Germany Shuts Down an ‘Extremist’ Left-Wing Website for the First Time

[amw]

The debate over “free speech” in the United States is complicated (a lotta ins, lotta outs, lotta what-have-yous). Sometimes, supporting “free speech” means opposing state censorship; other times, it means opposing activists who try to preempt speech they disapprove of through protest or pressure campaigns - which is to say, through free speech. So

Comments

[pairatime]

If you want to shut down and ban groups on the right you have to do the same to those on the left. But personally the right to free speech overrides all that and should not be infringed. Unless someone is making explicit threats it's protected by the first Amendment and those goes for all sides and needs to stay that way.

[lied_ohne_worte]

It's quite hard to have any sympathies for the violent wing of the recent G20 protests once you've seen the material of them going through residential streets systematically setting on fire small cars of the type driven by people who are already poor, or burning/looting small independently run shops that are not connected to any big bad evil corporation whatsoever, but rather run by people who probably sympathise with anti-G20 protests. That wasn't about any high-minded goals, it was about having fun destroying things.

Then, the German government is in fact putting pressure on Facebook, Twitter and the likes, and that is mostly about rightwing propaganda / incitement to hatred etc.

In that light, this quote from one of the articles is downright humourous:

In fact, Thomas de Maizière is carrying out the agenda of the German far right and fascists, as well as the repressive goals of AfD.

Normally, rightwingers accuse de Maizière of being an extreme leftist and suppressing themAll in all, while what you posted mostly seems to look at

[amw]

Disclaimer: many of my friends and ex-colleagues were in Hamburg during the G20 to protest, so my views are understandably sympathetic to the protestors

[lied_ohne_worte]

Why the constant scare-quotes around "poor"? What criteria have people to fulfill for you to consider them poor enough not to destroy their property? If your things had been torched, would you have deserved it?

What about this woman? How "rich and privileged" is she? Whom is she victimising?

As for insurance... yes, people who are well-off are going to have Vollkasko on their cars and will get the damage replaced. Poor people will have Haftpflicht, which they are required to have, but nothing more. The woman in the article: Her insurance will replace the car windows, what a great help. And yes, the city supposedly wants to give people money (paid from everyone's taxes, including poor people, hooray!), but last I read that was proceeding very slowly

[amw]

We are literally talking about a meeting of 20 of the richest countries in the world here. I don't think it's a stretch to scare-quote "poor" when talking about property owners who live in the fourth-largest economy in the world