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The pervasive belief in the eternal progress of mankind has been a crucial, driving element of Western liberalism for generations. It is starting to break down.
The most powerful force in Western politics today is a cultural virus that is always chewing away at our instincts for self-preservation. It is why millions of people support infinity wind turbines and infinity solar panels, even if these make their electricity more expensive and less reliable. It is related to out-group identification and the cultural fetish for victim minorities, and thus explains the popular impulses that permit mass migration. At the broadest level, this force accounts for an important phenomenon in modern politics, whereby millions of people support policies that make their lives objectively worse, while parties responsible for these policies appear utterly immune to their own failures, if they are not actively rewarded for them.
You might call this force “expectant progressivism.” It is the quiet, unstudied belief that things are always getting better, more just, more abundant, more enlightened, more advanced and more human-rightsey. Expectant progressives view the past teleologically, as one massive Whig-historical fable, and they regard their political preferences as investments in moral futures. They aim to put their names on the next brave innovations in social and economic justice while these are still culturally cheap – that is to say, controversial and disputed. Once these innovations become new cornerstones in the liberal consensus, the expectant progressives will be able to cash in on their far-sighted, humanitarian convictions. They will enjoy the privilege of proclaiming that they were, once again, on the right side of history.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
After months of masturbatory freaking out about “the right,” the German government inches towards collapse, as the social democrats realise they’re wildly unpopular and have neither money nor answers
After months of masturbatory freaking out about “the right,” the German government inches towards collapse, as the social democrats realise they’re wildly unpopular and have neither money nor answers
The Süddeutsche Zeitung reports on growing discontent with Chancellor Olaf Scholz in the ranks of his own party.
Since January, German political elites have waged an unceasing “fight against the right.” For weeks at a time, the establishment press would report on little else. We have had freakouts about secret right-wing immigrant deportation plans, we have had freakouts right-wing political violence, we have had freakouts about right-wing fifth-columnists, we have had freakouts about televised political debates and we have had freakouts about right-wing song lyrics. We have had every last kind of freakout you could imagine about the right, all of it promoted by an absolutely deranged media establishment eager to revive pandemic-era hysteria. Then, after all of that screeching and scratching and crying and caterwauling, we had the EU parliamentary elections, and just like that – as if someone had simply flipped a switch – we have stopped freaking out about the right.
As campaign tactics go, the “fight against the right” didn’t work as intended. The point of it, I guess, was to blackmail voters into supporting the social democrats, the Greens and the liberals, by warning them that the alternative was fascism. Nobody bought that, and all three government parties got hammered in the European elections. The latest poll pegs their combined support at 32%.
Now the politicians of these parties are awakening with a pounding post-election hangover, and realising they’ve made a huge mistake. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung reports, “it is dawning on the SPD that they have underestimated the importance of migration and domestic security as political issues.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
German Minister admits ruinous home heating ordinances were merely a “test” to determine “how far society is prepared to go in terms of climate protection”
German Minister admits ruinous home heating ordinances were merely a “test” to determine “how far society is prepared to go in terms of climate protection”
We are governed by crazy lunatics, Part 2436502345.
The Greens really are every inch as crazy as they seem to be.
Climate policies have long been a source of annoyance and exasperation, but they really began to terrify me for the first time with last year’s proposed changes to the Gebäudeenergiegesetz, or the Building Energy Act (GEG). The technocratic wing of the Greens, under Economics Minister Robert Habeck, proposed to mandate that all new heating systems installed after 2024 in Germany use no less than 65% renewable energy. In its original form, the law amounted to a de facto mandate to install heat pumps, and it would’ve entailed catastrophic renovation costs for the owners of many older buildings. The law proved so controversial that even some of the establishment press broke ranks to criticise it; in the end, Habeck had to sacrifice his powerful state secretary Patrick Graichen, and the legislation passed in modified but still pretty terrible form, laden with a wealth of complex subsidies and exceptions.
Yesterday, at a town hall event, somebody asked Habeck about the GEG, and he responded by saying that the first and most ruinous draft of the law was a test, to see how much the people would put up with:
Many of you will remember that we went as far as we could go in the buildings sector – at least that’s what I would say for myself – without risking the complete collapse of climate policies. The debate about the Building Energy Act, that is how we will heat in the future, was honestly a test of how far society is prepared to go in terms of climate protection when it becomes a reality…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The sad farce of German “democracy”
To live in Germany in 2024 is to be lectured constantly about democracy. An endless parade of doubtful personalities – pundits, experts and a lot of very shrill women – appear on the television every night to tell you which parties are democratic, which people are democratic and therefore who enjoys democratic legitimacy. As we have seen, however, the whole concept of democracy is very confusing. Those people and organisations who want to mute free expression and ban political parties are all held to be extremely democratic, while those parties that demand more direct democracy and talk constantly about respecting the popular will are the direct modern equivalent of illiberal antidemocratic fascists.
To make all of this even harder, we are told that the upcoming September elections in Thüringen, Brandenburg and Saxony present a grave threat to democracy. To counteract this threat we have things like the Thüringen Project, where our greatest legal minds are at this very moment brainstorming ways to defend Thuringian democracy from the political preferences of actual voters. Crucially, the very existence of the Thüringen Project means that democracy must still reign supreme in Thüringen. Otherwise, there would be nothing for the democratic police of the Thüringen Project to defend. We therefore need only study Thuringian politics in their present state to gain a better idea of what this mysterious, shape-shifting, elusive phenomenon we call German democracy might be.
We will start at the top. The current Minister President (i.e., governor) of Thüringen is a highly democratic man named Bodo Ramelow:
Ramelow is a member of Die Linke, or the Left Party, which is the direct successor of the Socialist Unity Party (or SED) that used to govern the DDR. That might seem baffling, as the SED and the DDR were anything but democratic…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Leading German politician calls for the state to issue “revocable social media licenses” for the privilege of commenting online
Leading German politician calls for the state to issue “revocable social media licenses” for the privilege of commenting online
If only speech were not a right but a privilege granted selectively by the state, our democratic freedoms would be that much more secure.
You may remember this man. His name is Mario Voigt, and he is the head of the centre-right CDU in Thüringen. He made national headlines a few weeks ago for grievously threatening German democracy by agreeing to debate his AfD counterpart Björn Höcke on national television. Because the AfD in general and Höcke in particular are antidemocratic fascists, allowing them anywhere near a microphone is very likely to destroy our entire system of government, that is what a weak and failed state we have here in Germany.
The duel between our leading Thuringian politicians was all but unwatchable, as indeed almost all political debates turn out to be. While Höcke could’ve acquitted himself better, Voigt’s performance was flat, uninspired and profoundly banal. Among other things, the man suffers from a peculiar rodentine aspect; he bites his way stiffly through bland preformulated arguments like a squirrel chewing a stale nut or a beaver gnawing through saplings. After the event, the CDU took to the press to declare victory, but polls showed that viewers found Höcke on balance more persuasive, which is of course the real reason that everybody told Voigt to avoid the confrontation. Voigt is intensely democratic and therefore extremely right about everything, but somehow – and this is very awkward to discuss – his being eminently righteous and correct in all things does not manifest in an ability to defeat the very wrong and evil arguments of his opponents. It’s very weird how that works, perhaps somebody should look into it.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
German domestic intelligence chief defends his efforts to police the “thought & speech patterns” of citizens, outlines the novel offence of “systematic delegitimisation of state conduct”
The German Interior Ministry continues to defend its controversial and widely criticised plans to restrict the speech, travel and economic activity of political dissidents. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), our domestic intelligence service and political police, have sacrificed substantial popular regard in the face of this campaign. According to a poll published last month, a plurality of Germans believe that the BfV are being misused for political purposes. The sentiment is prominent across all parties, except of course for the Greens, who believe that all is well with the Federal Republic.
The creepy, dissolute and rodent-looking BfV chief, Thomas Haldenwang, has taken to the pages of the Frankfurter Allgemeine to defend the conduct of his office and his plans to shape the “thought and speech patterns” of ordinary people through official repression.
The thing about “Freedom of expression,” Haldenwang explains, is that it “is not carte blanche for enemies of the constitution.”
Recently, public discourse has repeatedly featured headlines and articles calling the work of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV)into question. There is talk of an “opinion police,” a “language police” and even a “government security service.” They say the BfV discredits political opinions “on command” as extremist as soon as they depart from the social and political mainstream, or when they embark upon criticism of government action or the work of the democratic parties.
One thing should be unmistakably clear: Freedom of opinion prevails in Germany – and that is a good thing! Freedom of opinion is a fundamental element of our constitution and one of the greatest assets of our liberal democratic order. As such, it is also protected by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
On “hate,” “disinformation,” and the ever-expanding, ever metastasising establishment campaign to restrict free expression in the West
The minders of public discourse have developed two arguments about why ordinary people should not be allowed to say what they think on the internet. These are that the ignorant rabble, conversing freely, may tend to express that subset of dangerous, prejudicial and deeply unauthorised opinions known as “hate”; and that they may consume unauthorised theories and narratives about present political events, known as “disinformation.” “Hate” and “disinformation” are amorphous concepts that can denote almost anything, but they have come to work in roughly complementary ways. “Hate” encompasses all the things our rulers would prefer you not say, while “disinformation” denotes all the stuff our rulers would prefer you not read.
We are dealing here with an ad hoc cultural system designed to suppress undesirable political ideas. Presumably, our leaders would prefer simply to ban these ideas, but their liberal commitments make overt repression of this nature awkward for them, and so they have jerry-rigged this dumb Rube Goldberg contraption instead.
Via the Google ngram viewer, we can gain some notion of where this system came from and when it was first assembled. Here are the frequencies of “hate speech” and “disinformation” in print publications between 1975 and 2019:
“Disinformation” began its career in the latter stages of the Cold War as a way to describe adversarial propaganda. When Russia, other Warsaw Pact countries or later Iraq attacked Western “fascism” or “imperialism,” that was “disinformation.” After the fall of the Berlin Wall, this usage persisted at somewhat lower fequencies. A lot of things were “disinformation” in these intervening years; superficial searching reveals uses like “corporate disinformation,” “tabloid disinformation,” “Republican disinformation,” and so on…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Was the Covid response a coup by Western intelligence agencies?
On Thursday, friend-of-the-blog Michael P. Senger posted an important essay to Substack, in which he asks whether the “Response to COVID” was “effectively a coup by the Western intelligence community.” Everyone should read it, as it summarises in one place a range of evidence that Senger and others have collected pointing to the role of the defence and intelligence actors in promoting lockdowns, especially in America.
Many readers have asked me in sometimes polite and sometimes highly hostile and dismissive ways to comment on these ideas for a long time now. I find this surprising, as I don’t disagree with any of Senger’s specific observations, and I don’t think they’re necessarily in conflict with my own theses of What Happened in 2020. I’ve long held that the bureaucracy succumbed to very radical ideas about how to suppress SARS-2 between February and March 2020, and as the defence and intelligence sectors are part of the institutional apparatus of the government, it’s only logical to think that they should’ve fallen prey to these ideas too. Perhaps it is true, though, that my overall interpretation of events departs somewhat from the Intelligence Coup Thesis. In what follows, I’ll try to explain why.
Senger and others have surely shown that key members of the American defence establishment were very worried about SARS-2 and willing to follow the lead of China in pandemic policy from the beginning. Their advocacy, however, seems to be of two types. Either it occurs very early but doesn’t seem to be about mass containment specifically, or it occurs rather later and indicates an endorsement of lockdowns around the same time everyone else was endorsing them.
…click on the above link to read the rest…
Switzerland, Facing an Unprecedented Power Shortage, Contemplates a Partial Ban on the Use of Electric Vehicles
Switzerland, Facing an Unprecedented Power Shortage, Contemplates a Partial Ban on the Use of Electric Vehicles
It turns out that you can have battery-powered cars, or you can have renewable energy, but you can’t have both.
The Swiss Confederation usually imports electricity from France and Germany to keep the lights on over the winter, but this year neither country has any power to spare. Many French nuclear power plants are down after years of postponed maintenance, while in Germany we suffer from a superfluity of idle wind turbines and a (self-imposed) shortage of natural gas.
The Federal Council of Switzerland has therefore published draft legislation, which outlines four tiers of escalating measures to conserve electricity and avert potential blackouts. The first prescribes a lot of temperature restrictions for things like refrigerators and washing machines. The second includes more unusual rules, such as the demand that heating in clubs and discotheques “be set to the lowest level or switched off completely,” and that “streaming services … limit resolution of their content to standard definition.” The third foresees cutting business hours, banning the use of Blue Ray players and gaming computers, and also limiting the use of electric cars, which should be driven only when absolutely necessary. A fourth and final tier mandates closure of ski facilities, casinos, cinemas, theatre and the opera.
A lot of these rules look unenforceable, but they said the same thing about contact restrictions during the pandemic. It turns out that the state really can prevent you from socialising with people in your own home if it wants to, especially when there’s no shortage of prying neighbours eager to snitch.
Feasibility isn’t the point, though. It’s the optics here that are most astounding…
…click on the above link to read the rest…
The press are completely crazy and they are going to get us all killed
The press are completely crazy and they are going to get us all killed
Remarks on the rocket strike in Poland, and the heedless jingoistic war rhetoric of the German media
Yesterday, at around 3.40 in the afternoon, a rocket exploded in the Polish village of Przewodów. Two people died. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky immediately blamed Russia, later going so far as to characterise the alleged attack as a message from Putin to the G20 summit. Then the Associated Press reported that they had heard from “a senior U.S. intelligence official” claiming that “Russian missiles” were responsible for the attack, and thereafter the worst German journalistic actors embarked upon an evening of dark speculation about the proper NATO response to a Russian attack on Poland. Higher brow outlets, like ZDF, merely ran inflammatory headlines about Russian rockets, with the crucial information – that the rockets were Russian-made, while their immediate origins were unclear – buried in the body of the piece. Bild, on the other hand, went all-in, with this incredible rant from chief editor Johannes Boie:
The Russian army has bombed Poland, the AP news agency reports, citing a US intelligence official.
Two people are dead, murdered!
Accidental or not – this is an armed attack on NATO territory!
The two most likely possibilities are, first, that Putin’s soldiers hit Poland by mistake. They are often poorly trained and drunk. In this case, the tyrant must apologise formally, beg for forgiveness on bended knee, so to speak, while armed NATO fighter jets fly around his country.
He is not used to that. When his troops shot down a passenger plane in 2014, killing 298 people, there were no consequences.
…click on the above link to read the rest…
German Energy Apocalypse Update VII
The only published footage of the damage to the Nord Stream pipelines, featured on my Nord Stream Conspiracy Thread, turns out to come from Expressen, a Swedish newspaper. Their reporters hired undersea drone operators and took a boat out to the site of the explosions off the island of Bornholm. There, they found a sizeable crater and 50 metres of missing pipeline. That this is how the images should have made their way to us, rather than through any official path, speaks volumes about the eagerness of Swedish authorities to suppress this story.
Protests against the insane energy policy of the German government are gathering momentum, particularly in the East; sporadic reports are even appearing in major media outlets now. This is surely one reason that the Minister President of Saxony, Michael Kretschmer, continues to stray from official CDU talking points, calling for negotiated peace in Ukraine and likening EU sanctions to a “tsunami” threatening the German economy.
Feared gas shortages are causing chaos as customers rush to change suppliers in search of better prices, or because their current contracts have been cancelled. Several municipal utilities have flatly stopped accepting new customers, but this option is not available to the so-called Grundversorger or “basic suppliers”—the utilities that supply the majority of gas in their region. These are legally bound to take all comers, and many of them are already having difficulty meeting sudden surges in demand.
Their day-to-day solvency may also soon be a problem:
[I]t is not only the procurement prices that have risen sharply, but also the interim financing costs—that is, the sum with which the municipal utilities must bridge the time from the purchase of gas to the onward sale to the customer, and to the increase in customers’ instalment payments, [an Association of Municipal Enterprises] spokesman explained…
…click on the above link to read the rest…
Nord Stream Attack Updates
Nord Stream Attack Updates
United States complicity seems increasingly to be an open secret.
Radosław Sikorski, MEP, former Polish defence minister and husband of well-connected neoconservative intellectual Anne Appelbaum, has publicly thanked the United States for attacking the Nord Stream pipelines. Jim Geraghty, senior political correspondent for the American political journal National Review, has also praised the attacks in a brief piece called Who Will Rid Me of This Meddlesome Pipeline? He is proud that he has been arguing about the importance of taking Nord Stream 2 offline since February and suggests that the present attacks reflect his influence.
The biggest detail to break since I went to sleep yesterday, is this claim made by an anonymous intelligence source to Der Spiegel, that the CIA had warned Germany of Baltic pipeline attacks a few weeks ago:
The United States warned the German government weeks ago of possible attacks on gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea. According to information from SPIEGEL, a corresponding tip from the US intelligence service CIA was received in Berlin in the summer.
Several persons familiar with the matter confirmed this.
Even before the invasion of Ukraine, Nato partners had repeatedly pointed to suspicious activities of Russian ships over nodes of the underwater networks.
However, an initial analysis of satellite images from the area of the incidents showed only inconspicuous ship traffic at first glance, security circles said.
The Tagesspiegel has a longer piece today trying to come up with a plausible motive for Russia. They imagine that a Russian attack might have had the purpose of allowing Gazprom to escape contractual requirements to deliver gas through Nord Stream 1, thus driving European energy prices higher. Alternatively, they propose it might’ve been a ruse to circumvent sanctions for the repair of the pipeline. To even retype these theses is to reveal their infirmity.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Apparent Sabotage Disables Nord Stream 1 and 2, Cutting Off All Direct Gas Supply to Germany from Russia
Apparent Sabotage Disables Nord Stream 1 and 2, Cutting Off All Direct Gas Supply to Germany from Russia
Anonymous German officials appear to acknowledge the strong possibility of American or NATO involvement
Yesterday evening, pressure in the undersea Nord Stream 2 pipeline suddenly collapsed, and gas could be seen bubbling to the surface of the Baltic Sea near the Danish island of Bornholm. Shortly afterwards, reports came of a total collapse in the pressure of our other major undersea pipeline connection to Russia, Nord Stream 1, indicating a further rupture.
Due to the timing, the fact that three separate pipelines were affected1, and the severe pressure losses in Nord Stream 1, officials expect the worst. “We can no longer imagine any scenario other than a targeted attack,” said a person privy to the assessment by the federal government and federal authorities. They added: “Everything speaks against a coincidence.”
Such an attack on the seabed would be anything but trivial; it would have to be carried out with special forces – for example, by navy divers or a submarine, people informed of initial assessments said.
With regard to responsibility for the alleged attacks, two possibilities are being discussed. First, according to initial speculation, Ukrainian or Ukrainian-affiliated forces could be responsible. With the temporary shutdown of the Nord Stream pipelines, gas deliveries from Russia to Germany and Central Europe would only be possible via the Yamal pipelinje running through Poland or the Ukrainian pipeline network.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Apparent Sabotage Disables Nord Stream 1 and 2, Cutting Off All Direct Gas Supply to Germany from Russia
Apparent Sabotage Disables Nord Stream 1 and 2, Cutting Off All Direct Gas Supply to Germany from Russia
Anonymous German officials appear to acknowledge the strong possibility of American or NATO involvement
Yesterday evening, pressure in the undersea Nord Stream 2 pipeline suddenly collapsed, and gas could be seen bubbling to the surface of the Baltic Sea near the Danish island of Bornholm. Shortly afterwards, reports came of a total collapse in the pressure of our other major undersea pipeline connection to Russia, Nord Stream 1, indicating a further rupture.
Due to the timing, the fact that three separate pipelines were affected1, and the severe pressure losses in Nord Stream 1, officials expect the worst. “We can no longer imagine any scenario other than a targeted attack,” said a person privy to the assessment by the federal government and federal authorities. They added: “Everything speaks against a coincidence.”
Such an attack on the seabed would be anything but trivial; it would have to be carried out with special forces – for example, by navy divers or a submarine, people informed of initial assessments said.
With regard to responsibility for the alleged attacks, two possibilities are being discussed. First, according to initial speculation, Ukrainian or Ukrainian-affiliated forces could be responsible. With the temporary shutdown of the Nord Stream pipelines, gas deliveries from Russia to Germany and Central Europe would only be possible via the Yamal pipelinje running through Poland or the Ukrainian pipeline network.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
