up to and including a CDU/SDP left-right grand coalition.

Wasn’t the CDU talking about revising their “under no circumstance, ever” attitude towards Die Linke. Not terribly relevant right now with Die Linke’s numbers but it’s notable they’re even talking about it.

The current state coalitions are rather… diverse. In case Die Linke uses its new-found freedom from BSW types to turn itself around it could actually become relevant.

Article 3 (3) TEU:

The Union shall establish an internal market. It shall work for the sustainable development of Europe based on balanced economic growth and price stability, a highly competitive social market economy, aiming at full employment and social progress, and a high level of protection and improvement of the quality of the environment. It shall promote scientific and technological advance.

Emphasis mine. In a nutshell a social market economy is a Realpolitik compromise between capitalism and market socialism, where private ownership of the means of production is tolerated but said ownership doesn’t entail complete power over it, through e.g. co-determination laws.

To make this more concrete, and maybe blow some Yank’s mind: Volkswagen’s employees elect 50% - 1 seats on the board. Together with shares held by Lower Saxony (usually run by a socdem government) they run the place, no matter how many shares the Porsche/Piëch clan and the Saudis have. It’s why VW itself worked towards unionising its own plant in Chattanooga, to the bewilderment of many. Sadly can’t unionise the plants in China the CCP hates it when workers have a say.

GP without doctor is just a consequence of the vast majority of doctoral thesis in medicine, for ages, having been slop without academic value. You don’t need to be a good researcher to be a good healer, to know what you’re doing, and if you want to spend your career setting bones then there’s probably not much to research to be had in that area, anyway, so why force practitioners to come up with random stuff to investigate.

Did you know that you can become Heilpraktiker with Hauptschulabschluss, though? The only real requirement is the Gesundheitsamt judging you to not be an active hazard to patients and you can practice medicine. With or without scare quotes, from martial artists doing off-brand physiotherapy to complete but “studied” quacks like homeopaths.

You can also do work+university, best I can tell there’s actually no pure university option.

It’ll be a question whether you have 9/10 or 13 years of primary+secondary education: The latter qualifies you to study anything, while the former qualifies you for trade school, which then qualifies you to study anything remotely connected to the profession you learned.

If you want to bee-line for say a Doctor in physiotherapy starting with trade school might actually be faster, while with less hands-on medicine the route directly to university will likely take less time. On the trade school route university won’t really be teaching you the subject, any more, but focus on how you can turn your experience into novel research.

This “just a trade school” thing just doesn’t really make sense in the German context. You can study metallurgy and still not be able to weld for shit, or you can become a welder and then study metallurgy (skipping some courses) and be somewhat lost when interpreting Goethe because you didn’t spend three additional highschool years on a generalist skillset.

The step from single to multicellular life forms is a metasystem transition, and those don’t roll back, and are amplified by branching growth at the penultimate level¹.

Or, more concretely: A strain of cells learns to communicate with each other, to coordinate, giving all a fitness advantage in other words they create a control system to regulate the lot of them and apes together stronger than apes apart. The emergence of that (usually distributed) control system is a metasystem transition. Because that kind of cooperation has advantage over not cooperating like that, evolution never goes into the other direction (in that sense it has a direction, similar to how time doesn’t really exist in physical microstates, only in their relationship to macrostates: It’s not like genes can’t drift in the other direction, it’s that if they do they get culled at a much higher rate).

And because our critters now have an advantage, they have more resources to develop, to multiply both in absolute number, as well as to specialise into different functions. That’s the branching growth at the penultimate (that is, below the control system) level, and it makes them even more fit. Branching growth is one of those cybernetic laws that happen again and again and again and again and you’d think “surely this can’t always be the case” and yes you’ll find exceptions but by and large, yes, once there’s a metasystem transition you get that effect, again, because it’s very regularly beneficial to the whole.

If that got you consider the evolutionary step from soup of chemicals over the first feedback systems made out of simple molecules creating environments benefitting their own replication to actual cells. Which is explainable by chance alone, but once you take metasystem transitions into account suddenly it doesn’t take an eternity, any more, only aeons.

¹ I should, possibly, at this point warn about Principia Cybernetica just as people warn about tvtropes. It’s a rabbit hole.

Iran didn’t turn tribal and is still diverse AF. Don’t confuse the people and overall culture with the backwards government which isn’t exactly popular.

Iran only really fits half into the latter category because the people are vastly more liberal than their government.

And if you look at polls (can’t find them right now sorry) Iran is actually one of the least Muslim Muslim countries around when you drill down into dogma, e.g. belief in heaven, belief in angels, such things. The average Iranian is about as Muslim in their private faith as someone believing in reincarnation is Christian.

and questionable things regarding immigration laws

I mean… there have been some regrettable cases in Germany directly after the law declaring foreign sub-18 marriage to be invalid, like 16/18yold asylum seeker couples getting separated. There’s a difference between saying “we don’t recognise that, you’ll have to marry again under German law” and “we’re putting you in two different accommodations in two different states because you can’t possibly be a family unit and that’s how the dice fell”. You can’t just blindly assume they’re not heads over heels for each other, no matter how arranged and young the marriage was, you have to look at the individual case and if everything checks out treat them eg. analogous to siblings when it comes to accommodation.

The phase-out practically already started in the early 90s, latest when it became abundantly clear that building more reactors was not politically feasible.

The reason is distrust in anything being handled properly. See Asse (they just discovered irradiated water that they don’t have any idea how it came to be because it’s actually above the deposit), see plants running without functioning backup generators for decades, the list is endless.

IIRC according to the original plan the last coal plants would’ve shut down before the last nuclear plants. Certainly would’ve been possible without 16 years of CDU government.

How much of that is due to French nuclear reactors shutting down, both during summer (to not turn the rivers that cool them into fish soup) as well as all that maintenance stuff they had going on lately.

Germany is an electricity exporter.

Also: You’re looking at generated power. Not coal consumption. That doesn’t completely erase the bump but it’s quite a bit smaller, they shut down some very old plants and replaced them with more efficient ones.

The current biggest chunk is oil, mostly used in transportation, and gas, for heating. Those will need to be electrified and replaced with what 25% of their Joule-value in electricity production, gas will stay longest because it’s used for peaker plants and, once the grid is completely renewable, that will be done with synthesised gas.

Had the original plan to phase out nuclear and coal been followed we’d already be there but the CDU insisted on knee-capping renewables because the likes of RWE were asleep at the wheel and hadn’t shifted their investments fast enough, electricity production in Germany suddenly wasn’t an oligopoly, any more, can’t have that.

I’m mostly just sad when that happens. People do tend to consider me intimidating, but only very rarely scary, just as a roller-coaster might be intimidating but it’s not going to jump at you and strap you in so there’s no reason to fear it. On the contrary, I do tend to make people feel safe. Which then leads me to believe that those few people who actually are scared by my presence have completely fucked threat radars.

Then, OTOH, if you’re suppressing any urges to jump at people and strapping them in and looping them around yep people are going to notice that. You might not actually be doing it, ever, but the possibility is there and you’re going to be perceived differently, suppressed aggression is still visible in body language and at least their subconscious is going to pick up on it. People are going to be scared, at least a bit on edge, even if their threat radars aren’t fucked.

If your first thought is to be seriously angry at someone for not trusting a stranger, to me, that pretty much proves them right.

Nah they’re angry at themselves for not being at peace with themselves and projecting outwards, just as pretty much everyone else. SNAFU.

…in Teheran, while the rest of the country was pretty much still tribal.

While it’s absolutely true that the average Iranian is vastly, vastly more liberal than their government let’s not turn around and glorify the Shah regime either. You don’t need to go back in time to show Iranians in a positive light.

Another safe environment is one where the woman reflexively punches the assailant’s gob, and the other men around look at him in a “what did you think would happen?” kind of way, backing her up, because self-defence is understood to be completely legitimate and justified.

Y’all need more shield maidens wherever it is that you’re from.

In one incident, after two video game companies cancelled their sponsorship deals with Neom, Nasr threatened his communications team, saying that he would “take a gun from under my desk and shoot you” unless he was told who was responsible for the deals falling through.

Now if they were trying to make deals with me, I’d say you. Nasr, you’re responsible.

I mean… people in Berlin are complaining that Swabians aren’t integrating. The question is less whether there ever was cultural homogeneity anywhere in Europe (there wasn’t), but how many new-comers people are accustomed to, how many can come in over some time-frame before people go “wait, this is too much, we’re getting overrun”. By and large, at least in Germany, people don’t really move between regions. It’s not common to see a Bavarian taking up a job in Holstein. The Bavarian might move to the city, or to another village around the same city, maybe to the big city, anything else is an exception.

An often quoted statistic is how in the German east, where anti-immigration sentiment is highest, there’s the fewest foreigners. That fails to mention both the outflux of east Germans towards the west, the steeper rise in percentage of foreigners in the past decade, as well as this being the east’s first immigration wave. Total number still is and probably will forever be smaller than in the west but the perception is way different, and the west never had an immigration wave following right after an emigration wave.

Honestly for the majority of people the problem would be solved if this is simply accepted as fact. That it’s not wrong to feel a bit like you should be protecting culture a bit, and then maybe join a club to practice some local tradition. If, “It is important to me that local tradition is preserved” is immediately met with “you hate brown people” then people are going to be pissed, and rightly so. As the German saying goes: “Is this available in one size smaller?” Let people run around in fancy three thousand year old masks or whatever the fuck.

Lack of politics benefitting, and this is a broad term, left-behind people, be that economically or socially. The whole republic had a severe right shift after reunification with people calling themselves socdems introducing a whole new low-wage sector and that’s just the tip of the iceberg, together with the east never getting properly integrated, politically speaking, and having their economy forcibly dismantled by western competition (no those weren’t just market forces) that’s a triple whammy for them.

Voters aren’t necessarily actually ideologically aligned – they’re just out of options when it comes to protesting, and, well, they’re largely easterners they somehow don’t even consider founding whatever party they actually want to see. That is, for example, the average easterner is anti-immigration, but not anti-immigrant: They have zero beef with that black lesbian running a Kebab shop, heck in their village she might be the only one holding up the flag on a Sunday, it’s a “let no more in until we’re being taken cared of” kind of attitude. The political class by and large, both left and right, completely fail to see the distinction to xenophobia proper, there, deepening the – correct – impression that noone actually cares. That breeds a rebellious attitude, “vote where it hurts the establishment”.

The BVerfG can be surprisingly fast if things are sufficiently clear-cut and/or urgent. For one, the AfD will have to have sufficient discipline to not make death threats over this, siege the court, such things. I’m sure their higher-ups have game-planned this but I would be surprised indeed if fascists manage to not be, well, fascists, when backed into a corner.

The legal question isn’t actually complicated, there’s been enough cases so that the court won’t have to develop law. It’s mostly going to be hearing evidence.

Didn’t bring in the motion. The Bundestag will vote on it and if it passes the Bundestag officially filed a criminal complaint so to speak with the constitutional court.

Other options would be the Bundesrat starting the procedure (vote-majority of states) or the government (cabinet majority, presumably), but the general preference is for the Bundestag to do it because it has a direct, federal, democratic mandate (government is indirect (elected by the Bundestag) and Bundesrat is state governments).

I won’t argue against him being proud. But he’s also going to be pissed.