German lawmakers can’t agree whether to seek ban on far-right AfD

[yetanotheruser@discuss.tchncs.de]

Politico is owned by the German equivalent of Murdoch who are actively promoting the AfD across all their media by the way.

[foobarrington@lemmy.world]

That might be what people think the word means when they first hear it, but that doesn't mean we should use it that way.

[ogmios@sh.itjust.works]

Well if you actually want to communicate with others outside of academia, you're going to have to get used to the idea that language isn't the deliberate construct of a purely logical machine. I know it makes things more difficult than some would like to imagine it should be, but that's the price demanded of those who actually want to live in the real world.

[foobarrington@lemmy.world]

So we should just do away with definitions, and go with whatever people think a word means the first time they hear it? Why?

[ogmios@sh.itjust.works]

The point is that you have to make a good faith effort for communication to be possible, which you are not doing here.

[tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip]

Jailing the orange diaper would've had nothing to do with betraying democracy. He committed crimes that he should've been punished for under democratically created laws. The laws simply weren't enforced.

[foobarrington@lemmy.world]

When the "good faith effort" requires changing definitions, it's not a good faith effort from the other side.

[klear@lemmy.world]

Not like anything bad happened last time Germany started banning political parties...

I mean, I would ban them in a heartbeat, but I get their caution.

[flyingsquid@lemmy.world]

What was the difference last time? I'm sure you know.

[syntha@sh.itjust.works]

And as we all remember, when the Nazi Party was banned 98 years ago, the problem was solved, just like that, and nothing at all happened afterwards.

[flyingsquid@lemmy.world]

It was solved for decades. Sorry it wasn't solved for an infinity number of years like you think it should have been.

[mnemnosyne@sh.itjust.works]

If one person or a few people have a definition wrong, that's a thing that can be corrected.

If the majority of people think that's the definition, and it's been that way for decades, then you have the definition wrong.

[foobarrington@lemmy.world]

Do you have data to show that a majority of people have been missing "technocracy" for decades?

[mnemnosyne@sh.itjust.works]

Something I've been thinking a lot lately is that democracy is a process. It is a means by which we attempt to ensure a just and fair government for all. It's not an end in itself; we don't want democracy because democracy, at least not once people really think about it.

Which leads me to a saying. "The ends do not justify the means." This is a commonly held statement. However, it also works the other way:

The means do not justify the ends.

That means it doesn't matter if something was done by the rules, using the process, it doesn't matter if we voted for it, it doesn't matter what process was used to achieve it. If the ends are wrong, going "well, it's what was decided democratically" isn't an excuse.

[mitm0@lemmy.world]

Yes ban them on historical grounds at the very lesst

[ogmios@sh.itjust.works]

That's exactly my point. If you come in and start declaring the definitions have to be different from how the speaker uses their own words, because people they've never even met said so, that's not a good faith effort.

[syntha@sh.itjust.works]

I'm talking about the Beer Hall Putsch. Not the end of WW2, as that would 80 years ago.

[flyingsquid@lemmy.world]

Okay, and the Nazi party got outlawed after WWII and things seemed to do well for most of those 80 years.

[syntha@sh.itjust.works]

Do you think that was because of the ban on the NSDAP or because of the unconditional surrender, execution of influential personnel and subsequent occupation of Germany?

[flyingsquid@lemmy.world]

I think that there were no Nazis left to run the party by the 1980s and Germany was still fine.