The government that rules Germany is colloquially called the “traffic light.” This is because it is a coalition of three parties that are represented by the colours red, yellow and green.
Thanks for breaking down this zombie traffic light. The coalitions sound familiar. In America greens are progressives, SPD is DNC, FDP is RINO, and AfD is MAGA. A realignment is long overdue. Remember, remember the fifth of November…
"The division into whig and tory is founded in the nature of men; the weakly and nerveless, the rich and the corrupt, seeing more safety and accessibility in a strong executive; the healthy, firm, and virtuous, feeling confidence in their physical and moral resources, and willing to part with only so much power as is necessary for their good government; and, therefore, to retain the rest in the hands of the many, the division will substantially be into Whig and Tory."
I see no reason why gunpowder treason should ever be forgot.
Guy Fawkes who tried to blow up the Palace of
Westminster, where king James and members of parliament were meeting was unsuccessful. He was captured tortured and
jumping from the gallows platform broke his neck and died. His body was none the less quartered. So I am presuming he was sentenced to be hung drawn and quartered.
In celebration of the foiling of his plot he is burnt every year in effigy.
He was acting against the unfair treatment of Catholics by an unjust government.
So I am not absolutely sure what parallel to draw from this.
Eugyppius, Don’t worry, the Greens obviously are quite sanguine about the future. As one English newspaper reports today, “The German Greens want to make it illegal to reverse out of a parking space in the hope of reducing accidents.” You see, this is what really matters.
I should write about that story about the Green parking regulations in Kiel, it's amazing. They don't want anyone to back into or out of a parking space, which means that all parking facilities with a few exceptions will have to be entirely redesigned. I have never seen anything so crazy.
that is incredibly crazy. I love driving backwards and I am very adept at it.
The more you practice, the better you get. In fact, back in the days of olden, I used to drive around to make my babies go to sleep. I spent a lot of time in parking lots practicing many driving skills. Backing is my favorite. Kind of a nutty goal, but car handling is an under rated mastery
I taught my kids to drive, and the only vehicle I had was a large van. One of the exercises I gave them was reverse figure eights. If you can do those for a while and not back into a tree it really says something. Not sure what.
The greens hope the skills of driving will be redundant quite soon. Will there be a sane government in Germany or any other western country before driving is banned, ICE is unavailablke and hydrocarbons are no longer sold.
After spending hundreds of dollars each on all late model automobiles to provide standard back-up cameras and rear sensors, the Greens have decided that it's not enough. Wanna bet that they have no supporting data?
It's heartening to know that life in Germany is so near-perfect that your government has the resources to attend to such pissant social irritations.
In the RV community, such parking spaces are known as "pull-throughs," and typically command a premium rate, as they reduce the number of spaces a resort property can offer. Hey, you don't suspect that inconveniencing vehicle users by reducing parking might be the Greens' real aim, do you?
I suspect that reducing the number of parking spaces is precisely their aim. Publicly, they are justifying the initiative under the rubric of Vision Zero, the insane Swedish-origin traffic safety 'project' that demands zero traffic fatalities. Because reversing in an automobile is statistically more likely to result in a traffic accident than not reversing, they claim that any measure (however ridiculous) that reduces reversing is demanded under Vision Zero. Auto crash fatalities in parking lots must however be exceedingly rare, and I have enormous doubts that there is any research at all supporting the notion that not reversing in parking lots will save lives.
All of this—and your freedom—goes away with driverless vehicles. Bought one a while back and got to test their software under development. The vehicle isn’t quite driverless, but rather requires you to sit behind the steering wheel and do nothing. Inside is a built-in camera to record you. You must *not* take your eyes off the road (facial recognition and tracking) or you get a nasty voice activated reminder. Too many of them and your system shuts down and pulls off the road (that will teach you). The car reads the traffic signals and speed limits—but not too well—and will slow down or speed up according to the posted speed limit, but who drives the speed limit? Well you do now that “Big Brother” is your co-pilot.
Is this driverless AI car safer than one with a driver? Well no. Remember I said it reads the speed limit signs not too well. Guess what, at 85 mph my driverless car misread the temporary speed limit sign posted and decided it said “35 mph”. Of course it hit the brakes and hilarity ensured for all following me at highway speed. ;-). Soon I fear such safety features will be mandatory and their use ensured by having cars produced with no driver accessible features such as a steering wheel. Sigh…
If more people were taught the basic skill of driving backwards* perhaps the roads would be incrementally safer. Looking can make all the difference.
*and of using all the mirrors and also of turning oneself to look backward while having one hand on the wheel and the other behind the passenger headrest to hold oneself in position.
You know, it's the same here in the UK. We have a batshit-crazy government that hardly anyone voted for, a useless opposition that hardly anyone voted for and a future that looks bleaker by the day. We Westerners really have let the lunatics run the asylum for years because we were all too busy being rich, comfortable, over-fed, underworked, well-paid and pretty smug about how good the good times were. The lunatics are in charge because nobody thought it mattered any more. Well, look at us now - and things will only get worse because we are no longer capable of or interested in revolutions or uprisings. Ho hum
Theoretically there is a pendulum. Hopefully the opposite of batshit crazy results in a rational government. The west is currently in a freefall of self-destruction. How did comfort lead to so much ignorance and stupidity. I live in a constant state of near disbelief at our current trajectories. We are on a bad vector.
Unthinking by most people was the main cause of the deterioration. It seems the public came to believe in The End of History which seems to me the basis of most political thought (sic) for the past 25 years.
Lauterbach, in his vociferous vocalized, reminds me of someone. Darken the hair, lose the spectacles, maybe pencil in a little brush of mustache under the nose, and "Voila!", one Herr Adolph summoned up from the depths of whatever hell that aimless spirit wanders. It seems at least a portion of the German people like to have lunatics in positions of political power.
Meh, you can disagree with Hitler all you want and say he went too far even for my taste with the Jew thing. But he also accomplished some pretty amazing things like the level of planning necessary to be the first government to institute a federal highway system, and overseeing a society that made advances in electronics and aerospace like magnetic tape recording, condenser mics, rocketry and jet engines that were 20 years ahead of other countries.
The new German Greens will build nothing of that sort, they will only destroy things that have already been built. The old German Greens were at least anti-war and anti-globalist, what happened there?
"... they also hate carbon dioxide and those activities that emit carbon dioxide,..." Wait; doesn't every human and breathing mammal emit CO2 constantly??? 😨
You have to wonder what she was thinking, "Hey maybe if I get my bald head all tatted up I'll attract the best kind of life partner a girl could ever wish for.
Did she not foresee that the actual response would be more like, "Ahhhh, look at that idiot nutjob over there?"
HOLY SH*T, Eugy. This is SO dark, but nothing could be so distressing as seeing that image of the collapsed Carolabrücke.
In DEUTSCHLAND? A catastrophic engineering (maintenance) failure?? A triumph of the basest form of physics over the German logistics juggernaut? 😓 I beg your pardon while I disappear into a dark corner and mourn. 💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔
Great post! Apparently there is literally nothing one can always depend on. Oh wait... death, taxes, and the (poor) functioning of government bureaucracies.
What can a new government do? Realistically- the gas from Russia is gone, the laws and regulations that are killing business and industry are not going away, and the mass migration, even if stopped dead, doesn't solve the problem of the millions who are in Germany now. Nor does it address the problem in Brussels.
No matter how I look at it, the next decade is bleak.
I agree it's bleak, but right now German policy is "every insane thing the EU is doing plus some extra stuff to show how pious we are." we should open the sole intact Nord Stream pipe in the meantime and otherwise do everything humanly possible to get energy prices under control (also maximising brown coal production), repeal the GEG, as you say close the borders, stop all entitlements for non-citizens, and then begin the long process of picking fights with Brussels and disentangling ourselves from the worst of the Euro cancer.
What do you think of Hans-Hermann Hoppe's theory that the Euro was created to subvert strong national currencies like the DM, and to generally subvert the German economy?
If you read Martin Armstrong, he predicted long ago the demise of the EU due to it's economic policies, in particular it's refusal to unify all the member state's economies. Now rumor has it they are eyeballing Hungary for takeover which would make sense because Hungary is one of the few states that seems to have it's head screwed on straight.
There is more than enough gas to be fracked in Germany and its immediate neighbours to supply all you need at quite short notice and for our children's lifetimes. Long enough to build more nukes.
1. The gas can come back, so can the nuclear power (and subsidizing "the sun" can go). 2. Regulations can go. 3. AfD is not for stopping immigration, they are for remiration. The whole point is sending them back. The current government has already closed the border. 4. Brussels can be ignored.
Prediction: German parties, exception the AfD, will either skew heavily pro-islam in coming years, or clean house of moslem infiltration their power structure.
This will create a divide inside the civil service and the courts too, as entrenched moslems will subvert the state to try and destroy whatever they can, for the Germans, all to make an eventual future moslem take-over more likely.
How many Germans will side the invaders? At least 1/3 of those born post-1990, since they are the first generation to have been raised in with MultiKulti as their Normal.
Weimar II, but with islam instead of you-know-who?
You wicked boy. As if my kishkes are not yet roiling enough on this weekend before God knows what, you mentioned that name I thought never ever ever again to have to read, in any context, anywhere.
Isn't it awful? A vote for Kamala, over here, is a vote for all these people and will indeed inject some fresh blood into their rotting brains which have so badly infected this nation. With masking rising from the dead to be enthusiastically advised by health authorities in NYC and in some California districts, I am not very confident that enough people have learned the appropriate lessons from this our now neverending Plague Era.
The environment parties were started by those who couldn't get ahead in the social democrats or communists. So to get to the well-paid parliament seats they picked one single issue for the party, the issue the media loved and no one could criticize.
People come up with various explanations for the extreme environmentalism in the Left, but if they knew the Left's history, it's obvious. The communist parties used to be FOR industry. They proudly called themselves "materialist" parties. The Soviet Union would win The War of Production, and would reach the Land of Plenty. Just you wait! Except it became clear that the Soviet Union couldn't invent, and people were poorer than ever, walking in worn-out boots as they couldn't afford new ones. This even after the Soviets had invaded half of Europe, communists had taken China, and they had more trade with the Third World than ever. Not to mention the vast resources in the USSR itself.
So what should communist parties in the West do? When they could no longer claim that Western industry would lose? They attacked it for pollution instead. Technology, the West's crowning achievement, must be blackened, always connected to pollution. Which lead to "global cooling" - the smoke would block out the sun and usher in a new Ice Age. Which was changed to "global warming" in the 1980s. Same people, different tune. And let's not forget: Exploding nuclear power plants were on their way, acid rain (which is in the book Bladerunner was based on), birds would die off, "the hole in the ozon layer will widen and cover continents." And we would all suffocate because cutting down trees would remove all the oxygen.
(Even though it is actually easy to replace trees. And as for the Tropics, they consume much of the oxygen they produce. We never hear about the tropics scare anymore, do we? That cutting down palm trees will suffocate the planet.)
Pollution became "global cooling," which became "global warming" and the "greenhouse effect," which became "climate change" that could explain anything, even the Indian Ocean tsunami and tornadoes in the U.S. mid-West. (Even though there were more tornadoes in the 1920s.)
They NEVER mention the vast pollution, deforestation, poisoning of air and water in the Soviet Union. Communism was the worst climate disaster the world has ever experienced. They even dumped nuclear waste near the North Pole. Some lakes were so polluted that if you swallowed any of the water you had to be stomach pumped. If you stood in the water drugged fish bumped into your legs.
The air in Soviet cities was so polluted that they had to pump in air from outside to have oxygen for welding.
But you never got to see documentaries about that in school. Only about how "capitalism causes pollution!"
Green (communist) policy is to hobble private property rights, to incrementally increase the control of the state over that property. Only when state control of property has been once again achieved will they begin to value production over "protection." The state will be exempted from "protection" regulations.
Eugyppius, from your thorough description of the traffic-light government, it was clear to me that it is the reincarnation of a 100-year-old group immortalized in black-and-white film: the Keystone Kops (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqHPN4gXa-o)
Watch this and then try to tell me you don't agree ... 🤣
Have you seen or done any analysis on what AfD’s “ceiling” is, assuming the party’s platform and rhetoric does not materially change? Some constituencies will literally never vote for it under any circumstances, so I’m curious how close they are currently to “capping out” their vote share.
a few people have asked this and I don't really know. it's hard to imagine AfD polling ahead of the CDU in the West, but years ago I would've said it would be hard to imagine them polling ahead of CDU in the East, and they've managed that. in late 2023 they had near optimal conditions, before the massive campaign 'against the right,' and they were polling around 22-23% nationwide, in Thüringen or Saxony as high as 37%. that might be a clue as to what's possible in present politics.
Perhaps the platform and rhetoric will change, just enough to reach, say, 50.1%. That's kind of what MAGA has done, although we don't really know the percentage for two more days.
Thanks for breaking down this zombie traffic light. The coalitions sound familiar. In America greens are progressives, SPD is DNC, FDP is RINO, and AfD is MAGA. A realignment is long overdue. Remember, remember the fifth of November…
yes, all these same political factions exist everywhere, although the party divisions and names may vary.
"The division into whig and tory is founded in the nature of men; the weakly and nerveless, the rich and the corrupt, seeing more safety and accessibility in a strong executive; the healthy, firm, and virtuous, feeling confidence in their physical and moral resources, and willing to part with only so much power as is necessary for their good government; and, therefore, to retain the rest in the hands of the many, the division will substantially be into Whig and Tory."
--THOMAS JEFFERSON TO JOEL BARLOW, 1802.
Remember Remember the 5th of November ,
Gunpowder treason and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder treason should ever be forgot.
Guy Fawkes who tried to blow up the Palace of
Westminster, where king James and members of parliament were meeting was unsuccessful. He was captured tortured and
jumping from the gallows platform broke his neck and died. His body was none the less quartered. So I am presuming he was sentenced to be hung drawn and quartered.
In celebration of the foiling of his plot he is burnt every year in effigy.
He was acting against the unfair treatment of Catholics by an unjust government.
So I am not absolutely sure what parallel to draw from this.
Next iteration is V for Vendetta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_for_Vendetta_(film) involving a virus and Guy Fawkes masks.
There will be nothing to remember after Nov 05, just dysfunctional as usual !!!
Eugyppius, Don’t worry, the Greens obviously are quite sanguine about the future. As one English newspaper reports today, “The German Greens want to make it illegal to reverse out of a parking space in the hope of reducing accidents.” You see, this is what really matters.
I should write about that story about the Green parking regulations in Kiel, it's amazing. They don't want anyone to back into or out of a parking space, which means that all parking facilities with a few exceptions will have to be entirely redesigned. I have never seen anything so crazy.
that is incredibly crazy. I love driving backwards and I am very adept at it.
The more you practice, the better you get. In fact, back in the days of olden, I used to drive around to make my babies go to sleep. I spent a lot of time in parking lots practicing many driving skills. Backing is my favorite. Kind of a nutty goal, but car handling is an under rated mastery
I taught my kids to drive, and the only vehicle I had was a large van. One of the exercises I gave them was reverse figure eights. If you can do those for a while and not back into a tree it really says something. Not sure what.
agree. I taught my daughters the same.
You never know when you need good driving skill, kind of the same as any other very quick decisions necessary in life
The greens hope the skills of driving will be redundant quite soon. Will there be a sane government in Germany or any other western country before driving is banned, ICE is unavailablke and hydrocarbons are no longer sold.
After spending hundreds of dollars each on all late model automobiles to provide standard back-up cameras and rear sensors, the Greens have decided that it's not enough. Wanna bet that they have no supporting data?
I like my "old cars" I am so glad.
The biggest mistake made in 2000's is cash for clunkers
🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂❤️❤️❤️❤️
It's heartening to know that life in Germany is so near-perfect that your government has the resources to attend to such pissant social irritations.
In the RV community, such parking spaces are known as "pull-throughs," and typically command a premium rate, as they reduce the number of spaces a resort property can offer. Hey, you don't suspect that inconveniencing vehicle users by reducing parking might be the Greens' real aim, do you?
I suspect that reducing the number of parking spaces is precisely their aim. Publicly, they are justifying the initiative under the rubric of Vision Zero, the insane Swedish-origin traffic safety 'project' that demands zero traffic fatalities. Because reversing in an automobile is statistically more likely to result in a traffic accident than not reversing, they claim that any measure (however ridiculous) that reduces reversing is demanded under Vision Zero. Auto crash fatalities in parking lots must however be exceedingly rare, and I have enormous doubts that there is any research at all supporting the notion that not reversing in parking lots will save lives.
All of this—and your freedom—goes away with driverless vehicles. Bought one a while back and got to test their software under development. The vehicle isn’t quite driverless, but rather requires you to sit behind the steering wheel and do nothing. Inside is a built-in camera to record you. You must *not* take your eyes off the road (facial recognition and tracking) or you get a nasty voice activated reminder. Too many of them and your system shuts down and pulls off the road (that will teach you). The car reads the traffic signals and speed limits—but not too well—and will slow down or speed up according to the posted speed limit, but who drives the speed limit? Well you do now that “Big Brother” is your co-pilot.
Is this driverless AI car safer than one with a driver? Well no. Remember I said it reads the speed limit signs not too well. Guess what, at 85 mph my driverless car misread the temporary speed limit sign posted and decided it said “35 mph”. Of course it hit the brakes and hilarity ensured for all following me at highway speed. ;-). Soon I fear such safety features will be mandatory and their use ensured by having cars produced with no driver accessible features such as a steering wheel. Sigh…
Backing out of a parking space does not involve high speed. Fatalities must be zero or close to it.
That was exactly my thought. Plenty of dents, but I have never heard of a traffic fatality in a car park.
They could just eliminate the reverse gear (or option on an electric)
Perhaps after WWIII they will "build back better"
Parallel parking is even more fraught.
These people are nuts.
If more people were taught the basic skill of driving backwards* perhaps the roads would be incrementally safer. Looking can make all the difference.
*and of using all the mirrors and also of turning oneself to look backward while having one hand on the wheel and the other behind the passenger headrest to hold oneself in position.
You know, it's the same here in the UK. We have a batshit-crazy government that hardly anyone voted for, a useless opposition that hardly anyone voted for and a future that looks bleaker by the day. We Westerners really have let the lunatics run the asylum for years because we were all too busy being rich, comfortable, over-fed, underworked, well-paid and pretty smug about how good the good times were. The lunatics are in charge because nobody thought it mattered any more. Well, look at us now - and things will only get worse because we are no longer capable of or interested in revolutions or uprisings. Ho hum
Theoretically there is a pendulum. Hopefully the opposite of batshit crazy results in a rational government. The west is currently in a freefall of self-destruction. How did comfort lead to so much ignorance and stupidity. I live in a constant state of near disbelief at our current trajectories. We are on a bad vector.
"Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times”
Unthinking by most people was the main cause of the deterioration. It seems the public came to believe in The End of History which seems to me the basis of most political thought (sic) for the past 25 years.
Lauterbach, in his vociferous vocalized, reminds me of someone. Darken the hair, lose the spectacles, maybe pencil in a little brush of mustache under the nose, and "Voila!", one Herr Adolph summoned up from the depths of whatever hell that aimless spirit wanders. It seems at least a portion of the German people like to have lunatics in positions of political power.
☝️🤓
Does he have an aversion to dentists, or are they beyond his means? I understand Germany to have an excellent health system compared to the US.
You guys sure he's not British?
You got to the Brit joke before I did, lol!
agree. I thought we all learned by now that dental care can save your teeth. His teeth look like ruins
and are a terrible advertisement for his credentials as a health minister....
Meh, you can disagree with Hitler all you want and say he went too far even for my taste with the Jew thing. But he also accomplished some pretty amazing things like the level of planning necessary to be the first government to institute a federal highway system, and overseeing a society that made advances in electronics and aerospace like magnetic tape recording, condenser mics, rocketry and jet engines that were 20 years ahead of other countries.
The new German Greens will build nothing of that sort, they will only destroy things that have already been built. The old German Greens were at least anti-war and anti-globalist, what happened there?
"... they also hate carbon dioxide and those activities that emit carbon dioxide,..." Wait; doesn't every human and breathing mammal emit CO2 constantly??? 😨
Insignificant detail
Exactly, CO2-obsessed “environmentalists” are fundamentally anti-human and anti-life.
"Eccentrically toothed" Karl.
Brilliant!
But the photo of Tessa, I cannot unsee...
You have to wonder what she was thinking, "Hey maybe if I get my bald head all tatted up I'll attract the best kind of life partner a girl could ever wish for.
Did she not foresee that the actual response would be more like, "Ahhhh, look at that idiot nutjob over there?"
Not "she," he, don't use their pronouns it only encourages child abuse.
Born as Markus Genserer.
Maybe she was hoping she’d attract Mike Tyson.
HOLY SH*T, Eugy. This is SO dark, but nothing could be so distressing as seeing that image of the collapsed Carolabrücke.
In DEUTSCHLAND? A catastrophic engineering (maintenance) failure?? A triumph of the basest form of physics over the German logistics juggernaut? 😓 I beg your pardon while I disappear into a dark corner and mourn. 💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔
Great post! Apparently there is literally nothing one can always depend on. Oh wait... death, taxes, and the (poor) functioning of government bureaucracies.
The West is beset by theater kid-occupied governments.
Eugyppius,
What can a new government do? Realistically- the gas from Russia is gone, the laws and regulations that are killing business and industry are not going away, and the mass migration, even if stopped dead, doesn't solve the problem of the millions who are in Germany now. Nor does it address the problem in Brussels.
No matter how I look at it, the next decade is bleak.
I agree it's bleak, but right now German policy is "every insane thing the EU is doing plus some extra stuff to show how pious we are." we should open the sole intact Nord Stream pipe in the meantime and otherwise do everything humanly possible to get energy prices under control (also maximising brown coal production), repeal the GEG, as you say close the borders, stop all entitlements for non-citizens, and then begin the long process of picking fights with Brussels and disentangling ourselves from the worst of the Euro cancer.
What do you think of Hans-Hermann Hoppe's theory that the Euro was created to subvert strong national currencies like the DM, and to generally subvert the German economy?
If you read Martin Armstrong, he predicted long ago the demise of the EU due to it's economic policies, in particular it's refusal to unify all the member state's economies. Now rumor has it they are eyeballing Hungary for takeover which would make sense because Hungary is one of the few states that seems to have it's head screwed on straight.
Is that a call for Grexit?
There is more than enough gas to be fracked in Germany and its immediate neighbours to supply all you need at quite short notice and for our children's lifetimes. Long enough to build more nukes.
1. The gas can come back, so can the nuclear power (and subsidizing "the sun" can go). 2. Regulations can go. 3. AfD is not for stopping immigration, they are for remiration. The whole point is sending them back. The current government has already closed the border. 4. Brussels can be ignored.
Hubbs and I are watching the Trump Rogan interview right now.
I can't wait until He is in office again and makes the entire planet go insane.
Okay, I have to admit, the insanity is starting to get tedious
Prediction: German parties, exception the AfD, will either skew heavily pro-islam in coming years, or clean house of moslem infiltration their power structure.
This will create a divide inside the civil service and the courts too, as entrenched moslems will subvert the state to try and destroy whatever they can, for the Germans, all to make an eventual future moslem take-over more likely.
How many Germans will side the invaders? At least 1/3 of those born post-1990, since they are the first generation to have been raised in with MultiKulti as their Normal.
Weimar II, but with islam instead of you-know-who?
Dark but plausible
You wicked boy. As if my kishkes are not yet roiling enough on this weekend before God knows what, you mentioned that name I thought never ever ever again to have to read, in any context, anywhere.
Isn't it awful? A vote for Kamala, over here, is a vote for all these people and will indeed inject some fresh blood into their rotting brains which have so badly infected this nation. With masking rising from the dead to be enthusiastically advised by health authorities in NYC and in some California districts, I am not very confident that enough people have learned the appropriate lessons from this our now neverending Plague Era.
A note about the environment parties in Europe:
The environment parties were started by those who couldn't get ahead in the social democrats or communists. So to get to the well-paid parliament seats they picked one single issue for the party, the issue the media loved and no one could criticize.
People come up with various explanations for the extreme environmentalism in the Left, but if they knew the Left's history, it's obvious. The communist parties used to be FOR industry. They proudly called themselves "materialist" parties. The Soviet Union would win The War of Production, and would reach the Land of Plenty. Just you wait! Except it became clear that the Soviet Union couldn't invent, and people were poorer than ever, walking in worn-out boots as they couldn't afford new ones. This even after the Soviets had invaded half of Europe, communists had taken China, and they had more trade with the Third World than ever. Not to mention the vast resources in the USSR itself.
So what should communist parties in the West do? When they could no longer claim that Western industry would lose? They attacked it for pollution instead. Technology, the West's crowning achievement, must be blackened, always connected to pollution. Which lead to "global cooling" - the smoke would block out the sun and usher in a new Ice Age. Which was changed to "global warming" in the 1980s. Same people, different tune. And let's not forget: Exploding nuclear power plants were on their way, acid rain (which is in the book Bladerunner was based on), birds would die off, "the hole in the ozon layer will widen and cover continents." And we would all suffocate because cutting down trees would remove all the oxygen.
(Even though it is actually easy to replace trees. And as for the Tropics, they consume much of the oxygen they produce. We never hear about the tropics scare anymore, do we? That cutting down palm trees will suffocate the planet.)
Pollution became "global cooling," which became "global warming" and the "greenhouse effect," which became "climate change" that could explain anything, even the Indian Ocean tsunami and tornadoes in the U.S. mid-West. (Even though there were more tornadoes in the 1920s.)
They NEVER mention the vast pollution, deforestation, poisoning of air and water in the Soviet Union. Communism was the worst climate disaster the world has ever experienced. They even dumped nuclear waste near the North Pole. Some lakes were so polluted that if you swallowed any of the water you had to be stomach pumped. If you stood in the water drugged fish bumped into your legs.
The air in Soviet cities was so polluted that they had to pump in air from outside to have oxygen for welding.
But you never got to see documentaries about that in school. Only about how "capitalism causes pollution!"
Green (communist) policy is to hobble private property rights, to incrementally increase the control of the state over that property. Only when state control of property has been once again achieved will they begin to value production over "protection." The state will be exempted from "protection" regulations.
The entire West is simply decomposing.
Eugyppius, from your thorough description of the traffic-light government, it was clear to me that it is the reincarnation of a 100-year-old group immortalized in black-and-white film: the Keystone Kops (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqHPN4gXa-o)
Watch this and then try to tell me you don't agree ... 🤣
Have you seen or done any analysis on what AfD’s “ceiling” is, assuming the party’s platform and rhetoric does not materially change? Some constituencies will literally never vote for it under any circumstances, so I’m curious how close they are currently to “capping out” their vote share.
a few people have asked this and I don't really know. it's hard to imagine AfD polling ahead of the CDU in the West, but years ago I would've said it would be hard to imagine them polling ahead of CDU in the East, and they've managed that. in late 2023 they had near optimal conditions, before the massive campaign 'against the right,' and they were polling around 22-23% nationwide, in Thüringen or Saxony as high as 37%. that might be a clue as to what's possible in present politics.
Perhaps the platform and rhetoric will change, just enough to reach, say, 50.1%. That's kind of what MAGA has done, although we don't really know the percentage for two more days.