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DeusEx posted:though one would assume that a country with a history like Germany would be less judgmental about war crimes, it annoyingly really isn't. We like to point out how other countries "don't face their history, like we have done", and people really, honestly think that Germany is a shining beacon of human rights now, that is not only allowed, but morally obligated to to "friendly remind" other nations of their present or even past human rights violations, because we have "learned from history" or such drivel. And I think everybody is obligated to point out human rights obligations.
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Oct 2, 2011 12:31
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Deceitful Penguin posted:Holy poo poo. I had no idea you had this kind of insanity going on. I was going to make a post about how at least you guys aren't like the Japanese who try to trivialize their actions in WW2 but it seems you're more like them than I thought.  Not saying those aren't valid points, but they have nothing to do with trivializing any actions in WW2 unless you can explain to me that due to lessons from World War II there ought to be women in the military. DerDestroyer posted:Adolph Hitler Previously on GBS posted:All this Germany-bashing is very very German. How German of you. German.
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Oct 2, 2011 23:21
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Previously on GBS posted:Bashing Germany -> German. Bashing Germany and sucking up to other countries -> more German. The other stuff you're trying to put in my mouth -> poo poo you just made up. Seriously, what's annoying about your gimmick is that you'll probably always feel it's right when it's just the old "you're angry" transposed to a different subject. (Whenever somebody defends themselves against allegations of being angry, the answer is "See? You're just angry!". If they don't defend themselves, they "agree".) And what's "German" anyway? As has been pointed out here, there are several very different sections of society that exist in parallel in Germany. I'd rather discuss things on their merits than based on some arbitrary notion of them being "German" or not. It doesn't bother me so much that you call people "German", but more that you think it means something very specific.
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Oct 3, 2011 00:42
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Deceitful Penguin posted:Well, I was hoping not having to go too off-topic talking about Japan, but all that poo poo he talked about are things that are in Japan, only pretty much worse. Deceitful Penguin posted:And not having identity numbers on the cops is just idiotic. What it means is there is no accountability. You see that, surely. This is not to say they're perfect, but they're generally not as bad as James Bond villain henchmen. Again, I fully support recordings and numbers on uniforms. Deceitful Penguin posted:Intelligence agencies in general give me the creeps. For the longest time Iceland didn't have one, but at least I've met the guy and he seemed ok, for a spook. Deceitful Penguin posted:Actually, what I was going to say originally is that, considering WW2 at least, you are doing a hell of a lot better than the other participants. History books of the allies rarely mention the American Internment camps of Japanese-Americans or the Fire Bombing of Dresden, while on the Axis side the Japanese try and cast themselves as victims because of the atomic bombings. Consider poo poo like the textbook controversies and the fact that they did things just as bad if not worse than the Nazis, them trying to make light of it is loving sick. My main point is that Germany is now one of the better behaved countries when it comes to human rights and related issues. The mere fact that it does some things that aren't perfect and that other countries around it are also doing doesn't mean that Germany hasn't learned anything.
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Oct 3, 2011 06:11
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Deceitful Penguin posted:you you. you you You'd know you guys Deceitful Penguin posted:And the idea that it would come up in discourse is kinda the point, because if you read DeusExs' post, you'd see it kinda has, hasn't it? Aren't we talking about it right now as well? Deceitful Penguin posted:Is, that supposed to mean anything? Good on you for holding police up to the same standard as normal people, which is pretty much the rule in the rest of the civilized world? Deceitful Penguin posted:And not having identity numbers means they aren't accountable at all, because how can you complain about some faceless copper that hosed you over? It's also just the idea that they don't need one that is dangerous. Deceitful Penguin posted:Good thing that in politics we are more often than not talking about specific real life things ne? How much do you know about your Intelligence Agencies? How often have they cracked down on certain groups? You'd know better than me, of course.
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Oct 5, 2011 13:06
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StrangeRobot posted:I just wrote a retarded semi-funny piece about how an usurping group could easily reinterpret all those funny articles into their exact opposite without changing so much a a single word. I'll spare you that and rather say that the fact that some article cannot be abolished doesn't mean that they cannot be interpreted in a completely different way. Whats a "sozialer Bundesstaat" (social and federal state) for example? A federation made of facebook addicts? That joke is bad but still. According to you then, having a constitution is pointless. Why, any communication is pointless, too, because in the end those words could just mean whatever. Profound man, makes you think!  I'll give you that a constitution always needs to be interpreted from a context, but that context isn't exactly hard to find in case of the Grundgesetz. Two of its most obvious design goals were to set a counterpoint to the Nazi regime and the Weimarer Verfassung and be way more clear about human rights and specific about democratic principles that can't be changed. Mr. Smile Face Hat fucked around with this message at 21:43 on Oct 7, 2011 |
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Oct 7, 2011 21:40
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StrangeRobot posted:That lenghty exchange about constitutions was actually in response to hankor basically saying that all is fine and well with the EU because the German Grundgesetz will protect us from all harm. Like it's some magic spell that'll drive off all evil. Plus any distancing is insincere anyway considering how in your second paragraph you reaffirm that constitutions are pointless to you.
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Oct 7, 2011 22:33
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V. Illych L. posted:Capitalism - four hundred years of poverty and dictatorships around the globe! Some people can never reflect if their ideologies have ever done anything wrong, they can only point to the other side. I have seen East Germany in person when it was still the GDR. I had relatives there. The material living conditions and the personal freedoms were crap compared to West Germany. You can't reform a turd. But go on pointing to the other side. Though it's not my kind of thinking, I can understand if people join or vote for a socialist party, but not if there is a direct line back to the East German regime.
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Oct 10, 2011 01:43
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icantfindaname posted:edit: And also, people on both sides seem to be pointing to the other. Consider for a moment that maybe capitalism and soviet style authoritarianism are both bad. As an aside, I think well regulated capitalism might not be ideal, but is fine, and I also believe that what the DDR and USSR became is really not related at all to the theoretical aspects of socialism, but a whole mess of other stuff. Russia was basically a hellhole before the revolution, and chaos afterwards during the civil war (helped in no small part by western countries sending troops). Add the fact that the revolutionaries were mostly unfamiliar with the concerns of rural peasants and openly hostile to them in some cases, and the fact that a violent revolution by nature attracts some very unpleasant people (Stalin for one) and things don't turn out well. I'm not defending them at all, but don't lump all leftist thought in with that. Don't worry, I'm not doing that. People can have different politics and still be decent. I'm not a political theoretician, so I may not have convincing arguments on whether or not the flaws of East Germany were caused by socialism itself or by the way the Soviet Union handled it. In any event, nobody who doesn't' distance themselves from that system is acceptable as a voting choice, no matter how many actually existing problems of capitalism they may point at.
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Oct 11, 2011 07:03
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xf86enodev posted:And let's please not forget the years leading up to 1989. I would really like to know how you imagine that would have gone down if Czechoslovakia, Austria and the FRG had just closed their borders because all those stinking Ossis were just out to take their jerbs. East Germans were not seen as foreigners in West Germany. They were Germans legally and in the popular view. The only people who really believed that the two Germanys were really different nations that should be separated forever into different countries were the East German elite and maybe about a million West Germans (I'd say the entire leftist intellectual elite plus some extremist parties). Mr. Smile Face Hat fucked around with this message at 09:50 on Oct 17, 2011 |
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Oct 17, 2011 08:14
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Hungry Gerbil posted:Every country has the government it deserves. (Unless it's the Greek or all the other people that the majority here is sympathetic to. Then those countries are suddenly not democracies anymore and the population could have never seen things coming.) I actually agree with this saying, but I don't see where this guy did anything that warrants the death penalty or similar. One thing that's necessary to explain to non-Germans reading this thread is that Germans don't believe in huge prison terms for anything. Somebody like Bernie Madoff wouldn't have gotten 15000000000000000 years in prison in Germany, but maybe 15, if that, and gotten out after 10 or so. And this applies to all cases and all perpetrators, not just noble ones. One recent case that I seem to remember is about some non-noble young guy assaulting people in Berlin subway stations and hardly getting punished for that. Also, if his nobility is supposedly worth that much, then why did he feel he needed to plagiarize?
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Nov 25, 2011 04:01
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Hungry Gerbil posted:Thank you, Grendels Dad. Exactly what I wanted to post. "You got a parking ticket? That means you'll PUSH THE RED BUTTON whenever you feel like it!". I get it that you're having problems with this guy because
Your correlation between misdeeds and other misdeeds is questionable. People aren't criminals for life because they did one minor thing once. I wonder what parties you're voting for and whether those guys are all clean and if not, whether you've been spending time looking up laws to throw at them. (And don't worry, I'm not going to vote for him. I just think it's always easy to get into righteous indignation mode when it's somebody who has different politics.)
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Nov 27, 2011 01:03
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Hungry Gerbil posted:He has a lovely character and no morals. That should be obvious right? Hungry Gerbil posted:I'm voting green, but I don't think that the Union is the evil or something. Hungry Gerbil posted:And plagiarism in the academic world IS NOT equal to a parking ticket. You basically have to be a lovely person to do such a thing. And I don't want lovely persons to be in power. And again, it'd sure be interesting to look up some Green politicians and their transgressions. Look, it's all okay and right now people are focusing on this guy, but your zeal against him is a little bit overblown. Just don't vote for him and move on.
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Nov 27, 2011 02:20
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Broken Dictionary posted:Yes... plagiarism and lying politicians are the same as parking tickets because Hungry Gerbil posted:In this case it's not about party, it's just about Guttenberg. He is a loving, slimy rear end in a top hat. Come on, he blatantly, obviously plagiarizes and still claims it was a mistake and not intentional. gently caress this guy. Hungry Gerbil posted:He also basically shat on everyone else doing a PhD in Germany right now. Previously on GBS posted:Similar things could be said about the acceptance of marital rape Previously on GBS posted:and anyway, he's neither an immigrant nor a time traveler. But really, I think it's his inability of own up to his mistakes and the fact that the thinks he can fool the public with some lame excuses that ticks off people more than the actual plagiarizing. Previously on GBS posted:I got my PhD right around the time the scandal broke loose. All those jokes about my dissertation being plagiarized got old rather quickly. Not that they were anything but loving offensive in the first place.
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Nov 27, 2011 07:33
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Hungry Gerbil posted:obviously
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Nov 28, 2011 04:32
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DerDestroyer posted:You got me there. But yeah overall I've found German news services to be way way way better than anything I've seen in North America. Hell just the way they handle the typeface and the paper itself and how the text is clearly organized is very nice. "The grass is always greener on the other side". I haven't found a German paper that's comparable to the New York Times, but to each their own.
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Dec 6, 2011 03:53
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Riso posted:The constant reduction of German history to those loving 12 years annoys me to no end, as if there was nothing else to talk about. What I really think is remarkable is how a country can try for close to 70 years to do everything humanly imaginable to atone for its sins and change its image, but still not succeed at changing the perception of the masses in other countries. Sometimes between that unfunny Family Guy clip, innocent questions about how the Nazis are seen nowadays in Germany and other little shows of total ignorance, I really wonder if it's worth the public relations effort. (Don't get me wrong, this is only about the PR effort going nowhere with most people - not saying Germany shouldn't have changed after the war.)
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Nov 10, 2012 07:43
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Orange Devil posted:Germany's self-consciousness has a strange duality to it though. I mean, yes, there's pretty good education and discussion about nazi-times in German schools, although I did find it weird that my girlfriend told me she learned nothing about the actual war part of the war, having instead focused solely on the social and societal aspects of it. Orange Devil posted:However, denazification did not go as far as we all may like to believe or as it should have. Only the absolute top of the German hierarchy was prosecuted after '45, and people who were influential or even powerful, albeit to lesser extents, before the fall of the nazis continued to be so after. Some of the people killed by the RAF, for instance, garner no sympathy from me.
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Nov 11, 2012 02:25
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ArchangeI posted:Note the "some" in the sentence you quoted. When you have people like Schleyer saying he was proud to have been in the SS it gets kinda hard to feel too much sympathy for him. You don't even have to get all "ra-ra complicit with war in Vietnam ra" on them. It's just giving in to your basest feelings. As civilized people, the reason we're not just killing bad people without a fair trial (and even then I don't believe in the death penalty) is not because we like them or feel sympathy for them, it's because we're trying to be better than them. I also seriously don't think having been in the SS and being proud of it is enough to warrant killing someone. ArchangeI posted:Doesn't excuse the way the RAF happily killed whoever happened to be in their line of fire, of course. Its just that some people are slightly less innocent than others. This is such a platitude. With that kind of reasoning you can excuse just randomly killing people in the street, someone will always be slightly less innocent.
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Nov 11, 2012 03:21
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Drone posted:Most Americans also can't point out Germany on a map, so this is pretty huge. I don't think it's too important to know the exact position of some country you maybe hear about once or twice a year in the news, if that. Most Germans won't be able to point out many major American cities either. It's hard for Germans to swallow, but Germany just isn't as important to the people of the US as the other way around. Drone posted:Yeah Germany could have done a better job with the whole Vergangenheitsbewältigung thing Like what? Talk about it 25/8 instead of 24/7? When I went to school there, we went through the whole Nazi era three separate times in two courses (German and history), to give just one example of things. The era was NEVER portrayed in a positive light in anything public institution. Dealing with the Nazi past is a major part of the culture now. I'd like to know what country on earth has ever dealt with its past like this. All I ever see from other countries is sweeping things under the rug (e.g. Japan) or white-knighting them (e.g. Russia), unless the bad things happened at least a century ago.
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Nov 11, 2012 03:33
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V. Illych L. posted:Dude, he was hardy white knighting the RAF by saying some of the people they killed were despicable. Which they were. Honestly, hitting old nazis who have remained in positions of authority has got to be one of the least offensive acts of terrorism in history. No. It's simply inexcusable. People deserve to be put in front of a fair court because they're people. Exceptions didn't apply here. You're also painting people like Schleyer and other RAF victims as some kind of mass murderers, which they simply weren't. At least according to his German and English language wikipedia entries, he was certainly a nazi, but not a war criminal. That alone is not good enough for me to just shoot him and feel good about it. V. Illych L. posted:This doesn't necessarily excuse the remainder of the RAF actions (and actually, it makes no attempt at justifying even those actions themselves, saying only that the victims garner no sympathy), but it's legitimate to bring them up as they specifically targetted "rehabilitated" nazis (as you no doubt know very well). No, I don't know that very well, because it's simply not true. The goal of the RAF was not to go after old nazis, they were going for some kind of revolution. If they'd really have wanted to focus on old nazis, they wouldn't have focused on someone like Schleyer, and their priorities would have been different. Mossad and others went after nazis who had found cover in some places. I don't have much of a problem with that.
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Nov 11, 2012 04:47
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ArchangeI posted:Not feeling sympathy for him is not the same as cheering for his death. To me it's both based on the feeling that someone deserves to die. The cheering or lack thereof is just based on how strong the feeling is. ArchangeI posted:I also have my doubts that Schleyer was not at least complacent You mean "complicit"? ArchangeI posted:with war crimes when he was helping to organize the war industry in Czechoslovakia. He must have known about slave labor at least. He probably wasn't a nice guy at the time or even later on. But again, that doesn't justify killing him. And your doubts don't justify it either. And four other people were killed in order to kidnap him. To somehow even get close to defending this, tolerating this or whatever is disgusting.
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Nov 11, 2012 06:39
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The Ender posted:Well, to give a bit of western perspective, it seems odd to a lot of people that Germany has so many censorships laws re: Nazi imagery, Nazi figures, etc. When it's illegal to show images of Hitler in the media / in public spaces, it looks like there's an attempt at revising history. That's not a Westerner thing, it's more of a human one. Anyway, it's not at all illegal to show Hitler in the German media. The restrictions are to the use of Nazi symbols. The censorship aims at preventing Nazi propaganda. Unfortunately the legislators went so far as to disallow any use of Nazi symbols that isn't strictly for historical/educational purposes. It's not in order to revise history. While I'm skeptical about censorship and think they went overboard with this one, it's kinda understandable that the German government wants to be able to control the use of those symbols by private people.
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Nov 11, 2012 09:19
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Orange Devil posted:And we all know fascists have never done anything to deserve something so violent. What a nice feel-good excuse that applies to every group ever, with the possible exception of the salvation army. You seem to be very prone to excuse violence if it's from "your" side of the political spectrum.
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Nov 12, 2012 00:23
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Roadside_Picnic posted:I was in a pretty affluent part of the country with my sweetie, who's non-white and studies immigration from Turkey into Germany. While I was impressed with the handling of all of Germany's historical issues and the 'no room for Nazis in the toilet' swagger, frankly, there seemed to be a fair degree of racism in Germany, mostly just of the obtuse variety. I got yelled at to speak German (I look like I could be German) on the train. The East Asian restaurants all had ridiculous ching-chong conical hat caricatures on the menu. Things like that. Roadside_Picnic posted:On the one hand, some of this is the historical stuff that Germany, for the most part, can't be blamed for. It seemed like even issues from German imperialism (yes, it existed: Cameroon and I think Tanzania were German colonies) had been dealt with to some extent. My personal explanation for the anti-americanism has two main components: Cultural arrogance and cognitive dissonance. After WWII, Germans have been taught to be a shining beacon of peacefulness, not least by the Americans. At some point this became so engrained in the national consciousness that even the people who do the fighting instead of Germans are seen as barbarians. Germans have always had a very high regard for high-brow culture and arts. This, together with having gotten the message about WWII, a huge welfare state and a lot of economic success are the building blocks of German self-esteem. In a way, if the world were a just place, Germany or at least its principles would rule it. (I'm not saying that, I'm just giving you the spirit here). So now you come in, from a country that isn't that sophisticated in the eyes of most Germans, but is still economically successful and, most importantly is the one that is closest to actually ruling the world. This can't be! You must be some barbarian or crook! Roadside_Picnic posted:This isn't to run German political culture or Germany down: I admire both. I'm just a bit skeptical of this notion of Germany as a shining light of historical responsibility or that Germans now have to tow a higher standard. It seems like ressentiment to me.
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Nov 12, 2012 03:34
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xf86enodev posted:Hahaha what is this post? A very valuable contribution from one of the best minds here no doubt! Totally not a generic post that someone who has no arguments would make!
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Nov 12, 2012 12:30
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KaneTW posted:The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Germany Discussion: In-depth psychoanalysis of the German population A person describes their impressions of Germany and I'm not allowed to give mine or what? If you don't like my post, either reply to the contents or move on.
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Nov 12, 2012 12:33
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KaneTW posted:No, I'm saying that armchair psychoanalyzing is pretty much a waste of words. It wasn't only directed at you, the whole derail is going on for like 2 pages. Derail? From what? Talking about Germans' feelings about their country and the world is a derail from the thread topic of "Germany Discussion"? It doesn't get more "Germany Discussion"-ey than talking about German Selbstverständnis, and German history.
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Nov 12, 2012 19:28
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V. Illych L. posted:This is a while ago, but I actually have to make a slight apology here: I assumed that the RAF had hit more nazis than they actually did, based on what now appears to be faulty information. I should obviously have checked it before posting. Sorry! My problem with the attitude of "I'm not a terrorist or sympathizer, but I have no sympathy for the victims" is that it's a little like "I'm not a racist, but these people ARE a different type of humans" and it misses the point that terrorism is unacceptable because it causes collateral damage and if the victims really were guilty of something, they should have had a fair trial. And I simply don't believe that people can separate cleanly between applauding the outcome of something and the applauding the people who did it. I've never seen anyone do that at least.
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Nov 14, 2012 01:10
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Previously on GBS posted:This feeling is not unique to Germany at all and it's definitely not specifically about Germany or it's principles, it's about the extraordinary level of social inequality in the US. Oh okay, sorry. I should have seen the correct and objective reason for German anti-americanism, which has nothing to do with Germany or the background of the individual at all, but is based on some statistics. The problem with this is that if people would become anti-<insert country here> based on very objective things, they'd be just as much against some other countries, if not more so. But this doesn't happen for many reasons, one of them being that those other countries are not at the center of attention.
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Nov 14, 2012 01:18
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Deceitful Penguin posted:No, I don't think listening to flavour can be forgiven, oh snap. Hello, dear person who misspells my username, what's with the low content cheerleading? Do you have something to say about my reasoning or are you just annoyed that it doesn't follow some kind of "correct" line and therefore you post poo poo like you did without any substance?
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Nov 15, 2012 02:35
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xf86enodev posted:I've seen DP make ugly remarks about Germany before on these forums. So far he's doing good itt. I don't care at all if someone says something ugly about Germany. What I don't get is how it's okay for people to post their personal experiences here from a one-time visit of a week or so with no problem and then when I post my experience over decades of living there, that's somehow not backed up enough for some people who probably just saying that because they don't like the content. Yes, my life's experience is anecdotal and the reasons I am seeing behind people behaving a certain way are the ones that make sense to me. So how do you want me to back this up? With the names and sworn and notarized statements of the people who told me how they're feeling? I don't know how it's not okay to give a personal account of something that is ultimately personal. Is this supposed to be some kind of echo chamber? I'm sure nobody is going to ask Cjones to back up his deeply researched post about Germans and Belgians (his post doesn't bother me, I'm just seeing a double standard here).
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Nov 15, 2012 03:14
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Deceitful Penguin posted:And it's mostly just you bein' conservative, nothing deep. I don't think not buying into a laundry list of lovely reasons to hate a whole country's population, many of which apply much more to other countries, makes me "conservative". I'd like to see this as me analyzing things. Zwiebel posted:I don't think there was anything wrong with your posts. Personally I just figured you might be overthinking the root cause of anti-americanism in Germany. It's much easier to explain these things as a clashing of political values. Given that people are attached to their values, the reactions towards your post aren't very surprising. Neither are the reactions of people very surprising when they find themselves faced with a political spectrum that is at odds with their own. If I'm supposed to be in that second group: It doesn't bother me what politics some people have around here, it's their discussion style. A lot of my closest friends have different opinions from me, but they don't shitpost on my opinions and I don't do it to them either. Omi-Polari posted:I don't know if it's true that anti-Americanism is worse in Germany. I'd say the thread blows it out of proportion. It certainly exists, but it's not like everyone is consumed by it. I've mostly encountered it as people liking some aspects and disliking others. Omi-Polari posted:But if it is true, it might be explained as a way for some Germans to exercise nationalist impulses when positive nationalist exultation is largely taboo in way that it's not in many other countries. There's less of the "we're the best country in the world woo hoo" attitude that you constantly see in the U.S. But the same kind of thinking where you classify whole groups of people like ants is still there - it's just doing it the other way around. Yours is about the best analysis of the phenomenon I can think of. What I've seen a lot of in private conversations is a "we're the best country in the world" attitude minus the woo-hoo. Basically nobody denying that the Nazis and WWII happened, and people feeling genuinely bad about that, but on the other side pretty good about what the country has become after WWII. The aspects that get emphasized may differ a little bit by political persuasion, but overall the verdict tends to be that it's the best country. One group may emphasize the economy more, while another may point out the Sozialstaat. So the positive nationalism is there, it's just not expressed as openly as in other places.
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Nov 15, 2012 10:31
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Sereri posted:Notspeisegebäude Hört sich an wie eine Einrichtung, in der Hungerstreikende zwangsernährt werden. Das hässlichste Wort der deutschen Sprache ist für mich "Knirps", aber "Speise" kommt gleich danach  .
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Dec 14, 2012 00:30
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Landsknecht posted:How did they decide the split? I know Finanz and the AA are run prettymuch exclusively from Berlin, but I think a lot of the domestic stuff is still in both/bonn? It seems incredibly stupid, but at this point moving everything to Berlin would only serve to take a shitload of money out of Bonn. And back then it wouldn't have had the same effect? The decision to not completely move the government was pretty ridiculous and based on the desire to placate those who were against having Berlin as a capital instead of Bonn in the first place. In case you weren't there / too young / don't remember / whatever: It's always been part of the Grundgesetz (constitution) that Berlin is the capital. Due to that not being feasible in practice while Germany was divided, the government of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (aka "West Germany") was set up in Bonn with the understanding that it would be temporary. For the next several decades, politicians went on to talk about how the government would of course immediately be moved to Berlin as soon as Germany would be reunified (which basically everyone thought impossible up until November of 1989). Then the unthinkable - reunification - actually happened and suddenly the talking point was "Yeah, Berlin is the capital, but not the seat of the government, we'll need a vote to change this". When Berlin won, this "Yeah, the government is going to move, but not all government agencies will move" BS was implemented. It's a miracle that anything was moved at all. I wouldn't have been surprised if the next talking point would have been "Yeah, the agencies will move, but the officials will stay in Bonn and telecommute".
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Dec 24, 2012 07:59
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Teron D Amun posted:this is much better than Derricks past, lets have a look what the BND (the West Germany Intelligence Service) was up to: This all rests on the testimony of one guy, and the media and people who are writing comments are "just asking questions" - hmm... I'm not saying that this is impossible, but I don't know why you're presenting this as an established fact. Maybe because you'd like it to be so?
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May 9, 2013 23:15
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Topical placeholder until I give a real reply: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zUZlxEYF8o
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May 11, 2013 03:15
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dreamin' posted:It's an absolute lie to claim that "Deutsch-anything" is a word that is actually used in every day language. It might be used in print, but in every day spoken language there are Germans and there are turks. dreamin' posted:And it then took until the SPD/Green government in 2000 for legislation to even allow dual citizenship for second generation immigrants, under strict rules. (My citizenship is German for example and if I apply to gain Bolivian citizenship, too, which I am entitled to on account of my father, in theory I have to apply for a special permit or otherwise I will lose my German citizenship. I say in theory because most foreign states simply don't feel the need to inform the German state of the whole procedure so if Germany never officially knows about my second citizenship they also won't revoke theirs). The fact that Germany generally doesn't allow dual citizenship for people who are naturalized while the US does allow this also explains why many foreigners living in Germany would be reluctant to become Germans and why that situation is different from the US and many other countries. Mr. Smile Face Hat fucked around with this message at 10:07 on May 11, 2013 |
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May 11, 2013 10:04
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Baronjutter posted:As I was reading all about how germany is pretty new and a mostly made-up collection of different cultures and nations that just happen to more or less speak the same-ish language Okay, countries don't exist, cultures doesn't exist and languages probably also don't exist, and I hate every little thing they do but I still want to immigrate because... It's understandable that people argue in self-serving ways, but a lot of the garbage that got posted about the country and its culture not really existing or being new and a mixture etc. would also apply to most other major countries.
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May 11, 2013 23:52
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Deceitful Penguin posted:For a moment I thought you were gonna come out as Bavarian, what with the whole "Wir sind unseren eigenes Land!" and whatnot. And if you wanna say a Swabian dude doesn't have more in common with an Austrian than, say, Schleswig-Holstein I don't know what to tell you. Modern German is an artificially constructed language similar to, beh, one of the dialects, forget which one, while the country itself is an amalgamation of various counties, principalities, furstdoms and whatevers, united only 'cause of politics. And hell, you don't have to go far back when that meant something different. What a weird rant. An artificially constructed language is something like Esperanto. Without even digging too deep, I guess Switzerland (four languages!), Belgium (two), Spain (at least three), the UK, Italy etc. all do not exist either, because they either don't have their own languages or their languages are just as "artificially constructed" as German is. Deceitful Penguin posted:And people immigrate for the money. For fucks sake, people immigrate to the US, you think they wouldn't go for Germany, no matter the flaws? You think they should be happy you're letting them in at all? Be serious. What are you trying to say exactly? That they are coming for the money or not? And that they shouldn't be happy? What's the point of immigrating to a place that doesn't make you happy or give you the expectation that you're better off than before? Deceitful Penguin posted:Wow, it's like that in many other countries? Good thing we aren't in a thread, say, solely defined by it's discussion of a certain country but instead all of the major ones. Then you'd look a bit like an idiot for criticizing the discussion as overly specific instead of being flawed or wrong somehow. And if we really wanna go down that road, yeah countries, nations, all kinds of poo poo like that is pretty drat arbitrary most of the time. Well, if it's all just the same poo poo, man, then I don't know, man, why people want to deal with that poo poo, man, instead of just staying where they are, man. In any event, even in a thread about Germany specifically, it's still okay to compare Germany to other countries. You've just done that with the US. icantfindaname posted:It's almost as if the idea of a nation state is discredited and obsolete. This doesn't mean you have to open the borders to literally everyone, but it would seem to indicate that "well they don't have the same religion and aren't trying their utmost to become the most German Germans on earth" is not a valid reason to relegate an ethnic group to second class status and stuff them in ghettos for decades. The hyperbole about the cultural expectations is nice and it may be that many people regard the nation state the way you do (and I'm doing that also to a degree), but nonetheless I don't think it's so wrong to compare countries not only to some ideal utopia where no nations and borders exist, but to other existing countries and how they're handling things.
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May 12, 2013 06:04
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