thread locked due to high amount of people behaving uncivil or just being outright facists.
Hey, all you europeans pointing at america saying “what’s wrong with you people”
If it can happen anywhere, it can happen everywhere.
america isn’t special. it’s just one place where hate and fascism popped up in an obvious way. This stuff is happening all over the globe, and needs to be tamped down before it gets too big. Keep fighting, keep pushing, and stop thinking “it can’t happen here” cause it absolutely can, and will.
What are you even talking about.
Of course the Netherlands needs to fight this, but that doesn’t mean American exceptionalism suddenly stopped. Now that more people realize that it’s not “especially good”, but a different kind of “special” entirely, some don’t want to identify with that anymore - but that’s doesn’t mean it’s gone.
“What’s wrong with you people” to these Dutchmen, sure. But don’t pretend that’s not absolutely DWARFED by the same statement aimed at the country lead by an openly stupid, official pedophile rapist, which has gone back to lynching black people and has the secret police shoot people for protesting.
You WISH you had the “bad” were talking about here, because of how much of an improvement it would be.
I do wish we were back at the point you are at.
A lot of the European news I’ve noticed echoes some of the points we were at 10-20 years ago. It’s a lot easier to fight back against at the point you’re at, but it’s also a bit harder to convince people that it is problematic.
When we’re ready to start making our country better again, it’ll be good to have role models. And if we don’t make our country better, I don’t want to drag Europe down with us.
We Americans may be a special kind of stupid, but if you love your country, you should recognize that it can still happen anywhere.
What I’m talking about is that we shouldn’t be pointing fingers and saying “at least I’m not THAT bad” because that’s how we all fail. People that are saying “voting isn’t going to matter” and “america is a lost cause” are just trying to demoralize the ones that are fighting. Protests help. Voting helps. Volunteering helps. Posting on forums helps. Brainstorming ideas in a public way helps. All of these things take small bites out of the problem, and when they add up, they make change.
We should all be trying to make everyone better. We should be sticking together and trying to improve everything for everyone. We should be holding our politicians accountable for capitulating to the US, to Russia, to Israel. We should be pushing back on billionaires, racists, right wingers, religious zealots. We, as a species, are not doing enough to stop climate change.
None of those things are unique to one country, and pointing fingers just divides us.
Good intentions maybe, but from the outside it looks like you jumped on a post about bad things happening elsewhere, that had nothing to do with America, and tried to use it to make yourself feel better about your decidedly worse situation.
Pointing fingers at America with a “look what it gets you” was/is actually a nice damper on right wing sentiment, probably everywhere. It didn’t solve it (evidently), but it’s a prime example, happening in real time.
That finger is deserved. Take that finger, and let it hurt you. Because going for the “see, America isn’t special, it’s just as bad as other places” is how YOU fail.
When we say this we don’t mean that USA drifted to the right and Republicans won some elections. We’re talking about voting for a racist pedophile with dementia. Twice.
Which European leader shat himself in front of cameras recently?
When we were degrading our democracy 10-20 years ago, like Europe is today, our leaders weren’t shitting on camera either.
I don’t get your timeline. 10 years ago Trump won first elections so you already had leaders that were total clowns. Before him Obama was president so I’m not sure what degradation of democracy you’re talking about. If you’re referring to the general failures of your two party system and corruption of all institutions it started way before that but you don’t really see anything like that in EU yet. Voting for Trump and voting for far-right parties in EU isn’t the same thing.
Yea, you’re right I should’ve said 10-30 years ago. But even that, its all a slippery slope. Democracy takes a lot of work.
Here are two milestones on our descent.
Under Obama:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
A bit further back:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act
The patriot act is one that’s really been echoed in Europe recently with the age verification stuff.
Electing far right leaders is a sign of what might come. And if your response to it is, “our elected far right politicians don’t shit themselves on camera, we’re better than America” then you’re going down the same path we did. When the Patriot Act passed, critics were shutdown, because this is America, and we’re the righteous ones, our leaders are elected and want to see our country succeed. If you time traveled to 2001 and warned people of everything that Trump is doing now, they wouldn’t believe you.
We’re not saying America is better. We’re not saying that we have the answers. We’re saying that your path looks familiar.
Gay man here, I knew it would happen as a backlash of the 2010’s way before it became a trend. I am sorry to say that, but Trump first election (2017) did a lot of damage in Europe. Bolstered by the carrot’s mandate, euro far right has unified and imitated him. The euro bourgeoisie, who were more overtly lib (in Europe we’d say “centrists”) in the past, are way happier to be overtly fascist now. So yeah, Trump is to blame, in a way. He is using his status and power to rekindle fascism everywhere, lately through Musk in the German election.
Let’s hope the Dutch can reverse this trend. The Netherlands and the rest of Europe rank very high in the LGBT Equality Index, second only to South America, while China and India are among the least LGBT-friendly country in the world, with the public opinion in China notably being far ahead of the country’s legal progress regarding LGBT rights.
China is not “among the least LGBT-friendly countries in the world”, even by your own data there are 15 countries in Europe (9 of them in the EU) that are doing the same or worse than China. And because of far-right rising all over europe this is bound to get worse before it gets better, sadly.
Tardigrade’s whole schtick is China-bad posts.
Why would they let data, even if they source it themselves, get in the way of their xenophobic bias?
In the ‘legal index’, there are just 3 European countries doing worse than China though (Belarus, Russia and Vatican City)
I hate the ‘tolerance’ word used like this. No we don’t need to be tolerated we need to be respected as human beings with human rights.
What’s up with young men and fascism? I feel like fascism (as found outside the ruling class) is less a political philosophy or movement than it is a simple expression of human nature. It’s all so bare and obvious, the othering, scapegoating, rallying around an invented enemy. Hell, it’s so primitive, I bet it predates human divergence. I’ve seen ducks suddenly decide one of their own flock has to die, and a bunch of the males mob them. I doubt it’s THAT far removed.
Social media. It’s unregulated, and allowing people to fall into echo chambers of hate. When all you see is unchallenged radical nonsense you become a radical. The social media companies don’t care what people see, just that they stay on the apps as long as possible. Young men are a particularly vulnerable group - when you feel disenfranchised and worried for the future you’re the perfect target for easy answers from hate groups. And if you get fed more and more of that crap because you watched a bit, it soon becomes all you see unchallenged.
We urgently need social media regulation across Europe - not bans for children (pointless) but complete reform of social media to benefit all ages. Control of the algorithms need to be taken out of the hands of the big US & Chinese tech companies who use to to create addiction and maximise “engagement” to maximise profit, and instead it needs to be run for the benefit of the citizens / user. Public Service Social Media is what we need - much like Public Service Television ensured balanced and healthy TV across Europe in the 20th and early 21st century, we need the same for social media.
Social media is the common factor between the rise in far right hate groups across the UK, US, France, Germany, Italy and more. The changes in the Netherlands are a symptom of the disease, not the disease itself.
Social media is practically universal; that does not explain why young men are the most right-swinging group. I don’t think it’s just an emergent situation like you suggest. I think that they are swinging hardest because they are most vulnerable to the intentional manipulation we are all experiencing.
Young girls, too. Their decrease is even bigger:
Gonneke Stevens, principal investigator of the HBSC research and professor of Youth Welfare at Utrecht University, indicates that in the period 2021-2025 among boys in secondary education, the percentage with a positive attitude towards homosexuality has fallen from 40 to 22 percent. “Girls are more positive about this, but this percentage has also fallen sharply among them. Among girls in secondary education, this is a decrease from 78 to 51 percent.”
What’s up with young men and fascism?
Brain-rot rots brains. It is that simple.
We’re all subject to the same brain-rot. What’s up with young men and fascism?
No, we aren’t. Some are much more targeted.
And why would you specifically target a population? Doesn’t that also suggest that young men are especially vulnerable to fascist ideas? Doesn’t answer the question, just moves it slightly.
https://feddit.org/comment/15064610
Girls have had a larger slump.
That’s interesting! I think there is a larger trend beyond the metric used in this article, which isn’t specifically talking about fascism.
What’s up with young men and fascism?
Society has been silencing young men, driving them away and fascism accepts them. Pretty much the same happened in 1920s. Important difference though: most current young men haven’t suffered through a horrible world war, or really suffered at all.
I read somewhere that re-traditionalization is an Europe-wide trend.
Problem is that when you go back to the.“traditional” usa for example, some parts of europe were already woke at that point. Theres no “traditional” france you can go back to without beong completely ridiculous if the whole traditional thing wasnt ridiculous enough already.
That’s pure cosplay. Traditionalism where it excludes others but not where it would impact their own life or hold themselves to any standard.
The bigots of every culture in human history have always been conservatives. Always.
There is a valid, reasonable solution to conservatism. We aren’t allowed to talk about it on Lemmy, though.
What do you mean we aren’t allowed to talk about it on Lemmy? I regularly see people calling to kill all Nazis, fascists, etc
He’s alluding to killing conservatives, not Nazis and fascists.
Sorry, what’s the difference?
Oh fuck off. I refuse to believe that you were at the same time smart enough to come to this site and too dumb to not know the answer to that question.
At this point? Honest question. In real life US, what’s the difference?
I mean, like, where are we right now?
In a world where when someone says that theyre conservative it’s because they’re racist, misogynistic, a literal Nazi, transphobia, homophobic, islamaphobic, antisemitic and/or otherwise bigoted - even though they might say it’s because they like fiscal responsibility or that they support business.
What kind of milquestoast reply is that? You were the one that seems to think that there is a difference. So what is it?
My dude, with all that is being done under the conservative flag… If you haven’t started to be screaming mad about it, you are the problem. Then you have become , just like the rest of the republican party a fascist.
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The sad reality is that the left has been focusing on the wrong issues for some time now and when people are getting really worried about housing and healthcare they don’t see politicians waving rainbow flags as the people that can help them. The far-right obviously is not going to fix anything either but in tough times people look for strong leaders that offer simple solutions so more and more people are slowly drifting to the right.
However, the last left-wing cabinet in the Netherlands was in 1973, and the last cabinet with significant left wing participation ended in 2002. So 24 years of center/right coalition. Seems people have to be pretty much brainwashed to believe some left wing party is the cause of their suffering.
I didn’t say the issue is that people blame the left for all their problems. I said they don’t think the left has any solutions. It sounds like in Netherlands the center/right coalitions also didn’t solve their problems so they are slowly drifting father to the right. Not because far-right is so great at solving problems but because the narrative they have is easy to understand and it appeals to people in tough times.
Seems like something is missing in this explanation though. If people don’t blame left wing, and are just voting right to find a solution to their problems, then why is LGBT support plummeting (topic or this article)? There is no relationship between LGBT rights and the housing shortage.
Because right wing ideology is a package. Conservative politics claim that traditional values are the way to go and that everything was better when everyone was white and Christian, women stayed in the kitchen and gays couldn’t marry. You can see it right now in Spain were young kids are suddenly supporting Franco claiming that “back in the day” everyone had a job, there was no crime and everyone was happy. It obviously not true but young people believe it and buy with the entire “traditional values” package. Attacks on LGBT people are also up in Spain because of that even though the main concern of young people is housing.
I’m so tired 😫😫
