Haha very funny. Try google and definitely come sober, freshly showered and in a fresh set of clothes.

but at least here in Germany prostitutes are only allowed to be self-employed to ensure they aren’t getting “pimped”

Nope. The reason so many are self-employed is because the employment laws favour employees much more than usual. You can order a baker to knead bread at the penalty of firing, can’t order a sex worker to serve a client on penalty of firing.

The laws about pimping – in particular, holding women in financial dependence – existed way before legalisation and didn’t actually change. It was always legal to offer things such as bodyguard services and also to exchange money for sex, contracts were non-enforcable and you couldn’t have dedicated business spaces for the trade. As such the workers themselves were already plenty used to being freelancers which is probably another reason why so many are self-employed: Cultural inertia.

The change in Germany wasn’t much more about making it a regular trade, not decriminalising it because strictly speaking it has never been illegal.

Which might say something about your own reading comprehension, but I don’t know what.

Have you ever considered whether such a question can be considered an accusation. “Am I reading this right” cannot only be understood as a simple question, but “Retract that at once”. For that reason throwing such things out willy-nilly is toxic to conversation, it’s the exact opposite of “assume good faith”, two or three such comments in a row and you have a spiral and then you have twitter.

Whether I could read your mind as to which of the meanings you intended is irrelevant to the fact that it needed calling out to prevent a spiral. If you really simply want to ask whether you’ve missed something, “I don’t believe this is what you meant to say but I’m completely lost” or such would be a safe way to go about it.

And it’s always beneficial to try to find a good-faith interpretation, btw, even if you’re for sure dealing with an abhorrent commentor, or a random troll: Replying to the good-faith interpretation instead of what they meant to say is ludicrously disarming. They don’t know how to deal with it. Their hate goes unheard, the conversation becomes positive, it’s ultimate verbal aikido. (And just for the record no I’m not claiming I’m always doing it).

This is very similar to male judges being hardest on fathers in family court, with mothers getting custody more often than not and men being forced to pay alimony + child-support in the U.S.

A rape victim being told to fuck off because she “can’t be raped” is similar to dads being forced to pay alimony? Am I reading this right?

Do you want lemmy to become twitter? Please tell me you don’t want lemmy to become twitter.

That most sex workers are self-employed in Germany is a result of the strict employment laws, in particular, if you employ a baker and tell them to knead bread and they refuse then you can fire them. Can’t do that with a sex worker as they can refuse to serve any client for any or no reason.

It’s not like there’s no employed sex workers but the more usual model is that a brothel provides a room, security, and a lobby and sex workers pay for the use of those with money they make off their clients. Just like running a business in a mall, but a particular kind of business in a particular kind of mall.

Don’t get me wrong if they had those opinions and also posted other things, generally engaged with the community, was a part of it, I would be much more critical of a ban: It’d be shutting down conversation, as you say. But giving that kind of leeway to people who are doing, essentially, drive-by shootings effectively also shuts down conversation: People aren’t going to engage in earnest with that kind of thing, that thing being allowed would set precedence and sooner than later everyone’s on motorcycles taking strafes at each other. Can’t talk to people who aren’t willing to sit down for a beer, can’t talk to people who don’t engage in good faith, can’t talk to people who come barging in with a megaphone in hand. Paradox of tolerance, Nazi bar, and all that. It’s much less of a fickle balance than many (especially US) liberals assume.

Misremembered a bit, it was a Danish trader wanting to pay a German trader for a larger shipment. Probably not the best source at all but you’ll be able to pin it down more by the date.

I’m sure I found better sources some years ago it almost seems like both google and bing completely obliterated their news index from way back when.

Euro overtaking the dollar as reserve currency in 3, 2, 1…

Thing is: Much of the volume of USD-denominated trade is habit and inertia, it’s a convenient unit of transfer and thus banks keep reserves of it to make transactions with. It took the US blocking a payment from a German customer to a Danish tobacco retailer for banks to switch Euro<->Kroner transactions to not go via USD (Those were Cuban cigars) as standard operating procedure for banks very much involves “don’t fix it if it’s not broken”.

Thus: The more you stir the pot, the more people want to get away from your complications. On top of being a convenient unit of transfer the Euro is also backed by a similarly-sized economy as the dollar and on top of that much more price stable against that economy: The Fed is perfectly willing to inflate the dollar to influence e.g. employment, while the ECB is committed to price stability, rather telling member states to devalue internally if that’s what’s necessary the prices shall stay the same.

DW is not capital-owned it’s literally a state broadcaster. Whatever foreign policy agenda you accuse it of you accuse Germany of as their editorial stance is precisely that of the foreign ministry. Also they’re highly factual, like it or not.

How can you actually think at all, and arrive at such a conclusion?

Bold claim, asserting that whoever downvoted you thought before doing it. Humans short-circuit all the time, nothing you can do about that, and getting bitter or exasperated won’t help, either. Deal with it. If you want you can start your comments with something universally agreeable, that always helps, and only then get into details. “Universally agreeable” as in “agreeable to both truth and all false notions anyone on earth has at the moment”. If you want to get idiots to listen you have to start out on a common ground that they share.

More specifically, in this case, you could’ve started your comment with a short rant about the state of availability of ADHD medication.

Disagreements and getting downvoted are one thing, been there, done that. Getting that amount of downvotes in that short a time-frame with no other interactions anywhere on lemmy is a whole different game. It may be their actual convictions, it may be deliberate shit-stirring, in any case it’s not a net positive for the overall community, community needs common ground.

Also those opinions could’ve been expressed in ways less… tendentious. Things like “incapable of self-governance” are ban-worthy bigotry on their own, at least in my book. Plenty to criticise about Iran, the actual people isn’t among it. Iranians by and large are vastly more sane and liberal than their government.

Might that person have something valuable to contribute? Possibly. They should have done so instead of speedrunning a ban, then they could have contributed it. Probably a throwaway account anyway.

https://lemm.ee/modlog?userId=17743888

Judge for yourself.

Also have a look at the downvote totals, over 200 is quite an achievment in under 10 hours: https://lemm.ee/u/neocon@kbin.earth

Nah looking at the other comments it’s not overreach dude is a troll. They ate a /c/worldnews ban which comes with comment removal, this just happens to be an innocuous one.

She didn’t come up with the Wandel durch Handel doctrine, that one goes back to the 60s – and it worked with the Soviets, at least apparently so. It wasn’t just Merkel who had a consistent foreign policy Germany in general has a very consistent foreign policy, no matter the government. There’s been like three major shifts total in the whole history of the republic (Ostpolitik, Signing off on the Kosovo intervention, now Zeitenwende).

As said I’m not actually trying to defend her, here, just trying to contextualise all this in German politics, but two things about her: Firstly, she just plainly lacks imagination or vision. Her MO has always been status quo, so don’t attribute to malice that which can be attributed to being a conservative. Secondly, she plainly didn’t have the power to change anything: The chancellor alone is not powerful enough in German politics to impose or create such a shift. When Scholz proclaimed the Zeitenwende he did exactly that – proclaim it. He didn’t cause it. It wasn’t about some politicians or some foreign ministry bureaucrats analysing strategy, it was about the country as a whole being fed up with Russia’s antics, the invasion was the last straw. Ostpolitik came against a backdrop of the people being fed up with going along with the US’s militarism (e.g. Vietnam). Kosovo, well, not really a shift but a clarification: Yes going to war to stop a genocide is a perfectly valid thing to do.

There’s plenty of things Merkel should be crucified for, but I can’t blame our stance regarding Russia on her because if she had tried to make a meaningful change the country wouldn’t have followed. Worse, it probably would have strengthened the position of the Putinversteher by claiming Russophobia.

What she absolutely could and should’ve done is not kill off our solar energy sector, not be beholden to fossil fuel (and nuclear) corporate interests, not been a complete brake on the energy transition. No German would’ve minded her telling Russia “well yes we’re going to stop buying, you should invest that money we already gave you wisely there won’t be coming much more”. I can see how that, from an Ukrainian perspective, can seem like “she wanted to support Russia” – nah. She wanted to support RWE, EnBW, etc, big German electricity companies who moved their investments to renewable energy way too late.

If you want to hate on someone may I propose Schröder. He’s on record, this year, saying that there’s free elections in Russia. Don’t worry about the elections btw Ukraine support has a steady 2/3rd majority with more than half of that more hawkish than Scholz. Might have to go back on the legalisation of cannabis but if that’s to be our punishment, then so be it.

No, just most. War is the continuation of politics by different means, and political desires are quite often, but definitely not always, economical. Rome razed Carthage because of the economics of empires in the Mediterranean, yes, but Charlemagne didn’t genocide Old Saxony for its economic output, but religious fervour and autocratic arrogance (the whole one god one pope one king thing).

I’m sorry but it wasn’t Lutheran leadership which systematically and institutionally covered for, protected, and enabled, paedophiles, and you dare talk back to me about sanity. That “unbroken chain of succession” is a massive source of hubris and self-righteousness. It’s also a myth there’s been plenty of broken links in that chain.

And why would sola fide need to be tampered: The difference here between Lutheran and Catholic positions, both accepting sola gratia, is that faith is the result of that grace, its acceptance, faith cannot be without grace. Your works aren’t god’s grace. Your prayer and your worship isn’t god’s grace, only god’s grace is god’s grace. You’ll see it at the heaven’s gates, you’ll see definite proof of it, all you need is to not reject it once you have that proof. You really think an omnibenevolent and omnipotent god would create a world with plenty reason for doubt but then “haha gotcha, stupid” people into hellfire.

“Support” implies intent, at least it usually does.

Back in the 90s, early 00s, there was a definite possibility of Russia getting its shit together, they actually had, for a change, a civil society. In that sense believing in Russia’s capability to not drive that cart of theirs as blindly as usual is not entirely naive, heck, plenty of Russians believed in it, even through all those layers of fatalism. I agree though Putin showed his true colours way before Merkel got elected but then there’s other reasons why the German foreign ministry really doesn’t like the concept of “diplomacy is pointless”. To them that’s, for better or worse, defeatism: War is the continuation of politics with different means, sure, but maybe if you end up at war then you need to get better at politics. That’s how they think.

I will highlight the reaction of the German government to the initial use of the Bayraktar drones at the LOC before full scale invasion:

That wasn’t Merkel but Scholz, fresh in office. Or rather Baerbock probably, doing her job while the Chancellor was trying to get to grips with the overall situation of 16 years of CDU government.

Germany under Merkel did nothing from a military perspective and ignored and enabled every escalation by the russians. Show me how I am wrong.

They believed in Minsk. Or at least they believed that someone needed to believe in it, make an effort. Support went into the OSCE monitoring mission as well as general NATO initiatives, including exercises in Ukraine. Surveillance, both drones and satellites, and you might not want to hear it but but medical capabilities. Military ones, that is.

Traditionally, within the European context, it falls to France and the UK to be hawks, and Germany to be the brake… UK was (and still is) busy with Brexit fallout I think supporting Ukraine is the only thing that gives them joy and purpose right now, France, well, you’ve seen Macron in Moscow.

Long story short yes we all know we should’ve listened to the Poles but that doesn’t mean that everyone who didn’t just blindly strengthened Russia’s position.

And you know what? People make fun of Wandel durch Handel, but there’s an aspect that’s often overlooked: The entanglement. Without Germany getting into Russia they’d still be able to make their own ball bearings. The idea is that a rational actor wouldn’t kill off their own economy and, well, in the end it turns out Putin isn’t a rational actor. But at least their economy is toast, which it wouldn’t be if Russia had been isolated all those years.

Ultimately this war will be won through economics causing a collapse, internal revolt, putsch, whatever, and it’s not going to take long now because Russia is way overextended, cracks are forming quicker than they can patch them. Some of them very literally, as in district heating and winter is coming.

Russia could, probably, have been bitch-slapped back into its own borders by NATO on day one and nothing bad would’ve happened but a pissed Putin, but the powers that be thought that to be risky, and whether they were right or wrong it’s the situation we’re in right now. IMO, we can talk about assigning blame and generally divisive stuff as soon as Ukraine is whole, again, not much sense doing it now.

What if two patriarchs differ?

Then they differ. The Orthodox Churches are autocepalous, that is, self-leading, there’s one per nation – and generally only one, if multiple are operating in the same then because they’re serving their diaspora and there’s no native orthodox church. The Patriarch of Constantinople has a special role among the patriarchs as first among equals but it’s about representation, calling synods, no actual power. Oh, one thing: To declare a Church autocephalous. The Russian Church maintains that it’s the prerogative of the individual Patriarchs to turn internal sub-divisions into new Churches and guess who declared the Ukrainian Orthodox Church autocephalous, and who didn’t, and who the other Patriarchs agree with.

That was a trick question. You aren’t allowed to decide because you’re some random Christian.

Christianity in fact has the doctrine of universal priesthood, though it tends to get forgotten: Believers need no mediator to be in contact with god, consequently, god can choose to act through anyone. Luther re-ignited that whole thing which is why Lutherans are saner and much more democratic than Catholics and then America happened making people retroactively think the reformation was a mistake. All you really need is a vision and a following and you’ve got yourself a denomination.

The truth of it all is that it’s all held together by inertia, tradition, and hastily applied duct tape slowly turning into the former two. Just like anything else in human culture.

but if she knew that putin would invade and wanted to help Ukraine prepare, why was there no attempt to provide military (covert aid if needed)?

Have you ever wondered how the Ukrainian army went from getting caught with their pants down in 2014 to holding fast in 2022. Where all that… organisation suddenly came from. How a completely dysfunctional army could be brought into fighting shape in less than a generation. Why Ukrainians are outclassing Russia left and right in battlefield tactics and strategy.

I have no doubt that Ukraine would’ve been perfectly capable of developing all that stuff on its own, but in eight years? Sure, there’s been pretty much constant engagement with the “people’s republics” but that kind of thing doesn’t make you a master of, say, manoeuvre warfare. It might pay off to have a look at whether or not there’s any press coverage on Ukraine cooperating with other militaries in that time span. Just a hunch.

Not trying to defend Merkel here btw, why would I she’s a CDU politician, I don’t know if any of that has anything to do with her.