> I don't know why this article doesn't mention that, but a web search ("fake lease squatter") will show this is routine.
Same reason the article put "empty" in the title to imply they were just sitting around for speculative investing, when there's every indication the houses were intended to be immediately rented out, and are only "empty" because squatters moved in first.
one can combine the above issue with the force recording of leases to require every unit to pay a "residence" tax that if not recorded as being occupied by someone other than the owner is assumed (even if owner has other place of residence) to be occupied by the owner.
This does a few things. 1) it encourages the owner to rent out empty places, as empty places are no longer simply lost opportunity cost, but actually cost money in what they have to pay in this tax 2) requires people record who is legally living in a place to avoid these issues 3) enables areas to discount this tax for poor / disabled (or other logical reasons that they already have procedures for) for people who live in the area that they want to support.
So even you concede they benefit almost everyone, only they benefit some more. So should we really be dismantling them and descend into anarchy, just to harm a group you dislike? Doesn't seem like a good move.
> Do you want the issue decided on the spot with little actual knowledge?
Oh so after a ~week long prompt investigation, the police, now well informed, act decisively? Strange then how the landlord in the story would rather pay $12,500 to this swordsman than wait one or two weeks.
Legal process and approved enforcement not working correctly is a separate issue. Neither that nor the original problem will get solved by allowing police to intervene in all rental disputes and be the immediate judge and enforcer.
I gave my hypothetical to point out your "on the spot" was a strawman, and here you strawman again. Nobody demanded "immediate", and after the police verified that you are the lawful owner, and that there is no tenancy contract notarized/registered with the state, the squatters should be kicked out. But this is as ridiculous as the police refusing to remove someone from, say, your server farm, because that someone claims he's your employee and allowed to be there/actually he's the owner, prove he's not in a protracted civil procedure, during which time he dismantles your servers and sells them for parts. A year later when you get your judgment and can finally kick him out, a second squatter appears and you have to start all over again.
Trespassing and theft are criminal matters, and the police should treat them as such, even if the thief/trespasser says "actually, I'm not stealing/trespassing, this is mine/I live here".
That's what most of the usual reasons given (excuses and lies, really) ignore. They'll blame economics (despite us getting richer by nearly every metric, and extra funding only getting us more aggressively ugly buildings [1]), or the lack of craftsmen to carve gargoyles (as if there weren't countless beautiful buildings without anything so intricate), changing tastes (despite overwhelming public consensus older buildings looked better), or most hilariously, some kind of "survival of the prettiest", where supposedly buildings used to be just as ugly in general, but most were demolished, and only the best looking kept (yet e.g. old photos of Manhattan will show nearly every building being beautiful, at least compared to today).
Meanwhile they turn a blind eye to the dominant schools of thought in architecture, Loos and Bauhaus and modernism, that basically outright require ugliness and generic sterility.
> those numbers include "indecent" and "obscene" messages
Should we be worried that the government doesn't even bother to track how many people are arrested/jailed/convicted of non-true-threat/sexual harassment speech?
Well surely then one of the many NGOs fighting tyranny is trying to keep track of the numbers, right?
They are considering banning the largest opposition party, are using wiretaps and informants against it [1], have banned (ban since lifted) a magazine [2], and opened a criminal investigation into someone calling a fat politician fat online [3]. They are openly planning even worse [4] (if you dislike the author, keep in mind every claim is sourced, so take it up with the sources).
[4] Germany announces wide-ranging plans to restrict the speech, travel and economic activity of political dissidents, in order to better control the "thought and speech patterns" of its own people - https://www.eugyppius.com/p/germany-announces-wide-ranging-p...
Edit as reply to nosianu, because I am "posting too fast":
> Liar. Some demand it - but it is not considered by those with the power to actually do it, not even close.
On Monday, the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), which is currently serving as the junior coalition partner in Berlin’s conservative-led government, voted unanimously to begin efforts to outlaw [AfD]. - https://edition.cnn.com/2025/07/06/europe/germany-afd-ban-po...
> He also had connections to the far-right National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) and the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) parties.
Following the source wikipedia gives [1], we see the extent of that "connection" was that the killer donated €150 to the AfD, and that the AfD had previously criticized the victim (by sharing the victim's exact own words online).
Let's apply your standard evenly then, shall we? A writer for the state-funded left-wing Amadeu Antonio Foundation, armed with hammers and pepper spray, attacked a right-wing activist [2]. This attack was one of many [3]. So by your standard the German state sponsors and endorses terrorists. The US Democrat party wants to create an ICE tracker [4]. ICE agents have been the targets of attacks and ambushes [5,6,6a]. And of course it was hateful rhetoric [7] against Trump and Kirk that led to their (attempted) assassinations by the left. By your standard, the Democrat party engages in stochastic terrorism.
Of course that's just guilt by (vague) association. Enough for you, but I have higher standards. Bill Clinton pardoned a terrorist who (among other things) bombed the Senate. She now sits on the board of BLM [8,9]. An axe-wielding maniac attacked a Republican senator's home. Democrat politicians then donated money to the attacker [10]. The founder of the terrorist group Weather Underground [11], Bill Ayers, is now a distinguished professor at the state-funded University of Illinois [12], so we can add them to terrorists as well. As well as the University of California, where the terrorist Angela Davis is also a distinguished professor. "Terrorist" can be a vague term, so let me be specific: she bought the shotgun seen here taped to the neck of Judge Harold Haley, and helped plan the attack that killed him [13].
"In an op-ed piece after the election, Ayers denied any close association with Obama, and criticized the Republican campaign for its use of guilt by association tactics." - perhaps you should reflect on this.
So now what? Will you reconsider calling AfD terrorists? Will you instead also call the US Democratic and the German CDU parties terrorists? Maybe even apply more skepticism to the news sources that have so deceived you by cherry-picking what they show you?
Or will you reconsider nothing, and just hope the next person you lie to is less informed? Rhetorical question.
[7] That some of this rhetoric was true makes no difference - the charge of "stochastic terrorism" had no exceptions for truth when used against the right. And indeed the AfD's statements about the victim in the case you linked are not even alleged to be untrue.
[11] At one point, the Weathermen adopted the belief that all white babies were "tainted with the original sin of "skin privilege", declaring "all white babies are pigs" with one Weatherwoman telling feminist poet Robin Morgan "You have no right to that pig male baby" after she saw Morgan breastfeeding her son and told Morgan to put the baby in the garbage. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground
These statements are meaningless without considering who is being targeted by these rules. For context, Germany has a long-standing constitutional ban on Nazis. This isn't anything new; what is new is that one party (the AfD) is trying to find ways around the ban.
If you're arguing that the AfD aren't Nazis, I'm not sure I agree. They're already privately talking about deporting German citizens.
If you are arguing that banning a political party[0] is inherently wrong... sure. I'll agree with you, with one caveat. How do you meaningfully stop people from doing that? Just saying "Well, that would be illegal, so just disobey the illegal order" is not good enough. That's what you do for otherwise normal politicians that fuck up drafting the law[1]. But the people who are doing this shit are malicious. They need to be removed from power or they will just keep trying until they get their way. And that effectively means banning the political party trying to ban everyone else. Only a stand user can beat another stand user. Hence, the constitutional ban on Nazis.
[0] I should not have to explain to people that the Nazis banned other political parties.
[1] see also, the US 1st Amendment, which prohibits laws that restrict speech without specifying any meaningful punishment for politicians that attempt to restrict speech.
>They're already privately talking about deporting German citizens.
That's not specifically a Nazi policy.
In fact, remigration is an increasingly popular political idea in various Western countries that don't have any specific Nazi past (US, the UK, Australia, etc.)
(Remigration is also frequently done by non-Western countries as well.)
> They're already privately talking about deporting German citizens.
So is immigration policy supposed to be irreversible? One side can grant citizenship willy nilly, but undoing their actions is Nazism and illegal? Would not granting those citizenships in the first place also have been Nazism? The bar for branding someone a Nazi is low, and ~80% or more of the allied forces that fought in WWII would be Nazis under today's definition:
Citizenship has to be irreversible, or very close to it, for one simple reason: revoking citizenship is equivalent to stripping someone of their constitutionally-protected rights. Even if you have a well-defined and protected concept of free speech in the law, if the administration or government can just identify and deport people saying things they don't like, then their free speech is meaningless. Punishment and reprisal is an adequate substitute for silencing. You don't have freedoms anymore, you have franchise, a thing that can be taken away at the whim of the state[0].
Reversing a change to visa policy or not granting citizenship to migrants in the future is a different question. But it's far less problematic to not grant citizenship or visas than it is to revoke them after the fact.
As for "granting citizenship willy nilly", that wasn't done by "one side". The law is such that the choice of whether or not to admit an asylum seeker is a purely legalistic one with no political control afforded. The only thing Merkel (for better and for worse) did was smile and wave at the migrants you don't like. She had no power to stop them either. The reason why the law works this way is, again, because of WWII and Nazis. People fleeing Hitler were stopped by immigration policies at every turn. So we got every country to sign a bunch of international agreements that basically say "we will not attempt to stop people fleeing despotic regimes from entering our country".
Now, I get the feeling you want to shit on this policy, and I actually do think there's a valid critique of it. Specifically, only admitting immigrants during a time of crisis is almost guaranteed to generate resentment, both from the native-born and immigrant populations. You see, while Germany pledged to hand out passports like candy to asylum seekers, the rest of German immigration policy is rigidly inflexible and their society even more so[1].
The AfD getting banned under Germany's anti-Nazi policy is not at all unprecedented. Actually, they've had to use that same policy against the immigrants they're admitting. There's biker gangs run by Turkish immigrants that are illegal in Germany because they're too far-right. The case of Turkish immigrants to Germany is particularly illuminating. Turks in Germany have a higher rate of support for Erdogan than they do in Turkiye. Germany has managed to create a society that reliably turns poor immigrants into far-right stooges.
Do you want to know what country turns Turkish immigrants away from Islamist dictators? America.
Trump regime notwithstanding[2], the USA immigration system is unusually flexible and permissive for a rich country, and it has very generous family reunification visa programs. The family visas are, effectively, outsourcing the decision of what immigrants to admit to citizens that know the people they're sponsoring. It's an invite system. And since we've been doing this consistently for 50 years, we have immigrant communities from basically every country on the planet. So there's a very smooth gradient to integration. The "marginal cost" of an additional immigrant is basically zero. We imported the third world, but the third world became us.
> The bar for branding someone a Nazi is low, and ~80% or more of the allied forces that fought in WWII would be Nazis under today's definition:
This isn't related to the merits of the German constitutional ban on Nazis at all, but since I just spent a paragraph glazing modern American immigration policy, I feel obligated to completely dynamite America's moral foundations. I mean, even the family visas weren't intended to do what they're doing. Actually, they were created specifically to give white immigrants a fast lane through the system! The prior policy was basically "white immigrants only" and this was meant to appease people who opposed deracializing the immigration system.
To be frank, America's the country Hitler got all his worst ideas from. WWII happened right after the nadir of American race relations. The """liberal""" business establishment was planning assassinations and coups against the President. Hell, we were not that far off from joining the Axis. FDR had to bait Japan into attacking us to get the American people on board with fighting WWII. And even then he couldn't resist throwing shittons of Japanese immigrants into concentration camps in a blatant land grab.
There's a funny (in the "two nickels" sense) quirk of American history in that America will absolutely tolerate and engage in morally detestable bullshit until a war or other crisis makes it undeniably wrong. Lincoln ran on an abolitionist platform, but the actual moral opinion didn't change against slavery until Union soldiers were marching on plantations and actually seeing the horrors of slavery with their own eyes. Likewise, while we were nominally fighting an evil tyrant, that didn't hit home for a lot of soldiers until they were literally marching on Auschwitz and smelling dead bodies.
[0] The root word of "franchise" is "French", as in, the process of making one into a Frenchman. The linguistic association between France and temporary / revocable permission is because that's how freedom worked there at one point. Probably under a king named Louis.
[1] This is the same country where an announced rail detour becomes a passenger kidnapping because the driver couldn't be arsed to clear the extra stops up the chain.
[2] Part of the reason why the Trump regime is so polarizing in America is because European-style immigration enforcement is so alien to us.
>Citizenship has to be irreversible, or very close to it,
Australia at least states that expulsion is compatible with human rights.
"The Bill is compatible with human rights because, to the extent that it may limit some human rights, those limitations are reasonable, necessary and proportionate in achieving the legitimate objective of protecting the Australian community."
Australian Citizenship Amendment (Citizenship Repudiation) Bill 2023
Attachment A Statement of Compatibility with Human Rights
> The law is such that the choice of whether or not to admit an asylum seeker is a purely legalistic one with no political control afforded.
Right, and laws are not the result of politics, but are handed to us by God on stone tablets.
Your framing is also misleading - admitting refugees [0], and granting them citizenship, are very different. Relaxing citizenship requirements to a mere 5 years of residing in Germany (or just 3 with German language proficiency) is also very much political, as was the admission of 3 million explicitly economic migrant Turks.
We're asked to believe immigration and immigration policy is something that just happens, like the tides, in response to economic and geopolitical events, and politics can do nothing about it. Meanwhile Iran has deported 1.3 million Afghans, and plans to deport 2 million more [2]. So they are "afforded political control". As is China, which, despite being a growing economy and with significantly below-replacement fertility, has a population of just 0.1% immigrants [3].
[0] I wouldn't even call them that, since they passed through many safe countries before even reaching the EU, let alone Germany.
> They are considering banning the largest opposition party
Liar. Some demand it - but it is not considered by those with the power to actually do it, not even close. The AfD happily participates in state and federal elections and is in the federal parliament (Bundestag).
Why are you against freedom of speech??
People saying what they want is allowed! No action of that kind was or is taken. AfD and its members continues to participate in normal political life and getting elected, and they continue to participate in TV and media interviews.
What exactly is your complaint? You complain about some people's speech - while claiming to be for freedom of speech! Very peculiar.
[1] At best with a "trust us we won't tattle" "privacy" architecture.
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