Innuendo Studios summarized it rather well with:

“We’re not like those other fascists. We’re young, hip, and successful. Come back, baby. It’ll be different this time.”

https://youtu.be/5Luu1Beb8ng?list=PLJA_jUddXvY7v0VkYRbANnTnzkA_HMFtQ&t=1179

His whole series on White Fascism and the current Alt-Right is a phenomenal summary of today’s right wing “conservative” (fascist / nazi) landscape in an internet-connected age. Nothing has truly changed for them: they’re still a suicide cult based around attacking “the other” (whatever they pick to attack) and then narrowing who is allowed to be at the top until everyone is dead.

I like to talk about this in my CS classes. We get compiles to compile code by compiling a compiler with a compiler. It’s an infinite regression problem that terminates with someone writing a compiler in assembly… Which requires an assembler to assemble… So you write an assembler in machine code directly on the processor.

If we lost all of the currently compiled programs one day, even with the compiler source code in hand, it would be some serious work to rebuild our current tool chains.

South Korea is one of the leaders, last I heard. They’ve had a massive shift towards childless couples.

It would be very hard to start a show like Sesame Street because of the fascist right. Swings and roundabouts.

There goes yet another pillar of our layered defense of the US. Stripping every bit from soft power, economic power, political relations, geopolitical position, and now outright military defense of our allies doesn’t seem like a trajectory to protect the nation, but more like a “how can we get Russia to love us like our father never did” kind of move.

Genau! Having had to very slowly translate documents from the government, consulates, and Deutsche Bahn, I am acutely aware of how much not knowing the language is a hurdle.

We’re working on learning German fast. While I’ll be in the Berlin area, so daily life can be mostly in English for a while, we need to integrate and the language is a huge part of that.

Yes. It all boils down to getting a job offer, but those are fields and qualifications with possibilities.

Thank you!

Every field has some green grass and some brown grass. No place is perfect.

Our plan is to move and never come back, but who knows what the future holds?

There’s plenty of story behind it. The key parts are that I’ve been visiting Germany off and on for 30 years now, ever since high school. I like the feel of the cities and the culture. Their engineering schools have room for people with my skills and interests (I’m more engineer than academic).

I didn’t limit myself to Germany. I’ve applied and interviewed across Europe, though it mostly centered around Germany. I had a good offer in Finland last year that I couldn’t get the ex wife to let me take the kids to.

Was it difficult? Plenty of work to keep applying, but there’s work to be had.

Germany may have real concerns about immigration, but the country needs skilled people, and just plain and hard workers, to fill roles. The alternative is to have major economic collapse, so the government is opening doors even if the populace isn’t always totally on board.

I’ll be in a German Consulate soon to submit the last paperwork for my immigration paperwork. Our family is taking 2x STEM Phds, and kids going into engineering, computer science, healthcare, and education with us. This is a generational loss, but I’m doing it to protect my children, as well as myself.

I’m performing a short fuse wedding next weekend for a prior student so they can seek asylum in Canada as a couple soon. The number of students/prior students who have been reaching out about how to emigrate to anywhere else is very high.

The extra fun part is that all post industrial revolution countries have flat or falling populations. This includes Europe, Russia, China, Japan, South Korea, North America and parts of South America, and parts of the South Pacific. All of these regions need to import people if they want to keep using the same productivity and economic systems. The sheep lack of people is going to start causing major issues on all fronts.

This is going to put nations in a position to compete for immigrants with each other. It’s going to be a buyer’s market for young adults. Collectively, they need to make their labor more dear and nations need to treat people better to get and keep them in the future.

There’s plenty of material on the stages of population change in developing nations: https://youtu.be/Ufmu1WD2TSk

The demographic transition model continues to be reasonable on track around the world: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition

It’s classic whataboutism and trying to draw false equivalencies to muddy the waters. They want to put everyone else on defense about the decision to ban Nazis by making you waste time explaining why someone else isn’t a Nazi.

To sum up: fuck them. Nazis are bad. Please continue punching them, both metaphorically, legally, and physically as needed to keep them in their hidey holes.

Conservatism consists of one core value: there should be laws that protect, but do not bind, the in group while the same laws bind, but do not protect, the out group.

It’s been that way on a lot of vectors. For example, if you are neurotic about something and poor, you are called crazy. If you’re neurotic about the same thing and rich, then you’re eccentric.

That is a gute Idee.

I’ll make a note and see if I can convince someone to tag along for our appointment.

So far my German immigration process has been hazy at every step. It’s more like the information isn’t clear and the process requires careful reading of shifting rules all the time. Not so much antagonism, more like underfunded infrastructure.

Danke!

I’ve been visiting Germany since 1995. I’ve been to many countries around the world, but there’s something about how Germany feels that’s just right to me. I’m very excited to really give it a try as a new home.

I’ve been dreaming about having a döner. It’s time.

I’m either too early or too late… I’ve already got a slot to make the US -> EU move for a faculty position. Ever since Jan 6th’s complete lack of response by the US government to arrest and prosecute the coup leaders I knew it was time to give another country a try and it’s finally coming to fruition.

The faculty and students heading to grad school from my engineering school are asking about my documentation and guides to getting work, handling immigration, and getting to grad programs in Europe. The US is going to see record breaking brain drain.

Pride wasn’t a parade. Pride was a riot. The parades are the compromise to stop lighting things on fire until people were treated as people.

Last weekend I used a scrubber to delete every post and comment from my 15 year old Reddit account, then deleted the account, so I’ve finally burned the boats on the move. Lemmy is perfectly fine as it is. It’ll ebb and flow for users, but I’ve been happy for a year here now.