Can we finally ban this anti-democratic, Russian-psyops-spreading POS of a political Party? I fucking hate the AFD with a burning passion you can’t imagine. Everyone who votes for these fuckers just need to fucking cope that the war is over. Democratic Germany best Germany! Get rekt fascist keks.
I agree with the sentiment, but objectively democracy is a terrible form of government. We just haven’t come up with anything better, and the other options are even worse.
The problem with democracy is that to really work it requires an informed electorate, and a lot of the information the electorate get is propaganda. But like you say, I don’t have a better alternative to offer.
Pretty much this. The average voter is by all objective measures not qualified to decide on political matters, its just that not having every mouthbreather have a voice has always led to autocracy in every single attempt made.
While I agree on the AfD sentiment, we’re not exactly living in a democracy. When money/corporations have way more influence on politics than voters, that’s not even remotely resembling democracy.
A flawed democracy is still a democracy - and Germany is widely regarded, despite some corruption, as one of the best-functioning democracies in the world (5th best according to the Democracy Matrix - which is admittedly from a German university - and 12th best according to the Economist's Democracy Index). There are no serious scholars doubting this.
Democracy assessments / studies / rankings are heavily flawed. They tend to look at freedom of speech, corruption & integrity of elections, while completely disregarding “legal” corruption such as lobbying, and how much influence money has on the legal process. Which is exactly what I criticized. Germany is not a democracy. It has freedom of speech, and low corruption, and relatively fair elections. However, there is a severe imbalance towards lobbyists and big corporations in the legislation.
Neither does the Democracy Index, which has "political participation" as a criteria.
You can't just make up your own definitions. Democracy is a well-defined term. There being an imbalance just like in every society doesn't make a country not a democracy. That's not how this works.
I live in Germany and I can see with my own eyes and hear with my own ears that the power balance is heavily tilted in favor of corporations. You may be one of those who either benefit from the system, or tell themselves a fairy tale of “things are not that bad”. I don’t need to wait for people starving on the streets to know that this is the direction our system is going at the moment.
Germany is fucked up, but since we’re still exploiting the third world and our economy is booming, even those who get cheated out of their livelihoods do not starve yet (for the most part).
But there are already some people in a really bad place here because the government isn’t doing the very minimum of it’s fucking duty to protect the weakest, and instead giving tax cuts to the richest and the corporations.
So don’t give me bullshit about Germany being a “good democracy”. The only thing poor people still have left here, is that they are still allowed to call out those stealing their livelihood without being imprisoned for it. Not that it would do them any good.
Before Ukraine Russia funded right-wingers because they were anti-EU. Some of them were quite open about it. I don’t think anything has changed. Money just takes a longer route and people keep quiet about it.
So, in Germany, does anything happen to this Russia war enabler? Or is it like America where someone just screams “both sides” and “but his tan suit” and all courts and laws get disabled?
My logic says yes but mostly it’s gonna be PR issues. But reality says there won’t be any other consequences because politicians don’t like to oust other politicians and courts don’t wanna get involved with separation of power issues.
My guess is if this blows up enough and the far right can’t simply deny that it happened any more they will distance themselves a bit, perhaps throw him out.
Its just lip service though, the party is in large parts propped up by russia, and the members are all either corrupt shitstains doing the same as the guy who got caught or brainwashed idiots who themselves are the best argument against democracy and equal voices for everyone.
Well, his party is trying to make people forget he’s in there for fear of losing votes. Given that this party is the “presentable” face of the hard right I hope he gets as much media attention as possible.
Not sure anything is going to happen to him personally but he’s a politician and this is corruption so probably not.
We call them “exceptions” here, they’ll kick him out and say everyone else of the AfD is not like that. People will believe it and keep voting for them even harder because now. It’s a shit show.
That I’d be OK with. Or just pocketing the cash and telling their own agents who’s bribing and how.
But this twat might be dumb enough to actually do some dumb shit in return.
Also 20k, are the Russians that broke? The dude so insignificant? Or this just the tip of the money pile?
This is why Israel “leaked” info about its “Lavender AI”. The idea was to place the blame for genocide onto something that cannot be held accountable, and defer the humans to the “just following orders” defence.
most of the aid is rerouted to militants and the leftovers are mostly sold to civilians at exorbitant prices, while the hostages get crumbs.
not giving aid and attacking militant hotspots quicker could’ve ended the situation sooner and would’ve enabled direct giving of aid to civilians. in addition to securing the hostages sooner.
But the IDF does not allow an independent investigation so we’re going to have to take israel’s word for it that this was a little oopsie and definitely not a targeted attack on aid workers in Gaza. Israel would never lie right?
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