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Comment by flo123456 | Hacker News Reader

Still living here I must point out that you are pointing an equally one sided picture.

While all of what you say is true and problematic, there are people from all over the world living in Dresden and some parts (especially Neustadt) are politically rather left leaning.

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"there are people from all over the world living in Dresden and some parts (especially Neustadt) are politically rather left leaning."

Nu, nu. But do you talk with them about their experiences?

And sure, you will be fine with a dark skin in the Neustadt and Hechtviertel and co.

But move out of that bubble and you have to be prepared to face a different culture.

That's not how it works. There can be a lot of good people, but all you need is one in-your-face racist encounter to ruin your decade. It's like how even a rumor of a shark will keep you firmly on the beach.

Indeed. One single racist encounter of mine ruined my past 2 decades. I can’t help but think about it all the time till this day. It’s honestly wondrous how a simple insult of 2 words could destabilize my mental health and even pushed me over the tide to harming myself seriously once, thankfully I was rushed to the hospital fast. I’m still getting nightmares every other day, the blurry face of that stranger waking me up in cold sweats (I couldn’t properly see her because it was night). I even got recently diagnosed with terminal cancer due to chronic stress, and my obesity didn’t get any better since the incident. All because some random stranger shouted me 2 random words at some random hour of the night on some random street.

Edit: The very act of writing this comment traumatized me so much that I died of a heart attack. Fortunately the graveyard is near a cell tower, I can get LTE signal.

Do an s/racist/homophobic/ and you have a justification for being a jerk to muslim immigrants.

I'm a little confused -- how do we get from "it takes one homophobic reaction to deeply affect someone", to "if someone is deeply affected by one homophobic reaction from a population, we should be a jerk to the entire population?"

that is exactly the point being made about saxony...

I think the point wasn't that Saxony and Saxons were terrible people in general, but rather that if you're non-white you might get smashed in the face or murdered on the street if you're unlucky, and the odds of this happening being higher than in other parts of Germany. Which seems fair to me given recent history.

> and the odds of this happening being higher than in other parts of Germany

Police data for battery/assault 2019:

https://www.bka.de/DE/AktuelleInformationen/StatistikenLageb...

Homicides 2020:

https://www.bka.de/DE/AktuelleInformationen/StatistikenLageb...

Its not keyed up for race-based crimes, but less crime means also less space for race-based crimes.

Wherever this narrative came from, its dishonest. Its in every thread about Silicon Saxony.

You seem to be on some mission on this thread, maybe you should take a step back and reflect the discussion and arguments.

1. Hate crimes are hugely different from battery/assault, so I'm not sure how your reference adds anything 2. Police data is not a trustworthy source, as police is biased too. Just check some news articles about police refusing to even take in a report about hate crime, where this is more likely to happen, and consider what this means for the stats you're quoting

1. Hate crimes don't exist in Germany. It cant be measured like in the US because its not a thing.

2. You distrust police data and then tell me to refer to journalists instead. Same people who need to exaggerate their findings to generate income.

What am i doing here. You should be the one bringing up numbers on how Saxony is worse.

Believe it or not, hate crimes do exist in Germany. Maybe not as a legal term, but that's a legal thing and a political decision. You cannot forbid the term to be applied single handedly. And if a political decision was made to not count something, it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

However, based on your cliché populist statement of distrusting any media because it's biased, I don't see a point in continuing.

You are rejecting my statement based on people you associate it with (populists), not because you have a factual counter.

How does this comment fly on HN? This person is basically calling all Muslim immigrants homophobes, which is so far from the truth.

I was paralleling parents argument with an populist trope, to make it easier to understand that its not a good thing to say.

Be careful not to read more into my sayings than what i wrote. Its not an agreement, its an accusation.

Ethnic Germans are just as much a threat to LGBT people than fanatic Muslims are, and it's not just the former GDR where reactionary and fascist attitudes bloom.

I had to spend half a year in the ass cracks of Niederbayern... not something I'd like to repeat. People openly talking "something like that (i.e. LGBT) wouldn't have been a thing under Hitler" over their beers or someone shouting Sieg and the full pub responding Heil ("Sieg Heil" was the verbal Nazi salute) is common there.

And then, these very same people have the audacity to complain that "the gays" lure their children away to the cities... no you moron, you shouting Nazi salutes in a pub does.

sure, bavaria is as bad as egypt or saudi arabia for gay people, suuure

god this place has gone down the shitter

The person I replied to was talking about Muslim immigrants to Germany, which our far-right blames for being anti-LGBT.

No, i was giving a hint that parent was fearmongering, which i consider to be some bad thing. So i paralleled it with the fearmongering of the AfD because i think everyone agrees that this is bad.

And you backed them up with even more fearmongering. Why is a self-proclaimed antifascist using fascist methods? "Its justified when *I* do it" my ass. The AfD is problem enough, don't add to it. Bring your points across without fearmongering against groups of people.

> And you backed them up with even more fearmongering.

What fearmongering?! FFS. Just look at the election results of the 2021 elections, it's not by chance that the AfD is stronger in the rural areas - they were 2nd in Straubing, which is the area where I lived.

[1] https://www.bundestagswahl2021.bayern.de/ergebnis_regierungs...

This is my problem with you, your focus is entirely on the baddies, and not whether your behavior makes you one of them. Be better.

I know better that this is not true since i experience first-hand that wehrabooism and homosexuality (including mine) are living by each other with no issues. What you are doing is scaremongering against some group.

Neustadt is marketed as some left leaning paradise to outside investors of Saxony's liberalism. But as Indian guy in Germany around 2 years back, that was exactly my experience in Saxony. I have lived across all of Germany over the past few years, and nowhere did I face any hostility compared to Saxony and East Germany in general.

Left leaning and racist aren't mutually exclusive.

While your statement, put that generally, is certainly true, i wonder if you're familiar with leftism in Germany or in Europe in general (honest question). Antiracism and Antifascism are almost part of the core DNA of many of these circles or at least their self-perception. Doesn't mean that they necessarily live up it, of course. However, the term "left" means something quite different in Europe than compared to the popular usage of that term in the US where, i believe, a large chunk of the audience here is based.

For real, plenty of authoritarian leftists in the world who think the only path to socialism is through an autocracy with a heavy sprinkle of ethnic nationalism. But I think the commenter meant the more lib-left in europe, the kind who would be friends with anarchists.

I was literally pointing out another aspect on top of what GP said of that region and ended with saying that the city is "super nice". I love visiting and still have many friends there.

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