Am Fri, 21 Nov 2008 13:51:13 -0800 schrieb Darren New:
> Ah, so, because Hitler was bad, we're going to make sure you're not
> allowed to advocate a political leader from a similar party? In spite of
>   it being a democracy? :-)

No, no, no ;). Basically it's just forbidden to organize a mob randomly 
murdering other people. If you lead a party which includes peoples of 
mobs randomly murdering other people, but you don't tell this people 
explicitly to murder, nothing prevents you of becoming Bundeskanzler (if 
you get elected). The NPD exists and everyone knows, that there are Nacis 
in it (and they are the mobs in Germany murdering randomly people). But 
despite the failure to forbid this party was mainly due to other reasons 
(german secret service had to many people in it) it is highly doubtable, 
if the NPD could be forbidden on grounds of that law. Actually the 
majority of current politicians right now are against forbidding them, on 
the grounds, that it would legally not go through.

> 
> The problem with all these sorts of things is the slippery slope, and
> the application in ways that the original authors didn't intend. That
> always happens here: the politicians pass some overly broad law,
> everyone complains it's overly broad, the politicians say "it would
> never be used in that way, that makes no sense."  And then you get
> regular people being shipped off to foreign countries because they might
> be terrorists.

Well, the judges in germany are very independent and if they think the 
law is overly broad and unconstitutional, they don't apply it (Ok, don't 
quote me on the technical process of that - but in practice it means 
going back to the drawing board for the politicians). If the politicians 
make unconstitutional laws they will be sacked at some point (sometimes 
it takes the highest court - but independence of that court is taken very 
seriously. While I agree, that slippery slope is a problem in a lot of 
cases (surveillance laws for example are going overboard right now) in 
general it levels out after some time if people notice that they went 
over board. BTW, I found that blog of an american law professor living in 
germany quite interesting (he also writes about general stuff, but the 
posts about the law made some differences clearer to me - for a german 
the american law system looks ridiculous at first sight. However I think 
that has mostly to do with a lack of knowledge of the details. Maybe it 
is the same vice versa.):

http://andrewhammel.typepad.com/

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