Germans better not vote right-wing or “Christian” again, otherwise they can say bye bye to public transportation funding for the next 4 years.
I wish that too. Sadly the people are stupid. Over 16 years of doing nothing, corruption and stopping investments into the country, have already been forgotten because now with the last government of SPD and Greens that wanted to reform and invest, and the everything blocking FDP, the effect of that mismanagement are shown and they are being blamed for. Not the once at fault…
Progressives need better social media managers and to not be above playing dirty. They should be spamming their ideologies over all social media, being loud about mistakes the others made, being low-brow and making memes, phrases and shit that even monkeys on the right can understand. Give the media something to talk about - all publicity is good publicity. The nazis and right-wingers learned it, when will the progressives?
The greens also need to grow a pair. Bring threw what they stand for and yell it from the roof tops! Not what they have always been doing, being so passiv and only feel good words
Yes but we are also going to have to compromise on issues where a big part of the electorate does not hold doctrinaire progressive values (in Europe this means one thing: immigration). It won’t be enough to spam the “stupid” voters with low-brow memes and make fun of “nazis” and hope that non-progressives suddenly become enlightened and see that their values are wrong. There will have to be substantive concessions on policy. Even “stupid” voters know when they’re being manipulated.
The big thing to me is helping the “opposition” (that I put in quotes) clarify their values. Many of them say they oppose illegal immigration to get violent criminals out of America. (Many others are racists) We can focus on details that show Republicans don’t care about violent offenders, ignoring them to focus on nonviolent immigrants, and that Democratic organization successfully removes them.
A big point in favor of this is showcasing how many people were deported under Obama. It was more than Trump! The reason it’s not highlighted because it was “business as usual” going after violent offenders, not to mention scaling down operations from prior admins, and because the organization didn’t receive direct interference to make big shows of hurting innocent people.
People can get more done, more effectively, when their boss isn’t trying to make news headlines about it.
(Many others are racists)
In a modern world where Indiana voted for Obama and where brown people of all shades are now flocking to Trump, I don’t think there’s any hard evidence for this tired (and by definition unfalsifiable) line and I think that throwing it around casually is now serving mostly to make the left toxic, both in the USA and here in Europe. That’s my view.
On the rest, sure. Mastering the media narrative is as important as ever.
If you want to make the argument that “there are no racists” in America, that is a starkly uphill claim to make.
I acknowledge a huge number of voters are not like that. Which is why I talked about them first and regarded Others as being racist. Which is true.
The Nazis are already back in power, and this time they were smart enough to distribute their people among multiple parties. Even the highest ranking Green Party member was enthusiastically defending the genocide in Palestine, and pushing against calls for restraint against children.
It sounds like all of the problems they’ve faced are matters of fiscal priority. By contrast, how much money was spent on car infrastructure that ultimately has still not fixed traffic? I’m betting that number is higher.
The German government is subsidising having a fancy car as an employment bonus (Dienstwagenprivileg).
It’s not technically supposed to be about having a fancy car (i.e. an SUV), but that’s what it’s often subsidising in practice
At leats for Hamburg the plan was to invest 3.2billion into transport infrastructure from 2023-2026 of which 126million€ goest into roads for cars. That is a bit more then half they put into pedestrian and cycling infrastructure and absolutly dwarved by the extension of metro, regional rail and other public transport costs.
That being said that is the city and the federal government is covering up a long stretch of highway in Hamburg, which is extremely expensive.
That’s based of Hamburg as far as explicit costs go, but there’s also implicit costs. I don’t know Hamburg, I’ve never been there, but I’ll make an assumption that it’s like every other big city with urban parking and ICE cars stuck in traffic every morning, bellowing fumes out for everyone to breathe.
It is my argument that for every dollar you don’t explicitly spend on car infrastructure, you’ll get it back tenfold in implicit costs being alleviated elsewhere, especially in the physical- and mental healthcare sectors.
In the olden days Hamburgs city planners really thought cyclists were awesome. Like awesome enough to jump over a fully grown tree on the cycling path. Also it is the largest city in the EU without a tram system…
I don’t know Hamburg, I’ve never been there, but I’ll make an assumption that it’s like every other big city with urban parking and ICE cars stuck in traffic every morning, bellowing fumes out for everyone to breathe.
Thanks I’ll never visit Hamburg
That’s definitely one of the worst crossings on one of the worst roads in town. This road has been built in the 1960’s when people were fully committed to the “autogerechte Stadt” (car-righteous city). Even with the current budget and a green (and more importantly cycling) senator for traffic and mobility transition you can’t fix 70 years of missdevelopment in 5 years. But we are working on it.
3km to the west, the street now looks like this. On the Reeperbahn, 1.5km to the west they also converted 2 of the four car lanes into bicylce lanes, which also will be made permanent now.
In the other direction, the (more or less) parallel Mönckebergstraße is already closed for cars (except busses and taxis), and the even more parallel Steinstraße is due for a full reconstruction this year, after which it will also be closed for personal cars.
It’s getting better slowly but steadily. The biggest problem I see, is that there are often segments with great bicycle infrastructure that end abruptly without any useful transition from and to the old, shitty infrastructure. For example, this is the road leading towards the new bike lane on the Reeperbahn (see above). There is not even a shitty bike path there, you have to either illegally use the pavement, or the 4th lane of the 5 lane monstrosity you see in 5714s photo.
Spending twice as much money on walking and cycling infrastructure as on car infrastructure isn’t too bad, especially when you consider that roads for cars cost 20x more per km than roads for bikes. Hamburg for sure isn’t a paradise for cyclists, and they still build a fair share of stupid infrastructure, but it’s already gotten a lot better than 10 or 20 years ago.
EINE STADT, EINE STATION,
EINE KOMMENTARSEKTION!
SPRICH
DEUTSCH
BITTE
SONST
BIN
ICH
SO
Gut. Jetzt mehr investieren.
Wir haben genug Finanzen.
Aber denke doch jemand an die Schuldenbremse…
I love the Berlin transit system. I know I’ve never relied upon it for daily work yet (the longest I stayed was one month), but it’s been so very convenient to get around the city. Normally it’s so easy and quick.
Per capita, or?..
What are fuel costs at? I imagine the US destroying the Nord stream pipeline hit prices.
None of what you wrote makes any sense.
1st: it wasn’t the US.
2nd: it already wasn’t in use.
3rd: it was a natural gas pipeline, not gasoline.
LoL. Who told you it wasn’t the US? What a dumb way to burn your astroturf account.
If it wasn’t in use, why did its destruction result in a spill that was one of the worst environmental disasters in history?
Removing an energy source affects energy prices broadly.
eVerYThiNG I dOnT lIkE iS AStrOTuRfiNG!!
Did you just learn that word?
Not at all. Most of it’s just stupid.
But the ones spreading propaganda for fascists? Of course. By definition.
Western governments are spending millions on astroturfing operations. Not always easy to identify which ones are their accounts, but the ones denying crimes by intelligence organizations are a safe bet. If the US government allocates millions for feds to pretend to be regular people online, and you see someone posting ‘I love feds,’ common sense should take over at that point.
It’s like you searched the post title on a search engine that only shows alt right propaganda and then summarized everything you found into a sentence.
So criticizing the terrorism of the US empire is “alt right” now? LoL.
Go ahead and make a new astroturf account. Nine days in, and you already burned this one.
Masterful bait sir, you truly got them
