aargh!

[angeoverhere]

OK, now this is really fucked up, and frankly, *deeply* scary.

A German sociologist has been arrested under anti-terror laws on the grounds that his academic work uses lots of the same words as those used by a militant group in Berlin. And he might have met some of them, once, maybe

Comments

[strange_complex]

Jesus. You read about some fucked-up stuff these days, but the fact that two of the points against him consist of him a) not taking his mobile phone everywhere with him and b) having access to a library is frankly breath-taking.

Even if the supposed 'overlap' between his writings and those of the group in question is to be taken seriously, have the police not considered the possibility that they may simply have plagiarised from his publications???

They seriously need to think about how they have presented this case to the public.

[angeoverhere]

I think what makes it worse is that the words in question, 'gentrification' and 'inequality' are ones that you'd expect a sociologist specialising in urban gentrification to use rather a lot, no matter what their political sympathies.

[just_becky]

So the fact that on two occaisions he met people who were accused (but says nothing about convicted) of being arsonists is now "Evidence"?

I once rented out my spare bedroom to an Ex school friend who was accused of being a cult leader*. Clearly I should go turn myself into the police immediatley!

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* Simply because he was well educated, charismatic and lived in a house with a lot of younger people who found him far more interesting than thier parents.

[tiny_rockets]

Germany is scarier than you think - they've had BMEzine banned for some time now and have other similar outsider and sex-positive things removed from german google.

I'm guessing it's partly driven by overcompensation and partly by not noticing that they're letting the real bad eggs get strong in their fluster to be hard on bad eggs. Also, aren't they run by Christians? (just my prejudice but I'd expect them to come up with silly legislation based on moral panic)