The state of your country

At least you have legal weed.

Everything is possible, but there is a big hurdle: Brussels. It's majority French/Arabic speaking, but surrounded by Dutch speakers. And as long as Europe exists and it is the capital, no one wants the other side to have it. If a few decades from now Europe is kaput and the Muslim majority declares autonomy, then that will be the end of Belgium as a state.

Brussels becomes the sovereign capital of Europe and the rest gets split?

Let Brussels be a city state

Also thanks!

I recently visited London, it is like a liberal wet dream on the surface, but an utter dystonia underneath wherever you scratch the paint. When the City collapses, as it showing signs it will, times will be tough for sure. Just hope the Tories are in power then, and the Blairites fully purged, so a faction is in place to seize the crisis/opportunity.

A rather intelligent commie in the parliament said that weed is a bourgeois drug and that its legalization doesn't tackle how the poor are literal zombies running on Pasta Base (Cocaine paste)

Not that the war on drugs is doing anything remotely GOOD to start with, other than a class genocide

Thankfully no arabs want to come here, apparently they think Uruguay is too progressive for their likes or too damn backwards for their gib-needs

What do you guys think about gentrification? I personally think its the death knell of the human species, you know

Netherlands here. It's a long story, but not very different from the rest of northwestern Europe. The labour party went neoliberal, the socialists went socdem, our welfare state and public services are slowly eroding.

It's cancer. It's one-sided class warfare basically.

Britbong here as well.
The country is pretty shit, north-south divide is very prominent with southern countryside being the manor homes of the wealthy whereas in the north the levels of poverty and urban decay are unbearable. Something like one in four children are in poverty. Overall its worse than eastern europe and just being propped up for the moment by London, which itself while very glamorous is actually a deathtrap and decaying on the inside. Once the city collapses it will all be over. If tories preside over Brexit then the country will certainly continue to fall into third world poverty while the ruling elite pats itself on the back as we're the nth biggest economy based on financial speculation.
worst part is people will keep voting tory

My current prediction is to wait for the collapse, and hope for a left based uprising. It could just as easily be fascist though, but one thing is for sure, the path we are on leads to ruin for all.

Most people that don't live there wouldn't mind, but Brussels is a weird one, with a Dutch and Francophone minority, Maghreb plurality, and all revenue generated by foreign businessmen and bureaucrats. The actual live-in population is extremely poor, and many of them radicalized. If it really were an independent city state, it would fly the black flag, and not the good kind.

I used responsibly, absolutely. You can enjoy it without causing any hassle to the system. It's what I like about it. It works terribly as a commodity though, requiring very little specialized process. Everyone can grow it in their yard were it legal. It would be as an actual weed. Nothing a restrictive patent on seeds can't solve, of course, or making home growing illegal for "public health reasons".

It's the essence of capitalism: build up an industrial area, then the industry dies, then after the values have plummeted, it again starts generating surplus value as an area of bourgeois consumption. Purely systemic.

Does it make one bit of a difference if an uprising is commie or fashy?

It will end in disorder no matter what, and then Napoleonism or whatever its called when the military step in and everything reverts back to square one

If the government collapses like I think it will, the army will split down ideological lines

Uh, I think I picked the wrong term, forgive my secondlanguagedness, I think the word I wanted to say doesn't exist or I can't remember it atm. Its about how the people are becoming ever increasingly older and older, without enough youth to replace it.

I am certain it will crash the system eventually

Which lines? You are aware the army at best provides nothing other than sheer might is right and basic crisis control, right?

They are utterly brainless; if its the Intelligence Apparatus though… Oh, I dread them coming to power, they are neoliberal garbage eaters

too optimistic. The workers are thoroughly classcucked but also not nationalist enough to go full kristallnacht and anti-muslim pogroms. Nothing inn its history has ever prepared this nation for not having a strong centralised state.
I unironically think we need a NazBol vanguard party to prepare dual power structures for when the state shits itself.

When the time comes and the decades of Tory meddling catch up to them, the economy will implode Hiroshima style. That will be a crisis nobody will be able to contain.

I'm talking fighting in the streets, looting and burning and eventually army mutinies and civil war.

I know, which is why it's going to be complete fucking chaos. The UK will be a failed state one day in the next few decades, I guarantee it.

Military men are strictly taught not to think, the Intelligence will probably try to infiltrate any movement and co-opt it for their own means

It will end up with something midway between the French and Russian revolutions, bloody terror and who knows what

But in the end, there will be bloody, thoughtless order, which is what I fear the most, because it will set society backwards instead of forward

It will be a chaotic bloodbath, yes. But leading to what?

I don't think anything that happens will help towards rebuilding traditional values much, as much as cause people to feel repugnance for them in the end

In the end, all I just want is to be left alone without literal (rothschild) and figurative juden (big porkies, bankers, elites, whateverthefuck) trying schemes up my arse

I think it will be a period of uncertainty and failure of the state while various groups vie for power. Who they are….

Well, I guess we'll find out, won't we?

canadafag here

I honestly believe that left wing nationalism might be the only way to socialism here sadly

Portugal here. For 40 years either the centre right and centr left have been in power. There's no differences betweens the, they hate democracy, love EU and NATO. People keep voting for them, they may complain, but do nothing beyond complaining, online, or at the cafe. Football keeps the masses entertained, everyday some new sscandal from football appears and that's you will see in the media afterwards.
I'm preparing to leave this country, because i don't think Europe will be a safe place tto be in the upcoming decades. I'm thinking about going to Peru, Bolivia, Chile or Uruguay and live a simple life as a farmer

FACT
AMERICA IS THE VANGUARD OF THE ACCELERATIONIST REVOLUTION

FACT
FACT. OTHER COUNTRIES NEED NOT APPLY. ONCE THE REVOLUTION IS OVER, WE WILL BRING TRUE FREEDOM TO ALL OPPRESSED PEOPLES OF THE EARTH

FACT
USA IS #1 AND WILL BE #1 FOREVER

FACT
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fuckoff Holla Forums

Kek america is filled with retards, nothing will ever happen there. The most radical american can get is being a liberterian.

I'm from Scotland/Britain. I'll describe both. (As you can probably infer, I'm inclined to back Scottish secession.)
Britain is a bleak and hopeless place without any real future, and this captures me to the point that even the question of what brighter future independence could offer doesn't really occur - it's just not a continuation of the present.

There's no hope of real political change. Our elections back to 1970 can be predicted with a simple heuristic called the Kinnock Effect. (tl;dr in 1992 Labour's policies polled much better than those of the Conservatives, but their leader was a loud welshman who came off a bit weird, while John Major was just interminably dull - so people picked the dull guy with the worse policies over the weirdo. Factor in incumbents being discredited by events, and everything makes sense back to 1970 where the credible Harold Wilson lost to the credible Ted Heath.) Labour is structurally unelectable since selling out to neoliberals in the late 80s/early 90s, as the brief alliance of capital that propelled Blair to power no longer needs the party.

Governments of both colours have burned a fortune on Private-Finance-Initiatives (for an example of how inefficient this is: web.archive.org/web/20150301000000*/http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/politics/fury-at-729m-bill-to-build-schools-1426587 ) and hollowed out basically the entire public sector. The NHS and education is weighted down with an unholy bureaucracy of management, targets, etc, aptly surmised as market stalinism

Swathes of the country are simply electorally irrelevant (one of those areas is Scotland) becuase they aren't swing seats full of home-owners. Social Housing construction is woefully low in numbers and the government is propping up a house-price bubble (2008 barely saw a price drop at all in real terms - just a steadying.)

The economy is simply put a disaster. The country is run purely for London and the South East of England. In 1974, Labour's campaign had a poster that read "There are now a million good reasons to vote Labour - the unemployed!", unemployment is now a record low (since 1975) of 1.5 million. Population growth in this period has been 14%, but that's a 50% hop in unemployment - and we pretend it's to be celebrated. On top of this, in nearly every area of the country there are more unemployed people than there are job vacancies - and even when you take the aggregate figures and forget location this is the case. Yet our media, government, etc, portray unemployment as a choice by the lazy and the credulous population eat it up.
They keep cutting benefits for the disabled, they've capped them below inflation for the unemployed and others too. The test to get ESA - i.e. disabilitybux - is a kafkaesque nightmare. Instead of some kind of assessment with a doctor, you have to get a note from your doctor, then apply, then get assessed by a private company contracted by the government who use a ridiculous points-system to grade you - the contractors often outright lie about the people they assess - and then you have to keep being re-assessed. They'll stop at nothing to force the disabled into the workforce - and remember, this is in a country that already has ridiculous unemployment and too few jobs.

1/2

2/2
The media landscape is a nightmarish hellscape. Every single major newspaper (Including the pro-independence national) is scarcely worth using to protect floors from cat piss. Reporters are almost universally lazy scum with no real knowledge about anything, and there's an almost orwellian nature to their partisan stances. (In the last election Labour promised an energy price freeze - "You're going to bring back the 1970s! Socialist Yahoo!" - In the upcoming election the Conservatives have promised to cap energy prices - "'ARE MAY TAKING ON RIP-OFF ENERGY COMPANIES!"), and in Scotland the situation is just as bad - in 2014 45% of the population backed independence, but 0% of daily newspapers did so. The opinion simply wasn't represented.

Most of the population are stupid enough to believe that Labour caused the 2008 financial crisis. Even in Scotland I don't hold out any hope - people swapped because a weird confluence of events let the SNP punch trough, not because Scots are intrinsically any less terminally stupid than the rest of the country.

Scottish politics is a tedious hellscape unto itself. Because all the major parties (except the Greens) in the Scottish parliament are anti-independence, they all vehemently hate the SNP. (In 2007 at one point it was even mooted having Labour vote for a Conservative to form the government because the SNP won the election by 1 seat. Fortunately the Scottish Labour leader refused, The Lib-Dems wouldn't coalition with them either.) So the entire game is them sniping at the SNP over every little thing. The worst part is that Holyrood isn't a real parliament - it's basically a big administration centre. The SNP have helped make this more annoying by playing it up (they renamed it "Scottish Government") and by implementing some token good policies like free university tuition and prescriptions, but ultimately the thing simply isn't a real parliament with real power - it has power de-jure, but because of the way funding works in a union it doesn't have it de-facto. (Also notably with declining education performance, many local authorities are Labour run and schools are partly run by local authorities. You do the maths.)

There are also little memes that run through it, common knowledge that's actually bullshit. It sort of runs through "the establishment" in Scotland (like braveheart references relating to the SNP, it's not just a joke but a sort of underlying mindset it entails - it's the blindness to the factual realities that lead to the present situation that riles, not the partisan part. Or the idea the SNP put Thatcher in power because they helped cause an early election in the late 70s - at a time when it wasn't a question if labour would lose but when, and when backbench Labourites had undemocratically deprived Scotland of devolution by applying a ludicrous rule that counted abstentions as de-facto no votes.)

Britain is a country without a future and without any understanding of her own past - just mention the 1970s (the last decade I'd say Britain-was-Britain.) and listen to people regurgitate Thatcherite press lies. James Callaghan the overspending socialist! (he was actually imposing austerity at the time, forced by the IMF and liars in the treasury.)
Scotland is in a similar position but through a quirk of history finds itself identifying more SocDem overall. Since the SNP and independence aren't necessarilly a threat to the overall class-power structure in Scotland, the idea tepidly floats about. It might be a good way to move in a slightly more positive direction, but even with independence the cancer that has been Britain under neoliberalism will follow us, a mental and spiritual disease forever.
AND ON TOP OF ALL THAT
Britain pissed away the hope for the future of the 1970s - north sea oil wealth.
Money that could've made an independent Scotland at the time the "Kuwait of the West" (every Scottish Nationalist is obligated to link this: oilofscotland.org/mccronereportscottishoffice.pdf , there are some myths around it like that it was "hidden" [it was never obligated to be released, it's an internal document] but it's still a good read. tl;dr government in the 70s were scared of Scotland fucking off and becoming Norway. The fantasy still hangs around.) or funded industrial modernisation for the UK as a whole, or been invested in an oil fund to ensure prosperity once it was all gone.

But nope, we privatised the industry in the 1980s.
WE HAVE NOTHING TO SHOW FOR IT

I've not given enough real nuance, particularly to the Scottish situation, but hopefully I've given you a gloss-over of just how bleak and hopeless this country is.
If you've ever seen the nuclear war film "Threads" from 1984, Modern Britain is worse than that vision of a post-apocalyptic hellscape.

Different Canadafag here, I'm thinking you're probably right. I know we technically have two communist parties, but I don't see the left as actually existing in this country aside from based Montreal.

this. I've meet more leftists and been exposed to more leftist organizing and thought in my last year living in Montreal than I did for 19 years living in Vancouver.

I think the capitalist crisis just isn't bad enough in Canada like it is in other countries like the USA where there's like 40~million people living in poverty and jobs are precarious as fuck. Canada is far from perfect but our welfare system, healthcare, etc. generally function well enough for everyone that people could care less about radical politics. Montreal and Quebec are somewhat the exception to this, I think because of the province's political history. Other provinces like BC and Manitoba have a long history of labour politics but I don't think they've ever been hot beds of any thinking more radical than social democratic ideas.

I feel like the NDP is the "near-beer" of SocDem's. My friends IRL are angry that I consider neoliberalism and IdPol to be cancer, but I am too paranoid to meet new people because I am scared that anybody I meet might be a Mountie trying to create Project Souvenier 2: It's Not Terrorism When We Do It Boogaloo.

Germany here.

Our wages are low and our taxes are high. People are classcucked as fuck. Our healthcare system needs urgent reform but nothing will ever be done about it bc muh checks and balances. Rents are unaffordable in the cities, not just the big ones. If you earn 2000€ a month, you're practically poor as the government takes 50% of it (not trying to sound like an ancap but it's a pain in the arse) and you won't find a single-room apartment that is below 400€. You are even forced here to pay for TV channels which show folk music shows for old people and pay the church a part of your income.

Leftist politics are okay compared with some other countries, Die Linke is mostly Sanders tier SocDem but does host some communists. Two main socialist parties are the DKP and the MLPD, both are ML but they never win a seat.

I could write up more but I'm too lazy now. AMA I guess

Some time in the next few months the average American will wake up to a grim reality. This unpleasant truth has been solidifying for quite some time, but only now does it become truly tangible enough to be grasped by the average person. Very soon the average American will wake up and realize that he is not a Citizen in his Republic, but a Denizen in a faltering Empire being run by the confused old man who tottered his way over to putting the final few nails in the Republic's coffin. He lacks the muh privileges in a court of law that the Citizen can afford, a mitigation of financial responsibility and a segregation of assets between fictitious persons for legal purposes. He lacks the contacts and finances to pay to play in his state, which he thought for the people and by the people. He lacks even the educational standing to recognize what has happened, though he can sense that something is amiss.

I have to say that while a lot of people knew it was coming in one form or another, nobody quite saw it going down like this. Rome's Republic rotted until Caesar seized power, was murdered, and then in turn his murderers were murdered by his heir. The American Republic though, it falls to an upjumped used car salesman acting as the catspaw of a Russian autocrat. No one in history will remember this as a play of great men facing tragedy, it will instead be remembered as something of a joke and in a few hundred years people will laugh about it as a witty anti-republican quip when the idea of elective representation is brought up.

Well, ave imperium. There remains much to be done.

Canada here. Things aren't as bad as in other countries, but we have suffered from neoliberalism like the rest of the world. We have are own rust-belt in Southern Ontario were single-industry towns (mostly based around auto or steel manufacture) have been totally left behind and turned into post industrial hell-scapes. The welfare state has been undermined somewhat but we still have decent public services and reasonably strong (though class collaborationist) unions.

Montreal is the only remotely leftist place in the country though I feel the younger generations are more open to socialism as in much of the rest of the western world.

We suffered less in the great recession because of the commodities boom and our maintenance of some rudimentary banking controls. For this reason the populist wave in the rest of the world hasn't really caught up to us and we still have a reasonably stable political system with a popular obama-like pm in power.

Another interesting thing about Canada is there seems to be less racial tension here with anti-racism and multi-culturalism very much built into the national identity. Most immigrants here are also pretty well educated and wealthy which helps with integration.

Bonapartism, close though.

What part of Germany are you from? Would say Baden-Wurttemberg has similar issues?

What do you mean by this Quebecois nationalism or Pan-canadian civic nationalism?

I'm from Bavaria. Well, politically, Franconians have a hard time associating themselves with Bavaria.

I'd say Baden-Württemberg is pretty similar to Bavaria in regards that it is probably better off than everything in the North. It's currently ruled by the Green party but they are pretty much conservatives there. Not just from a leftist perspective, even conservatives say the Greens are conservative in Baden-Württemberg.

I'd say the cost of living might be slightly lower than in Bavaria as long as you don't live in Stuttgart or Freiburg. Swabians are known to be parsimonious and prissy, but that might be a meme.

I see, thanks. I would try to move to Tubingen, i've met a girl who studies there and things are going really fine. She only speaks standard german tho, doesn't really identify with swabian culture. The whole state is just beautiful….

In Swabia you have the mountains and the proximity to the Rhine going for you. Tübingen is a Universitätsstadt, I'd assume you have affordable rents there. It really depends on if you are getting a good job. Students jobs and jobs without a degree are paid garbage.

German culture is still very nice in terms that you have a streetlife, diversity, nightlife, festivals, etc. I can't deny that. Good luck tho comrade

France
Things will change a lot soon, one way or the other but for now:

One year, we will know the fate of Greece.

Brazil

Things sucks like usual but atleast every major political parties from The """""""Workers Party"""" and the right wing parties are being investigated so there is that

Well everyone pretty much knows what's going on in the US but I'm from Kentucky specifically. Kentucky has had strong unions in the east of the state in the coal mines basically forever and they're in combination with the cities are what's managed to keep our state from having republican control of both house and senate for decades. Unfortunately they didn't seem to turn out to vote (being unionized coal miners they tend to agree with dems on union policy and disagree with them on environmental regulation) which resulted in the republicans not only having complete control of congress but also the governorship. First week they pass right to work which is going to completely crush our unions, it resulted in a union protest in the state building, but they can't do anything but hope democrats would repeal it if they get into office, which isn't going to happen. They also put in place some conservative social reforms which to be honest I couldn't care less about, but is still less than ideal (I'm against social regulation generally, but it's far from my primary issue).

I'm from Jersey (Channel Islands). For a start the socialist movement here is very weak with only a minority centre-left party to represent SocDem views in a non-party based political system.
I wouldn't even know how to summarize our government's policy on the economy other than open cronyist 'government' where the States (our term for our government body) and private companies are often hard to distinguish from each other. Every single endeavour to build or develop a site; there is always a private company in bed with the States, making them pour thousands of tax-payer's money into sites that will benefit our 'too-big-to-fail' finance industry bullshit that nobody asked for. This is accelerated by the fact that most 'independent candidates' (which is the majority of our government body due to not having many political parties) are mostly rich businessmen. You hear stories of Tory MPs exploiting the break up of the NHS by working as CEOs in private healthcare companies, well imagine that but with every politician in Jersey. Also when these building projects are made, millions of pounds just disappear and because of political apathy and the lack of sufficient anti-corruption laws (Jersey updates it's laws at it's own pace separate to UK law) no inquiry is ever raised.

It's honestly rather hard to describe the scope of this issue so I'll give an example from Sark to illustrate the craziness of Channel Island politics; so there are these porky brothers called the Barkley brothers who live in Sark to avoid tax in the UK and practically own all the hotels (as well has other infrastructure) in Sark. The Barkley brothers wanted to tighten their grip on the island by installing loyalists into the Sark States to create a literal crony puppet government. The people of Sark soon found out (it's a small island after all) and started to object so because the Barkley brothers couldn't get their way; they completely shut down the hotels, and everything else they owned on the island. This utterly destroyed the tourism industry (which the island needed to survive) and put most of the island out of work. The Barkley brothers even sent appeals to their chums in the mainland for help dealing with the unruly peasants including a letter to the fucking Queen herself. In the end the people Sark lost and now the Barkley brothers de facto own the entire island.

The only people, other that the SocDem party, who are taking a stand are ratty middle aged conservatives who winge and moan about about muh corrupted and immoral out of touch politicians but all they do is elect equally cronyist politicians but it's all fine because at least they tackle the topic of 'uncontrolled mass immigration'.
On the subject of which; despite having a substantial Portuguese immigrant community, (8.2% of Jersey are ethnic Portuguese, who are mostly classcuked like the rest of us anyway), the biggest problem with immigration is actually the anglos (I'm not Irish btw) that immigrate over to here from the mainland. The States of Jersey thought it would be a great idea to actually pay £11,000 to English porkies to come and live in Jersey, crazy right? What's more crazy is that often times the porkies barter with the States to get a far higher amount. Jersey is the true zenith of classcuckery in that we have to pay Porky to exploit us.
This very fluid immigration through Jersey also has another effect: whilst right-wing Anglo porkies are flooding into Jersey; more progressive minded youth of the newer Jersey-born generation are going off to Uni (in the UK as there are no real universities in Jersey) and never coming back to Jersey (don't believe the tourism ads about Jersey; in reality our islands is really just full of pigeon shit, litter and rainy British weather like the rest of the UK). For example the socialist youth party I was in had to disband within a few months due to a majority of its members having to leave for uni.
So no left-wing people to hang out with, no union power to agitate with, to real leftist party to join and a hopeless future for the island and the rest of the UK.

pan-candian civic nationalism

Also it's kentucky so all our usual shit applies

Not great, I'm probably going to moving to Idaho next year, which is at least a little better.

Denmark, things are pretty good actually. The anti capitalist party has been rapidly increasing here as well.

Things will get better mate.
I'm half Danish/Brazilian myself

I should clarify that we don't pay porkies to come to Jersey but rather give them a tax cap of 1%. Also terms are still barterable.
Not sure where I got the £11,000 thing from

Canada here, Alberta specifically. As said previously by above posters things could be worse.

Only difference in Alberta is the slight increase in wannabe libertarians and normal conservatives since Weedman was elected.

I have directed my foreign friends living in the uk to what you have written as a quick read of how shit the uk is. We are still living in this post war mindset of "keep calm and carry on" which is become "its all shit but pretend its not look how great we are" bullcrap. We have no real industry, and what we do is leaving. The country's money comes from the finance sector in London so regardless of who comes to power they cant do anything about them because they can just pack up and leave. There is no hope even Labour going back to being soc dems rather than red torys isnt going to help. I agree after 1970 we fucked it and we fucked it bad

Can't you leave the church and stop paying?

Denmark here.
All this pretty much applies to the situation here as well. Rents are even more ridiculous in the cities.
But all in all I feel very lucky (muh muh privilege) to live here.

Yeah. It costs 30€.

Sometimes church run institions like kindergardens and hospitals won't accept you though once you leave the church.

I live in Ireland.

The far-left parties here are both Trots and have 6 seats out of 158 (People Before Profit - Solidarity).
However there are a further 9 or so far-left independents who do their own thing (most prominently Independents4Change).

I find it frustrating as there are three of these independents who used to be in PBP-S, and a further independent who never was but voted for the PBP-S leader to be our next Taoiseach (Prime Minister).

If they were altogether, they would be our fourth-largest party. Right now they look safe to retain all their seats, with just one in danger (Bríd Smith) and with the possibility of gaining two extra seats.

Aside from that, we obviously have Sinn Féin who call themselves Democratic Socialists.
In the next election they should hit the 30 seat mark, maybe as high as 34 like Adrian Kavanagh predicted lately.

What I would like to see is a coalition government with Sinn Féin as the main party, with PBP-Solidarity and independents as the minority partner.

From my own predictions, the absolute maximum amount of seats such a coalition could garner is 49 out of 185, a Minority Government which would require the backing of Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael (centrists and centre-right respectively).

Obviously that is very unrealistic, and Solidarity hate Sinn Féin because of the stance they took on the National Question but a boy can dream

Of course there are two of them…

How is life in Ireland nowadays? Last testimonies I read were from the boom days, but you guys got it pretty hard in the crisis years. Are there any towns that have become a wasteland, ghost cities, new lumpenprole-subcultures, …?

Have a couple of posts of this thread been deleted or something because I swear there was loads more?

There's a homeless crisis in Dublin and the centre-right ruling Government is doing nothing to help. It just so happens that about 40% of their elected TDs (MPs) are landlords.
They're getting very tory-esque in that they just released a huge campaign to tackle "dole scroungers", paying over 100K on it so far.

Unemployment is going down, but that doesn't mean people are getting good jobs. Lots of nonsense work that bypasses minumum wage laws somehow.

Waterford isn't doing too well these days. Nor is Limerick.

According to the latest census the only two counties that experienced a decrease in the past five years are Mayo and Donegal. That would suggest that Letterkenny, Wesport and Castlebar aren't doing too great. I used to live in Letterkenny however and it didn't seem too bad, so that would mean that it's the rural areas that people are moving out of.

Some country towns around the West and Midlands aren't doing very well. Clonmel (who elected a socialist), Tuam, Boyle, Ballinasloe, places like that.

Iceland. Every one here is classcuked as fuck. Some guy is about to found a socialist party on Monday and its looking out to just be another succdem party. I dont know anyone who is more left that the greens. Its just fucked.

fucking hell that's mental

Portugal. They say things are getting better but O feel as strangled as before. The current government is Socialist with parliamentary support from the Communist Party and Left Bloc. It seems seems like the socialist are going the neoliberal route as expected and the parties that support them can't do anything but complain because they would be slaughtered in the next elections and the socialists would get majority. They say unemployment is going down but most new jobs are precarious. They say the deficit is under control but they made some massive cuts in public investment and spending. The debt keeps rising and it's 130% now (despite investment being slashed). They sold one of our banks to an American fund. But they are experts in marketing, propaganda and making the situation look fantastic, so they will do even better in the next elections.

Also, a lot of our income comes from tourism so the major cities are turning into tourist-friendly overpriced shitholes. Cities are no longer cities, they're losing their soul and becoming amusement parks. The rest of the country (interior) is becoming more deserted and poor by the day. Portugal is basically the Atlantic coast now and even that is filled with tourists and hipsters while the people that live there have their homes demolished and forced to move because it doesn't look good for the tourists. It's a sad thing to see your country turn into a tourist trap and you hear on the news everyday how Portugal or another big city won another best tourist destination award from some minor publication while our situation degrades. It's sickening.

Why can't people just start farming on the deserted interior?

I'm an amerilard.

This place is a third world shithole. You know how people give North Korea shit for spending all their budget on the military and nothing for the people? Well that's literally America.

Because the farmers there are receiving subsidies from the EU to grow shit on the interior but they keep it all for themslves and don't grow anything. Also, it's much cheaper to import things from Spain and that's what most companies do.

There probably aren't any japanese posters here right? I'd love to hear about their perspective on the state of the JCP and how young people there generally feel about leftist politics .

Maybe you didn't think this "benefits" thing through.