Ugh your preachy MP sounds like an idiot, sad to hear that.

Exactly. Let’s refuse to reduce the Jewish community to the pro-israeli shills. The Zionists shouldn’t be handed out a monopoly on Jewishness. Prominent critics of Israeli crimes are themselves Jewish Canadians. In fact, soon we might have one of them, the unabashedly outspoken Avi Lewis, leading the federal NDP.

I don’t care about “everywhere”. I care about cities where most of the cycling happens.

Her comments were not antisemitic and do not encourage violent reprisals against the Jewish community.

This whole discussion is a distraction. The real solution is to have proper cycling infrastructure. You don’t need to reinterpret road signs if bikes have their own signs in their own protected lanes and protected crossings.

Give me cycling infrastructure of comparable quality to car infrastructure and we got a deal.

The Poilievre far right wing of the Conservatives would have let people die or have their lives destroyed. Blood for the Blood Economy God. I mean we are talking about the people who were cheering on the Convoy assholes.

I wonder what was going on in the world between 2020 and 2022…

src: https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/canada/national-government-debt

The sacrifices are not the insane amounts of defense spending and fossil fuel subsidies I assume.

Debt to do what. That’s the key. If we pay 1B/w to finance debt that was used to invest on stuff that is generating 1.1B/w, we have a net positive ROI. It’s the ROI that matters, not the financing cost.

Look, like I repeated multiple times in this discussion, nobody is saying Germany is a totalitarian state. There are worrying signs. I get that in your immediate experience those might not be there. But lived experience is not a substitute for structural analysis. The article is not saying that they are pervasive, but that they are becoming more common and that’s alarming.

We are on the same side here: the side that wants Germany to be a free and democratic country. Sounding an alarm should not be cause for defensiveness but for vigilance.

I’m a dual EU-Canadian citizen. Canada is not an authoritarian country. However in the past few years, more and more, provincial governments are using a constitutional trick called the Notwithstanding Clause to push various political agendas without having to care about judicial oversight. If someone rings the alarm that this is an authoritarian tendency, a slippery slope that could fundamentally erode our rights as Canadians, should I start calling them anti-Canadian propagandists? Or should I take stock and weigh the danger and maybe use my position as a citizen of a democracy to make noise about it?

«The price of liberty is eternal vigilance» because democracies don’t fail overnight. They erode at the margins, starting with the people it is easiest to vilify. The time to speak up is not when repression becomes universal, but when it becomes noticeable at all.

What makes things worse is that such posts critical of Germany’s and Europe’s stance on rights violations often come from accounts praising China, Russia, and other autocracies for their politics. This is the case also here.

This is a blatant ad hominem attack here. I’m a bit flabbergasted at this kind of unfounded vitriol and smear, presented in such a passive aggressive manner. What are your receipts?

a cheap propaganda piece published via Substack

Zeteo is a real new media organization, with “Mostly Factual” rating on MBFC, only because of the reviewer’s perception that it does “one-sided reporting that can sometimes lack opposing counterpoints”, without any failed fact checks in its history. Their choice of publishing platform is irrelevant: as far as I can see in the sidebar, !europe@feddit.org does not have a rule about Substack, this is not !world@lemmy.world.

written by a person who runs a YT channel called “Mad in Germany.” This person has no idea what is going on in Germany.

Wrong: “James Jackson is a freelance reporter and broadcaster based in Berlin and covering news, business and culture in Germany and Central Eastern Europe for publications like the BBC, Sunday Times, Time Magazine and others. A former trainee at Deutsche Welle, he produced an award-winning documentary about the trans history of Berlin and is a Poland fellow of the International Journalist Programme.” That bio definitely does not scream “has no idea what is going on in Germany”. Source: https://www.madingermany.org/about

I don’t understand why such a post is not deleted.

So, first you call me a bootlicker of autocracies, then you ask for the post to be deleted. You are creating an extremely toxic discussion and at this point, I’m pretty sure you’ve broken Rule 3 of the community.

Beyond that, for what it’s worth: Your Ai Weiwei point also misses the point. A private magazine can decline to publish, but spiking a commissioned piece for its political content is still evidence of a chilling climate. The article’s core claims are about escalating repression, police violence at protests, and the narrowing of acceptable speech. These are contestable on facts, not on the author’s YouTube channel. If you think the claims are false, show counter-evidence on policing, on protest bans, on international warnings, and on the treatment of Palestine-solidarity voices.

Further, you are choosing to double down on your smear precisely in response to a comment where I very very clearly say “I agree, absolutely agree, that Germany has not crossed the line yet, but the line is getting closer, and pretending the raising of the alarm is the problem is exactly how democracies sleepwalk into disaster.”

Do you have anything to contribute beyond toxicity, smears and paranoia?

I hear you, and nobody is claiming Germany is already living under a totalitarian police state. Yet pretending the article says dissenters are immediately jailed is a misread, precisely the misrepresentation you’re accusing me of.

The article is documenting escalating repression, police violence against elected officials, chilling of speech, and a political culture that treats Palestine solidarity as criminal suspicion by default. You can choose to read it as hysteria, or you take the rise of authoritarianism world-wide actually seriously and read it as a useful warning.

Look at how UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese was smeared, disinvited from institutions, and treated as an existential threat simply for applying international law. That pattern should disturb anyone who cares about democratic norms.

And when people like @hendrik@palaver.p3x.de and @JensSpahnpasta@feddit.org and @Hotznplotzn@lemmy.sdf.org jump in all over this thread and call critical journalism “propaganda” and accuse me of “scrapping the web for negative news to spread [my] propaganda”, it kind of confirms the point, doesn’t it? Criticism of state violence is instantly pathologized and viewed with suspicion. If this is what’s happening on fucking …lemmy, I honestly am a bit uncomfortable about what it means for mainstream discourse in the country! And yes, I agree, absolutely agree, that Germany has not crossed the line yet, but the line is getting closer, and pretending the raising of the alarm is the problem is exactly how democracies sleepwalk into disaster.

“The European Union should realise that Israel […] should be treated fairly”

Absolutely, 100% agree. Israel should be treated fairly, with entirely in accordance and respect to international treaties, international law, without double standards and without prejudice. You do the crime, your do the time, nothing less nothing more.

Now, where were we, the ICJ has ruled the occupation illegal and the system imposed as apartheid, has imposed provisional measures and is considering a genocide case. Oh and the ICC has some arrest warrants pending.

Fair is fair motherfuckers.

Lemmy Americans when the rest of the world warns them about authoritarian tendencies in their political system: “yea we know it sucks”.

Lemmy Germans when the rest of the world warns them about authoritarian tendencies in their political system: “you must be the victim of propaganda”.

One can’t be a Greek millenial and not have some idea.

I find problematic the framing of “scraping the internet for negative news to spread propaganda”. It is deeply bad faith and conspiratorial.

What do you mean “my rant here”? The text above is a reproduction of the paywalled article, not my composition.

I like you ask in hypotheticals.

Resist now.

Not properly fascist of course, but some very disturbing authoritarian tendencies have surfaced. It would be inconceivable until a few years ago that UN human rights experts would be wagging their finger at the Federal Republic of Germany. This is not normal.