What if I told you that Germany is a federation. NRW would be the fifth largest US state, Bremen the third smallest (actually, almost identical population to DC), most of all the US has more states. They can do stuff in parallel that’s no excuse to not have quick election results. And now don’t come with “but there’s so much space in between” you’re not sending the results via horse buggy are you.

And, no, of course the federation doesn’t legislate on state elections. It gets to say how federal (and EU) elections are run. State’s rights my ass in Germany the federation has no tax office, it’s all collected by the states, and their police can’t put boots on the ground outside of international borders (incl. airports) and the train system (cf Amtrak cops). Certainly can’t just decide to invade a city like is happening in LA. They also don’t have anything like ICE, that’s all state responsibility.

You mean cause a chargeback or something? You’d have to find a sufficiently shady seller, the key might get revoked, also you’re supporting another ilk of scumbags.

Germany, with 100% paper ballots, has preliminary results in by the end of the night. That’s preliminary as in “everything has been counted, but we haven’t double-checked anything yet”. The final result comes later and has never differed in even close to significant ways from the preliminary one. Most of the time delay is not due to voting but to give people and courts time to deal with any challenge there might be.

The German constitutional court declared voting machines unconstitutional for the simple reason that they don’t allow people with just an ordinary education, no specialist knowledge, to ascertain for themselves that the vote is kosher.

The CCC actually tried to get them outlawed based on technical grounds, including that it’s impossible to have electronic voting that is both secure and private (“can’t prove to the Mafia boss how you voted” type of private), the judges listened intendedly and asked many smart questions, just to then turn around and say “yeah we barely understood that and we’re practically all professors and it’s our job, can’t expect J. Random Citizen to do that between shifts”.

You should totally play the game, but make sure that you pirate it so your money doesn’t go to the thief who stole the rights from the creators.

Let me throw a disgusted upvote in your general direction.

As the old saying goes “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

It may be convenient to look at classical interpretations but “The intuition we evolved to interact with macro systems is also applicable to the micro level” is in itself an extraordinary claim.

Anything that happens in LA is being attributed to protestors,

“The tactic that we’re not employing in LA has no effect in LA”.

I don’t actually disagree, but I think our hyper-connected social media makes it practically impossible to avoid the kind of cross-contamination that soils the optics of even a well-organized protest here

On the live feeds I watched I spotted exactly one protester who might have had training. She was good at leading a chant, that’s it. Noone had an understanding of the larger situation, everyone was driving by the seat of their pants.

Now, of course, it’s too late to build those structures, build professionalism, but in the civil rights era you had it. Rosa Parks didn’t just decide one morning to sit in the front of the bus, the thing had been prepared for months and months. Everything was gamed out, people trained to have the right reaction in every circumstance, the whole shebang.

Fun fact: I actually played “Greenpeace and police” on the primary school schoolyard. About ten people sit down, hook into each other’s arms, four or five “cops” try to separate them. That’s the kind of cultural diffusion you want, enough dissemination of tactics through workshops that primary school kids pick up random fun exercises as a game.

I think I’ll just leave you with a MLK quote I think is relevant.

Indeed, it is relevant: Because you still haven’t learned how to make yourself heard.

And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity.

That’s not a call to violence. It’s a call to get out of a comfortable rut and fight for justice, equality, and humanity. Show me an MLK quote where he says “Yo dudes, just riot, man”. Especially the black civil rights movement was vulnerable to being portrayed as violent (racist stereotypes and everything). How did they get around that? Did Rosa Parks spit in the face of the cop who arrested her?

Maybe it’s different overseas, but from what I’ve seen written about it in our media you have the same problem.

“Protests were overwhelmingly peaceful with riots at the fringes”. The social media sphere is its own battleground, the AfD basically employs the same fake news outrage tactics as the MAGA sphere does in the US. No, you won’t get Fox News to change its narrative and to stop just making things up, but that’s not the only news network you have. Achieving anything on the social media front requires consistency and reach, honestly not my speciality. Ask someone who has never used a dial-up modem. Centrist-compatible edgy meme accounts with the occasional leap into the radical when the opportunity is right? Broad outreach is crucial otherwise the important stuff will stay in your bubble.

Also never forget that Antifa action can look like this. People do love to laugh at fascists, also liberals, even plenty of conservatives, give them plenty of opportunity to do so. Nick their clothes while they’re bathing, the whole republic was snickering. Those things are click magnets as you can see them being picked up even by US media.

how does that not still get used as justification for militarized escalation by police?

It splits the whole thing. Liberals can have their prayer vigil while the police is busy. Especially with jackboots, with individual motivation and not “crack down on them and I mean everyone” being the order from above, all you have to do is occupy them, they just want to have fun. Scratch that itch. Use their toys.

And then liberal media can go on waxing about non-violent protest, about that beautiful prayer vigil, how nice that is. Before, they couldn’t: Because there was no clear delineation, the vigil and the riot couldn’t be told apart. Thus you enable things getting air time, positive or at least neutral coverage, that would otherwise be swept under the rug.

And before you go on and say “but the whole US media landscape is captured by capital interest and racists” – yes. And the capitalists want their immigrants. They don’t, in principle, mind speaking of “ICE excesses”.

I think you’re just a shitlib who enjoys larping as an anarchist.

What I think is the actual issue here is an American incapability to actually organise. Last time you had a civil rights movement with any sort of discipline was, well, the civil rights movement. MLK, Black Panthers, etc. I suggest reading up a bit on what they did instead of jacking off to pseudo-insurrectionist fantasies.

the police were already escalating before the protests started.

You act as if that was something that never happens elsewhere. As if others haven’t found ways to deal with it. Me saying “Telling everyone to just throw stones is a stupid idea” is not an opinion, it’s observed history. It has been tried. It doesn’t work. Other approaches work better. But Americans, in their infinite wisdom, will do the right thing only after having exhausted every other possibility. Listening and learning from other people’s experience? Why, what’s the point, America is so exceptionally exceptional nothing could ever apply to you. Protesting with discipline, diversion, and de-escalation tactics cannot work because you have more people per capita or something. I retract that “fed” and will simply call you “yank”.

Germany had this since forever, it’s just how offline laws translate to the internet: There’s a difference between a) ordinary nudity, b) eroticism and c) straight-up porn. The latter was always 18+, in video rental stores etc. they would have a separate section and if you didn’t look of age you’d get ID’d.

You can’t order alcohol online in Germany without a proper age check, and the same applies to porn. For paid offerings that’s no issue, payment providers offer age checks (your bank knows how old you are and them vouching suffices), for free sites it’s a no-go, noone is going to go through the hassle. Especially as you can escape off the German-language internet onto the international one and merely click through an “are you 18” banner.

Notably, pornhub isn’t blocked in Germany – neither from the German side, nor from pornhub’s. Very occasionally DNS bans are ordered when a site without age checks tries to specifically target the German market. Mostly though it’s down to German google not serving up those international porn sites which in the end is good enough for the youth protection authorities because the point is not to make access impossible, it’s to make sure that youth not ready for content doesn’t stumble across it. And once you’re actively seeking, you’re ready, the hoops you have to jump through are proof of the “active” part. YMMV on “not ready for porn with 18”, back in the days there was still softcore. On free TV. Probably won’t hurt kids to not start out with gonzo.

Lmao, the intent of black bloc is absolutely not an acknowledgement of peaceful protest, it’s an acknowledgement that violence is necessary against oppressive capitalist systems and state violence.

Yeah you’re stuck in the 80s. That type of black blocs wasn’t a tactic, it was Autonomous Marxists jacking off. They were starting shit on May Day for the purpose of starting shit. It had the net result of lowering attendance to union marches because, circling back to my very first comment: Not that many people fancy dodging burning trash cans. Name comes from the federal prosecutor describing them as “Schwarzer Block”, the translation and weird lack of k came later.

As a modern tactic the black bloc is, as I said, a lightning rod. Marching alongside, holding still, if police act up they’re shielding other protestors by engaging. Yes, it acknowledges that violence is necessary to defend a protest. Defence being the key word, here.

You’re ignoring like 30 years of development in protest tactics. What you’re trying to do, we’ve been there. Doesn’t work.

There’s a prayer vigil planned for today, isn’t there, what are you going to do? Come there in black, mingle with the grandmas, and start throwing molotov cocktails? You know who does that kind of thing? Agent provocateurs. That’s why I’ve been calling you a fed.

Yup, and with any luck Trump will continue with the lack of subtlety.

You’re being accelerationalist. Also that wasn’t Trump that was a local jackboot jacking off.

Either he’s a dictator or he can be obstructed by judicial paperwork. You can’t have a dictator that politely complies with the judiciary, that’s what makes them a dictator.

Who the fuck cares if the dictator complies, what matters is that the overall system complies. There’s still quite some inertia left in the gears of the rule of law, people around Trump (not him, he doesn’t care nor does he understand) know how to attack that but chances are they’re severely underestimating the task. Unlike back in the Weimar Republic, you e.g. don’t have a country full of judges considering law passed by parliament to not even be law because law must be passed by the Kaiser.

Noticed how the Border Tsar backed off when Newson (what’s he spelled I don’t care) told him “go, come arrest me”? That’s not the behaviour of a viceroy of a dictator, that’s the behaviour of one who would like to have that power, but doesn’t.

One of the first things btw that the Nazis did was to (functionally) dissolve the states and put them under direct federal control. That’s another reason why you want to shout “state’s rights” right now.

Not everyone can or should be in black bloc sabotaging ICE vehicles

The fuck are you doing that as a black bloc. Those are a lightning rod for police violence so that others can protest in peace, you don’t want the sabotage squad to be a lightning rod, you want them to be ninjas. Unseen, unheard, unnoticed. More of a warning west and not black hoodie kind of task.

And, see, suddenly we’re talking black blocs. An actual tactic. One that acknowledges the importance of peaceful protest, at the very least the necessity to separate yourself from the overall crowd, so that liberals can go to baby’s first protest because we want them in the street, actually seeing shit, feeling vibes, and not in front of the TV, watching propaganda. Not, as in the OP, “fuck this shit I want to smash things”, at least that’s the vibes that I got: Justification for a foregone conclusion, not a plan grown out of analysis of the overall situation.

You want to wait that long do something? Be my guest.

Who said anything about waiting? Stop posting and organise that shit. Don’t look at me I’m on the other side of the Atlantic.

Nothing the protestors actually do will move the needle - it’s the extreme overreaction of the fed that will.

Please look up opinion polling after the Kent State Massacre: It took years for public opinion to shift away from “the National Guard did nothing wrong”. For what you say to occur the overreaction has to not just be extreme, it also has to be obvious – like the Aussie journalist which got shot, that’s a good video. Things don’t become more obviously an overreaction when cars are burning and shopfronts are deglassed.

Liberals need to pick a lane - either trump is a dictator who must be removed before he solidifies his hold on power, or we need to conduct ourselves until the midterms so that we can vote our way out.

I wouldn’t argue for either. Both are unrealistic for various reasons and the latter isn’t a good in itself. What you want to do is obstruct the fuck out the feds so they fall on their face, that’s best done on a level of state and lower administrations. California isn’t cooperating with ICE so make sure to have the state’s back. Yes, I, an anarchist is saying “have the state’s back”, fascism is too large a threat to risk over feelings of disgust regarding liberal democracy. Last thing you want is the Governor seeing himself in a situation where he has to ask the feds to intervene to keep (a semblance of) order instead of being able to say “fuck off feds we got this”.

They don’t need an excuse.

To shoot? No. To justify themselves in the media, in the public eye? Yes.

It’s also wild to me that ‘throwing stones’ is somehow seen as more violent than literal fucking munitions and chemical weapons.

It’s not. That’s as much a shitlib take as “police violence isn’t violence because it’s state violence”.

But it’s the perception that exists among the population, you’re not going to change it by throwing stones.

Communities are fighting against unaccountable and un-identifiable gestapo pigs blackbagging innocent children

You know what people did to protect Jews from the Gestapo? Hide them. You can’t protect them by throwing stones for the simple reason that police dgaf when they’re hit by stones, they’ll just blackbag you alongside.

Look there’s exactly one thing I’m saying here: Act strategically. I’m not arguing against violence because it’s evil – at most, violence is unaesthetic. I’m arguing against it because, unless you start an actual insurrection with plans to take on and take out the military, it’s ineffective. Just because your pigs are worse than what we’re dealing with over here doesn’t mean that lashing out at them suddenly becomes good praxis. You’re there to have an effect, not to blow off steam.

There’s a massive fucking vibe difference between a crowd taking cover behind whatever is at hand and one setting fire to shit and throwing back stones is all I’m saying. Be the former vibe. Stones aren’t going to stop them. Assault rifles and tanks wouldn’t stop them. Pining for escalation hands them excuses on a platter for no strategic gain whatsoever, it’s pissing in the wind. The only law you should be breaking is refusing to follow a dispersal order, or at least take your sweet time with it, everything else is fedposting.

There’s a much better reason to not be violent: So that you can get more people onto the streets. Figures that most people don’t fancy dodging burning trash cans and you want everybody on the streets, not just your polycule. People need to feel like they’re safe at the protest, the only danger there is is coming from the state.

Psi research is a fascinating field, responsible for lots of improvements in study design, metastudy statistics and criteria, whatnot.

Like, it is hard to control your experiment so that you don’t accidentally measure side channels as telepathy or whatnot. Or subjects having hit rates because they have the same cognitive bias as experimenters selecting cards “at random”. The list is endless.

Sceptic: “Your study has these and these flaws”. Psi researcher: “We’re using state of the art experimental design, accepted in every other field, and are open to suggestions”. Sceptic “…damnit”. I guess at least half of Psi researchers are consciously trolling for the heck of it, the bulk of the rest is dabblers, full-on crackpots are actually a rarity. Crackpots don’t tend to have the wherewithal to get their stuff into a form that’s even remotely publishable.

I’m Swiss and open to answer questions if you have any.

As a nearby neutral power: Is the peak of Mont Blanc French, Italian, or both?