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Germany could hold new elections if Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union fails to form a stable coalition government:
The breakdown of the coalition talks last weekend has done more than dent Ms. Merkel's seeming invulnerability and raise the prospect of new elections, analysts say. Although the Social Democrats agreed on Friday to meet with the chancellor's party next week — raising hopes for, if not a coalition, then a tolerated minority government — the current situation may well signal the breakdown of Germany's postwar tradition of consensus and the dawn of a messy and potentially unnerving politics.
"The distinctive political tradition of the Federal Republic of Germany is change through consensus," said Timothy Garton Ash, a professor of European studies at the University of Oxford. That was what was at stake, he said. "It hasn't worked so far this time."
The leader of the Social Democrats has said that the party's members would have to vote on joining a coalition led by Merkel.
Also at DW (alternate), BBC, The Hill, and NYT (11/20 editorial).
Related: Germany's jubilant far-right has Merkel in its sights
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 25 2017, @11:01AM (19 children)
Quite disgusting. You know what the the difference between 1930s Nazis and you? Pretty much nothing.
The entire root cause of hate is fear. And people are rather cowards, as you can see from the parent. What they don't understand, they fear. And what they fear, they learn to hate. You can take stories from late 1920s or 1930s about Jews and compare them to stories about Islam today in the "alt-right" circles, and they are all the same.
So my question would be, why are you so afraid? Why are you scared? Warum sind Sie ein Hosenscheisser? Do you need a hug from a moslem to finally realize that everyone is the same and just wants to live a normal life?
As for where this hate leaves, it's simply war, death and general shit. For everyone.
http://www.genocidewatch.org/genocide/8stagesofgenocide.html [genocidewatch.org]
1. CLASSIFICATION
2. SYMBOLIZATION
3. DEHUMANIZATION
4. ORGANIZATION
5. POLARIZATION
6. PREPARATION
7. EXTERMINATION
8. DENIAL
So, where are we in the "West" about Islam? About stage 2-3? Trump would love it to have 4, but not quite. In nations like Poland, we are closer to stage 5.
Of course, some parts of Islam are exactly the same. ISIS is like #7, except they were rather pathetic.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Saturday November 25 2017, @11:34AM (6 children)
It's about cultures. Personally, I like Western culture. It has create a lot of good things, not least of which is most of modern civilization. Massive immigration from other cultures is a serious danger. I like our culture, and I want to keep it. What, exactly, is wrong with that?
Let's try an analogy, and two different situations:
Situation 1: You live in a nice house. A friend of a friend is in a bad place. You give them permission to stay with you for a while, until they can get their life back together. Maybe, at your option, you will invite them to become permanent roommates. It's your house, you are in control. This is the equivalent of granting asylum.
Situation 2: You forget to lock your door, and come home to find that a bunch of random strangers have moved into your lving room. Your place is so much better than where they were before, so they tell you that they are staying permanently. Oh, and they'll be telling their friends and families to come as well. This is the equivalent of open borders and uncontrolled migration.
The second situation is what Ms. Merkel has created in Europe, by refusing to enforce European borders. This is a danger to our culture and way of life. The borders need to be closed. Anyone who has arrived in Europe illegally needs to be sent home. Entry by invitation, not by invasion.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bd on Saturday November 25 2017, @01:40PM (5 children)
As much as I hate Chancellor Merkels politics, your analogy, as well as your grasp on what happens in Germany, frankly sucks. To use an analogy of my own, it is basically equivalent in verity to me saying that Trump is proof Americans are stupid and literally voted for Hitler.
So, why is your analogy wrong?
It was not Germany that didn't enforce its borders, it was Greece.
Once the balkans route was established and popular in the Syrian refugee community, the great migration was basically bound to happen.
Making it legal made it possible to actually formally process these illegal arrivals. This enabled us to check their background stories, like checking wether the accent they speak matches their place of origin, whether they know places and people in the cities they come from, whether their passports are genuine etc.
What happened has happened many times in the past, albeit at a smaller scale. People who come from actual war-torn countries are granted a place to stay here until their country is deemed safe again, and are repatriated after the fact. Typically a minority is successful in their life here and will be allowed to stay after that. This has happened with Kosovo-Albanians during the Kosovo conflict, South Vietnamese and many others.
Those who are economic migrants are actually repatriated. This is what happens with Afghans right now, as ironically Afghanistan is deemed a safe place of origin.
There used to be a lot of loopholes for economic migrants that were only considered a nuisance in the past. Due to the massive immigration happening, those are being closed.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Runaway1956 on Saturday November 25 2017, @03:01PM (2 children)
So, how did mass migration work out for the native North Americans? Or, the native Australians?
Mass immigration is death for the existing culture, and we have plenty of examples in history to point to. Where are the people who lived in Europe before you round headed pale skinned people moved in? There are some theories that you ate them, other theories that you interbred with them to some limited extent, and yet other theories that you just murdered them, and left them for the animals to eat. Whatever it was - they're all gone. Well, except for maybe Denosovan man - he can still be found on the fringes of the arctic circle. I guess you Euros couldn't catch them before they got away.
(Score: 2) by bd on Monday November 27 2017, @04:10AM (1 child)
Refugees are not migrants.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday November 27 2017, @10:41AM
I might ask you to explain - - -
History is full of people migrating from one place, to another. Here in the US, the Apache, among others, migrated from one place to another, under pressure from rival tribes. Their (oral) history didn't start in the southwest, near the Mexican border. They moved there from Colorado and Kansas, I believer. (I'd have to do a search for accuracy, but that's close enough for my purpose here.) They weren't viewed as "refugees", nor do I think that they would have described themselves as refugees, or victims. There was pressure that they couldn't stand up to, so they moved southward, where there was less pressure. They "migrated" into the lands where the Spanish and Anglos eventually found them.
There are any number of accounts of migrant people in European history. Germanic tribes, Turkic tribes, and more. Always, they are described as migrating from one place to another. Most certainly, there were pressures pushing them along, but they were migrants.
Today's "refugees" are no different. There's a war at home, they are unable or unwilling to fight that war, so they migrate elsewhere.
And, today's Europeans put up no resistance. Unless they get some backbone, the Euros will be overwhelmed. Then, it will be "Goodby, Western culture!!"
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Saturday November 25 2017, @03:41PM (1 child)
Obviously, I disagree with you. Sure, Greece (and Italy and Spain) are immediately at fault for failing to secure their borders. However, Merkel pretty much led the European politics into providing the migrants with a goal: a place they could expect to stay. Had the initial migrants been caught and expelled, the movement would never have gathered momentum.
Want to stop people drowning in the Mediterranean? End the incentive to try to cross. Turn the boats around. When you rescue people at sea, return them to the coast they left from. They climb over a fence? Open the gate, and shove them back to the other side. Immigration by invitation, not by invasion.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by bd on Monday November 27 2017, @04:05AM
Of course, it is OK for you to disagree. I just read your point of view from a lot of Americans and UK citizens and am a bit tired of arguing about it. So, sorry for the wall of text.
I guess the main point of disagreement is that you think her invitation started the whole mess.
Or that refugees are migrants. You do realise that Syrians fall into the former category?
Here is a run down on why I think Merkel couldn't have reacted differently:
Immigration law in the EU is in dire need of reform, but there is no political will from the majority of member states who do not suffer the consequences.
There is a huge refugee population in the middle east. They live in dire conditions. At least the Syrians among them came from a relatively wealthy country that was suddenly ravaged by war. At the beginning of the crisis, they had the economic means to travel to Europe using relatively expensive illegal smugglers. Many of them were also able to pay for hideouts. A typical Syrian refugee had already paid roughly 9000€ just for the smuggling to Germany.
Germany was just one of several countries that refugees tried to get to due to local legal systems. Sweden and England were other targets.
Funny enough, the increase in refugees had started in 2012, doubling every year and was already well underway when Merkel (an anti-immigration hardliner) changed her opinion and let Syrians apply for protected status ignoring EU rules in the summer of 2015. The numbers increased even more after her announcement, but it was not such a dramatic shift in increase per time unit. Looking at the trend of the preceding years, in the most extreme case, I would guess that the number of refugees in 2016 was twice of what it otherwise would have been.
Why did she give the order to accept applications?
As much as I disagree with her politically, she has an acute sense for public opinion. Letting the immigrants die in the streets of Budapest just to make a point would have meant even more backlash than her pro-asylum stance. But there were practical reasons as well.
According to the EU Dublin-III agreement, Germany was only within its rights to send all the refugees they found back to Greece, as that was the place they entered the EU. Greece would then have to take care of them. If they did so, Greece would have collapsed. If they didn't, they would just come back.
Why would they come back? If they stay illegally for a defined timespan (up to 18 months), Dublin-III makes their asylum process the responsibility of Germany again. The asylum process is protected by the constitution, and there is a good likelyhood that it has to be granted in the case of Syrians (There was only a 30% rejection rate in 2016).
The result would have been at least several hundreds of thousands of people trying to stay under the radar in Germany. Amongst those, there would be potentially a hundred terrorists. If they are granted the ability to apply for asylum, those terrorists can either be vetted by the security agencies if they apply for the process, or are more obvious as they are part of only a relatively small population of people living here illegally.
Terror attacks were bound to happen either way, but the political implications would have been severe if those guys managed to hide more efficiently because Germany was too stubborn with the rules to at least take a look at those new arrivals.
This crisis created a very high number of refugees in a short amount of time, but not an unheard of one. It was roughly the same number of people as those that came here during the Bosnian Wars, but in shorter a shorter timeframe. The necessity to act enabled political majorities for changes in the asylum process that make it quick and efficient in repatriating those who don't have asylum.
So, who says the refugees will stay in Germany after Syria has been declared safe again, like Afghanistan?
In the end, Merkel achieved her goal of tougher immigration laws and no giant illegal population. As a bonus, the intelligence agencies get massive amounts of asylum application interviews while such information still contains useful leads.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday November 25 2017, @02:49PM
u😸
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 25 2017, @04:04PM
Bugger. Let's go straight to 7, with you and your moslem bunkie first.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 25 2017, @06:34PM (5 children)
[quote]You can take stories from late 1920s or 1930s about Jews and compare them to stories about Islam today in the "alt-right" circles, and they are all the same.
So my question would be, why are you so afraid?[/quote]
In the '20s and '30s, were Jews beheading people for apostasy, blasphemy or homosexuality and were they shouting religious slogans before blowing themselves up in suicide bomb/vehicle/knife/gun attacks? Just asking.
(Score: 3, Informative) by janrinok on Saturday November 25 2017, @07:30PM (4 children)
You are assuming that however one Muslim behaves is how they all behave. Because a small number of Muslims in the Middle East are adopting extremism you feel that all Muslims are extremists. You are wrong.
Many western nations have fought wars against each other, have been frightened of each other, and have adopted extremist views of each other. WW1 and WW2 where the main protagonists (but not necessarily the majority of those fighting) were predominantly Christian are good examples, but that doesn't mean that all Christians are evil. We have a history of inter-Christian wars and extremism - look at the battles that have been fought between Catholicism and Anglican/Presbyterian/Whatever. There are good and bad people to be found hiding behind any religion.
What Merkel was responsible for, along with a few other European leaders, was the belief that there is no need for borders within Europe. However, the ease by which the refugees have crossed Europe has caused many to have doubts in the wisdom of this view. Terrorists have carried out attacks in France but have been outside of France with hours of the attacks taking place. France may have extra checks at its airports and sea ports, but those extra checks do not apply in, say, Italy, Greece or elsewhere in Europe. It makes it relatively easy for those wishing to escape to do so. Fortunately, many have chosen to stay in Europe so get arrested or shot sometime later. The UK never accepted the border less Europe. Greece and Italy have, at various times recently, look at securing their borders to prevent the influx of refugees - but they are not allowed to under the laws pertaining to the Schengen agreement. Another case of Europe, imho, emptying both barrels into the same foot.
Don't judge people by their religion - judge them by their actions. If you were not an AC, I suspect we could find somebody with the same nationality and beliefs as yourself who has carried out some despicable act. But we do not judge you by their actions, only by your own actions here.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by jmorris on Saturday November 25 2017, @08:31PM (2 children)
Double digit percentages of Muslims holding U.S. citizenship support imposing Sharia, support violent action against infidels, including here on U.S. soil. That number is stable and repeated across time. Elsewhere in the world that support crosses 50%. Sorry, if that number dropped to 0.1% I'd still recommend deporting every motherfucking one of them. Where is the upside to keeping them? And more important, where is the upside to allowing ONE more to gain citizenship? Drop the jihad support to 0.01 and I'd be willing to discuss allowing the existing population to assimilate but I mean ASSIMILATE the way they mean it.
We can't maintain an open high trust civilization with armed guards and backscatter detectors everywhere. Something has to give, I say remove the problem at the root and be done with it. They can do whatever they want in their lands, EXCEPT build weapons of mass destruction to make war on us with. Any hint of that should be met with an ultraviolent response that leaves zero doubt as to our will to survive them. Sorry if someone's feels are harmed by that attitude but when somebody comes out of mosques for over a generation chanting "Death to America" I plan to assume they mean it. The entire extent of my mercy is in not glassing their sorry asses now, but it most assuredly doesn't extend to sitting by idly as they build the means to achieve my doom.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by r1348 on Saturday November 25 2017, @09:22PM (1 child)
[citation needed]
And no, Breitbart won't be accepted as source.
(Score: 5, Informative) by jmorris on Saturday November 25 2017, @09:48PM
Pew good enough for ya? Good grief, Google got results on the first effing page. Do you even belong here if your kung-fu is that weak? Sure you are smart enough for this ride?
American Muslims views on terrorism... [pewforum.org]
Note they are spinning, when Progs poll it is more to MAKE public opinion than reflect it. "Muslims say killing for political, social or religious reasons is not justifiable" is the headline above the table but the actual poll question is "... do you personally feel that this kind of violence can ____ be justified?" and then they report 12% of "all Muslims" say "Often/Sometimes" And remember, this poll is clearly a push poll if you look at it much. They also throw an obviously spurious "U.S. general public" 14% figure in there as chaff. Most pew polling of Islamic thought conspiciously excludes the U.S. and Europe but does have plenty of terrifying results. Wanna know why Putin is coming down hard on em, Pew says 22% of Muslims in Russia want Sharia Law.
And Google can find plenty more where that came from, most a lot more depressing than a Pew whitewash attempt.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday November 25 2017, @10:49PM
Sorry Jan, but I'm mostly with J-Mo he--aaugh, hang on a moment...*geuuurrrrghpth*...ugh, that is vile. Sorry. Yeah...sorry, but some cultures are not compatible with 21st century civilization. Most of the Middle East's cultures are among that number. I would say much of the US, especially that part of it below the Mason-Dixon line, is in almost the same situation of course.
Now, it could be successfully argued that the reason most of the Middle East's cultures are so awful is because of Anglo-American meddling over the last 100 years or so; I would not disagree there. So maybe some of this is a sort of national-level karma. But still, there's a difference between allowing immigration and having essentially open borders. That means the entire collection of open borders countries are only as secure as their weakest links.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 25 2017, @06:50PM
About here. [twimg.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 25 2017, @07:23PM
Humans have these emotions for good reason. Evolution gave us these emotions because the people without them are long dead.
Lebanon was recently a Christian nation. Afghanistan was Buddhist. Bangladesh was Hindu.
How many nations have escaped the grasp of Islam? Going by modern names, I can think of only two. One is Spain, half a millennium ago. The other is Israel. Neither has fully escaped the grasp of Islam.
When most immigration is Muslim, and when birthrates differ as they do, the end result is a simple matter of math.
Yes, you should fear. You pretend to be worried about genocide, yet you face it willingly. Unless you do as Spain and Israel did, you are doomed. You will be exterminated.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jmorris on Saturday November 25 2017, @07:58PM
And to quote the sign above Mars University (Futurama) "Knowledge Brings Fear" In this case, to understand the problem Islam presents to Western Civilization is to fear allowing this problem to fester. Nothing, absolutely nothing, good is going to come from Mad Merkel's open border policy. And nothing good is going to come from the U.S. importing millions of them either. They are incompatible with us, one must destroy the other if they are allowed to remain.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Sunday November 26 2017, @03:33PM
Of course Poland is at the Polarization step. They are Poles, after all.
Washington DC delenda est.