I became disgusted by some of the things that are published in the Liechtenstein papers. I therefore wanted to catalogue these idiotic, disgusting and just hateful Leserbriefe.

In my uninformed opinion, these letters are a symptom of a bigger problem we are not properly facing in our society. Our society has become more and more fractured, parts of our society (imo) have become afraid and hate certain parts of modern living and modern technology. They don’t want to live in a society that they can’t or rather don’t want to understand.

Let’s for example take a problem that appears every few decades years in the main stream. Electronic emissions like Radio Waves, WIFI or now 5G. These technologies have been demonized by mostly the same group of none experts whenever a new version appeared.

5G has not shown any evidence of being harmful to living organism in a lab and field environment. Yet, crystal moms and fake experts handing out doctorates to other fake experts to sell the public their own cure have been holding the discussion hostage for too long.

Let’s assume 5G and other EMF emission is harmful. Then 5G would be less harmful by the nature of how it works. But these skeptics don’t want to look at the hard facts, but rather talk about their feelings and their group memes that have been screenshotted and reposted to oblivion.

In my opinion, we need to accept that the world we live in is not the same world that existed 100 years ago. Where someone could reasonably understand their perceivable environment. Now we are bombarded by so much information every day, that no person will be able to understand the entire world. Therefore, we should try to rebuild societies trust in institutions and experts, while still allowing for healthy skepticism and discussion. Errors or negligent behavior occurs and will continue to occur. This might be a goal we can never achieve, but we should try to work towards.

The information age has brought humanity many benefits, but we need to make sure that we don’t leave behind parts of our society who despise society or its trajectory.

Therefore, we should try to educate and discuss the problems and advances in our society. In a panel of experts who understand the issues in a field. Nothing will be achieved by two stay-at-home parents discussing the benefits and drawbacks of gene modified plants in a public forum! They will only agree with each other, while having fundamental flaws in their assumptions and understanding of the technology.

The code

If you want to follow along, you can get the code on my GitHub-Page.

Download the dataset as CSV

Look at the data and search through it

The code is really simple. At first we start with a few configuration settings.
This part of the code sets bounds for the code to look at. Because the Website, where I am getting the letters has a simple file structure. If a new letter gets created (or article) a counter gets larger. So if we want to get a new letter we just look at the webpage at: https://www.volksblatt.li/Leserbriefe/*an id*

---

#Base URL atm it only works for this website but the Code could be adapted to other sites
base_url = "https://www.volksblatt.li/Leserbriefe"
#Bounds for Letters to analyze
amount_of_letters = 654932
lower_bound = 647504

---

So after the basic config, we open a txt-file, in which we save all letters that were already looked at and get the last id.

---

#Looking at all letters already looked at
with open("text.txt","r") as articles:
    list_articles = articles.read().split("\n")
newest_letter_id = amount_of_letters
for article in reversed(list_articles):
    if " --- " in article:
        newest_letter_id = int(article.split(" --- ")[0])
        break
logging.info("Newest Letter id: "+str(newest_letter_id))

---

Now we are ready to start checking for new letters.

---

#--------Creator--------
#Actually Getting the letters from the site
#Writing it to the output file text.txt
with open("text.txt","a") as text:
    #Going from upperbound to Lower Bound
    for i in reversed(range(newest_letter_id)):
        if i < lower_bound:
            logging.debug("Exited with: "+str(i))
            exit()
        letter = Leserbrief(i)
        if letter.get_text()=="Error":
            logging.debug("Letter not available at: "+str(letter.id)+" | did not get any text")
        else:
            text.write( letter.id+" --- "+letter.get_title() + " --- "+ letter.get_creator()+" --- "+ letter.get_text()+"\n")
            logging.info("")
            print("Done with: "+str(letter.id))

---

from urllib.request import urlopen
from html.parser import HTMLParser
from urllib import parse
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import logging

class Leserbrief:

    url = "https://www.volksblatt.li/Leserbriefe/"


    def __init__(self, id):
        self.id=str(id)
        self.url = Leserbrief.url+self.id
        self.title="body_hTitel"
        self.creator="body_divInfo"
        self.text="body_divText"