Lewis2
2hr ago
I’m sure many did abstain, but I didn’t think the polls included an abstention option. If that’s accurate, the CDU voters should have shown up in the polls somewhere.
Lewis2
2hr ago
Naturalized citizens and their citizen descendants can vote, including those who still hold citizenship in their home countries. As those numbers increase, the AfD will have a harder and harder time gaining traction. Not that it really matters in Berlin. The city is so left-wing, they passed a non-binding referendum five years ago to seize thousands of apartment buildings from their corporate owners, compensate them at less than market rates, and then convert the buildings to social housing projects. Now that the CDU is out, there’s a good chance the new government will try to pass a binding referendum to the same effect.
Lewis2
4hr ago
The latest round of German state election results are in, with great gains for the left-wing parties and the AfD, and a crisis of confidence for the center-right CDU, which had its worst election results in modern German history.
After the AfD’s historic win in Saxony-Anhalt two weeks ago, all eyes turned to the state elections in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin, which were held yesterday. In Berlin, the CDU dropped from the largest to second-largest party, which will push it out of government. This result was not unexpected: the Left, Greens, and SPD had won enough seats to form a left-wing coalition government in the 2021 Berlin election, and the CDU only snuck into power after those results were overturned due to election irregularities. The Left, led by Turkish dual-citizen Elif Eralp, saw the greatest gains, at 26% of the vote, while the AfD also did quite respectably, at 16%. The CDU, Greens, and SPD all lost seats, but the Left, Greens, and SPD will be able to easily form a coalition government.
(Incidentally, for anyone who was hoping that the AfD would do better in Berlin, the city’s demographics makes that almost impossible. “As of December 2025, about 42.3% registered residents of Berlin had a migration background, compared with 29.9% in 2015. Out of that, 976,419 residents (24.9%) were foreign nationals and 678,774 (17.3%) were German citizens with a migration background.” (Wikipedia) Even if the AfD were to somehow convince every single ethnic German in the city to oust the Ausländer, ethnic Germans will soon be a minority in their own capital city.)
Yesterday’s real electoral drama wasn’t in Berlin, however, but in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where the CDU failed to overcome the five percent hurdle and so won zero seats in parliament. This is the first time that the CDU/CSU has failed to receive any seats in a state or federal election. The AfD, on the other hand, surpassed all recent polls, gaining 38% of the vote and 32/71 seats. Of course, this will still result in a left-wing government, as all of the remaining seats were won by the Left, Greens, and SPD.
One thing I can’t quite understand is where all of the CDU voters went. Looking at opinion polls in the run-up to the election, the AfD was at a stable ~35% of the vote for the past year, while the CDU dropped from 13% to ultimately less than 5%. Did the center-right CDU voters mostly switch to the center-left SPD? This is what seems to have happened, but I have no real insight as to why, except that no one seems to like the CDU these days. If any of our resident Germans can chime in, I’d appreciate hearing your thoughts.
Lewis2
2d ago
Re #1, perhaps the legislator is just a secret eugenicist. Poor people can’t have more kids if they can’t have sex.
Lewis2
5d ago
I don’t disagree, but Hillary “basket of deplorables” Clinton wasn’t always the most smooth-tongued of politicians. To your point, though, the quote is actually 28 years old, and we’re still criticizing it.
Lewis2
6d ago
True, but I think she’s an actual, honest-to-God gynocentric feminist, and it never occurred to her that that statement might be controversial. She’s like a pro-lifer who starts off her arguments by claiming we are all made in the image of God. Neither one really thinks about how people who don’t share her foundational beliefs might react.
Lewis2
6d ago
It’s literally a nothingburger.
There’s already a meme for that.
ETA: Now that Reddit has hobbled old.reddit.com, it might be worth revisiting the decision to automatically change all Reddit links to old.reddit links.
Lewis2
6d ago
Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat. Women often have to flee from the only homes they have ever known. Women are often the refugees from conflict and sometimes, more frequently in today’s warfare, victims. Women are often left with the responsibility, alone, of raising the children. Women are again the victims in crime and domestic violence as well. Throughout our hemisphere we have an epidemic of violence against women, even though there is no longer any organized warfare that puts women in the direct line of combat. But domestic violence is now recognized as being the most pervasive human rights violation in the world.
Lewis2
9d ago
I think if you had asked even the most ardent American patriot on 9/12/01, “Do you think we should invade and occupy Afghanistan for the next 20 years?” he would have looked at you like you were crazy before answering “No. We’ll just bomb the shit out of them.” We could have gone in, bombed whatever we felt like bombing, taken out the Taliban leadership, hunted down al-Qaeda without letting Pakistan know, and left. We didn’t have to try to form a modern Western democracy out of illiterate goat herders, child rapists, cousin marriage enthusiasts, and Islamic fundamentalists. It’s not like we didn’t have plenty of historical examples to warn us against getting bogged down in Afghanistan.
As for wounded pride, I suppose I just agree with the old adage, “war is politics by other means.” If the offense is great enough, war seems like a pretty reasonable response.
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It was 25 years ago. Who even cares at this point?
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I told no false story. Try actually reading what people write.
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If you want to bitch and moan about people bringing up old conspiracy theories, go complain to @TitaniumButterfly, as he was the one who brought it up. My anecdote was merely a response.
Lewis2
9d ago
From where I stand, the invasion of Afghanistan was an almost unqualified success. We swept away al-Qaeda, swept away the Taliban, kept bin Ladin on the run, mended our wounded pride, and demonstrated to foreign leaders that they didn’t want to harbor terrorists that would attack the USA. It was the extended occupation that was the problem.
Lewis2
10d ago
Not exactly what you’re asking, but I’d probably just show them news clips from that day. The shocking plane accident (maybe terrorism?), the second plane hitting the building, Bush being informed of the attack, the Pentagon being hit, confusion around the fourth plane, Bush’s speech, members of Congress returning to the Capitol and spontaneously singing “God bless America,” reactions from the UN and other countries, and so on. Give them something of the feel of the event as it was happening. You can probably fill in details about al-Qaeda, the Taliban, etc., on your own.
Lewis2
10d ago
That seems like a rather harshly sarcastic response to the thoughts of a then-elementary school student who had never so much as seen an airport, but you do you. Also note that I said some credence, not all credence.
Lewis2
10d ago
I'm not sure the West was long-term viable after the decision was made to keep millions of blacks in the US.
Even granting, arguendo, everything in your first paragraph, by what mechanism do you see the presence of a large number of blacks in America dooming the entire West, including in Europe, South America, the Commonwealth, etc? It seems to me that the West either committed suicide in 1939–45 or failed in more recent decades (whether due to Communist influence, a superabundance of empathy, etc.).
Lewis2
10d ago
I remember my band teacher showing us a couple of photos she had taken of the Pentagon days after the attack. She claimed she was stopped by Pentagon security and made to stop taking pictures almost immediately, and I want to say they might have seized one roll of negatives (it was long enough ago that I don’t remember for sure). My family members were completely dismissive of 9/11 conspiracies, and at that age, I tended to defer to their judgment on such matters, but her story did strike me as lending some credence to the theories.
Lewis2
11d ago
I’ll be interested to see the reactions when white nationalists start using the new map to point out the relative sizes of Africa and Europe, before asking why the tiny continent should accept any immigrants from the massive continent.
Lewis2
13d ago
Some variation of the Swiss system, where (simplifying a bit) local residents have to approve citizenship requests, seems like it would do an okay job of this. Or at least it would as long as the local residents aren’t all of an “import the world” mindset.
Lewis2
18d ago
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Practice makes perfect, but most people only give presentations and demonstrations at most a couple of times per year, so they never get better. Also, only a tiny minority ever record themselves and go back over the recordings to see how they might improve (particularly by excising “uh,” “um,” “er,” etc.).
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Relatedly, most people don’t prepare properly. I’ve heard it said that you should ideally spend an hour of preparation for every minute you’ll spend speaking. That may be taking things to an extreme, but a ratio of one hour preparing to 15 minutes speaking has always struck me as the absolute bare minimum. I think most bad presenters just wing it.
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“I’ll just wing it” might be more common among extroverts. They enjoy talking to people and assume that those skills will transfer seamlessly to giving presentations (they don’t). On the other hand, some introverts have a deathly fear of public speaking, so they suck because they’re nervous.
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Nervous people especially, but also others, talk too fast. Sometimes this is unavoidable if you have to cram a lot of information into a sort time frame (for example), but it’s pretty common even when there are no real time constraints. Talking too fast isn’t great on its own, but it also usually leads to more “ums,” since the brain can’t keep up with the tongue.
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Very few people take a systematic approach to learning new skills, especially outside a classroom setting. So even if they think “I’d like to be a better presenter” (which more likely than not never even occurs to them), they’ll never take the next step of thinking “how?” And most people who did take a communications class in college regarded it as a silly freshman blow-off class; it didn’t occur to them that they might actually learn something valuable from it. (To be fair, though, many colleges treat that class the same way, assigning it to any random adjunct who happens to be teaching a lighter-than-normal load.)
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Most people are fuzzy thinkers. They include unnecessary details and get lost down rabbit holes when they present because that’s just how they always think. Even with ample preparation time, it probably wouldn’t occur to them to change that aspect of their presentation.
Lewis2
20d ago
Judas has to be an exception, right? “Woe unto that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed! it had been good for that man if he had not been born.”
Lewis2
24d ago
What do you think about early 20th century ads painted on the sides of buildings? There’s been a concerted effort in my neck of the woods to restore these “ghost signs” and bring them back to their former glory. In one sense, it’s kind of stupid, since the businesses being advertised have mostly long since closed their doors. On the other hand, the hand-painted lettering is usually not unattractive.
Lewis2
30d ago
It isn’t even purely about race. If someone kidnapped and hanged Clarence Thomas, many of the people who are currently crying about the lynching of Arday would be downright jubilant. As Sloot said, it’s all who/whom.
Lewis2
30d ago
Interesting how different our moral intuitions are. I would say, for example, that the teenage boys who kidnapped, raped, brutally tortured, and murdered Junko Furuta should have been immediately executed, and the fact that they weren’t was a terrible injustice. Likewise the murderers of Iryna Zarutska and Debrina Kawam, the would-be murderer of Bethany MaGee, and everyone involved with the Pakistani rape gangs. Allowing any of them to live, let alone to ever see the outside of a prison cell, strikes me as a horribly anti-social policy. I honestly can’t understand the mind of someone who disagrees.
Good point.
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