Cole Tomas Allen is a Harbinger of Much More Political Violence

Cole Tomas Allen’s motivation to murder Donald Trump and members of his cabinet are at first confusing. The sketchy manifesto alleges rape, pedophilia and treason. You can wave that off as usual Trump Derangement Syndrom and go after Jimmy Kimmel, but Cole put his life on the line and he is smart. A nerd. It’s possible that he doesn’t even know Jimmy Kimmel.

I asked Gemini which concerns he revealed in his online writings and I found a number of debatable concerns about programmable money, online IDs, worker displacement by automation (AI) and mass immigration, and the madness of the World Economic Forum. I rubbed my eyes and wondered if he were a Republican. The manifesto sounds daft and that got me on the track. I asked Gemini if the quality of his posts declined and, indeed, those more or less reasonable, technical opinions disappeared early 2025 and gave way to more sloppy repetitive posts about Jeffrey Epstein and Trump. They revealed a sudden and surprising lack of curiosity. He had, for example, no knowledge of the bipartisan nature of the Epstein clients and of the WEF circles. He didn’t bother to check allegations. And he described himself as an accelerationist.

I wanted to know what he specifically tried to speed up and there was nothing really but the expected collapse of the Trump administration and ‘the system’ that might magically reboot again. Finally, we arrive at bonkers land. What he hoped to bring down wasn’t an institution, but moral corruption in and of itself. He specifically did not care how life would look like after his ‘reboot.’ In his words he prioritised ‘duty over strategy.’

Cole Tomas Allen was raised as an evangelical Christian. His supposedly “anti-Christian” views were that churches and believers were not moral enough. His reasoning doesn’t have an overtly esoteric or religious look and feel, but it leaves the territory of rationality, firstly, by a lack of interest in the outcome of his actions (the “strategy”) and, secondly, by attempting to awaken the inner morals of other people with a purifying bloodshed.

This neo-religious irrationality is the hallmark of modern left-wing fanaticism. There is an intense focus on symbols, words and activism combined with a disregard for a worldly purpose. In its darkest form – and Cole Tomas Allen falls into that category – radicals believe that collapse were inevitable and actions could not stop it. All you can do is accept your decent role as it unfolds and save your soul. They themselves would avoid religious terminology, but it makes it easier for me to describe their concept.

Jem Bendell, a co-founder of the polit-cult Extinction Rebellion, has written a paper in which he coined the term ‘deep adaption.’ Officially, the group claims to fight climate change and Bendell carefully describes the coming climate catastrophe only as either inevitable or likely, but the mindset of many of its members is “post-apocalyptic” – they are already over the idea of stopping it. They are left to seek agency over emotional despair through symbolism.

They also fail to explain what the goal of soul purification is. There’s no G-d, but a judge, somebody who can read their symbols (which include symbolic actions like going to prison for the cause) and will tell right from wrong. There’s no purpose for that, either, because that judge won’t reward you. He’s ‘the right side of history’, ‘the arc of history’, or ‘history’ itself. If those phrases don’t take the role of a neo-pagan sentient deity, they are metaphors for ‘the future generations.’ Depending on the speaker those generations do or do not exist. One group is literally called ‘The Last Generation’ which again raises the question of purpose and can only be answered if, for some speakers, ‘the future’, ‘history’ and ‘future generations’ are actual neo-pagan deities who must be pleased. I doubt that they think it through to that point, but there is a judging entity worth the trouble. In the case of Cole Tomas Allen there’s going to be a ‘reboot’ of the system populated by people.

The absence of a goal and the obsession on their tormented soul point to mental problems. These milieus and organizations attract individuals with neuroticism, anxiety, and narcissism. Some are virtue-signalling Machiavellianists who only seek status in their peer group, but for most the angst is real. Many left-wing fanatics are female. Around 64% of the members of the Extinction Rebellion are women. Professionally frustrated academics are even more susceptible to this line of thinking. 85% of the members of extinction rebellion hold university degrees. Cole Tomas Allan worked as a part-time tutor after he graduated in mechanical engineering at Caltech and in computer science at Cal/Berkeley – both extremely prestigious schools.

The sociolgist Peter Turchin argues that we suffer from elite overproduction. There aren’t enough complex jobs for capable minds. This leaves behind a growing cohort of frustrated underemployed professionals whose expensive training goes to waste. The physicist Eric Weinstein describes modern academia as a pyramid scheme. The purpose of many professors is to teach students to become professors who will also contribute little more than working as professors for ever more students. For a growing number of people assuming a moral status is the only ladder they can climb.

This leads me to Cole Tomas Allen’s decline from academic rigor to loopy manifesto. Law professor Dan Kahan found out that graduates are more likely to ignore facts and logic to protect their moral identity (identity-protective cognition). Cole Tomas Allen’s outrage over Trump’s crimes from pedophilia to treason forbade the question whether the allegations are even true. Some academics are willing to jettison scientific rigor and use their training to make their opinions sound more scholarly. The chronic anxiety of the university, from exams to ‘publish or perish’, alters how the brain processes information. In fight or flight mode you need simplification and a fast friend-foe-dichotomy.

Radicals engage in a “logic” of their own. Universities provide the tools to develop intrinsic rigor, but they have no control over what an individual accepts as a premise for further logical deductions. For Cole Tomas Allen Trump’s “crimes” were simply taken as a fact and research into the matter would have threatened the axiomatic basis of his thinking.

But what poses the threat? Why is it dangerous to be wrong?

Sociologist Scott Atran found out that all of us can be pushed to engage in identity-protective cognition, i.e. in refusing to think about a matter when it touches our moral core, our sacred values. Then we stop our usual cost-benefit analysis and behave as if outcomes don’t matter. Cole Allen suffered from being ‘complicit’ with the alleged immorality of his government.

This becomes a growing problem because our moral core keeps expanding. In the past moral identities were tied to few stable roles (parent, professional, neighbour, member of a faith). They could be rigid and uncompromising on their own, but people were used to navigating conflicting moral systems. They were external and morality was not the centre of a person’s identity.

More and more beliefs and lifestyle choices become moralised. Fewer things can be questioned. The old stable roles with their moral obligations gave way to mega-identities. If you know somebody’s view on vegan dieting, you can guess his views on gender affirming care. Everything is mushed together and this colossal of moral righteousness is highly unstable. It changes with fashions, with the ‘current thing.’

And moral becomes the remaining identity stabilising force (moral centrality) for the losers of our elite overproduction game. While the old morals were external systems with rules you can break and sins to be redeemed, your new highly important mega-identity is who you are. It’s all you are. This makes everything a bitterly defended basis for any further moral reasoning and it crushes any considerations for consequences. Absurdly, the moralists of the ‘current thing’ don’t seem to notice that they were not motivated by it at all before it was a fashion.

In ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’ (1951) Hannah Arendt identified the collapse of stable institutions and social structures as the main breeding ground for totalitarianism. The ‘Mass Man’ arrives when the old classes and identity groups break down. The lonely individual, the loser, who finds no common ground or common sense with his neighbour becomes susceptible to the ‘Big Lie.’ He fails to make a distinction between true and false, she noticed. That indifference might be rooted in his fear to explore facts that can threaten the morality of the new fashionable mega-identity. It is in the logic of the banality of evil that Cole Tomas Allen and other radicals simply run their moral script as a mindless ‘duty.’

I want to skip the usual talking points about the breakdown of gender roles, families, churches and local communities because the main provider of a stable role with a moral duty is wildly under-discussed: the corporate workplace.

The career that gave men their main purpose in life outside of their family was defaced by ingratitude and disloyalty. Since the 1980s hiring a new guy has been preferred over promotions and slowly but steadly it took its toll on people’s motivation. Human resources departments operate a larger budget for new hires than for pay raises. Employees who work hard to get rewarded with a promotion and who don’t invest their time in a search for the next job are effectively punished. Even the top brass are hired from outside which sends a clear signal that there are no rungs to the top. In the 1970s, 90% of the CEOs were company men who had worked up the ladder. The younger generation has completely given up on the idea that good performance would eventually be rewarded. The average time a Brit under thirty (Gen Z) stays with one company is down to 1.7 years. If accomplishment and rewards aren’t what makes you you, it’s your moral and that moral may become little more than a fad. Soon this will no longer be a problem confined to academics.

Hungary’s Answer To Candace Owens

Nobody knows me. I’m a nobody. So you can trust me or not on my claim that I have tried to warn people of Candace Owens since the Youtuber ‘Tree of Logic’ exposed her in April 2016. That’s ten years now. In that time Owens got hired by Turning Point USA, by PragerU and by the DailyWire. That’s the miracle of reputation laundering. Once enough people seem to vouch for you, you can get away with anything.

So welcome to a new episode of Ben warns of crooks, but nobody will care and nobody will even look back when the damage is done.

Crook number one is Krisztina Koenen. First she got laundered “sqeaky clean” as editor for mainstream news outlets FAZ Magazin and Wirtschaftswoche. Another, cough, career step was in, eh, ‘corporate communication.’ As far as I’m concerned that’s code for nepotism and corruption. I’m sure people knew how to talk before she offered her “efforts.” Finally, she reached the shores of conservative blogs TichysEinblick and Achgut.

Her most recent article is already too long to unpack each of her dishonest statements. I’ve got no fighting chance to run you through her entire body of work. But let’s zoom in on that one for a moment.

The first thing you’ll notice is that she insults Hungary’s opposition leader Péter Magyar as a “demagogue” already in the title. Unfortunately, that’s a poor translation choice. The real insult is closer to snakeoil monger, but the thing you must know is that she’s getting out of the gate with an insult. Vigilant observer’s may recognise that ‘attack is the best offense’ technique from Candace Owen’s playbook. It would be even permissable when the accusation is clarified in proximity. But first she drowns us in reams of filibuster.

Krisztina Koenen gives us a little teaser before that: [Current media stories are] not merely a spy story; it also contains all the ingredients of a good thriller: drugs, sex, lies, and betrayal

So she drops scandalous words like groupies drop names and we’ll hear about taxes, the election system and endless sideshows before she even addresses Magyar who she insulted in the title. Would an honest person construct an article like that?

It’s difficult to write about Hungary because authors have to educate readers about a million things at once. The ‘sex, drugs, betrayal’ line refers to a story fanned out on TichysEinblick by crook number two: Boris Kálnoky. His reputation wash was done by Springer’s mainstream newspaper WELT where he was a journalist and correspondant.

His filibuster article makes a lot of words about Péter Magyar’s sex with his previous flame Evelin Vogel. Somebody secretly taped the intercourse and an anonymous email distributed the video. Magyar and Vogel had had a public feud for two months before they slept with each other, but they were late into a party and probably drunk.

I asked Gemini ‘Boris Kálnoky says he was in a relationship with Ilona Szabó. Is he lying?’ And the AI responded, ‘As of March 2026, there is no public evidence or credible reporting to support the claim that Péter Magyar was in a relationship with a woman named
Ilona Szabó.’

In other words: Kálnoky is lying or he’s at the very least not transparent about his sources.

The “drugs” is a powder visible on the video with unclear ownership. The bedroom belongs to an AirBnB unit and nobody knows who rented it. None of this has any connection to Magyar and I invite you to go through Kalnoky’s article to find anything substantial, ANYTHING, about what Magyar has actually done wrong. We are allowed to fuck. Still.

Back to crook number one Krisztina Koenen and her mentioned article. She tries a blanket ‘[Magyar] lies and asserts blatant, sometimes completely absurd, untruths, one thing today, the exact opposite tomorrow.’

In Hungary, a country brimming with corruption and lies, her example for Magyar’s supposed dishonesty is ‘He claimed that Filipino guest workers employed in a Japanese battery factory were so starving that they stole and ate goldfish and ducks from the Budapest Zoo. As the zoo director explained, there are neither goldfish nor ducks in the zoo, yet the story was reported by all left-wing media outlets.’

Ooh nooooooooo, Trump said the Haitians ate cats and that particular woman in the video wasn’t Haitian … My goodness, a politician cannot start a fact-finding mission on every single small complaint he hears from a citizen. Who cares?

She on the other hand writes that Magyar will go on a revenge spree with expropriations and what not, ‘a program “Road to Prison.”‘

Now, that’s a big lie. Anybody without in-depth knowledge of Hungarian politics wouldn’t know that ‘road to prison’ is a common phrase there which is used by all parties to accuse the others of authoritarian measures once their respective power (further) solidifies. She is absolutely aware that any outsider, like the readers of her German-language article, would assume the quotation marks refer to an actual program with a specific name. That’s intent. That’s lying.

Last September a 600-pages tax plan was supposedly leaked. Koenen writes, ‘While there is some evidence to suggest its authenticity, it cannot be definitively proven.’ The Budapest Court of Appeal and the Budapest Metropolitan Court ruled in December that it was a forgery.

Tragically, Péter Magyar helped her laundering her reputation and establishing her as a new Candace Owens in Germany. She gave an interview to conservative publication Tichys Einblick. It included [maybe misleading] quotes of his. He denied the authorization of it and got lawyers involved who threatened legal action. That tainted him in opposition media circles as the bad guy. Instead of the interview Tichys Einblick published an article by Koenen who complained about the incident.

His Trumpian lack of cool in the face of a hostile media is also noted by various parties in Hungary. In the wake of the tax-plan forgery scandal Magyar issued loads of angry statements. In one instance he wrote on social media that there’s a prison sentence for that. And there is! We are talking about forged signatures and an high-effort election manipulation attempt. That does potentially carry a prison sentence in Hungary. Koenen turns this into ‘He also regularly threatens journalists and publications that dare not to report on him in glowing terms with bans and imprisonment.’

Note the ‘regularly’! That’s lying. And the context wasn’t about reporting in glowing terms or not, but about a 600-page forgery. Even if you believe that the courts were wrong, presenting a false context and claiming a regularity where there is none is a hard, provable lie.

He also didn’t threaten a publication with a ban and she gives no example because there is none. She’s lying.

The Post-War World-Order Galaxy Status Within It’s Yet Transitional Context Is Debated

In my favorite newspaper ZEIT I read that Maja Kallas, Foreign Policy Representative of the EU, says she had a hard time to believe that freedom of the press were under pressure in Europe.

Obviously, I don’t have that hard time and I wanted to make sure that she actually said what she said. So I listened a bit into her speech and her sit-down conversation at the Munich Security conference, but I didn’t make it to the quote because, honestly, we citizens don’t have the time of the day for all that jargon.

It’s a problem of its own! Even people who I greatly admire have come to talk about ‘the world order’, the ‘system’ that doesn’t work anymore, Trump’s ‘transitional approach to foreign policy’, ‘partnerships versus deals’ and, not to forget, the ‘whoever doctrines.’

I don’t like the word ‘populism’ precisely because it is too vague, but for the sake of it, I’m going to make a ‘populist’ point: Politics is not about toading to academics. Most people just want to know what you want to do and how you do it.

Except for the mentioned status preservation motive among academics the allure of imprecision is that objections to your arguments are detected and thus raised much later in the game. Many politicians rise through the ranks because we keep nodding way too long while nothing gets said at all.

The danger, though, is that everybody can become highly alarmed in an instant because everything CAN also mean something you don’t want. Now, we’ve got a perpetually agitated political class that doesn’t trust itself and that also has a hard time to tell who wishs them well and who doesn’t. To add insult to injury at least half of them think they are particularly “clever” when they mislead an audience with imprecision. They’ve developed the insane delusion that their ubitiquous smokescreen wouldn’t affect their own vision.

Case in point is the headline of said ZEIT article. Verbatimly it translates to ‘EU Foreign-Affairs Representative Kallas Directs Away American Criticism of Europe’ (German: EU-Außenbeauftragte Kallas weist US-Kritik an Europa zurück).

You don’t ‘direct away’ criticism. You justify what you do. Criticism may include statements that you can debunk as false. Then you debunk. Both these verbs raise the expectation of an explanation. ‘Direct away’ doesn’t. Your average German would never say ‘I strongly direct away my neighbour’s criticism.’ It is pure jargon.

In the article that ‘directing’ is fleshed out with the questionable statement ascribed to Kallas that Estonia were ranked second place on a press-freedom list somewhere and the United States only at place fifty-eight. At first, I wanted to look into that. If somebody tells you that a former Soviet Republic is more transparent than the United States and that its market of ideas were already superior, you’re listening to a crook. The entire eastern half of this continent just laughed its ass off!

Maja Kallas can’t even enforce sanctions against Russia over her own kitchen table where her husband sat and made business deals with Moscow. She’s basically like that ditzy sitcome sidekick that the audience really needs to not understand what’s going on.

So if she said that she’s actually oblivious to Europe’s free speech problem and postulates that Estonia and the EU even trump America on freedom of the press, it would be fodder for some mockery. But has she? I don’t want to put in the work. I just listened to phrases like ‘might is right’ and ‘rules-based order’ and ‘our history’ and ‘partnership’ … Okay, done. I’m done. Politics in democratic nations must not be impenetrable to the general public.

At the same conference Marco Rubio spoke and that gained most of the attention. Cinema enthusiasts may have recognised his speech as a remake of the swamp scene from the movie ‘The Neverending story.’

It was good, but I must admit that the spicier rendition of his script by Brittany Phetasy will remain my favorite:

Attention Needed: Iran & Venezuela – Attention Received: Greenland

Everybody seems to have a different opinion on why Trump “needs” Greenland. My best bet is that the US military fears WWIII being launched by the Chinese. In his New Year’s address, Xi Jinping called a ‘reunification’ with Taiwan ‘unstoppable’ . Taiwan had never been under the control of the Chinese communist party, neither united or divided, but that is were the island belongs, says Beijing. Speaking of the capital, there is a construction site nearby for the largest underground bunker complex in history.

It’s nuke-proof. You don’t need that to sack Taiwan or Japan. You’d need that for a world war.
While Greenland did not extend the moratorium of understanding MOU with the United States that allowed for a joint exploration and future mining of the country’s rare minerals, it does, however, still have such an MOU with China. In 2018 China announced the Polar Silk Road and it is exactly what you’d expect. Greenland had to be pressured by Washington and Copenhagen to turn down multiple Chinese offers. Ever so often, Greenlanders and Europeans in general sound totally oblivious to the concerns that come with a Chinese monopoly on rare minerals and other bottleneck resources.

The security community likes to talk a big deal about how unreliable America had become under Trump. But can we digest for a moment that the entire Western defense architecture rests on the US precisely because all other partners are much less reliable? I don’t think that I have to reiterate the entire anti-Israel sh*t-show that followed the Hamas attack (‘October 7th’). You know who you are. Civilized nations don’t stand together when savages attack. Instead our leaders act like short-sighted wannabe war profiteers. Not even the most wicket Islamist voter can be foregone.

European elites won’t even commit to defending their own. ‘Erratic’ is maybe the most polite way to describe Viktor Orbán of Hungary. His forces go through a NATO-funded ‘rejuvenation’ makeover. Senior officers are replaced in big numbers. An audio was leaked in which his Defense Minister rallied the troops to get on a path to war as soon as possible. He announced to break with all previous ‘peacekeeping activities’. And, indeed, the peace gestures ceased around the time of the recording, at least all those towards Western and pro-Western peoples. Meanwhile, Orbán went out of his way to block sanctions and weapon deliveries to Ukraine because public encouragement of Russia’s attack, he insists, is just ‘wanting peace.’

Germany keeps destroying its own power stations, nuclear and otherwise, even though our grid becomes increasingly unstable and the Russian elites remain antagonistic for the foreseeable future. At the beginning of Putin’s ‘Special Operation’ Energy Minister Robert Habeck lied to the parliament in order to see some of them destroyed. No scruples. No reliability.

Before the Ukraine War changed into a drone nightmare, artillery shells were the main supply concern. Not one letter of the environmental and workplace regulation could be temporarily altered to speed up production and save lives on the front. Europe is hitting the wall with its stubborn elites.

The crossroads: either ‘net zero’ or an effective deterrence of China. Either (scheming) environmentalists get out of the way or we risk another world war.

Will the leadership of the EU educate the anti-nuclear energy advocates? Will they use the available carbon-free technology such as uranium reactors to reduce the demand for fossil fuels? Will they thus guarantee that it will be Western nations who extract key resources from the Arctic? Right now they look like they don’t want to guarantee anything.

In 1966, Project Iceworm, an attempt to station nuclear missiles on Greenland, got abandoned; officially because the ice shield were not stable. Notably, the Americans didn’t ask Denmark for permission. That’s diplomatic for ‘they probably did ask, did hear from them, but didn’t take a no for an answer.’ Why on earth did the Danes not offer that remote place to improve NATO’s nuclear cover? Greenland isn’t France! It’s not densely populated.

That’s why Trump “needs” Greenland. But he shouldn’t. Europe could yield. That’s the deadlock.
If Europe does yield, a treaty would probably include:
– The mining around the Arctic will not be threatened by their Net Zero environmentalism. Europe doesn’t bother to accept its de-industrialisation while it boosts dirtier production sites in China. If CO2 doesn’t matter when it emanates from China, it won’t when it comes out of the Arctic, either.
– The US comes to station nuclear-powered machines and weapons on Greenland.

The military theater around the island is silliness, but it does distract from the people in Caracas and Tehran who rest hunkered down and are torn between hopes and fears.

I may say that I’m none of the 4D-chess freaks. Whatever good reasons Trump may have – and I’m not privy to the intelligence information that imply a sudden urgency in that matter – his public communication is a complete disaster right now.

A Comprehensive Report about Germany’s Speech Curation

Click to access de-report-en.pdf

German Cargo Transport Heralds Disaster

Last week Sigrid Nikutta was axed from the management of DB Cargo, a daughter of German transport company Deutsche Bahn. Her unit runs red numbers. Since she took over in 2020 they accumulated a sum total of 3.1 billion euro in losses. As DB Cargo like their main competitors Captrain Deutschland, TX Logistik and SBB Cargo belong to a larger corporation and hence don’t publish detailed financial reports, it is hard to assess who’s still in good shape. All circumstantial evidence suggests that the whole cargo market is in trouble.

Following Covid, EU-red-tape avalanches, hyper-environmentalism and the destruction of all affordable energy producers, Germany’s economy comes to a screeching halt and cargo traffic is the artery system of the business world.

Arteries retract when less tissue must be supplied with oxigen. And this is what Sigrid Nikutta did. She wanted to reduce the workforce of approximately 17,000 staffers to 10,000 employees. Garages were set to close, vehicles be sold and dynamically leased from third parties.

Naturally she was confronted by the trade union EVG and it was their letter to the CEO of Deutsche Bahn that cost her job. They demand a new start with a ‘new leadership and strategy.’

They didn’t bother to propose any such strategy. I can think of the following alternatives to Nikutta’s plans.
– beg the taxpayer to pick the bills
– let the Chinese or other potentially hostile players take over

Sure enough the Chinese are as interested in building up blackmail potential for their widely expected attack on Taiwan as the Russians had been before they launched their large-scale invasion of Ukraine. But that is the most likely outcome after the EU Commission has banned Deutsche Bahn from shifting more funds into its daughter.

But there has always been a third rail: raising prices to cover the expenses as the economics of scale dwindle. It is not politically convenient. In a first loop it would have raised the cost of everything in the consumer market. Businesses would have gone to the competition. Since other railway cargo services run red numbers, too, clients would have resorted to lorries on the streets. It would have forced politicians to tax those motorised vehicles for their wear on the infrastructure and to build new lanes. That in turn would have raised consumer prices again. At some point the lorry transport cost would have surpassed the hiked rail cargo prices and the market share of Deutsche Bahn would have rebounded.

That’s inconvenient. On the other hand a Chinese takeover that grants insights into crucial military vulnerabilities and allows the installation of ransomware while MediaMarkt, an electronics retailer which changed hands just recently, threatens to release drones like Operation Spidernet does at least not alert the wider German public. ‘Does drone warfare mean my Amazon parcels are delivered faster?’

Of course, that was just some comic relief on my part, but even such a path would mean little more, but kicking the can down the road. Eventually consumer prices will hike following the dynamics described above. It will become inconvenient no matter who controls DB Cargo.

Sigrid Nikutta had the spine to tell her co-workers that they will have to give up many, if not all, of the things they worked on for many, many years. She is not bold enough, however, to address her own managerial class and the wider public with uncomfortable truths. And yet she’s almost certainly going to be replaced by somebody who’s even worse, who’s more coward, who will toe the line of the trade unions more slavishly and who will put all his efforts in cosmetics and delay.

The shrinking tissue isn’t fate, but it’s a matter that cannot be resolved internally. What DB Cargo would need is a confrontation with the economic decline induced by the fanaticised political left. Who is questioning publicly why almost everybody on TV is a communists or some other business illiterate? Who says that we want less environmental protections? Who dares to suggest that Ursula von der Leyen is not qualified enough for her job?

The managerial class hopes for a quiet solution that will not come. They waited too long and saw the fanaticization of the left unfold right in front of their eyes. The moment one of them will publicly weigh the risks of nuclear energy against the risks of not using it, he will be bombarded with accusations. He will be painted as a thug who’s keen to pour all of his fluorescent nuclear goo into the pond until each and everyone of us is a comicbook superhero. It wasn’t just Sigrid Nikutta alone who didn’t bother to say that green mutant slime doesn’t exist. It was all of them.

Some of My Misgivings About The German Election System

This is not the most pressing or amusing thing I have to share. Those are collected notes I jotted down over the years. Only concept. Everybody’s got to clear the desk once in a while.

The key motivations for an electoral reform should be:

(1) the sense of abandonment. (Does the government care about us?)
(2) uneducated elites
(3) responsibility pooling. (Who’s accountable for what? Deep state/The blob)
(4) inability to decouple the jobs of the government
(5) the Neonazi paranoia
(6) expertism – the reliance on real and fake experts, over-participation of the uninformed and a felt obligation to partake in every election
(7) breaking media power
(8) demagoguery

A first look at the problems

The sense of abandonment

While US Americans react to erratic government intrusions with a resounding ‘Leave me alone!’ cry, Germans feel alone already. Our problems are habitually ignored and hand outs are not a fulfilling sedative. People want to advance their ambitions, mainly their professional ones, and not be shut down or exhausted on bureaucratic grounds while the elites occupy themselves with their genitals and the rainbow flag. A discussion about the appropriate size of the government cannot be entertained until people have any sense of agency, unless your average citizen knows that his individual rights are guaranteed while he seeks to organise a majority in his interest.

As of now Germany has got no substantial racism problem, but a loss of control poses the question who’s in charge while our unaccountable elites occupy themselves with self-interests and childish infighting, perfectly ignorant of the concerns of the population. Historically those sentiments gave rise to hostilities to foreign nations and towards Jews. Scapegoats are a shortcut to research. And people who wake up in large numbers to politics because of a crisis are likely to be unfamiliar with the self-interests, the obsessions, the sub-clinical mental disorders and the psychological group-think dynamics that explain reality. Some hostile, rational profiteer in the background is an easy answer that can pop through any crisis window. At the same time elites historically showed to be happy about such witch-hunts because they distract from their actual decisions and the actual consequences of such.

Uneducated elites

In the face of the upcoming crises it is also likely for our elites to lose their own sense of control. One of the reasons why our elites and the mainstream media aren’t in a crisis mode and are not having honest unfettered discussions is that they still operate in their silly fake-it-until-you-make-it mode. The Dunning-Kruger effect lets them drag more and more responsibilities onto their desks. You must be smart to note the complexity of an issue. If you think a triangle is just a triangle anyway, you are not Archimedes.

In Germany there’s popular proposal to bar candidates with no professional background from running for elected offices. This is based on the observation that a lot of our leading politicians entered parliament during or after some academic efforts and hold neither degrees nor professional merits. Since this is not nearly as extreme in any other Western country, literally any change to the election system does already solve the problem. The downside of this proposal is that it gives political power to whatever group is supposed to certify the work and opens unnecessary discussions about the work of housewives, artists, novelists, part-time versus full-time, pseudo-employments from interest groups among other contentions.

Responsibility pooling

I coin the phrase ‘responsibility pooling’ because I noted a deliberate design of our government bodies to cover their tracks. Responsibility pooling is when citizens cannot trace who made what decision, when ominous committees or bureaucracies rule and you don’t know how to affect their governance. The underlying problem is the gradual loss of legitimacy of delegates. Delegation is the institutional equivalent of the game ‘Chinese whispers.’ Administrations consist of chains of positions in which one assigns the job of the next. The further down the chain a position is, the more remote it is from a direct election and the less clout an official should have over the public. Responsibility pooling makes individuals unaccountable and causes the mounting wrath to wear down institutions as a whole.

Decoupling problems

We will soon face an avalanche of crises. Energy becomes scarce, inflation shoots through the roof, production sites will be shut, mass unemployment will ensue and European countries will admit bankruptcy. As the unresolved problems underneath those crises persist, they become more and more intertwined. It is in our human nature to assume that a complex problem needs a single complex solution, a man, a program, a remedy, that can fix this. In reality complex problems are solved by tackling parts of them at a time. Elected offices should be as independent as possible from party headquarters and other offices. Cooperation must be based on individual initiative. Instead of assigning the best experts to a public office we move all-round generalists into these positions. And this is driven by our tribal occupation with party ideologies. The goal is not to find the best man for a job. The unspoken goal has become to cast the influence of a party and its leadership over as many institutions as possible. The party leaders and the public officials base their legitimacy not on competence but on the number of votes. Their campaigns and the affiliated “independent” media rally as many people to all available poll stations as possible. They moralise on the supposed importance of everybody’s constant participation in everything which forces citizens to rely on real and fake experts.

Neonazi paranoia

The Neonazi paranoia or ‘woke’ is particularly effective when you have this attitude that either your party foists its generalists across all public offices or evil people will do it instead. If the election system does not allow the wholesale sweeping of offices for this or that ideology, the scare of extremism would be more easily countered. As of now the German system is designed such that a peaceful transition of power in various independent areas of government cannot occur independently. To substantially reduce immigration the AfD (if even competent enough …) would need more than half of the seats of both chambers of parliament, assign new judges and fend off sanctions from the EU, the UN and other international bodies. Alternatively, they can bargain a deal with a left-wing party. There is no option but to sweep ALL institutions with supporters of one policy until it gets implemented. Interestingly, those who engage in the everybody-is-a-Nazi scare don’t find that prospect scary enough to grant other options to the public. For whatever reason they decided that unfiltered mass immigration is so important to them that they designated it the hill they desperately want to die on.

Expertism

The corona pandemic has illustrated how the powerful can further almost every policy proposal when they come to select the experts who talk to the public. In a specialised society we are used to consult experts. We try different doctors until we know to trust and then we blindly trust them. And if its not the doctor, it’s the lawyer, the accountant or somebody else. There is a limit of what one can be knowledgeable about. When it comes to everyday experts chances are high that they have your interest at heart. When a society as a whole becomes reliant on the expertise of others, it falls pray to manipulative ideologues. This reliance is created by the assumed obligation of your average citizen to have to be part of every decision. If you cannot decide all these complex matters on your own, you blindly go by trust and this is largely the evolutionary basis for group-think behavior.

Media power

The current system allows a handful of chief editors to rally masses of poorly informed citizens to the defense of one group or the attack of another. Instead of providing people with the most essential information to understand current affairs and to present both sides of a given conflict in a fair manner, they are usually party of various conflicts and rather distract than sharpen people’s focus and attention on the unfolding events.

How Germans talk about the election system so far

Most proposals from mainstream parties on election reforms in Germany circle around the voting procedure of the ‘Bundestag.’ The current method is so arcane that I have yet to meet a single German who actually knows where which parliamentarian came from and how to vote him out of office or defend him against what competitors. In what constituency is one supposed to organise any majority to get what policy supporter into the chamber? This undermines the very idea of a representative democracy. Citizens don’t know how to effect what change. More than half of the seats are alotted by party lists. How these lists are composed is a mystery to most voters and a substantial participation fence against the public. They tend to be combinations of ‘state lists’ (Länderliste), but the ‘hows’ and ‘whats’ of those details are a matter of party statutes. Most people only know that they don’t know where what parliamentarian exactly came from and how to get somebody more representative in his place. But without transparency democracy is a farce. Either people know how to determine their destiny or they don’t. Influence, determination and representation of interests are not the goals that are publicly discussed. And the underlying reason is that the years of responsibility pooling have led to the idea that delegation does not take away from the legitimacy granted by the voters. The party-list-derived larger half of the Bundestag is seen as delegations of the parties.

According to the constitution Grundgesetz a member of parliament is only subject to his own conscience. In everyday practice they are treated as if they owe their seat to the party. The fear of being isolated from the parties causes the chambers behavior to be highly predictable. The quality of speeches are extremely low because they don’t matter. No “representative” votes according to his conscience, the feedback of his constituency or the insights from the debate. Speakers follow theatrical ambitions and react only homeopathically to questions from peers. Why should they care when the results of the sessions are known in advance? The bills are mostly drafted in the ministries or by external business consultants and are only flushed through the institution that was once thought of as the heart of our democracy.

When the election system is discussed the only metric of interest to the media is whether it establishes more fairness between party leaders. A reform is sold to the public as an attempt to create the perfect representative composition of set-in-stone ideologies who supposedly have a right to blindly run down their agendas no matter what happens to the country. What matters to them is that the parties get as many delegates into public and administrative positions as possibles. And it is the fairness between those networks depending on the party headquarters that is the exclusive concern. Not only do I care little about this, I hold that it is not even a legitimate interest at all. If democracy were simply about replacing one fanatic king with another, we wouldn’t need the entire parliamentarian system at all. We could just grant some time of monarchical power to one party leader and exchange him for another thereafter. There are good reasons for the structures of Western democracy and voting is the exercise by which we render judgement on our officials so that we remain in charge of our destiny in the face of dynamically changing times.

Proposal

The representative should be answerable to a local community and organising majorities in that constituency for a given interest is how that interest is cared for in the chamber. A clear, normal first-past-the-post selection is the first part of the solution, removing party names from the ballot sheets is the second.

In the discussion how to establish fairness between the leaders, first-past-the-post gets brushed under the ominous ‘lost votes’ argument. Isn’t it unfair that my voters did not see their candidate take any seat or office at all even though they are also support of my party leader just like those who live in constituencies replete with his fans? To outsiders it is hard to believe that this is an actual argument in Germany and an unchallenged one. Nobody actually says, ‘No, you lost! Suck it up!’ The “lost votes” are still supposed to count somehow. The whole point of a decision is that one thing happens and the other thing DOES NOT HAPPEN! If the other thing also happens, you haven’t made a decision. And foiling the decision-making disempowers the sovereign, the voter.

There are voting systems that do this to a smaller degree like the Australian “instant run-off system”. In Australia the second choices of the least popular candidates are added. But why should people who have made an unpopular first choice have more weight? Those voters are actually supposed to ‘lose their vote.’ Another argument is that the candidates with fewer votes may still be closer to the overall intent of the electorate than the winning candidate. They still have lost. If candidates feel close to each other in their skills and ambitions, they are free to hold primary elections between them. There is no reason why the official election set-up should take care of bundling forces. Losing voters should continue their public debate efforts and maybe in a future election their space-shuttle parking lot will make the day. There is no system in which everybody will always get his way and be the monarch over everybody else. In Australia the decisions are still felt clearly enough, but the bundle-choice system in Germany disenfranchises the voters entirely.

The major reason why politics all across the West is so terribly tribal along party lines is that some people actually profit from it. The media can only rally against a party when low-information voters identify members en masse on their ballot sheets. High-information voters will find their candidates by name and independent of media recommendations. It is the masses of people who need the orientation with party labels that can be manipulated. Requiring voters to know the name of the candidate that represents them best in a public office reduces the participation.

The question over whether or not participation grants democratic legitimacy is hotly debated. The prevailing sense of abandonment in Germany leads to election abstention as a last signal of defiance. It is the idea that the elites would see their legitimacy shrink when voters abstain. After all this is what they say. If elites constantly try to lower the voting age, try to get immigrants who don’t understand the language and what’s going on to vote and overall drive up the participation rate with their rhetoric, they really must care about those numbers, right? Wrong. They care about drowning the informed with the uninformed. Of course, they wouldn’t admit it and so the original argument for political legitimacy as a function of participation is usually that democracy (δημοκρατία) simply means the rule of the people and that is just as many as you get. In the United States this meets the popular contention that the country is a republic (res publica) and not a democracy by which Americans mean that its’s not a mob rule (ochlocracy, ochlocratia, ὀχλοκρατία). The ancient Greek saw the danger of a kyklos (κύκλος), a cycle of government models. The best developed kyklos idea was described by the historian Polybios (Πολύβιος). In his view the natural next stage after a democracy is the descent into a mob. Powerful people in control of the means to manipulate can stir up masses to serve their interests under the guise of expressing the interest of the vast majority.
In antiquity the power of the demagogues (δημαγωγός) was based on their rhetorical tactics. Instead of presenting logical arguments they improved their own standing by supporting already popular ideas independent from their match with reality. We observe the exact same dynamics in our media. The difference is that those low-integrity speakers today also deny attention to counter-arguments, a depravity the demagogues of ancient Athens usually didn’t engaged in. The folly of the masses is the reason why representation matters and referenda alone – albeit a welcome addition to the political process – will not solve the core problems. It is not a design problem when representatives will occasionally act differently from what they promised during their campaigns. They are supposed to work their way into complex problems and it is likely that they realise something they did not know before. Contrary to popular wisdom this is not always a sign of a lack of integrity. It is the duty of a representative to explain why he was mistaken before. He is not supposed to blindly follow polls and hide behind a consent. However, he is neither supposed to place the responsibility for his diverging behavior on the complexity of an issue if he does not deign to explain any of that complexity.

In order to reverse the descend into a mob society we have to find criteria of legitimacy outside of a blind quantification of mobilisation and support. Reducing participation is historically associated with barring people from it. Thus the idea causes visceral discomfort. Occasionally people annoyed by the current mass craze and its downstream political effects bite the bullet and propose outright bans like limiting election rights to taxpayers. Where ever you want to set the axe, however, you will meet a lot of resistance. You can achieve what you seek to achieve without the friction by simply raising the cognitive bar. Ballots should only be available in the main administrative language of a country, i.e. in German, and people should remember the names of the candidates they hope to be best represented by. This is also the more palatable option simply because all of us would at the same time be included and excluded from elections; indeed, each of us would be excluded from most elections. If the legitimacy of a public office is derived from the support of people who care about it and not by the sheer number of cast votes, elections in a representative democracy become an ordinary human resources decision. This requires unprecedented humbleness in an age of narcissism. But if you imagine to run a business you would never hire somebody whose name you cannot remember. You would neither choose a craftsman based on his looks or how close his believes are to those of somebody else. Why would you choose a public representative that way? If you can desist from partaking in every election, you will also become less reliant on experts, real and fake ones. Experts can err, too, and they also have their own set of interest. You either know on your own who would be your best representative for a given public office or nobody does. If you cannot delegate decisions to other voting peers, you ultimately delegate it to a manipulative authority like the media, influential billionaires and (pseudo-)experts.

Not every official of the sprawling administration of our government can be elected. Even if we expand the number of electable offices (which we should do), we don’t want to strain the public with constant calls to the ballots. But administrations should be answerable to a ministry, a state or a federal one. And there is no reason why the entire executive branch should pend on only one single elected office. Ministers can be and should be entirely independent offices. It is the nature of executive bodies to be responsive to the changing circumstances. As such ministries are often created or reorganised. The establishment, budgeting and discontinuation of them can be placed in the hands of the parliament. When a new ministry is created, it should be the right of the people to elect its leader. As of now the responsibilities of the cabinet members are still pooled. Ministers should cooperate, but they should not work primarily on other ministries’ affairs or shed responsibility when matters in their domain go out of hand.

In a number of American states judges are elected. The European Union slammed its member nation Poland as supposedly undemocratic when the Poles considered a system of judicial oversight to punish misbehavior on the benches. Who does check the courts? The public, a committee or nobody? Courts like any institutions can corrupt and they are also as susceptible to ideological fashions as any of the others.

A German saying goes, “On the sea and in the court we are left in the hand of the Lord.”(Auf See und vor Gericht ist man in Gottes Hand.) Germany appoints her judges by parliament decision. The main argument for appointments over elections is that the courts are supposed to apply the law stoically and not ideologically. The saying suggests, though, that many Germans don’t feel that way. They feel that, for instance, foreigners are given more lenient sentences than citizens.

My proposal to scrap all party information from ballot sheets entirely is called ‘nonpartisan elections’ in the context of US judicial elections. These elections exist in Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, North Dakota, Oregon, Washington, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. The quality of elected judges versus appointed judges is difficult to measure. In a paper of the University of Chicago Law School with the title ‘Professionals or Politicians: The Uncertain Empirical Case for an Elected Rather Than Appointed Judiciary’ the authors tried to create measurements for skill, effort and independence, anyway. The result was that they did not find a superiority by any metric for one group or the other, but they noted that the appointed judges were more likely to leave a legacy behind in the form of high quality opinions while elected judges write more of them. Whenever I read the verdicts of German courts I am shocked by the low quality of the reasoning. It’s safe to say that elections, at least, wouldn’t do harm. What speaks for elections is that ideologies are often pushed down top-down corrupting all institutions in their way and elections provide one of only few options to reverse dangerous trends. The usual counter-argument is that courts are pressured and influenced by the fickle masses. But this has always been the case. The musical ‘Chicago’ is actually based on a real-life observation. What drives malleable judges into dubious verdicts is media frenzy and not voters. Citizens who take part in judicial elections are less likely to be the uninformed outrage mob that are whipped up by the press.

Notes On The Oval Office Tiff

Zelensky, Trump and Vance had a bad day. Maybe they were hungry and tired. Maybe the impact will be huge. And maybe they calm down and prioritise peace over mood.

As far as I see Trump’s Minerals Deal was a good one and even superior to Zelensky’s offer. The latter sought to ensure Ukrainian control over the raw resources fund with which some of the reconstruction efforts should have been financed. Even with all US corruption scandals in mind, America’s susceptibility to that kind of corrosion is much more limited than Ukraine’s own. The country would benefit from external oversight which is also one of the reason why some have high (and unrealistic) hopes for the European Union and their iron fist.

Zelensky’s second mistake was his public drive. He could have re-negotiated or accepted the deal for weeks now and by private means of communication. Instead he joined the choir of the European chatting class who aren’t used to any serious work and any heavy lifting whatsoever. They spend day in and day out insulting Trump and portraiting him as incapable of any good choice whatsoever. You cannot get these hate driven people to admit as much as that he may have put on a pretty tie. I keep listening to Anne Applebaum and her cross-Atlantik circles for years and they contort all of their claims on the axiomatic basis that Trump is dirt, that he can’t do anything right.

Contrary to their claims the White House is acutely aware that Vladimir Putin is the reason for this war and that Ukraine needs robust security guarantees. But that’s like admitting that he’s got a sense of humor.

Volodymyr Zelensky did not use offensive speech or make wild claims about Trump unlike many other European counterparts. But he is in a weaker position and he sounds too much like them. When J D Vance addressed European authoritarianism with many example’s, he felt like he should retort it somehow. He’s got all hands full with his own troubles and should’ve left it for other Europeans to heed the call. He doesn’t know sh*t about the EU except from the fact that it’s still less authoritarian than Belarus and Russia. By that he fueled the misconception that his nation which suspended free speech and banned political parties would not care about authoritarianism anyway. Given the gravity of the war a temporary suspension of democratic principles is indeed justified, but any public statement must emphasize its temporary nature. Comments of ignorance about concerns over a rise in authoritarianism elsewhere are a public relations disaster.

Overall Zelensky is not as harsh as other Europeans and maybe he can set the tone for others as everybody calms down again. He’s got high hopes that his relationship with President Trump can be mended. In recent weeks Emmanuel Macron played a pragmatic role and may facilitate the process. In the past Macron questioned the benefit of Western solidarity and proposed not to help Taiwan when push comes to shove. But now he seems to stand for a united free world which can overcome its internal frictions. Italy under Giorgia Meloni may also help getting Trump and Zelensky back on track. For the days to follow we are likely to see some emotional fall out. Nutty goons harass J D Vance and his family right now. Trump doesn’t want to talk to crazy Europeans for a moment. Maybe he scares the sh*t out of them as he forces them to organise weapon supplies. Huff, puff, boom. All is well as long as this remains a short blow-over.

Trump is showing American muscles. In Europe the talk is about a ‘rules-based world’ and that the ‘stronger must not dictate.’ That’s somewhat reasonable, but the problem with us Europeans is that we don’t just ignore power dynamics. We enter the room very aggressively and condescendingly lecture everybody DESPITE being in the weaker position. And this bossiness is the thing Zelenky should consider to apologise for. You cannot ask for money and tell people who to meet and what to say. Arrogance is the downfall of Europe. You cannot be part of the partisan choir that constantly seeks to shame and insult Donald Trump, painting him as a complete fool that he simply isn’t.

Trump and Vance made their own mistakes. As long as everybody gets back on track mistakes are okay. Key follies in the Republican party right now that fuel the misunderstanding:
– You cannot say that free speech works and than blindly repeat Russian propaganda unchecked. I saw the dancing-Zelensky video a million times. Thanks. Whatever point you tried to made, the actual message you send to all the Anne-Applebaum-types was that we are not mature enough for the First Amendment. Also Russia was never weaker since Stalin got the bomb. So dial back the WWIII talk.
– The price-tag talk comes after America poured gazillions into Afghanistan and Iraq. Ukraine is a highly educated population of 40 million people who risked a lot to adapt our lifestyle and become our partners. The Orange Revolution and Euro-Maiden were heroic acts and not just CIA projects (the CIA is clearly overrated, ludicrously overrated). Does your moral compass really tell you to let them down?
– The left roots for Ukraine because of Hunter Biden’s corruption and Hillary Clinton’s failure to accept her electoral defeat of 2016. They are very bad reasons. Historically, the left has always rooted for Russia and any other adversary of the United States. It’s a folly of history that the roles are reversed on this matter. If conservatives also allow fashionable opinion fads to override reason, Israel has got no future. There are more anti-Semites than Jews and mass immigration will dictate that the current war would be the last in which Israel can rely on the necessary weapon deliveries. Also remember what this entails for free-speech advocacy and the future of liberty as a whole!
– The popular talking point that ‘Russia is not the Soviet Union’ is nothing more than a slogan. In crucial matters it still is. Maybe Republicans relied too long on the economic argument that communism leads to authoritarianism. It does. But independently, Russia is also a brutalised nation with a long-standing authoritarian history spanning many centuries. And that’s not just over.

I’d Agree to a Quran-Burning Ban in Germany – Here’s Why

As Apollo News reports, the Youtuber Aron Pielka was sent to prison this Sunday, almost four years after his conviction.

The reasons why his once suspended sentence came into effect are his inability to appear at court and a delayed penalty payment. Pielka says that he did not pay in time because he did not receive the notification. His obligations included staying at a given home address, but for familial matters he was not present. In short, all of this suggests that he became destitute and homeless over his activism. In post-2015 Germany critics get their social and professional ties cut in so many ways that their lives get irreparably destroyed. And this is probably also the motivation behind his conviction in the first place. It’s a feature, not a bug.

The laws are incitement against (a portion of the) people and the blasphemy law. Most of the speech the judiciary indicted him for were images of a burning Quran. Technically that is rather freedom of expression than freedom of speech and you may wonder what that is for. It is for the ground you can break with low-information voters, for starters.

Many conservatives moan about the lack of right-wing arts and a supposed lack of appreciation for the arts. But this is a misconception. The political left enjoys a tight control over our communication and makes demands on others which they would never abide by. Conservatives are expected to trim off jokes and ambiguities. Anything potentially amusing can be construed as offensive and is an excuse to cut somebody away from his audience. Say ‘retard’ and you’re out. Make masturbatory gestures on a stage and you’re the Queen of Pop.

Thus the reason why Aron Pielka included videos of burning Qurans is that it works. His material was funny, sarcastic, and creative. He’d got a sizable audience for a German Youtuber. Never did he burn any of the Qurans himself and neither did he express actual rage with the imagery. There was also no way that he could have incited non-Muslim Germans against Muslims in this manner.

The ability to threaten the public order is the legal threshold to incitement according to the law. That same threshold is supposed to anchor the blasphemy law. The only problem is that German courts have already established a tradition of ignoring that threshold.

This is reflected in one of the indictments which were bundled into Aron Pielka’s verdict. The court found that he incited anti-Semitism because he altered his avatar – a portrait of the Jewish philosopher Samuel Johnson – into a bat-man chimera. I haven’t seen it, but I suspect that it looks anti-Semitic as a standalone image. However, the avatar – by definition a visual to represent the speaker – was constantly changed to reflect some mood and Aron Pielka’s body of work shows a long-standing, unwavering support for Jews and the nation of Israel. Nobody thinks that he cultivated an audience that would go on a riot after viewing a bat picture.

But the burning Qurans are different, right? We all know they are. They don’t incite violence against Muslims, but they may well incite violence. What incites violence depends on the willingness of a subsection of the population to engage in it. But this makes the law quite arbitrary and, worse, it creates an incentive for more and more sections of society to engage in violence. If your violence is followed by a punishment of those who you feel provoked by, you can determine the order. You can set the rules and call the perceived provocations on your own terms.

And that is the spiral we must break early on. We must set the criteria what society and law accepts as untenable provocation. The fewer things are acknowledged as accommodated outrage, the calmer society will remain in the long run. This means a dress-down of all legal codes tackling ‘insults’. Incitement against (a portion of the) people should be replaced with a clear ban on two things and two things only: Quran burning and Holocaust denial.

The latter is not an attempt to quiet Jews, but to pre-empt the communists who like to exploit the shoah to justify their aggression.

The reason why the law is too general has much less to do with the Third Reich (the public approval of which is also banned there) and more to do with the German legal language which oscillates wildly between extreme detail and extreme vagueness. In the process of codification the thought trail must have gone from ‘we must quiet the Nazis’ to ‘a German chisels his law for eternity.’ So on its face ALL groups can demand the punishment of ALL other groups by ANY provocation. A law for once and for all, a low for a thousand years.

Small is beautiful, however, and laws can be changed. We should only accommodate the outrage of today and dare to hope for a future when that paragraph can be erased completely.

With that said, no Muslim riots have been provoked by Aron Pielka. The technicalities that led to his imprisonment don’t matter to me. Nobody should be threatened with punishment for his harmless online commentary. And if the authorities see harm in a behaviour, they must outlaw that conduct clearly and not apply vague laws selectively. He is a political prisoner and must be freed.

The RationalWiki Fallacy

RationalWiki is a left-wing ‘encyclopedia’ of supposedly discredited views. Its condescension is prominently represented in the logo which was chosen to be an image of a brain. In its beginning the authors focussed on absurdities that most people identify as such like esoterics, alternative medicine and astrology. Also still uncontroversial were their texts about outlandish religious views and common fallacies such as red herring, appeals to authorities, straw man and so forth. Yet over time more and more was added that presented madness as somehow intrinsically connected to conservative views.

There are comparable developments in Germany where I’m based. The channels are different, though. The German-language RationalWiki-copy Psiram doesn’t enjoy nearly as much notoriety. Information gate-keeping is still mostly controlled by public broadcasters and select media houses such as Bertelsmann, Springer, Spiegel and Holtzbrinck. And they are using the trope that large swaths of views and interests in society are exclusively held by the wicket. Independent of the topic of the day, be it mass immigration, corona, criticism of Islam or something else, the predictable framing is ‘These views are commonly held by people who believe in [fill in garbage].’

And, of course, you can always find intersections of interests between any two non-related issues somewhere in the population. The dark art is to exhibit the voices of the crazies and drown everybody else. Not long ago conservatives were presented as squared, unimaginative nitwits who would benefit from LSD for its miraculous expansion of the mind. Conversely, the hippies spawned an entire New Age Movement. Generation after generation of left-wing women felt that sudden, longing urge to rush to the stores and seek out Hinduism jump-start literature and lubricant. However, if we read RationalWiki or listen to some average German media outlet, the left is all science while madness comes in business suits. The poorly defined phrase ‘conspiracy theory’ gets almost exclusively attached to the political right.

In reality its traditional and still largest resort resides within the left, filling walls in book shops and libraries. “Ms Science” herself Greta Thunberg will have you believe that everything is connected and climate were the hub of it all, widening her interests from climate justice to climate Zionism. Arguably all of their vague bogeymen from patriarchy over systemic racism to capitalism (not just identical with markets) are buckets of conspiracy theories.

It would be frivolous to discard the idea that conservatives are also speculative. There is even an argument to be made that an obsessive materialism is less rational than some element of irrationality. Leaps of faiths have paved the way of hard sciences most of the time. There is a reason why i and its coefficient is called the imaginary part of a complex number. What was auxiliary once is taken for granted today. Kurt Gödel proved that Hilbert’s program to develop a rigorous axiomatic approach to pure mathematics is not possible. Alonzo Church and Alan Turing demonstrated the limits of computability. Outside of pure mathematics quantum physics and black holes pose additional barriers to our understanding. We know for sure that we don’t know. Yet, if you look for academics who pry open small crevices to make outlandish claims, you’ll invariantly find left-wing cult leaders like Judith Butler and Kimberlé Crenshaw.

Most of what is presented as right-wing conspiracy theories are arms crawling over from the left. They are often tinged with anti-Americanism and anti-Israel animus. Nothing Tucker Carlson puts on the table is original. And that is good and well as long as the sane voices are well heard which is arguably still the case in most parts of America.

In Germany information gate-keeping is tight and selective nutcases get just enough airtime for mockery, but never enough to sort anything out. While leading nuclear engineer Manfred Haferburg and Hamburg’s ex-Energy-and-Environment-Senator Fritz Vahrenholt issue warning after warning against our energy policy to alternative media outlets, the big houses Bertelsmann, Springer, Spiegel, Burda and Holtzbrinck parade much less qualified academics as experts and block any public conversations between the sides. Haferburg and Vahrenholt aren’t even given their time of the day.

For years this had been the opening for Russia’s public broadcasters RT and Sputnik. Where all sane voices are quashed well-financed players can scoop up an audience of disaffected people who are willing to hear something outside the drumming propaganda and outside of the freak show it breeds.

A second effect of the RationalWiki fallacy is that the freaks could build up their networks. While the attention is meant to discredit the parts of society who seek constructive improvements, it also forces many of the drowned out to bind themselves onto the isles of attention.

Recently the magazine ‘Compact’ was banned. I’ve never read it, but my casual observations tell me that it is basically Alex Jones on steroids. Hmmm…maybe that’s a bad way of saying it. Is Alex Jones off steroids?

It is clearly more anti-American than InfoWars and its editor Jürgen Elsässer holds a wicket, long-standing grudge against Israel. In the show Deutschlandsafari host Henryk Broder walked up to Elsässer to ask whether Osamba bin Laden might not be an Islamist at all, but a CIA agent. The room erupted in laughter because, indeed, that was one of the magazine’s title stories. Later in the evening his co-host Hamed Abdel-Samad recognised a man in the audience who belongs to the Berlin-Neukölln chapter of the neo-Nazi party NPD. Moreover, Elsässer hired at least three members of that very party to work for his publication: Thorsten Thomsen, Arne Schimmer and Oliver Niedrich.

Maybe Elsässer is a neo-Nazi himself as some purport, but I refuse to allot much time to him to be 100% accurate. He may see himself as something else for this or that disagreement with the Hitler regime. That can even be true for the mentioned NPD guys. I don’t care.

The more interesting question is how many people around him share his views and how many simply hold back their own opinions because they’ve got nowhere to go.

The recent magazine ban caused quite some stir in Germany. But after years of complaining about censorship, I’m tired. On principle I’m against it. On the basis of where we are by now and how being principled is completely disrespected in this country, I’m too jaded to care. Jürgen Elsässer wouldn’t defend me. Jürgen Elsässer doesn’t believe in the principles he appeals to now. In 2014 he sued former Green-party politician and publicist Jutta Ditfurth after she called him an ‘ardent anti-Semite.’

At least he’s not a proud anti-Semite. But the crux of the matter is that the word ‘anti-Semite’ describes a category. It is always a subjective decision to place somebody into a circle of people or outside of it. Given his obsessions it’s fair to assume that some of his claims and believes are at least inspired by people who simply hate Jews – and that’s independent of whether Elsässer knows this of them or not.

So in the light of the magazine ban I still stick to my principles, but I point out that karma is a bitch. I am still tired of the everybody-is-a-Nazi mania, but to drag somebody to the authorities like Elsässer did with Jutta Ditfurth in order to penalise a (perceived) mis-characterisation shows a disregard for free expression. It is not up to the courts to address the occasional definition-overextension of ugly categories. It is the job of a freely speaking citizenry to define reasonable boundaries and more importantly to sort out the anti-Semitic tropes themselves.

Granted. This sounds like a fairy-tale world. The real world is emotional and childish. The public has a short fuse. Instead of cultivating a knowledgable and respectful citizenry our institutions have done everything to erode the civil maturity of the past. Public affairs have always been a mess, but there’s no doubt that asininity and irresponsibility grew geometrically.

In Germany the main driver behind it and the reason why I walked you through the Compact magazine ban is the RationalWiki fallacy. Jürgen Elsässer matters because Manfred Haferburg and Fritz Vahrenholt don’t.

Design a site like this with WordPress.com
Get started