Germany megathread

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https://twitter.com/DeutscheWelle/status/1335877843230846976

Today marks the 50th anniversary of Chancellor Willy Brandt's Kniefall ("Genuflection") in front of the Ghetto Heroes Monument in Warsaw on the same day as the Treaty of Warsaw was singed, in which the Oder-Neiße-line was acknowledged as the final border between Germany and Poland. His Ostpolitik and particularity that gesture are thought to be the reason why Brandt was bestowed the honor of the Nobel Peace Prize upon one year later.

As well-received as that gesture may have been internationally, his symbolic move polarized German society and political establishment: According to a SPIEGEL survey of the time, 48% of all West Germans thought the Kniefall was excessive, 41% said it was appropriate and 11% had no opinion. Many political commentators and pundits considered the genuflection to be too "servile". On several anti-Ostpolitik rallies, Brandt was stigmatized as a people's traitor, and some protesters even demanded that he be imposed the death penalty on for treason against the people
Despite half of the Germans being highly critical of Brandt's Ostpolitik, the other half of society highly praised him for his move towards rapprochement. In the 1972 federal elections, the SPD became the largest party of the Bundestag for the first time and moreover received his highest share of votes ever (45.8%), thus leading to a reelection of the red-yellow government.

A monument to Willy Brandt was unveiled on December 6, 2000, in Willy Brandt Square in Warsaw (near the Warsaw Ghetto Heroes Monument) on the eve of the 30th anniversary of his famous gesture.

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I always thought he was meant to be absolutely stuffed in 2005, and only just losing that election was actually one of his most impressive achievements.

Here's Schröder's legendary "performance" at the "heavyweight round" on Election Evening 2005.
He was a bit tipsy, smug, and self-congratulatory that night owing to his unexpected election success. During that time his demeanor was criticized as inacceptable (he himself belatedly called his behavior "suboptimal"), but the longer that event dates back, the more I appreciate his bold, courageous, and dauntless determination and truculence in hindsight.

Sorry for the poor quality of that clip, but it was the only one I found subtitled. (Moreover, the translation matches the poorness of the video quality quite well... ) If you want a HD clip of the Elefantenrunde, try this one.

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Yeah, Gerhard Schröder was a total comeback kid. In 2002 everybody thought he would lose (and for a while polling numbers certainly pointed that way) and then he managed to win a slim majority again in the end.

Not only Schröder behaved Trumpish in 2005, so did Stoiber in 2002, too. 😝

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After Timo Sievert's - Germany's "loudest firefighter" and probably most famous paramedic - devastating experience with AstraZeneca and with his primary care physicians' inhuman handling of his vaccination damage, I will never let that inoculant get under my skin.
Consider that he isn't an anti-vaxxer whatsoever, and the many dislikes come from The Wendler's and Xavier Naidoo's gloating QAnus army, whom he heavily criticized for their fearmongering regarding any kind of anti-Covid-19 inoculant.
Der Sievi nevertheless calls upon his fans to get themselves vaccinated against the Corona virus. He even says that he would have himself inoculated against Covid-19 again.

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Under German law would he be guilty of "Mord" i.e. first degree murder, which carries 15 years to life?

plus - theoretically - lifelong preventive detention (which however has to be regularly put to the test)

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Anti-Semitism prevailing and pervasive in the SED stronghold of Leipzig:

https://twitter.com/ZentralratJuden/status/1445341988145008642
There are far more Muslim and Antifa Anti-Semites in Germany than there are Nazi Anti-Semites.

It has just turned out that Gil Ofarim seems to be Germany's Jussie Smollett.

https://twitter.com/SPIEGEL_alles/status/1449507460054753282

https://twitter.com/GegenmeinungX/status/1449499804502007812

Aside from the fact that we don't know the political affiliation of the offender, the Left came in fourth in Leipzig with 13.7% of the second vote (/party list vote), almost tied with the AfD which got 13.3%.

Yes, the Left won the direct seat in Leipzig II  - as opposed to Leipzig I which went to the CDU with the Left again coming in fourth, this time behind the AfD candidate. Considering that out of 455.000 residents who were eligble to vote in either district a combined 66.000 voted for one of these two Left direct candidates there's about a 85% probability that the offender was either a SPD/CDU/Green/AfD/FDP/other party voter or didn't cast a vote at all in the recent election.

I just wanted to post an opposing view to all that disgusting agitation against Saxony. Many Twitter trolls said that that (faked) incident were foreseeable as they tax all Saxons with anti-Semitism. Applying that logic, the hotel employee could as well be an anti-Semitic Antifa member, as Leipzig is possibly the Antifa stronghold of Germany. Oh, btw, before I forget it: According to eyewitness accounts, that said hotel employee is reported to be a Persian, a medially ignored fact by which the whole incident would have taken an unexpected U-turn...

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Did the SDP ever banned Schroder from party membership and will they ever do?

The chapter in Heidelberg moved (or shall I say: put in) for an exclusion of Schröder from the SPD.
I'd really like to translate this article for you, but according to PUTP my English is too "non-understandable", thus I'll let someone else do the work for me. 🤷🏼‍♂️

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https://twitter.com/wirthstef/status/1507011521406070796


https://twitter.com/dw_culture/status/1507092890866135055

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Continuing from the polling numbers that I had posted earlier in the Ukraine megathread (https://talkelections.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=469771.msg8551757#msg8551757) one conclusion is that the Ukraine crisis has been very good to the Greens this month. Sort of a "Macron effect" - before inflation kicked in in France and Le Pen surged of course.

Robert Habeck (econonmy and climate energy minister) and Annalena Baerbock (foreign minister for NATO relations and Russia sanctions) being in full crisis mode turn the Greens into April's big winners. First graph is voting intention, second one is individual politicians' approval ratings.

🤮🤮🤮
At least the lesser of those two evils is prevailing. 🤢

As has been so frequently noted in the media recently they also benefit from the fact that our Chancellor has never been a man of big words and likes to play it safe. "Silent Olaf" often prefers doing and saying nothing instead of possibly doing and saying something wrong.

You ought to watch his CNN interview. There he was uttering more words than in his whole political career. (Which is because as a non-native English speaker he isn't proficient in the anglophone formal-diplomatic register.)

That seems to differ drastically from Robert Habeck's blunt (albeit these days sometimes bleak) style of communication where he tells it like it is by going full realist: Yes, we're in a sh**t situation and all of you people are probably gonna lose a lot of money over it and recently I went to Qatar to buy a sh**tload of gas from an evil, authoritarian regime, but alas, it is what it is. For some reason that seems to resonate with the voters at the moment. The popularity of that could come to an end one day, for it now is seems to hold.

Not forgetting: "WeLfArE ReCiPiEnTs bUrN ThEiR TaX-PaId hEaTiNg aSsIsTaNcE ThRoUgH OpEn wInDoWs!!!1!"👆🏻😤 Such statements prove that the Greens remain a party of the affluent upscale elite.
I wonder if Habeck regrets in the meantime not having become the gubernatorial candidate for the Schleswig-Holstein Landtag election. Ever since the Greens nominated two (!) women (!) for that post, a nursery worker on the one hand and the farthest-left gubernatorial candidate Germany has ever faced, they dropped from being the prevailing party to third again, just like in the course of the federal election. Bear in mind, he absolutely surprisingly won a direct seat owing to a landslide result in the latest federal election, while his party merely came third as for the second vote, which proves that endowing him with a direct mandate served a declaration of love from the people to him.

At the opposite side of the scale, health minister Karl Lauterbach, who used to be everybody's darling not so long ago, drops sharply due to regularly bungling COVID crisis response and not really being good at communicating things. Some people have started to wonder for how long he will remain at his post now.

Honestly, you start sounding like your fellow party member and anti-vaxxer and anti-masker PUTP. 😕 I always thought you were saner and smarter than her.
Being the forth-most favorable political while being backed by half of the electorate is nothing Karl ought to be worried about. The tiny minority of QAnon disciples shouldn't be regarded as "some people", but should rather be utterly disregarded instead.

I wonder why Mrs. Doubtfire hasn't been assailed with demands to resign, even though she has been scnadal-ridden from - literally - the first minute since her assumption of office, when she decided to take a two-week hiatus in ... whatever. 🤬
Not to mention her generous offer to send 5,000 helmets to the Ukrainian army. 😒

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https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1512676951391191042

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Anne Spiegel, Green Federal Minister for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women, Youth and Gender Affairs, has just resigned over her incompetence and refusal to work and her gendering fanaticism during the Ahrweiler flood disaster, during which she was Environment Minister of Rhineland-Palatinate.

https://twitter.com/dwnews/status/1513502446424780801

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Anne Spiegel, Green Federal Minister for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women, Youth and Gender Affairs, has just resigned over her incompetence and refusal to work and her gendering fanaticism during the Ahrweiler flood disaster, during which she was Environment Minister of Rhineland-Palatinate.

https://twitter.com/dwnews/status/1513502446424780801

That escalated quickly.

Stepping down was certainly the right thing to do, although the vacation - despite bad optics - wouldn't necessarily qualify for resignation in my opinion. However, she claimed in public that she attended state cabinet meetings remotely which turned out to be a lie. This and the text messages about covering up her missmanagement, however, are a different story.

Still ridiculous Fritze "gehobener Mittelstand" Merz and the Union have the guts to complain about this story and demand resignation, when they allowed a Federal Minister for Traffic to stay in office after wasting over 500 million euros in taxpayer money and other instances of gross incompetence.

On the other hand, NRW Grüne chairwoman Mona Neubaur clearly exhibited her double standards by scolding (former) Environment Minister Ursula Heinen-Esser (CDU) for her resignation, whereas she keeps shutting up when it comes to Anne Spiegel, even though she had been on vacation for four weeks, unlike Heinen-Esser, who had been off for a mere nine days! 🤬

https://twitter.com/MonaNeubaur/status/1512678420068585472

Who do you think will succeed her? Anton Hofreiter is being under debate. But I don't think the Green party executive would allow this suggestion, since it's statutorily-regulated that sex gender has to override competence when it comes to personnel matter.
Speaking of which, I've also read Tessa Ganserer's name on Twitter. Ens would not only write history as the first trans*minister - since ens has become the Querdenkers' new darling last week, ens could act as an arbiter between the Schwurbler and the Antifa wing of the Greens.
Or Ekin Deligöz, spokeswoman on family affairs of the Green Bundestag faction? She would become the first female Turkish and first female Muslim federal minister of Germany.
But in the end, I think it will amount to Frau Göring... 🙄

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Maybe one of the parliamentary state secretaries? Hofreiter is beyond doubtful, not just because he's a man, but he's not really suited for this job. He should have been Minister for Agriculture instead of Cem Özdemir, who represents one of the most urban districts (Stuttgart I). Özedemir would be better as Foreign Miinister (or Traffic). Well, I still hope he succeeds Kretschmann during this term (that old fool is long past his prime).

Lisa Paus is reported to become Spiegel's successor.
She has been a member of the Bundestag since 2009.
Paus claims to be a financial "expert" of the Green Bundestag group, and she is numbered among the "Fundi" wing of her party.

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One person is dead and six have life-threatening injuries after a man drove a car into a crowd of pedestrians in Berlin.

Scottish-American singer and actor John Barrowman, best known for his role as Captain Jack Harkness in Doctor Who and Torchwood, was an eyewitness to that carnage, and he appeared visibly traumatized when reporting on his harrowing experience:

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Isn't it kind of ironic that the woke German Bundestag legalized the advertisement for a genocide, whereas the based U.S. Supreme Court saved millions of innocent embryos - id est: lives - on the very same day? 😡

The Green Antifa Youth and the SJW Jusos and the Julis (youth organization of the NSDAP successor FDP), by the way, continue to press for the legalization of the slaughter of fetuses up to the ninth month of pregnancy. 🤮

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It's beyond ironic that this passed the day Roe was overturned. Yawn.

That's what I just wrote.

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What you meant to say, surely, was that Germany made a huge step towards humanitarianism and civilsation just as the US lurched towards fascist theocracy

Sorry, but I don't consider abortion to be a human right. It's murder.
On German Twitter, which is as opposed to its American counterpart faaaaaaar-left, the hashtag #Zellhaufen is trending. I wish I could tell you what it means, but that word creation coined by the Antifa simply too disgusting to translate. 🤮

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In the future, every person in Germany should be able to determine their gender and Christian name themselves for reasons of self-perceived gender identity and have it changed in a simple procedure at the registry office. This is what the new self-determination law provides for, which the Federal Ministries of Justice and Family have presented. As agreed in the traffic light coalition agreement, it is to replace the previous transsexual law.

"The transsexuality law dates back to 1980 and is degrading for those affected," said Federal Family Minister Anne Spiegel Lisa Paus. Being able to live self-determinedly is "fundamental for everyone," said the Green politician. "The law in force treats the people concerned like sick people. There is no justification for this," emphasized Federal Justice Minister Marco Buschmann (FDP).

So far, people who want to change their gender in the passport have to obtain two psychiatric reports and answer very intimate questions, for example one concerning their masturbation behavior. These reports cost more than 1000 euros and the process takes months. A court must then decide. According to the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, the courts decide in 99 percent of the cases in the interests of the applicants.

The new Self-Determination Act stipulates that, in the future, when it comes to gender entry and first names, it should be irrelevant whether it is a transgender, "non-binary" or intersex person. Reports on sexual identity or a medical certificate should not be required as a prerequisite for a change anymore.

For minors up to the age of 14, the legal guardians should submit the declaration of change to the registry office. Young people from the age of 14 should be able to submit the declaration themselves, albeit with the consent of their parents.

Sky News

New York Post

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Throw him out!

PJ, do you want to brief us on the latest news about Schröder's associate, former Interior Minister Otto Schily?

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Right now it is very hot in Germany and tomorrow it will be even hotter. This is why I just are three scoops of ice for 1.50 a piece... which is still an okayish price under the Putinflation, I guess, considering I recently had a scoop for 2.00 too.

https://twitter.com/JamesMelville/status/1550237013252734976

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Hasn't that set of images been confirmed as fake?

What exactly should be considered as "fake" regarding those two picture?
Perhaps you are referring to the fact that those screenshots were captured via two different newscasts, both of which, however, belong to the same tax-funded state TV network.
"Tagesschau" - the biggest and most-trusted news program of Germany by far, aired on ARD at 8 pm every day - already used that color scheme back in 2017, whereas the "third programs" (the regional tax-funded TV stations of the same ARD network) plus the ARD morning show, which I always watch before leaving for work, still refrained from highlighting weather map in color. One can criticize that the tweeter used screenshots of two different (but nevertheless related) newscasts, but they can't be treated as "fake", though.
The tweet I have embedded was on of the most liked and discussed tweets on July 21, and when I saw your post, I was totally reminded of said tweet, and since MAE and the parochial Swiss adore Twitter so much, I thought I'd bring this material into this "discussion".

Even with that question raised it's a bit unclear what point, if any, Hades is trying to make here.

Is he saying that it wasn't really 38 degrees Celsius last Wednesday or is he saying that 38 degrees Celsius shouldn't be considered as "hot"?

No. I think Hades posted that tweet in order to signify that all those doom and gloom scenarios that Middle-aged Europe's beloved tax-funded state TV has been trying to paint by use of various hellfire colors and hues for years annoy the heck out of him and his fellow Germans. Even the 22 °C (≙ 71.6 °F) areas look like the entry to hell, whereas on the 2017 weather map, when it was much hotter than on the same date five later, the lack of indoctrination made the whole of Germany seem pleasant and paradisaic.

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Schröder just emerged victorious before the arbitration committee.

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Schröder just emerged victorious before the arbitration committee.

(not that this particular Rettung is much better, but it beats the trashfire currently in power)

The same painters who created that election poster had created propaganda placards for the Nazis only few years ago where the growing menace of communism was depicted similarly.
I must confess they were quite creative in degrading Soviets; the creature looks like a hybrid of a Russian, a Chinese and a dog.

A little more subtle is this masterwork:

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At yesterday's open house of the Bundestag, two lovely ladies tried to persuade Olaf into placing a total embargo on Russian gas. Perhaps their knock-down arguments convinced him... 😂

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Well, um, technically, strictly speaking, he didn't rule it out per se...
he ruled it out as a measure "to save gas". What he didn't rule out is nuclear energy as a measure to ensure "the stablity of the power grid" in the winter. This is however, he added, subject to the result of an ongoing stress test of the three remaining power plants.

According the poll, 61% (not 68%) of the Green voters say to keep nuclear temporarily, while 7% of the Green voters say they want to keep it on a long-term basis.

What's "Schadenfreude" in English? 🤣

Btw, when I once used the preposition "subject to" in a post of mine, MAE's ally PUTP asked me what that expression is supposed to mean, and that I ought to improve my nOn-UnDeRsTaNdAbLe PrOsE™ instead of making up neologisms.