eugyppius

So it seems the main things driving the German propaganda ‘response’ were ‘The Hammer and the Dance’ and some expert from an institution called ‘The University of Nottingham China’

which is exactly the dynamic (social media/murky-sourced crap -> junior staffers -> passed upward to clueless Managers wanting to Do Something) that I had been imagining/conjecturing back in April/May ‘20. But it’s still shocking to see actual evidence of it

this is some of the wildest shit i’ve ever seen. coming years will only yield more of this no wonder merkel gvt is DEATH CORONA all the time. as long as everybody is terrified the likelihood of dirty laundry like this getting traction is low

i think others asked you this before but missed the answer (and can't read the german) - how did it come out? was it the equivalent of a 'freedom of information act' request, or was it some insider leak?

yeah, foia-equivalent release to this group of lawyers, but they held it close, refused to show anyone, and there was only this article in Welt. then some insider with access to the release scanned the whole thing and leaked it to the internet.

what's crazy to me then is how much was unredacted. i suspect a FOIA attempt of this same type of stuff in the US would have redacted 3x as much under 'pre-decisional'/'internal deliberation' exceptions

well, they‘re not allowed to arbitrarily redact. every black-out has a little citation to the legal provision that permits them to do this. it‘s how one can intuit which redactions are „China“ (the referenced provision is ‚could harm international relations‘).

if they overreach here, their redactions will be overturned in court. but, another thing is, half the correspondence is totally blacked out. the leaker (who seems to have worked in haste) only scanned the non-blacked pages.