Five Things: Nazis, Trump, Humanity, Fire, Cabin
It's Sunday, again.
Hello and welcome back to Five Things!
This week, two life-altering events happened to me. On Tuesday, the water tank of our coffee maker broke and it was until Friday at 11:13 when my wife brought me a nice cup of coffee while I was in a videocall that I could only drink instant coffee. I’m sure that stuff violates UN human rights resolutions. The other event happened on Thursday, when one of my favorite daughters turned into a teenager. I’m really kind of happy that our four kids are spread apart a bit so that only two kids at a time are teenagers. Now K3, as I affectionately call our third child, turned 13 and I’m hopeful that her teenage years won’t be that bad, but we’ll soon find out, I guess.
Also, we are one week away from the federal elections and I fear that all the polling will be off and that we end up with weird constellations and a powerful right-wing party, which will only allow for a coalition between the social democrats, the greens and the conservatives, which will essentially turn into a stalemate in government.
On a very personal note: this February 16th could have been my mom’s 80th birthday, but she passed away 32 years ago after a long battle with cancer. There hasn’t been a single day that I have not been thinking about her. She always encouraged me to stay curious, to explore things I liked and to stand up for things I believe in. I miss her deeply.
Trump Officials Attack a German Consensus on Nazis and Speech
Vance and Musk endorse the extremist right-wing party AfD, which is pro-Putin and tries to divide the German society while pushing for Germany leaving the EU. We have a pretty well designed system of free speech here in Germany, which is pretty strict when it comes to holocaust denial or using nazi symbols or codes. You can’t even register a license plate with an 88 in it as this is the hidden code for twice the eighth letter of the alphabet, meaning “Heil Hitler”. I think this is a good thing and it has served our democracy well. Or as one popular meme on the German interwebs has illustrated with a photo of the Nuremberg trails and the caption “the only setting for talking to Nazis.” - Germany should stay as anti-fascist as possible.
They Are a Minority
My wife and I have been debating what could be done to stop Trump and his broligarch caste from destroying American democracy. Will this lead to a revolt? Will we see a general strike? Will there be a civil war? Or will this menace be over as soon as people realize what Trump really is doing and how this will harm them? And what will happen for those who voted for Trump to realize that he doesn’t care the least bit about them and their future? This article gives some hope.
We’re Already at Risk of Ceding Our Humanity to AI
“If everything that makes us irreducible to algorithms, everything that is too complex to turn into numbers on spreadsheets, is dismissed and ignored—humanity will be over.” - is it too late to be alarmist? Or are we simply in a phase were everything accelerates until we will see a backlash and people will realize what they have missed when focusing too little on the human side of things?
Smoke, Heat, Flame
“In the weeks since the fires struck, Elon Musk has claimed, among other nonsense, that they were caused by diversity initiatives. Trump, for his part, blamed state water misallocation and threatened to withhold disaster relief funds for victims until Governor Gavin Newsom diverted more water to agricultural plantations in the Central Valley, the regional base of Republican power and a consistent source of donations to the MAGA movement. This is likely how all disasters will unfold in the future: the poor will suffer disproportionately while the rich distort accountability.” - I had to watch too many seasons of Chicago Fire with my wife and now I’m interested in fire fighting. Also I assume that huge fires will happen much more often than they used to due to climate change, dry lands, and so on.
My Final Days on the Maine Coast
This is a beautiful and sad story. And at the same time I like the idea of having a cabin near the ocean when I’m old and spending my day watching the waves. I’ve never been up in Maine, but I grew up in the Northernmost state in Germany, which has the rough North-Sea coast on the one side and the calm Baltic Sea coast on the other side.
That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:
— Nico