You know what sucks as well? Taking too many painkillers against headaches actually causes headaches. Horrible ones at that. Glad to read that you’re feeling better, but that’s a real trap many people out there are stuck in.

Who is going to pull the trigger? Point to the opposition leader willing and able to try and dismantle a party with this many active supporters.

Read the article. It’s already happening.

Which are used to target unpopular fringe groups not regional majorities.

You don’t seem to know a lot about the German constitution. The opposite is true. Unppular fringe groups are not banned because they are not actually a danger to democracy, as long as government positions are not in reach for them. That’s exactly how the german federal constitutional court has argued in the past. Successful bans ever only targeted actually successful parties.

The core mechanism of democracy is to abolish political organizations wholesale?

The core mechanism of democracy is to protect itself, and first and foremost that means protecting itself from facism. A political organisation that’s threatening democracy should obviously not be allowed, so it will be banned.

They won’t, in no small part because the AfD has enough seats to block the attempt.

They cannot block a decision of the federal constitutional court, don’t be ridiculous. Germany has measures in place exactly for this scenario, and they are about to be enforced. They cannot be vetoed away, it’s a legal matter.

Can you ban a party that’s got a plurality of seats in the Parliament? Or will they be the ones banning you?

Of course. And it’s nonsensical to claim we cannot ban them, while worrying they could ban us. We can and we should, based on what you yourself wrote:

If you pass a law but never enforce it, the law does nothing.

We have laws against undemocratic parties, so we should enforce them.

I mean, by all means, feel free to give it a shot. But it seems like you’re asking an elected government to do a thing it isn’t designed to do.

But it is designed to do exactly that. That’s like a core mechanism of our democracy.

The only way to argue we shouldn’t ban the AFD is if you claim that they somehow should be exempt from our mechanisms against fascism. They were enforced before, they will be enforced again. And the AFD fits the bill in every way.

That rather speaks for banning the AfD though. We have a law for banning fascist parties, so we should enforce it, or it truly would mean nothing.

Some of us are convinced this measure does nothing

Nothing? How can it do nothing? You could argue that it doesn’t do enough or not the right things, but if nothing else banning the party would obviously keep them out of the government at least for the next few years.

Killing the head of a terrorist organization won’t help if you don’t fix the underlying issues.

And yet we don’t allow terrorist organizations to campaign for office, officially and supported by tax money, in our societies.

banning it won’t make the people who vote for it and run it any less, well, fascist.

Correct. But it’s no supposed to do that. Banning a fascist party doesn’t solve every problem of a divided society, but it prevents the worst (a fascist party seizing power) and gives us time (and the chance!) to solve some of the others.

There’s basically no other option. Either a society has effective rules against fascism in place or it will stand idly by while being undermined. And if it has these effective rules, it must abide by them. ‘Fascists should not be allowed to rule the country’ seems to be a reasonable lower limit.

Don’t know what’s there to be so smug about. “Oh you would rather ban them in a constitutional process than to wait for them to seize power and fight a bloody civil war, or worse?” Yes please! I hope we all much prefer the first option.

The difference is that you as the owner are in that case not actively financing an industry that’s slaughtering other animals in order to feed your pet.

That a cat while roaming outside will inevitably kill other animals is not unethical on the cats part. It’s debatable if it’s unethical on the owners part, which is why many people nowadays discuss only keeping cats as indoor pets anyway. It is however a completely separate issue to vegan cat food.

Maybe you think vegans ask for vegan pet food because they want their cat to “be vegan”? Because if so, that’s a misunderstanding. Vegan ethics are always about our own consumption decisions and behavior. Never about those of animals. (Which is why “dO yOu JuDgE LiOnS fOr KiLliNg ZeBrAs As WeLl?” is never a good argument. We don’t.) As caretakers for our pets some of their decisions naturally fall to us. You’re always deciding for them which brand of pet food your cat will get. For example I avoid nestle owned brands, wether my cat supports that decision or not. If he was an outside pet I’m sure he would at least try to murder something occasionally. That has nothing to do with my responsibility to honor the ramifications of my own ethical considerations though. My cat is too dumb for that - literally. It doesn’t release me from the responsibility.

(He gets meat btw, he has chronic digestive problems and needs special food anyway - before anyone here accuses me of murder and torture or something.)

Ha, fair enough. But if you want to save calories, grabbing the non alcoholic alternative is actually a decent choice. (And if you want to get drunk on the least calories possible, pure gin/vodka/schnaps/white rum are your best options. Beer is reeeally energy dense.)

Alcohol has a lot of calories, so that would have to be non alcoholic as well.

Why doctors? Filming patients would be a nightmare in terms of privacy and data policy.

In my line of work (psychotherapy) it would be equally impossible. People are having a hard enough time as it is opening up to medical professionals, I don’t think that the additional barrier of being actively filmed would help anyone.

It doesn’t seem to work on the German Wikipedia. Super weird decision to tie display settings to a language.

Ironically, behind all this is a misconception that we’re actually constantly working on with our patients. The truth is that the clinics would function better and we could offer better therapy if, for example, we weren’t so overworked and enough staff were employed. But in order to achieve this, we would have to make decisions again and again in specific cases, which are less pleasant for patients in the short term. Specifically: saying no to our employers more often, strikes, and in the worst case resignation. Sensible in the long term, unpleasant in the short term. For our patients. And that’s the crux of it.

Unfortunately it is always easier to discover those mistakes in the thinking of others. I have met dozens of colleagues who avoid fighting for better working conditions for precisely these reasons (while advising their patients to avoid this error in particular). And clinics of course know this and take advantage of it.

So better negotiation skills are really only party of the solution (although also very important). I think in the long term we need better education and more focus on socialist ideas, specifically on how and why employee rights (and the ability to self-care) are such an integral requirement to a job well done.

That’s an interesting one. As a psychotherapist from Germany I can say we’re definitely not low paid, but it is much less than other academic professions, and especially in relation to the time it takes to get qualified (roughly 10 years) and the cost of approbation itself (varies from 30k-160k, and that’s in a country where education usually is free) it’s really not a good fit for someone who is very financially motivated. (Ironically because of the high upfront cost the job tends to attract people from well endowed backgrounds though.)

I think like in many helping professions we have a majority of very idealistic people who don’t negotiate very well. Employers get away with way too much because refusal at our side at first only ever hurts the patients, so we kinda keep up with it. Maybe something similar is happening in the professions that are in my mind actually the most underpaid for their time, and that’s nursing and care work of all sorts.