German contest to live in depopulated Soviet-era city proves global hit
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
An example to illustrate how dire this situation is: I was contacted multiple times by small East German universities that literally told me, I could immediately start a professorships there. Apparently the selection process is at the moment almost a formality, since they just don’t have any applicants for the positions..
The second is culturally hard for me to imagine in Germany, but if so, that could show even more strongly how extreme the situation is!
In other countries, academic labor unions might be mad about it, but it's theoretically possible that some universities might occasionally choose to grant academic teaching positions to people with unusual backgrounds. One of my great teachers at UC Berkeley was Brian Harvey, who had a PhD in education (not computer science) and only a master's degree in computer science. He was made a "lecturer with security of employment" (he could design and run courses, including courses that were mandatory for the computer science major, and give grades).
David D. Friedman was a law professor at Santa Clara University and had a physics PhD and no law degree of any kind.
These aren't quite the examples I want, because both of these people do have PhDs, just not in the subjects that they taught.
Wikipedia gives seven examples of famous U.S. professors who in fact had no doctoral degree, and in a few cases no postgraduate education at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professors_in_the_United_State...
This is called "exceptional" there, and it's clearly very rare (although all of the people mentioned are quite famous, and there are presumably less famous examples); I just mean to make the cultural point that outside of Germany people tend to believe that universities are in principle allowed to make such exceptions.
(There are also tertiary education institutions like community colleges that more routinely allow people without PhDs to teach, but these probably aren't relevant here because they're mostly not called universities and mostly can't issue bachelor's or higher degrees.)
Not a native speaker, but is depopulated really the right word here or just clickbait? At least I was expecting something else. Heavily shrunk of course.
(I don't think debugged software is a commonly used term, so no need to discuss the meaning)
Edit: Genuine question: Would native speakers call Detroit depopulated? The shrinkage seems to be about the same ratio.
But that's certainly less troits than bones in a deboned fish!
The expectation using those terms is that only a negligible amount remains if any at all.
Depopulated implies change, people used to live there. For me it meant no significant number left.
yes, as I said, it means a decrease, but the question of to what degree is unspecified. The assumption that it means to a near-zero degree is erroneous.
I would consider depopulated to be correct
Straight from the dictionary:
depopulate (v): to substantially reduce the population of (an area)
https://www.fachkraefteportal-brandenburg.de/eisenhuettensta...
If you live in a town with a shrinking population with a labour shortage, it doesn't really seem to make sense to be anti migrants...
True left-wing politicians like Bernie Sanders are still against immigration because it lowers the wages of working class people.
> Two-thirds of Syrian refugees are now employed
I don't think legitimate Syrian refugees were the biggest problem. Rather, the open-door policy was abused by lots of young men from other MENA-countries, with no eligibility for asylum. Deporting them proved pretty hard, and crime stats prove that some of them had a very bad attitude towards their new host.
We should be using immigration to shorten the workday for everyone, thus counter-acting its effects of wage suppression and giving people more time to dedicate to relationships, thus recovering the birth rate and reducing the need for immigration. Of course this will never happen, because economic growth is more important than people's well being.
https://www.politico.com/news/2019/11/07/bernie-sanders-2020...
If that is the position people hold, I think it would be good to understand why they feel that way.
To me, holding that position just feels racist or xenophobic, but I'm hoping that there's a lot more nuance to it than that. But I just don't know, and don't know anyone who holds that view such that I can ask them.
So basically right wing Americans?
That might have even been true decades ago when rates of influx were tiny, but now we live with a firehose under the assumption that there cannot be any hysteresis — we are a big planet, any new culture is a point mass. And that all these new populations get along (they don't).
We invaded Afghanistan and started nation building on the assumption that within every Afghan is a Western liberal trying to get out. If you haven't seen it, please watch the Adam Curtis doc "Bitter lake" to see how much of a disaster this project was. We don't understand their culture at all.
Those same people who planned that war brought about the current normal of historically flows of people every year. Some of them have explicitly said they wanted to do a cultural transformation project too but I'm prepared to say that was a relatively small group of extremists.
Most of the world is very, very, different to the things westerners are used to. We don't have clans, we don't marry inside our families, we don't grow up wanting to make our parents proud anywhere near as much as in non-western countries (etc, "WEIRD" culture as argued in the now-famous book).
Not all non-western countries are the same e.g. SEA famously quite compatible with our culture up to a point, but you'd clearly give a daughter very different travel advice if she was going to Morocco versus Inverness.
If nothing else, is it not a bit weird to go to quite a few large European cities and find roughly the same distribution of people serving your coffee or waiting at your table?
I genuinely wonder what the many Chinese tourists coming to London think when they go into a shop to buy some water or something and all the staff are new arrivals to Britain speaking (say) Hindi rather than English to eachother.
And that's not to say they couldn't integrate at some point but at the moment the "purpose of a system is what it does" revealed preference is that we don't want them to.
Also, this conservative thing of being bothered by people speaking a language they don’t understand amongst themselves shows the eternal entitlement they feel. Everyone’s actions must cater to me, I must understand and be able to participate in everything I want without having to do anything extra.
It’s like people visiting the countryside in Brazil and expecting to find English speaking restaurant servers everywhere.
The staff in my local tesco and sainsburys do not primarily speak English to eachother, and have previously struggled to understand basic questions I've had.
Please tell me in what way I'm entitled by wondering if this is a good way to organise a society? No one wanted it.
The purpose of a nation should be to do great things. How can we do anything with huge cultural questions floating around unanswered?
"What does it mean to be British?" is now a thing, and is in turn completely unanswerable. What are British values? Being nice to people?
This is really only a recent western dalliance too, most of the world's largest cities are actually extremely homogenous because they're in Asia.
> This is really only a recent western dalliance too
Historically, it's the opposite, homogenous populations are a very recent thing.
> "What does it mean to be British?"
Doesn't mean much? There's Wales and Scotland right there, you go to Spain and find the catalonians, basque, gallegos. A country is very rarely a single thing, its a mix of multiple people's and trying to come up with a single storyline for it is a very modern thing.
People identify with the city and region they're most associated with, I'm Brazilian but first and foremost I'm northwestern, the culture, accent, food, customs and religion there is unlike other places in the country. I see no reason to find an answer to "what does it mean to be brazilian" because different people will have different answers for that but if I meet someone from my region we will quickly connect on our shared experiences.
Welsh people are Welsh. Hyphenated British people are...?
Not taking into account places like Cornwell which is so different from britain. I'm probably closer culturally from an average Cornish than anybody from Essex, York or probably almost anywhere in England not living near the Channel in front of Brittany (unless people in Essex have sea shanty festivals, play cornemuse, play Celtic games, eat blue cheese, and speak a language close to Cornish).
What's the problem? They're not speaking to you and they share another language that's not English. Integration doesn't mean don't speak your mother tongue ever again. You're also taking about Europe where a different language is spoken every 100km.
Personally I find it pretty cool to hear other languages around me. Great opportunities to learn
Are you seriously saying that my reaction to the first languages I hear everyday being Arabic (outside my flat) and Hindi (shops) should be some dumb curiosity rather than wondering if this is a good way to organise a society?
Is it really that hard to understand?
They probably hate that too.
Correction: spelling
Enforcing the law costs money and these cities have been saving on that for decades now.
So: exactly.
It also matters if raping unguarded women is considered a crime or a fun hobby in your culture.
Law enforcement is important, but it can never catch close to all criminals, especially if it's politically sensitive to punish disproportionate numbers of ethnic groups.
The most famous example is the the Pakistani rape gangs in Britain, where authorities has mostly ignored the industrial scale raping for decades: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62n72mj113o
It doesn't really? Like I said, crime and rape and law enforcement exist every in the world. If you ignore rape as a police force, there is a lot to blame with your policing. Anyone can take advantage of that
In the UK case, the police actually has systematically ignored rape in the name of "community relations". I wish I made this up.
> Anyone can take advantage of that
Sure, but a population that is very keen on recreational rape will do a lot more damage than one who finds it abhorrent.
Culture and identity are tied to nations, and just dropping millions of people from Africa into Europe doesn’t make them European.
If your answer is that they just assimilate, they often do not. Example: many churches are being replaced with mosques in London. That is not assimilation, that is simply replacing one population with another.
It is okay for a people who have existed for thousands of years to want their own country and culture to survive in its same state, even if the population shrinks for a while. These labor shortages and shrinking populations are not eternal, eventually the population will bounce back.
1. anecdotal evidence, I have been to several in the UK myself. You can find converted mosques by using Google Maps as well.
2. You can find videos from UK Muslims celebrating their cultural victories talking about the churches they have converted. Here are two such examples:
> 500 CHURCHES TURNED INTO MOSQUES IN A CITY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62h_Im5cqxY
>How 100's of Churches are transforming into Mosques!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYBV4y42kXY
3. You can find videos from UK Christians lamenting the conversion of their churches.
One such example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YGA54WadgY
You can also just go and look up the number of mosques in the UK increasing over time: https://www.muslimsinbritain.org/statistics/statistics01.php
The most popular baby name in the UK has been Mohamed for the last two years. That's also a pretty good sign.
Do you prefer a slow death of your culture, or a catastrophic end to it?
For instance:
> A palpable sense of decline has spurred support for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party, which won nearly 40% of local votes in the February general election.
People that don’t look “right” should seriously consider if this is the right place to live given the circumstances, which is going to make those with many options to never consider a place like this. What will be left? Not much, the rust belt in the US is a good example of towns dying because the population can’t accept outsiders. A friend, that’s a neurologist, moved to a small town in the Midwest, him and another dude were the two only neurologists in many and many miles, the supermarket cashier asked for his ID and if he was in the country legally and isn’t even brown, just cos of his accent.
Couple of months later he moved to a large city that had no shortage of neurologists and will never come back to the countryside. These people will destroy whatever is left before they accept others, so that’s what what will be.
1. Basic, racist, "this person is a different skin color".
2. "We're not racist, but they're willing to work cheaper and take our jobs".
3. "They want to keep their own culture and not integrate with ours."
The third one is far less prevalent in the US than it is in Europe. I think this is for several reasons, but chief among them is that immigrants to the US do actually want to integrate into their new society, whereas immigrants to Europe generally do not. Unlike Europe, the US offers the possibility for immigrants to become as "American" as anyone else, regardless of their race or religion. Whereas immigrants to France, for example, can never become "French". This is mutually reinforcing - the French won't let them become "French", and the immigrants naturally react by not wanting to. Even if they do support liberal French cultural values without excessive judgment, which many do not, that is rarely their main reason to move there except in some political cases. The aim of immigrants to the US is not just economic prosperity, but to join the society and to be American (speaking for my own mixed Latin, Arabic and Jewish immigrant family).
This leaves a situation in the US where only (1) and (2) are arguments that have any traction, and those only have traction with a backwards and racist part of the population, aka MAGA. (3) is a much more difficult question, and it would have more traction here if it were true that immigrants to the US were similar to immigrants to Europe, in only seeking economic gains and choosing to remain separate from the societal mainstream.
You seem to be conflating (3) with the previous two. And maybe for some right-wing European nationalists it is. But I'm not a European white man, and myself and my Filipina partner have heard from some of those right-wing Europeans that as long as we want to learn their culture, they have no problem with us.
When JD Vance goes to Europe and scorns their immigration policy, he is using #3 to their faces, but he is appealing to racist voters who claim #1 and #2 at home. Conversely, when a European tells Americans that all anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe falls into the 1 and 2 categories, you are not honestly telling them about #3.
It's the same in Saudi Arabia, isn't it? You can't go get a job in an oil field and go around waving a bible and drinking bourbon. The fact that the West tolerates a lot of different beliefs and ways of life is a good thing, it adds to our diversity and that is our strength. But that tolerance for others has to also be a foundational understanding for newer arrivals who come here. And if it's not, and if they enter into open hostilities with the country that received them, then I don't think all of that can be laid at the feet of ignorant skin-color-based racism.
That's untrue. It really depends on where they arrived and their support system. If their support system isn't French, of course integration is extremely hard. I know a lot of people hosting political refugees (my mom and her friends basically), and met a lot of immigrants. I'd say the only couple that didn't integrate was hosted and worked through a Kazak support group before being contacted by cimade and moved far from Paris (tehy were white and christian, so racism and islamophobia are out). Other refugees i've met through the association integrated just fine. I must add that refugees who already have a support system in a big sity often refuse Cimade's help, so the refugees/immigrants i met had a specific profile (either single moms with child or highly educated middle-aged, most from a minority group in a violent country. Kurds and Druze, Kazaks, some russians, one Iraki from before the Irak war, some non-french speaking Africans).
I guarantee you most of them became French. I agree it's the minority, but it's the minority targeted by new laws and the far right (refugees, who can't have their papers in order until Cimade take care of that and teach them french).
I would agree we should do more for cultural integration for the rest of the immigrated crowd, through sport, through games, popular education in general (if you're an immigrant and your child go in youth camps with the Francas every summer, your child will end up French enough. Maybe a bit communist though, be carefull) and maybe through school, but we've dropped the ball in the 2000s, and killing the proximity police (which, while it didn't work as much as expected in big cities, worked extremely well in mid-size ones) didn't help. I understand the general sentiment, but i feel like current policies target the wrong crowd, and are ineffective in solving the actual issues.
In an ideal world, the majority would just appreciate the variety, in the actual world the minority will always suffer by just being different, though. (Grave incompatibilities aside, such as underage marriages and other ways of harming people.)
Doesn't really matter. Look at birthrates. People that don't exist won't immigrate to Germany. Germany will be begging for immigrants in a few years ... and won't get them. Or, at least, not from North Africa, and I don't really see any other place to get them.
The US will keep having immigrants from South and Middle America for a bit longer but even that is going to slow down dramatically.
> towns dying because the population can’t accept outsiders
There also are no jobs there. The population of these towns wants lots of things done ... but won't pay for doing them. If they did, there would be no shortage of US people/Germans doing them.
To be completely honest there is no longer much reason for these cities to exist. And if you're an old person enjoying your pension there, that really sucks. If you're young, you move away. Just like the rust belt.
I have many excellent and hard-working colleagues from India, for example. North Africa is not the only option, and just taking these people out of Africa and instantly placing in a completely different context will only create trouble. These things really need to be done properly but I guess we're past that point thanks to Merkel & co.
Tangential note: While I agree, there is something missing. You basically shift the blame from one group of people to another. This might be right to a certain extent, but doesn't take into account the enormous influence of things people don't have any control over (at least not people in Germany, even collectively). In other words, it's possible (although impossible to prove as economy is not a provable science), that no matter what individual people and the government would do, Germany would be still in the current situation, or not much different, especially in the long run (short term you can print some money but will have to face consequences anyway).
I wonder why people can't put two and two together and keep digging themselves deeper and deeper into a hole.
The size of Tempelhofer Feld is apparently almost exactly the same as that of Central Park, although it's probably much less used compared to Central Park. It looks like Central Park might get somewhere around four times as many visits.
And the people of Berlin actually made a smart decision not to dig the hole faster.