Iran only really fits half into the latter category because the people are vastly more liberal than their government.

And if you look at polls (can’t find them right now sorry) Iran is actually one of the least Muslim Muslim countries around when you drill down into dogma, e.g. belief in heaven, belief in angels, such things. The average Iranian is about as Muslim in their private faith as someone believing in reincarnation is Christian.

and questionable things regarding immigration laws

I mean… there have been some regrettable cases in Germany directly after the law declaring foreign sub-18 marriage to be invalid, like 16/18yold asylum seeker couples getting separated. There’s a difference between saying “we don’t recognise that, you’ll have to marry again under German law” and “we’re sticking you in two different accommodations in two different states because you can’t possibly be a family unit and that’s how the dice fell”. You can’t just blindly assume they’re not heads over heels for each other, no matter how arranged and young the marriage was, you have to look at the individual case and if everything checks out treat them eg. analogous to siblings when it comes to accommodation.

The phase-out practically already started in the early 90s, latest when it became abundantly clear that building more reactors was not politically feasible.

The reason is distrust in anything being handled properly. See Asse (they just discovered irradiated water that they don’t have any idea how it came to be because it’s actually above the deposit), see plants running without functioning backup generators for decades, the list is endless.

IIRC according to the original plan the last coal plants would’ve shut down before the last nuclear plants. Certainly would’ve been possible without 16 years of CDU government.

How much of that is due to French nuclear reactors shutting down, both during summer (to not turn the rivers that cool them into fish soup) as well as all that maintenance stuff they had going on lately.

Germany is an electricity exporter.

Also: You’re looking at generated power. Not coal consumption. That doesn’t completely erase the bump but it’s quite a bit smaller, they shut down some very old plants and replaced them with more efficient ones.

The current biggest chunk is oil, mostly used in transportation, and gas, for heating. Those will need to be electrified and replaced with what 25% of their Joule-value in electricity production, gas will stay longest because it’s used for peaker plants and, once the grid is completely renewable, that will be done with synthesised gas.

Had the original plan to phase out nuclear and coal been followed we’d already be there but the CDU insisted on knee-capping renewables because the likes of RWE were asleep at the wheel and hadn’t shifted their investments fast enough, electricity production in Germany suddenly wasn’t an oligopoly, any more, can’t have that.

I’m mostly just sad when that happens. People do tend to consider me intimidating, but only very rarely scary, just as a roller-coaster might be intimidating but it’s not going to jump at you and strap you in so there’s no reason to fear it. On the contrary, I do tend to make people feel safe. Which then leads me to believe that those few people who actually are scared by my presence have completely fucked threat radars.

Then, OTOH, if you’re suppressing any urges to jump at people and strapping them in and looping them around yep people are going to notice that. You might not actually be doing it, ever, but the possibility is there and you’re going to be perceived differently, suppressed aggression is still visible in body language and at least their subconscious is going to pick up on it. People are going to be scared, at least a bit on edge, even if their threat radars aren’t fucked.

If your first thought is to be seriously angry at someone for not trusting a stranger, to me, that pretty much proves them right.

Nah they’re angry at themselves for not being at peace with themselves and projecting outwards, just as pretty much everyone else. SNAFU.

…in Teheran, while the rest of the country was pretty much still tribal.

While it’s absolutely true that the average Iranian is vastly, vastly more liberal than their government let’s not turn around and glorify the Shah regime either. You don’t need to go back in time to show Iranians in a positive light.

Another safe environment is one where the woman reflexively punches the assailant’s gob, and the other men around look at him in a “what did you think would happen?” kind of way, backing her up, because self-defence is understood to be completely legitimate and justified.

Y’all need more shield maidens wherever it is that you’re from.

In one incident, after two video game companies cancelled their sponsorship deals with Neom, Nasr threatened his communications team, saying that he would “take a gun from under my desk and shoot you” unless he was told who was responsible for the deals falling through.

Now if they were trying to make deals with me, I’d say you. Nasr, you’re responsible.

I mean… people in Berlin are complaining that Swabians aren’t integrating. The question is less whether there ever was cultural homogeneity anywhere in Europe (there wasn’t), but how many new-comers people are accustomed to, how many can come in over some time-frame before people go “wait, this is too much, we’re getting overrun”. By and large, at least in Germany, people don’t really move between regions. It’s not common to see a Bavarian taking up a job in Holstein. The Bavarian might move to the city, or to another village around the same city, maybe to the big city, anything else is an exception.

An often quoted statistic is how in the German east, where anti-immigration sentiment is highest, there’s the fewest foreigners. That fails to mention both the outflux of east Germans towards the west, the steeper rise in percentage of foreigners in the past decade, as well as this being the east’s first immigration wave. Total number still is and probably will forever be smaller than in the west but the perception is way different, and the west never had an immigration wave following right after an emigration wave.

Honestly for the majority of people the problem would be solved if this is simply accepted as fact. That it’s not wrong to feel a bit like you should be protecting culture a bit, and then maybe join a club to practice some local tradition. If, “It is important to me that local tradition is preserved” is immediately met with “you hate brown people” then people are going to be pissed, and rightly so. As the German saying goes: “Is this available in one size smaller?” Let people run around in fancy three thousand year old masks or whatever the fuck.

Lack of politics benefitting, and this is a broad term, left-behind people, be that economically or socially. The whole republic had a severe right shift after reunification with people calling themselves socdems introducing a whole new low-wage sector and that’s just the tip of the iceberg, together with the east never getting properly integrated, politically speaking, and having their economy forcibly dismantled by western competition (no those weren’t just market forces) that’s a triple whammy for them.

Voters aren’t necessarily actually ideologically aligned – they’re just out of options when it comes to protesting, and, well, they’re largely easterners they somehow don’t even consider founding whatever party they actually want to see. That is, for example, the average easterner is anti-immigration, but not anti-immigrant: They have zero beef with that black lesbian running a Kebab shop, heck in their village she might be the only one holding up the flag on a Sunday, it’s a “let no more in until we’re being taken cared of” kind of attitude. The political class by and large, both left and right, completely fail to see the distinction to xenophobia proper, there, deepening the – correct – impression that noone actually cares. That breeds a rebellious attitude, “vote where it hurts the establishment”.

The BVerfG can be surprisingly fast if things are sufficiently clear-cut and/or urgent. For one, the AfD will have to have sufficient discipline to not make death threats over this, siege the court, such things. I’m sure their higher-ups have game-planned this but I would be surprised indeed if fascists manage to not be, well, fascists, when backed into a corner.

The legal question isn’t actually complicated, there’s been enough cases so that the court won’t have to develop law. It’s mostly going to be hearing evidence.

Didn’t bring in the motion. The Bundestag will vote on it and if it passes the Bundestag officially filed a criminal complaint so to speak with the constitutional court.

Other options would be the Bundesrat starting the procedure (vote-majority of states) or the government (cabinet majority, presumably), but the general preference is for the Bundestag to do it because it has a direct, federal, democratic mandate (government is indirect (elected by the Bundestag) and Bundesrat is state governments).

I won’t argue against him being proud. But he’s also going to be pissed.

Oh they were shaming him all right. How he personally thinks about it is quite irrelevant, he still has enough wherewithal to understand how it’s meant and what impact it has on other people.

Don’t look at what they said. Look at what they did, like showing nudes of Melania on state TV.

Well there’s no explicit ban there’s simply no Rechtsgrundlage. Also, a decision of the constitutional court which I can’t be bothered to unearth now regarding the establishment of the ZDF, which was initially supposed to be a federal broadcaster because the ARD was too left (according to the CDU).

All those stations, radio or TV, broadcasting in the whole republic (ARD, ZDF, DLF) are based on inter-state treaties because only the states can set such a thing up. It gets even more complicated because originally DW was a short-wave station set up by the ARD, then it became fully federal, now it’s still federal but also part of the ARD, but as said doesn’t broadcast domestically. Internet doesn’t count, there, just actual airwaves.

The target audience is all abroad, both the diaspora (hence German language programming) as well as general foreign propaganda. As in “broadcast the German view of things”. Similar to BBC World, France24, Voice of America and… RT. Just that RT sucks donkey ass, even more than VoA, because the Russian regime does suck even more than the CIA. Can’t divorce those broadcasters from the states running them.

Their reports on Gaza are quite unambiguous in who’s suffering and who’s at fault, but that’s by presenting facts, not interpreting them, or doing much drilling. Generally speaking they avoid talking about Israeli politics as much as they can: If the foreign ministry doesn’t want to talk about it you won’t see it on DW, there’s no direct ties just some kind of telepathic connection.

Compare that with their reports on e.g. the reparations discussion with Namibia, it’s night and day when it comes to covering detail.

They’re in fact forbidden from broadcasting within Germany, doubly so: First off they’re not public but state TV. secondly, they’re federal while broadcasting is state prerogative.

Expect their editorial policy to align with Germany’s foreign policy, and there’s some selection and framing going on occasionally in the sense of “we’ll report about a problem but only in the context of it being addressed” kind of deal. They’ll report about arguments within Germany, but they won’t start any. When it comes to raw factuality they’re highly reliable.

I think the ARD membership is just about access to each other’s programming, there’s zero overlap when it comes to editorial staff, running the channel etc. That would be highly unconstitutional.

Arte does have some English, Spanish, Polish, and Italian stuff but it’s quite limited and generally only subtitles. Other languages if they happened to have bought it from somewhere else, say a documentary about Kafka where you can select the original Czech audio. News won’t be among the English subtitled stuff but there’s a good amount of documentaries, background and big-picture stuff. Not just society and politics, all kinds of topics.

Just go browse. And, separately, a metric fuckton of live concerts from all genres.