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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   25064 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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In what ways are Western European nations (to the extent that they still function as nations) fuckups wherein the Dutch somehow aren't?

Based on my experience with Americans, most would conflate the Dutch and the Danes, not be sure who was in the Netherlands, and generally just think that being along the North Sea was enough to qualify for 'northern Europe.'

Most Americans know a few differences between the Dutch and the Danes- even if it’d be expressed as ‘one has tulips and wears clogs and the other one used to be Vikings’.

Their per capita GDP is 10% higher than Germany, 30% higher than France, and about 45% higher than Spain. Their debt to GDP ratio is 45%. When you visit, the productivity and industry is quite noticeable.

I agree that there are obvious factors that make those 3 countries fuckups, but raising the per capita GDP would have scarce if any effect on those.

The GDP is downstream of the general fuckuppery of the French and Spanish. They're just a lot less industrious than the Dutch.

Didn't the Dutch stop the migration in a sensible fashion, by responding to the right-wing criticisms and thus defanging them?

Are there Dutchmen being arrested for posting spicy memes?

Are there many foreign mass-murder (car) or random acts of violence (knife)?

Contrasts to Britain and Germany in favor of Nederlands.

ETA:

I am a boorish American and can't tell the difference between the Danes and the Dutch. For my own edification, I checked the distances. As the crow flies, the distance from Copenhagen to Amsterdam is about the same as Boston to Philadelphia (390 miles). Along roads, it's closer to Boston to DC, or, to my local environs, Seattle to Boise (500 miles).

Not sure why I'm getting strikethroughs when I'm only using one tilde each, but alas.

You're definitely thinking about Denmark, which instituted anti-minority policies that no one in the US would even think of suggesting, like breaking up ethnic enclaves.

Yes, I definitely had them mixed up.

I retract my praise of the Dutch.

I mean did they? Last I heard of Wilders the news were of the same sort of containment inflicted on AfD or RN.

Asking genuinely, I don't follow Dutch politics that much. Did they manage to do a Denmark?

Wilders's party - though not Wilders himself - is currently in the Dutch government. It already had a confidence-and-supply agreement with a previous government in 2010-2012.

I'm not sure if there are too many countries with Germany-like nationalist right exclusion policies left. Even in France, the Macronist government ended up trying to work with Le Pen to maintain government for some months until Le Pen decided to collapse the cooperation - over standard political woes over budget balancing, not over the spicy issues. Belgium still maintains the cordon sanitaire against Vlaams Belang, I think, though that's also a bit of a special case considering that VB would like to urgently make the entire concept of Belgium nonexistent.

Have I mixed the two? That's more likely.

I think so, yes.

Yes, I have.

This also puzzles me.

One might have actually made this point for the Swiss, but the Dutch have exactly the same maladies as France, Germany or the UK that Vance called out.

The Dutch at least seem to be handling their Moroccans better than Belgium does, while being mildly freer from an American perspective than Germany.

A smaller country generates fewer viral incidents, and so looks better if your view of Europe is formed by negative incidents that go viral on American social media. Also the anti-establishment right in the Netherlands isn't spicy enough for Musk to promote it on his birdsite.

That said, the Netherlands really is better in the limited sense that the Dutch VVD are no longer lying about their actual position on immigration the way the British Tories and German CDU are.

Belgium managed to generate more (I guess) viral incidents from time to time despite being even smaller. I suppose their per capita GDP isn't that different.

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