https://klausprogrammieren.com

1. This is so real that it’s not funny anymore.
2. This website is more usable than most German government websites.

Woodwalkers 2 is an entertaining enough kids movie. The conceit of beastwalkers (human/animal shapeshifters) is worth exploring despite the disbelief around diet and clothing logistics it requires. The special effects are very weak but not to the point that it makes the movie unwatchable.

The movie pretends to have representation but both the black supporting characters are done dirty. The black girl Lou seems to be the Carag’s girlfriend in the beginning but then disappears for half the movie while he gets it on with a wolf girl Tikaani. The black boy Brandon is relegated to such a passive role that another character remarks that buffalos do nothing but eat and shit.

From a theory of change point of view I would say the movie is commendable. It teaches kids that standing in a field with only the power of your convictions against men with machines and guns does not achieve very much. The main antagonist Andrew Milling demonstrates that it’s preferable to acquire political power by any means and then use that power to drive through your will.

Let’s talk about the episode with Veronika Grimm. It goes entirely as expected. Ronzheimer gives Grimm a bunch of easy passes that allow her to spout the talking points the German government has been pushing about the economy.

Grimm and the government want everybody to work more for less money. The threat is that if we don’t, the economy will become even more uncompetitive than it already is.

We’ve heard them rant against people who are working part-time. Nothing is going to change because of these rants. It would be better to examine why people need to work part-time and try to figure out solutions. The vast productivity and effectiveness gaps present in almost every German company and institution need to be fixed by investment, not papered over by pushing people to work more hours.

Doing any of these of course requires a politics based on changing something. That’s not something this German government can do.

But what takes the cake is Grimm also suggesting to roll back the “telephone sick note” to increase productivity in Germany. Me dragging myself to the doctor’s office on Monday morning and waiting three hours to get a piece of paper is really going to make the country more productive.

With thinking like this we’ll never get a better economy. In the Netherlands sick notes do not exist and working part-time is incredibly common. Last I checked they are doing better than Germany on all fronts.

https://pca.st/episode/08560107-9341-42b6-b177-13cdff827e06

For historic reasons my bank in Germany is the GLS Bank, an alternative and esoteric bank that pretends it’s good. Their statement after the fact was the following:

Von Sammstag bis Montagmittag lag eine Störung vor, sodass Bankkarten als auch Kreditkarten nicht funktionierten.

This is quite staggering. It means they had a disruption to all card payments from Saturday until Monday afternoon.

I don’t consider a three day disruption to be acceptable for any service, but especially in banking there are supposed to be very stringent compliance requirements around uptime that should make something like this impossible.

The GLS does not ship any new features like ever, if they also can’t keep what they have stable, then there is no point.

I was curious and the good custom in our industry is to disclose details of the incident as well as about the remediation you undertook and will still do to make sure this does not happen again.

Their response to my request was:

Bitte haben Sie Verständnis dafür, dass wir zu bankinternen Störungen keine Details mitteilen. Sie können gewiss sein, dass wir die Ursachen ermitteln und präventiv arbeiten.

That they are a backward and not particularly customer friendly organization is something that’s not news to me. And I definitely do not trust that they will track down the root causes and prevent them from happening again.

The only question is whether there are any other German banks that are any better than this.

From the Grothendieck biography, funny to see that the legend would express himself in German.

Riemann-Roch’scher Satz: der letzte Schrei: der Diagramm […] ist kommutatif!
Um dieser Aussage über f:X->Y einen approximativen Sinn zu geben, musste ich nahezu zwei Stunden lang die Geduld der Zuhörer missbrauchen. Schwartz auf weiss (in Springer Lecture Notes) nimmt’s wohl an die 400,500 Seiten.
Ein packendes Beispiel dafür, wie unser Wissens und Entdeckungsdrang sich immer mehr in einem lebensentrückten logischen Delirium auslebt, während das Lebens selbst auf Tausendfache Art zum Teufel geht – und mit endgültiger Vernichtung bedroht ist. Höchste Zeit unsern Kurs zu ändern!

—Alexander Grothendieck

• They failed to notify the people living there until after the change had already passed (incompetent!).
• They decided to only rename part of the street (insane!).
• Renaming part of the street forces the street numbers to be re-allocated (insane!).

„Im Nachhinein ist das eine ­gute Frage“, sagt Werner Heck von der ­Bezirksverordnetenversammlung (BVV) Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg.

Werner Heck’s statements are a good argument here for abolishing the entire concept of the BVV. If they couldn’t even be bothered to check-in on the implementation of one of their more material and prestigious measures, then what are they good for?

Heck sagt, es sei „nicht optimal“ gewesen, dass die involvierten Verwaltungsabteilungen „nicht miteinander gesprochen“ hätten.

This makes it clear that it is not uncommon for the Berlin administration to do things without talking to other departments. This is the way you would work, if you’re mentally entirely dead and checked out.

Das Bezirksamt erklärt, das „komplexe Verfahren“ solle künftig ressortübergreifend organisiert werden.

This sounds ‘good’ to the average German but it will in no way prevent these kind of problems from happening because the issue is not one of process or tactics, but one of culture.

All of these were unforced errors and you can ask yourself maybe they were actually intended to make a mockery of the entire process by a civil service that is politically opposed or too lazy to do any real work.

https://www.faz.net/aktuell/gesellschaft/menschen/wenn-die-umbenennung-von-strassen-in-berlin-schief-geht-ich-kann-mir-nicht-mal-eine-pizza-bestellen-110102184.html

I rescinded my Green Party membership a couple of months ago because of irreconcilable disagreements with their politics. Also because I don’t think they’re effective even at the things they want to do. That move put me way ahead of the Green youth wings many of whom recently exited the party for similar reasons and with a lot of fanfare.

Politics

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A lot of my beef with the Greens (though by no means all of it) is for their hypocrisy when it comes to the Palestine question.

I don’t really have a stake in the Israel-Palestine conflict. I know more Israelis than Palestinians and get along with them fine. I’m opposed against theocratic movements and governments of all backgrounds. Still, in this conflict it is obviously apparent what is right and what is wrong and it has been obvious for decades.

This topic is too big to treat in whole and I hope there will be hundreds of reckonings of the past year in German politics at some point. I’ll just post my receipts and explain why they made the Green Party morally repugnant to me.

Cem Özdemir

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https://youtu.be/m3o2kD3sy5E?si=4VohITr4yJbTawwB&t=2669

Özdemir quotes Golda Meir at an Israel Solidarity event

I saw Özdemir in this video with many other high ranking German politicians quote Golda Meir saying: “Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.” This is a vile bit of racism that should be unacceptable but to which nobody batted an eye back then.

Özdemir now is the mostly useless minister for agriculture in this Green government and his political views have not improved.

Baerbock

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https://twitter.com/Strack_C/status/1735629355668173297

Baerbock sat here next to the person responsible for spreading IDF propaganda in Germany which you can understand consists mostly of lies and excuses for war crimes. Her fans will make lots of excuses for this but the optics of being this chummy with such a vile human being do not become any less terrible.

Baerbock now is the foreign minister in the current German government where her already questionable and empty platform of “feminist foreign policy” has devolved to the point where she is making passionate pleas in favour of war crimes in German parliament.

https://twitter.com/tparsi/status/1846186196419924294

Parliament

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https://twitter.com/hahauenstein/status/1771455044098871704

The Green parliamentary fraction invited and posed with Daniel Ryan Spaulding, a comedian who’s made a name for himself now with increasingly racist anti-Palestinian bits.

Habeck

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https://youtu.be/-JfiOOuXG2Y?si=pU5LXRncsFyWAr9w

Habeck, the only functional politician in the German government, posted this sermon relatively quickly after the attacks. It has been much praised by mainstream Germany but every Palestinian and Arab listening to it will hear: “You are second class citizens. Your grievances are not real. You do not belong here.”

I didn’t think back then it was smart to put out a message alienating a sizeable minority in your country. I think I’ve been proven right.

Party

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What the of the Green Party members themselves?

Inside the party itself on this topic I’ve seen mostly silence and a significant number of statements that would not be out of place in the AfD.

The Green youth wings who left the party did so because of (valid) political disagreements with the party establishment but none of them even once mentioned Palestine in the exit statements.

Party Membership

#

I don’t think party membership is a thing for most people. There are power dynamics at play which are the same in the Greens as they are everywhere else. In every party there are two classes of members:

• Career politicians who have decades of experience and relationships in the party. They run everything.
• Ordinary members who are there to volunteer at the local levels and support the party materially with their time or money.

These two classes have almost no interaction with each other. The mechanisms of inner party democracy (and pretty much any functional organisation) are setup in such a way that ordinary members can’t bother the people doing the “actual work”.

So what is the point of being a member if you don’t have time or money to give?

I would answer that for me there is no point in party membership. I don’t get anything out of it. I may keep voting for the Greens (for lack of better alternatives) and support them in one way or another, but I don’t need to be a member to do either of those things.

Maybe being a party member will be worth it for others who have more to give or who stand to get more out of it. That is a calculation that everybody needs to make for themselves.

This particular video was going around on German twitter and all the usual suspects were letting themselves get baited by it including above mentioned Friedemann. I wrote about their podcast previously and I couldn’t resist so I confronted him on it.

So I got blocked.

I mean “obsessive”, sure. Being a major league hypocrite is one of the best ways to bait me.

I did listen to this podcast very regularly but after October 7th it’s become so absurdly pro-Israel that it invalidates their entire previous position. The only situation where I’ve seen people parrot a line so hardcore like that was Dutch men with Russian wives after Putin had just invaded the Crimean Peninsula (“You have to understand Putin has a point.”).

Fragment from around 45:00 clipped below:

“We got quite a lot of shit for doing that actually. Not entirely popular with my German colleagues. ‘Nicht zum Volkskörper zugehörig’ is a phrase that was used. ‘Wie trauen sie sich ein solches Urteil zu.’ Not belonging to the body politic of Germany. How dare you make a judgement like that. We don’t have any reason to regret it. We were clearly right.

https://pca.st/78n4b82o#t=2755.0

https://piratensenderpowerplay.podigee.io/155-neue-episode