> "Indeed, party sources told the media that although the leaked emails appeared to be authentic, the AI-generated summaries appeared to contain several inaccuracies."
Which is why I'm so confused that they did this instead of just publishing a "best hits" of excerpts or something, if the amount of content was an issue
> What is unusual is that the leaked emails are not published on the site directly. Instead, AI-generated summaries are shown, categorised and rated from Low to Critical.
Interesting choice. I don't feel like I'm at the comfort level where I would really trust any of those summaries - although I can respect the reasoning behind it.
I assume because of the high quantity they try to protect individual's privacy that way. Otherwise going by hand through each email would take years for PII and other links redaction.
Because the leakers might have ethical standards? Same as with snowden not dumping everything directly and letting journalists scrub it first. None of this actually applies though because everything (supposedly) got leaked in the torrent.
That's a weird take? It's entirely plausible to think that some of the info should be in the public (illegal stuff, prove of bad character, what's their strategy etc.) but not every PII in it? Like bank accounts, private addresses, private photos.
>Youre absolutely right. The fascist and de humanizing content might just as well be hallucinated. /s
It might not be entirely hallucinated, but it's still a real concern given all the discussions about the AfD inevitably gets filled with people engaging in motte-and-bailey tactics. For instance, are the AfD literally against democracy, or against the constitution (vaguely defined, because they're discriminating against immigrants)? In cases like these rough summaries inevitably mangle the exact policy positions, which might make them look better/worse than they actually are. You might think "AfD are fascists anyways, who cares if their positions get mangled?", but that's terrible epistemics.
"Dominic Cummings warned on The Spectator's Quite Right! podcast that Whitehall and the civil service would resort to illegal tactics—such as leaking confidential medical and tax records or bugging phones—to prevent Nigel Farage and Reform UK from gaining power."
>Dominic Mckenzie Cummings (born 25 November 1971) is a British political strategist who served as Chief Adviser to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson from 24 July 2019 until he resigned on 13 November 2020.[1]
Why should we care about a former government advisor who resigned 6 years ago, and isn't even in the same party as the government in power?
A) He's been closer to the levers of power than probably either of us, so would have a better view of how it would work and b) he didn't resign in disgrace.
>A) He's been closer to the levers of power than probably either of us, so would have a better view of how it would work and
But that's not an infinite excuse to extrapolate from one person's statement to the whole of uk political establishment. Not to mention he's not a totally neutral party either. According to wikipedia he's against the conservative party and supports Reform UK.
"In 2025 he dropped calls for the creation of a start-up party to replace the Tories and in a blog post in March talked up Reform UK."
I'd like to hope so, but the security services have been remarkably relaxed about the far right and focus all their energy on environmentalists and little old ladies holding up "Palestine Action" signs.
Or they could just let people vote for the party they agree with? Whether that party favours Palestine or limited immigration or whatever their policy is.
If you were paying attention, you'd see that Reform are predictably self-destructing due to their racism, jingoism, corruption, misogyny, governance, indiscipline and exposure of their lies to the public.
Dominic Cummings at best is a male Ayn Rand, decrying, denouncing and challenging everything but happy to accept largesse or break the rules as it suits him. I quite like him, as it goes.
I think Dominic Cummings is analogous to the stereotypical developer with the brain the size of a planet who never accomplishes much in a team/company because he is bad at working with and through other people.
I think Reform are self-destructing in part due to re-hiring Tory ministers responsible for the awful state of the country.
I don't think so either. We have some crazy ideological forces at play right now and you're told it's bad to not support people burning cities down, but you're told that by people who don't work, while you're working 80 hour weeks
We have to stop being afraid of having our own opinions
The BitDefender article immediately goes of with labeling AfD as far-right. This is going on all over Europe when a party is against mass-immigration and "sponsoring Ukraine till the last Ukrainian". And at the same time the streets in EU's big cities look worse than ever: unsafer, uncleaner and more un-European than ever before. Immigration is not good for us, and receiving a label "extreme rightwing" (and Fascist, and Nazi) simply because you want it to stop is loosing it's power... I dont mind to be called as such anymore (and I used to even call others this label).
In European vocabulary these "anti immigration of economically not-useful people" parties are not very rightwing: they are in favor of keeping the social benefit programs alive (that's why they want immigration of such people to stop).
Far right means hate extremists more than anything. As in, you can't call them nazis or racists until you have proof you can take to the congress (?) to get the party disbarred.
> It is about a party exclusion procedure against an AfD district executive who is said to have expressed Holocaust denial and glorification of Hitler. About a local leader who had to resign because of a "Heil Hitler" Christmas card, or about a member who is said to have written about "Muslims" and the "dirty monster Merkel". Another documented email subject is: "Sale of swastika flags and drugs at the information booth in Bottrop by district board member - measures required."
So it's all about the party correctly applying procedures to keep out the people supposed to make up too large a portion of the party?
We are in an era now where media publish leaks without having gone to the effort of compiling the facts into a story, just AI summaries. And in past cases where there have been revelations with even global significance, we get silence from authorities too.
Maybe there's a better write up somewhere, or a month wasn't sufficient for media to work through it all, but I just got a bad Groundhog Day kind of vibe from the vagueness in that article. Is this what news is now? All the information, none of the journalism, none of the consequences.
Well this is an emerging story, there may be more here.
The Corbyn case was transparently a factional fight with pro-banker neoliberal faction (Mandelson). It was a rallying cry for likeminded people to organise against him with a more respectable excuse for dislike of his policies than 'it might upset bankers'. That's essentially public record now, thanks to Epstein.
Maybe it has nothing to do with the voters directly. This might frighten some of the backers who thought they would remain anonymous. When you shine a light into a dark corner, the roaches scatter.
When the state holds the biggest light and has the darkest corners, you really have to question which one are the real roaches
If we think that those in power don't also have secrets and skeletons then perhaps we're not thinking at all.
Instead of trying to play kill the character all the time, we should be focusing on pragmatic solutions to domestic and regional problems. But that would require people not being afraid of cancel culture and politics not being so toxic that good people stay well away.
I think the voters, at least some part the voters, would be more reluctant to engage online due to this type of leak. Other than that, they'd continue with their convictions as before.
They should look at the current state of their country, look at the policies of the various parties, and select the party that in their judgement would move the country in the direction think it should move.
I know this is bait, but maybe their reaction should be to go and vote so that the persons who think rape should be OK (as per leaked e-mails btw) don't get to decide?
That doesn't seem comparable. The DNC and RNC were hacked by different actors.
My point was that this news is of the hack, and not of bombshell revelations from the emails themselves, which kind of indicates there's nothing there.
If you found the smoking gun, you would say "look I found a smoking gun!".
> right wing has been the normal ideology for most of human history, real democracy is/has center-right views
Before you make such a bold claim you might want to consider that there isn't even a very stable definition of right and left wing throughout history.
When peasants lived in a feudal states, did they have left/right views? Or did they their political opinions actually matter because the only people who had any control were the Lords above them (who more than likely did have a more modern 'right wing' attitude).
There are still some good hackers left. Hopefully this will send in place a party-shutdown procedure, because their voters don't care about already their apparent connections to Putin and Nazis. They have been grown on pure hate and 'protest against the system', and when they are in power, their voters will find out that they are much much more corrupt and uninterested in the public good than anything they claim the current 'establishment' would be. Exact same trajectory as pre WWII.
The limiting factor on a party’s ability to operate should be public support, not political permission. This is basic Democracy. If not, you’re giving those in power the authority to decide which political views are allowed to exist. That's Authoritarianism.
There is no such system as "political permission". Everyone is able to found a party. But of course any party has to act within the law, especially the constitution. Thus, the high court can, in a complex proceeding ban parties which are violating the constitution by their actions or even plan to overthrow the constitution.
The power to determine which political groups can exist is itself anti-Democratic. People can debate if the AfD is anti-Democratic or not but if they are not allowed to exist, then the government is already anti-Democratic.
> Hopefully this will send in place a party-shutdown procedure, because their voters don't care about already their apparent connections to Putin and Nazis
You are talking down to up to 40% of certain areas in Germany, convinced you know better and that hey are all either nazis or too dumb to recognise they're voting for them.
I don't think that popularity should factor into the consideration of a ban. Lots of objectively bad ideas can trend for a while which is why modern democracies emphasize constitutionalism and institutionalism. Would you not, for instance, have advocated for a ban of the NSDAP even in 1933 knowing the consequences?
Yes, had the consequences been known that would have been a good idea. The same is true for the Bolshevik party in Russia, Mao's communist party in China, Chavez's party in Venezuela, Castro's in Cuba, Pol Pot's in Cambodia, Khomeini should never have been allowed back in Iran, Lenin should never have been allowed back into Russia, etcetera. Hindsight is always 20/20 but that does not help when deciding which parties are allowed to partake of the democratic process.
AfD is a right-wing nationalist party which - like many if not most right-wing parties - does have its cadre of people with more extreme views. There'll be right-wing extremists in CDU/CSU (Christian democrats and Christian social union) as well but far fewer than in AfD since that party is more right-wing than CDU and CSU.
The same is true for left-wing parties like the communist party which calls itself 'Die Linke' where you'll find a large host of extremists. It also happens to be the party which under another name was responsible for the Stalinist government of what was ironically called the 'German Democratic Republic', three words with only one - German - being truthful. The same goes for Die Grünen (the greens) which is a far-left party grown out of the environmentalist movement which has taken up the 'progressive omnicause' of climate, migration and "palestine" as their leitmotif. You'll find left-wing extremists in the SPD (social democrats) as well but far fewer than in Die Linke and Die Grünen since those parties are further to the left.
As to AfD as a party being "far-right", well... not really. Their program isn't extreme right-wing, it mixes centre-right with centre-left policies. Their leader, Alice Weidel isn't extreme right-wing - she'd have to banish herself for being a lesbian in a union with another lesbian which tends to not go over that well in far-right circles. What supposedly makes them "far-right" is the same as which supposedly makes other similar parties in other countries - PVV in the Netherlands, SD in Sweden, Vlaams Belang in Belgium, Reform in the UK, RN in France etc. - fit under that category: their stance on migration from mostly non-western, largely islamic countries. They oppose such migration because they consider the large influx of people who either do not want to assimilate or integrate or, even if they wanted to do so can not due to their sheer numbers as a threat to their cultures and societies. Many people agree with these positions which has given these parties a boost and often brought them into significant minority to actual majority positions. This is seen as a threat by those who consider immigration from those regions and cultures to be necessary for some reason - Protestant Christian idealism, import of new voters to replace the traditional workers who moved to AfD and similar parties, payment of some imagined debt of honour related to historical colonialism, import of conflicting cultures to destabilise society (i.e. 'deconstruction') to make it ready for revolution, etc. - giving rise to the application of labels like "far-right" - especially powerful in a country like Germany which has been ruled by extremists (left and right) before with disastrous results for both the country as well as the world - to dissuade people from voting for them. Since these groups tend to have control over most of the mass media they have used them to try to convince the populace that these parties need to be banished, forbidden, excluded and shunned.
What these "progressives" do not seem to have counted with is the strong rise of such parties every time they urged them to be excluded, disbanded or forbidden. Disbanding a party which only gets a few votes is doable given the control these groups have over the mass media. Doing the same to a party which gets 1/3 of the vote is a wholly different thing and raises the question who is the more "extreme", the "progressives" who want to use what are considered to be "Soviet-style" tactics to get rid of their opposition or the parties threatened with banishment? It gets even more fraught with error when those "progressives" call for the protection of "Our Democracy". Whose democracy is it, who is the "δῆμος" (dèmos, ancient Greek for "ordinary citizens" or "common people") they're talking about? If those ordinary citizens want to vote the opposition into power should they be allowed to do so? The answer is clearly "yes" for those who take the word Democracy seriously but just as clearly "no" for those who consider their own ideology more important than the will of the masses. These "progressives" often claim that once parties like AfD come into power they'll get rid of "Our Democracy" as a justification why they should not be allowed to participate in elections and, should they happen to have been able to do so and won a large number of votes their representatives should be excluded from any and all positions of power. Again, Quo Vadis, Democratia?
Even if the risk were real, should a democracy be allowed to vote itself out of existence by handing over power to one of the extremist groups whether those be far-right, far-left, islamic or otherwise? Is Popper's paradox of tolerance for the intolerant to be ignored?
>Yes, had the consequences been known that would have been a good idea.
Yes, but only because the government that was in power at the time. It would have been a bad idea to ban the NSDAP if the government in power was far worse than the NSDAP. You can never justify granting that power simply by pointing to an exceptionally bad party.
Two things can be true simultaneously. As in, those AfD-voters-who-aren’t-racist-or-actual-Nazis have legitimate reasons to be angry at mainstream politicians and want meaningful change, and they’re making a bad choice to support the AfD in their desperation.
That isn't, at all, what GP said, and the perpetual seeking of fake victimhood by y'all is so deeply boring and performative.
But hey, if 40% of people are dumber than the median, then I guess you've uncovered basic statistics. So that's something. Come on, give me a nice 'but what about' now - keep to the script. We all know nothing original or insightful is coming.
And all the things you listed as proof are what AfD is firmly against. You also forgot gay couples having children as something that should be allowed only to the party leadership.
Which is why I'm so confused that they did this instead of just publishing a "best hits" of excerpts or something, if the amount of content was an issue
Edit: There is also personal data in that leak, so that needs to be cleaned first.
Interesting choice. I don't feel like I'm at the comfort level where I would really trust any of those summaries - although I can respect the reasoning behind it.
I think they could've redacted using a small model like OpenAI's privacy-filter model instead of rewriting.
So the leakers may have already been under some pressure to not end up in jail for doing the right thing.
An email states wishes to make hand bag leather from refuge skin.
But yeah, the leak basically reports forks found in a kitchen, nothing new.
It might not be entirely hallucinated, but it's still a real concern given all the discussions about the AfD inevitably gets filled with people engaging in motte-and-bailey tactics. For instance, are the AfD literally against democracy, or against the constitution (vaguely defined, because they're discriminating against immigrants)? In cases like these rough summaries inevitably mangle the exact policy positions, which might make them look better/worse than they actually are. You might think "AfD are fascists anyways, who cares if their positions get mangled?", but that's terrible epistemics.
The same will happen to Reform/Restore in the UK.
"Dominic Cummings warned on The Spectator's Quite Right! podcast that Whitehall and the civil service would resort to illegal tactics—such as leaking confidential medical and tax records or bugging phones—to prevent Nigel Farage and Reform UK from gaining power."
Why should we care about a former government advisor who resigned 6 years ago, and isn't even in the same party as the government in power?
edit: retracted the "resigned in disgrace" part
But that's not an infinite excuse to extrapolate from one person's statement to the whole of uk political establishment. Not to mention he's not a totally neutral party either. According to wikipedia he's against the conservative party and supports Reform UK.
"In 2025 he dropped calls for the creation of a start-up party to replace the Tories and in a blog post in March talked up Reform UK."
> b) he didn't resign in disgrace.
You're right. I edited my comment.
If you were paying attention, you'd see that Reform are predictably self-destructing due to their racism, jingoism, corruption, misogyny, governance, indiscipline and exposure of their lies to the public.
Dominic Cummings at best is a male Ayn Rand, decrying, denouncing and challenging everything but happy to accept largesse or break the rules as it suits him. I quite like him, as it goes.
I think Reform are self-destructing in part due to re-hiring Tory ministers responsible for the awful state of the country.
We have to stop being afraid of having our own opinions
Yesterday The Economist interviewed AfD's leader, in proper English:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cGGDu8sgXY
The BitDefender article immediately goes of with labeling AfD as far-right. This is going on all over Europe when a party is against mass-immigration and "sponsoring Ukraine till the last Ukrainian". And at the same time the streets in EU's big cities look worse than ever: unsafer, uncleaner and more un-European than ever before. Immigration is not good for us, and receiving a label "extreme rightwing" (and Fascist, and Nazi) simply because you want it to stop is loosing it's power... I dont mind to be called as such anymore (and I used to even call others this label).
In European vocabulary these "anti immigration of economically not-useful people" parties are not very rightwing: they are in favor of keeping the social benefit programs alive (that's why they want immigration of such people to stop).
> It is about a party exclusion procedure against an AfD district executive who is said to have expressed Holocaust denial and glorification of Hitler. About a local leader who had to resign because of a "Heil Hitler" Christmas card, or about a member who is said to have written about "Muslims" and the "dirty monster Merkel". Another documented email subject is: "Sale of swastika flags and drugs at the information booth in Bottrop by district board member - measures required."
So it's all about the party correctly applying procedures to keep out the people supposed to make up too large a portion of the party?
We are in an era now where media publish leaks without having gone to the effort of compiling the facts into a story, just AI summaries. And in past cases where there have been revelations with even global significance, we get silence from authorities too.
Maybe there's a better write up somewhere, or a month wasn't sufficient for media to work through it all, but I just got a bad Groundhog Day kind of vibe from the vagueness in that article. Is this what news is now? All the information, none of the journalism, none of the consequences.
This was, bizarrely, the same line of attack used against Corbyn, for being "insufficiently against" anti-semitism.
The Corbyn case was transparently a factional fight with pro-banker neoliberal faction (Mandelson). It was a rallying cry for likeminded people to organise against him with a more respectable excuse for dislike of his policies than 'it might upset bankers'. That's essentially public record now, thanks to Epstein.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50163502
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50184270
If we think that those in power don't also have secrets and skeletons then perhaps we're not thinking at all.
Instead of trying to play kill the character all the time, we should be focusing on pragmatic solutions to domestic and regional problems. But that would require people not being afraid of cancel culture and politics not being so toxic that good people stay well away.
For getting hacked? No (other than judging the technical team competency).
Same applies here.
Do remember though that the RNC was also hacked at the same time as the DNC, but only one was released right before the election.
My point was that this news is of the hack, and not of bombshell revelations from the emails themselves, which kind of indicates there's nothing there.
If you found the smoking gun, you would say "look I found a smoking gun!".
Before you make such a bold claim you might want to consider that there isn't even a very stable definition of right and left wing throughout history.
When peasants lived in a feudal states, did they have left/right views? Or did they their political opinions actually matter because the only people who had any control were the Lords above them (who more than likely did have a more modern 'right wing' attitude).
Rewarding people for being victims just incentivizes frailty.
Let's save democracy by abolishing democracy!
Look how well that idea worked out in Turkey. Authoritarian movements use democracy like a train and get off when they get power
You are talking down to up to 40% of certain areas in Germany, convinced you know better and that hey are all either nazis or too dumb to recognise they're voting for them.
Quo Vadis, Democratia? Ask mentalgear...
AfD is a right-wing nationalist party which - like many if not most right-wing parties - does have its cadre of people with more extreme views. There'll be right-wing extremists in CDU/CSU (Christian democrats and Christian social union) as well but far fewer than in AfD since that party is more right-wing than CDU and CSU.
The same is true for left-wing parties like the communist party which calls itself 'Die Linke' where you'll find a large host of extremists. It also happens to be the party which under another name was responsible for the Stalinist government of what was ironically called the 'German Democratic Republic', three words with only one - German - being truthful. The same goes for Die Grünen (the greens) which is a far-left party grown out of the environmentalist movement which has taken up the 'progressive omnicause' of climate, migration and "palestine" as their leitmotif. You'll find left-wing extremists in the SPD (social democrats) as well but far fewer than in Die Linke and Die Grünen since those parties are further to the left.
As to AfD as a party being "far-right", well... not really. Their program isn't extreme right-wing, it mixes centre-right with centre-left policies. Their leader, Alice Weidel isn't extreme right-wing - she'd have to banish herself for being a lesbian in a union with another lesbian which tends to not go over that well in far-right circles. What supposedly makes them "far-right" is the same as which supposedly makes other similar parties in other countries - PVV in the Netherlands, SD in Sweden, Vlaams Belang in Belgium, Reform in the UK, RN in France etc. - fit under that category: their stance on migration from mostly non-western, largely islamic countries. They oppose such migration because they consider the large influx of people who either do not want to assimilate or integrate or, even if they wanted to do so can not due to their sheer numbers as a threat to their cultures and societies. Many people agree with these positions which has given these parties a boost and often brought them into significant minority to actual majority positions. This is seen as a threat by those who consider immigration from those regions and cultures to be necessary for some reason - Protestant Christian idealism, import of new voters to replace the traditional workers who moved to AfD and similar parties, payment of some imagined debt of honour related to historical colonialism, import of conflicting cultures to destabilise society (i.e. 'deconstruction') to make it ready for revolution, etc. - giving rise to the application of labels like "far-right" - especially powerful in a country like Germany which has been ruled by extremists (left and right) before with disastrous results for both the country as well as the world - to dissuade people from voting for them. Since these groups tend to have control over most of the mass media they have used them to try to convince the populace that these parties need to be banished, forbidden, excluded and shunned.
What these "progressives" do not seem to have counted with is the strong rise of such parties every time they urged them to be excluded, disbanded or forbidden. Disbanding a party which only gets a few votes is doable given the control these groups have over the mass media. Doing the same to a party which gets 1/3 of the vote is a wholly different thing and raises the question who is the more "extreme", the "progressives" who want to use what are considered to be "Soviet-style" tactics to get rid of their opposition or the parties threatened with banishment? It gets even more fraught with error when those "progressives" call for the protection of "Our Democracy". Whose democracy is it, who is the "δῆμος" (dèmos, ancient Greek for "ordinary citizens" or "common people") they're talking about? If those ordinary citizens want to vote the opposition into power should they be allowed to do so? The answer is clearly "yes" for those who take the word Democracy seriously but just as clearly "no" for those who consider their own ideology more important than the will of the masses. These "progressives" often claim that once parties like AfD come into power they'll get rid of "Our Democracy" as a justification why they should not be allowed to participate in elections and, should they happen to have been able to do so and won a large number of votes their representatives should be excluded from any and all positions of power. Again, Quo Vadis, Democratia?
Even if the risk were real, should a democracy be allowed to vote itself out of existence by handing over power to one of the extremist groups whether those be far-right, far-left, islamic or otherwise? Is Popper's paradox of tolerance for the intolerant to be ignored?
Yes, but only because the government that was in power at the time. It would have been a bad idea to ban the NSDAP if the government in power was far worse than the NSDAP. You can never justify granting that power simply by pointing to an exceptionally bad party.
That isn't, at all, what GP said, and the perpetual seeking of fake victimhood by y'all is so deeply boring and performative.
But hey, if 40% of people are dumber than the median, then I guess you've uncovered basic statistics. So that's something. Come on, give me a nice 'but what about' now - keep to the script. We all know nothing original or insightful is coming.