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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026

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Two more CW aspects of the win of the Linke are accusations of antisemitism and the push to nationalize tenements.

Per claude (I have checked the sources in German, fair summary IMO):

The rapper Dahabflex sang "Yalla, yalla Intifada", "Death to the IDF" and "Intifada wie die PFLP" on the last Saturday in August at a Linke campaign event in Neukölln. The event was titled "Wütend auf den Kapitalismus". Audience members danced and clapped, and the Linke politicians present reportedly did not react.

Top candidate Elif Eralp said she condemned the performance in the strongest terms, that calls for violence and killing are absolutely unacceptable, and that those responsible should have intervened immediately. She also said she expects the Neukölln chapter to explain how this happened and draw consequences, and that she stands for protecting Jewish life and against all antisemitism.

Personally, I think that this is overblown. Calls for Intifada are most certainly not helpful for improving the ME situation. I am less convinced that they are clearly antisemitic, which I would define as hostility towards Jews due to their ethnicity. "Death to the IDF" is notably different from "death to the Jewish population of New York". Even opposing the existence of Israel as a Jewish ethnostate is not necessarily antisemitic, though most of the violent Palestinian groups revel in antisemitism.

I am sure that there are Ukrainians which are celebrating every killed Russian soldier. Again, I can understand where they are coming from, but still find it in poor taste and not particularly conductive to any worthwhile long term goals. Why should we tolerate them celebrating but not extend the same tolerance to the Palestinians in the West Bank?

Rappers are obviously going to say things for pure shock value. In retrospect, it might have been politically savvy not to invite that particular one. It generates a lot of publicity for the local candidate, but will expose their platform to predictable attacks.

Overall, this has me updating towards "Jewish organizations are instrumentalizing accusations of antisemitism to marginalize criticism of Israel".


I think there was a plebiscite on nationalizing the big companies holding tenements in Berlin a few years ago, and the Linke is campaigning for putting that into action. The idea is to make a law which will force these companies to sell their properties in Berlin to the city at a price they would not accept otherwise.

As a Georgist, I don't think this is the right way to do things (a land value tax capturing 100% of the gains would be the standard solution), but I am also not sure it is clearly bad? Land supply is perfectly inelastic, society gains nothing by people investing in it speculatively. Establishing "we will nationalize your land when we feel like it" should make a dent in the earning projection of a lot over the next 100 years, which might make housing more affordable. (Though NIMBYism and overregulation are separate issues which would need to be tackled, but the price of land is at least one obstacle.)

More generally, capitalism tends to run towards outcomes where their is a lot of value created (as opposed to competing systems), but that value ends up in the hands of the few. Because the utility people gain from their net worth only increases logarithmically (or so), thus gentle redistributive efforts might increase the utility sum.

Obviously this has the CDU even more excited than some rapper singing about Intifada. Chancellor Friedrich Merz (Blackrock) wants to make a law against nationalizations, but it is unclear if the federal government is even allowed to do that on constitutional grounds.