Ssnake

In summary, it's not that I think you can't have an opinion on Germany if you aren't from Germany. I just think that if you don't want to look like a dangerously ignorant fool you should gather more facts and opine less.

Well, Ryan, I'll concede that the Lüth quote wasn't translated. Yet, he was quoted in the context of Neonazis and gas chambers: An hour later I presented the "Step on the Gas" poster - mounted next to synagogues, no less - and two and a half hours after that Seahawk brought up the Lüth quote: You didn't care to find out. You just naturally assumed you know better about German politics than the Germans in a thread about Germany who are directly quoting what these people are saying. Fine, it's just supreme ignorance rather than active support. The result still is that your position helps to create the false impression that the AfD is quite the normal political party that is censored for it's anti-establishment attitude rather than for promoting violence against immigrants, like Beatrix von Storch: After a Facebook user asked her if she was asking for the police to shoot women and children crossing the border; a heinus trick question, apparently, that forced her to respond "Yes." Facing public backlash, in her first attempt of damage control her excuse was that she didn't mean to write that and "slipped with her mouse". Then, that she was for shooting the women, but not the children. These aren't isolated incidents. It's a communication strategy to test how open they can present their aims to the general public. At the same time they have a myriad of enablers to assure the general public that what we're reading wasn't written, that what we're hearing wasn't said, that what we saw were our lying eyes. This is the context when in Germany there is a debate whether the AfD should be forbidden. And all this isn't enough. No, the Constitutional Court has erected high hurdles. It demands a mountain of evidence that a party is actively seeking to destroy the current political system, that it's happening at all levels, and that a party must gather sufficient voter support that they actually have a non-neglible chance to succeed (which was why the NPD wasn't outlawed after the court was presented with the mountain of evidence it demanded - it then concluded that the NPD was too pathetic to be dignified with such a court decision). Yeah, it's totally a dictatorship here where there's zero freedom to speak your mind. What has the world come to that in Germany one can no longer demand minorities to be gassed?

You're deliberately misrepresenting what Lüth actually said. Which was pretty much non-interpretable and unambiguous as it gets - he wanted immigrants to be murdered. I don't care if you agree with him or if you just chose to ignore the part. The result is that you are among the rank and file that play down how dangerous these people actually are. Useful idiot or supporter? The result is the same, and that means you belong to that lot - by choice, or by ignorance. I don't care.

Most of them I would consider useful idiots, or enablers. But of course one can also be an enemy of the republic without being an actual Nazi. Like, by being a communist. Or an anarchist, a monarchist ... or a populist, intent on breaking checks and balances that were put in place to specifically prevent an autocratic power concentration.

Because it's not customary for the BND to publish their finding to the public. That their assessment made it to the public at all, even five years later, is what makes this exceptional.

They must have invented cloak shields, it's the only explanation that makes sense!

Sounds like a good start. I really hate seeing animals killed or hurt for human entertainment.

In how many of them do dirty foreigners express their opinion as loudly and arrogant as the usual Americans do in this thread, or Because Britain? I certainly don't, and I haven't noticed notorious non-US offenders. Like it or not, this is a very one-sided affair. You like to dish out. Now you're crying here all of a sudden. It's pathetic.

Look at the upside. Carnivorous super horses have the potential to turn Rodeos into an interesting blood sport.

And just in the overwhelmingly likely case that this hint flew over the heads of every non German, it's not that they are hiding it: Yes, that was the NPD, not the AfD. But a Venn diagram of supporters would show considerable overlap.

Never claimed that the mechanisms in place were perfect. Only, that they help to reduce the legal exposure of the publisher. This is basically the best you can hope for in a system that relies on the risk of litigation as the main factor to counteract the impulse to publish anything that the average reporter considers a "juicy story". Somehow, things aren't this level bad in Germany. There's still the occasional blow-out like the Hitler Diaries or Claas Relotius, and the BILD was notorious for false reporting in the 1970s but eventually they managed to reign that in. There's other mechanisms to reduce false reporting (can't completely eliminate it). I don't know if they are part of the "repressive state" because they result in stories not printed, or if they are part of the repressive "state media" because they result in stories not printed. The narrative changes by the hour here. Fact is, we don't hear about the false stories that don't get published, so we will never know how much BS is filtered by news organizations that do a better job that US journalists. There's the possible explanation that US journalism is particularly bad; in that case US practices can't be directly applied to other countries. I will only comment on the state of things in Germany - because this is the Germany thread, and as it happens I live here unlike 90% of the people posting in this thread who are clearly not half as well informed as they think they are, offering a lot mor opinion than fact. Here, the accusation that the media are terribly biased comes from people who, on average, tend to believe all kinds of bullshit stories, ranging from plain old antisemitism to chemtrails, which, well, reduces my willingness to spend a lot of time investigating the possibility that they might actually have a point. Just because all opinions are equally valid doesn't mean that they should be given equal weight. I guess that makes me a representative of the establishment. Given the freedoms that I enjoy as a citizen of Germany, I don't feel particularly ashamed about this. This is the best Germany we ever had. It's not perfect. But the proposal to give it all up because some extremists on TikTok claim that it's all a repressive dictatorship sounds like a terrible proposal to me. There's the slim prospect of a bit more freedom of expression (the freedom to post like a total asshole), and the considerable risk of losing everything that I hold dear to a narrative that is based on false allegations, amplified by Russian-funded troll farms that have the explicit mission to subvert and corrode liberal western democracies as we know them. People who want to change it all will have to improve the qualities of their arguments considerably before I will consider that the risk-to-reward ratio is acceptably small.

Well, Alex Jones and his wild theories about Sandy Hook led to rather bad harrassment of the victims. I don't know if he directly contributed to the "Pizzagate" murders, but people pushing crazy conspiracy BS like him did certainly fuel the delusions of the perpetrator, making him believe that he'd free trapped children milked for adrenochrome or whatever by shooting the workers and patrons in that pizza joint.

And you can voice your opinion. It's just that the notion that this would be entirely risk-free was never true, anywhere. The costs associated with public dissent will vary from time and country to another. But my point was in response to OG's complaint that your character might be assassinated and your employer might fire you if you said the wrong things, and therefore living in Germany is like under a dictatorship or something (the argument became a bit muddy after that). Now, I'm on the record here that I've always been against cancel culture and doxxing, but I can't help but notice that it's a practice from both extremist ends of the spectrum. So the complaint about it from someone who proudly boasts to be an Hungarian right-wing nationalist rings a bit hollow.

One tactical reason is that they were trained to attack with air support, and the air support was gone even before the US left the country. And then of course, each soldier had to make his own risk assessment for himself and his family of continuing to fight for a presumably lost cause. This is simply a matter of game theory. All your buddies around you are opportunistic - how likely is it that they will all stay in the force? If 40% are pretty much guaranteed to disappear, and half of them will join the Taliban within a month, the remaining 60% will have to fight an enemy that is becoming stronger by the day. Just put yourself into the shoes of the average ANA soldier. The Americans, and with them all the other western armies, are about to leave, and they take all the good toys with them. Stay in the army, and there's a good chance that your deserter buddy will rat out you and your family to the headcutters - unless you left with him, or did it first, to him. The math is simple. If you fear the Taliban more than you want them gone, and if keeping on fighting the Taliban increases the risk for your family, and if your corrupt commander without supervision from a Western representative will bag much of your pay, your motivation to keep fighting on the side of the current government goes way down while the risk goes way up. What would you do?

It's not whether they should. It's a natural consequence that those doing it for commercial entities will also enjoy the privileges of the companies that employ them. They will do it only as long as they feel reasonably protected by their employer, so the employer must take necessary action to retain the workforce, or curb the style and extent of their reporting. Usually it's a mix of both. Unlike a random dude with a smartphone, an organization like the Washington Post can equip their war zone reporters with a protection vest against fragments, a helmet, and have him hire experienced locals to bus the reporter and his crew around, possibly even a small protection detail. The WaPo can weather lawsuits that would ruin Mr. Rando Citizen Reporter. The WaPo has a legal staff to check what they post, before they post it; a risk mitigation strategy that Mr. Random Citizen Reporter can't afford. At the same time that same legal staff will create at least someorganizational barrier to emphasize responsible reporting over multiplying mere rumors. It's not a perfect system, but the reality today is that we have a million mini Alex Joneses that amplify crazy conspiracy shit which has resulted in violence already, including multiple murders. I'm not sure if that's a preferable future.