oakfarm | International news

So today the leader of the free world, bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel, will likely be reelected and tomorrow there’s the referendum for Iraqi Kurdistan independence. Just showing how my brain works, I thought the second thing might affect me more. My thought was that Kurdish people living here might move back to build a new country. Then we would end up with empty apartments, leading to the price of apartment (including mine) would fall. Ok, I think there’s several reasons my thought was wrong. It’s just one example the world is connected and has been for a long time. A plant disease devastated the potato harvest in 19-century Ireland, leading to mass starvation and mass immigration. A mass immigration that changed the history of the whole English speaking world. 2015, a civil war in Syria leads to a refugee crisis among other things stretching the infrastructure in Sweden (may or may not have increased the price of my appartment). Same thing. (Since then political decision in Brussel and Stockholm has lowered the number of asylum seekers.)

About the first, it’s said that when Germany as one of the last western European countries legalised same sex marriage, Merkel voted against it, but the six muslim MP's voted for it. That doesn’t mean that there’s no such thing as Islam homophobia (I have seen it myself) but that it’s not the only threat against LGBT-people in the west. And now Germany will join Western Europe in another way. They too will have a far right party that gets 10-20% of the votes, just like every other European countries. Actually I know a Belgian guy, he has told me their far right party has collapsed, so everywhere except Belgium. Otherwise of course I know the international news - this time outside Europe - are more scary than they have been in a long time.