• 14 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

  • the vast majority of people saying they are the same are just being hyperbolic or at worst ignorant

    I agree, and accusing them blanketly of antisemitism or being fascists is not helpful. A three-day timeout, “be less hyperbolic and read up on how bad the Nazis were” is absolutely in order, though, If for no reason than to not make a habit out of hyperbole.

    And then there’s select few who, when confronted with even a hint of nuance, will scream “SO YOU ARE A ZIONIST WHY DO YOU LIKE EATING BABIES” and I’m not at all sad about seeing them banned. Same goes for people saying stuff like “There are no innocent Palestinians” which actually straight-up qualifies as incitement to hatred under German law.

    And for the absolutists: Free speech free smeech this is still supposed to be a community (of course there’s a relevant xkcd).



  • On top of that SWIFT doesn’t even do payments. That is, it doesn’t transfer money, it provides a communication interface that banks use to talk about payments, the actual money transfer takes place separately via T2 (in Europe) or elsewhere via correspondent accounts.

    If they tried to handle actual money they would not have the market share that they have. Iran is semi-sanctioned right now, that is, select banks are cut off. It’s illegal under EU law to comply with US sanctions against US or Cuba so you can be sure that the commission came up with the precise list of what to block and what not so they’d hit the revolutionary guard but not random carpet or saffron traders.



  • It wasn’t the far right arresting people for saying that the covid “vaccination” didn’t stop people from catching, spreading, or dying from covid.

    When did that ever happen in Germany? That’s a true statement of fact and as such enjoys complete constitutional protection.

    No vaccine provides 100% protection, that’s just not how biology works. I wonder if you’re confusing getting into trouble over saying something that every doctor will comment with “duh” with “The deep state is implanting us with microchips so they can replace us with Jewish Muslims, the so-called ‘health minister’ should be summarily executed for high treason” or suchlike.


  • antisemitism as a crime which includes things like equating Israeli actions to those of Nazi Germany,

    That’s not antisemitism that’s trivialisation of Nazi crimes. If you look at what Israel does it absolutely can be classified as genocide, the Nazis did all that… and a fuckton more. Equating the two erases that fuckton more and can thus be considered holocaust denial. “Oh they only shot people, there was no highly organised industrial campaign, no special-purpose logistics chain, the gas chambers are a myth” type of stuff. With actual Nazi methods there would not have been a single Palestinian left after two or three months.

    In short: Don’t deny that the Nazis were even worse and you’ll be fine.

    calling for the abolition of Israel

    The basic idea is that genocide is not an appropriate response to genocide. If your abolition of Israel is a one-state solution with equal rights for everyone that’s fine, if it involves mass expulsions, flipping the apartheid around or some such that’s a no-go.

    In short: Don’t advocate for crimes against humanity and you’ll be fine.

    and being against Zionism in some cases

    Zionism is a very, very broad term, it ranges from fascist Kahanites to Hippies helping Palestinians with the olive harvest so they won’t get attacked by the fascists, everything in between and quite a bit laterally. It need not even involve Israel at all, but can also just mean “Jews should have a place they can call home, where they can live in peace and prosperity”. By that definition Kahanites are not Zionist because fascism inherently doesn’t vibe with peace and prosperity.

    Opposition to Zionism can also take many forms: You might oppose specific forms of Zionism, such as the fascist ones, because they’re fascists, there’s religious opposition within Judaism itself (the accusation there is that Zionists are trying to force a prophecy), and then there’s right-out antisemitism, “Why should Jews have a place to call home they’re Jews”. There’s also antisemitic pro-Zionism, “If they have their own home then we don’t have to deal with them here”.

    In short: …there’s no short version.


    Oh and just for the record: This all goes both ways. Plenty of people have eaten bans for denying Israel’s war crimes.


  • So potentially more than half of them are motivated by far-left ideology?

    Nope. Scroll down to the first graph. Bars are (in the graph, not legend), form top to bottom: Total, right, diverse, left, foreign ideology, religious ideology.

    So the large majority of these “crimes” were people saying mean things?

    Not even necessarily that, if you take a marker to an election poster and draw a dick on it that’s a political crime, property damage, orientation “diverse”.

    It’s a statistic, a very raw statistic, not an analysis, which is why politicians love to throw those numbers around. It’s also not amount of crime as in “someone got sentenced” but “police has a file on this”. Cases are counted as long as they’re open so a single one can show up in the statistics for multiple years.



  • I wouldn’t trust those poll numbers because practically noone actually understands the legal status of abortions. I would believe that for many people “legal” means “I won’t go to prison” and by that account yes Germany has legal abortions, even though technically they are… “not punished” is not the right term. I’m still not sure I actually understand what “the offence is not realised” actually means. Someone with a law degree please ELI20.

    Declaring at-will abortions straight-up legal probably won’t fly as the constitutional court has quite good arguments against that, what should absolutely be possible is to, in very clear terms, say that the state does not rule on the legality of the abortion: The constitutional court never said that at-will abortions can’t be legal in specific cases, it said that there cannot be a general judgement that at-will abortions are legal in all cases: It always depends on how the rights of pregnant woman vs. fetus balance out in a particular case. You can’t have a court decide on the specific cases though as that’d be a grave impingement of the right to privacy, so it’s left to the woman.

    tl;dr: To square that circle the state would say “Is your abortion legal, or just not punished? How would I know, ask your conscience”.

    Oh and just for completeness’ sake that’s all about at-will abortions, abortions for medical or criminological reasons are always legal because, in essence, self-defence.


    And lastly: I don’t think it’s the right construction site. How about we make sure that states actually fulfil their duty to have abortions actually available, which is something with actual practical impact, not just shuffling around legalese. Make sure there’s gynecologists performing them and so on. Looking specifically at you, Bavaria.


  • I’m not really acquainted with the details of how Spain does it but it’s common practice in Europe to need a license for short-term rentals, it’s usually municipal statute as an extension of zoning law. Details differ vastly depending on location because every municipality is different.

    Before the days of AirBnB circumventing those municipal regulations was very hard as big hotels are kind of hard to hide, they’re rather obvious, and if you have small apartments where are you going to get your renters from. AirBnB made it possible to get renters for small properties that fall under the radar of authorities. So requiring AirBnB to, effectively, ensure that what they list is licensed is closing that loophole.

    The “anti-tourist” thing only really comes into play when municipalities are actually limiting the number of licenses they give out: When licenses are abundant it doesn’t matter that you can skirt them with AirBnB. Cities like Barcelona do limit them, other places don’t, as such only places like Barcelona had an actual problem with AirBnB, as such cracking down on AirBnB is helping the anti-tourist “agenda” of places like Barcelona. With agenda I mean allow people to continue to live and work in their own city doing something else but wipe tourist asses.


  • Found a paper (a bit older, 2001, but should still be mostly accurate) comparing the two. Cliff notes:

    • Despite legislative power going by default to the central state in Spain and to the states in Germany, distribution of power is overall comparable. Less uniform in Spain as every region gets its own autonomy statute instead of all German states pooling their sovereignty in a uniform way.
    • Administration is practically completely state matter in Germany, while Spain retains central administration structures in all regions. Those largely delegate matters to the region’s administrations, though. So again overall not too dissimilar in practice.
    • Regarding the judicature: The regions don’t have courts. They have some say when it comes to how court districts are drawn and that’s pretty much it. German states all have their own courts and appeals courts, the federal level only has cassation courts. In this area German states have way more autonomy. States elect judges for their own courts as well as 50% of federal judges, or 50% of the people who elect them are designated by the states, depending.
    • Spanish regions have very limited means to influence central legislative. No right to initiative, no own legislative body, just a right to petition. German states can initiate federal law, have their own legislative body, and much federal law needs passing by both federal and state bodies because it tangentially affects state prerogatives.
    • Interestingly, the federal level has larger powers of oversight over the German states than Spain does over the regions. In both cases the oversight isn’t large, though, in Germany it only exists in so far states are administering federal law on behalf of the federation, which isn’t often the case. E.g. (practically all) criminal law is federal law, but administered by the states on their own behalf.
    • German states have more financial autonomy. I won’t get into details the distribution of taxes between federation and states in Germany is complex AF, also, has been renegotiated multiple times. Regarding administration, though, as said: The federation has no tax office, they couldn’t collect taxes if they wanted to.
    • German states have much, much, much more power when it comes to asserting their power. Maybe that’s why they’re not as hell-bent on carving out power for themselves: Autonomous regions have to rely on public sentiment and the good will of the constitutional court, otherwise the central authority can just walk straight over them, so they take whatever they can get their hands on while German states are much more relaxed about it.


  • My suggestion: stop defending war criminals based your feeling and some hearsay.

    Where did I defend war criminals? What part of me saying “Of course it’s a genocide” did give you that impression?

    You said that trucks are more damaging, right?

    …to roads. It’s a metaphor, if you stretch it too far of course it’s going to break. Side note though bikers mostly kill themselves, not others.




  • Spains regions lack of their own police, tax collection (the German federal level doesn’t even have a tax office), only partial cultural autonomy. Also the powers they have are only devolved, they’re not guaranteed those rights.

    German states are fully formed states in themselves, they have their own sovereignty, delegating the exercise of parts of it to the federal level just as EU member states delegate sovereignty to the EU. “Fully formed state” here meaning that they do not rely on the federal level for their administration, in fact living in Germany you generally don’t come into contact with federal bureaucracy at all, it’s all state or municipal level (district level is technically state level, they’re devolved public bodies).

    I’ll grant you that among unitary states Spain is quite federal, but it’s not “more federal than federal countries”.


  • Well it is an anti-tourist thing in the sense that regulations on AirBnBs and the like are meant to close the “hotel license” loophole. Touristy places generally don’t mind new short-term accommodation and give out licenses like candy, likewise small places with relaxed property markets, non-touristy places are much more restrictive because they don’t want to tank their economy.

    For grandma in a village renting out some rooms to visitors getting delisted will result in her going to the municipality, asking for a license, getting one, and putting the listing up again. For an investor buying up apartments in big cities to illegally use as a hotel because renting long-term has lower ROI, well, they won’t get a hotel license, their listings are going to stay down. If you want to build only hotels and have no long-term accommodation may I suggest building a theme park somewhere.




  • I think there’s some „reasonable” keyword in the right to be forgotten.

    The original case was a Spanish cook being haunted by the first google result for his name being an article in a local newspaper about his restaurant going bankrupt decades ago. No scandal or such, just an ordinary bankruptcy, but he could demonstrate that it was impacting his current business.

    He sued, and google had to remove the thing. Not when you search for his name and bankruptcy, not when you search for “what happened to that restaurant”, and the newspaper itself also didn’t have to do anything. As far as I know you can still find the article.

    If you’re a journalist writing the guy’s biography, you’ll find it, push come to shove in some offline archive. But random people won’t see him nailed to a virtual pillory, that’s what all this is about.

    I don’t think it’s really an issue for AI, but it has to be engineered in. Ultimately it’s about judging relevancy.
















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