1/ Public swimming pool in Switzerland near the French border bans all foreigners except holiday-makers and those with work visas. Staff and customers are delighted, many locals are returning to the baths after avoiding them. City council member Lionel Maître,
2/ who obviously came loaded for bear, vigorously defends the ban. Local residents financed the construction of this pool and deserve to use it undisturbed. Young males from nearby French "problem neighborhoods" were making welt.de/politik/auslan…
3/ constant trouble, groping and whistling at girls, assaulting staff, getting into fights, and swimming in their underwear. Maitre makes no apologies for the policy, and makes a crucial point: The reason the French louts are crossing the border is that most of the
4/ pools on the French side of the border have closed. Maitre says that the French decided to close their pools because of the same problems his town is having. The authorities there saw no alternative to just closing down the pools, for fear they would be
5/ charged with "discrimination" if the actually focused on the real problem. In other words, ordinary law-abiding citizens are robbed of a freedom or privilege because their political leaders let in too many of the wrong type of immigrants who don't care about the rules.
6/ Maitre defends the policy against critiques, noting that most of them come from left-wing people or groups, whom he is apparently prepared to simply ignore. Maitre is not going to deprive the people he governs of a pleasant pastime
7/ because a bunch of uncouth, shiftless louts are ruining it. Germany's solution to uncouth, shiftless louts is to pretend they don't exist and then, when forced to acknowledge their existence, hope to civilize -- I'm sorry, I mean sensitize -- them with a bunch of
8/ socio-pedagogical gobbledygook. Pruntrut's approach is to keep them out of the pool so decent folks can enjoy themselves in peace and privacy. Millions of Germans secretly wish their politicians had that much courage and pragmatism.
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1/ **Germany: Where Accountability Ends**
In 2021, Anne Spiegel, a Green Party politician, was the Environment Minister for the German federal state of Rheinland-Palatinate. In July 2021, a flash flood raged through the Ahr valley in that state, causing massive
2/ damage and killing 135 people. As Environment Minister, Spiegel was responsible for crisis response. Yet just 10 days after the flood, while bodies were still being recovered, Spiegel chose to participate in the holiest of German customs: vacation. theguardian.com/environment/20…
3/ She traveled to France for an entire month. Meanwhile, back home, the staff of her agency and other state agencies were working overtime to stabilize damaged homes, clear away debris, and locate bodies swept away by the flood. She later claimed she took part
1/ This chart has been making the rounds lately, and since I am an American and have both worked in a mental hospital and been a criminal defense lawyer, I have opinions. The idea that insane people belong in institutions came under 2-pronged attack in the 1950s and 1960s.
2/ From the left, radical psychiatrists such as R.D. Laing argued that it was society that was truly crazy, and that psychosis was a symptom of that overall situation. Hippies even embraced psychosis as a form of spiritual insight. The sociologist Irving Goffman
3/ wrote the hugely influential book "Asylums", which portrayed mental asylums as inhumane "total institutions" which broke down the humanity of their occupants. There were, of course, genuine abuses in this time period which provided grist for the mill.
1/ *71-IQ Syrian migrant held fully criminally culpable**
In a remarkable development, a German forensic psychiatrist declared that the Syrian migrant who stabbed 13 people, killing 3, at a "festival of diversity" in Solingen last year was "fully criminally culpable".
2/ I call this development "remarkable" because it's common for foreign criminals who commit violent attacks in Germany to be held less than fully responsible for their crimes because of real or claimed psychological problems. br.de/nachrichten/de…
3/ Court-appointed shrinks often seem to proceed on the assumption that someone who begins yelling and screaming and stabbing people at random probably isn't right in the head, and the task of the shrink is only to find out exactly *how* they're not right in the head.
1/ IS OUR MIGRANTS LEARNING? LANGUAGE TEACHER REFLECTS ON 10 YEARS SINCE "WIR SCHAFFEN DAS"
Surprisingly honest interview with Vanamali Gunturu (link below), an Indian guy who relocated to Germany decades ago.
2/ In 2015, he decided to volunteer to teach newly-arriving migrants German. He's continued doing so to this day. He lives in Germering, a suburb of Munich.
Illiteracy is common among his students, many of them, he says, "have never touched pencil in their life".
3/ He once had an entire class full of illiterates. Many come from remote hilltop villages and never attended any form of school. "It is nearly impossible to teach them how to make words from letters and sentences from words."merkur.de/lokales/fuerst…
1/ So, let's definitely do an Amanda Knox thread. The tl;dr is that her case was indeed a miscarriage of justice, which of course also happen in Italy, and probably more frequently than the USA. I'll quote the most important tweets as I respond.
2/ The first thing to realize is how incredibly unlikely the prosecution's scenario was. To believe the prosecution's case, you have to believe that an American and an Italian college student, both with no records of violence whatever,
3/ either (1) agreed with a random guy they barely knew to rape and murder AK, or (2) heard him raping and murdering AK, and decided, instead of trying to save her, to participate in the "fun" and rape and murder someone they barely knew, in RS's case.
1/ A thread about the class dynamics of air-conditioning in Europe. I believe attitudes toward air-conditioning are class markers in many European countries. Air-conditioning is seen as prototypically American, and that's important.
2/ I have lived in Germany for two decades and have observed the pro-A/C contingent here go from total defeat to now being on the verge of victory. The reason is normies. I remember visiting a local grocery store in my neighborhood just after it installed air-conditioning.
3/ This was 2016. You'd see dozens of people enter the store from the hot sticky weather outside and visibly transform, chattering with surprise and pleasure. Of course, people spent 3x as much time and 1.5 times as much money in that store to get relief from sticky heat.