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Last Sunday, I had dinner with my extended family in Germany. They’re what they call ‘Bildungsburgertum’, best class and best-in-class, educated middle class of doctors, teachers, and executives. They accordingly vote either green or social democrat, and gasp if someone dares defend the Afd or Trump.
Cousin‘s girlfriend says she’s in the running for a promotion at the bank she works for because the banking regulatory agency “suggested” they need more ”diversity“ at the top level. She might lose the job to a less competent woman because her rival is also the “director for sustainability” and the title sounds good to the powers that be. I ask her what the hell a bank has to do with sustainability . “Exactly. She just gives a silly PowerPoint presentation once a year and uses that “fulfilled mission” as an excuse to be incompetent on everything else”. Her male boss/colleague/friend did not appreciate being summarily passed over and has tended his resignation.
After the ladies retire to the boudoir, a different cousin’s husband, who works in IT at a large company, picking up on my skepticism, sits next to me and whispers : “It’s pointless if you’re male.” He tells me he just refused a promotion because he doesn’t want to deal with the headache of having women under him, and the constant humiliation of forced diversity. One of his colleague’s career was apparently ruined after a sexism accusation, although he didn’t give details.
He recently had a woman in a junior post who could not do a simple task and would cry sexism(“I feel like you’re always contradicting me and not the others”) if corrected in public or reminded of her duties. He just did her job for her and never corrected her again.
Final words: “I’m not a masculinist or feminist, I hate all those things. I just wanted to do my job. Now I do the bare minimum, I don’t care anymore, I’m a loser” (I had brought up Rao’s archetypes of Psychopaths, Clueless, and Losers earlier).
There was some controversy recently over Helen Andrews’ essay on the feminization of the workplace. I consider all internet discourse a priori overdramatic and disconnected from real people who just touch grass at a barbecue in ignorant bliss. But this couple of anecdotes suggests real life (in Germany, at least) is actually worse than the widely-decried-as-misogynistic Andrews take: open widespread discrimination against men (obviously), ubiquitous fear of one-sided legal and professional penalties, declining competence at all levels.
Yes, it's depressing. We consider building a house soon-ish, since there is a very attractive Erbbaurecht project currently. In short, they treat the value of the plot outrageously low (ca 200/sqm, comparable plots here can easily go to 600 and more!) and then on top you even only have to pay 2% of the cost per year, so you pay an absolute pittance. Connection costs etc. are also very low. After 15 years you also get the right to buy it up properly (still for a low price, though it can increase somewhat), so it has basically all the upsides of either buying OR renting the plot. For this reason, the project is considered "social" and it's also "family-friendly", meaning you can only apply if you're a family AND don't earn too much together.
But then they throw all of this under the bus for the "green" part. You have to use a green flat roof with water retention, which is basically worse in function in all ways that matter to you (notably excludes an attic) and also costs an extra 50k. We have to build significantly more solar than we normally would. You can't build a cellar, either, nor a garage or carport, because ... fuck you, I guess? Most importantly, you're forced to take the local cold district heating for 10 years, which includes renting the heat pump for >100€ per month (in addition to paying 25k connection costs in the first place) and then you still have to pay for the electricity to run the heat pump. The kicker? You can't use the solar energy for the heat pump, "for technical reasons" and since the energy provider owns the pump (not us), we can't do anything about it. And a million other overly-specific, stupid limitations.
All this together means especially that when searching for duplex partners, we had a lot of contact with low-earning people at first, but they all get weeded out by the requirements since they can't afford all this stuff. So the only people left are people like us, well-off Bildungsbürgertum who are not in private industry bc we'd be earning too much then. That's quite convenient to be clear, but also extremely self-serving since guess who are the people making these decisions?
And when I talk with other germans about this, they're just so goddamn defensive no matter how stupid and self-serving it is. Sure the limitations are annoying, but combatting climate change is alternativlos! Yes the cold district heating design is a ripp-off, but gas prices will go up (for mysterious reasons not spelled out) so you come out ahead! Green roofs will be mandatory soon anyways, so why complain! Sure the project is not actually social, but the real fault lies with capitalism not paying enough!
Germany feels so, so dead. The entire mentality revolves around what needs to be done to sate modern progressive moral conceptions, and everything else is an afterthought that can only be used if the former is threatened. German industry going down is good, actually, since CO2 is going down with it, and the only reason why we shouldn't overdo it is that we can't finance the Energiewende otherwise.
And mind you, this is with the allegedly conservative CDU allegedly in charge.
That's too funny. Did the most incompetent offspring of the head of the city council read Wikipedia under "rent seeking", and decided to do a 100% speedrun?
That has to be a scam, like Blackrock buying up trailer parks to get a captive customer base. I bet the electrical mains are to small for a heat pump without district heat, and I bet the price of the land explodes after you've been paying their interest rates for them for 15 years...
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