The Phileas Club 127 – It Belongs To All Of Us

On this episode we talk about:

  • France: Notre Dame de Paris
  • Finland: parliamentary elections
  • US: “a baseline of nonsense”
  • Germany: protests, protests, protests
  • And more!

Remember you can support the show at http://www.patreon.com/ThePhileasClub

More info on the show:

You can also download the MP3, or subscribe via iTunes or RSS.

Comments

  1. Matthias Keller says:

    Congratulations Patrick on baiting me so well that I completely blanked out there for a while (which also led to me misunderstanding something you said). 😛
    And since you always find the best comeback right after you closed the door (so to speak), here is mine: Democracy is a struggle between different interests that isn’t limited to elections and in an ideal world the voicing of and the exchanges between these different ideas will lead to a reasonable compromise no matter when it occurs. And of course everybody is allowed to voice her/his interests (and I never implied to take away someones right to protests) and this right doesn’t mean that your voice necessarily gets heard. (But I still stand by the premise that hate is not an opinion, no matter how hard you try)
    Nevertheless, within a very short time young people taking an active interest in important issues and the political process (in this case the copyright reform and the climate change protests) experienced that their factual arguments were just being ignored and pushed aside in favor of “the lobby” (be it the content industry, car manufactures or the coal industry) while they themselves were being disqualified by politicians and lobbyists. In both cases mentioned there were very good and comprehensible argument that were simply met with dismissal and attacks to discredit the opponents instead of counter arguments. And that is probably the main root of the disappointment a lot of the young people are feeling and which I was trying to convey, because there is a real concern of disenchantment with politics at a very young age, which is especially problematic in the age of raging populism and (media) manipulation. (There is also the cognitive dissonance of people complaining that young people are not political enough nowadays while completely ignoring them when they start to doing something. But that is another story entirely.)

    And to counter the underlying “accusation” that I only point out these protests because I happen to agree with them: I mentioned that there were some other protests as well, for example the issue of high rents, new police laws and others. But with the limited time we have on this show we couldn’t talk about all of them. I also had other topics on my list such as the debate about mandatory measles vaccination or the (for me) highly interesting but very technical subject of an electoral law reform. But I thought that would probably bore a lot of the listeners and climate change is hopefully something everyone can relate to without immediately falling asleep. 😉

    • Haha well I agree with you on 99% of all of what you said, so I really wasn’t trying to bait you, just to point out an argument people might have (and I myself also think the argument has merit). I would never try to artificially create a disagreement for the sake of it, as you know… 🙂

Speak Your Mind

*