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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: March 24th, 2022

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  • And yet every self-declared pro-Zionist I’ve talked to says Zionism is just the right of the state of Israel to exist, and so being anti-Zionist is being for the destruction of the state, and being for the destruction of the state is being for the death or dispossession of every person in the state.

    I think the German state is probably more inclined to interpret discussion of Zionism the way the pro-Zionists I’ve spoken to have describe the term.

    I think the historical description in the text that you link is accurate, but if you’re trying to argue that Germans should be able to critique Zionism however they want because of that, it’s like literally getting into an argument about the literal meaning of literally with people who use literally to mean figuratively, but instead of a random teenager or twee linguistic descriptivist, you are arguing with the state.



  • Here’s how Firefox translates what I see to be the relevant parts from German to English:

    “The Ministry of the Interior used a legal trick by declaring the platform not as a medium, but as an association. All investigations against allegedly involved persons, including because of the formation of a criminal association, were suspended or went into the sand. At the time, there was criticism from different sides against linksunten.indymedia.org.”

    “The accused is to have published an article on the homepage of the aforementioned radio station, which contains a link of an archive of the forbidden association “left-unten.indymedia”. The association “linksunten.indymedia” was banned and dissolved with the disposition of the Federal Minister of the Interior of 14.08.2017, since the purpose and activities of the association contravened the criminal laws and was directed against constitutional order.”

    I mean translations get a little funky but I’m reading this as saying that this office and two private homes were raided because someone posted a link to an archive of an indymedia website which was declared to be a criminal organization.


  • So here’s an article about a raid on an environmentalist group in Germany called Last Generation: https://earth.org/last-generation-activists/

    There’s a link to the German language statement from the police which is quite readable after translation, and of course the article itself describes the general activities that they were engaged in and accused of.

    Of the activities that they were accused of, it does seem in line with prior environmental activist groups like Extinction Rebellion, Greenpeace, and Earth First!

    As for what laws get enforced by a website, that is going to depend on jurisdiction. For example, the USA has section 230 of the DMCA, which holds that website operators are not responsible for user content with the exception of content accused of violating copyright within certain parameters. Doesn’t mean they won’t raid your servers, just means you won’t be held legally responsible if they think you were sufficiently responsive to issues when raised.

    At this time I don’t know the specifics of what Germans have to think about to avoid state interference, but it does look like it is more severe than what the US has to do with.




  • Problem I see with price based rather than square footage is that it’s going to vary by location and generation. A human being, or a family even, needs a certain amount of space, and beyond that there is some threshold across which one could say this family or person is undoubtedly taking up more than they actually need.

    For example, how much housing does a family of 5 people reasonably expect if living a middle class lifestyle in America? I think that’s something that changes generationally and regionally based on income and housing costs, but today I think such a family might expect ideally a house with five bedrooms, two or three baths, a kitchen, dining room, living room, laundry room, maybe also a den or other secondary communal room. I’m not saying all houses should be this big, or shouldn’t be bigger, but that a house about this big could be a fair measuring stick for determining how much square footage a house could reasonably be without the owner-occupant paying property taxes.

    Or it could be based on the number of kitchens. If a house is cut up into apartments as an investment strategy, it has to have more than one kitchen generally speaking.

    For price based limits I just don’t see how you avoid artificial inflation of assessments by governments or planned neglect by owners to keep houses on one side or the other of the threshold. It would also have very different impacts on different markets. And inflation and changes in the market would require whatever threshold you set to be revised fairly regularly or else fade into irrelevance.