Germany Is Losing Its Mojo. Finding It Again Won’t Be Easy

I wasn't talking about right wing nutjobs getting screen time, I was talking about having sane right leaning discussion with people, which you can't because you're automatically pointed to the Afd nutjobs on TV as being representative for what you're trying to say, even though you have no connection to those people.

Politics don't exist in a vacuum. Politics go right to the core of how we understand ourselves and the world around us. Elections in a representative democracy aren't a sport no matter how much the political system alienates us from itself through the centralization of power. Politics are informed by our ethical principles and electoral politics is how we do violence to support those principles, ideally without actually using direct violence against each other.

If you feel that everyone has a right to be heard, that is fine, and if that is integral to your ethical system, it is entirely acceptable to say that anyone opposing this principle is your enemy. But most people who say they value free speech to the extreme don't actually have that as the central basis of their ethical system. They usually just want to be able to say and hear certain opinions they agree with and that they think are unpopular. But the ability to say and hear unpopular opinions is merely a means to an end: once their social order is etablished, they want it to persist (because of course they would, otherwise what is even the point of establishing it) and at that point they would no longer want the opposition to speak freely. Libertarians may in some cases genuinely hold the absolute freedom of speech as a core value, but this does not mean they don't believe in hierarchies: favoring free trade for example means the ability to take advantage of the needs of others at their expense and to your benefit. Absolute freedom must always also include the ability to limit the freedoms of others because otherwise it can not be absolute. This leads to hierarchies, whether implicitly or explicitly. Thus the leftist anarchist who believes in the complete abolition of hierarchies must be at odds not just with the authoritarian who wants a predetermined rigid hierarchy but also the libertarian who wants an arbitrary dynamic hierarchy ruled by the market and the ability of its participants to take advantage of each other.

I don't think states are the answer to eliminating hierarchies because they are hierarchical by nature. It's like expecting corporations to help abolish capitalism: the incentives are completely misaligned. Where do people get the ideas that some people are worth more or more deserving than others? It's baked into the system. You can't debate the idea away within the system as doing so would challenge the system itself and the system is set up to reinforce itself. Any party openly running on a ticket of dissolving the state would be banned for being anti-constitutional the same way any part openly calling for another Holocaust would be. From a true libertarian standpoint (or the standpoint claimed by someone on the opposing end of the political spectrum trying to hide their true intentions) you can argue that all forms of censorship is wrong and all political options should be on the table and that the public opinion should decide. But through the mere circumstance of the debate happening in a system in which a state exists, the options on the table are already filtered by what the system can represent and the public opinion is already shaped by the system into which the members of the public were raised and exist in (as the saying goes: a fish has no concept of water). As someone more willing to side with the left anarchist side of this three-way split, I understand why my ideology is incompatible with the state and why the state can't allow it to blossom within itself, which is why I don't feign surprise when anarchist groups are attacked by it even when they have no interest in using physical violence. A person on the authoritarian end of the spectrum on the other hand is much more likely to be overlooked if they don't openly state their end goals and the precise nature of the hierarchies they want to use the state to manifest and enforce. A person on the libertarian end in contrast will only meet resistance when openly acting against the state itself (like the Unabomber did) but not when trying to erode its protective mechanisms under the banner of "opening it to the market". But that is largely due to the state existing in the overlap of its own structural system of hierarchy and other systems of hierarchy like capitalism.

Now with all that said, the Green party very much is not anarchist and while it's hardly as authoritarian as the right likes to claim, it is also certainly not libertarian. In the real world most people don't have coherent ideologies because they have more immediately important things in life than sussing out the logical contradictions of what they think is important or good. Political groups are made of people and then things get even more muddled.

However just like right authoritarians like to hide behind libertarian talking points to advance their goals so do some libertarians capture right authoritarian movements to advance theirs by undoing the structural changes that further the goals of those on the left (e.g. codifying gender equality in law, thus attempting to use the hiearchical state to attack the gender hierarchy). And to make things worse, the right will often also adopt left talking points (e.g. talking negatively about "the elites" but referring to a specific demographic group rather than the existence of an elite in general). This is right-wing populism: using a talking point that has a good chance of wide popular support ("protect the children", "save our jobs") to further a tangentially related goal (ban transgender identities, restrict immigration) or create popular support by presenting a largely fictional threat or heavily misrepresenting reality (e.g. examples of "looting" after Hurricane Katrina that turned out to be survivors helping each other or "looting" their own homes, "rapists and gang members flooding the border", BLM protestors "burning down cities"). More often than not, this is also used to hijack left-wing talking points that happen to fit the current zeitgeist (e.g. infamously the NSDAP referred to Jews as "international bankers" at various points to hijack the success of socialist movements at the time). Contrast this with "left-wing populism" which is usually applied as a label to anyone promoting ideas like "raising taxes on the rich", "increasing minimum wage", "providing free health care for all", "providing free education for all", etc implying there is something more sinister they're not saying openly (which, based on reports from FBI investigations into leftist groups, is generally not the case: leftist groups are fairly straightforward about what they want).

Apologies if you've read through all this. Or not. Maybe it taught someone something. It was certainly more educational than whatever the point of crying censorship over the mention of the existence of right wing populism was.

So called "Mittelstand" is what the German economy is build on. These are stable companies, often lead by families in the nth generation, concentrating on making good products. Most of these companies are the result of somebody (or some friends) being good at something, starting in his shed and scaling that operation up over time.

Aiming for that unicorn/public funding/VC money is just plain stupid. At least it's rich people money that's usually getting burned there.

Which can be a blessing or a curse depending on how you look at it.

See for example China: who have signed plenty of environmental treaties yet are dumping nuclear waste in the oceans on a large scale. Hell, China isn't even protecting their own people or nature just to avoid transporting the waste to the ocean. Rivers can do that for free, you see. To fully demonstrate how governments work, they lie about doing this (despite the fact it can be very easily measured), and secondly they criticize other countries for doing much less (such as China now criticizing Japan being forced into dumping some Fukushima cooling water)

The other alternative is what most tax havens are doing. They are raising taxes on companies ... and handing out subsidies that, somewhat suspiciously, exactly balance the tax raise. This is even done within Europe. This principle can easily be applied to emission regulations. After all, it's always paying to be allowed to pollute. Governments can simply pay that back some other way.

You are mixing things up. Western Europe didn't lead any of these wars. The UK joined the USA in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was a stupid decision but it had nothing to do with the rest of Europe. Unless you claim UK=EU.

The Kremlin propaganda is repeating these statements very often so I can understand some people started believing these lies.

No, the EU does not invade for any reason. People in the EU want to live in peace. The USA managed to convince Blair to ally with them to invade Iraq but that's it. Both Blair and Bush should be held responsible for their crimes.