Ublock does such a good job at blocking the old janky torrent sites, especially compared to the increasingly aggressive and intrusive new shit.

The public isn’t ready to hear about the Sissy-Hypno elective available after 9th grade.

They cannot block a decision of the federal constitutional court

Given the concentration of AfD in the Eastern Block, you’d be inviting the region to pull a Catalonia and threaten to break away.

Germany has measures in place exactly for this scenario

Riot police, sure.

Read the article. It’s already happening.

Place your bets. Place your bets.

And it’s nonsensical to claim we cannot ban them

Who is going to pull the trigger? Point to the opposition leader willing and able to try and dismantle a party with this many active supporters.

We have laws against undemocratic parties

Which are used to target unpopular fringe groups not regional majorities. The UK would have more luck banning the SNP.

That’s like a core mechanism of our democracy.

The core mechanism of democracy is to abolish political organizations wholesale?

Unfortunately, the US is perfectly fine with police and military officers killing its citizens

When your son brings you a pizza but there’s no tomato sauce.

Reminds me of the time Trump dumped a M.O.A.B. over Afghanistan shortly after taking office, because he thought it would win the war overnight.

It’s me! New Cable!

That rather speaks for banning the AfD though.

Belling the Cat.

We have a law for banning fascist parties

You have laws for banning use of symbols of unconstitutional and terrorist organizations. These have been deployed most aggressively against Communists, Socialists, Islamists, and - post USSR - against Russian Nationalists. Currently, it is pro-Palestinian Jews who suffer the most from application of these laws.

The AfD is that its being fueled by a ton of right-wing media. It isn’t just a party springing from the soil ex nihilio. It is a consequence of right wing press flooding German society. And as the press builds support for the AfD, the AfD helps shield these press organs from censorship by the state. Its a self-replicating trend.

Can you ban a party that’s got a plurality of seats in the Parliament? Or will they be the ones banning you?

I mean, by all means, feel free to give it a shot. But it seems like you’re asking an elected government to do a thing it isn’t designed to do. MPs aren’t going to vote against themselves.

who continue to have better voter turnout rates than Millennials

One of the biggest determining factors of enfranchisement is home ownership. Boomers got to plunder the real estate that prior generations had extracted from the First Nations. That land was commoditized and collateralized such that subsequent generations had to pay an enormous premium to get access to it.

Subsequently, home ownership rates after the Boomer generation plunged. More and more property is monopolized by business conglomerates and simply rented out rather than sold. People move more often, chasing lower housing costs and higher wages. So they never develop a local identity, join a local political party, or invest in the long term interest of the community where they reside.

They don’t know who their politicians are or why they should vote for any of them. So they don’t participate. And then they leave an area rather than fight to defend it if the political leadership starts fucking the place up, because they don’t own any of that land anyway.

Show up and vote, god dammit.

The Boomers vote with their ballots.

The Zoomers vote with their feet.

When, I think of “socialism,” I think of modern day Scandinavian health care, not Soviet-era Russia.

One of the upshots of the Great Patriotic War producing so many invalids and disabled veterans was a Soviet state dedicated to providing top quality public services for its veterans. An entire municipality - Rusinovo - was built to cater to the blind, in order to accommodate the number of Soviets who had lost their sight to chemical weapons and other injuries. It became a model for a host of disability-friendly improvements to cities the world over, and you can still find them if you know where to look. The Tokyo subway adopted the Rusinovo model for raised, guided pathways, for instance. And audible signals at crosswalks and in city metros are common mass transit features globally.

After the fall of the USSR, much of the country was privatized and subsequently looted by the Yeltsin-friendly oligarchs who endorsed the coup against Gorbachev. Rusinovo was one such target for looting. The school for the blind was defunded. Factories specifically geared to allow blind workers to participate in the manufacturing center were shuttered and stripped for parts. The transit network was gutted.

Who do these pants -wetting idiots think they’re scaring?

Post-Soviet Eastern Europe is regularly held up as the consequence of Soviet Economics taken to their logical conclusion. So you’ll routinely see Western politicians point to states like Estonia or Solvakia or the shattered remnants of the Yugoslavian Republic as proof of the Failed Socialist Experiment.

What you don’t typically hear is the rapid deterioration that occurred after the USSR was dismantled and partitioned off under Yeltsin. Or how much of the Soviet Era wealth was stolen by mafiosos and corrupt agents operating on behalf of western business interests and rival espionage agencies nce the Iron Curtain was torn down.

In some sense, its a lie. “Look at how awful it is now! That’s because of the socialism they did back then.”

In some sense, its a threat. “Try socialism again, and you’re next.”

How can it do nothing?

If you pass a law but never enforce it, the law does nothing. That’s assuming the Parliament could even pass it in a government that’s thick with AfD MPs.

Ban them now

They won’t, in no small part because the AfD has enough seats to block the attempt. Also, doesn’t help that lots of the enforcement wing of the German government (particularly in the national security services) are AfD or AfD sympathetic.

We’re well past the point at which Germans can do to the fascists what they did to the communists back in the 1990s - ban the party outright and seize their assets. Now they’ve actually got to make this a political fight, rather than a legalistic one, because they turned their backs on the AfD for far too long.

They’re calling it Greater Germany, folks. It’s their land. The illegal Poles stole it from them. Very bad. Gotta get them OUT!

I’m not saying Romani, Slavs, and Czhechs are subhuman folks. But I’ve been hearing a lot of good Teutons saying it. They’re excited about what we’re bring to Eastern Europe. They’re tired of the belly dancing. They’re tired of the stealing. They’re tired of the Communism. What even is a kolache? I hear its made from HOT DOGS!

Time to for a German for Germans, ladies and gentlemen. I think we all know what that means. Maybe its time we finally find a solution to this problem. I’ve got one. I’m not going to tell it to you, yet. But I assure you its going to Make Europe Great Again.

If German Nazis were running the government today, you can guarantee we’d be getting the rankest shit out of Auschwitz while some CEO at IBM insists Germany has a right to exist.

It’s interesting how much technology has slowed down.

We haven’t slowed down. We simply aren’t noticing the degrees of progress, because they’re increasingly below our scale of discernment. Going from 8-bit to 64-bit is more visually arresting than 1024-bit to 4096-bit. Moving the rendered horizon back another inch is less noticeable each time you do it, while requiring r^2 more processing power to process all those extra assets.

No we’re getting close to some 20 year old games still looking pretty decent.

The classic games look good because the art is polished and the direction is skilled. Go back and watch the original Star Wars movie and its going to be more visually acute than the latest Zack Snyder film. Not because movie graphics haven’t improved in 40 years, but because Lucas was very good at his job while Synder isn’t.

But then compare Avatar: The Way of Water to Tron. Huge improvements, in large part because Tron was trying to get outside the bounds of what was technically possible long before it was practical, while Avatar is taking computer generated graphics to their limit at a much later stage in their development.

To generate profit.

make russian lives as bad as possible

Wasn’t that the Shock Doctrine strategy from back in 1996? Anyone remember what followed?

Because then Russians would stop buying their phones.