Ali Hamidi

[Manuel Schwalm @coolservativ]

Hat sich schon mal irgendjemand gesagt: Nein, über Friedrich Merz machen wir uns nicht lustig. Das wird nur die CDU stärken. Das nützt denen nur.

Nein?

Warum nicht? Aha. Warum tut man es dann bei der AfD? Feuer frei. Demokraten müssen aufhören, perfekte Opfer zu sein. Es braucht den Populismus der Mitte.

[Sulkhan Metreveli @Sulkhan]

Russia was never punished for the twentieth century. It was rescued from it — and that is the wound it is still avenging.
Look at what 1991 actually cost Moscow. No surrender signed. No capital occupied, no army disbanded, no officer tried, no archive opened for longer than a season. It kept the arsenal. It kept the Security Council veto. It kept the intelligence service, the same building, largely the same men, with a new set of letters on the door. Then came the debt relief, the IMF billions, the seat at the G8 — a club of democracies making room for a wounded autocracy on the theory that dignity would do what accountability might not.
Now put the other fourteen republics beside it. Same collapse, same year, same ruin. The Balts came out with no veto, no seat, no arsenal, no rescue package sized for a superpower. Georgia came out into civil war. Ukraine handed over the third-largest nuclear stockpile on earth in exchange for a signature. Their nineties were poorer and more frightening than Moscow's. Not one of them spent the next thirty years demanding the map back.
Same defeat. Different inheritance. One outcome.
A state that loses everything except its instruments does not conclude that it was beaten. It concludes that it was interrupted. Notice the word it uses for this war — not conquest. Return.
Ukraine is not fighting the war of 2022. It is finishing the one nobody had the nerve to finish in 1991.

[Sander Tordoir @SanderTordoir]

This speaks to one of the misleading semantic narratives pushed against the China shock 2.0 thesis.

It isn’t simply an “innovation shock” in that Germany just fell behind.

As German production declines faster and harder at Chinas hand, so too will its innovative capacity.

[Julian Stöckle @JulianStoeckle]

Unglaubliche Vorgänge im BMWE: Reiche verspricht "low-profile" Meeting mit Wang, veröffentlicht danach eigenes pro-China Statement. Vorenthält Kollegen für ein halbes Jahr europäisches Positionspapier. Blockiert Merz' China-Politik. Sie manifestiert unsere Deindustrialisierung.

[Mel Aura @mel__aura]

This!👇

[Sulkhan Metreveli @Sulkhan]

Democracies are inefficient. Autocracies can plan for the long term.
The compliment of the decade, paid by people who have never had to petition one.
So compare the long-term plans. China's one-child policy: enforced for thirty-five years, then abandoned, having engineered a demographic collapse no stimulus can reverse. Its property sector, built as permanent growth policy, now the largest asset bust in modern history. Russia's long-term energy strategy: a continent of customers, converted into former customers in eighteen months. Venezuela, holder of the world's largest oil reserves, planned into famine.
Now the control case. The messy, quarterly-obsessed democracies produced the vaccine platforms, the semiconductor industry, the internet and the AI labs — while being shouted at by their own press the entire time.
The autocrat's advantage is not foresight. It is the ability to continue being wrong without interruption. No election interrupts him, no journalist corrects him, no court delays him — and no one dares deliver the news that the plan has failed.
Democracies look inefficient because you can watch them argue.
Autocracies look decisive because you cannot watch them fail.

[Andreas Gerbrand @AndreasHilft]

#UlrichSiegmund möchte #Ministerpräsident werden. Da ist die Frage nach der eigenen #Qualifikation keine Nebensache.

Im offiziellen #Lebenslauf stehen ein #Studium der #Wirtschaftspsychologie und Betriebswirtschaftslehre (Bachelor of Arts) sowie eine #Managementschulung 2015 in #Peking.

Doch welche Hochschule war es? Wie lautet der Titel der Bachelorarbeit? Mehrere öffentliche Nachfragen dazu blieben bislang unbeantwortet.

Und falls es Studienaufenthalte oder Kooperationen im Ausland – etwa mit #Russland – gegeben haben sollte: Warum nicht einfach transparent darstellen?

Wer #Verantwortung für ein Bundesland übernehmen will, sollte bei der eigenen Vita keine offenen #Fragen hinterlassen.

#UlrichSiegmund #AfD #SachsenAnhalt #Transparenz #Politik #FaktenStattFragen

[Marcos Agustín @marcosagusstinn]

🇪🇺🇨🇳 China is blackmailing Europe through its dependencies

China is countering Europe’s new trade policy with a strategy of threats, pressure and division.

🔸 China is using its €360 billion trade surplus with the EU to pressure European governments.

🔸 Beijing is restricting access to rare earths and strategic minerals.

🔸 China is courting individual EU governments to weaken a coordinated European response.

Europe must respond collectively with tariffs and restrictions on access to the European market if these actions continue.

Europe must also promote stronger military and economic alliances between India and ASEAN to reduce China’s power in the Indo-Pacific.

China is Europe’s main long-term strategic challenge.

[Jesse Livermore @Jesse_Livermore]

Hard to even process -- a president selling market-moving information to banks and wealthy investors in advance of everyone else, and personally pocketing hundreds of millions of dollars from it. This alone is more worthy of impeachment than 100 Watergate cover-ups.

[Christo Grozev @christogrozev]

@Meta Ten days later, and despite at least three formal complaints, @Meta /@facebook ar still hosting a video showing my full home address and endangering my kids.
Zero feedback, no case ID, pure criminal behavior of a corporate thug who fears no consequences.

[Murat Kayman @KaymanMurat]

Nur ein Beispiel, was ich meine: Der größte Verband, die DITIB, hat am 27.7. eine Erklärung auf ihre Webseite gestellt, in der sie den Anschlag verurteilt. Aber nur auf die deutschsprachige Version ihrer Webseite. Auch nach vier Tagen fehlt diese Verurteilung des Anschlages auf

[Aleksandar Djokic (Александар Джокич) @polidemitolog]

You can have whatever political calculus you like, if your first instinct when Europe is attacked isn't to come together but to retreat into your castle on a hill, you're not a European, you're a tribal nationalist.

[Nicolas Tenzer @NTenzer]

We must keep repeating it louder and louder: russia is the embodiment of absolute evil.
And this, too: let's not forget that pro-russian propagandists are nothing more than defenders—and therefore accomplices—of its mass crimes.
They, too, must be brought to trial—and convicted.

[Mel Aura @mel__aura]

Dann prüft endlich das Verbotsverfahren! Fangt an die gesichert rechtsextremen Landesverbände zu verbieten.🙄

[Sander Tordoir @SanderTordoir]

Indicative of the changing mood in Germany.

It's ironic that Volkswagen welcomes the EU EV tariffs it tried to block in 2024, and wants an extension to hybrids (I agree).

Shows, again, that German policy-makers should set incentives best for the economy, not flip-flop CEOs.

[Bad Baltic Takes @BadBalticTakes]

Happy 3rd birthday to the classic English expression, “a poor waif in his underwear”.

A combination of words literally never before used in English until they were said to Seymour Hersh by a totally real anonymous US official who has persistently delivered bad takes.

Three years on, still not a single person has attempted any remotely plausible explanation as to why a US official would choose to invent such a unique phrase that no English speaker would make sense of.

A unique phrase that also happens to be the autotranslation of a Russian idiom.

Three years on, neither Seymour Hersh nor any of the “russia expert” journalists and commentators who amplify his reporting from anonymous officials, has ever wanted to talk about it.

Any suggestions?

[Daractenus @Daractenus]

With Russians now finally finding the courage to criticize Putin on account of gasoline and online shopping becoming less convenient, it's worth remembering what Russia continues to do to entire cities, something that does not raise much complaint from the Russian population.

[Prof. Karl Lauterbach @Karl_Lauterbach]

Interessante Analyse in der Zeit. In viele Teilen Deutschlands hatte die NSDAP nie eine Mehrheit bis 1933 einschließlich. https://t.co/RZ5Pnj6xTs

[Robin Brooks @robin_j_brooks]

Greece is the single biggest supplier of oil tankers to Russia's shadow fleet. It's this fleet that's allowed Russia to circumvent the G7 oil price cap and keep its war economy running. The damage to the EU is incalculable. There must be consequences...
https://t.co/LOEwsvkjYG

[Thomas Jäger @jaegerthomas2]

Trumps Zollpolitik ist planlos. Da er die Verbündeten der USA damit ebenso trifft wie den Konkurrenten China, sich China dagegen jedoch erfolgreich wehren kann (Seltene Erden), nutzt das ganz Chaos wiederum China. China versorgt dafür Iran mit Waffen und hält Russland aufrecht.