Germany's ongoing deindustrialisation is no accident; key Green intellectuals have demanded precisely this for decades, and now the Greens are in government and they are getting what they want.
Thanks so much for the translation of the speech from German. It is absolutely chilling. It reminds me so much of the concept of The Year Zero from the Khymer Rouge in Cambodia that ultimately led to one of the worst genocides of the 20th Century.
I just don’t understand how anyone can say anything like that and be respected.
This is more evidence that radical ideologies stem from mental disorders.
"The Year Zero from the Khymer Rouge in Cambodia" 🎯
The Noble Savage is the Leftist idol, the ideal of the past and the goal for the future.
Leftists learned nothing from Stalin or Mao, so they certainly will learn nothing from Pol Pot.
The "No True Marxist" fallacy remains undefeated and it will stay that way. Zealots don't abandon their Promised Land, they just find new paths to get there every generation.
Periodic revivals of socialism/communism are now an established Western phenomenon, in the same way as religious revivals are.
"Like religions (and Socialism is tending more and more to put on the guise of a religion) it propagates itself in any manner rather than by reason. Feeble in the extreme when it attempts to reason, and to support itself by economic arguments, it becomes on the contrary extremely powerful when it remains in the region of dreams, affirmations, and chimerical promises.
With what lever does it seek to raise the soul? With the sentiments of envy and hatred which it creates in the hearts of multitudes? To the crowd, no longer satisfied with political and civic equality, it proposes equality of condition, without dreaming that social inequalities are born of those natural inequalities that man has always been powerless to change."
Socialists of one sort or another have, just in the last century or so, murdered well over a hundred million people, displaced countless millions more, and impoverished and destroyed every polity and society they've seized control of, without exception.
I find it utterly incomprehensible how it is not only tolerated, but championed by wide swaths of electorates across the formerly free world.
How many more people must socialists slaughter, impoverish and brutally oppress, how many more nations must they destroy, and how many more souls must perish fighting these lunatics and the pseudo-religious psychopathic death cult they worship?
When will enough ever be enough?
“[A] . . . trait . . . which, in my eyes best describes socialists of all schools and shades, is a profound opposition to personal liberty and scorn for individual reason, a complete contempt for the individual. They unceasingly attempt to mutilate, curtail, to obstruct personal freedom in any and all ways. They hold that the State must not only act as the director of society, but must further be master of each man, and not only master, but keeper and trainer. For fear of allowing him to err, the State must place itself forever by his side, above him, around him better to guide him to maintain him, in a word, to confine him . . . to sum up what socialism is, I would say that it was simply a new system of serfdom.”
Damn. This guy is a genius. He nailed it. Nothing has changed in the 125 years since he wrote it. I guess because by it's very nature socialism doesn't/can't "change".
It can be a bit outdated at times, like any 125-yr-old work, but it does nail all the essences and outlines the religious nature of the socialist enterprise.
also, it never ceases to amaze me how much better writers they were back in the 19th century compared to our time.
Also, he wrote all this in 1899, before any Communist states existed. Amazingly prescient:
In exchange for their rations, which the theorists of Socialism promise him, "the worker would perform his work under the surveillance of State functionaries, like so many convicts under the eye and hand of the warder. All individual motive would be stifled, and each worker would rest, sleep, and eat at the bidding of headmen put in authority over matters of food, work, recreation, and the perfect equality of all."
All stimulus being destroyed, no one would make an effort to ameliorate or to escape from his position. It would be slavery of the gloomiest kind, without a hope of enfranchisement. Under the domination of the capitalist the worker can at least dream of becoming, and sometimes does become, a capitalist in his turn. What dream could he indulge in under the anonymous and brutally despotic tyranny of a levelling State which should foresee all his needs and direct his will?
Israel is not committed genocide. Nice try. If you actually gave a fight for the Gazans you would demand they accept defeat, surrender, hang every last member of Hamas and build a society based on peace. But you don't actually care, apparently.
A couple of months ago at the height of the Gaza protests, I came across a couple of middle aged women in my small town, about to participate in some sort of local pro-Hamas protest. One of the women's had a kaffiyah wrapped around her head. I went up to her and started to casually chat about how women in the Arab world did not dress like that. I also mentioned that I had worked as a teacher in two Middle Eastern countries for over ten years, and I suggested that if she went into certain hostile areas in the Middle East dressed like that, she wouldn't exactly be welcomed with open arms, the outcome might not be a good one for her. She became immediately hostile and said she had traveled in the Middle East, yet she couldn't name even one country she had traveled in. I said a few more things that clearly demonstrated her ignorance about the whole issue and suddenly she started hysterically yelling "F**k you" and ran off. Her total ignorance about Gaza and Israel and the Middle East in general was painfully obvious, and such people will not engage beyond screaming slogans or insults. I would guess that she is typical of the protesters.
I also agree. Israel is dealing with the trash. We Americans couldn’t win a war with 8th century barbarians in nightgowns and flip flops. Not due to our boots on the ground, it’s leadership and politicians that keep getting American’s killed.
The war in Afghanistan was unwinnable, just like Vietnam. We would need to stay forever, and to what end? The Deep State had no plans to win, only to fight. If we were losing, they would step up the attacks. If we were winning too badly, they would change the ROE (rules of engagement) to favor the enemy. War is a scam, and we got scammed for $$trillions over the last 20 years.
Then and now I have repeatedly asked. Why was the US in Afghanistan? At no point did they attack anyone. The bad guys passed through Afghanistan like they did Somalia and Yemen.
I am more likely to believe it was a reason to steal money from the treasury.
Just a little siege warfare shooting lots of kids in the head and bombing entire city to rubble while openly babbling about amalec. Not genocidal at all
The Arabs who were wise enough to stay in Israel have done fine. The Jews and Christians in Gaza,and the West Bank, not so much. Not a rabbi, not Jewish. Perhaps you need to adjust your mak a bit better.
I mean it is genocide best I can tell, I just don’t really care. There are more important things in life than a war between two desert tribes on the other side of the world.
Rationing living space is great but I want to be the first to choose my ration in the city... Sounds like communism when sqm was the same price everywhere but somehow the party members got the good spots to 'buy'.
When I saw the California Redwoods - Truly magnificent - it was my husband's second visit and he commented on how they just didn't look as healthy as last time...
One of the funniest things I ever read came from an eco-friendly--no! Eco-over-enamored!--catalogue that sold all sorts of organic textile items and cleaning products etc. etc. etc., and one of those textile items was a beautiful pure wool throw or shawl or whatever, and in the fine print--I bet some of you can guess this--it said "dry clean only."
I got my suspicions about that dress our girl is wearing. It's just too elegant for a drip-dry sort of garment.
When these people aren't being morons they are hypocrites to the max, and I don't suspect that woman of shivering through her winters.
And we people--we get what we allow to happen. The need to be in a cult--any cult--is a powerful human hunger and if it's not taking communion in a cathedral it's turning elected office into the sacrament of deindustrialization, etc. etc., and until there are more normal people to make a tipping point we all gonna keep tipping downwards.
"we get what we allow to happen" is absolutely right. for decades now, also through Covid & until this very moment, i see the same thing: a small minority of nefarious assholes have plans, but then everybody else just sits around like absolute retards and lets their plans happen.
i have one basic rule of social comportment I propose to everyone. I learned this being forced to sit on university committees: You automatically and instinctively oppose everybody's fucking plan, anything presented to you as a ready-made system, as a sure-to-work solution to a problem nobody knew about before – anything like this. They can put it right up their asses. Half the time, your just saying this causes the whole charade to go down in flames, that is how fragile it is. The other half of the time, they regroup or you lose or whatever, but if you do it all of the time, you win on balance.
You can guess how much I was despised when I sat on that city council volunteer advisory committee for a couple of years with a term ending just as our Plague Era began. I had to shame them and shame them into finally acting on a modest proposal to put a crosswalk over a busy road served by our limited public transportation system. The thing was, the crosswalk would enable people to get from a big thrift shop to a non-posh supermarket and then take the bus home without getting squashed like bugs.
This was particularly important because the small supermarket that had been within walking distance in town had gone out of business not long before. And the public transport system didn't run on weekends, so getting your groceries was a big challenge for non-drivers. I used to see very frail people dragging their market carts onto the bus in all seasons and it gets rough up here starting sometimes by October.
It wasn't at all important to the nice middle-class professionals so happy to have that volunteer officer credit on their resumes and social connections. But it was important to people like me (though I myself am extremely fortunate to have a kid who ensures I don't need to worry about the provisioning) and as I keep saying, every place I go I end up being the representative of the Peasants' Rebellion even if I don't ever see that coming.
Those people on the advisory committee were eager to keep restricting parking spaces in new housing developments while pushing e-bikes etc. etc. etc. etc. It just never occurred to them that someone working, say, at the medical center who had to drop a child at daycare first and then take the child with them grocery shopping on the way home could not do all of that on an e-bike.
Quite a different situation from yours, but in my tiny rural town of 300, it's a constant struggle against gentrification.
You wouldn't believe the fight we had about pigs a few years ago, when I was still on the planning commission. People (usually newer residents) wanted to outlaw pigs completely, while some of us were arguing for the pre-existing reasonable limits—locally sourced food is actually quite popular around here. When they didn't get their way, two members of the planning commission resigned, sold their house, and moved away. Oh well!
I live in a town adjacent to a college town and the people in this place feel very insecure about their slightly lower social status and so they want to ban anything that enables lower-middle-class people to have a chance at affordable rents. There's a terrible housing crunch and the major medical center has a hard time attracting enough support staff because there's just not enough housing.
And a guy wrote a letter to the paper a few years ago complaining that more housing density would increase his drive time to get his cancer treatments. His drive time was of course only 10 minutes. And how the fuck did he think he was going to get his cancer treatments if the health tech staff couldn't get to work in a blizzard because they lived 4 towns over?
There was a case before the zoning board about a couple who had a beehive on their property which was within the city limits. (They call this place a city but...). Eventually they were granted a variance. This is what these morons wasted their time over when the beehive was located on one of those properties with so much of a back yard some people would mistake it for a small country.
I'll never forget the face one such woman made, after she had lectured us on why the sausages she had in her launch-box were superior to the cheap ones in the cafeteria.
Hers you see had "natural skin" on them. Only, she didn't know what that really meant.
Big burly Finnish-Swede colleague told her. She almost hurled across the lunch-room table.
I think maybe that is kind of the female eq- to the male "brand-fetishist": price and quality be damned, as long as it's The True Brand.
They're a curious bunch, the Finnish-Swedes. Some are of mixed parentage, some are descendents of Swedes living in Finland when it was part of the Realm, and some are war-orphans who grew up in Sweden after the Winter War of '41+Continuation War of '44. Or they are descended from Finns who came to Sweden to work during centuries past.
Stoic, silent, strong, dependable to a fault almost with a quiet wry humour when sober and boisterous and sentimental when drunk.
Sort of a refined alloy of Swede and Finns, actually.
It all started with the Swedish Crusades a thousand years ago - instead of just going viking and trading/looting as per usual, the vikings now went looting, trading and plundering while offering the conquered the choice of the cross or the sword.
As most of our historians in the pre-PC eras have often pointed out, Christianity took until the Reformation to really take hold here, culturally speaking, and remains a rather thin veneer over the actual "Volks-kultur".
Edit: you might want to try a true Finnish desert. Memma (Swedish) or Mämmi (Finnish).
Actually, most people's bathroom vanities terrify me. IMHO many people are poisoning themselves with toxic personal care products. Skin is very absorbent.
I fully agree with your assessment of this woman. How much do you wanna bet she's already moved into her 50 m² apartment and is riding a bicycle everywhere? Oh, and of course insisting on a drastic reduction in salary.
You'd love my vanity, I promise. These days of course I can only afford Jason toothpaste and not that pink Weleda stuff I could buy in my working years.
I should clarify a little bit. It's not so much the content of the vanities that terrifies* me, it's the sheer quantity of the stuff. Bottles and bottles and jars that overflow the typical cabinet.
That's why I buy my lovely organic body lotion in the 32-oz. size. My face is of course part of my body. (For extra support in this climate I live in I do get smaller jars of an intensive natural Vitamin C cream but you won't deny me that indulgence...)
There was a scene in a novel I read almost sixty years ago where a pair of kids decided to go on a hunger strike to force their parents, who were having an affair, to separate, and the naive English girl ate nothing but the cunning Italian girl was secretly gorging and when the English girl found out she felt so betrayed and furious, and the Italian girl looked at her mockingly and said something along the lines of "only an idiot like you would've really done it."
The German green insanity hit today's WSJ. "Volkswagen Hits the Net-Zero Wall
The German company’s layoffs and pay cuts are a warning to America about Biden-Harris climate policies." Hopefully this painful lesson on the carbon scam resonates with the US electorate so we don't continue down this destructive path.
US politics is different. Of the revulsions most motivating the American voter, environmental lunacy is far down the list. But happily their strongest revulsions are against the same group of politicians for entirely different reasons, so heaven willing, it will all work out.
The WSJ editorial talks about autos because everyone drives, but steel manufacturers have been staring down the barrel of a gun for several years too. Almost all heavy industry is being threatened.
The Soviets and red Chinese were obsessed with steel production quotas to the point of nonsense. But they were right in a way, a nation that can't make stuff loses its balls.
WSJ blames Dieselgate without seeing that was just earlier-stage climatist self-harm. And omits Nordstream from the energy problems. Still it’s good to see them taking note of this.
VW, Merc and Audi all suffered an inevitable fate since Europe mandated an utterly ridiculous tailpipe particulate ratio. Cutting by nearly half NoX from one year to the next was always a stupid idea even with mfrs having 3 years to figure it out. On the other side of that mandate we have diesels suffering a myriad of turbo, exhaust, and dpf maladies that simply make for a greater ecological mess for everyone. The only winners in all of this areself righteous idiot government flunkies and diesel owners who were paid for their pain and suffering for buying cars that didn't release patchouli and essential oils from their tailpipes. Quelle horreur!
> Then meat would have to be rationed, because meat production emits enormous amounts of CO2.
Still waiting for an environmentalist to explain to me how this is possible. Cows are net-zero carbon producers. Every gram of CO2 they emit came from food that they ate, and the CO2 in that food came _out_ of the atmosphere. Unless they mean something way more nuanced and specific than the 'cow farts' talking point, this is nonsensical
The whole carbon thing is based on pretty much nothing, just models, that are themselves made of assumption piled on assumption. Models are tested by their predictive value and these have, shall we say, underperformed.
It's rather breathtaking that this bad "science" has achieved such a powerful stranglehold.
Remember in "Gulliver's Travels" when he visits Laputa and the university there?
The researchers were paid by the monarch to do research and tutor students, not to produce results of any useful kind.
Enter the professor trying to turn feces into food, arguing that all you have to do is figure out of how to run the chemical process backwards.
Or the one arguing that since pigs make excellent fertiliser and make furrows when scrounging and foraging, instead of plowing fields all you have to do is bury acorns in the field, in straight rows, and the pigs will do the rest.
Cows are the most environment friendly machines. They can graze on uncultivated land and produce very nutritionally rich foods. There's a reason cows made human population to prosper when agriculture was very undeveloped. When you hear people boasting about vegetables you should argue with the facts above. Then they become silent.
> They can graze on uncultivated land and produce very nutritionally rich foods.
This was something I only learned being autistic and arguing on the internet.
One of the arguments greenies use is something along the lines of "1 acre of [crop] can provide X calories, but 1 acre of cows can only provide X/10 calories". This is a superficially reasonable concern... up until you talk to a farmer, who will tell you that the land that cows graze on is frequently not productive enough to support those crops in the first place.
It's not a tradeoff between growing cows or growing plants, just a tradeoff between growing cows, or not growing cows.
(I don't have enough agricultural knowledge to say if leaving the land unused would have some kind of negative consequence that the presence of cows would change, only to say that if it was unused it's food output is zero)
Year1: Crops (wheat or rye or barley or oats or something like that)
Y2: Potatoes/other root vegetables
Y3: Peas, beans or similar
Y4: Fallow
Y5: Grazing for cows, sheep, goats, pigs, whatever
And back to rye or something year six. Dep. on exactly where and when we decide to put our temporal pointer. But the basic principle was rotation, and using grazing animals to naturally fertilise land, slowly improving it and increasing the quality of the soil.
Sadly, that doesn't work with modern capitalistic industrial farming and the fees and taxes and such levied on all farmers, making small and local economically unfeasible.
I'm certain it's the same story all over the place?
Another stupid argument is that they say land can produce x amount of vegetables. Yes the industrial farming ones. There's a reason population boomed on grazing animals and not on vegetable growing. Of course when you use a ton of fertiliser/pesticider etc vegetables can grow also abundantly... But that's not sustainable imo.
It's all about deindustrialization. Remember global cooling and acid rain? What was their solution? Stop burning fossil fuels - deindistrialize. Then we began putting scrubbers on smokestacks and pollution controls on cars and the Greens were stymied. Then came global warming. What is the solution for that? Stop burning fossil fuels - deindistrialize.
You know, that's actually the correct answer, kind of, but the greens are too stupid to say it.
AIUI the closest thing to a steelman of the 'cow farts' argument is that methane has significantly more global warming potential per gram than CO2 does. I feel like someone said that to me once.
Dear Eugyppius, (and I say this with deep sincerity) how can you possibly doubt your betters deep concern for you and your people. They know, and only want what's best for you. Turn that frown upside down. Nothing but blue skies from now on.
With all due respect, any country that would let one of its best “friends” and allies blow up one of its primary sources of energy and say nothing is already doomed - any sane leadership would have pursued a war declaration against the aggressor - instead it either actively participated in the subterfuge or agreed to look the other way to the detriment of it’s own citizens.
I consider myself fairly smart, but I cannot understand, comprehend, or even imagine how ideas like this can even acquire credibility outside the lunatic asylum, never mind gaining popularity. I guess my Green betters are so much smarter than I am.
Eugyppius, while I think most every European above age 40 knows eactly what you mean with "1968ers", I'm not sure if the term is used outside (Western) Europe at all, or if the phenomenon exists elsewhere - on the other hand, the Pol Pot-admiring woman you quote is certainly a prime specimen so perhaps that explains it enough.
(I've used the term myself lots of times with non-Europeans and have had to explain it in detail. "Khmer Vert" usually does the trick.)
"50 square metres per capita." Well isn't that nice of her! That means my wife and I can build two entire rooms, each 25 sqm, since our 90sqm two story house is built in the traditional way, where the upper floor is only used as storage-area used during Winter. What an excellent way for her to tell her audience how spiled, privileged and pampered she's always been!
As a bachelor, I lived in a 24sqm "apartment". That includes a cooking-alcove and toilet with a shower-stall. 50sqm per capita. . . wow. The German construction industry might be interested in sponsoring her!
Please do! I'm not the originator of the term - it was coined over three decades ago by the then-leader of the Swedish Green Party, speaking about the lunatic fringe of same.
He used the name precisely because the anti-everything phalanx of the Greens and of the environmental movement (emphasis on the "-mental" part) were original 1968ers, Maoists who changed jerseys during the 1970s when the mass-murder of Pol Pot's regime became impossible to obfuscate.
The 1968ers are the grandparents of the current Generation Greta-woke fanatics, both biologically and ideologically.
Pre-coffee ramble:
European version hippies, consisting mainly of upper-middle class people born after WW2 (so young adults in or just out of college in 1968) mimicking the US civil rights movement. But:
With a strong post-modernist and existentialist bent (especially in France) to Stalinism, Maoism, or other versions of communism, often very violent and aggressive with threatening imagery and language. Extremist views on everything, combined with a puritanism leading to every group and "movement" splintering into smaller and smaller segments.
Replaced by the "prog"-movement in the 1979s, which was much the same but less violent, more feminist, with a stronger focus on environmentalism and "agrarian communism" (Pol Pot), led by the remaining 1968ers who recruited teens and young people of the 1950s generations (often called the "forgotten" generation).
In the late 1950s and early 1980s, these people (1968ers) got haircuts and careers, much like how the hippies had become yuppies in the US. However, in Europe they retained their extremist postmodernist Marxist - US civil rights - pomoexistentialist - jambalaya of ideas and worked inside the institutions of business and politics and especially education (as per Gramsci et al) to move the Overton window in their direction.
During the 1990s, they added "anti-colonialism" to their repertoire, inspired by the by then several decades of anti-white rhetoric in and from the US Hollywood/massmedia "intellectuals" and campus radicals who has access to platforms pre-internet. This led to a schism between the by then fully entrenched 1968ers and the actual working class, since the 68ers were Randian on economic policy and pomo Marxist on social issues: open borders and free wage setting, homosexual propaganda in kindergartens (but for moslems), and all things now called woke.
From there, the insanity has spiralled into punitive sadistic "destructionism", as the aging 1968ers come to realise that they were always wrong, no-one agrees with them, their ideas doesn't work and more: their solution is therefore to destroy everything they can - only when everything that's gone before them is in ruins, can their Schlaraffenland be built. "And if you don't like that, you grubby little pleb, they'll make you suffer until you do!" is about the sum of their souls.
If that is your pre-coffee output, you must be pretty formidable after coffee :-) Thank you for that explanation. It adds sobering color to 1968er description
AI to the rescue: "1968 was a year of global social and political unrest, marked by a wave of youth-led protests and uprisings. "
if you do a google on "1968er revolution" it lists out a number of incidents and themes that all took place in 1968, roughly corresponding to the boomer/hippy/activist/antiwar/civil rights activities of the era. The 1968er term makes sense now in Eugyppius context
1968er is most meaningful in France because of the uprising in the spring of ‘68 against the French government, the failure of which has haunted the French left ever since.
Quite true. Up here, the 1968ers blended French intellectual radicalism with US hippie-ideals and German fringe militant communism (Baader-Meinhof f.e.).
The elite intelligentsia of modern Germany have only one way to stand out and display to the world their obvious moral and intellectual superiority: atonement and renunciation. (In this they're not that much different from other Western liberals, just more extreme, for obvious reasons.)
This points once again to how Social Justice is the child of two parents: Christianity and Marxist socialism.
Ascetism, public fasting and flagellation, and various rituals of mass public atonement are part of every religious tradition, often led by priests or monks who want their people to follow them to a more godly world—the basic idea being that abstention is the path to holiness, that God wants us all to live on communal bread and water so nothing else distracts us from contemplating Him and his Commandments;
And the Marxist/socialists have been desperately trying to unwind the Industrial Revolution since its inception, to turn modern man back into some form of Noble Savage, where we are all "Equal" because we all only own a single loincloth, and where the power of business and merchants is replaced by the reign of the intellectual vanguard of philosopher-kings, who deserve to rule because of their enlightened wisdom.
This is sort of like a second (unless it's the third or fourth) Protestant Reformation, where the purpose of a society is to get closer to god. Except here the priestly caste doesn't expect to share in the miseries of its flock, they will still be enjoying second homes and taking nice long winter vacations. They may be priests but they're aristocrats first!
Whatever your reason for abject hatred of religion, your version of it is an avoidable perversion. My best friend is a God fearing Catholic lawyer who dislikes his profession because it is soulless but whose life is otherwise fantastic. He eschews material wealth but doesn't live as an ascetic. He is the picture of continence and has a vibrant, giving, fully intact family of 6 that don't seem to be suffering from post modern ennui or any other obvious mental disorders. Secular humanism is religion without any demand for humility and creates totalitarian disaster unless there is purpose which is usually a fiction created to imbue the follower with self virtue.
"abject hatred of religion"! ha! I said nothing of the sort and most of my family are "God-fearing Catholics".
I was simply referring to a strain of religious expression, found in everything from fasting Buddhist and Taoist monks to Christian ascetics like the famous Desert Fathers to the Flagellants of the Middle Ages and even including the Protestant/Calvinist campaign against idols, graven images, and church art—a form of belief that equates simplicity, renunciation and mortification with holiness. I wrote "part of every religious tradition" not the totality of religion or even its main purpose.
I was not prescribing, only describing. And whatever hatred you may have sensed comes from yourself, there was none in my comment.
Chris, I did not interpret the comment by ‘Clever Pseudonym’ as projecting hatred of religious belief. I saw the comment as a metaphorical allusion to the pseudo-religious forms and practices of the extremists of the environmental movement. In the words of the late Michael Crichton (successful author of the techno thriller genre, such as ‘Jurassic Park’) - “Environmentalism is the religion of choice for of the urban atheist”.
Eugyppius, how is the bulk of the German population reacting to all of this? I can’t fathom that any sane people would be on board with this lunacy. As bad as the US has been lately, any politician advocating for these policies would be laughed out of the room
This is no different than institutional racism, white guilt, intersectionality and a dozen other stupid ideas that people of low self worth, high guilt, and lack of regard for rationality believe.
The ten thousand soon to be unemployed workers may have strong opinions, but I suspect the strong social services provided by the government will temper their anger.
Ho hum, not very original thinking here. All this was was first proposed for Germany by United States Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. in 1944.
The 'Greens' are punishing the finest auto workers in the world by destroying their industry to solve a problem that arguably does not exist. Scholz is complicit in destroying the lives of hard working, highly skilled Germans who contribute taxes and are an asset to the quality of life in Germany.
This is a case of rewarding malcontents and lunatics at the expense of people who make Germany a better place through their labor, loyalty and good citizenship. Normally, politicians seek to attract clean industries with high-paying jobs to create healthy cities and states. But now in Germany, as in the U.S. we are led by incompetents and fools. These people contribute nothing of value while destroying everything that works.
I just purchased a new car made in Germany and shipped to the U.S. It is a marvel of German engineering, which is tops in the world. I paid a premium for the advanced engineering and high quality of the workmanship. Why anyone would seek to destroy an industry which is the envy of the world is beyond comprehension. I have had the pleasure of working with German engineers in Germany and I grieve for what is happening to them.
I am not being flippant, sarcastic, or sardonic when I say the model this woman presents is no different than how the Soviet Union ran its empire. What she describes is precisely the same; it's a carbon copy economy (pun intended). What universe does she come from?
Communism is the opiate of the intellectuals, they will never ever abandon it. It is the will to power for a certain class of cosseted people who believe that their enlightened morality entitles them to be philosopher-kings.
It is a very powerful post-Christian religion for secular priests and reformers who imagine themselves as being anointed to lead humanity to a higher plane.
The fact that their ideals and fantasies never work in the real world, and only create disaster, only encourages them to try harder. It's never their fault, it's we stubborn humans and our refusal to obey!
Thanks so much for the translation of the speech from German. It is absolutely chilling. It reminds me so much of the concept of The Year Zero from the Khymer Rouge in Cambodia that ultimately led to one of the worst genocides of the 20th Century.
I just don’t understand how anyone can say anything like that and be respected.
This is more evidence that radical ideologies stem from mental disorders.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/radical-ideologies-feast-on-mental
"The Year Zero from the Khymer Rouge in Cambodia" 🎯
The Noble Savage is the Leftist idol, the ideal of the past and the goal for the future.
Leftists learned nothing from Stalin or Mao, so they certainly will learn nothing from Pol Pot.
The "No True Marxist" fallacy remains undefeated and it will stay that way. Zealots don't abandon their Promised Land, they just find new paths to get there every generation.
"The Year Zero from the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia"
YES!!!
And you can push it into the distant future, over and over again.
Periodic revivals of socialism/communism are now an established Western phenomenon, in the same way as religious revivals are.
"Like religions (and Socialism is tending more and more to put on the guise of a religion) it propagates itself in any manner rather than by reason. Feeble in the extreme when it attempts to reason, and to support itself by economic arguments, it becomes on the contrary extremely powerful when it remains in the region of dreams, affirmations, and chimerical promises.
With what lever does it seek to raise the soul? With the sentiments of envy and hatred which it creates in the hearts of multitudes? To the crowd, no longer satisfied with political and civic equality, it proposes equality of condition, without dreaming that social inequalities are born of those natural inequalities that man has always been powerless to change."
"The Psychology of Socialism" Gustave Le Bon 1899
Socialists of one sort or another have, just in the last century or so, murdered well over a hundred million people, displaced countless millions more, and impoverished and destroyed every polity and society they've seized control of, without exception.
I find it utterly incomprehensible how it is not only tolerated, but championed by wide swaths of electorates across the formerly free world.
How many more people must socialists slaughter, impoverish and brutally oppress, how many more nations must they destroy, and how many more souls must perish fighting these lunatics and the pseudo-religious psychopathic death cult they worship?
When will enough ever be enough?
“[A] . . . trait . . . which, in my eyes best describes socialists of all schools and shades, is a profound opposition to personal liberty and scorn for individual reason, a complete contempt for the individual. They unceasingly attempt to mutilate, curtail, to obstruct personal freedom in any and all ways. They hold that the State must not only act as the director of society, but must further be master of each man, and not only master, but keeper and trainer. For fear of allowing him to err, the State must place itself forever by his side, above him, around him better to guide him to maintain him, in a word, to confine him . . . to sum up what socialism is, I would say that it was simply a new system of serfdom.”
~ Alexis de Tocqueville, September 12, 1848
http://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/tocqueville-s-critique-of-socialism-1848
thanks for the link!
“All of them” ~ funny internet meme
When I hear someone use the term Liberty from the period, they meant it and understood its meaning
Damn. This guy is a genius. He nailed it. Nothing has changed in the 125 years since he wrote it. I guess because by it's very nature socialism doesn't/can't "change".
Thx for sharing.
Just found a free PDF online a few days ago:
https://archive.org/details/cu31924030349587
It can be a bit outdated at times, like any 125-yr-old work, but it does nail all the essences and outlines the religious nature of the socialist enterprise.
also, it never ceases to amaze me how much better writers they were back in the 19th century compared to our time.
Also, he wrote all this in 1899, before any Communist states existed. Amazingly prescient:
In exchange for their rations, which the theorists of Socialism promise him, "the worker would perform his work under the surveillance of State functionaries, like so many convicts under the eye and hand of the warder. All individual motive would be stifled, and each worker would rest, sleep, and eat at the bidding of headmen put in authority over matters of food, work, recreation, and the perfect equality of all."
All stimulus being destroyed, no one would make an effort to ameliorate or to escape from his position. It would be slavery of the gloomiest kind, without a hope of enfranchisement. Under the domination of the capitalist the worker can at least dream of becoming, and sometimes does become, a capitalist in his turn. What dream could he indulge in under the anonymous and brutally despotic tyranny of a levelling State which should foresee all his needs and direct his will?
I was just going to say that. The prose was amazing a mere 125 years ago.
Have you read any of Cato's Letters by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon?
That's like 300 years ago...but man o man...quality prose.
Incredibly prescient work, as is his work The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. His observations could have been written today.
Uhm, that's 175 years. When you pay the dinner check, for the sake of the waitstaff, I hope your wife calculates the tip.
Perfect! Thanks for the Le Bon reference.....
Vegan B12 deficiencies are brutal on cognition
Severe shortage of minerals too.
My thought exactly.
In the end, more Green is Khymer Green.
At the end, when the food runs out, it will be Soylent green
The seals in the audience clapped for their own genocide.
Same people… Israel is committing genocide.
They’re very confused, insane, azzholes.
Israel is not committed genocide. Nice try. If you actually gave a fight for the Gazans you would demand they accept defeat, surrender, hang every last member of Hamas and build a society based on peace. But you don't actually care, apparently.
That was sarcasm. It’s the same crowd screaming about genocide in Gaza, while clapping for their own genocide. It’s why they’re very disturbed people.
A couple of months ago at the height of the Gaza protests, I came across a couple of middle aged women in my small town, about to participate in some sort of local pro-Hamas protest. One of the women's had a kaffiyah wrapped around her head. I went up to her and started to casually chat about how women in the Arab world did not dress like that. I also mentioned that I had worked as a teacher in two Middle Eastern countries for over ten years, and I suggested that if she went into certain hostile areas in the Middle East dressed like that, she wouldn't exactly be welcomed with open arms, the outcome might not be a good one for her. She became immediately hostile and said she had traveled in the Middle East, yet she couldn't name even one country she had traveled in. I said a few more things that clearly demonstrated her ignorance about the whole issue and suddenly she started hysterically yelling "F**k you" and ran off. Her total ignorance about Gaza and Israel and the Middle East in general was painfully obvious, and such people will not engage beyond screaming slogans or insults. I would guess that she is typical of the protesters.
Classic puritan.
I also agree. Israel is dealing with the trash. We Americans couldn’t win a war with 8th century barbarians in nightgowns and flip flops. Not due to our boots on the ground, it’s leadership and politicians that keep getting American’s killed.
The war in Afghanistan was unwinnable, just like Vietnam. We would need to stay forever, and to what end? The Deep State had no plans to win, only to fight. If we were losing, they would step up the attacks. If we were winning too badly, they would change the ROE (rules of engagement) to favor the enemy. War is a scam, and we got scammed for $$trillions over the last 20 years.
Then and now I have repeatedly asked. Why was the US in Afghanistan? At no point did they attack anyone. The bad guys passed through Afghanistan like they did Somalia and Yemen.
I am more likely to believe it was a reason to steal money from the treasury.
Those poppy fields didn’t defend themselves.
Before she was at the White House, Condoleeza Rice was on the board of Unocal oil company, which wanted to build a pipeline through Afghanistan.
So there’s that.
Just a little siege warfare shooting lots of kids in the head and bombing entire city to rubble while openly babbling about amalec. Not genocidal at all
Because the Nakba never happened right? Idiot.
Trying to choose the good guys in this conflict is a futile effort. Sometimes there just aren’t any good guys.
The self-imposed deportation happened. Not a genocide. Learn to not be an idiot.
"self-imposed deportation". If that's what you need to tell yourself to sleep at night, Rabbi.
The Arabs who were wise enough to stay in Israel have done fine. The Jews and Christians in Gaza,and the West Bank, not so much. Not a rabbi, not Jewish. Perhaps you need to adjust your mak a bit better.
BTW I also detest hamas *leadership* they're 9th circle below Israel even for sure but if you think this absolves Israel you're very confused
I mean it is genocide best I can tell, I just don’t really care. There are more important things in life than a war between two desert tribes on the other side of the world.
I hope they both lose.
I suspect the genocide that would result from this wouldn't necessarily be of the people they've planned.
CARBON GENOCIDE CULT. ONLY LASERS NEED LOW CO2. EARTH IS SO CO2 LOW ITS KILLING PLANTS.
Permanently ending carbon emissions? Rationing of concentrated living spaces and food? Sounds familiar, Germany...
AUSCHWITZ? DACHAU? HOLOMODOR? C40 CITY,SMART CITY,15 MINUTE CITY,WALKABLE CITY,…….++
Rationing living space is great but I want to be the first to choose my ration in the city... Sounds like communism when sqm was the same price everywhere but somehow the party members got the good spots to 'buy'.
yes.
"EARTH IS SO CO2 LOW ITS KILLING PLANTS." Not yet, but they are working on it.
They are well below optimal efficiency for photosynthesis.
TREES IN NEW MEXICO / TEXAS DIFFER
When I saw the California Redwoods - Truly magnificent - it was my husband's second visit and he commented on how they just didn't look as healthy as last time...
WE CAN USE SCALAR WAVE FOR ENERGY RATHER WEAPON == END CARBON GENOCIDE CULT …CO2 GOOD…ONLY LASERS NEED LOW CO2
One of the funniest things I ever read came from an eco-friendly--no! Eco-over-enamored!--catalogue that sold all sorts of organic textile items and cleaning products etc. etc. etc., and one of those textile items was a beautiful pure wool throw or shawl or whatever, and in the fine print--I bet some of you can guess this--it said "dry clean only."
I got my suspicions about that dress our girl is wearing. It's just too elegant for a drip-dry sort of garment.
When these people aren't being morons they are hypocrites to the max, and I don't suspect that woman of shivering through her winters.
And we people--we get what we allow to happen. The need to be in a cult--any cult--is a powerful human hunger and if it's not taking communion in a cathedral it's turning elected office into the sacrament of deindustrialization, etc. etc., and until there are more normal people to make a tipping point we all gonna keep tipping downwards.
"we get what we allow to happen" is absolutely right. for decades now, also through Covid & until this very moment, i see the same thing: a small minority of nefarious assholes have plans, but then everybody else just sits around like absolute retards and lets their plans happen.
i have one basic rule of social comportment I propose to everyone. I learned this being forced to sit on university committees: You automatically and instinctively oppose everybody's fucking plan, anything presented to you as a ready-made system, as a sure-to-work solution to a problem nobody knew about before – anything like this. They can put it right up their asses. Half the time, your just saying this causes the whole charade to go down in flames, that is how fragile it is. The other half of the time, they regroup or you lose or whatever, but if you do it all of the time, you win on balance.
You can guess how much I was despised when I sat on that city council volunteer advisory committee for a couple of years with a term ending just as our Plague Era began. I had to shame them and shame them into finally acting on a modest proposal to put a crosswalk over a busy road served by our limited public transportation system. The thing was, the crosswalk would enable people to get from a big thrift shop to a non-posh supermarket and then take the bus home without getting squashed like bugs.
This was particularly important because the small supermarket that had been within walking distance in town had gone out of business not long before. And the public transport system didn't run on weekends, so getting your groceries was a big challenge for non-drivers. I used to see very frail people dragging their market carts onto the bus in all seasons and it gets rough up here starting sometimes by October.
It wasn't at all important to the nice middle-class professionals so happy to have that volunteer officer credit on their resumes and social connections. But it was important to people like me (though I myself am extremely fortunate to have a kid who ensures I don't need to worry about the provisioning) and as I keep saying, every place I go I end up being the representative of the Peasants' Rebellion even if I don't ever see that coming.
Those people on the advisory committee were eager to keep restricting parking spaces in new housing developments while pushing e-bikes etc. etc. etc. etc. It just never occurred to them that someone working, say, at the medical center who had to drop a child at daycare first and then take the child with them grocery shopping on the way home could not do all of that on an e-bike.
Quite a different situation from yours, but in my tiny rural town of 300, it's a constant struggle against gentrification.
You wouldn't believe the fight we had about pigs a few years ago, when I was still on the planning commission. People (usually newer residents) wanted to outlaw pigs completely, while some of us were arguing for the pre-existing reasonable limits—locally sourced food is actually quite popular around here. When they didn't get their way, two members of the planning commission resigned, sold their house, and moved away. Oh well!
I live in a town adjacent to a college town and the people in this place feel very insecure about their slightly lower social status and so they want to ban anything that enables lower-middle-class people to have a chance at affordable rents. There's a terrible housing crunch and the major medical center has a hard time attracting enough support staff because there's just not enough housing.
And a guy wrote a letter to the paper a few years ago complaining that more housing density would increase his drive time to get his cancer treatments. His drive time was of course only 10 minutes. And how the fuck did he think he was going to get his cancer treatments if the health tech staff couldn't get to work in a blizzard because they lived 4 towns over?
Typical. That's the same mindset that outlaws clotheslines.
There was a case before the zoning board about a couple who had a beehive on their property which was within the city limits. (They call this place a city but...). Eventually they were granted a variance. This is what these morons wasted their time over when the beehive was located on one of those properties with so much of a back yard some people would mistake it for a small country.
Good riddance to the self deported
Result!
Epic. Lolol. Best comment in weeks.
I'll never forget the face one such woman made, after she had lectured us on why the sausages she had in her launch-box were superior to the cheap ones in the cafeteria.
Hers you see had "natural skin" on them. Only, she didn't know what that really meant.
Big burly Finnish-Swede colleague told her. She almost hurled across the lunch-room table.
I think maybe that is kind of the female eq- to the male "brand-fetishist": price and quality be damned, as long as it's The True Brand.
lmfao
This is a very enjoyable story.
You got any spare big burly Finnish-Swede guys over there, send one right over.
You guys are cracking me up
The right sort of Florida man, you could send me one of those instead.
They're a curious bunch, the Finnish-Swedes. Some are of mixed parentage, some are descendents of Swedes living in Finland when it was part of the Realm, and some are war-orphans who grew up in Sweden after the Winter War of '41+Continuation War of '44. Or they are descended from Finns who came to Sweden to work during centuries past.
Stoic, silent, strong, dependable to a fault almost with a quiet wry humour when sober and boisterous and sentimental when drunk.
Sort of a refined alloy of Swede and Finns, actually.
Good God. How could you not tell me before you got all those actual Beorns running around up there?
I'm on my way. You think they like brownies?
That's not a bad image, actually.
If you really want to delve into it, for once Wikipedia has a good article on the history of this sub-set of Swedes/Finns:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish-speaking_population_of_Finland
It all started with the Swedish Crusades a thousand years ago - instead of just going viking and trading/looting as per usual, the vikings now went looting, trading and plundering while offering the conquered the choice of the cross or the sword.
As most of our historians in the pre-PC eras have often pointed out, Christianity took until the Reformation to really take hold here, culturally speaking, and remains a rather thin veneer over the actual "Volks-kultur".
Edit: you might want to try a true Finnish desert. Memma (Swedish) or Mämmi (Finnish).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A4mmi
Ain't that funny? My brownies look just like that.
Yes, I think in the more northerly places the old spirit hasn't been entirely killed off.
I like them already. Where can we get some?
"Elegant" was not the word that occurred to me, but your point is well taken.
I don't see her as a cheap soap-and-water type of gal neither. I'd love a peek into her bathroom vanity.
Actually, most people's bathroom vanities terrify me. IMHO many people are poisoning themselves with toxic personal care products. Skin is very absorbent.
I fully agree with your assessment of this woman. How much do you wanna bet she's already moved into her 50 m² apartment and is riding a bicycle everywhere? Oh, and of course insisting on a drastic reduction in salary.
You'd love my vanity, I promise. These days of course I can only afford Jason toothpaste and not that pink Weleda stuff I could buy in my working years.
I should clarify a little bit. It's not so much the content of the vanities that terrifies* me, it's the sheer quantity of the stuff. Bottles and bottles and jars that overflow the typical cabinet.
* exaggeration for dramatic effect
That's why I buy my lovely organic body lotion in the 32-oz. size. My face is of course part of my body. (For extra support in this climate I live in I do get smaller jars of an intensive natural Vitamin C cream but you won't deny me that indulgence...)
Baking soda works too ;)
As I have read using that stuff straight eventually does bad stuff to your enamel. I have in past years sometimes used it.
What a frightening thought.
There was a scene in a novel I read almost sixty years ago where a pair of kids decided to go on a hunger strike to force their parents, who were having an affair, to separate, and the naive English girl ate nothing but the cunning Italian girl was secretly gorging and when the English girl found out she felt so betrayed and furious, and the Italian girl looked at her mockingly and said something along the lines of "only an idiot like you would've really done it."
That's how these people are.
The German green insanity hit today's WSJ. "Volkswagen Hits the Net-Zero Wall
The German company’s layoffs and pay cuts are a warning to America about Biden-Harris climate policies." Hopefully this painful lesson on the carbon scam resonates with the US electorate so we don't continue down this destructive path.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/volkswagen-layoffs-net-zero-electric-vehicles-europe-4d182e15?st=Mm5aFX&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
US politics is different. Of the revulsions most motivating the American voter, environmental lunacy is far down the list. But happily their strongest revulsions are against the same group of politicians for entirely different reasons, so heaven willing, it will all work out.
The WSJ editorial talks about autos because everyone drives, but steel manufacturers have been staring down the barrel of a gun for several years too. Almost all heavy industry is being threatened.
The Soviets and red Chinese were obsessed with steel production quotas to the point of nonsense. But they were right in a way, a nation that can't make stuff loses its balls.
WSJ blames Dieselgate without seeing that was just earlier-stage climatist self-harm. And omits Nordstream from the energy problems. Still it’s good to see them taking note of this.
VW, Merc and Audi all suffered an inevitable fate since Europe mandated an utterly ridiculous tailpipe particulate ratio. Cutting by nearly half NoX from one year to the next was always a stupid idea even with mfrs having 3 years to figure it out. On the other side of that mandate we have diesels suffering a myriad of turbo, exhaust, and dpf maladies that simply make for a greater ecological mess for everyone. The only winners in all of this areself righteous idiot government flunkies and diesel owners who were paid for their pain and suffering for buying cars that didn't release patchouli and essential oils from their tailpipes. Quelle horreur!
Dieselgate: "They made the cars too efficient so they had to make the computer lie and say they weren't so they'd pass the tests."
Excellent op ed.
> Then meat would have to be rationed, because meat production emits enormous amounts of CO2.
Still waiting for an environmentalist to explain to me how this is possible. Cows are net-zero carbon producers. Every gram of CO2 they emit came from food that they ate, and the CO2 in that food came _out_ of the atmosphere. Unless they mean something way more nuanced and specific than the 'cow farts' talking point, this is nonsensical
The whole carbon thing is based on pretty much nothing, just models, that are themselves made of assumption piled on assumption. Models are tested by their predictive value and these have, shall we say, underperformed.
It's rather breathtaking that this bad "science" has achieved such a powerful stranglehold.
Remember in "Gulliver's Travels" when he visits Laputa and the university there?
The researchers were paid by the monarch to do research and tutor students, not to produce results of any useful kind.
Enter the professor trying to turn feces into food, arguing that all you have to do is figure out of how to run the chemical process backwards.
Or the one arguing that since pigs make excellent fertiliser and make furrows when scrounging and foraging, instead of plowing fields all you have to do is bury acorns in the field, in straight rows, and the pigs will do the rest.
We've always had these loons among us.
To be clear, I think Global Warming is a scam, and I do not care about carbon emissions at all.
👍
if they understood physics, chemistry, or even basic math they wouldn't be greenies.
Cows are the most environment friendly machines. They can graze on uncultivated land and produce very nutritionally rich foods. There's a reason cows made human population to prosper when agriculture was very undeveloped. When you hear people boasting about vegetables you should argue with the facts above. Then they become silent.
> They can graze on uncultivated land and produce very nutritionally rich foods.
This was something I only learned being autistic and arguing on the internet.
One of the arguments greenies use is something along the lines of "1 acre of [crop] can provide X calories, but 1 acre of cows can only provide X/10 calories". This is a superficially reasonable concern... up until you talk to a farmer, who will tell you that the land that cows graze on is frequently not productive enough to support those crops in the first place.
It's not a tradeoff between growing cows or growing plants, just a tradeoff between growing cows, or not growing cows.
(I don't have enough agricultural knowledge to say if leaving the land unused would have some kind of negative consequence that the presence of cows would change, only to say that if it was unused it's food output is zero)
Here, the old way was:
Year1: Crops (wheat or rye or barley or oats or something like that)
Y2: Potatoes/other root vegetables
Y3: Peas, beans or similar
Y4: Fallow
Y5: Grazing for cows, sheep, goats, pigs, whatever
And back to rye or something year six. Dep. on exactly where and when we decide to put our temporal pointer. But the basic principle was rotation, and using grazing animals to naturally fertilise land, slowly improving it and increasing the quality of the soil.
Sadly, that doesn't work with modern capitalistic industrial farming and the fees and taxes and such levied on all farmers, making small and local economically unfeasible.
I'm certain it's the same story all over the place?
Well, the lack of cow poop means the soil never improves. So that's yet another way vegans are fucking retarded.
The average vegan doesn’t grow their own fucking food.
Another stupid argument is that they say land can produce x amount of vegetables. Yes the industrial farming ones. There's a reason population boomed on grazing animals and not on vegetable growing. Of course when you use a ton of fertiliser/pesticider etc vegetables can grow also abundantly... But that's not sustainable imo.
It's all about deindustrialization. Remember global cooling and acid rain? What was their solution? Stop burning fossil fuels - deindistrialize. Then we began putting scrubbers on smokestacks and pollution controls on cars and the Greens were stymied. Then came global warming. What is the solution for that? Stop burning fossil fuels - deindistrialize.
Remember when your hairspray would cause the ozone-layer to disappear "inside of ten years"?
> What is the solution for that?
Burn Greens.
Well you see my friend, it's like this. They're *lying*.
Yes, and the problem is a lot of people buy it.
"Cows fart methane and that's a greenhouse-gas and that means cowfarts increase global warming" is the logic.
All the while the same people lobby for switching to cars powered by "bio-gas".
You know, that's actually the correct answer, kind of, but the greens are too stupid to say it.
AIUI the closest thing to a steelman of the 'cow farts' argument is that methane has significantly more global warming potential per gram than CO2 does. I feel like someone said that to me once.
I have no idea if that's true or not
The worst one I heard is SO2 released to the atmosphere by vulcanos... Which you are obviously able to control by shaman rituals.
Dear Eugyppius, (and I say this with deep sincerity) how can you possibly doubt your betters deep concern for you and your people. They know, and only want what's best for you. Turn that frown upside down. Nothing but blue skies from now on.
^ Pure genius, man.
🤣🤣
Perhaps you start a green business smuggling Germans to Russia in electric Volkswagens through the one remaining Nord Stream pipe?
lmao
🤣🤣
With all due respect, any country that would let one of its best “friends” and allies blow up one of its primary sources of energy and say nothing is already doomed - any sane leadership would have pursued a war declaration against the aggressor - instead it either actively participated in the subterfuge or agreed to look the other way to the detriment of it’s own citizens.
I consider myself fairly smart, but I cannot understand, comprehend, or even imagine how ideas like this can even acquire credibility outside the lunatic asylum, never mind gaining popularity. I guess my Green betters are so much smarter than I am.
Middle class, ennui of a pointless life mixed with a sense of inherited guilt for every problem Germany has? Just a guess.
Eugyppius, while I think most every European above age 40 knows eactly what you mean with "1968ers", I'm not sure if the term is used outside (Western) Europe at all, or if the phenomenon exists elsewhere - on the other hand, the Pol Pot-admiring woman you quote is certainly a prime specimen so perhaps that explains it enough.
(I've used the term myself lots of times with non-Europeans and have had to explain it in detail. "Khmer Vert" usually does the trick.)
"50 square metres per capita." Well isn't that nice of her! That means my wife and I can build two entire rooms, each 25 sqm, since our 90sqm two story house is built in the traditional way, where the upper floor is only used as storage-area used during Winter. What an excellent way for her to tell her audience how spiled, privileged and pampered she's always been!
As a bachelor, I lived in a 24sqm "apartment". That includes a cooking-alcove and toilet with a shower-stall. 50sqm per capita. . . wow. The German construction industry might be interested in sponsoring her!
I'm going to steal 'Khmer Vert'.
Please do! I'm not the originator of the term - it was coined over three decades ago by the then-leader of the Swedish Green Party, speaking about the lunatic fringe of same.
He used the name precisely because the anti-everything phalanx of the Greens and of the environmental movement (emphasis on the "-mental" part) were original 1968ers, Maoists who changed jerseys during the 1970s when the mass-murder of Pol Pot's regime became impossible to obfuscate.
Same.
50 m² = 538 ft.². That's just a little bit smaller than my house.
Suddenly I'm feeling so virtuous...!
My house is 1,800 sq. ft. and I need a bigger house.
(And I live by myself.)
Yes please do tell me what a 1968er is
Short version:
The 1968ers are the grandparents of the current Generation Greta-woke fanatics, both biologically and ideologically.
Pre-coffee ramble:
European version hippies, consisting mainly of upper-middle class people born after WW2 (so young adults in or just out of college in 1968) mimicking the US civil rights movement. But:
With a strong post-modernist and existentialist bent (especially in France) to Stalinism, Maoism, or other versions of communism, often very violent and aggressive with threatening imagery and language. Extremist views on everything, combined with a puritanism leading to every group and "movement" splintering into smaller and smaller segments.
Replaced by the "prog"-movement in the 1979s, which was much the same but less violent, more feminist, with a stronger focus on environmentalism and "agrarian communism" (Pol Pot), led by the remaining 1968ers who recruited teens and young people of the 1950s generations (often called the "forgotten" generation).
In the late 1950s and early 1980s, these people (1968ers) got haircuts and careers, much like how the hippies had become yuppies in the US. However, in Europe they retained their extremist postmodernist Marxist - US civil rights - pomoexistentialist - jambalaya of ideas and worked inside the institutions of business and politics and especially education (as per Gramsci et al) to move the Overton window in their direction.
During the 1990s, they added "anti-colonialism" to their repertoire, inspired by the by then several decades of anti-white rhetoric in and from the US Hollywood/massmedia "intellectuals" and campus radicals who has access to platforms pre-internet. This led to a schism between the by then fully entrenched 1968ers and the actual working class, since the 68ers were Randian on economic policy and pomo Marxist on social issues: open borders and free wage setting, homosexual propaganda in kindergartens (but for moslems), and all things now called woke.
From there, the insanity has spiralled into punitive sadistic "destructionism", as the aging 1968ers come to realise that they were always wrong, no-one agrees with them, their ideas doesn't work and more: their solution is therefore to destroy everything they can - only when everything that's gone before them is in ruins, can their Schlaraffenland be built. "And if you don't like that, you grubby little pleb, they'll make you suffer until you do!" is about the sum of their souls.
If that is your pre-coffee output, you must be pretty formidable after coffee :-) Thank you for that explanation. It adds sobering color to 1968er description
I'm getting a vague idea, but I would appreciate an explanation too.
AI to the rescue: "1968 was a year of global social and political unrest, marked by a wave of youth-led protests and uprisings. "
if you do a google on "1968er revolution" it lists out a number of incidents and themes that all took place in 1968, roughly corresponding to the boomer/hippy/activist/antiwar/civil rights activities of the era. The 1968er term makes sense now in Eugyppius context
Well, being in the US, at first I thought…hippies?
But the references to Khmer Green didn't seem to comport with that.
See my attempted explanation above. Bring safety blanket/sick bag/Jeppson's Malört.
1968er is most meaningful in France because of the uprising in the spring of ‘68 against the French government, the failure of which has haunted the French left ever since.
Quite true. Up here, the 1968ers blended French intellectual radicalism with US hippie-ideals and German fringe militant communism (Baader-Meinhof f.e.).
A very dangerous and destructive "trinity".
Do they really want to freeze to death in the dark this winter??? No tractors, cars, busses or planes?
THEY don’t plan to freeze to death. They have their luxurious bunkers. Only the plebes will freeze to death, and what do they matter?
No one left to scrub the toilets.
Because t they cared about your health during Covid. 😂😂😂 such liars, it’s all become just a huge pile of vomit.
The elite intelligentsia of modern Germany have only one way to stand out and display to the world their obvious moral and intellectual superiority: atonement and renunciation. (In this they're not that much different from other Western liberals, just more extreme, for obvious reasons.)
This points once again to how Social Justice is the child of two parents: Christianity and Marxist socialism.
Ascetism, public fasting and flagellation, and various rituals of mass public atonement are part of every religious tradition, often led by priests or monks who want their people to follow them to a more godly world—the basic idea being that abstention is the path to holiness, that God wants us all to live on communal bread and water so nothing else distracts us from contemplating Him and his Commandments;
And the Marxist/socialists have been desperately trying to unwind the Industrial Revolution since its inception, to turn modern man back into some form of Noble Savage, where we are all "Equal" because we all only own a single loincloth, and where the power of business and merchants is replaced by the reign of the intellectual vanguard of philosopher-kings, who deserve to rule because of their enlightened wisdom.
This is sort of like a second (unless it's the third or fourth) Protestant Reformation, where the purpose of a society is to get closer to god. Except here the priestly caste doesn't expect to share in the miseries of its flock, they will still be enjoying second homes and taking nice long winter vacations. They may be priests but they're aristocrats first!
Whatever your reason for abject hatred of religion, your version of it is an avoidable perversion. My best friend is a God fearing Catholic lawyer who dislikes his profession because it is soulless but whose life is otherwise fantastic. He eschews material wealth but doesn't live as an ascetic. He is the picture of continence and has a vibrant, giving, fully intact family of 6 that don't seem to be suffering from post modern ennui or any other obvious mental disorders. Secular humanism is religion without any demand for humility and creates totalitarian disaster unless there is purpose which is usually a fiction created to imbue the follower with self virtue.
"abject hatred of religion"! ha! I said nothing of the sort and most of my family are "God-fearing Catholics".
I was simply referring to a strain of religious expression, found in everything from fasting Buddhist and Taoist monks to Christian ascetics like the famous Desert Fathers to the Flagellants of the Middle Ages and even including the Protestant/Calvinist campaign against idols, graven images, and church art—a form of belief that equates simplicity, renunciation and mortification with holiness. I wrote "part of every religious tradition" not the totality of religion or even its main purpose.
I was not prescribing, only describing. And whatever hatred you may have sensed comes from yourself, there was none in my comment.
Chris, I did not interpret the comment by ‘Clever Pseudonym’ as projecting hatred of religious belief. I saw the comment as a metaphorical allusion to the pseudo-religious forms and practices of the extremists of the environmental movement. In the words of the late Michael Crichton (successful author of the techno thriller genre, such as ‘Jurassic Park’) - “Environmentalism is the religion of choice for of the urban atheist”.
Whatever your reason for abject hatred of non-religion...well, live and let live is how I try to operate.
This is an incredibly wise explanation. You're completely right.
Eugyppius, how is the bulk of the German population reacting to all of this? I can’t fathom that any sane people would be on board with this lunacy. As bad as the US has been lately, any politician advocating for these policies would be laughed out of the room
This is no different than institutional racism, white guilt, intersectionality and a dozen other stupid ideas that people of low self worth, high guilt, and lack of regard for rationality believe.
The ten thousand soon to be unemployed workers may have strong opinions, but I suspect the strong social services provided by the government will temper their anger.
Ho hum, not very original thinking here. All this was was first proposed for Germany by United States Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. in 1944.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgenthau_Plan
Some called him radical, but I guess he was ahead of his time.
Morgenthau is doing the happy dance in his grave
The 'Greens' are punishing the finest auto workers in the world by destroying their industry to solve a problem that arguably does not exist. Scholz is complicit in destroying the lives of hard working, highly skilled Germans who contribute taxes and are an asset to the quality of life in Germany.
This is a case of rewarding malcontents and lunatics at the expense of people who make Germany a better place through their labor, loyalty and good citizenship. Normally, politicians seek to attract clean industries with high-paying jobs to create healthy cities and states. But now in Germany, as in the U.S. we are led by incompetents and fools. These people contribute nothing of value while destroying everything that works.
I just purchased a new car made in Germany and shipped to the U.S. It is a marvel of German engineering, which is tops in the world. I paid a premium for the advanced engineering and high quality of the workmanship. Why anyone would seek to destroy an industry which is the envy of the world is beyond comprehension. I have had the pleasure of working with German engineers in Germany and I grieve for what is happening to them.
I am not being flippant, sarcastic, or sardonic when I say the model this woman presents is no different than how the Soviet Union ran its empire. What she describes is precisely the same; it's a carbon copy economy (pun intended). What universe does she come from?
Communism is the opiate of the intellectuals, they will never ever abandon it. It is the will to power for a certain class of cosseted people who believe that their enlightened morality entitles them to be philosopher-kings.
It is a very powerful post-Christian religion for secular priests and reformers who imagine themselves as being anointed to lead humanity to a higher plane.
The fact that their ideals and fantasies never work in the real world, and only create disaster, only encourages them to try harder. It's never their fault, it's we stubborn humans and our refusal to obey!
> Communism is the opiate of the intellectuals
I feel a run of t-shirts coming on...
save me one pls
Precisely.
The green vision is communism rebranded for the younger generations who never learned history.
So it repeats itself.