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?
This line of analysis really highlights just how incompetent Trump is at being fascist.
I’ve got to disagree. This isn’t incompetence, its a deliberate strategy. One candidate plays the Nice Polite Republican and the other whips the base.
Traditionally, you get your aw shucks Good’ole’Boy on the front of the ticket - your Bush, your McCain, your Romney - and the nail-eating red meat psychopath as VP - Cheney / Palin / Ryan. In this particular election, Trump’s press is so bad that Vance looks sane by comparison. And the debate was an opportunity to really layer the mask on thick to calm the rubs into thinking he’s the normal one.
any one of the more competent fascists could potentially take his place
Just look at the primary ballot. Your options ranged from the vindictive culture-war sadists DeSantis and Christie to the neocon forever war hawks Hailey and Scott, with a few paleocons and grifters sprinkled in the margins.
Then there’s the ones who didn’t run - Abbot and Cruz down in Texas are both gunning for the Presidency in 2028. All these people suck.
I just don’t see anyone on the Dem side of the aisle who is going to do better than Hilary did in 2016, once Trump is off the stage.
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.
That rather speaks for banning the AfD though.
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.
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.
Or live in Houston and the governor can just strip your School Board of power, then install an unelected bureaucrat to loot the school treasury.
Having said that, there’s nothing preventing this status quo from changing in the future
There’s substantial existing industrial infrastructure that makes a kilowatt of new petroleum energy easier to produce than a kilowatt of renewable energy. But that’s a result of economic policies. Change the policies and you change the math.
It appears we are, both intentionally and inadvertently, slowly stacking the deck in favor of renewables.
The reward of controlling the main global reserve currency comes with the responsibility of not involving it in undue threats.
One might argue the reverse. The ability to hold the rest of the world hostage enables a nation to compel adoption of their domestic currency as the global reserve.
Ok, but why do all the major petroleum producers trade in USD?
Because the US cut a deal with the Saudis during the '71-'73 trade negotiations under Nixon, fixing the price of Saudi light sweet crude to USD. This helped backstop the falling value of the dollar after the official decoupling of USD from gold in 1971.
They use it because it’s stable, ubiquitous, and almost always accepted
The British Pound, the Swiss Franc, the Russian Ruble… even the Japanese Yen could have easily stood in for the US Dollar at the time. These were widely traded and regionally ubiquitous thanks to the international trade of the era. But it was the US with military bases scattered all over North Africa and the Middle East in the wake of WW2. And they were the post-WW2 industrial sector with the highest demand, in no small part thanks to US automotive industrial expansion.
If it’s not stable or ubiquitous anymore due to these sorts of sanctions, why would the petrol producers keep using it?
To access US financial markets, which have eclipsed the rest of the 20th century global banking powers. If you need USD to trade on the NYSE or to buy up US real estate or purchase US Treasuries, might as well trade oil. Also, we (in many ways literally) have a gun to the heads of Mid Eastern leaders. Just ask Saddam.
He wouldn’t be the first person to employ tariffs in order to encourage domestic development. A big part of the American Revolution revolved around northern industrial towns fighting for protectionist laws to discourage UK dumping their industrial surplus into colonial markets. Pennsylvania iron-mongers were some of the fiercest opponents of the British merchantalist system.
Prior to FDR, the primary method of US tax collection was tariffs on imports. And a big reason the policy ended was due to Europeans immolating all their industrial capital across two World Wars.
Like Stephen Miller is sitting on some underwater shares of US mining companies or whatever.
These goons are rarely so far-sighted. But I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s simply taking money up front from domestic lobbyists in the extraction industry. A big pivot to domestic fracking happened thanks to Bush/Obama/Trump era fossil fuel companies deluging state and national legislatures and governors with contributions to open up more public land for drilling.
It’s like he doesn’t realize that the US dollar is the world reserve because of the stability and reliability of it.
I mean, its the World Reserve Currency because the world runs on Petroleum and the major petroleum producers all trade in dollars. One of the big threats to USD dominance is renewable energy, as you don’t need to pay a Saudi in paper issued by the US Mint in order to power your house or run your car.
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?
Ublock does such a good job at blocking the old janky torrent sites, especially compared to the increasingly aggressive and intrusive new shit.