It’s wild to me that you’re equating having children with doing effort in your life. These people were supporting you in your choices too! They were paying taxes, maybe they were open to babysitting because they had no children of their own, maybe they financially helped parents within their family that were struggling. You’re kind of suggesting a two-class society, where childless people are off to fend for themselves with minimal support, regardless of what good they might have done in their lives. It’s like sending firefighters only to houses of other (ex-)firefighters, and letting all other houses burn because they ‘put in no effort’ themselves.

High adoption demand is good for the kids, but not for people relying on kids for their survival at an older age!

Exemptions will always be made for the unable.

Ruminate on that for a second. Think about how a government would determine if you’re unable. If you’re gay, does the government need to see you having sex with a man to be sure? What if a person has e.g. endometriosis and getting pregnant is far more unlikely but not impossible. Were they unable? Or just not trying enough? And what if a person wasn’t even diagnosed but just thought they were unlucky? We’d need a ridiculously thorough health check for every pensioner just to determine one factor in their eligibility.

Barely any pension, but that’s fine because they have kids to take care of them. This sounds nice, except for when you think of it for more than a few seconds. How would a homosexual couple survive while they’re old? They can’t have kids. They can adopt, but that does nothing to enlarge the population. What about people that can’t conceive for medical reasons? Should they have to suffer with “barely any pension” just because they got unlucky? This might be fine for most, but policies like that come at the expense of minority groups, which are already often at a disadvantage. And if you suggest adoption… If having kids is the only way to have a decent life after retiring, adopting would be an easy choice, because it saves you the pregnancy hassle as well as maybe some stressful first years of childcare. Surely the demand for adoptions would skyrocket, making it close to impossible for every person in a group that can’t have children to actually get them. Also, since kids are so valuable, supply for adoptions would fall, because who in their right mind would give up their pension that easily!

And let’s say a couple can and does have children because of the policy. In your mind they might have been ‘forced to make a better decision’, but ultimately ended up with the right choice, right? Have you considered that having kids might not be a healthy choice for a couple? Maybe the parents are just not cut out for the stress and suffer greatly while their kids grow up. Maybe the kids suffer as well, because a parent that is forced to have kids would hardly be a loving and enthusiastic parent, would they? You’d have to admit that forcing people into a choice is not exactly a good recipe for ensuring that they are happy, right?

Moving the financial burden of taking care of the elderly to an individual level works fine for some people, like your granddad enjoying your financial support, but greatly hurts people in different circumstances that they have no fault to be in. We should support everyone, not just a few lucky ones.

Except that is not the strategy at all. They actually used a formula that has nothing to do with the countries tariffs, only with how much they import/export from/to the USA. Why else would they put a tariff on an uninhabited island? The penguins surely had a 0% tariff policy with the USA, which according to your logic would mean, that they would get a 0% tariff as per trumps policy. Instead, all tariffs are at least 10%, because if you actually applied the formula to all countries, some would end up with negative tariffs! I strongly recommend this video by Stand-up Maths to understand how the numbers are actually calculated.

What the actual fuck is wrong with these people

It’s not only the risk factor, people routinely oppose wind turbines just because they dislike how they look. and huge cooling towers are not exactly subtle.

but the ‘risk factor’ is a total non-issue in regards to making this decision. nuclear power could be 100% safe and it would still simply be far too expensive to be worth it.

It’s really sad to see that evidently more than half of the german population have an opinion on something which they have little to no understanding of. It’s frustrating what misinformation can achieve.

If anything it would be more a ‘tu quoque’ fallacy than whataboutism, because the latter tries to shift the attention to an unrelated topic, whereas here it is occupying land both times.

It certainly weakens the criticism, because the robber in your example might do the right thing, but if they really opposed robbing, surely they wouldn’t do it themselves? As you said, it makes them a hypocrite, and makes you question their motive for measuring two cases with a different yardstick.

You’d think that if you had to jump through that many hoops to invite someone to your country, mayyyybe a few alarm bells should ring in your head. But no, Merz is an expert at mental gymnastics and will gladly invite a war criminal before he considers rethinking his position.

Every piece rotates 78° clockwise

Reading this made me instantly have the gay frogs song stuck in my head again

e -4

In addition to the other comments: Germany has a lot of voters that are like 60+, some of which either don’t care too much because they will die long before the worst of climate change happens, or simply don’t want to change. Any policies that try to reduce carbon emissions are met with criticism by people not wanting to change their own behavior.

Definitely agree. Maybe you could argue that you’d just need to cut out former East Germany to make the post accurate, but even overall, germanys far right is definitely strong.