2023 is the hottest year ever in record. Everything suggests that it won’t hold that record for long. Why would I bring children to this world to suffer the hell that 2050 will be?
And that’s why conservatives get elected. And since more and more young vote for right-wing parties we’re in for a real shitshow.
Yeah. To be honest most liberal and social democrat governments are playing right into the hands of the right wing too.
Too afraid to crack down on the far right, but still too conservative to commit to large public spending on housing and sustainable infrastructure. Or in Germany’s case, nuclear energy.
I have hope for those organzing outside of electoralism, those organzing within it in the West are in for another rude wake up call soon. They keep ignoring them.
Westerners are not more tolerant or intolerant then any other people on earth, we generally just have higher standards of living as a result of economic and military hegemony. As that continues to decline for more and more previously " wealthy " people the fascist radiclization will get worse in the West.
We need new ways of living and bold ideas. The far right nor neoliberals can offer that to people. Liberals will tolerate dissidents but they will never take meaningful action on the issiues of class, the military industrial complex or encomcis for the most part. It needs to change from the outside in.
Or in Germany’s case, nuclear energy.
You know that not even the former operators of the German nuclear power plants are in favour of going back to nuclear? Even if we decide NOW to invest in nuclear power again on a grand scale - which makes no sense at all economically - it won’t help the energy transition, because planning and construction takes decades and is irrational in terms of costs. However, I agree with you that it was a strategic mistake on the part of the former Merkel government not to shut down coal-fired power plants first but to shut nuclear - but this does not change the current path dependencies of the German energy sector at all!
For decades German politicians have used the excuse that it takes many years to build nuclear. If they had started decades ago, Germany would have a dozen plants now and have no energy woes. Instead we now see a huge proportion of Germany’s energy generated by coal and lignite. Get off the anti-science train and join us in the 21st century. Nuclear is safe, plentiful, and green.
This doesn’t mean they shouldn’t invest in other forms of energy too. Energy grids require diversification, and concurrent leaders have been asleep at the wheel.
And this is why the retirement ages have to be raised in many countries.
People live longer and fewer young to take care of the old (and the economy in general)
Yea and by the time I get to retirement age it will be pushed so far back that only a handful of people will live long enough to retire anyway. Just work until you die /s
I doubt that will happen.
But raising the retirement age is needed in an ageing population where people just live healthier and longer than ever.
Otherwise an ever increasing amount of people will be retired and the amount of people that can contribute to the economy and well everything really will decrease.
The same problem would arise if the amount of children suddenly started increasing rapidly, fortunately that would likely solve it self after a while since they would eventually work too. We need a balance of workers and non workers otherwise society would collapse.
The only way I can see that being sustainable is if we could automate to the degree that the amount of human workers could be less every year. But that’s not possible yet (if ever).
And no I obviously don’t want the retirement age to increase, I hope to also retire some day. But I see no choice.
Covid 2 electric boogaloo?
Europe has proven we can’t fix this by importing millions of unskilled people with radically different values. The social unrest is proving catastrophic. Rightwing parties are gaining traction in almost every European country. The EU is on track to accept more than a million applications this year alone, and most of them have large families which will be granted reunification. Data shows most of them will never work a day in their lives. Our social systems will collapse within a decade at this rate. We’ll be lucky if the EU itself survives this.
Instead, we really need to alleviate the issues resulting in young people not having kids. The usual argument is, “it’s too expensive.” While true, data shows that income isn’t a barrier to fertility. In fact, higher income results in lower fertility, with some exceptions at the very top end of the income spectrum.
As a German, I call bullshit. Every asylum seeker I’ve met either had a job/went to school or was denied a job because the application didn’t go through yet. I’m sure there are people out there who don’t want to work, but please show me the data which shows that “most of them will never work a day in their lives”. Your comment sounds EXACTLY like the rhetorics of the same right-wing you pretend to condemn.
As a German, I call bullshit.
As a Dane, I call bullshit. Show me the stats. Here are ours. Syrian migrants have an employment rate of under 20%. Somali immigrants are under 30%. As you can tell by the same link, their crime rate is astronomical.
As someone from a country where the AfD gains increasing popularity on an almost daily basis, calling “bullshit” rings completely hollow. You clearly have no idea how bad things have become for your average countryman.
Yes it doesn’t work if you make it impossible or very hard for it to work. I’m obviously not perfectly sure but for the amount of refugees we have both in Germany and likely Denmark, especially now with Ukraine we spend way to little money on the process of integration, if there’s not enough (language) schools, shitty temporary housing and unhelpful and uncooperative Ausländerbehörden, we shouldn’t turn to blaming the people who come here for the problems we in the “West” largely created.
Blaming and viliviying Somali and Syrian migrants just gets us increasingly deeper into this rabbit hole, until at the end of the day you have fundamentalist or ethnic riots, or firing squads at the outside borders. Both is completely unworkable, incredibly more expensive and frankly inhumane.
The conservatives that think human rights are a good thing should get their head out of fantasy land, the crusty socdems should ask themselves how they let this shit happen, and yeah the afd isn’t gonna fix it but closing the borders as they demand is the most stupid non solution ever, just letting the thing heat up there on the outskirts until it blows up in all of our faces. Which it will continue to as long as no one takes it seriously enough to actually make a good solution. But relying on the publics generosity and frankly Kafkaesque government regulation and support isn’t gonna get you well integrated migrants in a generation, it takes 3 maybe 5 in that case. Which is what we’ve been doing.
