thread locked due to high amount of people behaving uncivil or just being outright facists.
Europe
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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.
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.
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.
I blame the social media. Banning it for the underage is the only "nanny state" measures I agree.
I don't think banning it for the underage is specifically bad, but it can't be enforced without some bullshit that is bad, and won't work anyway. However, I think it's plenty bad for adults too. It either needs moderation, or it needs to be not allowed in general. I'm all for people being allowed to do what they want, but there are points where consumers need protections, and algorithms manipulating them, in the way social media does, is very harmful and needs protections against.
The reality is that something as mundane as social media can have an incredibly debilitating effect on the developing brain of an adolescent.
Corporations treat kids like an experimental playground. I mean, you can just look at the global drop in childrens' reading, writing, and spelling abilities and realise maybe replacing pen and paper for laptops has been a net negative for their developmental pathways.
Corporations treat kids like an experimental playground
Seeing how many adults go batshit crazy through Social Media, I say it's society as a whole having become an experimental playground.
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.
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.
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.
For context, when they say LGBT tolerance has dropped, its dropped to the level it was in 2008. So its not the overall level of tolerance that’s worrying, but the fact that it dropped so radically in such a short period of time.
I suspect the numbers reflect the influence of social media and right wing extremism. The influence of the manosphere is pretty evident. But I suspect the numbers also reflect the anti-‘woke’ sentiments being stirred up by right wing extremist parties like the PVV and the FVD. Even the more convential right wing party, the VVD, is constantly crusading against ‘woke’.
Because of that the LGBT community often ends up in the crosshairs of right wing extremist politicians.
targeted by the radical Catholic organisation
I think any Catholic organization needs to shut the fuck up and sit this one out.
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 unregulated but also in the hands of billionaires. Most of which absolutely hate democracy and think we, the general population are an obstacle to overcome as they work to replace us with machines.
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.”
probably because it's pushed on them, and teenagers resent what is pushed on them.
when i was a teenager being gay was horrible and bad, and if you didn't think that you were rebellious and cool.
now being gay is celebrated and lauded, and teens probably feel rebellious and cool by being against it.
it's the same with drug use. drug use has dropped a lot among teens because it's been normalized by adults and it's not cool.
further there is a huge uptick in gender extremism for both men and women, fueled by social media influencers and the kids love that shit. you have teenage boys thinking they need to be body builders and teenage girls thinking they need butt lifts.
I read somewhere that re-traditionalization is an Europe-wide trend.
It's not "re-traditionalization"
It is scapegoating by the usual suspects and all of the funding comes from the same pedos.
The fact everyone is blind to this is so terrifying to me and I just can't fathom how people have gotten so far in life without learning any history and current events
Why learn about minorities when you don't feel like one yourself?
I agree, it's terrifying. I interpret it as our collective chickens coming home to roost after almost 100 years of celebrating victory over the Nazis without doing the work to dismantle the thought patterns they exploited.
That’s pure cosplay. Traditionalism where it excludes others but not where it would impact their own life or hold themselves to any standard.
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.
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.
I bet my hat it’s social media.
I’m sure many will point to specifics, like bigot influencers thriving on controversy. Or, to play devil’s advocate, the forces astroturfing LGBT support that are clearly inauthentic.
But ultimately it’s all because LGBT controversy is too much of a lightning rod for the engagement algorithms to resist. That’s why it’s rising amongst children.
The EU needs to ban or restrict that kind of social media unless it wants to become a network of Nazis.
I'm so tired 😫😫