Comment by huijzer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by huijzer | Hacker News Reader

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Same in the US. Especially in the party that now lost. Maybe believing in some equality fairyland where everything is fair and equal doesn’t work. Doesn’t work for the US and doesn’t work for Germany. You need to let crazy people do crazy things (within the law of course). Many inventors were “crazy” at the time including Einstein, Turing and DaVinci to name a few. Maybe in 50 years we will talk about the government that forced Turing to take medication against his homosexuality in the same way as the woke politicians who supported cancel culture. A culture that has caused many academics to lose their job and caused even more academics to fear speaking up.

Germany is in a really dire situation now by the way. Car production is about 17% of GDP and sales for all their brands are declining steadily. Especially Chinese sales are going down fast. Relatedly, Xiami is now one of the fastest cars on the Nordschleife. But the German government doesn’t seem to have any solutions. Yes close power plants. Oh wait they have now the highest electricity prices in the whole of Europe.

And this is while their education system is fine. Young German engineers are great I think. I’ve seen many great German open source developers. Especially of course the creators of Typst.

> And this is while their education system is fine. Young German engineers are great I think.

German education system is not as fine as it used to be. It might still be fine at the later high school and university levels, but earlier school classes now often have a majority of kids that don't speak German, holding the whole class back. In parts of problem cities like Berlin there are even classes where no kid speaks German. We don't have enough teachers and the ones who are still there are frustrated and overworked.

> but earlier school classes now often have a majority of kids that don't speak German, holding the whole class back

Nope, that's not the problem. My wife is a teacher. Schools where teachers don't go on the toilet because it's so fucked up. That's the problem. But we need to reduce money there, because we need more tax breaks.

"Car production is about 17% of GDP"

Not sure where you got this number. Actually it's been between 4% and 5% for the last couple of years.

Thanks. I think you’re right.

This is my source: https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/exports-by-category

295B for “vehicles other than railway, tramway”.

I don’t know where the 17% on that page comes from. It’s indeed 6% if you compare it to GDP (4.4T).

> Same in the US. Especially in the party that now lost.

I'd say it's the same in both parties

> You need to let crazy people do crazy things (within the law of course).

Yeah, like stripping away LGBT rights or abortion? The far-right, no matter if we are talking about the US, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Argentinia, Israel or the UK, has clearly stated what they want to do, and they have shown in more than enough cases (Argentinia, USA, UK) that they are willing to throw the entire nation under the bus for their ideological bullshit! And the people have suffered horribly for the foolishness of their fellow countrymen.

I don’t know about you, but I actually watched interviews with Trump and he mostly seems to indicate that he doesn’t want a nation-wide ban on abortion. It should be up for individual states to decide. Although I’m in favor of more choice for women, I don’t think Trump’s stance is completely unreasonable. There are already more than enough federal rules and some states want to be more strict. But you make it sound like Trump wants to strip away abortion rights. Please give me a recent interview in which he himself clearly said that. Otherwise it seems someone else came up with that narrative.

> he doesn’t want a nation-wide ban

I guess he’s too old now but it still must be pretty personal to him.

> like stripping away LGBT rights or abortion?

These are ideological battles which are specular to those of the left. All these laws to extend and protect LGBT rights? Marginally useful only to a small minority (which should be already protected in its fundamental rights by the normal laws) but great to avoid talking about difficult issues: how to go against established interests to improve the economy, how to modernise administration so that is more efficient and cheaper, etc.

It seems strange to associate abortion as something only the left cares about. It's been a very big talking point for the right for a long time.

I agree, I also think it's fundamentally different from other "minority" rights. Anyway, I think the state referendums have proven the voters are going to defend abortion, whatever the right says about it.

> I agree, I also think it's fundamentally different from other "minority" rights.

Both result in completely preventable deaths. In the case of LGBT in massive youth suicide rates compared to non-LGBT youth, in the case of abortion bans deaths from medical complications of which there have been a few very widely publicised cases since Roe v Wade fell.

> Anyway, I think the state referendums have proven the voters are going to defend abortion, whatever the right says about it.

The problem is, when the federal government does things like revoke the certification of mifepristone (abortion pill) or levonorgestrel (plan b), there's jack shit the states can do. If they go and classify it as scheduled drugs, grey-importing or shipping it around the country will be a serious federal crime now.

And yes, that is the strategy. They already tried with mifepristone [1], they will try again now that they actually control the FDA and can just do it themselves instead of asking for a court order, and plan b is already dropping massively due to restrictions of states [2].

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2qq1wqw3w2o

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-06-26/plan-b-us...

> which are specular to those of the left

Are we cosplaying Hellen Keller? The only ones who are upset about the current state of those minorities are conservatives. Not those on the left, the left doesn't care and has moved on. The right is the only one propping up the "culture war" (your dreaded "ideology"). I don't understand how you guys can't see it, it's so obvious.

Conservatives are always cosplaying Helen Keller when it suits them and not when it doesn't - just like everything else they could possibly do. It's an ideology of "how do I win this next sparring matc?" not one of consistency.

It has been a whole campaign based on the needs of the 0.whatever% part of the population, I’ve always been a respectful member of society thinking that lgbt people have the rights to be whatever they want and everyone has the right to define himself, I’ve been even to a gay pride, but now they’ve broken my balls, a bunch of people can’t just monopolize the debate for everyone

>like stripping away LGBT rights

Not even a week ago a new law was signed that enables anyone to legally change there sex yearly while making it a finable offense up to 10.000€ to state reality.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Determination_Act_(Germ...

I think crazy people is very fitting.

> Not even a week ago a new law was signed that enables anyone to legally change there sex yearly while making it a finable offense up to 10.000€ to state reality.

First of all, that's Germany, not the US. Second, the only people who will realistically be using this right are trans people whose legal situation has been defined by a very old law that has been partially declared unconstitutional multiple times for years now.

Of course, there will be trolls abusing it - but it's expensive, so TBH I do not expect more than a dozen dumbasses going through with it. Even name change after a marriage is a huge fucking deal of bureaucracy. I went through that one just a year ago. Banks, authorities, association memberships of all kinds, billing changes for tons of services, new name => new card => new CC number, probably the associated effort cost me well over 5000€ if I include the value of my time, and probably around 1000€ in travel (dual citizenship) and fees for new documents. And for fucks sake it's a smokescreen anyway. There was nothing stopping creeps from invading women's toilets, installing cameras or outright raping women before, and such cases were on the regular. The new SBGG changes absolutely nothing, sexual coercion, rape and other abusive behavior were and will remain crimes.

None of this addresses the problem of making reality illegal not to mention that there is a monumental difference between illegally installing cameras and being legally physically in women spaces. If you want to play dress up and be called something else good for you but forcing people by law to lie is tyranny.

> None of this addresses the problem of making reality illegal.

Recognizing that trans people exist in reality and providing them legal backing for it is not new. Trans (or gender-nonconforming, third gender or whatever you want to call it) people have been a thing for millennia. Even back in old Greece their existence was recognized [1], the Talmud has regulations on their status in society [2], various Southern Asian countries have some sort of legal recognition for them for centuries [3].

"Reality" is a societal definition, and nature alone provides a lot of interesting edge cases such as various sport stars who pass for females in all aspects including having vaginas but have chromosome sets (or hormonal levels) typically associated with males.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Androgynos

[2] https://www.talmudology.com/jeremybrownmdgmailcom/2019/6/17/...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hijra_(South_Asia)

>"Reality" is a societal definition

Reality can be whatever crazy people want it to be

Given that I just posted evidence of non-binary people over millennia and at a large enough scale to warrant inclusion into legal systems, it's hard to call non-binary people "crazy" - they have always been a staple of humanity.

I'm sure glad 99.99% of people are now lawfully punished for not lying because of 0.01% crazy people

Crazy people have been trying to reshape reality to fit their two-gender ideology for thousands of years and it has never worked.

It did bring us the most well known historical atrocity though.

made up claims as expected. Yeah how could people use 2 sexes when there are.....2 biological sexes...the horror.

To the people downvoting me again. Please come with arguments instead of just clicking the “I disagree” button. I’ll happily be proven wrong but I need someone to do it. Just clicking “I disagree” doesn’t add anything to the discussion. Thank you.

“Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.”

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's ok to downvote without comment if someone is not following the posted rules: Please "respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says"

Your response included the statement: "The left wants to chemically castrate gay teenagers and ban single-sex gay spaces." - I don't think that's a response made to the strongest plausible interpretation of mschuster91's post.

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