It’s much healthier for Germany if digital issues have an answer that goes beyond “Let’s see what the CCC has to say!” The CCC is a shady organization which is good at taking things apart but does not have that much constructive to offer.
A broader social discussion would reveal that security and privacy are not the only two dimensions on which digital solutions can or should be measured.
The last episode of Spaßbremse treats the history of German-Israeli relations and clarifies what the strategic foundations of the current complex are: white-washing and moral standing for one side and economic reparations and industrial capacity building for the other.
The thinly veiled racism and colonialism is just the rotten cherry on top.
https://podtail.com/de/podcast/spassbremse/52-whitewashing-and-statebuilding-german-israeli-r/
Suppose you’re a well-known journalists hosting a weekly rather left podcast around topics such as migration, the climate and criticism of right-wing frames in the media. And then suppose you let yourself get baited majorly by an American alt-right activist.
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.”).
Just some more German insanity from the anti-Deutsch group that I have to archive here for when it may come in handy later.
Given the current developments around the German debt brake, I think it’s good to refer to this bit about German financial politics and Adam Tooze’s initial prediction (FT, Zeit) that Christian Lindner as finance minister would not be good.
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.
An unexpected deep dive on the problem of unaffordable and underutilized land as it relates to Berlin. It manages to even sneak in some mentions of land reform and land value taxes (which would solve this problem pretty much instantaneously).
I was surprised and delighted by this story (in German) about social cohesion in small town America. A look back to when everything was less of a trash fire.
https://www.merkur-zeitschrift.de/artikel/sie-haben-jetzt-auch-cold-brew-in-berlin-a-mr-77-9-87/
It’s hard to believe that it’s going to cost €1.6B for Germany to hook up ChatGPT to their beloved fax machines.
Once in a while they knock them out of the park in this podcast. In this episode Friedemann Karig goes out and asks for people to understand the necessity and reasons behind violent antifascism in the void left behind when the state fails to protect its citizens.
Putting this receipt here about life in the DDR and its eventual downfall:
Anekdote 3: im November 89 kam eine neue Schülerin in unsere Klasse. Aus der DDR. Wie ich später erfuhr, war ihr Vater in einer verantwortlichen Position in einem VEB. Er hat seine Familie in Sicherheit gebracht, weil er Angst hatte, was passiert, „wenn alles rauskommt.
https://twitter.com/waldorf_charles/status/1673584970902675456
It’s anecdata but it’s plausible and pretty damning and there’s a bunch more where that came from. Don’t listen to people glorifying how nice and functional things were under the GDR.