Summary
Elon Musk livestreamed a conversation with Alice Weidel, co-leader of Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, on his platform X, endorsing her and urging support for the AfD ahead of Germany’s February 23 election.
The livestream, which drew over 200,000 viewers, raised concerns across Europe about Musk’s influence in foreign politics.
AfD, under observation for extremism, has gained popularity amid discontent with Chancellor Scholz’s government.
Musk’s promotion of Weidel and controversial remarks on other European issues are being monitored for violations of the EU’s Digital Services Act.
Why is Germany not just blocking Twitter? I don’t get it.
Why are we just letting Nazis take over again? Seems like we had a solution to them before.
Money and power… And propaganda.
The elites don’t want immigrants, they want wage slaves. Who will come when they are told to, live like they are told to, work in any condition they are given and leave when they are told to.
So the goal is to deport these pesky immigrants with rights and import those slaves, then those slaves will work for extremely cheap cuz the threat of deportation and how their home countries are beyond fucked anyways.
Who benefits from slavery? Is it the working class (poor and middle) or the elites who will have cheap labor?
Not to mention this will reduce the salaries for everyday Germans, and then elites gets to claim 2 things to fellow germans:
look at all the immigrants who are stealing your job and driving your wages down.
look at how much our economy is growing (it will be the elites who will be getting all the wealth not the working/poor class)
Btw you can replace the whole scenario in USA as well with the whole H1B visa stuff.
When large parts of the population say they’d like less islamic immigration and, instead of listening, politicians patronise them, what you end up with are Nazis…
Don’t politician have to serve their country? In Germany’s case that means promoting immigration, to have any chance at keeping up the pension and welfare system as it is, because Germans don’t get anywhere near enough kids. Being against immigration right now means being for less pension, higher medical costs, worse infrastructure etc. Merkel realized that (more than) ten years ago. The average afd dumbo is still too fucking thick to think further than from wall to wallpaper. There would be other options, of course. Consuming less, getting rid of the thought of eternal growth, but not even worth a thought as long as sexy Christian is still alive and foamy.
While I personally don’t agree with them, what you are doing here is exactly the kind of patronising I was talking about. The choice between poorer services and immigration should be a democratic choice. People should be allowed to be ok that the country will be poorer but less culturally diverse. If that’s important to them. That’s that point of having democracy at all- it’s not obvious which matters are the more important ones. You may have you own opinions, they may in fact be thoroughly based on data and utilitarian greater good, but as soon as you say ‘this whole mass of people must be thick because of what they value and I’m going to ignore them’ you’re engaging in the exact kind of behaviour that you think you’re fighting.
IF(!) people were voting AfD while acknowledging that it will result in less money, general quality of life etc. for them: fair enough. If they made an informed decision to live a shittier life by voting against immigration because that’s their priority: all right (he he). But we both know that this is not the case. They fall for the dumb and blatant lies of the populists, telling them they will have more money, better social security, better infrastructure, a better life in general.
No. This is the fundamental of democracy, it’s weakness we have to bear with (but only because all the other options are worse). Despite all the bullshit (and there is a lot of bullshit) democracy has to rest on the fact that a population of adults can make a decision. That en masse their bullshit detectors work good enough. Else we become anti democratic ourselves and start favouring a vanguard of the insightful, educated, tasteful, moral, high thinkers “such as ourselves!” that get to patronise everyone else and disregard their opinions.
A lot of people thoroughly dislike conservative Islam. Both as a concept and from firsthand experience. There are other things wrong with the country too. But acting like people have no right to want there to be greater discernment at the border, and in fact call then churlish and mentally deficient for expressing anything of the kind, is what leaves them (and the are many of them) disconnected from the political process, frustrated, and open to the rhetoric of more extreme ideologues.
I would further and say just immigration is not enough. We need to provide equal rights and opportunities to immigrants as well. Because as long as immigrants can be exploited for lower labor, Germans will also be exploited indirectly.
Whether its about crimes, poverty leads to crime not immigration. Which immigrants tend to be.
Or if it is about equal pay, cuz if immigrants don’t get equal pay that will just lead to lower pay for everybody industry wide.
AfD knows this because they serve the rich not the people. They want the threat of deportation to immigrants so they work for cheaper and rich get richer.
And at the same time, when Germans get angry, AfD tells them to direct it towards immigrants not the rich.
Its crazy how many of the world’s problems can be solved by having empathy and humanity.
While I don’t disagree that there’s a serious class battle going on people are also allowed to want there to be less immigration, especially of islamic culture, no? That’s democracy. Steamrolling over this, as if it’s a totally invalid thought to have, is what leads to the disconnect between urban elite politicians and the mass of people who are frustrated that the border seems to be porous to objectionable social values. You could have a moderate solution, but by ignoring people you end up with them feeling they’re only understood by more extreme ideologues.
Obviously the way Merkel and CDU did immigration and the way it is still done is far from ideal. Germany needs to change the way it looks at immigrants in general. But I doubt Fritzl sees it that way so yeah, tough times to hope for a better future…
It’s Mexican immigration they care about. But if they wanted their jobs to be taken by skilled immigrant workers, they’re gonna get that with trump. Whoops. Leopards.
Wrong continent
The more serious issue is, why haven’t they banned AfD. Where the fuck is the “Defensive” in “Defensive Democracy”?
After the actual Nazis banned a party, people made it far more difficult to ban parties.
You can try it, but it could fail. And the whole spectacle means more attention for them.
In Germany, they view extremist politics as anything to do with Islam, so if you promote the expulsion of Muslims or their reeducation or forcing them to sign pledges to Israel to become citizens, you’re just being German.
How about you stfu?
You seem to have no Idea what you are talking about.
Your foreign minister applauds Israel for mass killing children, your rising AfD party wants to deport Muslims and you now demand that anyone becoming a Germany citizen give the racist state of Israel a stamp of approval. Everyone watched half your politicians blame the Christmas ramming attack on Islam even though the perpetrator hated Muslims. You send a non-Jewish antisemitism commisars to bully Jews who criticize Israel. You are burying liberalism’s corpse. So enlighten me.
And what has this to do with being German?
I’m as German as you can be. I voted for none of these Parties and are actively fighting Nazis on EVERY FUCKING CORNER ,for example, I just helped to publish an Article about Nazis in our Trade schools, will this get me expelled? Maybe! But I did it and would do it over and over again! And then you come along and say stupid shit like “you’re just being German.”
This statement in itself is being an enormous generalization of ALL 83.500.000 Germans, which is racist in itself.
Which was followed by the largest uprising in modern German history. And let me tell you the People on the Street were… German :O
Why I know that? BECAUSE I LIVE HERE AND WAS WITH THEM!
If you want to criticize our Government do as you like, I have no stakes in this shitshow.
My Party is not (yet) in the Bundestag.
But I fight Nazis tooth and nail on every possible front I can reach. And I’m not going to take such an unreflected and uniformed Statement about what “German” is from someone who can’t even read our language and pastes his worldview together from Global Press.
And I’m by far not the only one. Many Germans fight their Family, Friend and Colleagues about these topics EVERY FUCKING DAY.
How dare you to disrespect us like that?! WE are here! WE do our part! And WE are Germans!
So shut your racist mouth!
You seem to have misunderstood what I said. I’m not saying these terrible things are just being German. I’m saying that the current government and political class doing these terrible things view these things as “just being German” and define extremism as “being Islamic”. I know that the majority of Germans are liberals, humanists, educated and anti-racist.
The afd is not the root problem and won’t go away if it were banned
The problem is moderate politicians persistently ignoring (and patronising) the working class over serious reservations they have over immigration and cultural dilution
Same as everywhere else…
When I moves to Germany I saw the exact same propaganda lines used in the US against African Americans and Median Americans leveraged against Turkish immigrants. The same percentage bullshit, the same lazy / taking our job lines.
Cultural dilution is not an objective metric, it’s a tool to rule up the uneducated and the racist. It’s all culture warfare to hide the constant class warfare.
The problem is not the immigrant population in every country on earth, totaling hundreds of millions of people, it’s the billionaire/millionaire class in every country totalling tens of thousands of people. The fuckin growing wealth disparity isn’t happening because of skilled labor or asylum seekers, it’s because of the rich.
There is absolutely a class war going on but it has many fronts. Globalised capitalists acting like one can simply pour population from here to there to satisfy the economic machine creates exactly the kind of cultural tension we see. Many people don’t like the conservative values that come with Islam. That’s ok. Moderate politicians acting like that’s a totally invalid (even evil) opinion only patronises people and leaves them disillusioned with the democratic process altogether. In a democracy people will have different values to oneself, they’ll even have a different idea over what’s important. The idea that it would be ok for the country to be poorer by have less immigration is a democratic choice and urban elites acting like you can’t even think like that is ultimately undemocratic.
The world is trending towards atheism bud. This Islamic fear mongering is horseshit. “Many people” who don’t like the “conservative values” that come from Islam are likely the same people who don’t like the conservative values that stem from Christianity or Catholicism and yet that’s far more prevalent in the US or Germany - in same cases literally baked in to their government - than the number of Islamic migrants could ever reach. It’s just smoke screen for blatant racism and xenophobia. Those two religions are more similar than they are different and yet one is tied to brown people and immigrants (looking for a better future). I bet if we looked at immigration statistics for the US the number of Islamic immigrants would represent a minority percentage of the total immigrant population. And that’s not even considering the fact that some people label themselves as the religious group they grew up with but aren’t practicing and possibly have even fallen out of faith.
I’m a Christian immigrant in Germany but I’m probably more likely agnostic at this point. Now tell me what my values are? Tell me what cultural pressure I’m putting on Germany? The reality is religion, except for heavy practitioners, is not necessarily indicative of their beliefs.
Immigrants bring skilled labor that societies need to survive. Its Not just Germany being poorer, it’s Germany not having working infrastructure, hospitals and clinics having larger wait times, it’s less organic and ethically produced products in your neighborhoods, it’s worse education and more expensive housing. Populations are declining and the best way to ensure every job is still filled, for the betterment of society, is immigration. Culture is a horseshit political word for people who didn’t grow up in my small town, which is most people.
Europeans and racist Americans talk about culture as if we’re in a fantasy or sci-fi setting, like people across an imaginary border don’t use money and don’t like music and don’t like good food. It’s stupid.
Was this problem something German people were concerned with when their government colonized Tanzania and other African counties prior to WW1?
Did they see the forced christianization and emigration to the colonies with the same distaste as their nationalistic descendents do immigration and islam today?
Not to mention the difference between top down colonization and bottom up immigration being fundamentally different. One revolves around cultural amalgamation and the other around forced cultural erasure.
Or do you think this only matters when it happens to white europeans?
If they are fundamentally different, why bring it up at all?
The Afd, nor the people who vote for them, advocate the colonisation of Africa. Correct me if I’m wrong.
One can acknowledge evils in the past, even be in favour of redressing them financially. That doesn’t invalidate the preference that conservative Islam be prejudiced against at the point of immigration.
That might be a good idea, but I think that folks need to examine fundamental factors underlying the rise of the far right and the ways in which limiting speech may be a weak remedy.
Germany has never had a problem with it before (post-WWII).
What’s the use of that information? They have that problem now.
It appears to be an internationally occurring problem.
No, I mean they have never had a problem limiting Nazi speech before.
Quite contrary, we have a big problem censoring Nazi speech.
We have some very specific rules when something can be censored and when it can’t - and the far right has quite some training in “just not saying that, maybe only implicating it a little”.
So any legal action outlawing then needs to rest on really solid legal basis or it will fail. Such a failure would be the propaganda the right wishes for.
Consequently they are always just shy of openly saying things but implying them. Like having election posters where their politicians can say “No we’re not showing a Hitler salute in that image, we were just miming a roof of a house over a bunch of kids”
Sometimes a single politician gets caught with doing something too far, but then (of course) the whole party acts like they are shocked.
Getting rid of this shit is not easy, unfortunately. We can’t censor what we don’t like willy nilly.
Getting rid of a platform who’s owner is trying to influence your elections even though he isn’t even a citizen is not “willy nilly” by any means.
I personally absolutely agree of getting rid of that shit. I just said there are big hurdles, and you need to do so in a very organized and based on proof way.
You can’t just outlaw them because you don’t like them, that doesn’t work. Germany having laws against hate speech doesn’t mean there’s not also a law about freedom of expression in the Grundgesetz.
You need to prove them to be against democracy in a watertight way. That’s what I mean with not willy-nilly.
Or as I read it once: Democracy implicitly protects its enemies.
If you block certain social media channels that you personally don’t agree with while being in charge, you set a dangerous precedent for other people blocking things they don’t agree with should they ever come to power.
And censorship doesn’t address the root cause in the first place. Alt-right / far-right clowns know that they are often operating outside of the law or at the very least skirting a line that makes them prone to being observed, so they’ll typically operate with VPNs or other obfuscation tech that will let them access Twitter regardless.
All a block achieves is that regular citizens can’t inform themselves about the crap that is being spewed to invalidate claims made by the right.
Germany has never had a problem with censoring Nazis in the past. I see no reason why they should start.
And I have no problem censoring harmful propaganda. The idea that harmful propaganda should be allowed because of some nebulous concept of freedom of speech is nonsense.
The AfD is a legitimate political party. Legitimate as in, they haven’t been caught with anything openly anti-constitutional.
Individual members have been, and were tried in court, and if found guilty were publicly expelled from the party, hence they operate under the guise of plausible deniability for the time being.
Nazi propaganda has been blocked once it’s confirmed anti-constitutional, but you can’t block a political party just like that.
And blocking Twitter as a whole is quite a big difference to blocking certain individuals or groups. No matter how much crap is on there, there are still a lot of legitimate postings, not least from legit government actors etc.
The federal party is suspected to be anti constitutional and several state level partys have been declared as anti constitutional by the Verfassungsschutz, so that’s not completely true.
Defensive Democracy
Would you say that banning political parties is undemocratic? If so, should the NSDAP (Nazi Party) be un-banned?
No, where did I say that? All I said is that as long as they are a legitimately recognized party, they can’t be censored.
I’m all in favor of banning the AfD, but only after this has been achieved, can their public channels, mouthpieces and whatever be censored, not the other way around.
Because they have their own problems which are real an not reality tv bullshit.
A world propaganda mouthpiece with millions of users is not “reality TV bullshit” and dismissing it like it has no effect is the wrong thing to do.
So what is the right thing to do homie?
See my very first post.
Removed by mod