Archiv der Kategorie: politics

German Politics

The Bike is back.

When my sister moved to Hamburg last year, one of the first encouters with her new city of choice was that someone chose to steal her bike. As it was an unusual bike, maybe the thief was as confident as police were that they would find it and decided to take it back after sleeping over it.

The thief who stole Hans-Christian Stroebele’s bycicle last week apparently wasn’t quite as concerned about selling his booty. Via German MP Jakob-Maria Mierscheid’s blog I just learned that Hans-Christian has been united with his bike – a bycicle messenger recognized it on a local flee market and just bought it back for the rightful owner…

And the bottom line of this story? We don’t need increased electronic surveillance of public space. We need more cycling, attentive citizens. Sure, the former is a lot easier to achieve than the latter, but it’s also a lot less effective. QED.

Standard
German Politics

Give him his bike back…

It may be a plot to demonstrate the inefficieny of the increasing closed circuit surveillance and increased policing of public space – or just C/conservative terror against one of the remaining true leftists in German politics.

Last Tuesday, German MP Hans-Christian Ströbele’s bycicle was stolen from the east entry of the Bundestag, despite the presence of security cameras and police.

As Ströbele mentions on his website that he needs his bike to execute his mandate, there’s a chance Friedrich Merz, the former CDU/CSU economic policy spokesperson saw an opportunity to beef up his “street cred” by finally really stealing a bike, and not just making it up, like he did in 2002…

In any case, if you want to help Mr Ströebele get his bike back, he’s posted a very detailed description with photo here (via German MP Jakob Mierscheid’s blog).

Standard
Iraq, oddly enough, US Politics

Irony…

ironyLast Wednesday, at the anti-Bush demonstration during the President’s visit to Mainz, Germany: This demonstrator’s “subtle” statement about murderous, and militaristic foreign policy allegedly exhibited by a well known remaining superpower that “everyone, except ‘us'” (whoever us may be) allegedly participated in, is, ironically, just as subtly contradicted by a portrait of a certain Mr. Kruger printed on his jacket…

Standard
photoblogging, US Politics, USA

More Texan-friendliness.

Texan-friendliness

I had heard of http://www.sorryeverybody.com/gallery/single/se24.jpg/ before, but I had not seen the site until today. As opposed to the reason for its existence, it is really good fun. And in light of this blog’s recently re-discovered Texan-friendliness, I just had to reassure the lady above that while Europeans are religiously deprived and accordingly morally depraved, we are also, as prominently pointed out by Robert Kagan, generally rather too quiet and peaceful. Moreover, while many of us would love to, we have been taught by history not to play around with long-distance missiles just for fun…

Standard
almost a diary, songwriting, US Politics

Mary Hodder is right

to state that not all blogs that are inactive are abandoned.

Take this one for example. See, I haven’t updated my proto diary for a month now and not even written anything over on afoe but that doesn’t imply I have given up blogging much as I haven’t stopped reading in the meantime.

I have taken breaks from blogging before over the last two years (although I have to agree that the inactive intervals have become more frequent) and I am rather sure I will do so again in the future.

However – and I am saying this particularly to the handful of faithful readers of my personal blog – should I ever stop writing here for good, I would certainly inform you about it.

And thus, gentle readers, begins the third year in the young and exciting life of www.almostadiary.de. I’m starting off with a teaser… tomorrow I will regale you with a rough pre-demo of a little song I’ve written about a certain guy from Texas whose analytical skills have already been the subject of a certain number of posts on this blog. Until then, if you haven’t yet, please go and watch this clip about rural campaigning in the US, brought to you by the only reliable US news source, Comedy Central’s Daily Show with John Stewart…

Oh, and this is what I wrote two years ago, on August 19, 2002:

Is the bottom line really chapter 32, in part VIII of volume one?

Oxford’s Niall Ferguson thinks that Marx’s thoughts about crisis prone capitalism should be given more attention in light of the not so recently past days of “CEOcracy” and increased income inequality in the US. But today, Ferguson claims, the class struggle is not waged between workers and owners but between ordinary shareholders and their CEO and controlling oligarchs, so the Marxian acculmulation theory could have a point. In the end, he somewhat loses track and the article becomes more of a summary of recent estimates of American growth prospects. And he never tells us what the consequences could be if the analogy were correct.

But anyway. Could it be true? Could Marx be headed for big comeback in the digital age? I am very sceptical. Alhtough I do think that he has created a scary seductive beast whose feared return will likely scare this planet for some decades to come.

Standard
oddly enough, songwriting, US Politics

Pretty Good.

The George W Bush Don’t Worry, be Happy List by Tim Dunlop.

Oh, and did I mention I composed a song called “George W Blues”…. well, it’s not actually blues, it’s got more of a Texan country feel in the latest version. It’s about a dyslexic boy whose dad once read to him from Machiavelli and then told him he would become a great leader, if only he learnt how to read…

If Michael Moore won’t produce it, I’ll post it here sometime.

Standard
German Politics, oddly enough

I’m leaving the country.

You know what? A sizeable portion of Germans are probably truly mad, after all. I have just learnt of a poll result indicating that a third of Germans would support a political comeback of Oskar Lafontaine, the loony left former chairman of the Social Democrats, who blocked each and every economic reform initiative in the 1990s. Yes, *that* Oskar. The “I’m against it, what are we talking about?” Lafontaine.

Frankly, if Lafontaine had been born in the US, he would be advocating Creationism and write op-eds about the failure of science to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the earth is not flat.

I mean, has anyone ever “really” seen the entire globe?

Standard
German Politics

Shorter IG Metall.

“You can be as flexible as you want to, work as much as you want to, earn as much as you want to – but only if we allow it.”

In a move displaying the current hipocrisy of German trade unions in all its beauty, IG Metall, the poweful metal worker union, struck a deal with Siemens AG that will increase working hours in one plant to 40 hours a week – something the union previously claimed would be the end of the world as we know it.

Apparently it’s not – as long as the union’s officials get to decide instead of the people affected…

More via Deutsche Welle.

Standard
US Politics

America’s Echo Chamber

I remember a discussion among several a-list bloggers about “blogs as echo chambers” earlier this year. While I largely agreed with the theory that blogs can become echo chambers – a public sphere simply reflecting and reinforcing opinions already held by readers and writers mutually self-selecting each other for the precise reason of not being confronted with world-view-challenging opinions – I am also quite confident that this risk is particularly important in America – still the dominant part of the world’s blogosphere.

I suppose it would be impossible for blogs to entirely escape the general echo chamber that the American public sphere seems to have become given the apparent progressive ideological division of the country. If you’re not sure what I am talking about, take a look at some of the headlines about the 9/11 commissions interim report about the alleged connections of Saddam Hussein government officials with Al-Qaeda.

Some might wonder why the Bush administration is not changing their talking points in light of the amount of evidence challenging its stance instead of thouroughly demonstrating once again that George W Bush might have a black and white world view except when it comes to telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Maybe Richard Cheney told Mrs Bush to read Machiavelli’s “The Prince” to the President…

But whatever the reason, both men seem to know very well that to keep lying will not do more harm to their reputation than it has already. However, changing the tune now would certainly alienate those on their side of the American echo chamber, those who, for one reason or another, if only to avoid cognitive dissonance, still believe – or pretend to believe – that the administration was not lying all along.

Unfortunately, it is these people that President Bush needs come November, not those who believed he was bending the truth with or without a commission report.

Standard
German Politics

She Was Not Surprised?

I’m a little confused about a statement by the Chancellor’s spokesperson, Bela Anda, as reported by Netzeitung.

As you might have heard, yesterday, an unemployed teacher was able to approach Mr Schroeder during a campaign rally in Mannheim and slap him. The Chancellor was, according to Mr Anda, not seriously injured by the “attack” and the perpetrator, who, interestingly, is – and for technical reasons will remain – a candidate for the Social Democrats in next months local elections despite immediate cancellation of his party membership, was released from police custody later in the evening. He faces charges of assault and insult.

Physical attacks on politicians are, luckily, very rare in current German politics – so there it is always surprising to hear about them. Or maybe not – apparently, Mrs Schroeder has been expecting such reactions to her husband’s politics all along – or how else is one to interpret Mr Anda’s statement that she “had been startled but was not really surprised.”

Standard