The money from the fountain gets collected and sent to Caritas, a catholic charity that focuses on health, disaster relief, poverty, and migration. I am a Queer atheist person in Spain that uses their services and they haven’t once made my queerness an issue. Nor have they exposed me to their religious views.
So, shrug, I’m not gonna shit on them doing the tradition that many diplomatic events in Rome do.
Objectively, it sounds like it's an innocent tradition and a healthy charity.
Subjectively, it's tone-deaf af, when the rule-makers perform superstition for such a massive world-changing problem. Basically "thoughts and prayers."
A friend once applied for a job at Caritas in Germany and got rejected for the reason of not being catholic, but christian. I think you could argue that is okay, but by German law it actually is not.
I realy don't understand why the church still gets to do so many things that are simply not legal. It seems like the law that they have to follow is an older version.
My aunt works for Caritas in Germany. They do seem like they do good work, even if they believe in the whole resurrected vampire man who was birthed by a virgin and impregnated by a dude who flooded the world for fun.
There are Rules for Rulers. In the background there are always nobels, clergy, bankers, businessmen, military and the common folk each with their own demands and reasons to pressure or remove the ruler of their demands are not met.
There are a enough examples of leaders trying to change too much and being assassinated. Although these days that's more killed in the media.
"We need to have more babies! Our population is declining!"
Well we could subsidize child care.
"Fuck you! Oh whatever shall we do?!"
Well we could provide housing programs for people who want to have children.
"Fuck you! Oh we need to think of something."
Oh, I know, we could subsidize fertility treatments for parents that want children but are having difficulties and can't afford 10s of thousands of uncovered medical expenses at once!
"Fuck you! Oh, woe is me, there's nothing anyone can do!"
I actually agree for the sake of the Earth and humanity long term, if there is such a thing anymore.
I acknowledge though, that it will be very painful for humanity to adjust to downsizing, and in sociopolitical discourse, short medium term humanity is all most ever consider relevant. But yes, I agree with the long game position that humanity should strive to shrink and find equilibrium with our world.
Is that Angela Merkel in the middle? If so this must be at least an old photo. She is not the German chancellor anymore. Not that that would make things any better...
Just wanted to make sure. Not sure if any US representatives are in this picture though. But it kinda looks a bit like Merkel and Martin Schulz (2nd from the right, also a German politician and at the time probably President of the European Parliament - this guy looks like him) are on the lookout to see if our friends from America (on maps to the left/west from europe) would like to flip a coin as well.
Right? There's nothing you defend, these major corporations and billionaires are literally ruining everything and offering no benefit. Most of the best stuff that happens is from publicly funded research or volunteer work.
Well the current coalition isnt really doing any better in that regard. All they seem to care about is condemning climate protesters and the usual corrupt behaviour that we know from the CDU...
There would never have been a Deutschlandticket with CDU. Fuck FDP but at least neither Grüne nor SPD is openly fellating the AfD Nazis like the current CDU is doing.
Condemning climate protesters isn't anything unique to politicians. We would all be behind them if they blockaded billionaire homes but sitting on highways only makes us despise them like we do PETA.
They did NOT toss coins for "good luck fighting the climate emergency." Maybe some did, who knows. It was not a collective wish for something, just a stage for a nice group photo.
From the Yahoo article:
"Of course the wishes can't be revealed to anyone if they are to become true - so who knows what British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, French President Emmanuel Macron, outgoing German Chancellor Angela Merkel wished for."
"I wish I didn't have to let the peasants elect me. I wish I could just have power so I could enrich myself! I wish I didn't have to stand here for this damn photo!"
We know what they wished for whether they tell us or not lol
Due to reports of misinformation from users I'll post this comment here.
No. They were not actually tossing coins backwards for good luck fighting climate change. No one knows exactly what the people in this picture were actually wishing good luck for.
I don't want to come down too hard on people but one of my jobs as moderator is to prevent the spread of misinformation.
I despise Modi but there's not one single Indian who doesn't care about climate change. It's at least one thing literally all politicians and people of all classes get behind here.
You think these fuckers used one of their own coins? They were just props that was handed to them. They probably haven't touched an actual coin themselves in years.
I'm always surprised about this ideas. I imagine this happening when the marketing intern comes up with it and somehow it climbs the ladder to a point where the person in charge says "let's do this". Amazing.