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A German man named Stefan Niehoff used a parody of a shampoo advertisement to put forward the view on Twitter that Germany’s Minister of Economic Affairs and Climate Action, Robert Habeck, was a moron – or a “Schwachkopf” in the original German.
That did not please Mr Habeck. As has become customary for German government ministers since the Covid pandemic, he decided to retaliate against an ordinary citizen who had mocked him by filing a criminal complaint against Mr Niehoff for “hate crime”, and arranging for two cops to turn up at the latter’s house at six fifteen one morning.
Many such incidents of repression in Germany have been chronicled by the German blogger “Eugyppius”. In his latest article, simply titled “Schwachkopf”, Eugyppius writes,
Our Green Minister of Economic Affairs Robert Habeck has been bringing criminal speech complaints against his critics for years. As of August 2024, he had filed 805 such charges – well over half of the total raised by all cabinet ministers since September 2021 combined.
Even in Germany as it now is, on its own that attempt to bring the criminal law down on someone for insulting a politician might have provoked enough ridicule to deter Mr Habeck from proceeding. But Habeck had another card up his sleeve – or rather, his membership of the ruling class gave him the power to keep turning over cards until he found one he could use.
In the course of the trawl through Niehoff’s Twitter history that Mr Habeck got his friends in the police to carry out in support of his hate crime prosecution, some bright spark turned up another tweet that they could twist against Niehoff in the fashion of the American media talking about Donald Trump.
Some time before calling Mr Habeck a “Schwachkopf”, Stefan Niehoff had posted another tweet, this time in opposition to a boycott by left-wingers of the dairy brand Müller. Niehoff posted a pair of pictures of stickers plastered over supermarket shelves that urged people not to buy Müller products, juxtaposed against a historical photo from the Nazi era showing a SS or SA man holding a placard saying “Germans, do not buy from Jews”. He gave the pair of photos the caption “We’ve seen it all before!”.
Do you think that Mr Niehoff’s use of a picture of a Nazi in that tweet demonstrated that he (a) did, or (b) did not admire the Nazis?
Any normal person would say (b). I have no doubt that the German authorities know perfectly well that Niehoff’s tweet was anti-Nazi. But they could suck up to Habeck and make his charges look less moronic by pretending to think (a). So that’s what they did. They announced that they were not just investigating Niehoff for insulting a member of the government, but also for incitement. Anti-semitic incitement. As Eugyppius writes,
Plainly, Niehoff meant only to compare the Müller boycott to Nazi boycotts against Jews by way of rejecting both of them. That might be in poor taste and I certainly wouldn’t argue this way, but I also can’t see how this tweet has anything to do with criminal statutes against incitement.
What happened here is clear enough: Insulting cabinet ministers may, if you squint, count as online “hate speech,” but it does not remotely qualify for the Eleventh Action Day Against Antisemitic Internet Hate Crimes. To improve their enforcement statistics against the kind of crimes that really generate headlines, while at the same time persecuting the Green Minister’s online detractors, our Bamberg prosecutors went poking around Niehoff’s account for a minimally plausible post that would justify putting him in the precious antisemitism column.
There is an amusing silver lining to this dark cloud of moronic malice. Click on the link to the word “Schwachkopf” above to find out what it is.
Will Hutton: “Farmers have hoarded land for too long. Inheritance tax will bring new life to rural Britain”.
“Inheritance tax springs from the universally held belief that society has the right to share when wealth is transferred on death as a matter of justice.”
It is not universal.
“This is not confiscation, especially if the lion’s share of the bequest is left intact.”
It is confiscation.
“It is asking for a share.”
It is not asking.
Sometimes the journalist really is the story: “Telegraph journalist faces ‘Kafkaesque’ investigation over alleged hate crime”, reports the Telegraph.
A Telegraph journalist is facing a “Kafkaesque” investigation for allegedly stirring up racial hatred in a social media post last year.
Allison Pearson, an award-winning writer, has described how two police officers called at her home at 9.40am on Remembrance Sunday to tell her she was being investigated over the post on X, formerly Twitter, from a year ago.
In an article for The Telegraph, she said she was told by one officer that “I was accused of a non-crime hate incident. It was to do with something I had posted on X a year ago. A YEAR ago? Yes. Stirring up racial hatred apparently.”
When Pearson asked what she had allegedly said in the tweet, the officer said he was not allowed to disclose it. However, at this time last year, she was frequently tweeting about the October 7 attacks on Israel and controversial pro-Palestinian protests on the streets of London.
The officer also refused to reveal the accuser’s name. Pearson recalled: “‘It’s not the accuser,’ the PC said, looking down at his notes. ‘They’re called the victim.’”
An accused person is not told what crime they are alleged to have committed nor who is accusing them, but the police speak as if the crime is already proven. There was a time when Britain defined itself as a place where this could not happen.
Here is another account of the same events from GB News:
“Fury as police officers spend Remembrance Sunday knocking on journalist’s door over social media post: ‘A day celebrating freedom!’”
I am not a huge fan of celebrity chef and food campaigner Jamie Oliver, nor of children’s books whose main selling point is a sleb’s name on the cover, but this is just cruel:
Jamie Oliver apologises after his children’s book is criticised for ‘stereotyping’ First Nations Australians
The man once known as the Hammer of the Twizzlers has not merely apologised but professed himself “devastated” and pulled his book from sale worldwide. So how bad was it?
Billy and the Epic Escape, a humorous fantasy adventure novel, is set in England but involves a subplot where a wicked woman with supernatural powers teleports herself to Alice Springs to steal a child from a fictitiously named community called Borolama. She wants an Australian Indigenous child to join her press gang of kidnapped children who work her land because “First Nations children seem to be more connected with nature”. The adults responsible for Ruby, a young girl who lives in foster care and likes to eat desert bush food, are distracted by the woman’s promise of funding for their community projects. Once abducted, Ruby tells the English children who rescue and repatriate her that she can read people’s minds and communicate with animals and plants because “that’s the indigenous way”.
Ah, the Australian version of what TV Tropes calls the “Magical Negro”
She also tells them she is from Mparntwe (Alice Springs), yet uses words from the Gamilaraay people of New South Wales and Queensland when explaining her life in Australia.
OK, that is a research failure, or, more probably, a complete failure to realise that a quick browse of Wikipedia might be good. The (sadly almost extinct) Gamilaraay language is spoken in a region some 1,700 miles away from Alice Springs, where the unrelated Arrernte language is spoken. But given that this fictional character is already being portrayed as being able to read minds and talk to animals, surely the additional divergence from realism involved in depicting her as speaking the wrong language for her supposed place of origin does not make things much worse. It is like the way that the character Hikaru Sulu from Star Trek was meant to be Japanese but had a vaguely Filipino-sounding last name. Gene Rodenberry thought it symbolised intra-Asian peace or something. You could do that in the sixties and be praised for your progressive vision. These days the same behaviour gets your kids’ book placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, as if it were the junior version of Mein Kampf. There is no need for this. Though they did share an interest in healthy eating, Jamie Oliver is not Hitler. Give his silly book two stars on Amazon and move on.
I wish I were only talking about this:
“Essex Police Issue Update After WWII Bomb Safely Detonated in East Tilbury”
(This Twitter thread by Tony Brown @agbdrilling shows detailed pictures of how the bomb was found and safely exploded under sand.)
But the thing uppermost in my mind was actually this:
“Amsterdam rioters ‘planned Jew hunt on Telegram’ before they attacked Israeli football fans”
“Why has the American center right disappeared from the ballot box?” asks Jan-Werner Müller in the Guardian. Along the way, he takes a minute to say this about Ronald Reagan:
Infamously, he kicked off his 1980 election campaign in Mississippi – close to the site where three civil rights activists had been murdered in 1964 – and endorsed “states’ rights”.
This line of thinking seems odd. Sixteen years had gone by between the murder of the civil rights activists – almost certainly a crime carried out by Democrats – and Reagan launching the Republican campaign at a place nearby. Evidently Professor Müller thinks that a place where a crime occurred must remain off-limits for political activity for longer than sixteen years, lest having a campaign event there be taken as endorsement of the crime. If one took seriously the argument made by Tim Walz and Hillary Clinton that the infamous pro-Nazi German-American Bund rally in Madison Square Garden in 1939 meant that Trump’s rally in the same venue in 2024 was tainted by co-location, then the time for which a place must not be used for political activity after a crime or extremist political event would be at least 85 years. This would rule out almost all of America. Good thing the limit only seems to apply to Republicans.
Update: having written the post above, I found that the point I wanted to make today had already been made far better in 2011 by David Kopel, writing in the Volokh Conspiracy website (now at Reason magazine): “Reagan’s infamous speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi”.
“Donald Trump closes in on victory with two crucial swing-state wins”, reports the Guardian.
I am glad that lawfare and censorship did not prove to be winning tactics.
“Elderly litter picker who voluntarily cleans up local area fined for forgetting walking stick”, the Telegraph reports.
An elderly volunteer litter picker has been handed a fine for accidentally leaving his walking stick by the roadside.
Alan Davies was “shocked, angry and upset” to be penalised by Walsall Council when he forgot his cane in Aldridge, West Midlands, on Sept 6.
Mr Davies and his friends had been on their daily litter pick along Longwood Lane and Hayhead Wood.
The grandfather said he drove off, forgetting to pick up his walking stick and a bag with his cushion inside, which he had placed by the roadside.
Mr Davies claims Walsall Council tracked him down after trawling through local CCTV footage.
He said council officers found his address by using his car’s number plate and sent him the fine last week.
And this is typical:
Mr Davies’s neighbour Ann said: “£150 is a lot of money for a pensioner. You cannot speak to the council on the phone, it has to be [by] email. Not everyone has the internet. Hopefully when people realise what Alan is being put through the council will back down.”
In the end Walsall Council did rescind the fine, although the story does not say whether Mr Davies ever got his walking stick back.
Some aspects of this story reminded me of the raid a few days ago by multiple agents of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation on Mark and Daniela Longo’s home, which ended with the authorities killing a pet squirrel and raccoon. Why have officials in English-speaking countries become so sluggish in pursuing criminals but so dogged in the pursuit of harmless people? There has always been some incentive for cops and officials to go after someone who will not resist in preference to going after a criminal who might stab them, but why has it got so much worse in recent years? Perhaps it is because the number of bureaucrats has so multiplied that responsibility for a process is always divided.
Someone tweeting under the name of “Lyndon Baines Johnson”, a supporter of Kamala Harris, explains how he would like a Harris administration to deal with technological innovators:
Lyndon Baines Johnson
@lyndonbajohnson
If Harris wins, fairly high on the agenda should be finding new federal contractors so that SpaceX and Starlink are shown the door. -OS
8:05 PM · Nov 3, 2024
For all his grievous faults, the actual LBJ would have known how to describe that proposal in a few choice words. He wanted the Apollo program to succeed.
I was just old enough to read the blue sign bearing the word “POLICE” – and I thought my parents had gone mad. We were on a family walk, going past the local police station when, to my horror, my parents stopped. They stopped walking and stood outside the police station looking at the posters and casually talking about grown-up things. Didn’t they realise the peril we were in? Didn’t they understand that at any moment the door could be flung open and policemen could come rushing out to arrest us and drag us off to the cells?
Well, time went by and eventually my seven year-old self was able to chuckle at the foolish worries of six and a half. I realised that I had misunderstood what was being depicted in a fragment of Dixon of Dock Green that I had glimpsed despite it being on after my official bedtime. I came to understand that, whatever might have been the case in the time of King Herod or Henry VIII, that sort of thing didn’t happen nowadays. The authorities in modern, civilised countries do not randomly decide to ruin the lives of ordinary people.
The young couple who owned Peanut the squirrel and Fred the raccoon probably assumed the same thing.
Peanut, a squirrel made famous by his large and devoted Instagram following, has been euthanised just days after being seized by New York authorities.
The state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) raided the home of Mark Longo on Wednesday following complaints of potentially unsafe housing for the animal.
Earlier this week, Mr Longo pleaded with authorities for Peanut’s safe return, writing on Instagram that there was a “special place in hell” for the DEC.
Authorities, however, said that they put the animal down after he bit an official involved in his seizure. The DEC also said it had euthanised a raccoon named Fred that they took away during the raid from Mr Longo’s home.
The alternative possibility – that I was right to be fearful standing outside the police station all those years ago – is not pleasant to contemplate. As a twitter user called “Mason” said,
The squirrel isn’t just a squirrel
Peanut is for everyone who has ever feared that someone more powerful than you could walk into your home and take something that you absolutely cherish away from you, for absolutely no good reason, with no recourse
I know, I know. That’s three things. But there are two more items listed later in Peter Walker’s article for the Guardian, which he probably thought of as a list of things not to like about the newly elected Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch.
Although I have never called myself a Conservative, and have never joined a political party, I do like her. She is my local MP. I have written to her and got a reply that was clearly written with some thought. That is rare. Someone in my family used to be a member of the local Conservative party and I have met her several times at party events, at which she always came across as friendly and convivial. That said, I also like the fact that her smile is not jammed in the “on” position. In their current state the Tories need a leader who will fight – who “would cross the road to bite your ankles” as one of her admirers put it. Sir Keir Starmer had better put on thick socks.
Obviously, the incident in 2008 when Badenoch guessed the password of Harriet Harman’s website, hacked into it, and changed it to say that Harman had defected to the Tories and that everyone should vote for Boris Johnson as Mayor of London was an unspeakably wicked assault on Our Democracy and not funny at all.
In case you’re wondering, the apostrophe in the title is not a contraction for “is”. It marks the possessive and refers to the large amount of garbage in Puerto Rico. Apparently Puerto Rico’s landfill sites are overflowing, and this has been recognised as an environmental problem for years.
It would be amusing to do a whole post about the deficiencies of waste disposal in an unincorporated territory of the United States without ever mentioning what brought the subject to the forefront of my mind. I seek to amuse, so that is what I am going to do, although readers from the future who seek context might like to click on one or two of the names to which I link below.
I did a quick internet search for articles containing reference to “Puerto Rico” and “trash” or “garbage”, but containing no reference to “Hinchcliffe” or “Trump” or “Biden”. Here are some news reports from the last few years that demonstrate that Puerto Rico’s garbage problem is not new:
Trash Crisis Leaves Puerto Rico Near ‘the Brink’ – Global Press Journal, February 16th 2021.
Puerto Rico Landfills: Is the Problem Around Capacity or Noncompliance? – Waste360, August 7th 2019.
An island littered with trash: How Maria highlighted Puerto Rico’s poor waste management. Accuweather, 29th March, 2018 (“Maria” is a reference to Hurricane Maria.)
The following quite lengthy report was apparently published just today. I admire them for resisting the temptation to bring politics into it:
Puerto Rico Trash Problem: Understanding the Crisis and Working Toward Solutions – The Environmental Blog, October 30th 2024.
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