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…

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

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…

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".

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.

https://twitter.com/dilanesper/status/1957875494671773739

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,

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.

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…

1/ Air-conditioning is like smoking bans. For decades, Europeans in the chattering classes looked on with smugnorant amusement as "puritanical" Americans banned smoking in public, one of "life's civilized pleasures". People were still writing these articles in the early 2000s. 2/ This was mainly a product of cultural snobbery and reflexive negative polarization: Childish Americans were just having one of their moral panics again, like with topless bathing or alcohol prohibition or prostitution. But then people came back from vacations to

1/ I once spoke to a German judge about a case she had heard involving a short, squat defendant with very dark skin who claimed to be from Somalia -- thus setting up a defense against deportation if he was convicted. She Googled Somalia a bit and noticed that virtually all 2/ Somalis were tall, thin, with mahogany-colored skin. She did some research on what the main ethnic groups were in the Horn of Africa and found out that there is more genetic diversity between Africans of two distinct ethnic groups than there is between Africans

1/ In 2016, while Germany was still celebrating its own righteousness, a Syrian father entered Germany joined by 11 other family members. They settled in Stuttgart and promptly began committing crimes of all descriptions, including violent ones. bild.de/regional/stutt… 2/ So far, 10 of the 12 family members have accumulated long criminal records, the total number of cases is 154. Just yesterday, three brothers from this family (2 of whom had already served prison time) were sentenced to prison for a July 2024 knife-attack

1/ This article in Die Welt tells the armchair sociologist (and who isn't one?) so much about Germany. First the authors survey German city-cleaning agencies in many German cities, all of whom report a dramatic increase in street trash dumps. welt.de/politik/deutsc… 2/ Now comes the traditional part of every German news article about problems caused (mainly) by migrants: How to obfuscate the obvious truth that the problem is caused (mainly) by migrants. The 'Welt' is a center-right publication, so it makes a bold move:

1/ How "Feminist" Foreign Policy Endangers Women in Germany
Outgoing Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock from the Green Party proudly announced that she would be implementing a "feminist" foreign policy. 2/ You can read speech after speech from her describing what this was supposed to mean, but
it seems to just boil down to spending more money on aid projects for women and expressing disapproval of countries where women are denied basic rights.auswaertiges-amt.de/de/newsroom/ba…

1/ It's a shame that modern sociology is so ideologically demented, because it would be intersting to compare the movement to legalize pedophilia in the 1970s and 1980s to the movement for trans self-id in the last 10 years (obvious but necessary disclaimer: not equating… 2/ …pedophilia with transness).

In the early 1970s, leftist French academics decided the next phase of their "liberatory crusade" were abolishing prisons and legalizing sex with children. The German greens took up these ideas, especially sex with children.

1/ One of the highlights of Germany's decade-long immigration free for all was October 2015, at the height of the first surge. For the past months, Germany mainstream media consumers had been patiently instructed by a series of politicians and "migration experts" 2/ that "reputable scientific studies" had "conclusively shown" that "pull factors play little or no role in immigration". What's key are "push factors" -- the terrible conditions migrants are fleeing. Which means, of course, that Germany cannot control the situation

1/ Big news: *National AfD Gets the "Extreme Right" Stamp of Disapproval*
Germany's "Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution" (OPC) has released a report categorizing the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party as "gesichert rechtsextremistisch"... 2/ a clumsy phrase which can be translated as "demonstrably extreme-right".
This will have considerable political and PR implications, and will of course be cited by every English-language publication as a kind of Homeric epithet.faz.net/aktuell/politi…

1/ Every week, as per British law, the Guardian is obliged to print an article by an English-speaking expat complaining about how "right-wing" the European country they live in has "become". This is what I call the "laptop-class bubble effect" (LCBE). theguardian.com/commentisfree/… 2/ A left-learning American or Brit teacher, professor, writer, or art type (there are 100 engineers and data analysis expats for every one of these, but those people don't count), sickened by the endemic racism and anti-intellectualism of their home countries,

1/ Sketch of some thoughts for an upcoming piece: Identity politics, postmodernism (and specialization, which is somewhat related to these) caused a big structural problem for the humanities which is now coming home to roost. 2/ Humanities professors, especially at public universities, are parasitic. They consume (modest amounts of) resources without instilling *high-value* marketable skills.

1/ Protests are now an ineffective political tool. 2/ They didn't stop globalization, they didn't stop the Iraq war, they didn't oust the Iranian government, they didn't stop Trump being elected and re-elected, the Tea Party didn't stop Obama's re-election, the 2021 US Capiol riot didn't stop Biden's election, the list goes on.

1/ The AfD is now tied for first place with the CDU in Germany. A shibboleth among the Euroleft is that center-right parties who ape "extreme-right" rhetoric only prompts voters to pick the "real thing". This is one of many direct counter-proofs to that theory. 2/ In a desperate scramble to avoid working with the AfD, the CDU has been trying to put together a "Grand Coalition" with the Social Democrats. But the Social Democrats have the whip hand, because they are the only party the CDU is *willing to* form a government with.

1/ "Adolescence" is an interesting case study. Growing up in the USA, you quickly become aware that violent crime as depicted in the mainstream media has nothing to do with actual violent crime that happens in the real world and which is your constant low-level concern in cities. 2/ Everyone understands at some level what typical cases of violent crime look like and who commits them -- in fact the series "48 Hours", which focuses on real violent-crime cases, captures the reality pretty well: imdb.com/title/tt027189…

1/ To fill their quota of fresh Afghan "resettlement" candidates, German diplomats rely on almost 100 NGOs who trawl through Afghanistan offering promising families resettlement in Germany. There have now been dozens of accounts of people presenting focus.de/politik/deutsc… 2/ fraudulent documents or failing DNA tests or background checks. German-language articles tiptoe around this issue but reading the accounts from anonymous diplomatic staff it appears some of these NGOs are quite sketchy and may be taking bribes or helping