Grundgute Grüße!

Hello,
my name is Sebastian and I am from Germany (Baden-Württemberg). Thats why my English is probably not the best, I hope thats okay for you. :2razz: I was looking for a long time an US-American community like this one, because I am (obviously) very interested in politics and I woud like to see what people from other countries think about politics, states, governments etc. Actually I am a member of a simulation of German politics too and I thought there must exists something, at least a little bit, comparable in other countries too. So I am here now. To my rl. person. I am 19 years old and I study in Heidelberg history (75%) and political science (25%). Private, I am a member of the "Junge Liberale"/"Young Liberals" which is the inofficial youth organisation of the liberal FDP, or in English, the Free Democratic Party. So I would described myself as a Social/Left-Liberal (I know that liberalism in the US means often something different, as in Europe) but I do not have problems with other more conservative of left opinions. I hope to find a lot of interesting opinions and people from the US or other countries, so that I can just say.
Greetings from Germany.

Sebastian F said:

Hello,
my name is Sebastian and I am from Germany (Baden-Württemberg). Thats why my English is probably not the best, I hope thats okay for you. :2razz: I was looking for a long time an US-American community like this one, because I am (obviously) very interested in politics and I woud like to see what people from other countries think about politics, states, governments etc. Actually I am a member of a simulation of German politics too and I thought there must exists something, at least a little bit, comparable in other countries too. So I am here now. To my rl. person. I am 19 years old and I study in Heidelberg history (75%) and political science (25%). Private, I am a member of the "Junge Liberale"/"Young Liberals" which is the inofficial youth organisation of the liberal FDP, or in English, the Free Democratic Party. So I would described myself as a Social/Left-Liberal (I know that liberalism in the US means often something different, as in Europe) but I do not have problems with other more conservative of left opinions. I hope to find a lot of interesting opinions and people from the US or other countries, so that I can just say.
Greetings from Germany.

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Wilkommen!

Thank you. : )

Willkommen in Debate Politics! Ich bin auch ein liberal und studiere Geschichte. Mein Deutsch ist nicht gut, aber ich versuche es!

Your Star said:

Willkommen in Debate Politics! Ich bin auch ein liberal und studiere Geschichte. Mein Deutsch ist nicht gut, aber ich versuche es!

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Wir kunn Uns alle hilfen mit unserem Deutsch. Ich kann nich sehr gut schreiben.

Sebastian F said:

Hello,
my name is Sebastian and I am from Germany (Baden-Württemberg). Thats why my English is probably not the best, I hope thats okay for you. :2razz: I was looking for a long time an US-American community like this one, because I am (obviously) very interested in politics and I woud like to see what people from other countries think about politics, states, governments etc. Actually I am a member of a simulation of German politics too and I thought there must exists something, at least a little bit, comparable in other countries too. So I am here now. To my rl. person. I am 19 years old and I study in Heidelberg history (75%) and political science (25%). Private, I am a member of the "Junge Liberale"/"Young Liberals" which is the inofficial youth organisation of the liberal FDP, or in English, the Free Democratic Party. So I would described myself as a Social/Left-Liberal (I know that liberalism in the US means often something different, as in Europe) but I do not have problems with other more conservative of left opinions. I hope to find a lot of interesting opinions and people from the US or other countries, so that I can just say.
Greetings from Germany.

Click to expand...

Hey there,
I'm not going to torture you with my fractured German, except maybe to make a joke now and then.
Your English is quite serviceable, so I don't have the least bit of difficulty understanding you, except for the "simulation of German politics" reference.
A simulation? Do you mean a DISCUSSION FORUM? Or are you "simulating political events"?

Sebastian F said:

"So I would described myself as a Social/Left-Liberal (I know that liberalism in the US means often something different, as in Europe)"

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Ha ha, yes it does mean something different here in the U.S., because we LOST OUR liberal political party many years ago, when the establishment members of the Democratic Party decided it was best to try to be a "low calorie-diet" version of the Republican Party, and to bow and appease them as much as possible. The result? The USA has been on a steady move to the Right for the last thirty years.
A lot of Democrats still stick with the party, hoping that now and then their party will do a few good things, and then the rest of the liberals are like "The Man Without a Country", cast adrift and searching for some US equivalent of a European Left party.

But the problem here in the USA is, at the TOP, at the Presidential and Congressional levels, you really DO ONLY HAVE the two main parties.

Oh sure, there is some opportunity to build support for independent smaller third parties at the local, city, county and maybe even state legislature levels.
But we are stuck with a TWO PARTY SYSTEM and have been so almost since the country first came into existence.
We do not have a coalition type parliamentary style legislature, so it is almost impossible for independent parties to get a foothold.
We could TRY to rebuild our Congress as a parliamentary body, but that would be GENERATIONAL WORK and it would have to start way down at the bottom.

Some parts of this country have vigorous independent third party participation at the very small local, city or county level, but when it comes to Congressional and Presidential elections, the harsh reality is, it is a football game, and there really are only TWO teams on the field. If there IS any third "team", all they are doing is running interference, and in the last fifty or sixty years that interference has been a help to ONLY the Republicans, even if the third party is of the Left.

Unfortunately, way too many on the hard Left REFUSE to accept this harsh truth.
And the other unfortunate issue is, we in the USA do not have the kind of Green Party you have in Europe.
The USA Green Party here is an absolute joke. They hibernate for 3.5 years, then come out, field a candidate for President, lose badly, helping Republicans in the process, then go back into hibernation for another 3.5 years.

Some Democratic Socialists (DSA) (or "social democrats") try to work with the Democratic Party occasionally, but many believe that they themselves are also a legitimate third party with a chance of filling the White House. Too bad they did not support their own Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders when HE ran. But it would have been smarter if Bernie had just become a regular Democrat and changed the Democratic Party instead.
I won't call the DSA a joke, some of them at least have tried to do the right thing. They are fielding good candidates at the local level. It looks like they might win a few elections, they already have in the last year.

Glad to see you here, Wilkommen.
Vermeide den gefingerpoken!!

Thank you very much for your nice greetings and especially for your greetings in German. I am very excited to read what everybody thinks here on "DP", however I can just repeat myself. I will probably not be able to talk with you in English on a level I would like to do it. Some sentences could sound stupid or they will not make a lot of sense. I say sorry in advance.

Hey there,
I'm not going to torture you with my fractured German, except maybe to make a joke now and then.
Your English is quite serviceable, so I don't have the least bit of difficulty understanding you, except for the "simulation of German politics" reference.
A simulation? Do you mean a DISCUSSION FORUM? Or are you "simulating political events"?

Click to expand...

Sorry, it really was a little bit strange.^^ The forum I mean is both. A simulation which simulates the political system of Germany on the one hand and on the other hand there are threads in which you can talk about everything else and of course about real live politics too. The name of this simulation is "vDeutschland".

Ha ha, yes it does mean something different here in the U.S., because we LOST OUR liberal political party many years ago, when the establishment members of the Democratic Party decided it was best to try to be a "low calorie-diet" version of the Republican Party, and to bow and appease them as much as possible. The result? The USA has been on a steady move to the Right for the last thirty years.
A lot of Democrats still stick with the party, hoping that now and then their party will do a few good things, and then the rest of the liberals are like "The Man Without a Country", cast adrift and searching for some US equivalent of a European Left party.

But the problem here in the USA is, at the TOP, at the Presidential and Congressional levels, you really DO ONLY HAVE the two main parties.

Oh sure, there is some opportunity to build support for independent smaller third parties at the local, city, county and maybe even state legislature levels.
But we are stuck with a TWO PARTY SYSTEM and have been so almost since the country first came into existence.
We do not have a coalition type parliamentary style legislature, so it is almost impossible for independent parties to get a foothold.
We could TRY to rebuild our Congress as a parliamentary body, but that would be GENERATIONAL WORK and it would have to start way down at the bottom.

Some parts of this country have vigorous independent third party participation at the very small local, city or county level, but when it comes to Congressional and Presidential elections, the harsh reality is, it is a football game, and there really are only TWO teams on the field. If there IS any third "team", all they are doing is running interference, and in the last fifty or sixty years that interference has been a help to ONLY the Republicans, even if the third party is of the Left.

Unfortunately, way too many on the hard Left REFUSE to accept this harsh truth.
And the other unfortunate issue is, we in the USA do not have the kind of Green Party you have in Europe.
The USA Green Party here is an absolute joke. They hibernate for 3.5 years, then come out, field a candidate for President, lose badly, helping Republicans in the process, then go back into hibernation for another 3.5 years.

Some Democratic Socialists (DSA) (or "social democrats") try to work with the Democratic Party occasionally, but many believe that they themselves are also a legitimate third party with a chance of filling the White House. Too bad they did not support their own Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders when HE ran. But it would have been smarter if Bernie had just become a regular Democrat and changed the Democratic Party instead.
I won't call the DSA a joke, some of them at least have tried to do the right thing. They are fielding good candidates at the local level. It looks like they might win a few elections, they already have in the last year.

Glad to see you here, Wilkommen.
Vermeide den gefingerpoken!!

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Yes, I have read that it seems, that the Democrats have a lot of internally problems. In special to build a strong opposition inside the Congress. However, in Germany, Donald Trump gets the most attention in media, so that the Democrats problems are not so obvious here. Honestly, I was for a long time more excited about the Democrats´ primaries than the elections, cause I was so fascinated to see this high numbers of different candidates with different plans. The Germany parties work very different. They have, more ore less, full developed ideologies such as the FDP which sees itself just as a liberal party, or our Social Democrats in the SPD. US-parties are much more divided inside themself, so you can see how important some single wings can be. I believe the US would benefit by a multi-party system but that's just my amateurish opinion. Anyhow, thank you for the greetings and for the first introduction of American politics. : )