Quotulatiousness

December 21, 2024

German democracy tottering on the brink (again) after latest attack by Elon Musk!

Filed under: Germany, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Germany is, yet again, convulsed with political unrest as politicians react strongly to foreign interference in German affairs by … dun-dun-duuuuuun … Elon Musk:

“German flag” by fdecomite is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

German democracy, which has existed undeterred since 1949 but is somehow always shaken to its foundations whenever anybody sings the wrong song or holds a televised debate with the wrong person, is once again on life support.

Christian Lindner, head of the market-liberal Free Democrats, did much to trigger the present catastrophe on 1 December, when said that the Free Republic should “dare more Milei and more Musk“. Because there is little distinction between praising Milei and Musk and demanding the return of National Socialism, there ensued a brief period of establishment hyperventilation.

Less than a week later, CDU chief and probable future German chancellor Friedrich Merz, did his part to denounce Lindner’s political wrongthink in a statement to Deutschlandfunk:

    So neither the Argentinian president nor, how shall I put it, the American entrepreneur Elon Musk – let’s put it plainly – are role models for German politics in my view. I don’t see where we can find similarities in German politics. What Christian Lindner meant will probably remain his secret.

The next day, Merz repeated the same denunciations, only more harshly, explaining to one of our extremely adult and far-sighted pantsuit talkshow hosts that “To be honest, I was completely appalled that Christian Lindner made that comparison“. Milei, Merz said, is “really trampling on the people there”.

Yesterday, all of this came to the notice of the (honestly rather tiresome) influencer Naomi Seibt, who posted a video statement to X rehearsing all of this old news to her largely American audience:

Elon Musk then brought down the hammer on the German democratic order, retweeting Seibt’s video and remarking that “Only the AfD can save Germany“.

Today a lot of very important and influential people got out of bed and took to their keyboards to denounce Musk’s election interference. His statement might be illegal, at any rate it is very likely fascist and certainly it is beyond the pale for an American to voice an opinion about German politics. Germans absolutely never, ever, utter the slightest word about American politics and certainly would never advance negative opinions about the American president in the middle of an election campaign. Our Foreign Office would never try to fact-check an American presidential debate! Our journalists would never depict President Donald Trump dressed as a Ku Klux Klan member or offering the Hitler salute or decapitating the Statue of Liberty! That’s just not done!

Like a great stream of green diarrhoea, the outrage is pouring fourth. Matthias Gebauer, who writes for Der Spiegel, observes that “Elon Musk … is openly promoting the AfD” and concludes that “Putin is not the only one who loves this party”. Erik Marquardt, head of the Green faction in the European Parliament, says that “The EU Commission and EU member states should no longer stand by and watch as billionaires misuse media and algorithms to influence elections and strengthen and normalise right-wing extremists”. This “is an attack on democracy”, and “has nothing to do with freedom of expression”. Dennis Radtke, CDU representative in the European Parliament, concludes that “Musk … is declaring war on democracy” and that “the man is a menace”. We are also under siege via “interference from Putin”; “the erosion of our democracy is being fuelled from both within and without”. Julian Röpcke, who writes for BILD, believes that “This is interference in the German election campaign by a tech billionaire who uses algorithms to decide what gets heard”. If Germany does not “respond with penalties, there will be no help for our eroding democracy”.

The Canadian Armed Forces are doing great on diversity … but not much else

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the National Post, Tristin Hopper reports on the amazing progress in anti-racist activism, diversity, equity, inclusion and — for all I know — drag queen story times in the officers’ messes but too bad about all the other stuff, eh?

A new report finds that while the Department of Defence is making steady progress on all its new “equity and diversity” goals, morale is plummeting and the Canadian military has reached new lows in terms of its ability to actually deploy forces.

For the first time, more than half of Canada’s naval and air fleets were marked as being unfit to “meet training and readiness requirements”, according to the military’s latest Departmental Results Report, published Tuesday.

Only 45.7 per cent of Royal Canadian Navy ships are fit to be used for “training and operations”, and the same is true for just 48.9 per cent of RCAF “aerospace fleets”.

And the figures weren’t much better in the army. The report wrote that the serviceability of Canadian Army equipment remained in a “persistent downward trend”, with army personnel forced to rely on “aging and increasingly obsolete fleets”.

One example was the BV 206, a tracked snow carrier that is ostensibly the main form of transportation at the Nunavut-based Arctic Training Centre. The vehicle now has an incredible 80 per cent failure rate, with the report saying that it can’t be safely used for “essential” tasks.

Morale is also hitting new lows. In a survey, just 30.4 per cent of military personnel said that the armed forces provide a “reasonable quality of life” — that’s far less than the official target of 85 per cent.

And among full-time personnel, just 53.5 per cent said they felt “positive” about their job.

Some of the few figures in the document that weren’t in decline were in the realm of “equity and diversity”.

The Canadian Armed Forces slightly increased the share of personnel who “self-identify as a visible minority” (from 11.1 per cent in 2023 to 12.2 per cent in 2024).

There was also a moderate uptick in the number of civilian employees “who self-identify as a woman” (from 42.4 to 43 per cent).

The report boasted of a new system of military promotions that does not “disadvantage the intersections of diverse groups of women, men and non-binary people”.

It also announced that “Gender Advisors” were now being routinely deployed on overseas operations, including on Operation Unifier, Canada’s mission to provide combat training to Ukrainian soldiers engaged in their ongoing war with Russia. “The Task Force Gender Advisor was involved in all aspects of this training mission”, it read.

Alton’s Eggnog | Food Network

Filed under: Food — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Food Network
Published 1 Dec 2014

Alton’s making eggnog, the drink that thinks it’s a custard pie.

Get the recipe: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/al…
(more…)

QotD: Portugal’s early expansion in the Indian Ocean

Filed under: History, India, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

At a cursory glance, the first arrival of Portuguese ships in India must not have appeared to be a particularly fateful development. Vasco da Gama’s 1497 expedition to India, which circumnavigated Africa and arrived on the Malabar Coast near Calicut consisted of a mere four ships and 170 men — hardly the sort of force that could obviously threaten to upset the balance of power among the vast and populous states rimming the Indian ocean. The rapid proliferation of Portuguese power in India must have therefore been all the more shocking for the region’s denizens.

The collision of the Iberian and Indian worlds, which possessed diplomatic and religious norms that were mutually unintelligible, was therefore bound to devolve quickly into frustration and eventually violence. The Portuguese, who harbored hopes that India might be home to Christian populations with whom they could link up, were greatly disappointed to discover only Muslims and Hindu “idolaters”. The broader problem, however, was that the market in the Malabar coast was already heavily saturated with Arab merchants who plied the trade routes from India to Egypt — indeed, these were precisely the middle men whom the Portuguese were hoping to outflank.

The particular flashpoint which led to conflict, therefore, were the mutual efforts of the Portuguese and the Arabs to exclude each other from the market, and the devolution to violence was rapid. A second Portuguese expedition, which arrived in 1500 with 13 ships, got the action started by seizing and looting an Arab cargo ship off Calicut; Arab merchants in the city responded by whipping up a mob which massacred some 70 Portuguese in the onshore trading post in full sight of the fleet. The Portuguese, incensed and out for revenge, retaliated in turn by bombarding Calicut from the sea; their powerful cannon killed hundreds and left much of the town (which was not fortified) in ruins. They then seized the cargo of some 10 Arab vessels along the coast and hauled out for home.

The 1500 expedition unveiled an emerging pattern and basis for Portugal’s emerging India project. The voyage was marked by significant frustration: in addition to the massacre of the shore party in Calicut, there were significant losses to shipwreck and scurvy, and the expedition had failed to achieve its goal of establishing a trading post and stable relations in Calicut. Even so, the returns — mainly spices looted from Arab merchant vessels — were more than sufficient to justify the expense of more ships, more men, and more voyages. On the shore, the Portuguese felt the acute vulnerability of their tiny numbers, having been overwhelmed and massacred by a mob of civilians, but the power of their cannon fire and the superiority of their seamanship gave them a powerful kinetic tool.

Big Serge, “The Rise of Shot and Sail”, Big Serge Thought, 2024-09-13.

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