Numbers, please!

by Peter Löcke //

Numbers are mathematics and science. In contrast to language, numbers are about objective results. Verifiable. Do you remember your school days? The interpretation of a text, for example, was difficult to grade. The German teacher could determine the spelling error rate, but then? I can well remember the anger and tears of many classmates who felt unfairly treated and wrongly graded after returning a German exam. Mathematics, on the other hand, was easier. No hermeneutics. You knew whether you had succeeded or unfortunately failed after the work. The teacher looked at the correct or incorrect result of a task, taking into account the chosen solution. One was right, two was wrong. The rule of three is objective, the essay is subjective. I'm probably not the only one who remembers it that way.

All of this is at least partly nonsense. Precisely because we humans think this way, precisely because numbers come with a perceived claim to truth, there are endless opportunities for manipulation. Examples?

Death. There is probably nothing more definitive, final and measurable than death. At the RKI press conferences in spring 2020, Lothar Wieler announced the daily increase in corona deaths in an introductory and groaning tone. Really, Mr. Wieler? The number of deaths has not fallen compared to the previous day? Thank you for this information. A year and a half later, in November 2021, Germany's 100,000th corona death was recorded. More of a celebration than a declaration. The figure of 100,000 was celebrated politically and in the media in a pathetic act of consternation. 

"Look here, you aluminum hats and corona deniers! One hundred thousand. Even during the last big wave of influenza, there were only 25,000 flu deaths!" 

Objection, Your Honor. Apples and oranges were compared. What is in front of the equals sign of the calculation that led to these different numbers? The bizarre definition of death "positive PCR test equals official corona death" has been sufficiently discussed. Little has been said about how the figure of 25,000 was arrived at during the last major flu epidemic in the winter of 2017/18. I'll let you in on it. This figure is an estimate. It was modeled far in retrospect by the RKI. Not a daily live ticker like Corona. This figure is an extrapolation in the truest sense of the word, because influenza is hardly ever the number one cause of death on a death certificate. The primary and pre-ill people officially die with and not from influenza. And now a heretical thought. There is also an influenza PCR test. What if this were to be made compulsory? What if every seriously ill 85-year-old who tested positive for influenza at the time of death was officially counted as having died of influenza? Because a head of the RKI, when asked, defined "We'll just count through it!" Would it be 25,000 influenza deaths or could you add a zero to this figure?

Numbers seem to be important. Who doesn't remember the endless discussions about the number of participants at the two major demonstrations in Berlin in August 2020? Why were there dozens of sometimes hilarious fact checks attempting to suppress the number of participants? Was it 17,000 or not over a million? My thesis is this: There was a political-media narrative that the demonstrators were a collection of right-wingers and conspirators, a social minority. This defamatory narrative can easily be used figuratively. Show a few Reichstag flags, show a close-up of a few nutters and aggressive demonstrators. The rest of the propaganda follows the pars pro toto method. The part stands for the whole. But this defamatory narrative would collapse if politicians and the media had to report on 100,000 demonstrators. The narrative that the corona measures are supported by an overwhelming majority of the population would no longer have been tenable with a 6-digit number of demonstrators. How? There is no social consensus after all. This impression for the sofa TV viewer had to be prevented at all costs.

The much-cited social consensus that politicians and journalists like to talk about. Above all, of course, when it comes to climate protection and the energy transition. This is only what the majority of the population wants. It is the will of the people that we are implementing here. That's what I hear in the media. Is that true? Is it really a broad social consensus that the traffic light government is implementing here in so many areas? I turn the numbers around and try to check this objectively. It must be measurable somehow.

I went to phoenix, a public service channel. It's serious and not suspected of being on Telegram. This is where politically interested people watch Bundestag speeches in their entirety and form their opinion from the original source. This is what happened on November 23, 2022 during the general debate on the federal budget. Alice Weidel from the AfD was speaking. You have to distance yourself from her. Katharina Dröge from the Greens then spoke. This is a woman who is one of the good guys and represents the broad majority of the population. She represents the social consensus. My personal opinion on the two speeches is insignificant. Form your own opinion. Here the speech by Alice Weidel, here the speech by Katharina Dröge.

The speech with the supposedly radical outsider opinion was clicked on over a million times and liked over 40,000 times. The speech representing the supposed social consensus was viewed just over two thousand times and received twelve thumbs up. Sometimes numbers can be revealing after all.

By the way, Phoenix is not interested in your opinion. The comments section is deactivated. Quite unlike the club of clear words. I am interested in your opinion on the subject of numbers.

Articles identified by name do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the publisher.

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18 Responses

  1. ...the National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians issued a press release and position paper on 20.10.2020 - signed by 18 professional medical associations, which in Germany was only stylized as a "paper around Mr. Streeck", in the German Medical Journal only to be found as an Internet link and - listen and be amazed: was published properly in Switzerland: On October 20, 2020, there were 463,419 Covid diagnoses - of which 327,697 had recovered and currently still positive 125,601 - 10,121 had died. The hospitalization rate was 5%. intensive care treatment requirement: 1.3%, positive rate for PCR tests: 5.7%...all figures nicely conveyed as bar charts: "take it easy, it's not that bad...". (weshslb of course in individual cases certainly still bad enough...but there are many diseases that are not needed...The then Minister of Health is a banker...and has no idea about health...but the numbers did not fit into the political program - and were suppressed. Apart from the fact that the term "incidence" was used incorrectly and inflationarily.
    The RKI has already done a proper job - on page 30ff in the small print. But it is a subordinate federal authority bound by instructions...subordinate to the Ministry of Health...
    You can find all the figures for Germany seriously processed and graphically visualized in the (well - not our press) Neue Züricher Zeitung...

  2. Numbers are often the basis for decisions, e.g. in epidemiology, demography or climate models. Figures can reveal truths if you want them to. Obviously, many people do not want the whole truth, neither those who act as perpetrators in secret nor their victims. This can compromise a more democratic community and even lead to a total erosion of the legal basis. Conversely, the victims' denial of reality is no less dangerous for our democracy than that of the perpetrators. If you want to start there, you should think about the reasons for the victims' denial; in my opinion, fear is the decisive factor.

  3. Dear Peter Löcke, respect!

    They address an exciting topic and show the right way to deal with it, the "numbers"! "Corona numbers", for example, mutated into a killer word in our language like a virus, we know that. Your text alone gave me the idea of backing this up with numbers. You don't need to have the intuition of a truffle pig, just a few thoughts of your own, then a good idea is not far away.

    In the case of the killer word, the figures are clear and underpin what we actually know very well: The progression curve in the newspaper corpus of the Digital Dictionary of the German Language (*) shows not a single occurrence for the word "Corona-Zahlen" in 2019, i.e. (absolutely) zero, 5148 for the first time in 2020, then a further 8089 in 2021 and another 3094 so far this year. Together, that's 16,331 occurrences in less than three years. Without the hyphen, you guessed it (and please enter "corona numbers" in the linked DWDS search field yourself), it is only found a total of 3256 times, i.e. in a ratio of one to five.

    But which hyphenated numbers should you compare with? When it comes to weather, we tend to talk about data. I was wondering and thought: "Flu numbers", they certainly don't exist because "corona numbers" was such an artificial creation. Well, that's not quite true, because the word does exist. But it's almost true: from 1946 up to and including 2019, there were a total of exactly nine (9) findings, another four (4) in 2020, zero (0) in 2021 and this year, it's astonishing, a whole twelve (12), almost as often as before combined and probably Corona's side effect. It is also interesting to note that "Merkel" is easily outperformed by "Corona" with a total of just 144T to 550T since 2020. As expected, both fell sharply this year compared to the previous year and, with 14T and 106T respectively, didn't even stand a chance against, well, what? That's right, the shooting star "Ukraine", which - or rather: which one - didn't literally catapult from zero (2014 at least a good 90T, most recently just under 20T), but nevertheless to 333T! -

    What led to these far-off statistical paths? It was your idea, dear Mr. Löcke, to look up the clicks at Phönix on the - nomen est omen - Weide(l)- in comparison to the Dröge speech, which simply impresses immensely and even tops what I had already guessed! I had heard about Ms. Weidel's performance on Kontrafunk and had planned to see it myself, but only now was I prompted to put it into practice. I listened to it to the end, sometimes rewinding it for repetition. I put an abrupt end to the boring speech quite early on. It was simply enough for me ... that the Weidel speech before mine had 1,181,951 views with 41,374 thumbs up, while the Dröge speech had 2354 clicks and 12 approvals.

    This calls for one last numbers game: the ratio of these call figures is a cheeky 50,210 percent - a salute to the great inflation of exactly one hundred years ago! You can also turn the tables, i.e. the fraction, then it becomes 0.2 percent. This is also reminiscent of the recent past, when the general public got to know the foreign word abbreviation IFR from the second series of "corona numbers": namely as "infection mortality rate" and also completely new in the newspaper corpus, albeit only 71, then 41 times and this year again completely out of fashion with four more. Nevertheless, many will have learned that this figure is roughly equivalent to a severe case of flu. Incidentally, it is also associated with a drunken stupor, which I find figuratively very meaningful. They say two per mille. We also know that "Omikron" doesn't keep up. The per mille will be well below the decimal point. As we all know, that's enough to keep you happy.

    Sincerely,
    Your through you to the pun
    excited numbers person

    PS. The correct handling of numbers, in addition to mathematics or at least correct arithmetic, i.e. correctly finding, estimating and distinguishing the important and useful numbers from the completely useless and dangerous fog candles, this should be an important goal of future or sustainable education! Sensible waste separation at last, so to speak.
    _____
    *) https://www.dwds.de/r/plot/?view=2&corpus=zeitungenxl&norm=abs&smooth=line&genres=0&grand=1&slice=1&prune=0&window=0&wbase=0&logavg=0&logscale=0&xrange=1946%3A2022&q1=Corona-Zahlen

    1. Many thanks to all commentators for their appreciative and exciting feedback.

      Dear Mr. Schneider, thank you very much for this link. When was a term "born", when did it become inflationary? In the newspapers, in advertising, etc. .... I have asked myself this question so often. Your linking tip makes it visible and measurable. Thank you. I will now visit this page more often 🙂

      "You don't need a nose like a truffle pig." Exactly, you said it. It takes curiosity and critical, independent thinking. I'm not an IT and numbers expert like you, and I'm not a doctor like some of my fellow writers in the club, but I can think logically and critically. And above all, I try to go to the original sources as best I can. Take the example of influenza death figures. I only hinted at it in the column.

      The Influenza Working Group of the RKI publishes annual seasonal reports. 2010/11, 2011/12 etc ... sounds a bit like soccer. The seasonal reports, which were short twenty years ago, are now 134 pages long. A lot of technical jargon that hardly anyone reads through. Certainly not a journalist from ÖRR. How the death figures are calculated is extremely interesting and also controversial. Go to point 5.3 "Influenza-related deaths (excess estimates)" on page 46. It's only one page plus an interesting graph/figures on page 47.
      https://influenza.rki.de/Saisonberichte/2018.pdf

      Do you know what else is interesting? Here is an overview of all season reports ... https://influenza.rki.de/Saisonbericht.aspx
      Have you noticed anything? The last influenza report was from 2018/19. Oops. No report since Corona.

      And while I'm on the subject of the RKI. Do you remember the beginning of the pandemic? There were only two medical issues, the most important issues. Lethality and infectiousness. How deadly and how infectious is Covid? "Corona is more deadly and more infectious than influenza. Period." According to the RKI in mid-March. Formulated as a fixed fact, as a mantra. Half a year late (October 2020), the RKI did a fact check on its own factual assertion. Just a short 14-page comparative study on influenza/Covid. In it, they "surprisingly" confirmed their own creed. See https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/Infekt/EpidBull/Archiv/2020/Ausgaben/41_20.pdf?__blob=publicationFile

      This study is so manipulative in many respects that it almost physically hurt me. I am writing this as a non-medical professional. Just one example of many: Go to page 5 and look at the two bar charts. Flu on the left. Covid on the right. Similar at first glance with just one difference. An incredible number of young flu patients in the ITS, no young corona patients. What did the RKI do? It removed the age group up to 15 from the comparative study. The official reason? That would "distort" the comparison. Unbelievable.

      Best regards back

      1. Thank you for torturing the RKI!

        You are exemplary when you "try to go to the original sources as best you can". Everyone should do this as best they can in order to form their own opinion or question an existing one. You usually learn quickly. The ability to judge would also be an outstanding educational goal! And healthy doubt! I'm afraid that this is exactly where the misery has been for decades ... In any case, I read in your dug-up Influenza Report 2018, page 46:
        - "In contrast to other diseases, influenza is often not entered as the cause of death on the death certificate, even if influenza was confirmed by laboratory diagnosis during the course of the illness and contributed significantly to the death."
        Great! You'd think that good journalists would find that. Instead, you read about "conspiracy theories" ... And in the comparative study I read:
        - "Hospitalization due to acute respiratory disease can have a much milder course in children than in adults, especially in older adults, as they are less likely to receive intensive medical treatment or ventilation and are significantly less likely to die."
        So why would the Paul Ehrlich Institute, the Ethics Commission and other suspects recommend vaccination if not for "base motives"?

        At the RKI, great experts (as Wolfgang Wodarg likes to emphasize) work in the belly of the fish, but then it just stinks from the head down ... Just like at the StatBA, now modernist destatis. Someone like Gerd Bosbach appreciates this very much, because he started there himself, and is still very critical in public. - That was the transition to my book tip, maybe something for Christmas:
        - https://d-nb.info/1006148310 Gerd Bosbach / Jens Jürgen Korff: Lügen mit Zahlen, paperback, 2011, he was also on Pelzig:
        - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-P-3Ck2mjXY Unfortunately, as the last guest of the evening, the good Pelzig really stepped on the gas.
        Bosbach also remained relatively critical of Corona very early on and publicly, I can't find that now in a hurry. In any case, I also noticed (in the search for the real personal risk!) that press releases or press conferences, i.e. presentations in public, seemed governmental compared to the data basis. The result was the article https://www.rubikon.news/artikel/die-corona-delle including the realization that the 2019/2020 influenza had failed. -

        We continue to write!

  4. If you follow the two linked speeches in the Bundestag carefully, you will discover an invaluable advantage of the current times: as has always been the case, gangsters are outing themselves by wearing masks. Unfortunately, the people of the Weimar Republic lacked such clear indications of an impending period of rampant malice and infinite stupidity. The bitterly angry look on Claudia Roth's face when she heard the truth about the Greens' rampant infinite naivety reveals what awaits freedom-loving and dissenting people in our country should the Greens win an absolute majority in the future. Then God have mercy on us all.

    1. Dear Dr. Aßmann,

      Now you've triggered me 😉 I'd almost forgotten that disgusting look on the face of this "Minister of State for Culture"... Hopefully this kind of person won't be able to "rule through" at some point, which AM already dreamed of back then.

      1. Dear Michael Linser,

        Now you've got me: the puzzle of the initials "AM at the time" made my penny drop! Even the smartest technical aids available today didn't get me any further. For example, the progression curve of the word "durchregieren" in the newspaper corpus of the Digital Dictionary of the German Language (*) shows us a first appearance from 1981 and a steep and so far never-ending rise in fashion from 2002, but I can't think of any prominent government representatives from those times whose first and last names begin with "A" and "M" ... who has an idea and can perhaps help with a tiny tip?

        *) https://www.dwds.de/r/plot/?view=1&corpus=zeitungenxl&norm=date%2Bclass&smooth=spline&genres=0&grand=1&slice=1&prune=0&window=3&wbase=0&logavg=0&logscale=0&xrange=1946%3A2022&q1=durchregieren

      2. Dear Michael Linser,

        Now you've got me: the puzzle of the initials "AM at the time" made my penny drop, it just won't drop! Even the smartest technical aids available today didn't get me any further. For example, the progression curve of the word "durchregieren" in the newspaper corpus of the Digital Dictionary of the German Language (*) shows us its first appearance from 1981 and a steep and so far never-ending rise in popularity from 2002. But I can't think of any prominent government representatives from those times whose first and last names begin with "A" and "M" ... who has an idea and can perhaps come to the rescue with a tiny hint?

        *) https://www.dwds.de/r/plot/?view=1&corpus=zeitungenxl&norm=date%2Bclass&smooth=spline&genres=0&grand=1&slice=1&prune=0&window=3&wbase=0&logavg=0&logscale=0&xrange=1946%3A2022&q1=durchregieren

          1. Oh no, how embarrassing! When the good was so close, you looked unflinchingly into the distance

  5. Thank you Mr. Löcke for shining the spotlight on the topic of the 'objectivity of figures'. And thank you also for the link to the two speakers on the 'topic of the 2023 federal budget'! Since the 'objective reporting of the ÖRR within the Corona conflict' ... and the seamless transition of the 'objective reporting on the topic of military. Conflict Ukraine' I have completely banned the ÖRR from my pers. I am no longer able to enjoy these verbal outpourings from the Berlin Bundestheater ... Well, whether I have missed something essential ... maybe the one or other entertainment value. Perhaps, yes ..., but in view of the very serious situation in which the future of our country finds itself, one no longer feels like laughing heartily at the performances of the puppets from the Berliner Puppenkiste. After listening to the speeches of the two ladies ... and I started with Ms. Dröge - because I didn't know her as a politician from the Green Party before - ... so I was completely unbiased towards her, I involuntarily had to think of the introduction to this column in terms of the school assessment system for the subjects German compared to math. After exactly 3 minutes and 20 seconds, I switched off the video. My objective school assessment of Ms. Dröge's presentation expressed in 'numbers': Set - 6 ! Topic missed !!! What a more than 3-minute-long laudation about the 'presence' of our German Foreign Minister at this year's climate summit in the popular Egyptian seaside resort of Sharm el-Sheikh has in common with the 2023 federal budget was unfortunately not clear to me. I would rate Ms. Weidel's speech on the scheduled topic of the debate - in direct comparison to Ms. Dröge's (aborted) speech - with a 3(+). At least she addressed the glaring deficits in the budget management of the traffic light government. Well, you can't do much with mathematical objectivity in the federal political theater. The number of clicks and likes on the two speeches that you described at least reflect a kind of ratio of public perception that allows the perception of Ms. Dröge's speech to be presented in an almost landslide fashion. After all, figures are a better representation of the situation than pages of verbal explanations, no matter how objectively they are presented. And yes, nowhere else have figures been abused more recently than in the coronavirus conflict. Starting with the misuse and misrepresentation of the infamous "PCR test" ... which technically cannot be described as a kind of 'test' at all. Moreover, with its replication number of 45(!), which is praised as the 'gold standard', this method for detecting DNA structures has already led to the absurd! If all 'objective' experts on this 'polymerase chain reaction' had been consulted from the outset ... or had simply been involved in the official decision-making bodies 'RKI & Co Kg', and above all had been 'approved' ..., the 'events of the entire public life' of the last 2 years would not have taken place in this way. As we can all painfully see today, a disproportion created purely on the basis of number manipulation can have significantly perverse excesses in the way such a conflict is played out.

  6. In my German A-level essay, my German teacher, who hated me, gave me a 5. The second examiner gave me an A for my essay! Which number was the right one - for what reasons exactly - or the wrong one - for what reasons exactly. I wasn't allowed to find out. Math lessons were more precise. Add to that a great fondness for my math teacher, who turned every task into a criminal case, who taught us precise thinking with the right conclusions, especially in geometry - in the end we always had to write the sentence: Wzbw, Was zu beweisen war.-, then exact numbers were no longer enemies.
    I will never forget his explanations on the importance of the right angle, one-two and three-dimensionality. I later passed these lessons on to my students in exactly the same way as a teacher.
    I thought about the accuracy of numbers in real life when I worked for an opinion research institute during my studies.
    There should also be precise figures at the end: How many in percent thought the product was good or not, etc. The final result depended on who I grabbed for a conversation in the pedestrian zone, in which setting, with which emphasis or mimicry I asked my questions. Then it depended on the correct entry of the results, further processing by subsequent people, etc. The more numbers, the greater the sources of error.
    Today, we are inundated daily with figures from all areas of life that no one can verify. Everything is relative, not just Einstein. Some people have had enough of life at the age of five and have no energy left for more years, others have another 15 years at 15 and others another 50 years at 50.
    In the corona chaos and climate chaos, nobody cares. Mr. Söder fantasizes about tens of thousands of deaths (or was it hundreds of thousands?) that he has prevented with his measures, with the measures that have since been deemed illegal.....The excess mortality of the last few months is justified one way or another. A Ms. Baerbock, who no one in my entire circle takes seriously - at best! -, who falsifies her CV, copies a book, who doesn't speak German, who spreads our money from "special assets" around the world with a loose hand, who skipped geography (countries hundreds of thousands of kilometres away from us), who calls helicopters rubbish robbers and promises that she wants to kill Europe, supposedly gets the highest poll ratings and is passed around as a candidate for chancellor on public television. Who cares about numbers? Climate warming of 1.5 degrees - where exactly, how exactly, with what, is this determined, for example, on the large water measurements of the world's oceans? No one is interested. But thanks to a Green, we know that there have already been billions of climate deaths on Palao with its 19,000 inhabitants. Who does the math anymore? At the very most, there will be a reckoning at some point. Also with the fact that 80% of citizens are against the nonsensical destructive gendering that is mercilessly imposed on us in public broadcasting (OT in the BR24 news: "The ministers of the various departments break"), that incidences with two digits after the decimal point are arbitrarily stomped on and disappear again and so on and so forth.
    What would happen if compulsory intelligence tests were ordered, both general and job-related (don't forget the Kijmea panel of experts in their white coats!) What if the results exceeded all expectations? Let's take a look at the next election results!

  7. Ms. Weidel got to the heart of the matter. The other Ms. Dröge doesn't mean anything to me. I have no idea who she is or what she said. Does that say something about me? Am I now a right-wing extremist? Not at all. I just can't listen to all this drivel any more. I tried to watch the ÖRR news last night. I can't manage that. Then later I watched a crime thriller. It was AI-heavy. It gives you a taste of what AI can do. I'm not just promising good things. It certainly sent shivers down my spine. Brave new world. But first get those out of the way who are overwhelmed by it anyway. And speaking of corona deaths, I would be interested to know how many have died from the vaccination, or how many have suffered serious damage. In a minimal sequence, the news reported on 2 girls who were attacked by a migrant on their way to school. One of them died. Shit happens, that's my impression! I feel incredibly sorry for the girls' parents, and so close to Christmas. And then you blame Ms. Weidel's speech on the right? In our country, the truth is now completely upside down, that's an unmistakable fact for me, and even numbers don't help.

  8. You are certainly not the only one, dear Mr. Löcke, who remembers this sentence: "The rule of three is objective, essays are subjective." And this was also accompanied by a grading system: a five in math was a disaster, whereas a very good grade in German could be safely disregarded. That says a lot about our society. Questioning figures, finding out who collected them, what money is behind certain studies and why this is the case, simply mentally admitting that figures have been manipulated and no longer embedded in the correct context - all of this has been a kind of blasphemy over the past three years. Suddenly, the majority of the population no longer wanted to or could no longer think in broader contexts. So many people clung to numbers like drowning men. Perhaps philosophy would be the better "supreme discipline" in the education system? With the willingness to question critically, pure numbers might lose their power.

  9. Dear Mr. Löcke, thank you very much for this article and the link to the two general debates. I already knew the one by Alice Weidel, and I watched the one by Katharina Dröge, who was unknown to me. No wonder I didn't know the lady, her speech doesn't reflect my reality about the state of our country. Numbers are important for establishing a new reality in people's minds. They are a great tool of manipulation to suggest majorities for certain causes. Numbers themselves do not lie. It is the counting method and the appropriate presentation of the figures that contain the suggestion and manipulation. And it works, not for everyone, but for many. These figures, which were announced daily via all channels during the coronavirus crisis, sound powerful and frightening on their own as long as the survey, the analysis and the intention behind it are not questioned and must not be questioned! Most people don't bother. They allow these figures to seep into their brains in passing, where they are consolidated as reality and the brain reacts accordingly. It automatically switches into fear mode and thus into survival mode in the face of the danger suggested to it. It's a great mechanism that we all need, but it has its weak points. The brain does not distinguish whether a danger is real or is merely suggested to us as a danger as long as we do not consciously confront it.how much reality is there in the effects of the so-called climate crisis? Natural disasters and climate change have existed since the beginning of our beautiful planet, they have made our planet habitable and ensured biodiversity. I think most of humanity agrees that we should be more careful with our resources and nature. However, I always have a very uneasy feeling whenever there is a debate about combating the climate crisis that it is not really about the climate and nature. There's no congruence in my brain at all. It seems to me to be more about a kind of "climate adaptation" according to the ideas of a few who benefit from it at the expense of the population. In my opinion, it is a modern business model that is being established in the same way, through doomsday scenarios, underpinned by figures and powerful images that target precisely these mechanisms in the brain. Time will tell how much "truth" there is in this new religion.

  10. A new district administrator was elected in our district (NRW). Voter turnout 27% of eligible voters. This is then "talked up" in the local press. Not a word is said about the 73% of non-voters. Now it's on to the so-called run-off. I'm taking bets that they will slip below 20%.

  11. Interesting figures, dear Mr. Löcke! I hadn't even noticed the obviously increased public interest in opinions expressed by AfD politicians. - The YouTube algorithm also serves "right-wing extremist ranters" and only brings the relevant videos to my attention. Maybe it's the sensationalism of the ordinary do-gooder who simply can't believe what these enemies of democracy are saying and watches the AfD videos with equal parts fascination and horror? I actually have a different impression. In political discussions with friends, colleagues and relatives, I always find that the people I talk to agree with the AfD's credo and election program - but you can't vote for the AfD! They are right-wing radicals! Then you just vote for the usual evil again and complain about the bad policies afterwards. - The question is how bad our country still has to be before a relevant number of voters dare to do the unspeakable and vote outside the political mainstream.

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