They're such morons they'll take it a step further by trying to have the media disassociate his name from the court of public opinion.
They call that the Herostrates Effect.
Herostrates was the guy who burned down temple of Artemis (one of the original seven wonders of the world). His whole point in doing this was to attain immortal fame.
The trial he was put through ruled that in his punishment for that crime nobody was to ever mention his name. He was to be forgotten and by being "erased", to never be brought up.
It backfired big time, and to this day history documents exactly who burned down the temple.
So in 2003, a photographer wanted to document coastal erosion in California, and took a picture of the coastline. The coastline happened to have Barbara Streisand's house in it.
She freaked out about her privacy, and had her lawyers try to get that photo banned from publication. It backfired.
If she had just said nothing, nobody would have ever known it was her house. But after she tried to get it banned, the story became "celebrity thinks the world revolves around her", and suddenly _everybody_ knew it was her house.
"The Streisand Effect" was coined: the effect where, when trying to get sensitive information suppressed, you drive attention to it, causing it to become much more widespread than it would have been if you just said nothing.
Despite this being 20 years ago, people on the internet still haven't figured this out.
You _cannot_ suppress information from the internet. You can suppress it from the _mainstream_ but you cannot make it go away. As the hackers used to say, "the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it".
There are only three ways to "suppress" information online:
1) Turn it into a subject of ridicule, so people avoid it out of fear that they will be ridiculed for knowing it
2) Turn it into something boring, that nobody cares about, so nobody bothers to go looking for it ("just say nothing" is a variant of this)
3) Flood the internet with noise, either some unrelated distraction or misinformation that misdirects people away from the information, so that nobody recognizes the information for what it is.
You _cannot_ remove information from the internet, and if you try to, it just makes it spread more. Like how if you tell teens not to do something because it's bad for them, they just think that makes it cool, and do it more. It's kind of like alcohol. Some parents try to prevent their teens from drinking, and it just makes their kids drink in secret. Then, some other parents let their teens have a small glass of beer or wine at special occasions, so that it doesn't seem like some cool taboo, but rather a lame thing your parents do.
If this guy really wanted to ride this out with minimal reputational damage, he would have had a better shot if he personally amplified it. Like, if he retweeted the image mocking him, with some kind of sarcastic funny comment.
Actually, a hilarious mundane illustration of this
So I used to listen to this comedy podcast in 2015-2016, which abruptly ended when the hosts had a falling out over a woman. This turned into a gigantic internet feud that ended when the one host frivolously sued the other for $400M in defamation damages and had his case thrown out of court.
(this is Maddox and Dick Masterson if anyone is familiar with the lolsuit. https://lolsuit.com if you want to mainline internet autism directly into your veins)
Around the time of this lawsuit, the plaintiff went on some youtube livestream for unrelated reasons, and as a condition of his appearance, he gave the stream hosts a list of words he required to be censored from chat. His intention was that, he knew a bunch of people were going to send in superchats trolling him, and didn't want to deal with that.
Most of the words concerned inside jokes but two of the words seemed really out of place. One was a number, and one was I think the word "maple". It didn't take much effort to figure out that this was his home address.
In this case, if he had really wanted to suppress it, he should have gone with (3) and given them a list of like, 37 numbers (in a row?) and 11 different tree names (that's ridiculous, it's not even funny). That way, not only would nobody have been able to figure out which one was actually his address, but, at that point I don't think people would have recognized it as an address at all. Maybe they think he's just autistic and has numbers and trees he hates? But instead, he tried to suppress his address, and this just made everyone figure out where he lives.
You _cannot_ suppress information online and trying to just makes more people look for it.
Yeah, and when you ask Google to remove something from search results, that definitely makes it impossible to find. That's why there are nobody on the internet talking about how the COVID vaccines injured people. That's not a thing that happens. We're definitely not doing it right here
No disrespect, and no snideness in this, but starting articles and the like with "so" was something started by Buzzfeed and similar clickbait publications. The purpose was to make a reader think that he had stumbled onto an ongoing conversation the journo had with his readers; how intimate, gotta stay and read more.
It was right up there with adding "more about that later," and then there's barely anything about "that" later, it's just a way to make people keep reading.
"So" means "so therefore," which is incorrect in this way. It's as jarring as if you'd start talking with "and," when you didn't say anything right before it that would lead to "and."
I hear a lot of people speak English all the time, but it's only Americans and adjacent nationalities - the Canadians and British - who start with "so". Forgive me, but it does sound jarring. But worse, for the rest of us it sounds like, "this person is just repeating something unthinkingly." It's like people who write, "you can't make this stuff up" (of course you can) or "what could possibly go wrong?" (which you can say about anything).
"So" never bothered me before (although it will now), but I can't stand it when people start a sentence with "look." The other one is throwing "sort of" into the middle of things, like they're painstakingly expressing delicate layers of nuance, when in fact they're just equivocating.
I admit that Lammy might actually be dummer than Baerbock, which is really saying something - although, to be fair my he wasn’t UK foreign monoster when this particular insult was aired.
That begs the question- can the authorities arrest you for brand new made up insult labels? Will you get fined for calling a minister a moronster? It’s not a word but every one knows what you mean. Maybe this is the way forward
It is astounding that Rht Hon D Whammy-Lammy Kings Council, educated at an expensive school as well as Universities on both sides of the Atlantic ocean should imagine he is in chains aboard a ship from Africa bound for the USA. Now that's full-blown derangement.
Also.
Whammy-Lammy KC is unclear about bits of land in the Pacific. Or indeed, any other ocean.
Never mind. He's only upstaged by Chancellor Reeves' huge hole (financial, of course) and the Prime Minister, Sir-Sir-Sir Rodney K 'son of a tool' Charmer-Starmer KC MP. Meanwhile, Ed Milibean has invented perpetual energy. What a star.
While others are devious, Whammy-Lammy KC is stupid. We've had years to test this theory - yup, really, really stupid. Hardly a great advert for his expensive edukayshun.
By the same token, Angela Merkel only gets to be the second-worst German Chancellor ever, despite her best efforts. I am sure it is a great disappointment to her.
The greens are only green on the outside. Inside they are Stasi red and eager to use violence against anyone who speaks against their authoritarian ideology.
You would like what Mike Benz articulated, that modern day liberalism or democracy is not so much the will of the people but the consensus of institutions. I am probably not saying it right. What Habeck is saying is in the same vein - freedom is only inasmuch as it exists in the confines of institutions, beyond that, is in the non-EU jungle, and we can't have that
Further, 2100 euros simply means "legal for a fee". I remember during the Covid days, the fine for mask violations was something like 500 euros where I am. I eventually withdrew the cash equivalent from an atm, put it on a shelf and said "this is my mask-free fee" expecting to spend it within a week. I never did, the fines were an empty threat in the end. Worked on 95% of the pop tho
Many Germans, myself included, don't even have 500€ on their account at the end of the month. That's not something I'm proud of, but I'm pointing it out to explain how such threats work on young and poor people. Of course there are other reasons why people avoid fines, e.g. shame, that apply to wealthy people too.
Today most admit that lockdowns and school closures affected the well-off the least (or even benefitted them in many cases). Although most may still see them as "necessary evil", much of the left at least timidly recognises the harms done, although too many think that the next lockdown can be made more equitable or inclusive by throwing more money at the poor and forcing more needles into their arms. Or forcing them to mask even harder. The harms from mask mandates are hardly recognised at all. Meanwhile, they also affected lower income people most. The well-off have cars and can work from home. They were forced to wear a mask much less than the less well-off who use public transport and have to be physically present at their warehouse, retail or restaurant job.
My response to that is simply then that people of means have an obligation to reject such authoritarian overreaches even more so, because they can afford to, and it paves the way for others. This falls under traditional leftist thinking I guess, but the modern era has created an anti-authority streak
"You would like what Mike Benz articulated, that modern day liberalism or democracy is not so much the will of the people but the consensus of institutions."
Democracy, as a practical matter, is basically an exercise in passing the buck, in avoiding responsibility. Everyone in power claims to answer to and derive their authority from someone else, going ultimately back to "the people" who themselves do not directly exercise power, and who would find it difficult to exercise as a collective action problem, even if they had the formal authority to do so. The technical term for this is a "beard".
What this means is that real power is often in the hands of unelected bureaucrats, who typically don't even want to stand for election because they don't want the voters to know what their programs are, much less to exercise any oversight. Robert Moses is the classic example here, although it seems that he did run for office once.
Even that minimal level of scrutiny is too much for some, and real power is often exercised by people not formally part of any government structure. Corporate lobbyists or Robert Kagan come to mind.
Freedom granted at the whim of institutions leads to a 'permission society,' where all is forbidden unless expressly commanded, and even that may be arbitrarily taken away. When such ideologues rave about 'A THREAT TO OUR DEMOCRACY,' they really mean a threat to 'OUR BUREAUCRACY.'
Up on a trail in winter 2021 deep in the Washington-Jefferson National Forest on the border between Virginia and West Virginia, two young Americans had finished eating a single tangerine each. They were going to chuck the peels into the woods, but then they halted. "Wait, are we allowed to do this?," the woman in the pair asked. I was incredulous. Since when do Americans think they need permission to throw a (very) small amount of organic matter into the vast woods? I assured the couple that it's perfectly acceptable to drop a few tangerine peels off the trail in the woods. For me, it was a staggering moment. My American ancestors conquered and eventually prospered in the great wilderness of North America. Yet these youngsters were so timid about their mere enjoyment of a walk through the woods that they were neurotic about dropping a couple of fruit skins that would definitely be dried out and invisible by the time spring arrived. It was sad, and poignant. Americans ought to recover their jaunty confidence that we ourselves are in charge of our own lives, as well as the whole country. To press the point, can you imagine today's American youth when challenged to put a person on the Moon: Do we have permission to do that? Do you need an official permit to go to the Moon? Geez. It's high time for a new spring in our stride, and confidence in our step. The people who need permission to act are those in the government, not the citizens.
The sad thing is, people actually have been prosecuted for such trivial acts. Given the number of laws and regulations that are technically in force, it is impossible for a citizen not to commit several felonies in a day, which may be arbitrarily enforced.
Trump is like Godzilla. He absorbs your insults and turns them into pure energy. The next thing you know he’s sitting in a garbage truck and everyone is cheering
An extraordinarily extreme way of shutting down criticism. I wonder why he continues to pursue office. A quieter life would make life simpler for this very scared man.
Easy to know why he pursues higher office, and I know nothing about this man other than what Eugyppius has told me. Herr Habeck is a moron and a narcissist. He feels an overwhelming need to be adored, and he will compel other people to adore him.
Also there is money in wielding power. He expects to be well compensated after leaving public office. He hates humanity and wants to enslave mankind and there are many who will pay him for the work.
Let me float something here: I think the propaganda is mostly directed inward, and the censorship protective in nature.
The establishment/elites/PMC/whatever retreated into a fantasy world years ago, maybe after 9/11, maybe after the financial crisis of '08, and they desperately need to conserve a media environment that lets them happily operate in their fake world, because the real world broke and stopped making sense to them. When the Greens sic the police on you, the injury was not the insult, the injury was that somebody intruded into their fantasy. The propaganda is meant to convince *themselves*, not anybody else; the censorship is meant to keep the others out of sight, not to make the others conform.
The experts were revealed to be fools during the currency crisis and the Long Term Capital Management crisis at the end of the last century. Everything since then has been similar and worse mistakes and betrayals to try to shore up their dwindling power and collapsing narratives. Powerful grifters.
it’s amazing, just think about this whole situation. thousands of hours of police and prosecutor time to have a few hundred people prosecuted / posts deleted / etc. despite that there are still probably millions of posts insulting Habeck all over the internet. and now he is the top google result in Germany for „schwachkopf“. there are long twitter threads explaining why he is a schwachkopf. all you have to do to get 50 retweets is call Habeck a Schwachkopf. it has become like a national pastime.
if he had done zero to silence his critics the number of habeck insults out there would be far fewer.
it would be hilarious if Germans started testing insults that *are* allowed. Can you call a politician a poo poo head? Can you say you think they smell like doody? What about making rabbit ears behind their heads in photos? Can you draw a moustache and a blacked out tooth on their posters? Like how childishly unthreatening does the insult have to be to be permissible?
whenever one of these cases fails and the accused is acquitted, the cheekier press run headlines announcing that everyone is allowed to call Baerbock ‘stupid’ (or whatever) now.
the optics of these tactics alone are so bad, I have trouble understanding why they do this. all i can imagine is a kind of elitist entitlement.
I have yet to meet a Green who has a sense of humor, and as Dr. Jessica Rose once remarked: “humor is a sign of intelligence”. Clearly absent in the case of the Greens; ours as well (next door).
Why do public prosecutors and the police even bother with this nonsense? Issuing a libel fine is bad enough, but raiding the place at dawn is absurd. What were they expecting to find—illegal boxes of Schwachkopf Professional?
It really is amazing how dumb these people are. Anyone with a functioning brain cell could see what would happen but no they believe they are more intelligent than us. This yet another example of how out of touch politicians are. Will they every learn
FFS as particularly we in Europe slip gloriously into decadence as particularised by the well off insulated MSM dinner set insulated who know the answer to the world's ills - as particularised by their beloved neo liberal "governments" and their propagandised MSM.
I really wish I was just like the average sheep, polishing my shiny new EV bought on Tick and dreaning of my next foreign holiday.
But I fucking care.
And it grieves me. How the F, did these idiots attain any influence.
That a German NGO has as its actual official name an example of what Dudley Newright so accurately described as Millennial Snot (and IN ENGLISH): "So Done"
....is, well, what is it really? How to describe exactly this flippant authoritarianism that finds itself super cute and amusing and winks archly while pulling out the intestines of its victims?
All this, and previous things everywhere people have been using letters to put together words these days, made me think of Dostoevsky so I ran over to his Wikipedia page and just as I thought, he was first arrested for belonging to a literary group that read banned books.
In 1849.
You know those cartoons with arrows and signposts leading some hapless traveler forward on a long long road that leads him right back to where he started?
When they make mockery illegal then mockery goes underground. "Art" just popping up on posts, walls and other surfaces. Totally random, opportunistic and funny. Keep'em coming.
Herr Habeck, meet the Streisand Effect. Moron.
Moron moron moron.
They're such morons they'll take it a step further by trying to have the media disassociate his name from the court of public opinion.
They call that the Herostrates Effect.
Herostrates was the guy who burned down temple of Artemis (one of the original seven wonders of the world). His whole point in doing this was to attain immortal fame.
The trial he was put through ruled that in his punishment for that crime nobody was to ever mention his name. He was to be forgotten and by being "erased", to never be brought up.
It backfired big time, and to this day history documents exactly who burned down the temple.
You beat me to it on the Streisand Effect! Well done.
How do we trick google translate into making "streisand effect" <--> "habeck effect"? I'd be happy with "Professional Moron" translation too.
Hahaha the "Moron Effect"!
Please explain, what is the Streisand Effect?
So in 2003, a photographer wanted to document coastal erosion in California, and took a picture of the coastline. The coastline happened to have Barbara Streisand's house in it.
She freaked out about her privacy, and had her lawyers try to get that photo banned from publication. It backfired.
If she had just said nothing, nobody would have ever known it was her house. But after she tried to get it banned, the story became "celebrity thinks the world revolves around her", and suddenly _everybody_ knew it was her house.
"The Streisand Effect" was coined: the effect where, when trying to get sensitive information suppressed, you drive attention to it, causing it to become much more widespread than it would have been if you just said nothing.
Thanks, I learned something!
Despite this being 20 years ago, people on the internet still haven't figured this out.
You _cannot_ suppress information from the internet. You can suppress it from the _mainstream_ but you cannot make it go away. As the hackers used to say, "the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it".
There are only three ways to "suppress" information online:
1) Turn it into a subject of ridicule, so people avoid it out of fear that they will be ridiculed for knowing it
2) Turn it into something boring, that nobody cares about, so nobody bothers to go looking for it ("just say nothing" is a variant of this)
3) Flood the internet with noise, either some unrelated distraction or misinformation that misdirects people away from the information, so that nobody recognizes the information for what it is.
You _cannot_ remove information from the internet, and if you try to, it just makes it spread more. Like how if you tell teens not to do something because it's bad for them, they just think that makes it cool, and do it more. It's kind of like alcohol. Some parents try to prevent their teens from drinking, and it just makes their kids drink in secret. Then, some other parents let their teens have a small glass of beer or wine at special occasions, so that it doesn't seem like some cool taboo, but rather a lame thing your parents do.
If this guy really wanted to ride this out with minimal reputational damage, he would have had a better shot if he personally amplified it. Like, if he retweeted the image mocking him, with some kind of sarcastic funny comment.
Actually, a hilarious mundane illustration of this
So I used to listen to this comedy podcast in 2015-2016, which abruptly ended when the hosts had a falling out over a woman. This turned into a gigantic internet feud that ended when the one host frivolously sued the other for $400M in defamation damages and had his case thrown out of court.
(this is Maddox and Dick Masterson if anyone is familiar with the lolsuit. https://lolsuit.com if you want to mainline internet autism directly into your veins)
Around the time of this lawsuit, the plaintiff went on some youtube livestream for unrelated reasons, and as a condition of his appearance, he gave the stream hosts a list of words he required to be censored from chat. His intention was that, he knew a bunch of people were going to send in superchats trolling him, and didn't want to deal with that.
Most of the words concerned inside jokes but two of the words seemed really out of place. One was a number, and one was I think the word "maple". It didn't take much effort to figure out that this was his home address.
In this case, if he had really wanted to suppress it, he should have gone with (3) and given them a list of like, 37 numbers (in a row?) and 11 different tree names (that's ridiculous, it's not even funny). That way, not only would nobody have been able to figure out which one was actually his address, but, at that point I don't think people would have recognized it as an address at all. Maybe they think he's just autistic and has numbers and trees he hates? But instead, he tried to suppress his address, and this just made everyone figure out where he lives.
You _cannot_ suppress information online and trying to just makes more people look for it.
Those who’ve thrown God out of their lives to worship climate, have no sense of humor.
You can ask to have personal information removed from Google. Search for "remove personal information from Google."
You will find: "Remove personally identifiable information (PII) or doxxing content from Google Search results"
Yeah, and when you ask Google to remove something from search results, that definitely makes it impossible to find. That's why there are nobody on the internet talking about how the COVID vaccines injured people. That's not a thing that happens. We're definitely not doing it right here
No disrespect, and no snideness in this, but starting articles and the like with "so" was something started by Buzzfeed and similar clickbait publications. The purpose was to make a reader think that he had stumbled onto an ongoing conversation the journo had with his readers; how intimate, gotta stay and read more.
It was right up there with adding "more about that later," and then there's barely anything about "that" later, it's just a way to make people keep reading.
"So" means "so therefore," which is incorrect in this way. It's as jarring as if you'd start talking with "and," when you didn't say anything right before it that would lead to "and."
I hear a lot of people speak English all the time, but it's only Americans and adjacent nationalities - the Canadians and British - who start with "so". Forgive me, but it does sound jarring. But worse, for the rest of us it sounds like, "this person is just repeating something unthinkingly." It's like people who write, "you can't make this stuff up" (of course you can) or "what could possibly go wrong?" (which you can say about anything).
Okay, that was all.
> . But worse, for the rest of us it sounds like, "this person is just repeating something unthinkingly."
You got me. I was paraphrasing wikipedia because I forgot the details. Mea Culpa
"So" never bothered me before (although it will now), but I can't stand it when people start a sentence with "look." The other one is throwing "sort of" into the middle of things, like they're painstakingly expressing delicate layers of nuance, when in fact they're just equivocating.
So, look, ;-)
it’s all benign or nefarious versions of NLP all the way down, to manipulate and engender a required feeling/response.
Would be a step in the right direction for each individual to study these techniques deeply enough for protection.
Reading at least summaries of the 48 Laws of Power would be another one.
He really is a professional moron. Like other dependent puppets propped up by the oligarchs.
I'm sorry, but the title of "Most Stupid Foreign Secretary" has been awarded to David Lammy for his lifetime achievements.
I admit that Lammy might actually be dummer than Baerbock, which is really saying something - although, to be fair my he wasn’t UK foreign monoster when this particular insult was aired.
If “monoster” is a typo in this instance, it’s very apt nonetheless.
inadvertent typo because commenting on my phone but leave it and perhaps use monoster again in future
Yes, Lammy is a mononeuron, sorry, moron.
He's a Moronster!
Please stand for the Prime Moronster.... 😜
And this is why I’m here- omg, you guys are so funny
especially me - 😝
That begs the question- can the authorities arrest you for brand new made up insult labels? Will you get fined for calling a minister a moronster? It’s not a word but every one knows what you mean. Maybe this is the way forward
Not a bad idea. I like the way you think
You read my mind.
It is astounding that Rht Hon D Whammy-Lammy Kings Council, educated at an expensive school as well as Universities on both sides of the Atlantic ocean should imagine he is in chains aboard a ship from Africa bound for the USA. Now that's full-blown derangement.
Also.
Whammy-Lammy KC is unclear about bits of land in the Pacific. Or indeed, any other ocean.
Never mind. He's only upstaged by Chancellor Reeves' huge hole (financial, of course) and the Prime Minister, Sir-Sir-Sir Rodney K 'son of a tool' Charmer-Starmer KC MP. Meanwhile, Ed Milibean has invented perpetual energy. What a star.
At least Eugyppius comforts us that we are not alone in having moronsters running the country.
Lammy and others like him are not necessarily stupid. In most cases, far from it.
They are sociopaths.
While others are devious, Whammy-Lammy KC is stupid. We've had years to test this theory - yup, really, really stupid. Hardly a great advert for his expensive edukayshun.
There's a chance that Baerbock knows the name of the UK foreign monoster but the other way round? No way!
Do you think I am going to get prosecuted in Germany if I say “Dumbest foreign minister ever *at that time*”?
I really love open and fair competition for a championship, particularly when it is such a perfectly diverse and inclusive one!
By the same token, Angela Merkel only gets to be the second-worst German Chancellor ever, despite her best efforts. I am sure it is a great disappointment to her.
The greens are only green on the outside. Inside they are Stasi red and eager to use violence against anyone who speaks against their authoritarian ideology.
I believe the derogatory term you're looking for is "watermelons": red on the inside, green on the outside
The watermelon phenomenon is alive and well in Australia also. Commonly used description of our own Greens party.
😎
Ditto Canada!
Yes, so what does anyone propose to do about it?
The Grunners began as a coalition between pedophilia advocates and ex-Nazis. Morally, it has all been downhill from there.
You do a really good job writing about what happens in germany, thank you.
Eugyppius,
You would like what Mike Benz articulated, that modern day liberalism or democracy is not so much the will of the people but the consensus of institutions. I am probably not saying it right. What Habeck is saying is in the same vein - freedom is only inasmuch as it exists in the confines of institutions, beyond that, is in the non-EU jungle, and we can't have that
Further, 2100 euros simply means "legal for a fee". I remember during the Covid days, the fine for mask violations was something like 500 euros where I am. I eventually withdrew the cash equivalent from an atm, put it on a shelf and said "this is my mask-free fee" expecting to spend it within a week. I never did, the fines were an empty threat in the end. Worked on 95% of the pop tho
Many Germans, myself included, don't even have 500€ on their account at the end of the month. That's not something I'm proud of, but I'm pointing it out to explain how such threats work on young and poor people. Of course there are other reasons why people avoid fines, e.g. shame, that apply to wealthy people too.
Today most admit that lockdowns and school closures affected the well-off the least (or even benefitted them in many cases). Although most may still see them as "necessary evil", much of the left at least timidly recognises the harms done, although too many think that the next lockdown can be made more equitable or inclusive by throwing more money at the poor and forcing more needles into their arms. Or forcing them to mask even harder. The harms from mask mandates are hardly recognised at all. Meanwhile, they also affected lower income people most. The well-off have cars and can work from home. They were forced to wear a mask much less than the less well-off who use public transport and have to be physically present at their warehouse, retail or restaurant job.
My response to that is simply then that people of means have an obligation to reject such authoritarian overreaches even more so, because they can afford to, and it paves the way for others. This falls under traditional leftist thinking I guess, but the modern era has created an anti-authority streak
Ditto for us in South Africa and sad to say even more so for the people our government pretends to care so much.
"[L]ockdowns and school closures affected the well-off the least (or even benefitted them in many cases)."
Certainly and outrageously true here in the USA.
The working poor and their kids were absolutely beaten into the ground, in so many ways.
"You would like what Mike Benz articulated, that modern day liberalism or democracy is not so much the will of the people but the consensus of institutions."
Democracy, as a practical matter, is basically an exercise in passing the buck, in avoiding responsibility. Everyone in power claims to answer to and derive their authority from someone else, going ultimately back to "the people" who themselves do not directly exercise power, and who would find it difficult to exercise as a collective action problem, even if they had the formal authority to do so. The technical term for this is a "beard".
What this means is that real power is often in the hands of unelected bureaucrats, who typically don't even want to stand for election because they don't want the voters to know what their programs are, much less to exercise any oversight. Robert Moses is the classic example here, although it seems that he did run for office once.
Even that minimal level of scrutiny is too much for some, and real power is often exercised by people not formally part of any government structure. Corporate lobbyists or Robert Kagan come to mind.
I've become a monarchist myself, lately. At least the buck stops somewhere
Freedom granted at the whim of institutions leads to a 'permission society,' where all is forbidden unless expressly commanded, and even that may be arbitrarily taken away. When such ideologues rave about 'A THREAT TO OUR DEMOCRACY,' they really mean a threat to 'OUR BUREAUCRACY.'
Do you want to hear an anecdote about something I observed a couple of years ago here in Virginia, USA, that underscores your point?
Yes, I would be very interested!
Up on a trail in winter 2021 deep in the Washington-Jefferson National Forest on the border between Virginia and West Virginia, two young Americans had finished eating a single tangerine each. They were going to chuck the peels into the woods, but then they halted. "Wait, are we allowed to do this?," the woman in the pair asked. I was incredulous. Since when do Americans think they need permission to throw a (very) small amount of organic matter into the vast woods? I assured the couple that it's perfectly acceptable to drop a few tangerine peels off the trail in the woods. For me, it was a staggering moment. My American ancestors conquered and eventually prospered in the great wilderness of North America. Yet these youngsters were so timid about their mere enjoyment of a walk through the woods that they were neurotic about dropping a couple of fruit skins that would definitely be dried out and invisible by the time spring arrived. It was sad, and poignant. Americans ought to recover their jaunty confidence that we ourselves are in charge of our own lives, as well as the whole country. To press the point, can you imagine today's American youth when challenged to put a person on the Moon: Do we have permission to do that? Do you need an official permit to go to the Moon? Geez. It's high time for a new spring in our stride, and confidence in our step. The people who need permission to act are those in the government, not the citizens.
The sad thing is, people actually have been prosecuted for such trivial acts. Given the number of laws and regulations that are technically in force, it is impossible for a citizen not to commit several felonies in a day, which may be arbitrarily enforced.
I understand.
But the really sad thing is nobody else was even around, and yet they still balked at the innocuous act of chucking a tangerine peel into the forest.
The Greens are so thin skinned. They would self destruct if they got even 1/100th of what the left gives to Trump every single day of the year
Trump is like Godzilla. He absorbs your insults and turns them into pure energy. The next thing you know he’s sitting in a garbage truck and everyone is cheering
His moral and physical strength is almost superhuman.
Not really. To give the first example to come to mind, Trump twice cucked out of leaving Syria.
Call him "Putin puppet!" and Trump willl fold.
Well, that claim is empirically false. Trump has been called a 'Putin Puppet' since 2015, and he has not folded. Far from it!
To give the first example to come to mind, Trump twice cucked out of leaving Syria after being called "Putin puppet!"
https://medium.com/hackernoon/the-big-fat-compendium-of-russiagate-debunkery-4278a753a3af
Nice. Quite an accurate description.
An extraordinarily extreme way of shutting down criticism. I wonder why he continues to pursue office. A quieter life would make life simpler for this very scared man.
Easy to know why he pursues higher office, and I know nothing about this man other than what Eugyppius has told me. Herr Habeck is a moron and a narcissist. He feels an overwhelming need to be adored, and he will compel other people to adore him.
Also there is money in wielding power. He expects to be well compensated after leaving public office. He hates humanity and wants to enslave mankind and there are many who will pay him for the work.
Well, he does like his hair to be in great shape, to be dressed in a rather relaxed but cool yet cutting edge kind of way. All looks and no content.
"I wonder why he continues to pursue office."
Beccause he can. For a Habeck, the point of life is to rise higher.
Let me float something here: I think the propaganda is mostly directed inward, and the censorship protective in nature.
The establishment/elites/PMC/whatever retreated into a fantasy world years ago, maybe after 9/11, maybe after the financial crisis of '08, and they desperately need to conserve a media environment that lets them happily operate in their fake world, because the real world broke and stopped making sense to them. When the Greens sic the police on you, the injury was not the insult, the injury was that somebody intruded into their fantasy. The propaganda is meant to convince *themselves*, not anybody else; the censorship is meant to keep the others out of sight, not to make the others conform.
The experts were revealed to be fools during the currency crisis and the Long Term Capital Management crisis at the end of the last century. Everything since then has been similar and worse mistakes and betrayals to try to shore up their dwindling power and collapsing narratives. Powerful grifters.
He'll always be remembered for this. 🤣
it’s amazing, just think about this whole situation. thousands of hours of police and prosecutor time to have a few hundred people prosecuted / posts deleted / etc. despite that there are still probably millions of posts insulting Habeck all over the internet. and now he is the top google result in Germany for „schwachkopf“. there are long twitter threads explaining why he is a schwachkopf. all you have to do to get 50 retweets is call Habeck a Schwachkopf. it has become like a national pastime.
if he had done zero to silence his critics the number of habeck insults out there would be far fewer.
it would be hilarious if Germans started testing insults that *are* allowed. Can you call a politician a poo poo head? Can you say you think they smell like doody? What about making rabbit ears behind their heads in photos? Can you draw a moustache and a blacked out tooth on their posters? Like how childishly unthreatening does the insult have to be to be permissible?
whenever one of these cases fails and the accused is acquitted, the cheekier press run headlines announcing that everyone is allowed to call Baerbock ‘stupid’ (or whatever) now.
the optics of these tactics alone are so bad, I have trouble understanding why they do this. all i can imagine is a kind of elitist entitlement.
I have yet to meet a Green who has a sense of humor, and as Dr. Jessica Rose once remarked: “humor is a sign of intelligence”. Clearly absent in the case of the Greens; ours as well (next door).
Just be careful to avoid those expensive prepositional phrases.
Why do public prosecutors and the police even bother with this nonsense? Issuing a libel fine is bad enough, but raiding the place at dawn is absurd. What were they expecting to find—illegal boxes of Schwachkopf Professional?
The process is the punishment. The embarrassment of having the police raid your home.
Habeck has too much free time on his hands
It really is amazing how dumb these people are. Anyone with a functioning brain cell could see what would happen but no they believe they are more intelligent than us. This yet another example of how out of touch politicians are. Will they every learn
FFS as particularly we in Europe slip gloriously into decadence as particularised by the well off insulated MSM dinner set insulated who know the answer to the world's ills - as particularised by their beloved neo liberal "governments" and their propagandised MSM.
I really wish I was just like the average sheep, polishing my shiny new EV bought on Tick and dreaning of my next foreign holiday.
But I fucking care.
And it grieves me. How the F, did these idiots attain any influence.
Because power always ends up in the hands of sociopaths, as sociopaths are precisely the ones who will do whatever it takes to get power.
Habeck appears to be among the vainest of vain politicians.
That a German NGO has as its actual official name an example of what Dudley Newright so accurately described as Millennial Snot (and IN ENGLISH): "So Done"
....is, well, what is it really? How to describe exactly this flippant authoritarianism that finds itself super cute and amusing and winks archly while pulling out the intestines of its victims?
All this, and previous things everywhere people have been using letters to put together words these days, made me think of Dostoevsky so I ran over to his Wikipedia page and just as I thought, he was first arrested for belonging to a literary group that read banned books.
In 1849.
You know those cartoons with arrows and signposts leading some hapless traveler forward on a long long road that leads him right back to where he started?
We are here.
When they make mockery illegal then mockery goes underground. "Art" just popping up on posts, walls and other surfaces. Totally random, opportunistic and funny. Keep'em coming.