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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   14202 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 14, 2025

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As @IGI-111 hints, Europe is not so sick as America, but instead is differently but certainly no less sick.

By all means come here if you want to trade the sickness you know for another you don't.

I’m an outsider - what are the ails of Europe?

Depends what you mean. If you're asking for the kinds of things you'll notice after moving here as an American, the first slap to your face is going to be the salaries, the second the taxes, and if you didn't manage to buy a property in the US that you could trade in, the third one will be the housing prices, particularly relative to the aforementioned after-tax salaries.

If you're referring to the kind of Culture War stuff dr_analog's wife is referring to, on one hand she might feel right at home with the European PMC which will provide her with plenty of positive reinforcement, but on the other hand The Far Right Is On The Rise™ - AfD, Vox, Le Pen, Reform... take your pick - and vile Putinists are lurking under every rock, coming up with ever more creative ways to undermine our glorious Union. And if by any chance she's Red Tribe and just wants to get away from it all it's a bad choice as well. Europeans used to smugpost about how wokness is just American politics, but they all got with the program right now, and you get the same bombardment of Trans Women Are Women, CRT, infinity immigrants, etc.

Ignoring the "Europe is doomed because they are not following my preferred policy" style of arguments, the big ones are:

  • The fertility crisis among the productive classes in Europe is worse than the US (but not as bad as first-world Asia)
  • Europe is not self-sufficient in food or energy
  • The places in Europe you can go to escape the NIMBY cities are much less attractive than Texas.

"NIMBY" is a bit of an Americanism to begin with, and I'd say it violates your "doomed because not following my preferred policy" constraint,

Excessive rents in tier-1 metro areas (even for poor-quality accommodation in less-good neighbourhoods) is a near-universal problem and near-universally recognised as a problem. So I don't think this is a "doomed because not following my preferred policy" issue - it is a "doomed because universally recognised problem is not being solved" issue (although the simplest solution would be to adopt my preferred policy and increase housing supply). Certainly my intent when stating the proviso to exclude issues like "taxes too high" or "you can't own a gun" where the question of whether there is a problem at all is controversial.

The problem is worse in the UK and Ireland than in Continental Europe, but Barcelona, Paris, and Frankfurt all show the classic pattern, with the same retarded political response as London or San Francisco.

Consider German villagers (and sometimes town-dwellers) trying to block everything from pork farms to wind power plants to power cables to roads to mosques to railway lines and stations getting built. They're not always wrong to do so, but NIMBY as a phenomenon clearly does exist here.

I thought in the US context it usually refers to residential construction (hence "NIMBY cities") and was a way of saying "the real estate prices are too damn high" (which they are) but polluting it with his preferred policy.

I freely admit to being to letting local news fly in one ear and out the other, so maybe I missed the phenomenon, but I also haven't noticed particular shortage of solar and wind farms, and a local railway construction is currently adding half an hour to my commute.

FWIW, the real estate prices are indeed too damn high. Rents, too.

I hope other euros will chime in. I only know half of it and I'll probably forget to mention most of that half, too.

  • If you think mass immigration by latin americans is bad, then please imagine that they are in fact all africans and muslims and consider whether that's any better.
  • We're behind the curve on trans-whatever, matching you on national self-hatred, but far ahead in terms of green economic self-destruction.
  • You have homelessness? Please, we solved that. Just sacrifice one productive member of society, have him work for nothing but keeping one addled fuck fed, clothed and housed. We hate hard workers and love our unproductive parasites.
  • Speaking of redistribution, I hope you like paying around 50% of your income in taxes.
  • And all that talk of loicences? They're for real. Assume that everything is illegal and you are allowed to do nothing.
  • You guys are fat. We are...slightly less fat. But old. So old. Our inverted demographic pyramids are monuments to behold.
  • Whenever you complain about tariffs, zoning, indoctrination in public schools, or buerocratic overregulation, just multiply it by a factor between two and ten (depending on where exactly you want to go) to get a rough idea of how European countries run themselves.

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