Germany to ban paintball after massacre
German government under pressure on gun laws after shooting in which 15 died
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/08/germany-paintball-school-massacre
We can’t take that chance. Let’s just ban children already.
I was eating when I first heard this. Politics ruined my lunch is all I can say about it.
We should ban steak knifes and forks. Spoons are okay since they are rounded. Sporks gotta go tho.
I am missing something. Which party is the ‘opposition’? Or is every party in Germany a left social democrat party?
They also should ban dodgeball, afterall its the same principle of aiming and hitting another person with a projectile.
The official opposition is the FDP (edit- actually just the largest opposition party, the Greens are also part of the opposition), the closest thing Germany has to a libertarian party. They have few seats though. The government is composed of a “national coalition” of right-and-left-wing statists containing the two largest parties (Christian Democrats and Social-Democrats).
Using that definition, and further improving on Stranger’s suggestion, they should simply outlaw sex. All good for the glorious nation of Germany will come from such a ban, comrades.
Banning paint ball? Oh no!
Or they could just ban men. Onward, sisters!
Postwar German politics have always been very curious but starting from the '70s it seems like that great country has been on a downward slope to selfdestruction. The country is hostage to a number of very vocal and very powerful lobbies (just to give an example they have always had the strongest Green Party in the world) and there’s very little in the way of organized resistance. Right wing parties tend to fall quite quickly inside the Nazi trap and so get banned before they have any real shot at big politics.
Present day German politics are a mess (what a surprise): their politicians tend to be slightly more intelligent than their foreign colleagues so they know very well how present day politics are unsustainable in the long run. The problem is they also know very well that any radical change is very likely to ignite social unrest on a colossal scale and so every effort is poured into keeping the status quo. German electors prize stability above any other thing but what will happen when stability becomes too expensive?
As much as I dislike first chancellor Konrad Adenauer for reintroducing the draft and other sins, his general motto of “no experiments” laid the foundation for one of the most prosperous periods of German history in the 50s and 60s.
This was all destroyed by the emergence of “democratic socialism”, environmentalism, communist terrorism and, as a reaction, the upswing of police state measures. Needless to say, public school history ridicules Adenauer’s precaution and praises all the destructive socialism that followed his administration as “democratic progress”.
Remember that of the 5 dominant parties in Germany, not one subscribes to free market/libertarian thought. The only difference is in degree - “social market economy” (conservatives / classical liberals / social democrats), “green economy” (greenies) or outright socialism (guess whom).
It’s so depressing. Say, Kakugo, is it as bad in Italy or do you have some kind of libertarian alternative developing?
Wasnt he more forgiving with the Waffen SS veterans (a huge number of the postwar male population)? Now it seems like every couple years they want to prosecute an elderly veteran for some vague war crime that may or may not have happened 65 years ago.
Let’s hope Hoppe finishes his new treatise before the book bannings begin.
On a more serious note I don’t really get this move by the German government, it doesn’t seem to acheive anything. Banning regular guns makes people easier to control, banning various other things will usually be for some special interest group or another besides that the only reason to ban anything is for public support. This ban doesn’t seem to fill any of those catagories.
I already read a few German sites that complained Demokratie: Der Gott, Der Keiner Ist is ‘dangerous’ and ‘doesnt share the values of the German constitution’.
That is not really suprising, if (and that’s a big if) what Tom Palmer says is correct the newspaper that Hoppe did an interview with in Germany is associated with neo-nazism, Sphairon might know about the magazine. In which case, I don’t doubt that people will be doing everything they can to label him some sort of a fascist.
I think when governments begin banning books etc. (which will come soon) Hoppe’s would be some of the first to go in Germany.
I guess he did, but I can’t exactly say I like his attitude on coming to terms with the past. He sort of tried to sweep it under the rug and hoped that noone would object, but that was not only insulting towards the victims, it also fueled the hippie-leftist movement of the late 60s that is blessing us today with diploma-backed equality commissars and an intellectual culture that reeks of socialist decay.
You don’t understand the ritual.
Every few years, you’ll have a school shooting over here because we have established a deadly combination of compulsory public schooling, overarching gun hostility and a political culture that fries your brain with fear and desperation if you’re not absolutely steady in your view of the world.
However, public schooling, public disarmament and the brain-grinding social atmosphere are all sacrosanct and may not be blamed for these shootings, even though the despairing shooters often clearly name these things in their farewell notes as motivations for their murder - notes which are promptly censored by the police.
So, after everyone has been sufficiently shocked, victims’ associations, politicians and intellectuals come together on TV for their Two-Minute Hate of everything that had nothing to do with the shooting and agree to “do something about it”. And that’s where ridiculous proposals such as banning paintball stem from.
Unfortunately, I’m not informed about the details of the controversy. Can you post a link to Palmer’s claims? That would be helpful.
It’s all here, his problem is that they published with a newspaper called Junge Freiheit that has a bad reputation in Germany for being associated with Nazism, or something along those lines. I was wonder if the newspaper does have such a reputation?
I already suspected it would be Junge Freiheit. Anyway, here’s the anarchist take on that magazine:
It’s a conservative paper that stresses the importance of national sovereignty, distinctly German culture and, of course, the Constitution. What makes them pariahs is that they sometimes interview people that can somehow be connected to the far-right community and that as principled conservatives, they are working against the zeitgeist.
And because of that, they are often called a Nazi magazine by people with an agenda.
I also suspect that Hoppe’s books are still legal only because they have such a small audience. Hoppe’s DTGTF meets all the criteria necessary to get it banned, that’s why sicsempertyrannis found remarks along the lines of “it doesn’t support our constitutional values”: if it’s openly against the foundations of the German state, it is illegal and must be fought, according to the law.