Most of Europe seems to have gone mad. The UK, Germany, and quite a few others... may be some exceptions, Hungary, Croatia... the US is not paradise, but at least you can move far away from the shouting crowds (both sides) and just live your life. Several friends urge me to visit my family while still possible - but I am not going, because, within a few days the world might have turned around and I cannot get back home - remember the 2020 moment when all of a sudden we could not travel anymore. No thanks.
glad you stayed Mary Rose. No one seems to have foreseen how this EU thing would make things so much worse. We had a feeling it was no good when we were not even asked if we wanted the Euro or not, it was all decided over our heads. I left 22 years ago this month and haven't had any regrets.
Glad for your choice! Well done. I always hope that what my late dad said is correct, that the US is "too big" to go totally fascist. We have such diversity politically, even though they try to sell everyone on the 2 party system. Indpendents/no party is huge here as you are probably aware. And we have GUNS.
It was always my thought that because of those GUNS our government would hesitate to be to overbearing, least they are faced with an armed revolution. Lets hope we can keep them and never have to use them.
I know the feeling. At one point right after the patriot act passed, my husband and I had enough money to seriously consider going to Canada or New Zealand.
In retrospect, I'm so glad we decided to stay. I wouldn't want to be anywhere near Europe or the Commonwealth, especially in the last 5 years or so.
Yes you would have had to deal with either Justin Turdeau or Jacinda the lying wicked witch of the south, both shitters with the privy of king Chuckles the Turd
OMG yeah, both those countries now - YIKES! They have fallen. Australia, too. Canada is so bad. Do you follow "Absurdistan"? She did an incredible essay on just how bad Canada is.
US is so large one can hide for years and not be found! Only European countries I would consider (if I spoke the language) are Hungary and Croatia. And recently, Russia. I have seen several YouTubes from, mostly mixed couples (one Russian) who had been bullied like you would not believe. Other couples took that 'escape' passport, I think for 3 years. But what if Putin dies, or after 3 years stops the program. At least here after all those years I know who to turn to if I need something. And we have an Aldi now :D with European food.
US Aldi must have gotten classier over the years. We had one in our neighborhood back in the 90's and I shopped there once. They made you pay a quarter to use a cart and a lot of the stuff on the shelves was literally like the generic food from Repo Man, just a plain label with writing on it. I don't buy a lot of canned stuff and as a cook, I was willing to pay a bit more for nicer produce. A lot of people I knew raved about the prices, but I wasn't impressed...especially after I came out west and discovered Grocery Outlet. This was 30 years ago though, I haven't been in one since 1995...
there is a lot of difference in the stores. I have shopped there in Belgium and a few times in Germany. I don't buy much canned stuff, but they carry European cookies and chocolate, and especially around the holidays, European style cheese. I live in small town GA and all we had was Walmart and Kroger (which I despise). Prices on fruit and veggies are still extremely lower - last week the local store had 3 bell peppers for 5.45, the same package at Aldi was 2.99. Blueberries in local store 8.49 and they were very bad, almost all molded, whereas Aldi had 4,49 for a bigger box and not one bad. No one had any rain jackets this winter but them and at less than 20 bucks ! When I lived in Tucson there was a slew of stores to chose from. Different here. One has to do with what one has! I am not willing to drive over 2 hours to Atlanta to get some international stuff! May be one day I need to come and see what is cooking !
Nice. Sounds a lot like Grocery Outlet. We have a few local european stores but they are so expensive, which is a shame because I love stuff like Sour Cherry jam and Syrup, etc. In Sacramento we had a Russian place that stocked a lot of good European stuff cheap and had a huge case full of different cookies and baklavas. MMMM. I miss that here.
Oh gods yes, I dodged a bullet there. A few years before I ended up divorced, my wife and I had gone to New Zealand for her 40th birthday. We were theoretically also going to go for mine a few years later, but... we were no longer together by then, and so I did not go. Still, I had quite enjoyed it, and in the 2016 / 2017 time frame had been contemplating moving there.
Not mad, unfortunately. Madness among the ruling class has a different pattern, and can be made profitable.
This is simply the death-throes of an older order, as a new one emerges. That's why the leadership doesn't do the practical, sensible things that ought to be the obvious choices, but instead chain themselves harder to the steering-wheel of their ideal-ology, and why their utopianism resembles a sdafety blanket more than actual strategy with concrete goals.
Let's take the Trump-tariffs, based in lies as they are, as an example.
The sober and pragmatic way of dealing with this would be to figure out how to set things up so EU companies profit from Trump's actions, and how to hurt the US economy via Trump's actions (in order to get him to negotiate from a weakened position). How? Possibly, by telling Putin: "Hey, how about a ceasefire from your side and we lift all the emabargoes and unfreeze all your assets, and you sell us your gas and oil while we put a 1500% tariff on US oil and gas?" - an actual agreement is of course a lot more complicated, but the bottom line is, the EU could show the US that while we kind of need the US' market to sell to, we don't need the US for any kind of import, at all.
And then where is Trump's friends in the US corporate capitalism going to sell their goods at the same prices they can get in the EU? I doubt the markets in Africa or most of Asia is going to shell out the eq. of $1 500 for a smartphone every other year.
Or the EU could present the US with a bill for the cost of all the refugees and migrants the US' military adventures have flooded us with. I'm thinking at least a couple of trillions. Or the EU nations could demand all gold stashed in the US be delivered back to the nations that owns it. That would really put a fire under him, since most of that gold is a fiction: it's there as long as no-one tries to actually prove it's there (why else refuse to let nations audit the gold reserve?).
And the EU could of course tell Trump: "You have 72 hours to remove all US troops from Europe. All materiel will be delivered back to the US, at cost, as soon as possible."
That too would force him to change his tune, because he too dances on strings; not necessarily from any one person or group, but from factors no single human can control - the economy for starters.
Or the EU could tell him: "We will no longer comply with any US embargoes against selling whatever we please to whichever nation wants to buy it. I hear Iran is mighty interested in an anti-missile defense system". That too would force him to negotiate in earnest.
That's a list of actions that are technically possible, but politically impossible, because I (if we imagine that I have any clue about this stuff, no guarantees of that) having no ties or vested interests betond patriotism, can afford to look at things from a real-politik angle, instead of a neoliberal capitalist one, the latter being the one used by the EU leadership, intelligentia, and Brussels-Strasbourg nomenklatura.
(Again, it's a /lot/ more "complexicated" - and I'm certainly not any kind of expert!)
But since they're tied to an old dead paradigm that has run its course, they can't step back and view things "from above", so instead they try to solve every situation according to the paradigm, instead of looking at the context and ciscourse of the situation itself.
Not madness, just an old beast fighting to get out of the tar-pit it has waddled into.
And what happens to the EU when all troops and matériels are removed from Europe? You think the USA currently BENEFITS from NATO as much as the EU?
Oh right, you run to Putin’s loving arms for all your energy, and ask for protection from big bad America. Ask Poland and Finland what they think of that possibility.
Or even better, give Iran pallets of cash to fund “Sesame Street” tv shows in Iraq. No terrorist links for the smart EU!
Get started, I can’t wait to see how Europe out-deals Trump.
Nothing much, military speaking. The combined military of Poland, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and the Baltic states alone are greater than Russia'sw military, and that was before the Ukraine war, and before re-armament started.
Poland and Finland would have no problem buying gas and oil from Russia; they didn't before the US started meddling in the Ukraine and started excerting leverage against Germany and EU to get its proxy-war for profit going.
Why would EU fund Sesame Street in Iran? Are you drunk?
European nations had and has had lots of business with Iran (same as the US before the '79 revolution - before then, you backed a murderous dictatorship because it profited you to have leverage against the Saudis and OPEC - I guess you're too young to remember/know) before the Cold War ended.
For Europe, what I suggested would be very profitable. For the US, not so much, which is why it opposes any such moves from European nations: the US needs us, but we don't need it for anything, really.
"Backed a murderous dictatorship"... The lesser of two evils is still evil, but it's ... what's the word.... "lesser". The Shah was a full "cr*p-ton" better than Iran's current Islamist regime. So if nobody in the Middle East is Pure of Heart and has love for every person, then don't align with ANYONE? That's ridiculous as well.
Your intense over-estimation of the interest or ability of the EU to defend a single blade of European grass is awe-inspiring. And your dismissal of the American military as "needing" the EU, is laughable. Sorry, we're full up on EU potentates preening their sparkly chest full of non-combat medals.
that would be the smart thing to do. It seems to me that smart and government are 2 opposites. I even think Putin would jump on the deal, he seems to be one of the smarter eggs in the basket.
May be these are just the last convulsions of a dying era, just like the excesses mentioned from the end of the Roman empire. I wish I could repost your response!
You know, and I think we and others have been over this before, but I'm pretty sure that at least 2/3s of the actual people in the USA and EU-rope are in agreement on at least 2/3s of issues, or 2/3s of any single issue.
Most people don't want tariffs when they have it explained to them what the negatie effects are.
Most people see it as a self-explanatory right to defend their home, family, kin or helpless third party from illegal aggression.
Most people don't think abortion ought to be used as a post-fact contraceptive.
Most people are of the live and let live mindset, not minding legal migrants who assimilate and show respect and gratitude to the nation that has taken them in.
Most people have no problem with one nation saying "good X may only be sold if it lives up to standard Y, for the good of the consumer"; take the difference in food quality f.e. - I'm quite certain most Americans would be happy to not have steroids, hormones, antibiotics and so on in their food.
Most people are, when you can sit down and talk it through with them, very pro-freedom of speech and such.
And so on.
It's the corpos, the swamp creatures, the useful idiots and the token astroturf-gardeners aka the media that's fomenting discord, strife and despair - not the people. Remember just a few years back, when people from all over the West no matter their politics in other matters found great accord with each other on-line ia Rumble, Substack and other places, sharing their disbelief over the Covid-tyranny, and how they all encouraged each other to fight back, sharing information and strategies.
That's the will of the people. That's what the elites fear.
This is the stuff political uprisings are made of. In the USA, there is a legal distinction between "slander" (which has a high bar to prove and which is merely a civil matter when proved) and "insult," which is rudeness at worst. How can an "insult" be a crime? And why is it a crime to insult a politician and not a fellow plebeian?
I concur, a public figure should be subject to public scrutiny - particularly when it is truth by meme, satire, analogy, metaphor, pure snark and simile.
These German memes that people are being prosecuted over are so clunky. If this kind of shit were happening in the US, memesters would have an absolute field day making memes that would tie the politicians, prosecutors, and courts in knots, hilariously, while the rest of us just laughed and mocked them harder. What's up Germany???
Can someone please speak to the origin of the mindset in ostensibly free, democratic societies that by all appearances have earned V.P. Vance’s chastisement at the Munich Security Conference?
This is only the beginning of a guess. Maybe the origin of the mindset that tolerates persecution lies in the deep-seated values of a culture that are passed from individual to individual over the generations. These values are not universal to all individuals, but they are somehow a central cultural tendency. Exactly where they come from or how they develop is above my pay grade!
There was that German politician who went on 60-Minutes, and she said it's worse for politicians because it might discourage people from going into public service. But she somehow made that out to be a bad thing.
If anyone in the US thinks what happens in Europe will stay in Europe then they've not been paying attention. The First Amendment is being "reinterpreted" by legal scholars armed with clever linguistics. Every "inalienable" right is. Such that one day, soon, war will mean peace, ignorance will mean strength and freedom will mean slavery.
Noted Obama "nudger" and Harvard constitutional law professor Cass Sunstein published a piece in 2022, "How to Interpret the Constitution" to do just that. He is read by and taken seriously by judges and lawyers all the way up to SCOTUS.
Just like Germany and Europe opened their borders to hordes of illegals around 2011 and US borders dissolved in 2021 so too will German and European assaults on speech come to the US. And the First Amendment will dissolve into Newspeak linguistics.
Unless we do something much different than the Germans and Europeans did. And prevail upon our elected leaders to cement free speech as *we* currently define it as protected by the law, and practice, of the land. Lest it be "reinterpreted" by the totalitarians.
Free speech absolutism. Embrace it without apology. Severing the Alex Jones's and Nick Fuentes's from permissible speech ensures our speech meets the same fate. I may disagree with them on some things but will defend their right to say what they say with all my might and will.
Has it joined the league or rather, are we all far more awake to this type of govt suppression than we were 10 years ago?
Since covid we have all become aware of countless court cases and legal fights over freedom of expression and published speech here in the UK, Germany, and elsewhere in the West. What has been more outrageous for me has been learning how many similar cases there were throughout the 2000s and even earlier -- in some cases going back to the 80s.
The issue is that back then there'd be an article or two buried in a newspaper somewhere but otherwise no amplification. We didn't have the indie media ecosystems we have today, not to mention many of us were perhaps not very attuned to the types of powers held by our governments. We thought we had liberties we didn't really have, and those ensnared by the system were voiceless.
All I can say is what a lesson it has all been, and what a mountain we have got to climb if we hope to claw back the rights we are owed.
It's predictable that as soon as government can decide what is and isn't allowable speech, they determine political dissent goes in the latter category.
There isn't much real satire in the German mainstream anymore, I think, it stopped with Corona completely (at which point many seasoned cabaret artists had already retired or died) when satire suddenly began to make fun of normal people, deviants from the point of view of the establishment. There are now dark creatures like Jan Böhmermann, who is something like a state-approved, professional mocker of everything anti-establishment.
There was a book preface from the 1980s that had, “If just ONE person buys this book and gets something out of it, then we will lose many thousands of dollars and be forced to sell handguns to schoolchildren”.
In American law it's much harder for a politician or other public figure to sue for defamation of character and similar crimes--putting up with false accusations, exaggerations, parody, sarcasm, and even lies are seen as being part of public life. In politics the bar is even higher, because claims like "John Doe is the worst mayor in the country!" or "A vote for Smith will ruin us all" are usually opinions, not claims of fact, and are generally understood to be rhetorical. It's amazing to me that Germany enacted a law to say that criticizing politicians is worse than criticizing private citizens.
That happened to be the case in Germany, too, until it suddenly stopped, or so it seems. Now the law seems to be interpretable in an arbitrary way, however fits to pursuit inconvenient citizens. Of course there is a pedagogical moment to it: educate the masses by example. Interestingly, the political detached don't bother, mostly they probably do not even know, as the mainstream media manage to not mention it or frame in a proper way.
The overwhelming majority of politicians are self-serving twits of average intelligence. Many are of well below average intelligence. So glad in the US we can call then what they are
It is so absurd that I am wondering why none of the earlier victims of the use of this law, such as by the likes of Habeck, has taken the matter to the ECtHR: it would be an exquisite test of the sincerity of all those sonorous enthusiasts of The Rule of Law that sit in Strasbourg, and of the German State's respect for human rights, for this law to be contested in the cradle of European human rights (as the ECtHR sees itself).
It is surely a no-brainer that seven months probation and a punitive fine is an infringement of the right to free expression under Article 10 (although it must be admitted that having no brains is a characteristic of members of the censorship-industrial complex). Germany would doubtless invoke the exception in Article 10 about restrictions on free speech allowed "for the protection of the reputation or rights of others" but we would at least have clarity on whether the solons of human rights think politicians' delicate feelings have absolute priority over free speech. If they did uphold the German law, it would utterly vindicate JD Vance's condemnation of Europe and its "values" in his Munich speech.
Precisely, it also means they cannot be held up to scrutiny because that would amount to criticism which wcould classify as an insult. I cannot believe what it is coming to Nextdoor, mind you neither here at home!
It is the moral duty of the public to make the exercise of public office more difficult. That's just a no-brainer where I come from. I could never live in Germany.
Procedurally, this kind of lèse-majesté legislation has the effect of empowering CLOWNS IN GOWNS (aka "judges¨) with a law diploma to become the final arbiters of ALL speech.
Anything at all worth saying in public debate is liable to offend some powerful person. The inevitable result will be escalating self-censorship.
And of course, the - UNNAMED - "judge" in this case is paid by the same government of which the complainant is a senior representative.
Every day it becomes more clear that the 'elites' have way more loyalty to one another than they have to us.
Even worse than the censorship will be the nanny-scolding they'll do about 'dangerous misinformation' or 'threatening politicians' as they remove their political opposition.
When civilizations die from suicide, it starts when those born into privilege and/or those who grift off the state no longer identify with their nation-state and begin to associate more with elites from other nations.
Its just like that meme with the wall you've shown a couple times.
Another book that changed my comprehension and understanding of people: Ernest Becker's "The Denial of Death."
Now that I think about it, "Denial" was extremely predictive of how many governments and hundreds of millions of people behaved during the virus hysteria crisis of 2020-22.
We remake the political landscape to secure a generation's worth of restoration of the ideals of the Western Enlightenment, or we see the left resurge with a ferocity that is hardly even hinted at now.
The Western Enlightenment was *good.* Unfortunately, it wasn't and cannot ever be proof against human nature.
Too many conservatives are the exact cognate of too many progressives. They both want an imposition of a State religion. The most surprising people really do hate freedom.
Faeser (whose name sounds like how you say "farting" in Swedish) ought to open a book on German history. It generally goes badly for the politicians who silence people and stifle debate.
Now, I'm a bit curious: could Bendels file a complaint with the police where he reports virtually all German media for defamation, against Donald Trump (or Putin!)?
It might lead to some interesting squirming when Faeser tries to explain why what they've called him over the years, isn't defamation.
In Holland they used to have a crime called "Belediging van een bevriend staatshoofd" -- Insulting a befriended (or friendly) head of state; it was OK to insult unfriendly ones. So in the late 1930s a Dutch journalist, Maurits Dekker, wrote a booklet purportedly analyzing the sanity of Hitler; I have read it, and it was not all that brilliant. But the German Ambassador complained, so at his behest Dekker was prosecuted and convicted; he was fined, though other people helped pay the fine, and all his remaining booklets were confiscated and destroyed.
And then, a couple of years later, Hitler invaded. But the law remained on the books until just a few years ago. You wonder why.
We had similar laws right before and during WW2, but those were emergency laws, not regular ones.
The same thing happened here: a stage actor made a couplet about the Trojan Horse, but the lyrics make it clear that he's talking about nazism. German ambassador files complaints and the state censorship bureau bans the lyrics.
The artist, Karl Gerard, still performed but he went on stage and quipped: "I'm not allowed to sing the lyrics anymore, so I'll just hum along to the music".
Upon which the audience sang the entire song anyway.
Sadly, the "cultural establishment" of his day blacklisted him during the war, as long as it looked as if Germany would preail. Then, in '45, they were suddenly all anti-German...
People did, yes. I live in one of the areas where this was done, and where Norwegian resistance fighters used to come to, for rest and recuperation.
tl;dr-rant about our sordid WW2-era history:
But:
All of this was done against the will of the Socialist Democrat-led emergency government. They tried to force local constabulary to report on people hiding Norwegians or English; since the police back then were all locals to the area they policed, it went nowhere.
And:
Our government allowed an entire SS-division to pass through Sweden. 30 000 men and their equipment, on trains protected by Swedish military and police (though one train was blown to kingdom come by Swedes protesting the government's disgusting acts of cowardice).
In fact, Sweden holds the unique status of having had to pay war damages /to/ Germany and to Allied nations too, for the duplicity and collaboration (f.e.: a lot of stolen gold was transited by the Wallenberg banking family when Wehrmacht, SS and the like started organising the "rat-lines"; wedding rings, teeth, necklaces, et c stolen from the victims of the fascists).
Our government and upper class was solidly pro-German (not pro-nazi, pro-German). The people was 100% for helping the Finns against the Soviets, and the Danes and Norwegians against Germany. The government feared inasion by the the Allies, USSR and Germany all at once, trying to take control of the harbours and the iron mines, smelting plants and refineries up North.
Heck, our Socialist Democrat party even ran 13 concentration camps (not death camps, prison ones) where "troublesome" people were incarcerated for political reasons during the war. And their own secret police, until the late 1960s. And a eugenics programme into the 1970s. The Party, not the state (but up until the 1980s, the Party was effectively the state).
People who know our history usually hate the Socialist Democrat party, in part due to how they have tried to scrub all of the above out of history books.
I am very much inclined to hate ANY group that self labels as, "Socialist Democrat".
Consider the words. Try to recall any "socialist" group, anywhere, anywhen, that actually practiced any recognizable form of "democracy". Lip service does not count!
The only reason they re-branded from socialist to social democrat in the late 19th century/early 20th was to create an illusion: that they weren't socialists.
But when you read the actual party programmes from that time, it is clear that they view democracy as a tool for gaining control of the state, and nothing more, and once in control of the state the party will become the state, making elections either illegal, impossible to lose (because the entire bureaucracy is made up out of party apparatchiks and loyalists) or pointless ("seven kinds of vanilla" as we say, meaning all our parties are some flavour of socialist democrat).
Another thing, very telling for any western European of my age or older, who was invloed in the punk/skin/anarchist scene in the 1980s or earlier, is the very deep hatred for anyone arguing for liberty displayed by the socialist democrats. An example: in 1980, the Party tried to make private bookings of artists illegal. All such were to go through a guild controlled authority under the control of Party-loyal musicians and actors (kind of how the SAG is in the US relative the Democrat party, but officially and legally so too): the point was to make art, literature, music, movies and theatre not in line with Party/state doctrine impossible to get displayed.
Later in the 1980s, they wanted to ban priate ownership of satellite dishes, and they discussed in the early 1990s to try and create the same type of internet-system that China would later build.
The goal of socialists, in spite of what socialist scripture claims, is always as total control of eerything and everyone as they can manage, for no other reason than the control itself.
Amnesty has been bought out since at least 2015 when they went way off mission and started providing signage and other provisions for protests supporting Stonewall and BLM, etc. ACLU under Chase Strangio is just as bad. Nobody deserves free speech except for the regime's pets and provocateurs.
Yeah. Amnesty were out in the streets of Ireland campaigning for the repeal of our 8th constitutional amendment back in 2018. They should stick to political prisoners. They're just a tool of the US state department anyway.
1) Germans need to read more Chinese history, because one of them needs to ask "what is the penalty for [redacted]?". If you're _going to jail_ for a tweet, you might as well start doing more than just tweeting, it's not like they can put in you a jail cell _inside a bigger jail_ or anything.
2) It would be beautiful if this guy got off with a defense of "my meme is actually true, and cannot be defamation/etc. After all, her actions in bringing this case clearly demonstrate the truth of it". A sort of "my post was in fact slander until you brought this case; this case retroactively legitimized it" situation
Old Swedish joke, a hobo is before the judge, the sheriff is testifying about the hobo loitering and the hobo is to be brought out of court and to jail:
Hobo: "Your honour, is it legal to call a sheriff or a judge an idiot?"
Judge: "No, that'd be slandering a public official and doing so is a crime!"
Hobo: "Well, you honour, is it legal to call an idiot a sheriff or a judge?"
Judge: "No, I can't see that it'd be criminal to do so?"
Hobo: "Good day to you, sheriff and judge!"
This one is several centuries old, yet it is a very good lesson in how to dodge censorship.
Re your point 2: exactly! The meme creator is clearly guilty of ‘timing’ and that’s about it. A quantum paradox type defence should work perfectly for him.
That's all I needed to read to know what this judgement was about - the 'accused' was "chief editor of the AfD-adjacent Deutschland Kurier".
For the judges and the Bavarian politicians this was a two-for: get that pesky chief editor who dares to be 'AfD-adjacent', and show how bravely they defend 'Our Democracy', in form of Ms Faeser. It should help CSU's head honcho Markus Söder in those terrible talks with the deep-red SPD Politician Ms Eskens, showing how firmly he's committed to defending said 'Democracy' ...
You folks in Germany need to completely overwhelm the "justice" system of your country. Post daily hundreds or thousands of increasingly vile memes—ones which clearly violate the censorship standards in use—and don't stop until the system breaks under the load. This is the classic Cloward-Piven strategy to use against government and is extremely effective.
You Germans are going to have to fight against these people in Germany ... we did it to the best of our ability in America, and things do get better when you go with people who don't want to silence you and throw you in jail ... You can't vote for these morons ... You have real enemies and you're going to have to fight for your own rights ...
Can a fire at the Bundestag, blamed on Afd, be in the offing? Or another Kristallnacht wherein all Afd offices are “spontaneously” destroyed by mobs of righteous citizens defending German democratic purity from those hated 3 letter people?
Most of Europe seems to have gone mad. The UK, Germany, and quite a few others... may be some exceptions, Hungary, Croatia... the US is not paradise, but at least you can move far away from the shouting crowds (both sides) and just live your life. Several friends urge me to visit my family while still possible - but I am not going, because, within a few days the world might have turned around and I cannot get back home - remember the 2020 moment when all of a sudden we could not travel anymore. No thanks.
And to think 10 years or so ago I wanted to flee to Europe to escape the US' burgeoning fascism.
glad you stayed Mary Rose. No one seems to have foreseen how this EU thing would make things so much worse. We had a feeling it was no good when we were not even asked if we wanted the Euro or not, it was all decided over our heads. I left 22 years ago this month and haven't had any regrets.
Glad for your choice! Well done. I always hope that what my late dad said is correct, that the US is "too big" to go totally fascist. We have such diversity politically, even though they try to sell everyone on the 2 party system. Indpendents/no party is huge here as you are probably aware. And we have GUNS.
It was always my thought that because of those GUNS our government would hesitate to be to overbearing, least they are faced with an armed revolution. Lets hope we can keep them and never have to use them.
Yes, they keep trying to disarm us using all sorts of trickery. It seems to have only made people more determined to own guns.
🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻
I think you're exactly right.
I sure hope so!
I know the feeling. At one point right after the patriot act passed, my husband and I had enough money to seriously consider going to Canada or New Zealand.
In retrospect, I'm so glad we decided to stay. I wouldn't want to be anywhere near Europe or the Commonwealth, especially in the last 5 years or so.
Yes you would have had to deal with either Justin Turdeau or Jacinda the lying wicked witch of the south, both shitters with the privy of king Chuckles the Turd
Blessed be yourself and your vocabulary !!! ... 👍👍👍 🧨🧨🧨
OMG yeah, both those countries now - YIKES! They have fallen. Australia, too. Canada is so bad. Do you follow "Absurdistan"? She did an incredible essay on just how bad Canada is.
US is so large one can hide for years and not be found! Only European countries I would consider (if I spoke the language) are Hungary and Croatia. And recently, Russia. I have seen several YouTubes from, mostly mixed couples (one Russian) who had been bullied like you would not believe. Other couples took that 'escape' passport, I think for 3 years. But what if Putin dies, or after 3 years stops the program. At least here after all those years I know who to turn to if I need something. And we have an Aldi now :D with European food.
US Aldi must have gotten classier over the years. We had one in our neighborhood back in the 90's and I shopped there once. They made you pay a quarter to use a cart and a lot of the stuff on the shelves was literally like the generic food from Repo Man, just a plain label with writing on it. I don't buy a lot of canned stuff and as a cook, I was willing to pay a bit more for nicer produce. A lot of people I knew raved about the prices, but I wasn't impressed...especially after I came out west and discovered Grocery Outlet. This was 30 years ago though, I haven't been in one since 1995...
there is a lot of difference in the stores. I have shopped there in Belgium and a few times in Germany. I don't buy much canned stuff, but they carry European cookies and chocolate, and especially around the holidays, European style cheese. I live in small town GA and all we had was Walmart and Kroger (which I despise). Prices on fruit and veggies are still extremely lower - last week the local store had 3 bell peppers for 5.45, the same package at Aldi was 2.99. Blueberries in local store 8.49 and they were very bad, almost all molded, whereas Aldi had 4,49 for a bigger box and not one bad. No one had any rain jackets this winter but them and at less than 20 bucks ! When I lived in Tucson there was a slew of stores to chose from. Different here. One has to do with what one has! I am not willing to drive over 2 hours to Atlanta to get some international stuff! May be one day I need to come and see what is cooking !
Nice. Sounds a lot like Grocery Outlet. We have a few local european stores but they are so expensive, which is a shame because I love stuff like Sour Cherry jam and Syrup, etc. In Sacramento we had a Russian place that stocked a lot of good European stuff cheap and had a huge case full of different cookies and baklavas. MMMM. I miss that here.
Oh gods yes, I dodged a bullet there. A few years before I ended up divorced, my wife and I had gone to New Zealand for her 40th birthday. We were theoretically also going to go for mine a few years later, but... we were no longer together by then, and so I did not go. Still, I had quite enjoyed it, and in the 2016 / 2017 time frame had been contemplating moving there.
I am... very, very glad that I did not do that.
Not mad, unfortunately. Madness among the ruling class has a different pattern, and can be made profitable.
This is simply the death-throes of an older order, as a new one emerges. That's why the leadership doesn't do the practical, sensible things that ought to be the obvious choices, but instead chain themselves harder to the steering-wheel of their ideal-ology, and why their utopianism resembles a sdafety blanket more than actual strategy with concrete goals.
Let's take the Trump-tariffs, based in lies as they are, as an example.
The sober and pragmatic way of dealing with this would be to figure out how to set things up so EU companies profit from Trump's actions, and how to hurt the US economy via Trump's actions (in order to get him to negotiate from a weakened position). How? Possibly, by telling Putin: "Hey, how about a ceasefire from your side and we lift all the emabargoes and unfreeze all your assets, and you sell us your gas and oil while we put a 1500% tariff on US oil and gas?" - an actual agreement is of course a lot more complicated, but the bottom line is, the EU could show the US that while we kind of need the US' market to sell to, we don't need the US for any kind of import, at all.
And then where is Trump's friends in the US corporate capitalism going to sell their goods at the same prices they can get in the EU? I doubt the markets in Africa or most of Asia is going to shell out the eq. of $1 500 for a smartphone every other year.
Or the EU could present the US with a bill for the cost of all the refugees and migrants the US' military adventures have flooded us with. I'm thinking at least a couple of trillions. Or the EU nations could demand all gold stashed in the US be delivered back to the nations that owns it. That would really put a fire under him, since most of that gold is a fiction: it's there as long as no-one tries to actually prove it's there (why else refuse to let nations audit the gold reserve?).
And the EU could of course tell Trump: "You have 72 hours to remove all US troops from Europe. All materiel will be delivered back to the US, at cost, as soon as possible."
That too would force him to change his tune, because he too dances on strings; not necessarily from any one person or group, but from factors no single human can control - the economy for starters.
Or the EU could tell him: "We will no longer comply with any US embargoes against selling whatever we please to whichever nation wants to buy it. I hear Iran is mighty interested in an anti-missile defense system". That too would force him to negotiate in earnest.
That's a list of actions that are technically possible, but politically impossible, because I (if we imagine that I have any clue about this stuff, no guarantees of that) having no ties or vested interests betond patriotism, can afford to look at things from a real-politik angle, instead of a neoliberal capitalist one, the latter being the one used by the EU leadership, intelligentia, and Brussels-Strasbourg nomenklatura.
(Again, it's a /lot/ more "complexicated" - and I'm certainly not any kind of expert!)
But since they're tied to an old dead paradigm that has run its course, they can't step back and view things "from above", so instead they try to solve every situation according to the paradigm, instead of looking at the context and ciscourse of the situation itself.
Not madness, just an old beast fighting to get out of the tar-pit it has waddled into.
And what happens to the EU when all troops and matériels are removed from Europe? You think the USA currently BENEFITS from NATO as much as the EU?
Oh right, you run to Putin’s loving arms for all your energy, and ask for protection from big bad America. Ask Poland and Finland what they think of that possibility.
Or even better, give Iran pallets of cash to fund “Sesame Street” tv shows in Iraq. No terrorist links for the smart EU!
Get started, I can’t wait to see how Europe out-deals Trump.
What happens?
Nothing much, military speaking. The combined military of Poland, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and the Baltic states alone are greater than Russia'sw military, and that was before the Ukraine war, and before re-armament started.
Poland and Finland would have no problem buying gas and oil from Russia; they didn't before the US started meddling in the Ukraine and started excerting leverage against Germany and EU to get its proxy-war for profit going.
Why would EU fund Sesame Street in Iran? Are you drunk?
European nations had and has had lots of business with Iran (same as the US before the '79 revolution - before then, you backed a murderous dictatorship because it profited you to have leverage against the Saudis and OPEC - I guess you're too young to remember/know) before the Cold War ended.
For Europe, what I suggested would be very profitable. For the US, not so much, which is why it opposes any such moves from European nations: the US needs us, but we don't need it for anything, really.
"Backed a murderous dictatorship"... The lesser of two evils is still evil, but it's ... what's the word.... "lesser". The Shah was a full "cr*p-ton" better than Iran's current Islamist regime. So if nobody in the Middle East is Pure of Heart and has love for every person, then don't align with ANYONE? That's ridiculous as well.
Your intense over-estimation of the interest or ability of the EU to defend a single blade of European grass is awe-inspiring. And your dismissal of the American military as "needing" the EU, is laughable. Sorry, we're full up on EU potentates preening their sparkly chest full of non-combat medals.
that would be the smart thing to do. It seems to me that smart and government are 2 opposites. I even think Putin would jump on the deal, he seems to be one of the smarter eggs in the basket.
May be these are just the last convulsions of a dying era, just like the excesses mentioned from the end of the Roman empire. I wish I could repost your response!
Feel free to repost my thoughts if you want to, always.
Ideas and opinions must be free, no matter if they are inspiring or worthy of ridicule or scorn.
Well said.
I have a long quote that's similar to your thoughts...but it's just as you say....so i won't bore anyone.
You know, and I think we and others have been over this before, but I'm pretty sure that at least 2/3s of the actual people in the USA and EU-rope are in agreement on at least 2/3s of issues, or 2/3s of any single issue.
Most people don't want tariffs when they have it explained to them what the negatie effects are.
Most people see it as a self-explanatory right to defend their home, family, kin or helpless third party from illegal aggression.
Most people don't think abortion ought to be used as a post-fact contraceptive.
Most people are of the live and let live mindset, not minding legal migrants who assimilate and show respect and gratitude to the nation that has taken them in.
Most people have no problem with one nation saying "good X may only be sold if it lives up to standard Y, for the good of the consumer"; take the difference in food quality f.e. - I'm quite certain most Americans would be happy to not have steroids, hormones, antibiotics and so on in their food.
Most people are, when you can sit down and talk it through with them, very pro-freedom of speech and such.
And so on.
It's the corpos, the swamp creatures, the useful idiots and the token astroturf-gardeners aka the media that's fomenting discord, strife and despair - not the people. Remember just a few years back, when people from all over the West no matter their politics in other matters found great accord with each other on-line ia Rumble, Substack and other places, sharing their disbelief over the Covid-tyranny, and how they all encouraged each other to fight back, sharing information and strategies.
That's the will of the people. That's what the elites fear.
Spot on, once again.
What pisses me off more than anything is that police officers are enforcing this.
Can they not see how dangerous this is....and that it'll eventually work against their interests?
Or are they that stupid?
Yes!
This is the stuff political uprisings are made of. In the USA, there is a legal distinction between "slander" (which has a high bar to prove and which is merely a civil matter when proved) and "insult," which is rudeness at worst. How can an "insult" be a crime? And why is it a crime to insult a politician and not a fellow plebeian?
You just don't understand: Politicians are a higher life form, extremely sensitive, and if you insult them they may melt.
{...Politicians are a higher life form...} BINGO !!! 👍👍👍
They're all backed by Chosen Ones, entirely UN-ACCOUNTABLE
I concur, a public figure should be subject to public scrutiny - particularly when it is truth by meme, satire, analogy, metaphor, pure snark and simile.
These German memes that people are being prosecuted over are so clunky. If this kind of shit were happening in the US, memesters would have an absolute field day making memes that would tie the politicians, prosecutors, and courts in knots, hilariously, while the rest of us just laughed and mocked them harder. What's up Germany???
who cares? no one
They have to be publicly punished!!!!
Can someone please speak to the origin of the mindset in ostensibly free, democratic societies that by all appearances have earned V.P. Vance’s chastisement at the Munich Security Conference?
This is only the beginning of a guess. Maybe the origin of the mindset that tolerates persecution lies in the deep-seated values of a culture that are passed from individual to individual over the generations. These values are not universal to all individuals, but they are somehow a central cultural tendency. Exactly where they come from or how they develop is above my pay grade!
There was that German politician who went on 60-Minutes, and she said it's worse for politicians because it might discourage people from going into public service. But she somehow made that out to be a bad thing.
LOL
...and when they do, you can ruin your best shoes.
So, fair to say Germany has joined the league of countries with policed speech. Saudi Arabia, China, England, Germany, and others.
Do the voters care enough? 75% of them seem ambivalent at best
If anyone in the US thinks what happens in Europe will stay in Europe then they've not been paying attention. The First Amendment is being "reinterpreted" by legal scholars armed with clever linguistics. Every "inalienable" right is. Such that one day, soon, war will mean peace, ignorance will mean strength and freedom will mean slavery.
Noted Obama "nudger" and Harvard constitutional law professor Cass Sunstein published a piece in 2022, "How to Interpret the Constitution" to do just that. He is read by and taken seriously by judges and lawyers all the way up to SCOTUS.
Just like Germany and Europe opened their borders to hordes of illegals around 2011 and US borders dissolved in 2021 so too will German and European assaults on speech come to the US. And the First Amendment will dissolve into Newspeak linguistics.
Unless we do something much different than the Germans and Europeans did. And prevail upon our elected leaders to cement free speech as *we* currently define it as protected by the law, and practice, of the land. Lest it be "reinterpreted" by the totalitarians.
Free speech absolutism. Embrace it without apology. Severing the Alex Jones's and Nick Fuentes's from permissible speech ensures our speech meets the same fate. I may disagree with them on some things but will defend their right to say what they say with all my might and will.
Bingo. Very well said
Most people tend not to care until, inevitably, the worm turns and they are on the receiving end.
Has it joined the league or rather, are we all far more awake to this type of govt suppression than we were 10 years ago?
Since covid we have all become aware of countless court cases and legal fights over freedom of expression and published speech here in the UK, Germany, and elsewhere in the West. What has been more outrageous for me has been learning how many similar cases there were throughout the 2000s and even earlier -- in some cases going back to the 80s.
The issue is that back then there'd be an article or two buried in a newspaper somewhere but otherwise no amplification. We didn't have the indie media ecosystems we have today, not to mention many of us were perhaps not very attuned to the types of powers held by our governments. We thought we had liberties we didn't really have, and those ensnared by the system were voiceless.
All I can say is what a lesson it has all been, and what a mountain we have got to climb if we hope to claw back the rights we are owed.
Actually, you are so right. But everything kept chugging along didn't it? Having free speech is nice and great for society but it seems not critical
Unsound asleep.
Unsound asleep.
Wow this an incredible abuse of human rights. How can mocking or criticising a politician be a crime? Because it makes their job difficult????
yes, making the exercise of public office more difficult is the legal standard according to StGB 188. it is a crazy law and should be eliminated.
It's predictable that as soon as government can decide what is and isn't allowable speech, they determine political dissent goes in the latter category.
LOL, it's like a law against hurting the feewings of a public official.
So - is satire and comedy illegal there, as well?
As I understand it, yes: that manipulated picture with the old drone holding the sign is one piece of evidence.
And it's a shame, because effective political speech often relies on humor.
{...picture with the old drone ...}
Thank the Lord, this one doesn't fly by itself and pops-up at your rear-window ... !!!
There isn't much real satire in the German mainstream anymore, I think, it stopped with Corona completely (at which point many seasoned cabaret artists had already retired or died) when satire suddenly began to make fun of normal people, deviants from the point of view of the establishment. There are now dark creatures like Jan Böhmermann, who is something like a state-approved, professional mocker of everything anti-establishment.
Yuck. Sounds like here, although now we have good comedians fighting back making satire allowable again.
BTW, I am a huge Tex Avery fan.
You know, if just one public official's feelings are saved by the curtailment of your and my rights, it will all be worth it.
If just ONE tear is prevented - SUCCESS!
There was a book preface from the 1980s that had, “If just ONE person buys this book and gets something out of it, then we will lose many thousands of dollars and be forced to sell handguns to schoolchildren”.
I bought the book.
The Founders were brilliant and gave us 2A as a backstop.
If we didn't, have no doubt, our fate would be the same as the EU.
In American law it's much harder for a politician or other public figure to sue for defamation of character and similar crimes--putting up with false accusations, exaggerations, parody, sarcasm, and even lies are seen as being part of public life. In politics the bar is even higher, because claims like "John Doe is the worst mayor in the country!" or "A vote for Smith will ruin us all" are usually opinions, not claims of fact, and are generally understood to be rhetorical. It's amazing to me that Germany enacted a law to say that criticizing politicians is worse than criticizing private citizens.
That happened to be the case in Germany, too, until it suddenly stopped, or so it seems. Now the law seems to be interpretable in an arbitrary way, however fits to pursuit inconvenient citizens. Of course there is a pedagogical moment to it: educate the masses by example. Interestingly, the political detached don't bother, mostly they probably do not even know, as the mainstream media manage to not mention it or frame in a proper way.
The overwhelming majority of politicians are self-serving twits of average intelligence. Many are of well below average intelligence. So glad in the US we can call then what they are
For now…
In the highest echelons of politics, intelligence, humbleness, servitude do NOT have any value.
Narcissism, arrogance, shamelessness and power-lust are top-notch instead !!!
Yea “special.”
I mean Rosa Parks should have been incarcerated for making the bus driver's job more difficult
Aren't you thinking of IRENE MORGAN? If not, WHY NOT?
Rosa Parks was a collusive stage production by the NAACP and various other actors.
It is so absurd that I am wondering why none of the earlier victims of the use of this law, such as by the likes of Habeck, has taken the matter to the ECtHR: it would be an exquisite test of the sincerity of all those sonorous enthusiasts of The Rule of Law that sit in Strasbourg, and of the German State's respect for human rights, for this law to be contested in the cradle of European human rights (as the ECtHR sees itself).
It is surely a no-brainer that seven months probation and a punitive fine is an infringement of the right to free expression under Article 10 (although it must be admitted that having no brains is a characteristic of members of the censorship-industrial complex). Germany would doubtless invoke the exception in Article 10 about restrictions on free speech allowed "for the protection of the reputation or rights of others" but we would at least have clarity on whether the solons of human rights think politicians' delicate feelings have absolute priority over free speech. If they did uphold the German law, it would utterly vindicate JD Vance's condemnation of Europe and its "values" in his Munich speech.
They're afraid.
All of this is to demoralize the populace so that they fall into the apathy trap.
Precisely, it also means they cannot be held up to scrutiny because that would amount to criticism which wcould classify as an insult. I cannot believe what it is coming to Nextdoor, mind you neither here at home!
It is the moral duty of the public to make the exercise of public office more difficult. That's just a no-brainer where I come from. I could never live in Germany.
Obviously, their jobs SHOULD be difficult.
Procedurally, this kind of lèse-majesté legislation has the effect of empowering CLOWNS IN GOWNS (aka "judges¨) with a law diploma to become the final arbiters of ALL speech.
Anything at all worth saying in public debate is liable to offend some powerful person. The inevitable result will be escalating self-censorship.
And of course, the - UNNAMED - "judge" in this case is paid by the same government of which the complainant is a senior representative.
It's a crime to criticize a politician's power to suppress your criticism of them. I think I'm getting it now.
I'm guessing comedy there must be verboten as well
What a disgrace.
Every day it becomes more clear that the 'elites' have way more loyalty to one another than they have to us.
Even worse than the censorship will be the nanny-scolding they'll do about 'dangerous misinformation' or 'threatening politicians' as they remove their political opposition.
Exactly right.
When civilizations die from suicide, it starts when those born into privilege and/or those who grift off the state no longer identify with their nation-state and begin to associate more with elites from other nations.
Its just like that meme with the wall you've shown a couple times.
https://ibb.co/Jjd28Pmm
Yeah. That's the one!
More than 25 years ago an American thinker published a book entitled "Revolt of the Elites."
I've read only synopses of the book, but I think it's right on the money.
I read it. Its prescient. You're right, they were over the target nearly 3 decades ago
I just looked the book up.
Written by Christopher Lasch, and published posthumously (!) in 1995. Thirty years ago now.
Yes, some people have the ability to gauge the present and figure out what the future will be.
The problem for the rest of us is figuring out who currently will be proved right.
Apart from this book, another that I think is well worth reading - and which I haven't - is Erich Fromm's "Escape from Freedom."
I did read Fromm's "The Sane Society," and found it right on the money, even decades ago.
Thanks for the suggestion, CS.
I just ordered both
Another book that changed my comprehension and understanding of people: Ernest Becker's "The Denial of Death."
Now that I think about it, "Denial" was extremely predictive of how many governments and hundreds of millions of people behaved during the virus hysteria crisis of 2020-22.
Well, this is what comes of all those years of being taught the European arched eyebrow was a superior cultural form to the American gleeful rudeness.
We here were only saved on November 5 and only for two-to-four years if we don't get our own shit together.
You're right, this is no time to be complacent.
We remake the political landscape to secure a generation's worth of restoration of the ideals of the Western Enlightenment, or we see the left resurge with a ferocity that is hardly even hinted at now.
The Western Enlightenment was *good.* Unfortunately, it wasn't and cannot ever be proof against human nature.
Too many conservatives are the exact cognate of too many progressives. They both want an imposition of a State religion. The most surprising people really do hate freedom.
Human nature seems to be incompatible with civilization.
We ain't never gonna stop being mammals no matter what fantasy LEGO Elon comes up with.
Spot on, SCA
Erich Fromm's book: "Escape from Freedom."
I've been meaning to read it for thirty years.
Very well expressed.
Faeser (whose name sounds like how you say "farting" in Swedish) ought to open a book on German history. It generally goes badly for the politicians who silence people and stifle debate.
Now, I'm a bit curious: could Bendels file a complaint with the police where he reports virtually all German media for defamation, against Donald Trump (or Putin!)?
It might lead to some interesting squirming when Faeser tries to explain why what they've called him over the years, isn't defamation.
In Holland they used to have a crime called "Belediging van een bevriend staatshoofd" -- Insulting a befriended (or friendly) head of state; it was OK to insult unfriendly ones. So in the late 1930s a Dutch journalist, Maurits Dekker, wrote a booklet purportedly analyzing the sanity of Hitler; I have read it, and it was not all that brilliant. But the German Ambassador complained, so at his behest Dekker was prosecuted and convicted; he was fined, though other people helped pay the fine, and all his remaining booklets were confiscated and destroyed.
And then, a couple of years later, Hitler invaded. But the law remained on the books until just a few years ago. You wonder why.
We had similar laws right before and during WW2, but those were emergency laws, not regular ones.
The same thing happened here: a stage actor made a couplet about the Trojan Horse, but the lyrics make it clear that he's talking about nazism. German ambassador files complaints and the state censorship bureau bans the lyrics.
The artist, Karl Gerard, still performed but he went on stage and quipped: "I'm not allowed to sing the lyrics anymore, so I'll just hum along to the music".
Upon which the audience sang the entire song anyway.
Sadly, the "cultural establishment" of his day blacklisted him during the war, as long as it looked as if Germany would preail. Then, in '45, they were suddenly all anti-German...
On the positive side, Sweden housed Allied airmen who had made emergency landings after their planes were damaged during the raids on Germany.
Short answer:
People did, yes. I live in one of the areas where this was done, and where Norwegian resistance fighters used to come to, for rest and recuperation.
tl;dr-rant about our sordid WW2-era history:
But:
All of this was done against the will of the Socialist Democrat-led emergency government. They tried to force local constabulary to report on people hiding Norwegians or English; since the police back then were all locals to the area they policed, it went nowhere.
And:
Our government allowed an entire SS-division to pass through Sweden. 30 000 men and their equipment, on trains protected by Swedish military and police (though one train was blown to kingdom come by Swedes protesting the government's disgusting acts of cowardice).
In fact, Sweden holds the unique status of having had to pay war damages /to/ Germany and to Allied nations too, for the duplicity and collaboration (f.e.: a lot of stolen gold was transited by the Wallenberg banking family when Wehrmacht, SS and the like started organising the "rat-lines"; wedding rings, teeth, necklaces, et c stolen from the victims of the fascists).
Our government and upper class was solidly pro-German (not pro-nazi, pro-German). The people was 100% for helping the Finns against the Soviets, and the Danes and Norwegians against Germany. The government feared inasion by the the Allies, USSR and Germany all at once, trying to take control of the harbours and the iron mines, smelting plants and refineries up North.
Heck, our Socialist Democrat party even ran 13 concentration camps (not death camps, prison ones) where "troublesome" people were incarcerated for political reasons during the war. And their own secret police, until the late 1960s. And a eugenics programme into the 1970s. The Party, not the state (but up until the 1980s, the Party was effectively the state).
People who know our history usually hate the Socialist Democrat party, in part due to how they have tried to scrub all of the above out of history books.
I am very much inclined to hate ANY group that self labels as, "Socialist Democrat".
Consider the words. Try to recall any "socialist" group, anywhere, anywhen, that actually practiced any recognizable form of "democracy". Lip service does not count!
Yeah.
The only reason they re-branded from socialist to social democrat in the late 19th century/early 20th was to create an illusion: that they weren't socialists.
But when you read the actual party programmes from that time, it is clear that they view democracy as a tool for gaining control of the state, and nothing more, and once in control of the state the party will become the state, making elections either illegal, impossible to lose (because the entire bureaucracy is made up out of party apparatchiks and loyalists) or pointless ("seven kinds of vanilla" as we say, meaning all our parties are some flavour of socialist democrat).
Another thing, very telling for any western European of my age or older, who was invloed in the punk/skin/anarchist scene in the 1980s or earlier, is the very deep hatred for anyone arguing for liberty displayed by the socialist democrats. An example: in 1980, the Party tried to make private bookings of artists illegal. All such were to go through a guild controlled authority under the control of Party-loyal musicians and actors (kind of how the SAG is in the US relative the Democrat party, but officially and legally so too): the point was to make art, literature, music, movies and theatre not in line with Party/state doctrine impossible to get displayed.
Later in the 1980s, they wanted to ban priate ownership of satellite dishes, and they discussed in the early 1990s to try and create the same type of internet-system that China would later build.
The goal of socialists, in spite of what socialist scripture claims, is always as total control of eerything and everyone as they can manage, for no other reason than the control itself.
Wow.
Great data point.
sounds like the whole of X needs to share this picture.................
Do the Bamberg police have an account on x? Inquiring minds would like to know…
While you're at it, send a 💩 to that other guy.
And do more. I could see one with an arrow pointing upwards saying "I'm with Stupid".
It makes my day when they whine about stuff like that.
*applause*
Memesmith rights are human rights! Hear that? It’s the silence of human rights NGOs like amnesty international.
Amnesty has been bought out since at least 2015 when they went way off mission and started providing signage and other provisions for protests supporting Stonewall and BLM, etc. ACLU under Chase Strangio is just as bad. Nobody deserves free speech except for the regime's pets and provocateurs.
Yeah. Amnesty were out in the streets of Ireland campaigning for the repeal of our 8th constitutional amendment back in 2018. They should stick to political prisoners. They're just a tool of the US state department anyway.
Two thoughts
1) Germans need to read more Chinese history, because one of them needs to ask "what is the penalty for [redacted]?". If you're _going to jail_ for a tweet, you might as well start doing more than just tweeting, it's not like they can put in you a jail cell _inside a bigger jail_ or anything.
2) It would be beautiful if this guy got off with a defense of "my meme is actually true, and cannot be defamation/etc. After all, her actions in bringing this case clearly demonstrate the truth of it". A sort of "my post was in fact slander until you brought this case; this case retroactively legitimized it" situation
Old Swedish joke, a hobo is before the judge, the sheriff is testifying about the hobo loitering and the hobo is to be brought out of court and to jail:
Hobo: "Your honour, is it legal to call a sheriff or a judge an idiot?"
Judge: "No, that'd be slandering a public official and doing so is a crime!"
Hobo: "Well, you honour, is it legal to call an idiot a sheriff or a judge?"
Judge: "No, I can't see that it'd be criminal to do so?"
Hobo: "Good day to you, sheriff and judge!"
This one is several centuries old, yet it is a very good lesson in how to dodge censorship.
Re your point 2: exactly! The meme creator is clearly guilty of ‘timing’ and that’s about it. A quantum paradox type defence should work perfectly for him.
> "what is the penalty for [redacted]?"
I got that reference... :D
"Well... we're *already* late..."
That's all I needed to read to know what this judgement was about - the 'accused' was "chief editor of the AfD-adjacent Deutschland Kurier".
For the judges and the Bavarian politicians this was a two-for: get that pesky chief editor who dares to be 'AfD-adjacent', and show how bravely they defend 'Our Democracy', in form of Ms Faeser. It should help CSU's head honcho Markus Söder in those terrible talks with the deep-red SPD Politician Ms Eskens, showing how firmly he's committed to defending said 'Democracy' ...
You folks in Germany need to completely overwhelm the "justice" system of your country. Post daily hundreds or thousands of increasingly vile memes—ones which clearly violate the censorship standards in use—and don't stop until the system breaks under the load. This is the classic Cloward-Piven strategy to use against government and is extremely effective.
Exactly. Let them try to arrest 10,000 or more people for posting memes.
Exactly right. Make it unenforceable.
This is the way.
You Germans are going to have to fight against these people in Germany ... we did it to the best of our ability in America, and things do get better when you go with people who don't want to silence you and throw you in jail ... You can't vote for these morons ... You have real enemies and you're going to have to fight for your own rights ...
Can a fire at the Bundestag, blamed on Afd, be in the offing? Or another Kristallnacht wherein all Afd offices are “spontaneously” destroyed by mobs of righteous citizens defending German democratic purity from those hated 3 letter people?
I'm surprised the police and courts haven't gone after you, Eugyppius, for reposting this meme on Substack, which I guess is available in Germany.
Perhaps we should give them a day or two to hunt you down.
They can’t find him because he has a VPN, pays in cash, and puts his phone in a faraday pouch :)