchen has to offer. But you can't afford a fancy restaurant.

    Well. Comparison is the thief of joy. Turn the TV off (so to speak). Experiment with some new ingredients to see if you can surprise yourself with what's on hand.

    You should probably also fast from porn for a while (if that's your thing).

  • The brothers went to Syria to train and attempt to fight in Iraq against the Americans. They stated their motivation was the abuse carried out at Abu Ghraib by the Americans.

    Then they trained in Yemen

    They were eventually assoiated with al-Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula

    They expressed a desire to kill Jews, Chérif Kouachi specifically stating that he wanted to firebomb Jews

    Targetting Jews is what their accomplice, Amedy Coulibaly, actually did attacking a Jewish supermarket

    Kouachi stated his motivation was "avenging the prophet Muhammad" (for the cartoon) and retaliating against the "killing women and children in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan"

    Jews.. America.. a media company. Not the French state. They have never cited Algeria as their motivation. You really shouldn't be erasing their identity and narrative and substituting your own. That's quite colonial of you...

    sources:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Hebdo_shooting

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercacher_kosher_supermarket_siege

    https://edition.cnn.com/2015/01/13/world/kouachi-brothers-radicalization/index.html

    https://www.thenationalnews.com/world/from-orphans-to-terrorists-journey-of-the-kouachi-brothers-1.114610

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/former-teacher-of-kouachi-brothers-says-they-were-not-intelligent-enough-to-resist-extremism-9973318.html