“I’m BACK. I’m not as back as the Trump folks; they’re SO back. I’m just back.”
The senator from Kentucky is on fine form. Put the mince pies on to warm and read the whole thread.
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“I’m BACK. I’m not as back as the Trump folks; they’re SO back. I’m just back.” The senator from Kentucky is on fine form. Put the mince pies on to warm and read the whole thread. A writer going by the name “Gurwinder” produces a popular Substack blog. In the following piece Gurwinder writes thoughtfully about the experience of discovering that one of his fans was a cold-blooded murderer: “The Riddle of Luigi Mangione: My interactions with the alleged CEO assassin” Quote:
(Emphasis added by me, although Gurwinder himself has chosen to highlight this passage.) A German man named Stefan Niehoff used a parody of a shampoo advertisement to put forward the view on Twitter that Germany’s Minister of Economic Affairs and Climate Action, Robert Habeck, was a moron – or a “Schwachkopf” in the original German. That did not please Mr Habeck. As has become customary for German government ministers since the Covid pandemic, he decided to retaliate against an ordinary citizen who had mocked him by filing a criminal complaint against Mr Niehoff for “hate crime”, and arranging for two cops to turn up at the latter’s house at six fifteen one morning. Many such incidents of repression in Germany have been chronicled by the German blogger “Eugyppius”. In his latest article, simply titled “Schwachkopf”, Eugyppius writes,
Even in Germany as it now is, on its own that attempt to bring the criminal law down on someone for insulting a politician might have provoked enough ridicule to deter Mr Habeck from proceeding. But Habeck had another card up his sleeve – or rather, his membership of the ruling class gave him the power to keep turning over cards until he found one he could use. In the course of the trawl through Niehoff’s Twitter history that Mr Habeck got his friends in the police to carry out in support of his hate crime prosecution, some bright spark turned up something that they could twist against Niehoff in the fashion of the American media talking about Donald Trump. Some time before calling Mr Habeck a “Schwachkopf”, Stefan Niehoff had posted another tweet, this time in opposition to a boycott by left-wingers of the dairy brand Müller. Niehoff posted a pair of pictures of stickers plastered over supermarket shelves that urged people not to buy Müller products, juxtaposed against a historical photo from the Nazi era showing a man in SS or SA uniform holding a placard with the words “Germans, do not buy from Jews!”. Niehoff gave the whole group of photos the caption “We’ve seen it all before!”. Do you think that Mr Niehoff’s use of a picture of a Nazi in that tweet demonstrated that he (a) did, or (b) did not admire the Nazis? Any normal person would say (b). I have no doubt that the German authorities know perfectly well that Niehoff’s tweet was anti-Nazi. But they could suck up to Habeck and make his charges look less moronic by pretending to think (a). So that’s what they did. They announced that they were not just investigating Niehoff for insulting a member of the government, but also for incitement. Anti-semitic incitement. As Eugyppius writes,
There is an amusing silver lining to this dark cloud of moronic malice. Click on the link to the word “Schwachkopf” above to find out what it is. Many conservative commentators have hailed Donald Trump’s victory in the recent election as a “landslide”. It would appear – not all the votes have been counted yet – up your game, yanks! – that he will get 50% v 48% of the popular vote and 312 v 226 (58% v 42%) of the electoral college vote. For comparison, in 1924 Calvin Coolidge got 54% of the vote and 72% of the electoral college although he may have been aided by the presence of a third-party candidate. Rather puts a damper on things. Not least because Trump’s opponent, Kamala Harris, has to be the worst candidate I have ever seen: cowardly, inarticulate, trivial, vacuous. She couldn’t even decide if she was the continuity candidate or the change candidate. I really do struggle to think of somebody worse. McGovern ’72? Carter ’80? So, how come Harris did as well as she did? The communist media certainly helped. By the way how did the media get so communist in freedom-loving America with a free market in media? Is it something to do with the “Fairness” Doctrine? But there is also academe once an incubator of intellectual curiosity, now a factory for the production of brain-dead communists. How did that happen in free-market America with a free market in education? We would also have to look at big-government programmes like pensions and healthcare which give a powerful incentive for people to vote for high-spending candidates. And the Democrats were adept at using the abortion issue. The truth of the matter is that if the Democrats had put up an only slightly more plausible candidate than Harris they would have won. They might even have won fair and square. I hope the people who Trump will be appointing to senior positions in the coming weeks are aware of this and will be focused on evening up the odds. By the way, seeing as the 1924 election came up – entirely by chance you understand – here’s a little quiz for you. There were three candidates that year: Calvin Coolidge (R); John Davis (D) and Robert LaFolette (communist). Which of them said this:
Answer below the fold. “Why has the American center right disappeared from the ballot box?” asks Jan-Werner Müller in the Guardian. Along the way, he takes a minute to say this about Ronald Reagan:
This line of thinking seems odd. Sixteen years had gone by between the murder of the civil rights activists – almost certainly a crime carried out by Democrats – and Reagan launching the Republican campaign at a place nearby. Evidently Professor Müller thinks that a place where a crime occurred must remain off-limits for political activity for longer than sixteen years, lest having a campaign event there be taken as endorsement of the crime. If one took seriously the argument made by Tim Walz and Hillary Clinton that the infamous pro-Nazi German-American Bund rally in Madison Square Garden in 1939 meant that Trump’s rally in the same venue in 2024 was tainted by co-location, then the time for which a place must not be used for political activity after a crime or extremist political event would be at least 85 years. This would rule out almost all of America. Good thing the limit only seems to apply to Republicans. Update: having written the post above, I found that the point I wanted to make today had already been made far better in 2011 by David Kopel, writing in the Volokh Conspiracy website (now at Reason magazine): “Reagan’s infamous speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi”. How to tell if the people in Europe making predictions of doom if Trump wins actually believe what they have been saying: Europeans defence expenditures go to 4%+ (i.e. Polish levels) within the next few months. Otherwise it’s just so much verbal flatulence. If Trump does indeed abandon Ukraine and tries to force a de facto surrender of occupied territories on them, and Europe still does not rapidly ramp up defence expenditure, then maybe Trump and the USA was never the problem. “Donald Trump closes in on victory with two crucial swing-state wins”, reports the Guardian. I am glad that lawfare and censorship did not prove to be winning tactics. “Elderly litter picker who voluntarily cleans up local area fined for forgetting walking stick”, the Telegraph reports.
And this is typical:
In the end Walsall Council did rescind the fine, although the story does not say whether Mr Davies ever got his walking stick back. Some aspects of this story reminded me of the raid a few days ago by multiple agents of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation on Mark and Daniela Longo’s home, which ended with the authorities killing a pet squirrel and raccoon. Why have officials in English-speaking countries become so sluggish in pursuing criminals but so dogged in the pursuit of harmless people? There has always been some incentive for cops and officials to go after someone who will not resist in preference to going after a criminal who might stab them, but why has it got so much worse in recent years? Perhaps it is because the number of bureaucrats has so multiplied that responsibility for a process is always divided. Someone tweeting under the name of “Lyndon Baines Johnson”, a supporter of Kamala Harris, explains how he would like a Harris administration to deal with technological innovators:
For all his grievous faults, the actual LBJ would have known how to describe that proposal in a few choice words. He wanted the Apollo program to succeed. I was just old enough to read the blue sign bearing the word “POLICE” – and I thought my parents had gone mad. We were on a family walk, going past the local police station when, to my horror, my parents stopped. They stopped walking and stood outside the police station looking at the posters and casually talking about grown-up things. Didn’t they realise the peril we were in? Didn’t they understand that at any moment the door could be flung open and policemen could come rushing out to arrest us and drag us off to the cells? Well, time went by and eventually my seven year-old self was able to chuckle at the foolish worries of six and a half. I realised that I had misunderstood what was being depicted in a fragment of Dixon of Dock Green that I had glimpsed despite it being on after my official bedtime. I came to understand that, whatever might have been the case in the time of King Herod or Henry VIII, that sort of thing didn’t happen nowadays. The authorities in modern, civilised countries do not randomly decide to ruin the lives of ordinary people. The young couple who owned Peanut the squirrel and Fred the raccoon probably assumed the same thing.
The alternative possibility – that I was right to be fearful standing outside the police station all those years ago – is not pleasant to contemplate. As a twitter user called “Mason” said,
In case you’re wondering, the apostrophe in the title is not a contraction for “is”. It marks the possessive and refers to the large amount of garbage in Puerto Rico. Apparently Puerto Rico’s landfill sites are overflowing, and this has been recognised as an environmental problem for years. It would be amusing to do a whole post about the deficiencies of waste disposal in an unincorporated territory of the United States without ever mentioning what brought the subject to the forefront of my mind. I seek to amuse, so that is what I am going to do, although readers from the future who seek context might like to click on one or two of the names to which I link below. I did a quick internet search for articles containing reference to “Puerto Rico” and “trash” or “garbage”, but containing no reference to “Hinchcliffe” or “Trump” or “Biden”. Here are some news reports from the last few years that demonstrate that Puerto Rico’s garbage problem is not new: Trash Crisis Leaves Puerto Rico Near ‘the Brink’ – Global Press Journal, February 16th 2021. Puerto Rico Landfills: Is the Problem Around Capacity or Noncompliance? – Waste360, August 7th 2019. An island littered with trash: How Maria highlighted Puerto Rico’s poor waste management. Accuweather, 29th March, 2018 (“Maria” is a reference to Hurricane Maria.) The following quite lengthy report was apparently published just today. I admire them for resisting the temptation to bring politics into it: Puerto Rico Trash Problem: Understanding the Crisis and Working Toward Solutions – The Environmental Blog, October 30th 2024. |
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