Yeah it's just spin on a thoroughly depressing coalition agreement. Legalising weed is fine and making it easier/cheaper for transgender people to get their paperwork done is too, the biggest positive for most people is raising minimum wage by €1.50 to a whopping 12 Euros.

Virtually everything else is demoralising to outright catastrophic. Labour laws are being relaxed meaning employers have it even easier to stick workers into "atypical" working contracts where the employer doesn't have to pay normal tax and contributions, you don't make enough to make a living and the unemployment office adds just enough for you to pay your rent. Pensions will be put into a privately run fund that will invest them in the stock market just to add insult to injury.

A lot more sabre rattling and agitation in direction of China, Russia and the Middle East should be expected with a Green hawk foreign minister Annalena Baerbock, but at least she's a woman and will bring a mother's touch with her when she decides on the next rounds of crippling sanctions on whoever. The designated defence minister said in the past she wants to raise military spending to not just the NATO target of 2% but 3%. Cutting on emissions "drastically" has been said by every government of the last 25 years and literally nothing ever happened, and there's nobody who does greenwashing and climate virtue signalling as well as the German Greens. Everything that's been announced so far just corroborates that further.

All of the above however pales compared to the fact the coalition has put an market radical in Christian Lindner in the position of finance minister. Even moderate or slightly conservative economists, mostly abroad, have expressed concern about this appointment, he's genuinely stuck in the 70s or 90s or whenever the last time was where deregulation, cutting back on government expenditures (ie on social services, subsidies for corporations are ok) and privatisations were the rage. Literally every single thing in the coalition agreement is under funding reservation which means he basically gets to green light everything before it happens.

To summarise - a couple of minor good points, a whole lot of hot air, a couple of catastrophic developments on the horizon and a massive black cloud above all of it is what's happening here.

Absolutely. There are six established parties in Germany, and the four that have contributed to every coalition since the inception of the federal republic vary from neoliberal with a green or red tarnish to vanilla 100% neoliberalism. The party system/political representation here is well and truly broken, not to say it's any different anywhere else. Germany's is only special in that it's housing the second biggest parliament in the world behind only China (German efficiency my dick), you have a wide range of parties in it and yet regardless of which colour box you open left right or centre inside you'll find the same load of steaming garbage.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-un-disarmament-idAFKBN2IW1UJ

https://asiatimes.com/2021/12/no-un-agreement-on-killer-robot-ban/?mc_cid=a7424d778b&mc_eid=f072d9574c

Deploying AI to murder people is really the fate and end that humanity (or the part that dabbles in stuff like that) deserves. Can't trust it to drive our cars in traffic but sure, why not let it decide whether to end human lives or not

Unlike existing semi-autonomous weapons such as drones, fully-autonomous weapons have no human-operated “kill switch” and instead leave decisions over life and death to sensors, software and machine processes.

The Geneva talks, ongoing for eight years, have taken on new urgency since a U.N. panel report in March that said the first autonomous drone attack may have already occurred in Libya.

For example, a neural net designed for use in Pittsburgh hospitals identified asthma as a risk-reducer in pneumonia cases; image recognition software used by Google identified Black people as gorillas; and a machine-learning tool used by Amazon to rank job candidates systematically assigned negative scores to women.

minor spelling correction

adaptive and resilient system of """control"""

Burnwinter wrote:

By the way the story on fully autonomous killer drones is fucked, though I think the idea there's usually an engaged moral subjectivity in imperial acts of killing these days at any level is ... in question. Feels more like this stuff just makes it totally explicit to me.

Was just reading an FT article about the projected 30% contraction of the Afghanistan economy since the humiliation of the US and the overnight dissolution of the ADF and the Ghani government, which will come in significant part as a consequence of reserve bank funds being frozen. That in itself is using a technical instrument to kill with no directly adjacent culprit facing censure.

Of course there's no moral subjectivity in the acts of killing by your average human US soldier (let's be honest, not too many other passports carried by those doing the killing) or drone operator, that much becomes evident when you see that most countries where said killings happen aren't even formally at war ie most people getting killed aren't soldiers or combattants. AI operating drones in combination with loitering weapons are just the next level where it's easy to see it escalate to a level with it going "sadly, horribly" out of control. You can smell the headlines already.

Absolutely no argument on your second point. As deadly as "normal" warfare (and its deviant relatives like DU etc) is, economic warfare is far more deadly and has been for a good while now. That's why I never exclude or absolve Europe from its responsibility for the demise of Syria, EU sanctions of the Syrian economy are one of the biggest factors to lead to the current catastrophic situation there. Same for Saudi Arabia's all out war on Yemen and of course the grandmasters of that instrument, the US who use extra territorial sanctions to cover half the planet. This is just the official list the US Treasury bothers to put online itself:

https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/sanctions-programs-and-country-information

They're exactly as you describe, a weapon that kills - even worse than indiscriminately - the weakest first in efforts to achieve regime change or bully governments into their doing.

mdgoonah41 wrote:

the war has started.

i feel for all the ukranians out there. fucking hell

Ukraine has been at war since 2014. No one gave a fuck since it was pro Western Ukrainians shelling the Donbass which is fine, but let's not act like there haven't been more than 10,000 dead since then and Russia are the ones starting the killing now.

Clrnc wrote:

I am shocked nobody is backing Ukraine up. At this rate they will be eaten up alive by Russia in 2 weeks.

Kiev has only itself to blame. There have been plenty if opportunities to avoid this in the last years but when you reject them all and keep verbally pushing for conflict, promote literal Neonazis to important positions to negotiate you can barely act surprised that your civil war turns into a bigger one.

As usual the people are the only ones feeling the repercussions. Not on the same level of course but the sanctions and shutdown of Nord Stream 2 probably means Germans can look forward to buying American fracking gas for 30x the price next winter.

I'll refrain from reading too many "news" in the next days from any party, not good for your mental health to be exposed to propaganda from either side.

That's a pretty good summary Burns. I disagree with the quip about the freely elected leaders in the East - no doubt there's plenty of nepotism or outright corruption at work there too but being native Russians to a large percentage and having been at war for close to ten years, not out of their own volition, I'd wager they have a lot more backing in the populace than the pilot operated comedians and oligarchs in Kiev.

Putin's speech is very long but makes for interesting reading. His stance is obviously presidential and one sided but the international chartas, contracts and historical facts he mentions are available online to read for anyone who cares enough to do so. Compare that to the ridiculous simplification and outright distortion of what's going on there, literally "Putin invades Kiev" in German news since last night.