'Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions'
- Primo Levi
No President, Prime Minister, Dictator nor a King can plant the seeds of tyranny without legions of enablers.
But in order to rule with an iron fist of tyranny, otherwise decent people, must be rendered bystanders.
AfD is a threat to their squishy-totalitarian inclination because they are not "bystanders". They had great plans to rule with an iron fist but the peasants decided to rebel.
I suspect the tantrum dial will be turned to 11 and beyond as AfD continues transcending from a mere protest party to a legitimate party of and for the people.
A more modern essay on this topic was published in installments in American Handgunner many years ago, but I no longer have copies of the installments and do not recall the author nor the year. The essay was very unpopular with writers of letters to the editor, who wanted to believe that the Second Amendment is the guarantee of democracy, but, like you and De La Botie, the author was saying the threat is cooperation and the solution is un-cooperation with authoritarian rule.
There are times--not often, but we're living in one of them--when we must be grateful for morons. I here in the US, for example, am deeply, deeply grateful that Kamala and Timmy are nincompoops.
But we've such a brief window now in which to neuter the morons who beset us everywhere we look, and we must not falter in this grimly enjoyable work. After all it's disgraceful to lose to them and for several generations now we've been doing so.
These poor HOA boards. I once considered running for a spot but the annual meeting of the residents convinced me that I was surrounded by very few reasonable, logical and calm thinkers. Crazy always wins!
I have heard HOA boards are pretty bad, but seriously, I can not BELIEVE they have not threatened us. Our Fence is crumbling.
Once we got a notice that one of our "street trees" had branches that needed trimming.
Oh, and once they photo'd my trash can in front of my garage on a non trash day.
All the neighbors here are like us. We do not care what you do, we will never rat on you. So if they get letters of warning, we know it is from the "outside"
Oh another thing: neither of our garage outdoor lights is working.
One of the best X-file episodes was when the HOA appeared in monster form (and Skully and Mulder moved into the neighborhood under cover to find out why people were disappearing.
I spotted an interesting tweet earlier (from Austrian, Alexander Ehrlich). Food for thought, here's a rough translation:
"You're all making a mistake in Germany, overlooking something: the report on the AfD & corresponding campaign are by no means just aimed at criminalizing them and proving that they are right-wing extremists.
Rather, it's a linguistic campaign to redefine the word "right-wing extremist." The campaign aims to label the statements in the report as right-wing extremist in order to stretch the meaning of the term and apply it to a wider range of views. The AfD are just a pretext. I bet there's a very good think-tank with top linguists behind it. What appears to be a clumsy and failing maneuver by the Ministry of the Interior is in reality a very successful manipulation of language. If the AfD is harmed in the process, that's just the icing on the cake.
The true target is all of us, our language use, and our linguistic freedom of expression."
It is an intriguing argument, but I can't agree with it. The report really was supposed to be secret. We're not supposed to see it, and what is more, the BfV know that a lot of this will get thrown out by the court. The previous report, classifying AfD as under "suspicion" of extremism is 2021, was only leaked this February.
I'm afraid this may be too optimistic. This is how the braindead, over-socialised and feminised will be told to interpret it, and they will happily oblige and internalise it so.
Their stupidity helps us. Own goals like this and senile Biden’s cover up are beneficial longer term. Meanwhile in America, a MSM talking head said the Afrikaners are German so they should go back to Europe. Our brains break trying to fathom their cognitive dissonance.
How odd that people who have after hundreds of years descended from persons from Holland are regarded as "German." Considering the way the Germans treated the Dutch during ww2 it makes one think, "How rude."
It's not quite correct, but hardly "nonsense", since the Dutch East India Company oversaw the immigration from the early 17th century onwards, which was mainly from the Netherlands, but also included minorities French Huguenots and German mercenaries employed by the company. They were joined by smaller minorities from Scandinavia. Afrikaans is undoubtedly closest to the European language Nederlands, rather than the languages of the minority groups.
Or are you referring to all speakers of Afrikaans? By a narrow majority, the largest group of Afrikaans speakers today is the Cape Coloureds (I know one, who speaks perfect Afrikaans, heavily accented but effective English, and a good level of Zulu).
Progressives know amazingly little about the world and how it works. What is more, they exhibit an aggressive refusal to learn. Actually knowing stuff is low status. Instead they are proud of their education, which in reality is just indoctrination and word salad.
'This report represents the work of untold hundreds of people who do nothing but scroll Facebook and Twitter every day, archiving thousands of social media posts and speeches and blog comments.'
I'm dying to know if eugyppius is represented in the report.
"The BfV assessment falls so far short of this STANDARD, you have to wonder if there are saboteurs working secretly to defend the AfD inside the offices of constitutional protection."
IMO, the "standard" is the point; its the Lefts only standard
The socialist tendency of the left demands thinking collectively. It’s not as important that the object of their focus is true, only that it is a STANDARD many see, follow and believe.
So much of this that appears illogical actually snaps into place as completely logical to them when you think of it that way.
Called it a couple weeks ago. If there was anything super damning in the report, it would have been leaked first to build the momentum for the banning. Since it wasn't, there wasn't, and now German 'officials' look like idiots who are scared of losing a legit election.
Never, never, never underestimate the vulnerability of political enthusiasts to be completely incompetent at what they attempt. Much of the politics in many nations of the world is a melange of stupidity, malice, and ideology. None of these things mean the conspirators are particularly intelligent. Just look at my country, Canada, which had the low-grade moron Justin Trudeau as its Prime Minister for a decade.
Idiots failing spectacularly the case in:
1. the absurd coup-plottters seeking to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow in 1991. It was organized so badly that, far from restoring the Soviet regime in Russia, the drunken conspirators were simply rounded up and arrested by the police in Moscow;
2. the attempts of the administration to conceal the mental and physical feebleness of Joe Biden were demonstrated clearly to the public during the Presidential debate against Donald Trump. It became immediately obvious that Biden was incapable of stringing three words together in a coherent sentence.
And it's a good thing when enthusiastic politicians are incompetent. Otherwise, like the Adoph Hitler's and Joseph Stalin's of history they can create death and horror for millions. We are indeed fortunate that most of them are dimwits.
Looking at Carney's cabinet we basically have these morons for at least a couple of more years, a grim assemblage of losers and imbeciles who failed upwards. German politics may, indeed, be stupid but I'd argue that Canada's is on a *whole* other level of retardation.
I tend to agree with you. Justatwit was a level of stupidity I've never seen before from any national government. His idiocies are too numerous to list here. But what makes it so much worse is that Liberal politicians were willing to tolerate this stupidity, as well as Canadian voters who supported the goof three times in national elections.
I haven't given up hope entirely. There are a few signs that Carney is ditching most of the more extreme of Trudeau's strident environmentalist policies.
I'm fairly convinced now that Canadians will never give up on the idea that government exists to provide a welfare state, which, if traded for any other type of government, will end up with them "losing something" that the current welfare state provides them.
Anecdote: when my Canadian fishing lodge proprietor saw, during Covid, that the U.S. was engaging in massive rescuing of businesses (e.g. forgiveable loans, etc.) he asked his local MP what Canada's parliament was going to do for him, given that his fishing lodge was going to be shut down by government fiat for the summers of 2020 and 2021 - a significant dent to his livelihood. His MP basically told him to pound sand. But this experience was not enough to get him and others in his province to vote for the Conservatives in the most recent elections.
People, who have gotten used to welfare state policies, are apparently inclined to inflict pain upon themselves over and over again.
No, you're more fortunate than many. The US managed to survive the idiocies of Woody Wilson. It managed to survive what Jimmy Carter could do, and it survived Barrack and Hildabitch. And it is now reversing at least some of the damage done by the Biden Gang.
This 'secret' report is a true monument for the incompetence not just of the BfV and their then superior, Madama Marshmallow Faeser. Moreover, it painfully shows how threadbare the arguments of all those politicians are and were who clamoured for a ban of the AfD. As for those SPIEGEL reporters and reporters in other 'quality' papers as well as the German TV stations - well, eggs on their faces is too civil an expression.
Seems like they gave the job of preparing the document to some trigger happy, female, American college administrator millennials. And in typical fashion, they didn’t understand the rubric (the legal standard) and instead they listed all the words that made them feel hurty.
'they didn’t understand the rubric (the legal standard) and instead they listed all the words that made them feel hurty.'
And that will likely make their supporters feel hurty also. So in that sense it's effective. Hopefully not to the courts, which will hopefully pay attention to the legal standard.
Lest we become complacent, remember that the average person reacts emotionally rather than, you know, evincing a reality-based response, so the leaked document could possibly stoke their outrage at AfD.
As an American, I recognize a similar tactic in the attempt to jail Trump for "election fraud." When you read the DOJ's indictment against Trump, you find that it's just a long list of citations of all the instances between the election and J6 where he said he thought he was the real winner in 2020 and that the election was stolen from him. They juxtapose this against a bunch of instances where people told him he was wrong. Therefore, in their minds, he was deliberately repeating known falsehoods. But of course, all this establishes is that Trump thought he was the rightful winner, not that he _intentionally spread falsehood_, which is what they were actually trying to prove.
One such example:
36. On December 1, the Defendant raised his Michigan vote dump claim with the Attorney General, who responded that what had occurred in Michigan had been the normal vote-counting process and that there was no indication of fraud in Detroit.
37. Despite this, the next day, the Defendant made a knowingly false statement that in Michigan, "[a]t 6:31 in the morning, a vote dump of 149,772 votes came in unexpectedly. We were winning by a lot. That batch was received in horror. Nobody knows anything about it. ... It's corrupt. Detroit is corrupt. I have a lot of friends in Detroit. They know it. But Detroit is totally corrupt."
The AG told Trump he was wrong. Therefore, Trump made a "knowingly false statement".
I am not sure if this is like a legal jargon thing, maybe it has a technical definition that makes more sense. But
> Despite this, the next day, the Defendant made a knowingly false statement that in Michigan,
If I think something happened, and you say "no that didn't happen", and then tomorrow I say it happened, I am not making a _knowingly_ false statement.
The fact that some random asshole told me something, doesn't mean I know it, and that's true even if the thing they told me was true.
Here, let me give you an example.
"[redacted] didn't happen"
Now, every time you all say it did, you're making "knowingly false" statements.
Am I the only one who sees how dumb this is?
(Dear German police: This is not denial. This is sarcasm and irony, and is actually affirmation)
Our overlords may be evil, but they are not very smart. This will be their undoing on a global scale.
"When a clown moves into a palace, he does not become a sultan; the palace becomes a circus."
-- Turkish proverb
Right on.
'Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions'
- Primo Levi
No President, Prime Minister, Dictator nor a King can plant the seeds of tyranny without legions of enablers.
But in order to rule with an iron fist of tyranny, otherwise decent people, must be rendered bystanders.
AfD is a threat to their squishy-totalitarian inclination because they are not "bystanders". They had great plans to rule with an iron fist but the peasants decided to rebel.
I suspect the tantrum dial will be turned to 11 and beyond as AfD continues transcending from a mere protest party to a legitimate party of and for the people.
The Politics of Obediance by Etienne De La Botie.
A more modern essay on this topic was published in installments in American Handgunner many years ago, but I no longer have copies of the installments and do not recall the author nor the year. The essay was very unpopular with writers of letters to the editor, who wanted to believe that the Second Amendment is the guarantee of democracy, but, like you and De La Botie, the author was saying the threat is cooperation and the solution is un-cooperation with authoritarian rule.
There are times--not often, but we're living in one of them--when we must be grateful for morons. I here in the US, for example, am deeply, deeply grateful that Kamala and Timmy are nincompoops.
But we've such a brief window now in which to neuter the morons who beset us everywhere we look, and we must not falter in this grimly enjoyable work. After all it's disgraceful to lose to them and for several generations now we've been doing so.
Too true.
I had no idea my HOA board was moonlighting as the nonsensical government of Germany!
it's literally the same mentality
These poor HOA boards. I once considered running for a spot but the annual meeting of the residents convinced me that I was surrounded by very few reasonable, logical and calm thinkers. Crazy always wins!
And crazy is second to vested interests
I have heard HOA boards are pretty bad, but seriously, I can not BELIEVE they have not threatened us. Our Fence is crumbling.
Once we got a notice that one of our "street trees" had branches that needed trimming.
Oh, and once they photo'd my trash can in front of my garage on a non trash day.
All the neighbors here are like us. We do not care what you do, we will never rat on you. So if they get letters of warning, we know it is from the "outside"
Oh another thing: neither of our garage outdoor lights is working.
LOLOLOL! so true
LOL sure it wasn't my HOA board?
What is a HOA Board please?
Home Owners' Association.
Think it's some kind of suburbian hedgerow-mafia going around making sure your yard looks the same as everyone else's.
One of the best X-file episodes was when the HOA appeared in monster form (and Skully and Mulder moved into the neighborhood under cover to find out why people were disappearing.
To be avoided at all costs then.
From what I've heard from Americans, oh yes!
Am so glad we don't have that crap over here.
Well then you deal with your city council, sometimes that's just as funky.
My husband is a self employed builder so he has lots of fun with council regulations and inspections etc.
I spotted an interesting tweet earlier (from Austrian, Alexander Ehrlich). Food for thought, here's a rough translation:
"You're all making a mistake in Germany, overlooking something: the report on the AfD & corresponding campaign are by no means just aimed at criminalizing them and proving that they are right-wing extremists.
Rather, it's a linguistic campaign to redefine the word "right-wing extremist." The campaign aims to label the statements in the report as right-wing extremist in order to stretch the meaning of the term and apply it to a wider range of views. The AfD are just a pretext. I bet there's a very good think-tank with top linguists behind it. What appears to be a clumsy and failing maneuver by the Ministry of the Interior is in reality a very successful manipulation of language. If the AfD is harmed in the process, that's just the icing on the cake.
The true target is all of us, our language use, and our linguistic freedom of expression."
It is an intriguing argument, but I can't agree with it. The report really was supposed to be secret. We're not supposed to see it, and what is more, the BfV know that a lot of this will get thrown out by the court. The previous report, classifying AfD as under "suspicion" of extremism is 2021, was only leaked this February.
I'm afraid this may be too optimistic. This is how the braindead, over-socialised and feminised will be told to interpret it, and they will happily oblige and internalise it so.
And we are here to do the dirty work of handing the braindead, over socialized and feminized folks their own asses.
Double-plus ungood wrongthink.
Their stupidity helps us. Own goals like this and senile Biden’s cover up are beneficial longer term. Meanwhile in America, a MSM talking head said the Afrikaners are German so they should go back to Europe. Our brains break trying to fathom their cognitive dissonance.
How odd that people who have after hundreds of years descended from persons from Holland are regarded as "German." Considering the way the Germans treated the Dutch during ww2 it makes one think, "How rude."
Except they didn't just descend from Hollanders. I don't know who told you that nonsense.
It's not quite correct, but hardly "nonsense", since the Dutch East India Company oversaw the immigration from the early 17th century onwards, which was mainly from the Netherlands, but also included minorities French Huguenots and German mercenaries employed by the company. They were joined by smaller minorities from Scandinavia. Afrikaans is undoubtedly closest to the European language Nederlands, rather than the languages of the minority groups.
Or are you referring to all speakers of Afrikaans? By a narrow majority, the largest group of Afrikaans speakers today is the Cape Coloureds (I know one, who speaks perfect Afrikaans, heavily accented but effective English, and a good level of Zulu).
Progressives know amazingly little about the world and how it works. What is more, they exhibit an aggressive refusal to learn. Actually knowing stuff is low status. Instead they are proud of their education, which in reality is just indoctrination and word salad.
I like the expression, "morally required belief". Of course, it comes from the twisted progressive version of morality or virtue.
'This report represents the work of untold hundreds of people who do nothing but scroll Facebook and Twitter every day, archiving thousands of social media posts and speeches and blog comments.'
I'm dying to know if eugyppius is represented in the report.
I am not, thank god.
I guess I'm relieved on your behalf.
It does indicate an even higher level of incompetence in their social-media-scroll team.
Most likely dim-witted, indoctrinated twenty-somethings that have no experience of ideas outside of their tiny, epistemic bubble.
Or too cheap to subscribe.
Holy smoking Joe’s! Don’t give them any ideas!
"The BfV assessment falls so far short of this STANDARD, you have to wonder if there are saboteurs working secretly to defend the AfD inside the offices of constitutional protection."
IMO, the "standard" is the point; its the Lefts only standard
The socialist tendency of the left demands thinking collectively. It’s not as important that the object of their focus is true, only that it is a STANDARD many see, follow and believe.
So much of this that appears illogical actually snaps into place as completely logical to them when you think of it that way.
Called it a couple weeks ago. If there was anything super damning in the report, it would have been leaked first to build the momentum for the banning. Since it wasn't, there wasn't, and now German 'officials' look like idiots who are scared of losing a legit election.
You're right - you did call it. Hat tip, sir.
Sort of the German government version of a Vice article that is based on hearsay from Reddit for its veracity.
Isn’t there a counter argument to be made that the fight FOR human dignity is part of the AfD platform?
Protecting elderly, women and children from being stabbed raped or run-over by seventh century barbarians?
I do love the “Alice für Deutschland” phrase…
Never, never, never underestimate the vulnerability of political enthusiasts to be completely incompetent at what they attempt. Much of the politics in many nations of the world is a melange of stupidity, malice, and ideology. None of these things mean the conspirators are particularly intelligent. Just look at my country, Canada, which had the low-grade moron Justin Trudeau as its Prime Minister for a decade.
Idiots failing spectacularly the case in:
1. the absurd coup-plottters seeking to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow in 1991. It was organized so badly that, far from restoring the Soviet regime in Russia, the drunken conspirators were simply rounded up and arrested by the police in Moscow;
2. the attempts of the administration to conceal the mental and physical feebleness of Joe Biden were demonstrated clearly to the public during the Presidential debate against Donald Trump. It became immediately obvious that Biden was incapable of stringing three words together in a coherent sentence.
And it's a good thing when enthusiastic politicians are incompetent. Otherwise, like the Adoph Hitler's and Joseph Stalin's of history they can create death and horror for millions. We are indeed fortunate that most of them are dimwits.
Looking at Carney's cabinet we basically have these morons for at least a couple of more years, a grim assemblage of losers and imbeciles who failed upwards. German politics may, indeed, be stupid but I'd argue that Canada's is on a *whole* other level of retardation.
I tend to agree with you. Justatwit was a level of stupidity I've never seen before from any national government. His idiocies are too numerous to list here. But what makes it so much worse is that Liberal politicians were willing to tolerate this stupidity, as well as Canadian voters who supported the goof three times in national elections.
I haven't given up hope entirely. There are a few signs that Carney is ditching most of the more extreme of Trudeau's strident environmentalist policies.
I'm fairly convinced now that Canadians will never give up on the idea that government exists to provide a welfare state, which, if traded for any other type of government, will end up with them "losing something" that the current welfare state provides them.
Anecdote: when my Canadian fishing lodge proprietor saw, during Covid, that the U.S. was engaging in massive rescuing of businesses (e.g. forgiveable loans, etc.) he asked his local MP what Canada's parliament was going to do for him, given that his fishing lodge was going to be shut down by government fiat for the summers of 2020 and 2021 - a significant dent to his livelihood. His MP basically told him to pound sand. But this experience was not enough to get him and others in his province to vote for the Conservatives in the most recent elections.
People, who have gotten used to welfare state policies, are apparently inclined to inflict pain upon themselves over and over again.
We’re not that fortunate. Biden and his handlers got four years to fuck us over.
No, you're more fortunate than many. The US managed to survive the idiocies of Woody Wilson. It managed to survive what Jimmy Carter could do, and it survived Barrack and Hildabitch. And it is now reversing at least some of the damage done by the Biden Gang.
Yes it could certainly be worse
And IMHO, they’re doing it at record speed (example:southern border).
Hanlon's Razor rules: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Never doubt that malice and stupidity can join forces. (Me, right now)
lolol
same!
It's a nonsense assertion, a ridiculous bifurcation. The malicious can often also be stupid.
This 'secret' report is a true monument for the incompetence not just of the BfV and their then superior, Madama Marshmallow Faeser. Moreover, it painfully shows how threadbare the arguments of all those politicians are and were who clamoured for a ban of the AfD. As for those SPIEGEL reporters and reporters in other 'quality' papers as well as the German TV stations - well, eggs on their faces is too civil an expression.
(Thanks for the download)
Seems like they gave the job of preparing the document to some trigger happy, female, American college administrator millennials. And in typical fashion, they didn’t understand the rubric (the legal standard) and instead they listed all the words that made them feel hurty.
'they didn’t understand the rubric (the legal standard) and instead they listed all the words that made them feel hurty.'
And that will likely make their supporters feel hurty also. So in that sense it's effective. Hopefully not to the courts, which will hopefully pay attention to the legal standard.
"Hopefully not to the courts, which will hopefully pay attention to the legal standard."
Precisely. This is an open question.
I feel very silly not to have realised “Alice für Deutschsland” is a witty variant of “Alles für Deutschsland”. I must now get that on a T-shirt.
I'm thinking perhaps a hot air balloon. Yes. 10m high. That should be interesting.
Right, especially if you say "Alice" with any number of European inflections...
Sounds like "Alles".
Clearly you are unfit to protect the constitution.
Lest we become complacent, remember that the average person reacts emotionally rather than, you know, evincing a reality-based response, so the leaked document could possibly stoke their outrage at AfD.
CORRECT
As an American, I recognize a similar tactic in the attempt to jail Trump for "election fraud." When you read the DOJ's indictment against Trump, you find that it's just a long list of citations of all the instances between the election and J6 where he said he thought he was the real winner in 2020 and that the election was stolen from him. They juxtapose this against a bunch of instances where people told him he was wrong. Therefore, in their minds, he was deliberately repeating known falsehoods. But of course, all this establishes is that Trump thought he was the rightful winner, not that he _intentionally spread falsehood_, which is what they were actually trying to prove.
One such example:
36. On December 1, the Defendant raised his Michigan vote dump claim with the Attorney General, who responded that what had occurred in Michigan had been the normal vote-counting process and that there was no indication of fraud in Detroit.
37. Despite this, the next day, the Defendant made a knowingly false statement that in Michigan, "[a]t 6:31 in the morning, a vote dump of 149,772 votes came in unexpectedly. We were winning by a lot. That batch was received in horror. Nobody knows anything about it. ... It's corrupt. Detroit is corrupt. I have a lot of friends in Detroit. They know it. But Detroit is totally corrupt."
The AG told Trump he was wrong. Therefore, Trump made a "knowingly false statement".
I am not sure if this is like a legal jargon thing, maybe it has a technical definition that makes more sense. But
> Despite this, the next day, the Defendant made a knowingly false statement that in Michigan,
If I think something happened, and you say "no that didn't happen", and then tomorrow I say it happened, I am not making a _knowingly_ false statement.
The fact that some random asshole told me something, doesn't mean I know it, and that's true even if the thing they told me was true.
Here, let me give you an example.
"[redacted] didn't happen"
Now, every time you all say it did, you're making "knowingly false" statements.
Am I the only one who sees how dumb this is?
(Dear German police: This is not denial. This is sarcasm and irony, and is actually affirmation)