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Germany finds itself in a dilemma. After WW2, laws were put in place to ensure that the Federal Government could never again subvert the security apparatus to create something similar to that which enabled the Nazis to seize power. A quite laudable aim, at least at the time. As a result the German States, of which there are currently 16, are each responsible for their own security and intelligence organizations. The Federal Security organization has only limited responsibility for the security at such places as borders and railway station etc.
In a speech reported here the Federal Minister of the Interior Thomas de Maiziere has suggested that this split of responsibilities needs to be rethought to enable acts of terrorism which are targeting at the country rather than the individual states to be effectively combated:
De Maiziere examines national as well as European security structures in the article, and concludes: reforms are "required." The core of his analysis calls for expanded federal responsibilities, which will demand that states relinquish some of theirs. Formulations such as "centrally operative crisis management" or "control competence over all security agencies" appear throughout the article.
However, the recent terror attack, the most serious in Germany in over 35 years, did not prompt de Maiziere's considerations, it simply gave him a reason to group them together into a kind of list of demands. The interior minister writes that he himself had proposed most of the changes "prior to the attack." The demands affect all authorities and areas of government concerned with defense against the threat of terror: Namely, the police and the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), Germany's domestic intelligence agency - but also, as the minister sees it, the army. The international scope of the problem, he says, touches on the need to secure Europe's external borders, as well as the global dimensions of the right to asylum.
This suggestion has not gone down well, particularly with those who were living in fear of a state controlled secret intelligence organisation (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, MfS), commonly known as the Stasi) until relatively recently.
[Continues...]
For example, this report contains the following:
Anis Amri, believed to have carried out the [recent Berlin] attack, was allowed to remain in the country because he did not have a valid travel document and his home country, Tunisia, initially refused to produce one.
To handle such cases, Mr. de Maizière suggested setting up federally controlled "departure centers," which could be placed "close to German airports" to aid the process.
He argued that such measures were already possible within existing German law and suggested extending the period for which a person can be detained pending deportation beyond the current maximum of four days.
Opposition lawmakers sharply rejected that suggestion, insisting that the government had a responsibility to respect the human rights of each individual, even those who are to be deported.
"In a country governed by the rule of law, the end does not justify every means," said Ulla Jelpke, an interior affairs expert with the left-wing Left Party.
She further criticized the plans as a "frontal assault" on the decentralization of powers that were set up to prevent another takeover like that of the Nazis.
What initially appeared as a problem with a relatively simple solution has become a lot more complex.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 06 2017, @08:44PM
> Your explanation is far too simplistic. You can't pin this down entirely to nature or nurture, as elements of both are involved.
I'm not pinning it on either. I'm saying that religion is no more special of a form of "nurture" than any other ideology or even simply just culture in general.
> the threat of endless, eternal torture could motivate people to do things they otherwise wouldn't,
that hypothesis does not explain all the haters who believe in reincarnation
there are plenty of horrible hindus, they are ascendant in India right now. there are even horrible buddhists who are in the process of cleansing Burma.
> history has shown that certain religious ideas are both extremely radicalizing and extremely wide-ranging in who they affect.
The same can be said about ideologies in general. Religion isn't special. Religion is a human construct like any other ideology. They all can be bent for evil or good by the people who construct them. You seem to think religion is more easily bent for evil. And to prove it you seem to have a list of examples of when religion was used for evil. But have you even tried to look for the cases of religion being used for good?
If you want to say that religion is more prone to abuse then you have to at least weigh both sides of the scale. And that's why I keep accusing you of finding what you are looking for. I don't think you've given equal effort to cataloging all the positive uses of religion. Furthermore, I think that its self-evident that religion has more positives than negatives for the simple reason that religion is widespread. If it were a net negative not only would the religious impulse have evolved out of human DNA, there wouldn't be resurgences of religion in formerly atheist societies like china and russia.
You are obviously concerned over the ascendance of the religious right. But your attitude about religion excludes your best ally against them - the religious left. The most humane president in recent history happens to also be the only evangelical president the country has ever had. The religious right hijacked Jimmy Carter's church and the hijackers handed that captive laity to the reagan and the republicans based on picking new sections of scripture. The SBC laity voted overwhelming for Trump despite their top ethicist denouncing him. And while the SBC isn't going to qualify as the religious left anytime soon my point is that by condemning religion out of principle you are enabling the worst among the religious right to claim religion for themselves. That ethicist may be getting the boot now that Trump won. Denouncing religion as inherently bad makes it harder for people who see themselves as religious to say that all the bad stuff is not part of their identity because the people who claim to stand for the good stuff reject them out of hand.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday January 06 2017, @10:43PM
Maybe I just don't have enough faith (hurr hurr) in the average person? For entirely non-religious reasons, I don't like most people very much, and it seems like no matter how low I set my expectations they're continually underwhelmed.
It sounds like your post mostly boils down to "don't offend the ones who are only partly delusional, since we need them to stand up to the ones who are dangerously batshit." It sounds like what you want to do is essentially play the good ones off against the bad ones. Are there enough good ones? Are they passionate enough? Do they control enough resources, media, etc? SO FAR we've been able to sort of coast along on accumulated humanist and "good religionist" capital, as it were, but this seems to be running out. And we just got dealt a very, very bad hand indeed in this regard in terms of the US government.
And, sorry, but your point about horrible Hindus and bastard Buddhists notwithstanding (no, I'm not one of those "free Tibet!" idiots, I know plenty of Dharmic religions' horror stories...), that still doesn't change the fact that the threat of endless torture has motivated people to do all kinds of evil they never would have otherwise. Nevermind many of the early church fathers were Universalist (Origen, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Gregory Nazianzen, etc), most believers can't even SPELL "Koine." Let's not pretend, as self-righteous Christians do, that "all sins are the same." That sort of mush-headed thinking doesn't even deserve to be dignified with term "moral relativism."
Also...the argument from popularity really doesn't work. Plenty of bad systems stick around because of popularity, or more likely, because people can't think of anything better. Religion, for all its faults, is EASY. Actually studying moral philosophy, history, ethics, logic, comparative religious culture, etc. is hard, and too time consuming for most, and most people in the world don't have any free time at all to do it in because they're trying not to starve or otherwise die.
You can't argue that something is good just because it's stuck around a long time...and saying that "the religious impulse" is coded into DNA is evo-psych claptrap of the worst kind. No, the "intentional stance" is what's coded into DNA, and that is an old, old, old set of instincts. Religion would be two or three degrees of emergence removed from that.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...