'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.
Milton Friedman (I think) remarked that we should not wait for the right people to come along to do the right thing, but make the wrong people that come along do the right thing. Waiting for the right people can be a long wait.
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!
Another aspect of craziness is that crazies and degenerates actually enjoy going to meetings. Thus they are able to outlast normal people and drive them away with endless jabbering about trivialities.
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.
Here, there's nothing like that, not with any kind of legal standing.
If someone has a hissy over some tree of yours, and they report it to the local inspector's office, and he actually shows up, it's the person calling that pays the fee, unless you are in some serious violation (like a 25 yards tall dead pine that will squash someone's roof when it falls over, or having a tyre-fire in your yard or something like that).
You don't care to swap up a light-bulb, it's your problem. Heck, in the house across the intersection in the village my mom lives in, the couple who moved in three years ago haven't even built a stair to the front door (it's one of them 1970s half-storey-above-ground-style houses), they enter via the garage instead.
Golden Rule out here in the country-side is, talk it over with your neighbours and never bring the bureaucrats into it.
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.
Except the people in Germany don't interact with you, are completely isolated from you and protected from any social consequences, and it's still criminal to communicate about anything truly important and those laws are enforced. You cannot compare it to dunking on your fellow Americans on Twatter (sorry, I mean Eckss).
(I originally wrote a very long and detailed reply but you've been spared my probable tedium by the flushing of temporary buffer memory when changing my phone from dark to light mode)
Chilling. Then it can be referenced in a zillion opinion pieces, academic papers, theses and so on as the 'gold standard' for measuring rightwingness. A bit like Habermas: oft cited seldom actually read.
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).
Sorry I confused what you were replying to with something else. Of course you are right. And yes, that anyone could call Afrikaners "Germans" is so incredibly and hilariously ignorant - the generalisation would indeed be "Dutch".
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.
They're arrogant and proud of their education "certificate" degrees. Whether or not they actually learned anything doesn't matter. We used to think the Ivy League colleges indicated high levels of education and smart students. Right now, Harvard has remedial math classes for the little dilettantes who waltz in unable to do much math. Pretty pathetic. There are now corporate CEOs who say they would not hire someone from one of these universities any more.
"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.
'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.
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.
Glad Minnesota lodges benefited. The people of southeastern Ontario actually love American tourists/outdoorsmen. The lodgmasters of virtually every local lodge generally only rent out their cabins to American fishermen because we're boy scouts - we leave the place as nice or better than when we found it. We've been going to the same lodge for 39 years (and the same lake for 51 years). The locals living near the lake are almost all farmers, and the nicest people you'd ever want to meet. But they love the "free" government benefits, to a fault (medical care is socialized, but the wait time for an MRI is more than one year).
Frankly, I'm surprised that Canada continues to enjoy a generally good reputation in the USA, because for a long time now it has seemed to be nasty, braindead, dysfunctional place.
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.
True, but the rabid Left Democrats unleashed demonstrated to the American public just how unremittingly awful they are at governing.
Had Trump won a second term and beaten Biden, chances are he would not have been able to get the team he wanted, he'd have been continually hamstrung by the Deep State, nothing much would have changed, and in 2024 a Democrat would have been elected with no Donald Trump waiting in the wings, and voter fraud embedded to ensure the Democrats won for the foreseeable future.
It was bad, but maybe the American public needed to experience how bad it was to say "no more."
The Democrats are a busted flush at the moment, with nothing sane or sensible to offer the American people.
Likely true. People rarely believe anything they don’t experience. Feels to me like the combo of Covid and Biden did a lot of damage that will take time to repair. Before that, people were willing to trust that other people were, well, worthy of trust. But perhaps it was necessary for us to become acquainted with the utter bankruptcy of our leadership class.
When Joe Biden was wheeled out to debate Donald Trump in the 2024 election campaign, he was clearly not on whatever drugs they normally gave him to function. It looked like the Democrats put him out there to fail so they could use that as an excuse to replace him. He was already doing badly in the polls, and many on the Right had predicted he'd be replaced with someone else at the last minute without having to go through the usual process of picking a candidate. What they didn't expect was that it would be Kamala Harris.
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.
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.
The ultimate irony here is that the unveiling of this downright comical, albeit pathetic reports will most likely serve to increase support for AfD, via an almost thorough refutation throughout its thousand vacuous pages, that AfD is actually nothing of the sort of extremist”they’ve been screeching about it.
The report can very well turn out to be an enormous gift to the very party they’ve fear.
Most people won’t read it and the media is still pushing the message that it proves that the AfD is extremist and needs to be banned. Only Alternative media and non aligned lawyers etc. are tearing it apart.
I agree that most people will accept mainstream media advice on that report instead of reading it.
Once in awhile I try discussing report formats with people, and progressives are embarrassed when I try to use as an example the format of the report on alleged Russian interference in the USA election of 2016, because they have not even skimmed it nor examined the table of contents. Worse, apparently none of my conservative friends actually looked at a copy of the report.
Also, I would try to discuss Congress delegating its constitutional power to legislate to the executive branch in the USA and mention that the Affordable Care Act (which progressives were morally required to believe is excellent) was 900 (+) long pages to restrict executive branch freedom, and yet it had many places where it said that the Secretary of Health and Human Services will determine requirements of the law. Progressives typically had no actual knowledge of the law per se and would get defensive, not so much about the substance of the law but about their ignorance.
BTW, is there a problem with parliament delegating its duties to the Prime Minister under the German Basic Law?
We on the outside greatly appreciate the incompetence of the left. Hopefully the backlash will get attention. I do hope Germany also gets angry at unfairness.
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.
'More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions'
Right on the money.
The Riddle of Steel
"Steel isn’t strong, boy, flesh is stronger! Look around you .... What is steel compared to the hand that wields it?"
- Thulsa Doom
Love that proverb, saved
Excellent proverb; I agree.
Don't use it in Turkey though, you might get arrested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedef_Kaba%C5%9F
The alternative version at that link is also very good: "a bull does not become a king just by entering the palace, but the palace becomes a barn"
And i assume Erdogan has an excellent sense of humor regarding such things.
🤯
It felt purpose made for Justin Trudeau becoming Prime Minister of Canada
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.
Milton Friedman (I think) remarked that we should not wait for the right people to come along to do the right thing, but make the wrong people that come along do the right thing. Waiting for the right people can be a long wait.
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/51/89/9a/51899a1d962ff71d8518536805329f67.jpg
The right man in the wrong place can look forward to a short lifespan.
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
Another aspect of craziness is that crazies and degenerates actually enjoy going to meetings. Thus they are able to outlast normal people and drive them away with endless jabbering about trivialities.
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.
Here, there's nothing like that, not with any kind of legal standing.
If someone has a hissy over some tree of yours, and they report it to the local inspector's office, and he actually shows up, it's the person calling that pays the fee, unless you are in some serious violation (like a 25 yards tall dead pine that will squash someone's roof when it falls over, or having a tyre-fire in your yard or something like that).
You don't care to swap up a light-bulb, it's your problem. Heck, in the house across the intersection in the village my mom lives in, the couple who moved in three years ago haven't even built a stair to the front door (it's one of them 1970s half-storey-above-ground-style houses), they enter via the garage instead.
Golden Rule out here in the country-side is, talk it over with your neighbours and never bring the bureaucrats into it.
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.
You don’t have HOA’s? How do you control what your neighbors are doing?
We don't, unless someone is a serious nuisance.
And the general laws apply, not some private league of busybodies.
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.
Except the people in Germany don't interact with you, are completely isolated from you and protected from any social consequences, and it's still criminal to communicate about anything truly important and those laws are enforced. You cannot compare it to dunking on your fellow Americans on Twatter (sorry, I mean Eckss).
(I originally wrote a very long and detailed reply but you've been spared my probable tedium by the flushing of temporary buffer memory when changing my phone from dark to light mode)
That's a solid (if unfortunate) point.
Double-plus ungood wrongthink.
Chilling. Then it can be referenced in a zillion opinion pieces, academic papers, theses and so on as the 'gold standard' for measuring rightwingness. A bit like Habermas: oft cited seldom actually read.
The flaw in their reasoning is that if you stretch a meaning too far - everyone is right wing and thus nobody is.
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).
Sorry I confused what you were replying to with something else. Of course you are right. And yes, that anyone could call Afrikaners "Germans" is so incredibly and hilariously ignorant - the generalisation would indeed be "Dutch".
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.
They're arrogant and proud of their education "certificate" degrees. Whether or not they actually learned anything doesn't matter. We used to think the Ivy League colleges indicated high levels of education and smart students. Right now, Harvard has remedial math classes for the little dilettantes who waltz in unable to do much math. Pretty pathetic. There are now corporate CEOs who say they would not hire someone from one of these universities any more.
Isn't it non-education?
"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.
'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.
The more important thing is person in their fifties or sixties that they answer to.
Holy smoking Joe’s! Don’t give them any ideas!
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.
The closure of Canada to American visitors during the virus hysteria crisis was a massive boon to fishing lodges in my home state of Minnesota.
I'm sure as far as they were concerned, Canada should be closed off to Americans forever!
Glad Minnesota lodges benefited. The people of southeastern Ontario actually love American tourists/outdoorsmen. The lodgmasters of virtually every local lodge generally only rent out their cabins to American fishermen because we're boy scouts - we leave the place as nice or better than when we found it. We've been going to the same lodge for 39 years (and the same lake for 51 years). The locals living near the lake are almost all farmers, and the nicest people you'd ever want to meet. But they love the "free" government benefits, to a fault (medical care is socialized, but the wait time for an MRI is more than one year).
Frankly, I'm surprised that Canada continues to enjoy a generally good reputation in the USA, because for a long time now it has seemed to be nasty, braindead, dysfunctional place.
I used to hear of Canadians heading south to Montana to pay for the medical care they wanted because they could not get it at home.
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).
True, but the rabid Left Democrats unleashed demonstrated to the American public just how unremittingly awful they are at governing.
Had Trump won a second term and beaten Biden, chances are he would not have been able to get the team he wanted, he'd have been continually hamstrung by the Deep State, nothing much would have changed, and in 2024 a Democrat would have been elected with no Donald Trump waiting in the wings, and voter fraud embedded to ensure the Democrats won for the foreseeable future.
It was bad, but maybe the American public needed to experience how bad it was to say "no more."
The Democrats are a busted flush at the moment, with nothing sane or sensible to offer the American people.
Likely true. People rarely believe anything they don’t experience. Feels to me like the combo of Covid and Biden did a lot of damage that will take time to repair. Before that, people were willing to trust that other people were, well, worthy of trust. But perhaps it was necessary for us to become acquainted with the utter bankruptcy of our leadership class.
When Joe Biden was wheeled out to debate Donald Trump in the 2024 election campaign, he was clearly not on whatever drugs they normally gave him to function. It looked like the Democrats put him out there to fail so they could use that as an excuse to replace him. He was already doing badly in the polls, and many on the Right had predicted he'd be replaced with someone else at the last minute without having to go through the usual process of picking a candidate. What they didn't expect was that it would be Kamala Harris.
Frying pan, fire comes to mind.
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.
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
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)
The ultimate irony here is that the unveiling of this downright comical, albeit pathetic reports will most likely serve to increase support for AfD, via an almost thorough refutation throughout its thousand vacuous pages, that AfD is actually nothing of the sort of extremist”they’ve been screeching about it.
The report can very well turn out to be an enormous gift to the very party they’ve fear.
Gotta love it!!
Most people won’t read it and the media is still pushing the message that it proves that the AfD is extremist and needs to be banned. Only Alternative media and non aligned lawyers etc. are tearing it apart.
I agree that most people will accept mainstream media advice on that report instead of reading it.
Once in awhile I try discussing report formats with people, and progressives are embarrassed when I try to use as an example the format of the report on alleged Russian interference in the USA election of 2016, because they have not even skimmed it nor examined the table of contents. Worse, apparently none of my conservative friends actually looked at a copy of the report.
Also, I would try to discuss Congress delegating its constitutional power to legislate to the executive branch in the USA and mention that the Affordable Care Act (which progressives were morally required to believe is excellent) was 900 (+) long pages to restrict executive branch freedom, and yet it had many places where it said that the Secretary of Health and Human Services will determine requirements of the law. Progressives typically had no actual knowledge of the law per se and would get defensive, not so much about the substance of the law but about their ignorance.
BTW, is there a problem with parliament delegating its duties to the Prime Minister under the German Basic Law?
We on the outside greatly appreciate the incompetence of the left. Hopefully the backlash will get attention. I do hope Germany also gets angry at unfairness.
I am amazed at people who believe the MSM. They must be in a cult because that is the only explanation.
From your lips to God's ears. Time will tell.