Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by NonHyloMorph 26 days ago
Dresden and especially Leipzig are quite nice though - lots of culture, music and art. Also close to Berlin. It's not exactly like you would have to travel through the countryside by carriage to get anywhere. I agree that the political and cultural situation outside the cities there is sad though.
1 comments

I am frequently in Leipzig, it's indeed a very nice city. But it's also immediately obvious people with a (visible) migration background are a smaller minority than elsewhere (which is backed by stats). So for a lived experience, I would strongly suggest talking to those minorities. The reports I heard speak of a lot of casual racism.

While you don't have to travel by carriage, you may even use the airport, avoiding the Umland is still an alienating and saddening state of affairs you can hardly call acceptable. For example, Saxony has absolutely beautiful nature along the Elbsandsteingebirge/Sächsische Schweiz, but those areas are also notoriously hot spots of the violent far right (e.g. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skinheads_S%C3%A4chsische_Schw...). For me it felt moderately dangerous, as a white person. As an Indian, are you gonna join your colleagues on "workation" there, are you gonna bring up your worries? It's all fine, bro, racism in Saxony is all Wessi propaganda, bro. Just avoid leaving the safe zones.

I don't disagree and I don't think think that it's a good state of affairs. Whether acceptable is a legitimate category here i have some doubts about. There is definetly people that do not accept the status quo there (for good reasons) and try to become acively engaged in doing something about it. To state that it is not acceptable kinda evokes the image of some higher force that intervenes and changes the situation; idk seems weird. Would be nice if the xenophopic and far right resentfull mindset would stop holding it's grasp over such huge portions of the population. (Globally, too)
> To state that it is not acceptable kinda evokes the image of some higher force that intervenes and changes the situation

Yes, this higher force is morality and conscience. Going back to the original argument, Saxony isn't sponsoring these developments all by itself. It's a larger collective's effort. As a tax paying citizen, I am entitled to judge the situation and at the very least demand conditions for success, or ask for reallocation of resources to more fertile grounds.

As can be seen in this thread, the people living in these regions feel zero accountability or problem awareness. Unsurprisingly you even see the common "How dare you call us Nazis, we're just against multiculturalism and anything woke", ironically proving the point: Foreign engineers are not welcome. The foreign workers are not all going to be drawn from white Norway and Poland (what an idiotic assumption), but India and Asia etc.. They will make the landscape "multicultural". Not too mention the higher percentage of queer and other "woke" minorities in the tech sector, which are also "just" not welcome. After all, being not accepted at home may be another reason to seek shelter elsewhere.

Saxony is not full of Nazis, just people who kinda prefer the authoritarian ethnostate. Wessis need to be more accepting of the fact Pride parades are cancelled. And did you know, statistically you are far more likely to die by other means, than a hate crime in Saxony!

Quite frankly, you can't get to them (reactionary idiots) through rational discussion. It's been tried over and over again. We don't know how to do it, but talking to them isn't it. Meeting them with brainrot TikTok, seems to be somewhat effective (see Linke campaign), but in the end the simplistic answers win social media and the right got a natural edge there. They are living in informational bubbles and, in the East, due to liberal people leaving/fleeing (no judgement), these bubbles become lived realities. Worth noting: The high AfD turnouts are likely due to demographics, population density is really, really low across the east. Self-fulfilling prophecy. Of course there is historic baggage, too, but it's not just the old fucks, so at last let's start putting accountability where it belongs. The people there need to change, if they want the economic prosperity they feel entitled to. Rainald Grebe's "Brandenburg" is 20 years old: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uellmynA34U

And yes, some of this entitlement and mental retardation is also rapidly growing in the West. All of Germany is very sick, geriatric, mismanaged and racing towards precarious inequality. Whatever the East is cooking is not the solution, so let's not call it a virtue.