Twigs and branches

@1
Why does your new link, just like dw.com before, tell me what RT said without linking to the actual RT statement? Do you find it curious? I do.
I plug the alleged RT quote into google search, but all it gives me is clones of your tagesschau.de piece. No RT-authored page. Was it a translation? Then, where’s the original?

“…the German Press Council wouldn’t and couldn’t investigate it”

What I want to hear from Sascha Borowski is that German Press Council has never ever criticized any publication that hasn’t signed the pledge. Otherwise, all these “monitor” and “investigate”sound like a non-denial denial.

And why is it that the first sentence of you link “Auf eine SWR-Anfrage dazu teilte RT DE mit, man betreibe “keinen Kampagnenjournalismus, sondern bleibt auf dem Boden der Tatsachen und präsentiert ein großes Spektrum an Sichtweisen” links to something that, unless I’m mistaken, adds nothing whatsoever RT-related to your article? Same allegations, the same quote, and a link back. Is this good journalismus?

” Technivorm Moccamaster”

That’s a great coffee maker – I recommend it to everyone who asks. It is expensive as a first purchase but less expensive than replacing a burned-out post-2000-design department store coffee maker every 2-3 years.

2: You seem to not understand and probably overestimate the role of the Press Council.
The RT quote is from a response to a direct journalist question, not from the RT web site. No need to suspect conspiracies 😉

John Quiggin
“Happy Fall to you too MPAVictoria. Though in my current location (North Queensland) there are no deciduous trees and we are now finishing the Dry season and entering the Build-up (hot and sticky, waiting for the Wet).”

Happy Build-up Season John! One day I want to visit Australia and experience your climate. :-)

Trader Joe
“Has anyone else noticed the sizeable increase in coffee prices? I recently did some restocking and found 20-30% price increases in higher end beans and 10-20% increases in more mid-range. I try to view buying decent coffee as a luxury I’m willing to pay for (and I did this time) but sticker shock definitely drives substitution effects as the economists like to say.”

Thanks Trader! I have noticed the same thing here in Canada. The price of locally roasted beans have jumped from about $20-22 for 340 grams to $25-30 for 340 grams. Still worth it imo.

Cranky Observer
“That’s a great coffee maker – I recommend it to everyone who asks. It is expensive as a first purchase but less expensive than replacing a burned-out post-2000-design department store coffee maker every 2-3 years.”

Thanks Cranky! One of the things that made me pull the trigger on what is a pretty pricey coffeemaker were all the reviews from owners who have been using one for literal decades without any major issues.

From Michelle Goldberg –
(important enough to quote in – nearly – whole length)

….“If Europe fails on the question of refugees, then it won’t be the Europe we wished for,” Merkel said, calling on the other members of the European Union to take in more people as well. “I don’t want to get into a competition in Europe of who can treat these people the worst.” For the usually stolid and cautious chancellor, it was a great political leap, a sudden act of moral heroism that would define her legacy.

‘Many observers predicted disaster. According to Marton, Henry Kissinger, ever callous, told Merkel, “To shelter one refugee is a humanitarian act, but to allow one million strangers in is to endanger German civilization.” Marton quotes my colleague Ross Douthat writing that anyone who believes that Germany can “peacefully absorb a migration of that size and scale of cultural difference” is a “fool.” She describes former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s fear that the refugees would be Merkel’s “political undoing.”

For a while, it seemed like some of this pessimism was warranted. Douthat’s column was inspired by a hideous outburst of violence in Cologne on New Year’s Eve, in which a mob of largely Middle Eastern and North African men sexually assaulted scores of women. The refugee influx fueled the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany party, known as the AfD, which in 2017 won 94 seats to become the largest opposition party in Parliament. Some blamed Merkel’s policy for spooking Brits into supporting Brexit. As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump seized on it. Though Merkel retained the chancellorship after the 2017 elections, her party, the Christian Democratic Union, lost 65 seats.

But six years later, the catastrophes predicted by Merkel’s critics haven’t come to pass.

In the recent German election, refugees were barely an issue, and the AfD lost ground. “The sense is that there has been comparatively little Islamic extremism or extremist crime resulting from this immigration, and that on the whole, the largest number of these immigrants have been successfully integrated into the German work force and into German society overall,” said Constanze Stelzenmüller, an expert on Germany and trans-Atlantic relations at the Brookings Institution.

“With the passage of time,” Marton told me, Merkel “turned out to have chosen the absolutely right course for not only Germany but for the world.”

The refugee policy was what inspired Marton, a former ABC News bureau chief in Germany and the author of nine previous books, to write about Merkel in the first place. Marton is herself the daughter of refugees from Hungary, journalists who had been imprisoned by the Communist regime, and the granddaughter of victims of Auschwitz. (She’s also the widow of the famed diplomat Richard Holbrooke, whom she began dating when he was Bill Clinton’s ambassador to Germany.) Watching Merkel in the summer of 2015, said Marton, “I just thought wow, who is she, and how is she getting away with this?”

Part of the reason that Germans accepted — and in many cases celebrated — Merkel’s decision lies in their country’s unique relationship to its national history. Germany has made reckoning with the Holocaust central to its identity, and many citizens grabbed eagerly at this chance for redemption.

“When their trains pulled into the gleaming Munich station, exhausted men, women and children were greeted by a sea of signs that read, ‘Welcome to Germany,’ held aloft by cheering citizens lining the platforms,” wrote Marton. Volunteers converted schools and stores into dormitories. “Germans were more than happy — in fact, thrilled — to see themselves in the role of humanitarian saviors,” said Stelzenmüller.

But the refugees had more to offer Germany than a burnished self-image. In an aging country with a low birthrate, they were a useful addition to the work force. The economy, Stelzenmüller said, “was looking for labor before the pandemic, and so there was a real demand and presumably a willingness from the labor market and companies to help people. And of course we have a long experience, a decades-long practice, of on-the-job training that is seen as a model by other European countries and in fact by America.”

Not all the lessons of Germany’s refugee experience will be welcomed by progressives. Merkel, after all, headed a center-right party, and her government took a conservative approach to assimilation. “Refugees have a responsibility to adapt to German ways,” Marton quotes Merkel saying at a meeting of her party in 2015. “Multiculturalism is a sham.”

The newcomers were required to learn German and they were settled throughout the country to avoid ghettoization. Merkel, wrote Marton, “was determined to avoid the dense concentration of immigrants that ring cities in France and Great Britain.”

And in the end, Merkel didn’t leave the border open, eventually negotiating a controversial deal with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey to take in asylum seekers and prevent them from continuing on to Europe. She didn’t remain in power for 16 years by letting emotion outpace her sense of realpolitik.

All the same, in absorbing a million desperate people at a time when others were putting up razor wire, Germany did something great, something the rest of the world could learn from as wars and ecological calamity send many millions more trudging across the globe in search of sanctuary.

“We now have a case study, an example, of how it can work, and I’m hoping the world will make use of Merkel’s example,” said Marton. The chancellor’s refrain in 2015 was, “We can do this.” If only the rest of us could too’.

A large portion of the British Left has been against Stalinists for a long time. The 1956 invasion of Hungary is traditionally seen as a turning point, even though this may involve a certain amount of after the fact revisionism (such as people belatedly declaring that really always were against Soviet Communism).

The Socialist Party of Great Britain is only a very small portion of the British Left, but it has been against Stalinists essentially as long as there have been Stalinists.

You could probably find a few self-identified Stalinists if you tried hard.

I did not have to try hard to find out about the New Communist Party of Britain.

“purges of his political opponents” … oops, that was Starmer, not Stalin.

Why can’t it be Boris Johnson?

Or Donald Trump?

To be fair, Leon Trotsky was dealt with rather more harshly than Jeremy Corbyn.

Can I take it that you use ‘rather’ to mean ‘a very great deal’?

The important question about how Jeremy has been treated is not whether it is harsh but whether it is fair.

So the shorter Glenn Greenwald might be that he finds the current leftist leadership a bit too Stalinist for his taste.

I don’t know of any reason to attach any importance to Glenn’s tastes.

I do find Glenn Greenwald interesting, in that he manages to be right on the edge of being a conspiracy theorist without actually talking about space lizards (cf. David Icke) or Jewish Space Lasers (cf. Marjorie Taylor Greene).

I haven’t read enough by or about him to comment, but having now located the earlier discussion you cited, my reaction is that it makes no sense for anybody who genuinely objects to authoritarianism to be more concerned about authoritarianism on the left than about authoritarianism on the right. Authoritarianism is a sporadic tendency on the left, a systemic tendency on the right.

So it’s agreed: Glenn Greenwald is History’s Greatest Monster. Who else is worthy of a purifying, unifying round of righteous contempt? Jonathan Franzen? Allison Roman? Nile Rodgers?

@
‘So it’s agreed: Glenn Greenwald is History’s Greatest Monster’.

Nah – as who would agree with such a cartoonish judgement –
(beside a few Cartoon Characters) – BUT Glenn is the perfect example of ‘a once pretty sane dude’ – who completely lost IT –
(about ‘who and what he was’)
and now – there is just ‘a bunch of silly tweets’ –
left…

JQ: „Greenwald is sui generis, but I wouldn’t see any benefit in engaging with him.“
J-D: “I don’t know of any reason to attach any importance to Glenn’s tastes.”
Kiwanda: „ So it’s agreed: Glenn Greenwald is History’s Greatest Monster.“

Why do right wingers and their apologists always have to be so over the top?

This brings me to two news items that surprised me today. Turkey’s authoritarian ruler was criticized by foreign governments for imprisoning his political opponents – nothing new there – and he likened this criticism to invading tanks. Poland‘s prime minister, not to be outdone, accused the EU of starting World War III – I kid you not – because they insist on Poland abiding by the rules they agreed on when they joined the Union.

I wonder: do these sound like strong leaders?

@20
The people who think Greenwald was ever part of the left, or betrayed it, or expect him to associate with leftists I think misperceive him, as they are looking through the Overton window’.

Well – when I got to know Glenn Greenwald he was a pretty cool fighter against Crazy Right-Wing Reactionaries and –
THEN –
he even became unable to differentiate between Right-Wing Crazy Reactionary and everybody else. And as you mentioned Bolsonaro – How confused do you have to be –
to be able to identify Bolsonaro as the stereotypical ‘Crazy Right-Wing Racist Science Denier’ BUT at the same time to defend is much HUUUGER Idol and Role Model ‘trump’.
(the worlds new word for: ‘Utmost Evil Stupid’)

BE-cause ‘Trump’ is ‘American’ and it always was Glenn’s Dream to burn the whole (American) Place down?
And NOW as Trump didn’t succeed doing it for Glenn and his cult of silly Nihillists he tweets day and night about how mad he is?

And about Snowdon –
Snowden approached Glenn when Glenn STILL was ‘the good ole Glenn’ but – like ME and
Noam Chomsky probably asks himself too:

What the fudge happened to Glenn?

stj is also sui generis. American liberals hate Greenwald because they so love Trump’s brother in spirit Bolsonaro? Can you tell us something more plausible, perhaps involving space lizards?

Bolsonaro, expecting to lose next year’s election, is following Trump’s example, attacking the democratic process in his country, undermining the integrity of elections, and preparing for a potential coup. He met with Trump advisor Jason Miller.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/09/07/politics/jason-miller-brazil/index.html
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/biden-envoy-told-brazils-bolsonaro-important-not-undermine-elections-source-2021-08-08/

Bob @19: I’m clearly missing some context, but can we please never call it “the transgender question”? That phrasing sounds to me like “the Jewish question”, with all of the baggage that entails. The main difference between the two phrases, and the reason I’m making this request, is that the latter phrase was used a lot prior to an attempt to commit genocide against Jews. I feel there is broad agreement now that this attempt was Bad and that it shouldn’t happen again. I wish I could be confident about the former, but I don’t think such broad agreement exists. One thing we can do as responsible anti-genocide people is to try to shut down dog whistles (e.g. “the [x] question”) so that they can’t be so easily used again.

… American liberals hate Greenwald …

For the avoidance of doubt, I’d like to put it on the record that I don’t hate him and that I’m not an American liberal.

The people who think Greenwald was ever part of the left, or betrayed it, or expect him to associate with leftists I think misperceive him, as they are looking through the Overton window. It should be the Overton blinkers.

Steven—

People have a right to be confused.

Below is just a partial list of his appearances on the far left anti-Democratic Party–slopfest “Democracy Now!”—stolen by Goodman and Cagan from Pacifica. He still makes appearances on that heap, even after becoming Tucker Carlson’s go-to anti-leftist phreak.

Greenwald was also a frequent columnist from the left on “Salon” before and during Joan Walsh’s reign.

His least-confusing career move was producing “Hairy Naked Men” porn.

https://www.democracynow.org/appearances/glenn_greenwald.Democracy

stj 29, I’m not turning anything around. You wrote the following, referring to what you call “social liberals”: “Thus, Greenwald making problems for US friend Bolsonaro is yet another unforgivable offense.”

This claim is absolutely bonkers. I’ll also take issue with your “witness the universal derision for Biden after Afghanistan”. Nope, no “universal derision”. Most liberals have supported Biden’s withdrawal decision and most Republicans/rightwingers have attacked it. There is a fraction on the liberal side that is hawkish and that has outsize support in the mainstream media, but it is still only a fraction. Your claim is just as wrong as it is wrong to blame the Democrats for the Iraq invasion because some Democrats did support it at the time, and this whole framing is totally steeped in bad faith, but that is precisely what we must expect from commenters like stj.

The antiliberals (or anti-anti-rightists) showing up here hate LGM precisely because they destroy their narrative. LGM has offered the strongest refutation of the hawkish foreign policy blob (e. g. https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2021/08/the-laughably-unjustified-hubris-of-the-foreign-policy-military-blob) and also steadfastly exposes anti-anti-Trumpers like Greenwald (https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/tag/glenn-greenwald) as fascist fellow-travellers.

TM @ 37:

and also steadfastly exposes anti-anti-Trumpers like Greenwald (https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/tag/glenn-greenwald) as fascist fellow-travellers.

I’ve somehow managed to avoid forming a strong opinion about Glenn Greenwald up ’til now, but after reading the first link on that page (the one where Greenwald examines the congressional investigation into the 6 January “protest” and finds it wanting) I think I’ve made up my mind.

AWOL@35 believes “Democracy Now!” is far-left. Not having seen or read this, it’s hard to argue specifics. But the claim Salon was left powerfully suggests AWOL is not a skilled observer. The need to tell us Greenwald was a pornographer also says a lot, to me at least.

Tm reminds me of the Fyvush Finkel character in the old series Picket Fences. He said a lawyer argues the facts when the law is against him and argues the law when the facts are against him. But when both are against him, he pounds the table.

The notion that Robert Farley, honcho at the Patterson School of Diplomacy, Cheryl Rofer, Charli Carpenter and Dan Nexon aren’t part of the blob would be funny if it weren’t tragic. The blob by definition is amorphous. LGM is a group of advisors on how to run the empire efficiently, humanely, without messy overreach. This is not a critique of the blob, it’s being one strand or side or part of it.

The notion that anybody who votes for a third party is a fascist fellow traveler is merely offensive, coming from people who support a real live fascist government in Ukraine. (The open fascists weren’t in charge in Franco’s Spain either.) The ritual abuse still heaped on Nader is astounding, the kind of behavior people tend to think of as a cult.

And LGM does this while claiming anybody who votes for a third party is a fascist fellow traveler, even as the Democratic Party is giving the insurrectionists a pass! LGM also ignores the religious element in the insurrection, partly because they share the mad dog anti-Communism, despite the overlap with anti-Semitism. Similarly, the religious element in anti-vaxxer is ignored because religion is off limits (except unpopular ones like celibate clergy and Scientology.) LGM is quite happy to live in Joe McCarthy’s political universe, where the left has been purged.

stj: “LGM also ignores the religious element in the insurrection, partly because they share the mad dog anti-Communism, despite the overlap with anti-Semitism. Similarly, the religious element in anti-vaxxer is ignored because religion is off limits”

This guy is living in a fantasy world wasting his precious time inventing strawmen. A minute of googling would have spared him the embarassment.

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/?s=evangelical
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2021/04/white-evangelical-resistance-to-covid-vaccination
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2021/09/the-white-evangelical-attack-on-voting-rights
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2021/09/leader-of-authoritarian-christofascist-cult-addresses-rally-of-another-authoritarian-christofascist-cult

The problem, J-D, seems to be that you are coming to a complex, contested issue with a long history and strong feelings on both sides, and making pronouncements on it based on a brief summary from a Wikipedia page.

It’s not clear to me how it is a problem if I express an opinion about what I have read on a Wikipedia page. This is an open thread. If you would like to express an opinion about the content of my pronouncements (if that is what you would like to call them), you are free to do so; being under no obligation, you can also choose not to.