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Cake day: July 15th, 2023

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  • It was announced that they all committed “schwere Verbrechen”. That means it’s all felonies and capital crimes. I do characterize people who commit capital crimes as scum, because those are by definition never small misconducts or accidents. Felony convictions for capital crimes need proof of malicious intent. So there really is incredibly little room left to feel bad for the criminals.


  • Why do people fall for these stupid populistic statements?

    We in Germany value human rights. We have some of the most pro-asylum laws and culture in the world. Which is part of the reason right wing parties like the AfD get popular.

    The problem is, not every human is a saint, not even asylum seekers. Some come here without having a valid reason for asylum, because they are not actually persecuted. Others come here with the express intent to criminally exploit our welfare system. There’s lots of reasons to come here, but not all of them warrant asylum. These people should seek to immigrate properly like anybody else and not exploit our hospitality offered to people in need.

    Now, under our previous Merkel government, we welcomed hundreds of thousands of refugees in an unusually short timeframe. Our chronically overworked and slow bureaucracy became even easier to exploit, many could simply wait out time limits on their asylum requests, making them automatically accepted without any check for validity.

    I was an active volunteer helping arriving refugees get accommodated in their assigned first quarters (often old empty barracks, I helped with trips to all kinds of bureaucratic necessities, but also got a central free Wi-Fi set up for everyone to use and stuff like that), and funnily enough the most vivid calls for stricter handling of asylum requests and punishments for rule-breakers came from all the legitimate refugees: those were some of the most decent people, and they hated being associated by their status with any criminal refugees. The assigned building security and police quickly learned that they actually had to be swift in picking up fresh offenders, before street justice would be applied by their “fellow” refugees.

    In short: We have laws and we try to follow, them. It’s not always easy.

    Also, asylum is different from immigration, I feel many people forget that. If conditions in your place of origin have improved, you are expected to leave. Asylum is inherently temporary, contrary to migration. And if you violate the trust and resources your host nation has given you, you should suffer legal consequences, just like any regular citizen. Committing hard felony crimes is obviously not a nice way to repay that trust, and as consequence we ask you to leave. If you refuse to do so in a (very) sufficient timeframe, we can use it executive power (police) to force you.

    Last but not least… Each of these criminals even got 1000€ cash upon exiting the plane in their home country, just to ensure they have zero risk of having to live in inhuman conditions while they get reacquainted in their home society ( e.g. get an apartment and a job). Because that risk alone would be reason enough to make even the worst terrorist ineligible for deportation. Because it’s a basic human right to not have to live in extreme poverty and/or hunger.

    I think that’s pretty much the opposite of “shitting on human rights” and definitely not what I expect many other nations would do with such foreign felons.


  • I find it amusing that you believe German bureaucracy to be versatile and efficient enough to be able to be steered so quickly by spontaneous political will.

    No, deportations are rare because we take asylum rights as a basic human right extremely seriously and there are an unbelievable amount of reasons a deportation can be called off. Each of these deportations takes months, if not years of preparation by the interior ministry ( executive), leading to lots of legal consultations and usually legal battles in court due to appeals, intense diplomatic talks with the recipient country ( especially in this case, because Germany refuses direct diplomatic ties with the Taliban and Qatar had to play middle -man) and only then the actual forced deportation itself can be tactically planned and organized. And there’s tons of very specific rules, even for how and when police may or may not pick up a deportee during the night and if/what charter flights can be used.

    So definitely no spontaneous politicking. The change in policy to start enforcing existing extradition orders more rigorously started years ago when the current government got elected. It’s a very slow and arduous process still.


  • Just a small correction: the involved German states did not “make it a point to hide” the individual crimes from being published. Instead this happens because we in Germany place a comparably very high value on privacy. And yes, even criminal scum gets theirs protected by neither naming them nor their crimes. Even convicted criminals’ names are never published on principle unless they have become public figures through other means anyway.

    And the crimes were not detailed because knowing the specific combinations of crimes and sentences would make it too easy to identify them, given there’s only 28 of them.

    The idea of protecting privacy so much is that by having completed their sentences, they should have the same opportunity as anyone else in life and not be “tarnished” forever.


  • It’s is important to understand what law is used for these rulings.

    Germany limits free speech by putting penalties on speech that calls for others to commit crimes. This is rarely actually enforced by police or judges when it is about minor things or clearly satirical/parody usage. On the other hand, when it’s clearly malicious intent and for severe crimes, there’s little tolerance.

    Most commonly this happens when people publicly call for violent regime changes (attacking democratic/republican or feudal constitutional principles) or calling for violence against basic human rights, e.g. supporting genocide, deportations of specific groups, etc…

    This actually serves as a strong base which is mostly used to combat domestic terrorism and unconstitutional organizations such as far right parties ( see dissolution of NPD).

    Calling for support of an officially recognized terrorist organization is a surefire way to get into trouble. Hamas is, as in many countries, recognized as such by Germany. The judge now based their ruling on the belief that the chant is “clearly and obviously used to support Hamas” and as such supports terrorism.

    What the article above does not tell: This ruling is incredibly controversial in Germany, and it is actually very likely to be overturned in a higher court. There even are precedent rulings of the same chant with entirely different ruling outcomes.

    It really saddens me to see so many clearly well-meaning left-oriented people on Lemmy get outraged so easily without being informed. If you lack info, I feel such news should be approached with cautious neutrality until more info is gathered and an opinion is formed and voiced.

    Yes, it’s fine to dislike this ruling and voice such an opinion. But calling Germany fascist or “freedom of speech is dead in Germany” based on such an individual event is just comically far from the truth.

    We have checks and balances in Germany. Our system is not perfect, but whose is, and I firmly believe it’s still better than most out there.

    Germany has no infinite freedom of speech, but I also firmly believe that being intolerant of intolerance is absolutely vital for a robust liberal society. So I’m fine with deeply disruptive and simply vile inciting speech being treated as criminal.




  • Everyone wants cheap cars, but that’s not what this is about. This is about fair and competitive markets and products.

    China heavily subsidizes their car industry. Actually everyone had been doing that, but currently China is doing it more.

    Subsidies become a problem when they don’t serve to make necessities affordable in-country, but are used to boost sales in foreign countries, while hurting their local industry.

    Now you might conclude that “why don’t we just subsidize or own manufacturers more as well so cars get as cheap as China’s?”

    Well, where do you think the money for subsidies comes from? Taxes. So in the end, it’s just another scheme to make the general public pay for things that only part of the population needs, and it reduces pressure on manufacturers to innovate, leading to stale products. Which is a big reason why Western car companies are not competitive: the West has done exactly what China is doing now. We have subsidized the car industry massively in order to push or products into the global market. Those subsidies were considered worth it, because it created a trade surplus, effectively meaning wealth is transferred from the global market to mostly the car industry leaders, and a bit of it trickling down to workers as well.

    After a while, the subsidies lead to corruption, inefficiency and lack of innovation, and the bubble bursts. That’s how you get histories like Detroit. Equivalents exist in almost any Western country.

    A means to protect against subsidized products ruining the local markets is to impose tarrifs. The US has many of those, not only against China, but also against EU companies, especially in the car market. See chicken tax. American car manufacturers were so far behind after decades of heavy subsidies they couldn’t even compete with European cars ( and apparently still can’t, given that the chicken tax and similar tariffs still exist). In the end, tariffs run the same risk as subsidies: over time, a protected market means the industry can get lazy and keep selling the same, because competition is forced out of the market. Tariffs and subsidies are never a viable long term solution. Both can only serve strategic purposes: either providing actual essentials to ones population or nurture change ( eg subsidized regenerative energy build up) that only exist for a limited time. Tarrifs can be used to protect strategically important industry: e.g. military or technological cutting edge tech where you don’t mind paying extra for the privilege of maintaining in-country know how and manufacturing abilities.


  • What’s your source on the reverify thing? I use matrix a lot, and this hasn’t been an issue I ever experienced anymore since they introduced cross-signing a couple years ago.

    Same goes for the common clients such as element. It has been clunky in the past, but after the past major overhauls ( also years ago now) everything has been silky smooth for me, if not better than others. The one thing left I prefer from Signal is the one-time photo share.

    Matrix is great, clients are great too, only the server part still is annoyingly complicated and messy. Would only recommend that for tinkerers, on that case it’s a great path to learning about the complexity of addressing lots of security concerns that others gloss over.

    Edit: to add - there’s a reason why the French government and the German military decided to build their secure internal IM infrastructure on Matrix. Obviously they are hosting their own private network, but if the concept is good enough for European government and military, it is an indicator for quality especially in terms of security and privacy.





  • That is so utterly wrong. It all depends on the cause of death. Especially sudden traumatic deaths, such as choking or drowning, where the rest of the body was little impaired, have crazy high recovery chances if immediate and persistent CPR is applied.

    And even on chronically I’ll patients, e.g. the commonly thought of cholesterol caused infarction and subsequent heart attack has a good chance to recover. Modern medicine is amazing!

    But in most cases, you simply won’t know in the moment why somebody dies. And does it matter? You can make assumptions, but you could be totally wrong. So leave that part to the EMTs and doctors. Your job as a human in that moment is to give someone the best chance they will get to experience more life.

    In all cases the chances of survival and recovery sink with literally every second, which is why it can be so frustrating to see people too scared or cynical to even try. What are you afraid of? You can’t make em any more dead. And I truly hope anyone would be willing to “waste” the time and effort to at least try if I suddenly died. Even if your CPR is too weak, too strong ( yes, also possible, albeit very rare), too slow or too fast: the by far worst CPR is the one not given at all.

    And I can promise you this: you will never regret having attempted to do CPR, even if there is no resuscitation.


  • If my post came across as a comparison, it was not meant to. Of course the average scale and intensity would be higher in occupied territories.

    I just wanted to highlight that a vast majority of Germans have both the knowledge of the terror their ancestors committed due to the schools’ focus on keeping every new generation well educated on it, while combining it with the traumas their own family or communities experienced.

    This combines into a fairly strong anti fascist society.

    Yes, we have neo nazis and all other flavors of right wing extremists, but they have much less real power than some international media reporting might make you think. Exactly because the majority of society is sensitive to this and does rise against it in numbers.

    Even before the current wave, there never was a right wing demonstration or rally that wasn’t accompanied by a liberal counter rally with at least a hundred times their number. And even then those weren’t left wing extremists or other political radicals in the majority. Most of these types of rallies have a large number of very boring participants, people that are close to apolitical otherwise.

    Regarding AfD: remember it’s not an openly fascist party, unlike the previously existing NPD, which is now forbidden. AfD claims to be a neo conservative party, a bit further right than the big CDU ( which is center-right). And the AfD keeps dancing on this line, in some areas actively pushing out people as soon as their fascist activities become known and turning themselves, while simultaneously following a slightly tamer route. It’s a dangerous and effective way of moving the goal posts of public discourse, especially with no other party effectively engaging their topics. The AfD group revraled to participate in the current nasty discussions is not even a hundred people. I’m confident you’ll find a couple dozen idiots of their scale in every larger city of this world.

    But every time they slip up like this in Germany, they experience massive setbacks.

    It’s still important to recognize their danger and work against them, but Germany is far from lost to their twisted ideology. But media does like to be sensationalistic, even when it has good intentions.

    A US comparison might be how the tea party developed as an offspring of the Republicans, and how they subsequently shifted the entire political landscape, despite them actually only bring a rather small group. So many unthinkable policies that nobody would have even considered worth a discussion are now on the table for actual legislative processes.



  • And getting rid of the unfair preferential terms is good for the EU as a whole, because it will reduce resentment in all other current and potential future member nations.

    Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely believe Brexit hurt everyone in Europe and I can’t wait to welcome UK back into the Union, but make it on equal terms. It’s a very small silver lining to the whole fiasco. I just hope it doesn’t take too long for UK to find a leader string enough to say “I think we made a mistake, we should reapply”. Make a new referendum while the populace still realizes the connection between Brexit and the current misery before some populist schmuck finds a new scapegoat.


  • I do. I do not understand why this tiny delivery bears mentioning compared to all the other, much larger deliveries.

    And I want to highlight how little all the billions of aid will mean if the West now just stops delivering, simply because the public is bored of the war. War is expensive, but sometimes there’s no alternative. And cynical at it may be, supporting a proxy to fight for you on their ground is still hell of a lot cheaper than your own people dying on your soil.



  • Almost all western leaders have condemned Israel blocking vital supplies and the forced indiscriminate expulsion of civilians from north Gaza, as far as I know. Just like they condemn the atrocities of indiscriminate murder and kidnapping of civilians committed by Hamas. International aid is still being sent to Palestine, except where Israel blocks it. And the international community rightfully complains that this blockade is not in accordance with humanitarian laws and applies diplomatic pressure to get it through.

    “The West” is neither accepting Israels logic blindly, nor does it excuse Hamas transgressions. But it mostly does it with words for fear of escalation. This also applies to nearby Arabian countries, by the way. Egypt refuses to accept Palestinian refugees for fear of Hamas establishing a base in Egypt Sinai and firing rockets from there, which would risk a much larger conflict. Nobody except Hamas, Hisbollah and Iran - and Russia, because it distracts from Ukraine - wants the conflict to escalate.


  • Even today, it’s often the smallest common denominator in large scale hardened enterprise environments. Absolutely zero chance of getting vscode or anything outside of the bare RHEL/SUSE packages running for mere convenience reasons on the servers. So we are forced to learn vim and bash scripting on the fly whenever the higher level tools ( config management, CI/CD) fail that - in theory - make direct access completely unnecessary. But that’s not a good reason, it’s more an indication for a badly managed project/environment.

    And no, I’m not an oldie, so I grew up with IDEs being ubiquitous and versatile.

    Advantages of being forced on bare vim/emacs are slim. It’s cumbersome, it’s hard to teach newcomers, syntax highlighting rarely works, etc. Overall efficiency and productivity is very low in environments where people are forced to use them. But yes, as is true with any other tool, the wizards of old can cast amazing shortcut spells and be highly productive. But it’s very tedious and time consuming to learn, and there’s little point in wasting time on it when modern tools are much more accessible and equally flexible.