[sva_]

What a poor example.

As a German, we are forced to pay much more than that, about 220 euro annually. Only a small percentage actually goes into news and such, most are entertainment programs. I don't know anyone who is younger/my age that is in favor of it or consumes it. It is basically the boomers forcing us to subsidize their shitty crime shows.

Annually they collect about 9 billion euro, no surprise the author of that piece creams their pants at the prospect of being able to fuck the population over like that. I mean how much money can you reasonably expect for reporting news?

People who can't afford food and clothes are forced to contribute to the insane salaries of the moderators of some of the shows. They're also not unbiased at all, they skew heavily left. The system is pretty rotten, can't wait for there to be a reform of it.

/rant

[immibis]

Reality skews heavily left. Should the news be about reality or ideology?

[sva_]

Reality is indifferent to our political views.

[helpfulContrib]

Here in Austria, we are being threatened with a visit from the bayliff if we don't pay the "ORF tax", which funds television and radio transmissions.

Its pretty heinous, especially for those of us who simply don't consume mainstream Austrian media in any form.

However, there is nothing to be done. The tax has to be paid.

ORF is heinous propaganda, and I despise it, as I do with all mainstream Austria media, which is inexcusably corrupt.

[Nifty3929]

Everybody loves communism except those who've actually experienced it.

My wife and I were visiting a Western European country and watching the street from our balcony. Outside there was a parade of communists rallying for an upcoming vote. Well, my wife is from an actually communist country, and wanted to warn all those people that they would not have been allowed to parade or demonstrate in the country she's from. And would probably be a lot hungrier.

[ben_w]

It's somewhat messier than that. While I am aquatinted with the authoritarian nightmare that was Stalin himself, and with the DDR's Stasi, and think that Marx's vision was *only* an improvement *relative to pre-New Deal era capitalism* and doesn't have much to offer to the modern world[0], there's people in ex-communist countries who yearn for a return to the "good old days" and don't see what the problem was.

(And hunger probably wouldn't be a big thing today: the communist eras most associated with that were fairly early into the process of transitioning away from agrarian and towards industrial societies. Probably would be less choice of food, but there would likely still be enough food, unless they started seeing every failure as a sign of sabotage like Pol Pot did. Which is a thing I'm worried about with Trump, because that failure mode is not limited to just communists).

[0] because the modern world treats women as equals and we have universal education (which was novel for the era Marx wrote in), and trade unions are a thing. This gets most of the benefits without the various different failure modes that come with different kinds of Communism.