The deindustrialisation -> rising populist right pattern is kinda similar in Lil' US (Germany); it started later and moves quicker. And we can't get by on software subscriptions.
What's particularly interesting is that the article shows how in Western Europe only Germany (and its brother Austria) has it's popular extreme right supporters be so pro-Russian. See in particular the chart about views on Ukraine. The majority of AfD and FPO voters see Ukraine as a "rival or adversary". Much more than RN, Reform UK, Vox, PVV, Chega or any of the Italian parties. And it's not even close.
Germany and Austria are once again the most dangerous countries in all of Western Europe. We'll very soon see an AfD win, and from that moment Germany will once again be hostile to the rest of Europe.
I already knew that Germany had learnt _less than_ nothing and had been saying this for years, though always being met by anger from Germans, regardless of their political allegiance. Until about a year ago, which is when at least some of them finally started admitting that indeed, they'd been living a lie.
I'm kinda relaxed w.r.t. actual hostilities coming from Germany/Austria. The large pensioner populations and - still - a sizable part of workers understand that burning the house down doesn't improve anything. But it could become a political shitshow like in the US. Certainly we're going to get more deregulation, hopefully of the right kind.
The natural ("prehistoric") state used to be a low density distribution of mobile tribes, which sidestepped a lot of the problems that afflict civilizations, like pandemics and local resource exhaustion.
The obsession with constant content production combined with algorithmic, feed driven consumption frontends with terrible discoverability and intense bubblification lead to today's screaming contest that ruins our sanity. On average I find it much worse than the old infosphere (TV+print+radio) used to be, for producers and consumers. It's quite tragic, really.
Though I also notice awareness around this issue is rising (e.g. smartphone bans in school, initiatives like bluesky), which is good, I guess. All of this is still a society-wide experiment without control group.
Agreed. Discussions like these always remind me of some great research on how the destruction of the old, more averaged, and less targeted infosphere used to support significantly more political cohesion.
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