It sure is easy to portray your country as successful, clean and beautiful if you don’t allow any free press to contradict you.

The people complaining about that are mostly the same as the ones who complained that the masks were “suffocating” them during covid.

No, I just have very different ideas what progress is.

Progress in my eyes is made when a society becomes more democratic, and when we solve conflicts without bloodshed.

In that sense, sure, the GDR was a step in the right direction, but nazi germany didn’t exactly set the bar very high.

The idea of socialism is nice, but you hardly have any progress if the system (be it built on free markets or planned economies) doesn’t work to improve ordinary citizens’ lives, but only to keep the powerful in power.

Personaly, I don’t care much about free markets or planned economies. I think the best approach, as so often, is a kind of blend, a social market economy that allows independent companies in a framework that protects workers, consumers and the environment.

Thing is, the specifics of the economic system aren’t important. What matters is that the people are the ones who decide them.

There is nothing wrong with pursuing a utopian society, but ultimatly you have no control over what happens in the far future (neither should you, future societies need to be ruled by future people).

The only thing you can control is the present and the near future, so what really matters aren’t the ends you strive for, but the means you employ while doing so.

Ah yes, my grandparents, the landlords. Wait hol’ up, they were working people, not landlords. GDR fucked them regardless.

“bUt tHAT wASn’T rEaL ComMunIsM” If neither the USSR nor China could achieve true Communism, then maybe it isn’t so much a realistic goal as a utopian ideal, a convenient justification for all kinds of crimes against humanity that occur in its pursuit.

I compared these numbers to the general population (Source: https://www.wahlrecht.de/umfragen/ )

Support for the far right AfD is about 5 percentage points lower than among the general population (12% vs 17%)

For the conservative CDU/CSU it is 10 pp lower (20% vs 30%)

For the Social Democrats it is 3 pp lower (12% vs 15%)

For the liberal FDP it is 4 pp higher (8% vs 4%)

For the Greens it is about 4 pp higher (18% vs 14%)

For the Wagenknecht alliance, a weird mix of far right and far left, it is about the same (5%)

Unfortunately this article doesn’t mention the socialist left, which for the general population sits at around 3%

So, to conclude (and from my own experience) youths in Germany don’t deviate that much from the general population in terms of their political views. They tend to be less conservative and xenophobic. Most of them are somewhere in the center, having slightly more liberal tendencies than the general population.

If this surprises you, you never had to worry about how you are going to pay next month’s rent

->go to sleep

->mobilization is announced

->wake up

->too late, go to prison

Yeah, I’m gonna need a source on that.

I’m all for rehabilitation. But according to the University of Adelaide, almost half of prisoners released in 2018-19 returned to prison within two years. Not much rehabilitation going on there. Also, if we’re talking about rehabilitation, fixed lengths for prison sentences make no sense. A prisoner should then be released into society when they have been rehabilitated, not after a fixed amount of years.

“Murder in Victoria carries a potential maximum sentence of 15 years in prison.” Now that’s wild.