May 20

Welcome to the New Germany

Posted in: links, politics

I’m not too big a fan of re-posting other people’s stuff on my own blog, but this little clip here really got my attention. With the elections in the European Union coming up in a few weeks every German european citizen should really take a step back and think about for whom he or she is going to vote.





Personally, I’m a supporter of the Piratenpartei. There may be many reasons why one shouldn’t vote for a party like that, but I have run out of options a long time ago. Every time I open up a newspaper it seems like the big parties are trying to pass each other on their race to make me puke my guts out before breakfast.
But to whomever you give your vote – make sure you know who they are and what they stand for. If you’ve followed the news during the past couple of months you have seen the kind of uninformed knee-jerk reactions to current events that systematically erode our civil liberties and make a joke of the once highly held concept of the presumption of innocence. The seemingly rampant voracity for total surveillance paired with a downright ludicrous display of incompetence is nothing short of grotesque. And it’s enough. This needs to stop, and it needs to stop now. It simply can not be that all the politicians have to do in order to push any legislation through that they see fit is play the terrorism or child pornography trump card. Don’t make me quote Benjamin Franklin.

The elections are coming up. And it’s time to take a stand. To say it with the immortal words of Howard Beale:

I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!

Get mad. Make your voice heard. Make your vote count.

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Apr 17

Chinese Pornography. Almost.

Posted in: politics, rants

What a glorious day! First a Swedish court convicts Pirate Bay owners, then German’s family minister Ursula von der Leyen persuades ISPs to block child pornography websites. Now all we have to do is outlaw violence and theft and world peace is at hand!

Oh, wait…

The whole thing would be a good laugh if it wasn’t so frightening. I’m not gonna comment on the Pirate Bay ruling, there is plenty of press coverage on that as it is, and it’s the blockage of web sites containing child pornography that really worries me. Not because I endorse it (far from it) but because it is not merely a futile move but a dangerous one at that.

Here is how it is supposed to work: Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (aka the BKA) creates a list of all web sites containing child pornography and supposedly updates it on a daily basis (that alone gives rise to plenty of questions). That list is then forwarded to the ISPs who block all access to those sites.

First of all: it’s not gonna work. Ever. There’s VPN, there’s Tor, there’s proxies… but this is what you get when politicians make decisions about things they don’t understand. We were all very happy to hear that Germany’s Minister of the Interior Wolfgang Schäuble finally realized that the internet isn’t really just a modern telephone switchboard. Even he has his moments.
And even if it did work it wouldn’t change a damn thing. The children were already abused. The damage has been done. You are fiddling with symptoms. It’s populism, and nothing but populism. All it will achieve is force pedophiles deeper underground, aggravating the problem if anything. You can close your eyes all you want, it’s not gonna make the issue go away. If history has taught us one thing it is that people who desire forbidden things have always found ways to get it. It takes a lot of willful ignorance not to see this.

In and by itself this may not seem all that bad. But you have to see this in context: a while ago a German court approved of a house search of a blogger who linked to a site that in turn linked to another site which was on the Danish child pornography blacklist. Add the fact that “child pornography” is a delightfully fuzzy term to begin with and you find yourself on a very slippery slope to censorship.

This isn’t China. Yet. But we get closer to the edge every day and when you look at the big picture it gets really scary. Censorship is unacceptable, whatever form it may take. Wehret den Anfängen!

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Nov 05

A chance for change

Posted in: politics

Distinctly do I remember the last presidential election in the US four years ago. I was spending two semesters in Pennsylvania at the time and had the opportunity to experience the whole process first hand (including the final phase of the election campaigns, which – if you’ve ever seen their German equivalents – are quite often as grotesque as they are entertaining).

It was painful to see The Man with The Plan lose against a retarded fellow. What made it worse was that while the 2000 election was a scam, Bush won fair and square in 2004. (To be fair, he didn’t win as much as Kerry just threw it away. Not that that makes it any better…)
Like most colleges, the one I attended back then was very liberal, especially the staff with which I had a great connection. The atmosphere of resignation, incredulity and anger that lingered in the air the days following the election was dense. I remember a friend being close to tears when the results were announced – something that I just couldn’t (and still can’t) picture happening in Germany.

Present day. Obama is president-elect. And although the messiah-metaphor is stupid and certainly out of place, it does capture the spirit of the day. I for one am glad and very excited. A democratic Senate, a democratic House and a democratic President. Let’s see what they make of it.

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