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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   1278 thread views

Transnational Thursday for September 17, 2026

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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The new migration pact

The one with relocation quotas and 20K EUR per migrant fines for not meeting them? The one that opens the door to 7 zillion Indians - no wait, that's a different deal.

Likewise, Merz opposing online anonymity doesn't demonstrate a left-wing institutional bias. That's an authoritarian/non-libertarian position, not inherently a left-wing one and the SPD opposed it. Being opposed to libertarianism doesn't make the CDU left-wing.

Does "a liberal society must still be able to adequately protect it's citizens, including from false information, from personal putdowns, from discrimination, and from many other things that ultimately define our personal lives in freedom" sound like he's about to crack down on Antifa to you?

There absolutely was a broad establishment consensus on immigration in much of Western Europe, including much of the centre-right. But that's different from saying the institutions had been captured by the green-left.

I don't follow. If even "right-wingers" are left wing, that sounds like institutions being captured by the left. And if you add on top of that all the environmental stuff they're pushing through, with essentially no one opposing it, that sounds pretty green as well.

If anything, the fact that those old exclusions are weakening and EU migration policy itself is becoming more restrictive is evidence of the broader movement to the right.

Again, if we separate public from institutional sentiment, I think it's perfectly accurate to say the institutions are taken over. Now that the public sentiment is getting bad enough, they are also seeing a need to appease the public, that doesn't mean they are willingly implementing a right-wing program, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, like they have been doing with left-green policies.

If even "right-wingers" are left wing, that sounds like institutions being captured by the left

Do you propose that people like the Koch brothers were leftwing and that Bernie Sanders was rightwing in 2015?

"Left Wing" and "Right wing" are fuzzy social categories, not mathematical primitives. You should sort by tribe, it's closer to the joints of reality.

Kinda. Look at how all the anti immigration lefties were treated by their supposed fellow left-wingers. They were treated as enemies, and that means that whatever you want to call them, they definitely weren't left-wing.

The main reason the “right wing” has so many diverse policy viewpoints is that the left has a rolling omnicause, and anyone kicked out of the left will thenceforth be described as right-wing.

Reddit is firmly convinced JK Rowling is a “right-wing nut job” because she disagrees with trans ideology, despite holding fast to every other piece of the left’s policy platform. They believe famous Monty Python comedian John Cleese is now a right-winger because he's outspoken against Muslim migration to Britain.

Really, there are three axes, and you can only be a left-winger if they say you’re on the left side of all three: anti-patriarchy, anti-colonialism, and socialism. The Kochs are for unbounded immigration, which is anti-colonial, but not socialism.

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