quink
Banning the party isn’t going to help.
Yes it will. It’ll mean it won’t be standing in elections, and that’s only fair because it’s an anti-democratic party… and it will deprive its members of broad protections afforded to parties and remove a unifying banner for them.
Banning anti-democratic institutions in a democracy is not only justified, it is conducive to the democracy’s survival. It lifts the bar for getting rid of democracy to be equivalent to not winning in an election but by establishing a second monopoly on violence, a far greater threshold and attempts at which are more straightforward to deter, prosecute and stamp out than being within every TikTok user’s first few swipes.
There’s nothing that prevents AfD voters from going to other parties, there’s plenty, or to voice their concerns in a new party that can be a legitimate part of the democratic system. Changing parties isn’t like banning a religion or a creed or a race, a party is hardly more than just a banner, the power of which can change between and during elections, at any time, through a simple act of the mind. Banning the party will absolutely help.
It sends a good message. It doesn’t send a message of wanting the silence the concerns of those who voted for the AfD in anything but the short term, it sends the message of ‘we hear you, but try again… a bit less fascist-y please’.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzGimN2H2oQ as written by Howard Goodall, 1:06 in particular is a moment I live for.
I’m thinking he might be happier with Noridian, ZephyrOS, Sylvanix, or AetherForge.
I myself have been trying neoNova, specTRAos, and VortexLinux and they’re all pretty good.
…
All of these are made up, I think, I just can’t cope with everybody and their dog still rolling their own distros (and alternatives to GNOME 3, thank goodness for KDE), even after 25 years of observing it happen over and over again.
Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
Zawinski’s Law.
Not quite the same, but you’ll be prying my imported 2004 Estima from my cold dead hands.
The whole thing read to me like a Seinfeld episode - Kramer accidentally kills a whale off the coast of New York, and with the show having made dozens of Kennedy references, hearing of a Kennedy dumping a bear in Central Park would fit right in.
So this doesn’t feel even like an own to anyone, more like a parody, a comedy. And in the context of it actually happening 1. in the setting of probably the most famous one, 2. with a character from the exact family they’ve referenced many times over and 3. with the same type of bizarre things happening to wildlife one of which has been one of the most famous episodes.
To me, as a lib, it feels like the best Seinfeld/Curb Your Enthusiasm episode that’s never been written.
Edit: Now that I think about it, the story even came out because he told it to Roseanne Barr, writer of most popular sitcom just prior to Seinfeld, notwithstanding her interminable slide, with her just staring at him incredulously throughout, the whole thing feeling like a Curb Your Enthusiasm scene. Honestly, at this point Larry David is definitely thinking to himself that he could never have written anything this Larry David.
Edit 2: I completely forgot that his, Larry David’s, wife in Curb Your Enthusiasm is RFK Jr.'s actual wife. At this point I’m about 80% sure that multiple Seinfeld and/or Curb episodes were actually just Kennedy misadventures in disguise.
Nintendo wound up sending the guy an unopened SNES
Of course they did, it says ‘92’, which clearly meant an expiry in 2092 starting as of, I don’t know, about the year 2000.
Germany is being interpreted as a disaster, but the only hard right party is the AfD and they’re up around 5% it looks like… and there are 13 other parties about to represent Germany in the EU parliament. France is looking terrible though, at least the RN has at least pretended to cut off ties to the AfD. And the equivalent of the CDU/CSU in France is near death, so it’s not like voters in the middle had anywhere to go other than Macron or RN.
Austria could have gone worse, despite the FPÖ up. In Germany you have this kind of cordon sanitaire, the other parties have an agreement of sorts to never cooperate with the AfD, the CDU/CSU has been a bit flimsy on that though.
Meanwhile in Austria, the FPÖ has been around forever and used to represent some liberal politics way back when so they didn’t have that cordon sanitaire, including coalition governments between the ÖVP (the equivalent of the CDU/CSU but imbroiled somehow in more political turmoil in recent years) and FPÖ on numerous occasions. And what happened in this election is that basically three seats went from the ÖVP straight to the FPÖ.
Basically Austrian representation in the EU probably got marginally worse for all it matters, but in turn the CDU/CSU saw that any cooperation with the AfD would just lead to voters of theirs just going to the AfD in the long run, strengthening the case for a cordon sanitaire.
At least I hope that’s how they’ll interpret it. The other Austrian shift was one from the Greens to the heavily pro-EU NEOS, as much as I’ll disagree on some of their domestic policies when it comes to their EU politics they’re a bit more palatable.