last saturday
August 26: Saturday
Well, the end is nigh. I'll be leaving in just five days. I still have some class-related work to wrap up, but overall I'm feeling very, very good. It's weird that a span of time as long as a month can go by so fast and yet seem so long. This room has seen a lot of me. I'm gonna miss its absurdly massive desk and giant pillow.
Also, my the fan I bought is still lying under one of my tables. Never got around to finishing its setup. Just my luck that it started to cool down anyway.
I'm starting to miss aspects of home. I love the Danube, but I would settle for our apartment swimming-pool, you know? I miss my old roommates. I miss the Wii and the Xbox. And my big laptop (no offense to my little laptop, which I'm currently typing on).
I miss when United States political news occured during my waking hours rather than after I'm already asleep. Timezones...
Polarized
Speaking of news, I just discovered this article in the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/25/world/europe/germany-bans-far-left-antifa-website.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fworld
The subject matter is the move by Germany to shut down an extremist website. ...No, not neo-Nazis or other right-wingers, but left-wing extremist activists.
Interestingly, this shut-down happened only days after a wave of shut-downs in America. After the incident in Charlottesville, Google pulled the plug on the major white-supremacist websites The Daily Stormer and Vanguard America.
So, in both cases, America and Germany, extremist sites have been shut down. But in America it was done by the tech company hosting the sites - and in Germany it was done by the Interior Ministry itself. The website, Linkstunden, has long been in existence, but its possible involvement in the Hamburg Riots in July put itself on the government's watch list. Raids were performed. Arrests were made of the website's leaders.
So, this inspires some observations from me on just how extremism is being treated in the country of the United States and the country of Germany. And not just extremism, but the concepts of free speech and order and how they are balanced.
In the United States, it took some lobbying just to get Google, the company, to take extremist sites off of their hosting list. In Germany, though, their reaction to websites that support extremism was very direct: bring the government in. Can you imagine the uproar if the United States made a government move to shut down these websites. Sure, we have some sort of precedent for this kind of thing - like, in Eisenhower's days, back when enforcing de-segregation meant bringing the National Guard to Georgia. But in a time when everyone seems so sensitive about the government getting all in our free speech, such a move would be unthinkable. If Obama's administration had directly moved in to shut down right-wing websites, a third of the country would be screaming "Impeachment!" (And many other, worse and more colorful words). If Trump's administration had directly moved in to shut down right-wing websites - ahahahAHAHAHA. Sorry. Yeah, no.
But it goes without saying that Germany has a history with partisan violence. The United States has had violence, sure, but its source has usually been racial rather than political. Int he past few decades, and especially in the past few years, those racial lines have of course begun to blend into the political lines - but the point is, Germany's experience in the 1930s and 1940s dwarfs any experience America has had. And since then, it seems they've been much tougher on the practice of free speech when it comes to inciting violence.
...
It's a guarentee that Merkel will win the election in a couple weeks. But when I think about the seats that Alternative For Germany wants to gain, I wonder how much news like this affects peoples' votes - and what that may lead to.
