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from the your-days-are-numbered...-Drei,-Zwei,-Eins dept.
Anu Garg at A Word A Day posted this story of an upcoming mayoral election in the small town of Völklingen, Germany (near the French border, south of Belgium), wherein one of the candidates gave a spectacularly bad answer to a question in a recent debate.
Representative Uwe Faust of the political party Die Partei jokingly asked, “According to the building code, paragraph 126, each owner is obliged to label his property with the number given by the municipality. I find it alarming that in Völklingen many house numbers are displayed in Arabic numerals. How would you like to take action against this creeping foreigner infiltration?”
To which Otfried Best, running with the far-right NPD party, fell for the joke, replying, "You just wait until I am mayor. I will change that. Then there will be normal numbers."
Mr. Best apparently does not know what Arabic numerals are.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by meustrus on Tuesday September 12 2017, @06:27PM
I'm more of a leftist and I (mostly) agree with you. I wish the people that agreed with me on ideology would stop writing recruitment for the opposition. I'll just ignore the genocidal regression in your last paragraph...beyond pointing out that I could flip all the actors and it would sound exactly like Antifa talking about you rather than the other way around.
But I have to disagree on one thing:
I can say with confidence that the policies of the last few decades are not leftist by any stretch. Many of the most liberal things since the New Deal happened under Republican control, like the EPA, the ADA, and the Earned Income Tax Credit (which was originally supposed to be more of a reverse income tax aka basic income).
Sure, there has been a lot of social progress in that time. But beyond the Civil Rights Act (which reapportioned party loyalties, transforming party politics), that progress has been driven by public opinion and the courts. Corporations are now driving a lot of this progress, because supporting your customer's identity politics leads to ideological support which leads to increased profits. Meanwhile, Washington has been busy working on other priorities, namely dismantling effective regulatory frameworks and safety nets.
The Democratic party has moved hard right on a lot of these issues, abandoning real pro-union policies, simple hard-line regulations like Glass-Steagall, and permanent family-oriented welfare in favor of free trade, byzantine regulatory schemes, and a patchwork of more expensive, more bureaucratic, and less effective welfare programs.
Since you describe yourself as "a very far right winger", I'd like to think you'd appreciate these changes. But I know that the new version of the Democratic party is actually worse for your actual priorities. And I will make a nod towards the movement of the Republican party as well; they tried to look like the old Southern Democrats to steal the bigot's vote, but they just never really did what they said they were going to do.
What I'm saying here is that the country certainly hasn't moved to the left, because "the left" doesn't mean identity politics. "Progressive" is not a "the left" thing, it's its own separate cause that happens to be taken up by Democrats.
But I'm equally unconvinced that the country has moved to the right, because "the right" doesn't mean reverse Robin Hood. Republicans (and Democrats) have been instrumental in this urban-elite takeover of America. It's gotten so bad that our president is one of the urban elite despite vocal opposition to his kind (not that the alternative was any different in this regard).
So yeah, all those things you hate about the direction of the country? I, your political opposite, am concerned about the same damn things. Your opponent is not the left. Your opponent is the corporate, urban elites pulling the strings.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?