SeventyTwoTrillion

A strategic rural land grab by rightwing extremists is taking place across Germany with the concerted aim of creating communities independent of the state, according to the domestic intelligence agency and government ministries.

Authorities and NGOs monitoring far-right groups say the members of the Reichsbürger movement who reject the post-1945 German state are making a targeted effort to establish parallel societies and infiltrate existing structures including schools, clubs and public offices.

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The snug and secluded village of Rutenberg, a 90-minute drive north of Berlin in the state of Brandenburg, has become one of the latest targets of the KRD’s attempts to establish an autonomous community, or what its leader, the self-styled “King” Peter Fitzek, has labelled a Gemeinwohldorf (common good village).

The KRD first bought up a derelict farm grange in the centre of the village, named the Naturscheune or “nature barn”, with a view to it becoming a “public enterprise” to provide the KRD with organic food. According to the BfV domestic intelligence agency , it has plans to expand on to an adjoining 44 hectares (108 acres) of land on the edge of the village.

The self-governing KRD was established in 2012 by Fitzek, a former cook and karate teacher, on the grounds of an old hospital in Wittenberg, Saxony Anhalt. Fitzek had himself crowned “Peter I” in a ceremony complete with sceptre, orb, ermine gown and crown.

Never trust cooks.

He and his followers – estimated to number between 2,000 and 5,000 – openly reject the modern German state and dream of taking it over and replacing it with their own realm. To this end the KRD already issues its own passports and has its own currency, the Engelgeld (angel money), and bank.

something something dedollarization (deeuroization?)

At almost exactly the same time that Rutenbergers were reeling from the discovery about their new neighbours, an altogether bigger revelation was making headlines around the world. German authorities announced that a separate armed rightwing extremist Reichsbürger group headed by the self-appointed Heinrich XIII, Prince Reuss, had planned a putsch, intending to storm the Bundestag, kidnap MPs and topple the state. In December, German prosecutors filed terrorism charges against more than two dozen people in connection with the plot, including Heinrich XIII and a former far-right lawmaker.

Authorities estimate there are about 25,000 Reichsbürger and supporters of self-governance in Germany, and that numbers are steadily growing. “What drives someone to overthrow a democracy? How is it possible in the middle of Germany, that a state within a state can emerge?” said Berckner.

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But Brandenburg’s state premier, Dietmar Woidke admitted that authorities had been too hesitant to clamp down on the far-right. “Brandenburg was too sluggish and tardy in openly confronting right-wing extremism. The attitude in the 90s (after the collapse of communism) when they first started settling, was that these were just a few wayward youths with an attitude wanting to pick a fight,” he told the Guardian. But now he said, the far-right, including the populist AfD, was recognisably damaging the reputation of the state, and “poses a bigger threat to our economic development than anything else”.

More than sixty years ago, the sociologist C. Wright Mills coined the phrase “crackpot realism,” referring to leaders who he believed were making incredibly reckless decisions with little understanding of the consequences, while believing themselves to be exceptionally rational. In The Hell of Good Intentions (2018), Stephen Walt describes countless blunders made by the foreign policy elites in the Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations. He convincingly demonstrates that very bright people with the best of intentions, no matter their party or ideology, get caught up in “rational” processes that lead to disastrous outcomes.

I think part of the issue is that everybody loves to call themselves a "realist" regardless of their actual position because it makes them sound more correct and worldly. To the extent that I'm unsure to what exact degree the idealist vs realist camps even exist in the US in the current stage. It feels like it's all just getting blended together as everybody tries to pull the empire in every direction at once, leading to these really zig-zagging policies and statements. Blinken trying to make friends with the Chinese, while Biden then calls Xi a dictator five minutes later. Deals and discussions but also fearmongering and shooting down weather balloons.

#Tradle #661 6/6
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"I have no idea what socialism is. Given that I am the protagonist of reality, therefore, nobody must have any idea what socialism is."

My favorite minigame is "Was this tagline a bit or a genuinely-held opinion"

little confused by the wording

if what you're saying is "3, 6, 9, and 12 are all multiples of 3, why should this be" then I think this is a relatively trivial case of like:

a two-digit number is 10x + y (e.g. for your case, x = 1 and y = 2)

then doing x + y gives some number, c

there's a correspondence between those facts that doesn't change whatever coefficient is out in front, because you can always express it as: (10x + y)n : (x+y)n = c*n

so if you multiply by 2, you get 2*(10x + y), and so (x + y)2 = c2, then that equals 2c, and so on for 3, 4, 5, etc

a) if reactionary politics is the only conceivable alternative to a miserable status quo, then people will take the reactionary option out of desperation. peronism seems to have really run out of gas in the tank at this point, though perhaps it may get a brief second wind out of the failure of Milei

b) Milei is aware of at least some of the basic psychology of Argentinians, where dollar = good and stable, and peso = bad and unstable. if you don't have the economics knowledge to know why shifting to the dollar is an awful idea, then why would you be concerned about it? if anything it might be seen as a "progressive" policy and not the deeply harmful austerity that it actually is

c) there's also a lot of richer people for whom Milei's proposed program is fine and they can swallow the costs

Gaza is, last time I checked, reporting somewhere in the realm of 700-800 vehicles damaged+destroyed (obviously, hard to tell if you're doing hit-and-run guerilla attacks and don't wanna stick around to see if they're totally knocked out or still operational). This isn't a terribly helpful figure of course, unless we know the typical makeup of an Israeli brigade and how many vehicles each one has. Israel almost certainly does have thousands of vehicles, but as you say, not thousands of tanks. Unsure to what degree a tank operator trained on a Merkava can operate an Abrams, so idk if the US can just keep tanks flowing in indefinitely, though troop losses might decide events before those thoughts are entertained.

It's not as if the Resistance has to knock every single vehicle out anyway, as NATO doctrine says that once a quarter to a third of a brigade has been knocked out, it's not longer effective at carrying out tasks. My uneducated vibe is that the Israeli losses are not sustainable, especially when including the potential of Hezbollah which is probably close to an order of magnitude stronger than Hamas in several ways (and many times stronger in terms of missile capacity and strength). Time estimates on how long a conflict will last are always hilarious so I won't really bother to guess aside to say that we probably still have several months left before the current situation appreciably ends.

Ori and the Blind Forest and especially its sequel, Will of the Wisps, are both games where I genuinely don't have any critiques of the gameplay or story. There are some games that I like playing more, like Elden Ring, because they have more things to do and choices and such, but those two games for me have immaculate vibes and perfectly execute the vision of the developers.

It's very easy for sequels of games to become overloaded in the quest to add more stuff so that they feel like different games, which usually comes in the form of adding lots of discrete subsystems which can be interesting but often not very intuitive for new players especially in aggregate. This is not so for Will of the Wisps, where there are new abilities but all of them feel like completely natural things that you should obviously be able to do, and are very simple. The most "complicated" addition is an improved combat system with more choices especially for boss battles, but the first game relied on chase sequences rather than battles, so it's not as if you could critique the first game for not having a better combat system for boss battles when it doesn't even have them (it would be like critiquing Portal for not having a hunger system or something). And the combat system in WotW is kept pretty tight and simple and the animations and how they chain together have the correct physics and weightiness.

A game like Path of Exile on the other hand is really my nightmare game, where it feels like the whole thing is just a shitload of discrete subsystems duct-taped together without a strong skeleton holding it together. Most games fall on a spectrum between the "streamlined, simple, tight" design and the "chaotic, complicated, expansive" design though.

I am a massive weighted blanket enjoyer. It's kind of a problem actually after a while, because if you have to sleep in beds without one if you're visiting friends/relatives or staying in a hotel, then it just feels really wrong. Also, after a while you get used to the pressure (though it always feels heavy in a sense) so you're just like, "I NEED a heavier blanket now."

honestly maybe what I need is to just be utterly crushed under like 5 weighted blankets, maybe that would fix me

Chocolate Rain being about racism blew the mind of my 13 year old self but now it's so obvious lmao

#Tradle #660 3/6
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