Jinn, I will come back to the other questions and debate with you later, as I am about to go to work. However, I have to respond to this last line here.. given your country's history, do you not see the irony in your reply to my statement about blindly following one ideological slant?? Groups that are separate in their platforms but still believe the same ideological slant, just disagree on policy is really to me, the same group,and all about Political Correctness and virtue signaling.
I can see how a strictly left/right view of parties can lead to this impression of one ideological slant, but there is much more nuance, for example the SPD, the social democrat party, is pretty financially conservative, for example they introduced version of unemployement aide that is less... Let's say "consumer" friendly and, in the long term, stigmatized unemployed people. On the other side they are also responsible that we now have minuímum wages, which proved to be a more liberal act, even though the system can be exploited by the some employers. On the other side of the political spectrum of our parliament, the CDU and the CSU (Markel's party and basically the independant Bavarian branch of her party) have had internal fights about islam in the last couple of weeks. And I haven't even mentioned Germany's 13% alt right party, the AfD, that prominently features a guy who wants to pull a one-eighty on German Culture of Remembrance on the Nazi regime... I have a strong dislike for the CDU, but it's hardly part of the same ideological slant as the AfD.
And if I may present one final argument on why the SPD, the German Green party and Die Linke aren't part of the same ideological slant, consider this: In the 2013 elections the SPD got 193 seats, Die Linke got 64 seats and the Green Party got 63 seats in the parliament, out of 631 seats. The three generally leftist parties got 320 seats which is more than half the seats and enough to form a goverment. So, why wasn't Peer Steinbrück, chancelor candidate of the SPD, our chancelor for the past four years? Well, the SPD elected to not even engage in coalition talks with Die Linke and instead formed a coalition with the CDU.
In the end the reason why people with similar (similar, not identitcal) believes come together in organised parties is that it is easier to reach any goal. If everyone with a vague interest in politics would run for chancelor we would probably end up with a ton of less than one percenters, no goverment would be formed and nothing would be achieved.
I think Merkel has done a dis-service with Mass immigrant migration
First, let me make one thing clear. I don't like Merkel. She is conservative, she is neo-liberal, she proved to be extremely indifferent to energy politics in a way that was clearly designed to make her more popular and she barely cares about social issues, for example, before the last election she made it possible for the parliament to vote over gay marriage rights, then she personally voted against it, which made her both personally attractive to conservative voters for voting against it, but also to liberal voters since she made gay marriage possible. Furthermore this took away the one of the already few reasons to vote for the Green party.
That being said, the only time I even vaguely agreed with Merkel was probably her decision to open the Balkan route. I say vaguely for a few reasons: Merkel didn't have a whole lot of agency with her initial decision, the refugees were being let through Hungary by its head of state, Germany and Austria were forced to do something and taking in refugees was pretty much the only option left. The other thing is that the crisis didn't come out of nowhere. The reason it felt like that for Germany is that we've been hiding behind the Dublin III regulation, which required refugees to ask for asylum in the country they first arrived in. Of course, due to its position on the European continent, that was almost never Germany, so all the refugees for the past years were stuck in the already financially unstable countries like Greece and Italy. Once they couldn't bear the load that Germany, one of the most financially stable coutnries in the EU, refused to help them with, they started letting immigrants through, so Germany was forced to act. Merkel doesn't care about the immigrants, she could have helped them since IMO 2012, or at least 2015, but she didn't until the very last minute which proved to be a bad decision for everyone involved.
Long story short, Merkel can be blamed for a lot of things, but she is not responsible for mass immigration.
and cultural clashes that have resulted from it, not to mention the Middle Eastern view of women is like something out of the Middle ages
I won't deny that there are immigrants who have a backwards attitude towards women, but keep in mind that rape in marriage was legal in German until 1997 and now, just twenty years later, we are a lot more progressive on social issues regarding gender and sex. My point is that people can change and that our points are convincing enough to do so.
forget the perceived inadequacies of Western Nations, which are by far more progressive and liberating for females then any of the people your country has recently brought in. No wonder assaults on women are up, tho the government has tried their best to keep a lid on it, and has admitted such when called out.
One thing that has to be kept in mind is that half of the asylumseekers that came to Germany in 2016 and 2017 are less 21 years old or younger and most of them are male. In 2016 9% of the offences against sexual self-determination involved at least one migrant as perpetrator. According to the PKS, in the entirety of 2016 out of 100,000 such offences 8279 were caused by males under the age of 21, 677 by females under the age of 21 and 8956 by perpetrators where the gender couldn't be determined. So, 8.279% were commited by males under the age of 21, 0.00677% by females under the age of 21 and 8.956% by those of indeterminate gender.
My point is that higher numbers of rape seem to come from a higher number of young, male people, not per se more people from the Middle East.
