This really strengthens my argument that the execrable CJ is absolutely terrified that he will be tainted forever by the decency, generosity and concern you extended to him when he needed it.
I understood that Bavaria is one of the most conservative/traditionally-minded areas of Germany. So seems a bit weird that it's Bavarians going mad about speech crimes. Is there a reason they've adopted this so enthusiastically?
Bavarian courts have always handed out the strictest sentences across all of Germany. It is indeed more conservative and therefore more law-and-order minded. This intersects with these prosecutorial speech initiatives in unfortunate ways. Traunstein District Court is notorious for harsh sentences, only Munich is stricter.
Crazy me, I thought that the one thing Germans might have learned after last century's Hitler/Holocaust debacle is NOT to blindly follow orders/laws/authorities. Nope.
The most infuriating & stupid element of conservatism: conservatives enthusiastically adopting the initiatives of their opponents as the new status quo that needs maintaining.
Some in the US, particularly in the South, still think the Civil War is not over, and Robert E. Lee and his rebel host are going rise up and invade and conquer DC. It seems some Germans, particularly those in the South, think WWII is not over, and Hitler and the Waffen-SS are going to rise up from the ashes and start new concentration camps for immigrants and left-wing politicians. Neither of these scenarios represent reality, but that doesn’t make any difference to those who have little grasp on reality.
75 days? he's lucky not to live int UK where Ms Lucy Connolly was sentenced to 31 months (!) in prison. Use your browser of trust to find out what happened - a better case for the UK's two-tier system of justice can't be found.
Keep in mind that sex offenders and violent criminals are being released early now because 'the prisons are full' ...
straight-up rapists in Germany frequently get probation. this man did not sufficiently distance himself while quoting some SA slogan that hardly anybody ever heard about until a few years ago and he needs two months in jail.
Lucy Connolly isn't in the same category. Even by pre-woke standards, free-speech rights ended where incitement to violence began.
Here's what she wrote: “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f****** hotels full of the b******* for all I care… if that makes me racist so be it.” (The asterisks were in my source.)
The first clause is in the imperative, but should be protected speech (it is a demand for a particular government policy).
The second clause starts as if it's another imperative "set fire ...", but ends as if it's a different construction, which would have read "Let them set fire ... for all I care." - that form would have given her lawyers a lot more leverage, since it would have indicated indifference to a criminal act, not incitement.
Yes, of course a double standard is being applied on political grounds, but anyone following the Southport atrocity, and the dishonesty and provocations of government and media, also knew that the full force of the law would be brought down on them if they provided the least cause. Connolly unfortunately took the bait.
The court will discuss the sentence to determine its precise import, yes. I doubt they'll need a Chomsky tree diagram, but if the prosecution and defense contend over the sentence for long enough, that's not impossible.
The court will not accept a defense of "Poor Lucy only meant to say that she was very angry about the murders, so angry that she went and wrote something else." The mitigating circumstance of personal grief wasn't present - she was not a relative or friend of the murdered girls.
On top of that Poor Lucy's actual words were a threat to a politically protected class, while she is not a member of any politically protected class.
And on top of that again, the government and media were doing their best to provoke prosecutable reactions so that they could then point triumphantly and say "Here is the Far Right! Here is the threat to our democracy". Lucy took the bait and took the consequences.
Poor Lucy was bright enough to know this, and I hope her treatment (yes, double standards) will prevent like-minded people from making her mistake in future. The reason I weighed in here was because the foolish bravado of claiming it was a freedom-of-speech case (when her actual words disqualified her from this category) increases the risk of people ending up in prison for the same reason as Lucy.
Her post did seem to be based on very poor judgment, as evidenced by the fact that she deleted it pretty quickly.
I was merely commenting on the irony that courts might scrutinize your grammar very carefully in order to determine if what you said was technically illegal, while the average person is pretty hapless, grammatically speaking.
Apart from the deletion several hours after she posted her comment, the words "for all I care" suggest that she was already having second thoughts before she even finished the comment.
At that point, she should have asked herself "What am I telling people to do?" and the answer was obvious: "Set fire to hotels full of people".
You could shave 30 points of Connolly's likely IQ and still have someone who could be prosecuted for saying this.
If you've ever seen video footage of the people who turned out to protest in Southport, they set fire to some rubbish in a bin to the side of an invader hostel (that's my choice of phrase), where there was a high blank wall (no windows). The fire was not at all impressive in the footage I saw, and I'm sure the media wouldn't have held back anything that looked more extreme. So even the rabble at the protest could not bring themselves to endanger lives of invaders, or even cause them much fear. But it was enough to let the government and media claim that they had their far right - the flip side of the "mostly peaceful protests" (and mostly prosecution-free) when politically favored groups burn and kill.
I'm well aware of that. As the courts heard, the comment still received over 300,000 views while it was up. If you reply to this, remember my caveats - I wasn't siding with the UK "justice" system, but only pointing out that it wasn't the kind of speech that would be protected even if the UK operated under the 1st Amendment.
It really would be. The US 1A protects anything that is not direct and immediate incitement, which is why I'm really disappointed in all the idiots having the vapors over the whole "86 47" thing. It's not even close.
It's difficult to get a timeline of the relevant events. The arrest of the murderer occurred at 11:57 on July 29 last year. Connelly posted her message at some point later on the same day (no timestamp is visible on any image of her Tweet). The first rioting only began the next day.
So I concede that even by this vague timeline, there would be grounds of non-immediacy in the US for contesting any prosecution if the incident had taken place there. If "direct" means on the scene of subsequent violence, that would rule out all online incitement, and I doubt that that is the case, but I'm afraid I've used up the time I can spare to check these matters further.
I certainly agree with you on the "86 47" matter, and the wretched Comey is on safe ground. There may be grounds for legitimate prosecutions against him, and the present foolishness, if it actually goes to court, would undermine the credibility of these in the public eye.
However disgusting each new case may be, we must remember: this is a reaction based in FEAR. Our overlords are clueless about the backlash that is building--which is what they really should be afraid of.
I think something much deeper and darker is being expressed here. There's a smell of sexual perversion to it. We're in an age where torture porn is part of the script of almost every movie and TV show you can think of, available on all the normal (*) broadcast and cable channels.
The ability to hurt or condone, per one's tastes, is evident in all our Western court systems now.
Good observation. What they fear is truth. The state doesn't censor or prosecute liars - Why should they bother when lies easily dealt with by revealing the truth.
It's not actually accurate that this phrase is strongly associated with the Nazis, is it? I looked into that claim when this first appeared years ago, and the only places I could find it being mentioned was on that very specific dagger and nowhere else. The dagger in turn is nothing famous, the phrase wasn't discussed anywhere outside of obscure historical books and one Wikipedia page, and there was no reason why anyone would have known about this unless they'd somehow actually seen the dagger in question.
That is why, when this problem was pointed out, the German leftists changed their story slightly to be "he should have known about this because he is a history teacher" - very weak sauce.
It's clear that what happened here is someone went googling phrases used in AfD speeches until they found one that could be linked in some way to the Nazis, without doing the same to other parties as a sanity check. After all, the Nazis said a great many things and used a great many slogans in their time, including words like "Comrade" and statements like "I [Hitler] am a fanatical socialist", which is rather inconvenient for all the other people in Germany who say they are socialists.
It is unwise to agree with the German leftists that this phrase is untoward in any way, especially if other people being imprisoned for using it were using it because the AfD guy did. That simply hands them ammo. The correct thing to do is to point out that Hitler was a far left socialist, and thus any historically accurate review of his statements will be forced to conclude that the SDP is much more likely to repeat things they said than anyone else. And thus maybe that their supporters should be randomly imprisoned.
Those SA uniform daggers were widely produced, and the phrase is known and associated with the Sturmabteilung in some quarters – though I would not say the association of "Alles für D--" was common knowledge until Höcke was indicted for using it. The first prosecution under 86a for this slogan was I believe in 2006, and if you do a lot of Google Books searches, you do get the impression that the "Alles für D--" was generally avoided after 1945, presumably because of its Nazi associations. I personally think 86a should be retired and people should be allowed to say what they want, even if the National Socialists also said those things.
Yes, the Nazi connotations were pretty much manufactured just to censure Björn Höcke. But since they have the power of legal precedent behind them the phrase is now pretty much illegal, hence our host here feels the need to laboriously distance himself from it.
Of course the as-yet unknown damage to all those children offered in sacrifice to--well, there are so many children being offered in sacrifice these days, it's hard to figure out which gods in particular they're intended to propitiate.
I’m getting the sense that Germany and the UK are in some kind of undeclared race to see who can be first to utterly destroy their respective country beyond all recognition.
Right now, it looks to be a tie, though the UK’s levels of Muslim infiltration into all arenas of government could give it a slight edge.
Perhaps the most worrying aspect of this post is that you felt compelled to add a footnote distancing yourself from a proscribed form of words, whose proscription is a matter purely of association with the past and not for any reprehensible meaning.
Try it in another language, put it in the mouth of a footballer hoping to qualify for the national team, put it in the theatrically impassioned speech of even a politician and the expression becomes unexceptionable and unmemorable with only the faintest oblique reference to the National Anthem.
I can see that getting a German Shepherd and calling it Blondi might be a stretch to far for some sensibilities but attaching a ball and chain to an anodyne combination of common words is ridiculous.
So glad that sort of thing could never happen in the UK, a beacon of democracy where free speech reigns and everyone is equal under the law. Without fear or favour n'all that. English Common Law at its finest.
So basically the wall came down and the Stasi won.
Especially in Bavaria. The courts there have gone insane. It was a major reason in itself to move, the professional risk is just too great.
This really strengthens my argument that the execrable CJ is absolutely terrified that he will be tainted forever by the decency, generosity and concern you extended to him when he needed it.
People are always their true selves under stress.
I understood that Bavaria is one of the most conservative/traditionally-minded areas of Germany. So seems a bit weird that it's Bavarians going mad about speech crimes. Is there a reason they've adopted this so enthusiastically?
Bavarian courts have always handed out the strictest sentences across all of Germany. It is indeed more conservative and therefore more law-and-order minded. This intersects with these prosecutorial speech initiatives in unfortunate ways. Traunstein District Court is notorious for harsh sentences, only Munich is stricter.
Crazy me, I thought that the one thing Germans might have learned after last century's Hitler/Holocaust debacle is NOT to blindly follow orders/laws/authorities. Nope.
Asking a German not to follow orders is like asking an Italian not to love his mama and her cooking. It's in their blood and how they're programmed.
That would explain the continuing American military occupation 80 years after WW2 ended.
The most infuriating & stupid element of conservatism: conservatives enthusiastically adopting the initiatives of their opponents as the new status quo that needs maintaining.
That's not actually an element of conservatism though. It's just a thing that some people do.
It’s what the Conservative Party here in the UK has been doing for the last 20 years.
That's the classical definition of conservatism.
Correct, liberals in the US love to do the same thing.
Yet all sorts of mayhem go on around the railway station. There are police but crime still goes on.
Some in the US, particularly in the South, still think the Civil War is not over, and Robert E. Lee and his rebel host are going rise up and invade and conquer DC. It seems some Germans, particularly those in the South, think WWII is not over, and Hitler and the Waffen-SS are going to rise up from the ashes and start new concentration camps for immigrants and left-wing politicians. Neither of these scenarios represent reality, but that doesn’t make any difference to those who have little grasp on reality.
Not just the Stasi! So intent on not becoming that which they hate, they seemed to have managed it very well.
People actually just want the power of those they hate. They become them willingly.
No jail can ever hold such a violent and cunning criminal as that pensioner. He'll bust out by sunrise shouting Germany First.
Can you imagine if he ran through a crowded street shouting that? It could be catastrophic, causing an untold number of ears to start bleeding.
I just realized how MAGA "Alles für Deutschland" :)
75 days? he's lucky not to live int UK where Ms Lucy Connolly was sentenced to 31 months (!) in prison. Use your browser of trust to find out what happened - a better case for the UK's two-tier system of justice can't be found.
Keep in mind that sex offenders and violent criminals are being released early now because 'the prisons are full' ...
straight-up rapists in Germany frequently get probation. this man did not sufficiently distance himself while quoting some SA slogan that hardly anybody ever heard about until a few years ago and he needs two months in jail.
To low IQ politicians trying to hang onto to the Gravy Train, speech crimes are worse than real crimes: https://youtube.com/shorts/tkk5DDuSw3k?si=YR38tudsjiERxFgN
Lucy Connolly isn't in the same category. Even by pre-woke standards, free-speech rights ended where incitement to violence began.
Here's what she wrote: “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f****** hotels full of the b******* for all I care… if that makes me racist so be it.” (The asterisks were in my source.)
The first clause is in the imperative, but should be protected speech (it is a demand for a particular government policy).
The second clause starts as if it's another imperative "set fire ...", but ends as if it's a different construction, which would have read "Let them set fire ... for all I care." - that form would have given her lawyers a lot more leverage, since it would have indicated indifference to a criminal act, not incitement.
Yes, of course a double standard is being applied on political grounds, but anyone following the Southport atrocity, and the dishonesty and provocations of government and media, also knew that the full force of the law would be brought down on them if they provided the least cause. Connolly unfortunately took the bait.
Rubbish. Lucy is a victim of the two tier justice system.
Sure. I covered that in my comment, which you were clearly too enraged to read to the end.
Ok. Sorry. Lucy should be out.
Good reason for people to pay more attention in grammar class, if diagramming sentences is going to be used against you in a court of law.
The court will discuss the sentence to determine its precise import, yes. I doubt they'll need a Chomsky tree diagram, but if the prosecution and defense contend over the sentence for long enough, that's not impossible.
The court will not accept a defense of "Poor Lucy only meant to say that she was very angry about the murders, so angry that she went and wrote something else." The mitigating circumstance of personal grief wasn't present - she was not a relative or friend of the murdered girls.
On top of that Poor Lucy's actual words were a threat to a politically protected class, while she is not a member of any politically protected class.
And on top of that again, the government and media were doing their best to provoke prosecutable reactions so that they could then point triumphantly and say "Here is the Far Right! Here is the threat to our democracy". Lucy took the bait and took the consequences.
Poor Lucy was bright enough to know this, and I hope her treatment (yes, double standards) will prevent like-minded people from making her mistake in future. The reason I weighed in here was because the foolish bravado of claiming it was a freedom-of-speech case (when her actual words disqualified her from this category) increases the risk of people ending up in prison for the same reason as Lucy.
Her post did seem to be based on very poor judgment, as evidenced by the fact that she deleted it pretty quickly.
I was merely commenting on the irony that courts might scrutinize your grammar very carefully in order to determine if what you said was technically illegal, while the average person is pretty hapless, grammatically speaking.
Apart from the deletion several hours after she posted her comment, the words "for all I care" suggest that she was already having second thoughts before she even finished the comment.
At that point, she should have asked herself "What am I telling people to do?" and the answer was obvious: "Set fire to hotels full of people".
You could shave 30 points of Connolly's likely IQ and still have someone who could be prosecuted for saying this.
If you've ever seen video footage of the people who turned out to protest in Southport, they set fire to some rubbish in a bin to the side of an invader hostel (that's my choice of phrase), where there was a high blank wall (no windows). The fire was not at all impressive in the footage I saw, and I'm sure the media wouldn't have held back anything that looked more extreme. So even the rabble at the protest could not bring themselves to endanger lives of invaders, or even cause them much fear. But it was enough to let the government and media claim that they had their far right - the flip side of the "mostly peaceful protests" (and mostly prosecution-free) when politically favored groups burn and kill.
She deleted it the same day.
I'm well aware of that. As the courts heard, the comment still received over 300,000 views while it was up. If you reply to this, remember my caveats - I wasn't siding with the UK "justice" system, but only pointing out that it wasn't the kind of speech that would be protected even if the UK operated under the 1st Amendment.
It really would be. The US 1A protects anything that is not direct and immediate incitement, which is why I'm really disappointed in all the idiots having the vapors over the whole "86 47" thing. It's not even close.
It's difficult to get a timeline of the relevant events. The arrest of the murderer occurred at 11:57 on July 29 last year. Connelly posted her message at some point later on the same day (no timestamp is visible on any image of her Tweet). The first rioting only began the next day.
So I concede that even by this vague timeline, there would be grounds of non-immediacy in the US for contesting any prosecution if the incident had taken place there. If "direct" means on the scene of subsequent violence, that would rule out all online incitement, and I doubt that that is the case, but I'm afraid I've used up the time I can spare to check these matters further.
I certainly agree with you on the "86 47" matter, and the wretched Comey is on safe ground. There may be grounds for legitimate prosecutions against him, and the present foolishness, if it actually goes to court, would undermine the credibility of these in the public eye.
However disgusting each new case may be, we must remember: this is a reaction based in FEAR. Our overlords are clueless about the backlash that is building--which is what they really should be afraid of.
They create the crisis so they can decide the solution (punishment).
The fear of the coof created the perfect circumstances for the ‘remedy’.
And the people obeyed. 🙏🏼
Fear and hate are the tools used to keep the people enslaved.
I think something much deeper and darker is being expressed here. There's a smell of sexual perversion to it. We're in an age where torture porn is part of the script of almost every movie and TV show you can think of, available on all the normal (*) broadcast and cable channels.
The ability to hurt or condone, per one's tastes, is evident in all our Western court systems now.
Good observation. What they fear is truth. The state doesn't censor or prosecute liars - Why should they bother when lies easily dealt with by revealing the truth.
Yes to that!
Alice for Deutschland!
AL is for Deutschland too.
And AI
No, that still reeks of the rusty old SA dagger in Großvater's basement memorabilia.
But you might get away with "Alice in Wonderland!"
I had replied to one of Eugy's post a week or two ago...
Convince me that " alles" and "alice" can be confused with an accent or inflection.
Could have been worse. He could have been in England and got 31 months in jail.
It's not actually accurate that this phrase is strongly associated with the Nazis, is it? I looked into that claim when this first appeared years ago, and the only places I could find it being mentioned was on that very specific dagger and nowhere else. The dagger in turn is nothing famous, the phrase wasn't discussed anywhere outside of obscure historical books and one Wikipedia page, and there was no reason why anyone would have known about this unless they'd somehow actually seen the dagger in question.
That is why, when this problem was pointed out, the German leftists changed their story slightly to be "he should have known about this because he is a history teacher" - very weak sauce.
It's clear that what happened here is someone went googling phrases used in AfD speeches until they found one that could be linked in some way to the Nazis, without doing the same to other parties as a sanity check. After all, the Nazis said a great many things and used a great many slogans in their time, including words like "Comrade" and statements like "I [Hitler] am a fanatical socialist", which is rather inconvenient for all the other people in Germany who say they are socialists.
It is unwise to agree with the German leftists that this phrase is untoward in any way, especially if other people being imprisoned for using it were using it because the AfD guy did. That simply hands them ammo. The correct thing to do is to point out that Hitler was a far left socialist, and thus any historically accurate review of his statements will be forced to conclude that the SDP is much more likely to repeat things they said than anyone else. And thus maybe that their supporters should be randomly imprisoned.
Those SA uniform daggers were widely produced, and the phrase is known and associated with the Sturmabteilung in some quarters – though I would not say the association of "Alles für D--" was common knowledge until Höcke was indicted for using it. The first prosecution under 86a for this slogan was I believe in 2006, and if you do a lot of Google Books searches, you do get the impression that the "Alles für D--" was generally avoided after 1945, presumably because of its Nazi associations. I personally think 86a should be retired and people should be allowed to say what they want, even if the National Socialists also said those things.
Yes, the Nazi connotations were pretty much manufactured just to censure Björn Höcke. But since they have the power of legal precedent behind them the phrase is now pretty much illegal, hence our host here feels the need to laboriously distance himself from it.
I don’t care if the guy did know. So what? What’s a 75 year old going to do?
But in heartening news over here, we have made it through to see this:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-14754031/rfk-jr-vaccine-restriction-americans.html
Of course the as-yet unknown damage to all those children offered in sacrifice to--well, there are so many children being offered in sacrifice these days, it's hard to figure out which gods in particular they're intended to propitiate.
I’m getting the sense that Germany and the UK are in some kind of undeclared race to see who can be first to utterly destroy their respective country beyond all recognition.
Right now, it looks to be a tie, though the UK’s levels of Muslim infiltration into all arenas of government could give it a slight edge.
Perhaps the most worrying aspect of this post is that you felt compelled to add a footnote distancing yourself from a proscribed form of words, whose proscription is a matter purely of association with the past and not for any reprehensible meaning.
Try it in another language, put it in the mouth of a footballer hoping to qualify for the national team, put it in the theatrically impassioned speech of even a politician and the expression becomes unexceptionable and unmemorable with only the faintest oblique reference to the National Anthem.
I can see that getting a German Shepherd and calling it Blondi might be a stretch to far for some sensibilities but attaching a ball and chain to an anodyne combination of common words is ridiculous.
Shameful.
An Egyptian Islamist is sending German pensioners to prison (in Germany) for speech "crimes"?
Debtors' prison, at that!
I just marked myself "safe" from German senior citizens.
At least, since you write about it, it is not you behind bars. Be careful out there in that weird land ! (now afraid to even mention it by name)
It is infuriating to live in a world where this kind of thing happens in a country that until quite recently was civilized.
So glad that sort of thing could never happen in the UK, a beacon of democracy where free speech reigns and everyone is equal under the law. Without fear or favour n'all that. English Common Law at its finest.
Er...