Well I might look at this Rosa Luxemburg Foundation or perhaps this Heinrich Böll Foundation if I were in need to peddle some specific policy to someone that both cares and is powerful. It’s in many ways the same prisoners dilemma as with all of advertisement.

So yes if they were all gone it’d be better for everyone but as we unfortunately live in the system we live in I’d rather have the few that might actually represent me exist beside all of the garbage. Same with the political parties they are associated with as well.

Yeah this whole thing a bit maximized might be neatly wrapped up in this Hegelian insight rephrased in 2014 found on the wiki

“It is Hegel’s insight that reason itself has a history, that what counts as reason is the result of a development. This is something that Kant never imagines and that Herder only glimpses.”

In this way if not even the greats can do it how could a modern person or a think tank but at the same time does this not imply we currently need all three of them.

Also is the modern YouTube video essay channel sort of a think tank for terminally online people ? Maybe food for thought, maybe a joke who knows really.

It would be funny if it weren’t so sad. As much as reading and understanding smith and other philosophy is important for the individual, think tanks unfortunately seem necessary in a modern context aiming to transform, often quite unreadable, as your excerpt demonstrates, philosophical learning, into applicable law/policy.

As with everything this process is utterly captured by right wing and market fundamentalist interests. Just sort this list by Bias/Affiliation and skim some of the descriptions it’s a bit horrific, but it also might save you from reading an old school stochastic parrot with an inhumane agenda. Or if you actually find one you can agree with it might give you a reasonable first source.

The Adam smith institute is a right wing free market think tank with likely very questionable donors. wiki It likely doesn’t really do research but takes sources that support their preexisting believes and retells them.

Certainly it was at least very hard to make the capitalist exploitation of the worker so all encompassing before the invention of the mechanical watch (Although there was likely a ton of housework and the general situation was garbage what with feudal lords and all that) . It then likely exploded with the industrial revolution and at least in places where the working class managed to emancipate themselves got somewhat cut back. Now especially for countries outside of the west and increasingly also the US and parts of EU it’s likely getting worse, especially with multi employment and precarious employment(gig work, semi self employment, 0h contracts, mechanical turk …).

Generally i feel work where you or your peers get to keep the total output of your work isn’t really a problem, it’s a problem when your work gets appropriated into this terrible machine and as a result you are alienated from the work.

If sapolsky is to be believed we have the natural inclination to view in- and out- group as part of our brain. Everything else is learned or a coping mechanism. I guess this is why people propose lived multiculturalism especially during childhood as a solution to xenophobia.

No matter if he can be believed or not on this fact the book is fun wiki

Rojava wants a few words.

You are right but also wrong at the same time. People might be able to be antisemitic without being Nazis, but if they are in this way afraid or in rejection of ‘the other’ they’ve certainly at least been taught this kind of thinking by a fascist that tries to exploit both them and ‘the other’ for their own gain. In this way the Israeli right wing Government as well as IDF and police are thoroughly fascist just as much and in exactly the same way as Hamas are. “no blacks, no dogs, no Jews” can not be put up by a person that hasn’t been taught to reject others in this way, this rejection is the fascist lie they have internalized, and it is the reason why we call them a fascist.

The splintering of this concept of rejection into, antisemitism racism homophobia Islamophobia patriarchy … isn’t useful when trying to reject the ideas of their suppression, it only muddies the waters. They are the same struggle against unjustified oppression, in parts of which we may be a benefactor, and in other parts we may be oppressed, this shouldn’t make their existence any more justifiable.

To cowardly to scream so I hiss at the mirror instead.

Police violence eviction and the entire prison system are political violence, we’ve never stopped using it so how is there anything new here.

Could also be a Kurd

Your experience might be true, but to frame it as representative or real in any general way like you insinuate with;

if you/they want people to switch up the way they do things, there needs to be an alternative that’s at least as good, but preferably better.

is just disingenuous, you admit you live in a place with 4000 people, yet still you complain about transit. It fundamentally doesn’t matter because you are in the last couple of percent in terms of transit viability.

That’s why it reads like propaganda because while the examples you give are likely true, the overall picture you paint is significantly worse than the lived experience of most people that use the system, because you consciously or accidentally collect examples that make it seem dysfunctional. It’s mismanaged and it could be much better but it isn’t dysfunctional.

I somewhat harshly disagree with this sentiment, sure most of the problems you mention are real, although I always feel like criminal danger in central/western Europe is just not really something anyone should let impact their live decisions, as it’s generally so rare –

Punctuality is very much a mixed bag regional and S trains are usually pretty good here in Köln, there are delays of course but half of them seem to be idiots walking on the tracks which I don’t really attribute to DB.

Long distance is a bit worse than that, you could definitely say delays are common and sometimes very long delays occur as well.

And communication is usually pretty atrocious. Although this usually can be sidestepped somewhat by just reading the app carefully and at least occasionally reading the upcoming construction notices.

But and this is the actually important thing that makes it all worth it, they run a ton of service, to a just insane number of stations. You can legitimately use it for all your travel if you just impose a time buffer about as long as the initial trip. From everywhere to everywhere in this country, usually for under 50€ if you just plan the slightest bit, or with the Deutschlandticket travel regio.

The amount of stations we have in towns of under 50k people might be among the highest in the world. The amount of people within x km of a station with regular (usually at worst hourly) service is enormous. The amount of track per person both in the country as well as company is staggering.

It’s nice and easy to call DB a joke but I think it’s far from it, public transit especially in urban areas, where as we all know most people live, is nearly world class in terms of coverage. You don’t need a car anywhere in Germany if you don’t want to and that’s a great thing, sure if you are impatient or get stressed when things outside of your control have impact on you, you might want a car but it’s very much not a requirement. Unless you almost pretty specifically have your home or work as far away from civilization as you can get.

DB has much more potential and probably should be much better than it is but it’s far from bad even. Some of the arguments brought against it also in your comment will just read like old anti transit propaganda for the car companies, wether rehashed out of habit or ignorance. Please at least get your mostly valid criticism and don’t aim it at DB but the car lobby, and 20+ years of neolib transit policy that’s responsible for this situation.

I knew 14 year old girls who would use the trains in the middle of the night and I have used them for all my transport that’s not on a bike for the last 6 years. And I like the system. Your comment reads like pure anti transit propaganda to me. Even though some of it I’d say myself as a jokey complaint.

To end on a lighthearted note, at some point in time I borded a train (45mins delayed although for me it was essentially 15 mins early in a hourly schedule)heading for Aachen from Köln Deutz. After heading successfully through Hbf and Ehrenfeld we found ourselves on the track heading onto the südbrücke back to the eastern side of the rhine, with our train conductor being about as confused that we were now rolling through the same station i borded the train at, as everyone else on the train. All in all we ended up almost another hour behind.

In this same reality it’s also still more expensive, logistically difficult and just again inhumane. If the afd is getting close to taking charge entirely, I’ll take my bike to France to learn how to make the polices job a living hell. Just resigning to stupid outdated thinking doesn’t seem particularly appealing to me.

Sure some might cheer when they start to push that hard against immigration. Others will riot and burn the streets even worse than they do already. Because for example we believe having such a thing as universal human rights is a good idea.

Because completely counter to whatever you think about defending borders countries have for literal time immemorial tried and failed to gain advantage or prevent each other from doing so by military force. It’s been catastrophic every single time. Or are the Greeks Romans, Chinese kingdoms, Nazis, Soviets, still here with us today, did they have a graceful and good end to their reign.

The choice you present is false both options will inevitably end in the decline of the West, one just might be faster than the other. But there is in theory at least better alternatives, they just require Europeans to stop being US lapdogs. And letting go of the thousands of years old doctrine of military and economic domination, that creates most of its own problems to begin with.

Yes it doesn’t work if you make it impossible or very hard for it to work. I’m obviously not perfectly sure but for the amount of refugees we have both in Germany and likely Denmark, especially now with Ukraine we spend way to little money on the process of integration, if there’s not enough (language) schools, shitty temporary housing and unhelpful and uncooperative Ausländerbehörden, we shouldn’t turn to blaming the people who come here for the problems we in the “West” largely created.

Blaming and viliviying Somali and Syrian migrants just gets us increasingly deeper into this rabbit hole, until at the end of the day you have fundamentalist or ethnic riots, or firing squads at the outside borders. Both is completely unworkable, incredibly more expensive and frankly inhumane.

The conservatives that think human rights are a good thing should get their head out of fantasy land, the crusty socdems should ask themselves how they let this shit happen, and yeah the afd isn’t gonna fix it but closing the borders as they demand is the most stupid non solution ever, just letting the thing heat up there on the outskirts until it blows up in all of our faces. Which it will continue to as long as no one takes it seriously enough to actually make a good solution. But relying on the publics generosity and frankly Kafkaesque government regulation and support isn’t gonna get you well integrated migrants in a generation, it takes 3 maybe 5 in that case. Which is what we’ve been doing.

Ah yes because 2M people without any ~15cm diameter metal pipes sugar and fertilizer makes a lot of sense.

Which is a stupid thing to say knowing full well that the IDF doesn’t give a shit about Palestinians, or anything said by them. The IDF and the Israeli police and public regularly take Palestinian land, harrass their people, as well as jail and kill them. How would any Palestinians suffering from that situation even begin to trust the IDF for anything.

Only if you see no alternative does treating them as the same actually benefit the crappier, if you realise resonably well that they are two sides of the same coin, and realise that this coin doesn’t create much good, it just exploits people. You can vote so that the less crappy ones survive as long as the really crappy ones are a threat, but also fight against the liberals as well if they are currently keeping you down.

Sure it might be hard to imagine a socialist US but if that’s not the goal then you might be missunderstanding the meme quite frankly.

Layers in paint is huge tbf

Not accepting Wikipedia as some reasonable baseline for truthful or commonly accepted definitions is the sort of hill I wouldn’t want to die on but sure. Especially for content that is so politically contentious Wikipedia usually settles on a reasonably holistic description where other outlets will leave out downplay or politically color certain parts of definitions, obviously this happens there too, but it’s more likely to be corrected especially on divisive Issues. I mean you can go ahead and read the discussion page related to a topic and find out why and how sections came to be.

I’m not trying to lecture you I simply think that having any discussion is impossible if there is no shared understanding. Which is why I deferred to Wikipedia simply the most common database of knowledge in the world. The articles there might show me to be ignorant, but unlike you I’ve at least read parts of them with the intent to understand the information provided. Which I do to some extent not to completely accept what is said there but just to effectively communicate with other people, because Wikipedia gets close to a common definition for anything you might be talking about.

It’s not about a completely factual definition because the topic is way to complex and nuanced to have one that isn’t at least several long books, everyone lacks understanding of the topic because it’s impossible in many ways to have a complete understanding of it. That’s why it’s a philosophical topic and not a natural science, the topic is currently completely impenetrable for the scientific method alone.

It is interesting and important to discuss precisely because it’s so hard to grasp, so multifaceted and so central to all of our lives at the same time. And as I said before if we can’t agree on baseline definitions all that potentially interesting discussion is lost on us.

I don’t even really know where to start. First is probably that you don’t get to define words on a whim and that your definition of both capitalism and socialism lacks understanding. Just read the Wikipedia entry for both and you’ll find them better defined within the first sentence of their respective entry.
And honestly I’m too tired to properly explain all the traps you fell into after that so good luck with your Libertarian socialist dream or something idk