Hacker News Reader

Comment by blattimwind | Hacker News Reader

The gist of it:

Someone did something probably illegal and put a @riseup mail in as the contact info. Police looked at riseup (Not-in-Germany) and found some people (In-Germany) forwarding donation money to riseup. Police and state prosecutor somehow conclude that these donations might be relevant and seizes them (and the usual bycatch).

Now my commentary: On the face of it this seems overblown and rather out of proportion. To me it looks like some AG was looking for an excuse to raid these left-wing organizations. It doesn't have to be that way, but I have a hard time imagining how some leftist hateblog I've never heard of before justifies such a large scale raid of (presumably) at best tangentially related entities. It's a somewhat different story of course if it turns out that the backers of the blog have actually been raided as well as part of these raids.

View on HN

I'm sure, as the article says, if they search every @gmail user because of one @gmail criminal they will eventually search the criminal too. How is that a different story?

They didn't search every @gmail user, they searched what would be roughly equal to (in gmail's commercial case) a payment provider for gmail, and people loosely related to such a provider. It's a flawed comparison, obviously.

Yeah. The proper analogy is: Somebody doing something they didn't like had a gmail address, and they raided the internal servers of Google's German sales office.

Calling for protests of a far-right conservative party's convention in Bavaria apparently is now "probably illegal" and justifies this kind of action?

Not just protests, violent protests. While I think the police’ action was overblown, I have little sympathy for violent politic groups (if it turns out to be correct).

This outlook is a very privileged one. Outside your community, violence may not be an option.

Where does it say "violent" protests?

I used to feel very much the same way about no sympathy for violent groups, but then I realise that some people feel (rightly or wrongly, is up for you to decide) that the democratic process does not or even cannot accomodate the kind of change they want to see - not because they see democracy as unable to acheive emancipatory goals, but because they see democracy as having been brought under the rule of capital and media rather than by an informed and active demos.

As my favourite social critic Marcuse wrote, when the democratic process is blocked, apparently undemocratic means may be required to unblock it.

Cool. Do you feel the same about the folks in the Western US who now and then seize federal property, or elsewhere who hold menacing protests when somebody takes down a Confederate statue?

I'm not sure what events you're referring to regarding the Western US, but I was specifically referring to emancipatory (even in a symbolic way) radical politics, rather than reactionary protests that are mostly uncritical of the history they claim to represent.

Whatever a "leftist hateblog" (!) might be, that description doesn't seem to be fitting here.

I think he means the website calling for people to disrupt the AFD party congress.

I'm referring to the blog which is said to be the reason for all this. The blog is named "AUGSBURG für Krawalltouristen" and has the tagline "Den AfD-Bundesparteitag am 30.06./01.07.2018 angreifen!". Translated: "Augsburg for Hooligans: Attacking the AfD party conference on the 30.06/01.07.2018".

"Krawalltouristen" specifically is a term that came up for the first time, I think, with the G20 protests last year. Hooligans might not be the most accurate translation; it essentially means people who travel somewhere specifically to participate in riots/vandalism/looting under a political pretence.

If you know a more fitting description for a blog like this, please do comment.

So the purpose of the blog is to inform about a political protest. I still think it's misleading to refer to it as hateblog, even if the organisers are militant or radical.

The blog doesn't just "inform about political protest", it explicitly advocates for violence. Their primary motivation seems to be hate of the political right. As a leftist myself, I think that "leftist hateblog" is a pretty accurate description.

We can get into word definition games here, but “hate” generally refers to a desire for the extermination or oppression of a group of people based on personal characteristics like race or ancestry. Conflating “hate” with any call for political violence is disingenuous and a sloppy attempt at bad faith rhetoric.

Do you consider the New York Times a “hateblog” for their endorsement of political violence against the former government of Iraq?

>Do you consider the New York Times a “hateblog” for their endorsement of political violence against the former government of Iraq?

No, that's war mongering/yellow journalism by a mass media company, far worse and more destructive than a "hate blog"

That definition of hate is a very recent construct, and trying to sweep the regular meaning under the rug makes you the disingenuous one.

A quick look at https://augsburgfuerkrawalltouristen.noblogs.org/anleitungen... shows me a paragraph that says throwing rocks is an old classic, please bring gloves, because rocks also carry fingerprints.

I don't know if somebody is going to say that this is edgy triple-layer sarcasm, but its pretty clear to me that at least some readers of the site will take this as an endorsement of potentially lethal violence against political opponents.

If you throw rocks at political opponents, you don't think they're just misguided and their policies unfortunate, you hate their guts.

EDIT: The paragraph is explicitly about breaking windows, and say to be careful not to risk hitting people. So it's not about violence against individual people, but it's still violence, and illegal. And you don't break people's windows if you merely disagree with them.

"Krawalltouristen" (riot-tourists) has been a term for a long time before G20. Sometimes it is applied to radical left wing antifa groups, sometime for right wing exremist groups, but more often than not to moderate groups, who achieved to mobilize lots of people for a demonstration like "Attac".

„Riottourism“ was used as term in english papers at the time of G20 iirc.

As for naming such Blogs, „Riot Travel Agency“ seems fitting... ;)

> Whatever a "leftist hateblog" (!) might be, that description doesn't seem to be fitting here.

Leftist doesn't mean liberal, peaceful etc.

It means leaning to the left, afaik that usually means towards socialism and communism.

For those who are either old enough or have read enough history there are plenty of examples of left leaning haters.

See for example https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army_Faction

Edit: added quote from parent post.

I'd also like to point out that I'm not defending the police (or anyone else) just trying to correct a misunderstanding before it spreads even further.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com