Parking Wars

This great moment in criminal justice comes from the disgustingly gemütlich city of Augsburg:

A DISPUTE over a parking space in the southern German city of Augsburg turned deadly when an irate man who threatened his neighbour with an axe was shot dead by police.

So, like, don't touch his ride, bitches.

It's a Polite Way of Saying "Hello, I'm Tedious and Vapid"

Berlin, a city where being individualistic always seems to mean sheepishly following one dingbat style cult or another, is holding a "hipster festival. Gack. Most of them think the former east is charming. In other words: hide the children and the livestock.

Piraten! Move out of Your Parent's Basement!

I've never heard of a political party become so adept at repelling women without, say, making them wear veils or binding their feet:

Just after walking the German Pirate Party plank due to exhaustion, ex-Pirate political manager Marina Weisband dropped the boom on her mobbing male marauders by outing them as being just as chauvanistic and sexist as male types everywhere else are, political or otherwise.

The response she got from these thoroughly modern males amounted to "whatever you say, sweet cheeks."

Kein Schwein War Da...

Fans of pointless phrases should certainly enjoy this.

As it turns out, reading Schiller’s plays and singing Goethe’s poems doesn’t actually make you fluent in contemporary German.

Well, now!

They Invented Their Own Worst Stereotypes

Now iss de time on Schprockets venn ve tance.

You Know them by their Blank Stare

Berlin's eternally dyspeptic "Wutbürgers." Their intellectual heft makes one nearly want to evacuate in situ.

The Swedish Miracle Mullet

"I have been trying for ten years to get this classified as a handicap," Tullgren told The Local.

"I spoke to three psychologists and they finally agreed that I needed this to avoid being discriminated against."

Whenever you see news coming out of Sweden, why do feel compelled to ALWAYS ask "is this a joke"? It’s a stupid question, because it never is.

Sweden: Man gets sick benefits for heavy metal addiction

A Swedish heavy metal fan has had his musical preferences officially classified as a disability. The results of a psychological analysis enable the metal lover to supplement his income with state benefits.

So on the occasions where he DID show up to work, he employed psychiatry to try to compel his employer to listen to metal for what is likely a 6 hour a day job. This despite the fact that he was getting paid at all.

Eventually his last employer tired of his absences and Tullgren was left jobless and reliant on welfare handouts.

But his sessions with the occupational psychologists led to a solution of sorts: Tullgren signed a piece of paper on which his heavy metal lifestyle was classified as a disability, an assessment that entitles him to a wage supplement from the job centre.

"I signed a form saying: 'Roger feels compelled to show his heavy metal style. This puts him in a difficult situation on the labour market. Therefore he needs extra financial help'. So now I can turn up at a job interview dressed in my normal clothes and just hand the interviewers this piece of paper," he said.

Winners and enterpreneurs seem rather hard to come by after 6 decades of deprogramming people of common sense.

The Dreaded Google Street View now Confounding German Car Buyers

Oh, how very ironical. Volkswagen will be putting the dreaded privacy impuning Google Street View into Audi dash boards.

Forbes:

When Germany pushed back hard on Google Street View, Google complied with its conditions — blurring people’s faces and even going so far as to allow privacy-sensitive Germans to have their houses blurred out. (Not everyone in Germany was on board with the visual censorship, and some of those blurred houses wound up getting egged by pro-Googlers. Ironically, opting out made them even more visible.) But eventually Google got fed up with the restrictions, and abandoned Street View in Germany.

Talk about your Fahrvergnügen.

An Effete Pig Fingers Effete Pigs

”Firing back” at an idea with an unrelated trope has become the gold standard in (anti) intellectualism by intimidation.

Two books have shaped German debate this autumn. Thilo Sarrazin's book "Deutschland schafft sich ab" (Germany is abolishing itself) and "Das Amt und die Vergangenheit" (The Foreign Ministry and the past). On first appearances they would seem to have little in common, other than they are both published by Random House. Actually, though, these books are intricately bound up with one another, two souls in the breast of the politically-minded Bildungsburger or member of the German educated classes.

After all, both arguments somehow become equal because they came out of the mouths of “a class”, a sorting mechanism from people outside of those being assigned to one class or another.

Somehow, Sarrazin’s mention of the disinvolved and least educated not participating in the larger society’s social and economic life, and a collection of essays about the largely now deceased staff of Germany’s postwar foreign ministry whitewashing its’ past are to become about something else entirely. Were those Ausenministarium folk really elitists? Maybe. But was it their class and education that drove their moral failure? This is a question that one may not ask in a post-you name it society.



Which “class” is it right to appear to be after today, all you Besserwisser types out there?

Where then, should we arbitrarily deposit out judgment on the likes of that elite “class” called opinion journalists such as the article’s author, Welt journalist Alan Pösner? We may not judge right nor wrong in an individual for fear of sanction or being held to account for our words, which is how constructing invective for a constructed class develops so much appeal.

Forgotten Facts, Done Dirt Cheap

Don’t be mislead by the American mainstream media, or anything else you may have seen or heard.

Observing Hermann made clear not of the fact that Germany’s “authoritative” Focus newsmag was quick to declare the mid-term election “undecided”. I guess their hoping for some Washington-state democrat-style ballot box stuffing and “found” votes. All in the spirit of fairness, legality, and social legitimacy, of course.

But their obsessive-compulsion to misinform their readers doesn’t stop there. Another piece keyed in by the most unflattering picture that they could find of George Bush, a man who had nothing to do with the mid-term election, even by way of political ghosts, reads:

“The Democrats also win the Senate”

Also?



Just to illustrate what a great job Focus has done in informing its’ readers, we find to be rather typical comments such as these:

I am pleased that the Bush administration has received a shock and has to start thinking although I also know that a total reversal of the policy is not possible, but a start has been made.

I though the likes of this twit would have ‘also’ been happy to have heard about the 2008 election at this point.

Here’s another gem from someone unaware that George Bush isn’t just no-longer-in-charge, but left office when his term ended, in the fashion precisely opposite of a dictatorship:

Now the USA can move away from the warlike Bush dictatorship that can comes to an end. It’s funny when a despot wants to democratize the world, but at home undermine any form of respect for democracy, and want to overturn with self-made laws.

It’s painful to even try to deconstruct the sickness in that commentator’s mind... WHAT dictatorship? What “self-made laws”? It doesn’t matter in Euro-land: they are superior beings who (despite election reports) just KNOW what the “real facts” are, and are willing to dispense with democracy, reflection of reality, or anything else to keep their petty hatred alive.

It’s probably all they have to keep their dignity intact.