I’d be inclined to think that going from 30% to 20% is worse than “not entirely successful” (assuming AfD voters in general are at the very least somewhat sympathetic to fascist views, which really doesn’t seem like an unfair assumption)

Did they do it, though? Eg. the BfV (Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the domestic intelligence agency) and BKA (Federal Criminal Bureau, the federal investigative police) are somewhat notorious for having a bit of a neo-Nazi problem, and they’re not the only German federal or state entities with the same issue (see eg. this article about the BfV and BKA. Edit: PBS report about neo-Nazi infiltration in German security forces).

It’s not an uncommon view that denazification wasn’t entirely successful. Hell, they even have a word for the sort of rushed “washing clean” of Nazi officials that was done: Persilschein, “Persil ticket” (Persil is a detergent brand).

I’d argue that if denazification had really succeeded, the AfD and others like it wouldn’t be as much of an issue.

I don’t disagree with that sentiment at all, I’m just not sure how to set this particular broken bone. How do you make ~20% of the population less fascist?

There is a difference between conservatism and being a threat to the democratic order.

I’m not sure I agree. More and more it’s started seeming like they’re generally just waiting for a moment to drop their masks; eg. here in Finland now that we have a fully right wing government, our “fiscally conservative” party started their term off by limiting the right to strike, and is now echoing extremist right wing talking points about eg. immigration, LGBT+ people, and the environment. They were OK with an extremist right wing minister leaving us out of Ukraine’s “Alliance for Gender-Responsive and Inclusive Recovery” because the plan mentioned LGBT+ people, and they stood in the way of banning abusive LGBT+ “conversion therapy” even though they claimed to be against it back when they still had to be in a government with leftist parties (sorry, couldn’t find an English source for this but here is one in Finnish. For translation I’d suggest DeepL, it’s vastly superior to eg. Google). They are also blaming the opposition for “besmirching” Finland’s reputation abroad, meaning they don’t want anyone pointing out that we have literal neo-Nazis in the government and parliament.

Banning the party isn’t going to help.

Like I say of Trump, the AfD isn’t the problem, they’re a symptom. Conservatism and conservatives themselves are the problem – the question is how should we deal with them, and I really don’t know the answer to that.

Edit: just to clarify, I’m not saying the AfD shouldn’t be banned, just that banning the party won’t change the people who vote for it and run it.

Gee I wonder what Palestinians might have against Israelis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy_in_the_workplace

as revealed in his new book, Play Nice: The Rise And Fall Of Blizzard Entertainment, […] he could tell when things were starting to fall apart, and a key reason for that was certain “business-minded hires,” including former CEO Bobby Kotick, who came on after the Activision merger.

MBA and MBA-minded parasites ruined shit for everyone? What a shocking revelation!

“The purpose of a system is what it does.”

Why take a risk with new ideas when you can repackage old ideas and sell them again?

/uj As much as I like Myst and Riven, isn’t this like the 29th re-release of Myst? Fuck, if Cyan folks want to redo something they should do Myst Online again, it was legitimately the best online gaming experience I ever had and I fucking hate online gaming in general.

Yeah, same, I found it a bit surprising they have fewer than Germany

“I literally can’t tell these two apart”

Yeah, some real “DEBATE ME” energy here

Shutting it does shut you out though, at least until you unshut it.

Huh, surprising to hear that at least “officially” SD’s gotten slightly less… well, nazi.

Also, love the Stafford Beer quote 😀 Honestly “the purpose of the system is what it does” is an excellent heuristic.

Yeah but that’s exactly it though: they’re not very moderate if they really have no qualms about collaborating with the likes of SD.

It’s the same here in Finland too, the “moderate” and “fiscally conservative” National Coalition Party (Kokoomus) is suddenly pretty much indistinguishable from the far right Finns Party (Perussuomalaiset) now that they’re in a 100% right wing government. They’re eg. loosening the punishment for denying the Holocaust, blocking the progress of a law that would ban “conversion therapy” (ie. psychological violence to turn people straight), their MPs are now openly racist, and so on.

Feels like “moderate” conservatives are just waiting for an excuse to drop their masks. One of my former acquaintances who is supposedly a moderate KOK voter told me straight up that the world would be a better place if gender minorities (like me…) didn’t exist.

I’ve always found it a bit funny that one of the Swedish conservative parties is called the Moderates. They pretend they’re “centre right” like every fucking conservative seems to, because for whatever baffling reason they lack the spine to call themselves right wing. “Nooo you can’t call me right wing, that hurts my feelings – I’m centre right and a moderate! But anyhow, Hitler was right and trans people and leftists should be put in death camps, and here’s some Russian propaganda for you that proves all this”

Oh I wish it was. Eg. here in Finland sharing movies etc. among friends or downloading them off the internet used to be legal as long as you weren’t doing it for profit or distributing stuff to a huge audience, but that changed in 2006 because the new EU Copyright Directive required it, and that directive was hugely influenced by the likes of WIPO.

Governments rarely realize anything related to IP that the copyright mafia doesn’t spoon-feed them, unfortunately.

Researchers have achieved data rates as high as 424Gbit/s across a 53-km turbulent free-space optical link using plasmonic modulators—devices that use special light waves called surface plasmon polaritons to control and change optical signals

This could be a line from Star Trek