Banning the party isn’t going to help.

Yes it will. It’ll mean it won’t be standing in elections, and that’s only fair because it’s an anti-democratic party… and it will deprive its members of broad protections afforded to parties and remove a unifying banner for them.

Banning anti-democratic institutions in a democracy is not only justified, it is conducive to the democracy’s survival. It lifts the bar for getting rid of democracy to be equivalent to not winning in an election but by establishing a second monopoly on violence, a far greater threshold and attempts at which are more straightforward to deter, prosecute and stamp out than being within every TikTok user’s first few swipes.

There’s nothing that prevents AfD voters from going to other parties, there’s plenty, or to voice their concerns in a new party that can be a legitimate part of the democratic system. Changing parties isn’t like banning a religion or a creed or a race, a party is hardly more than just a banner, the power of which can change between and during elections, at any time, through a simple act of the mind. Banning the party will absolutely help.

It sends a good message. It doesn’t send a message of wanting the silence the concerns of those who voted for the AfD in anything but the short term, it sends the message of ‘we hear you, but try again… a bit less fascist-y please’.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzGimN2H2oQ as written by Howard Goodall, 1:06 in particular is a moment I live for.

Not quite the same, but you’ll be prying my imported 2004 Estima from my cold dead hands.

That, to me, looks like an intersection I would never want to turn left on in the first place in anything but the most deserted area.

I see. I should have my lawyers argue buying a $1,000,000 house for $0 is reasonable, that way a deal for $500,000 is perfectly reasonable. In the same way that threatening to illegally detain is a halfway compromise between nothing and threatening murder.

And it seems that imprisoning political opponents goes beyond carting down a hill in a shopping trolley which is what we here overseas associate with “jackass”, but what do I know.

Non-American just double-checking I’ve got his right…

Private citizen makes actionable credible threat to unlawfully detain legislators, legislators choose to do nothing for about half a year before slowly murmuring without specifics other than “yeah he said it” and “I think he means us”.

You OK USA? Just checking in.

The New York Times is fighting off Wordle look-alikes with copyright takedown notices

I cancelled my NY Times puzzle subscription as soon as that happened.