The often mentioned “silent majority” are actually latent fascists who were previously apathetic.

You saw the silent majority on the streets when that “remigration” talk leaked out of closed AfD circles: The streets were literally not big enough to contain them. 70% oppose any other party going in coalition with them (unsurprisingly, the rest are AfD, BSW, or FDP voters), about half want to see them banned, which is a question more nuanced than “I want them gone”.

I guess that after a ban, the BSW could gobble up most of that support for them. And while Wagenknecht is a clown and at least veering towards Nazbol she’s far less of a danger to democracy.

The Steam store is a nightmare for discovery.

It’s brilliant actually. I mean it’s still arguably a shitshow, but Steam is very good at letting shovelware sink to the bottom of their algorithms.

1000xResist was an indie title that was named GOTY 2024 by a few publications, but they only just crossed 100,000 copies sold about a week ago.

Not bad for a story-focussed adventure.

Sifu sold 3m, Baba is You about half a million. The game may be brilliant, the GOTY award may be perfectly deserved, still ain’t going to play it because it’s not my genre. “Story-focussed adventure” is like a quarter of a step above walking simulator when it comes to ludological complexity I’d rather read a book. That’s of course just me, for the general audience… well, it’s niche.

Also btw young people never drove sales. The reason is simple: They’re broke.

Solve anxiety. The hatred, the desire to put down others, all that is caused by anxiety short-circuiting people’s minds, acting on, put very hand-wavily, reptilian instead of higher mammalian instincts, including social ones¹. Without underlying anxieties fascism has nothing to latch onto, and nothing to make even worse so it can propagate and perpetuate itself.

Key anxieties to address nowadays, and feel free to add your own, are economical security, “will I be poor in the future”, as well as social alienation, “can people be trusted”. Both require overcoming neoliberalism. Also, yes, solve anxieties regarding the future of the planet but that’s more about saving the planet so we may continue to live on it than anti-fascism for the simple reason that eco-fascism is overall negligible as a political force.

How? First of all, stop acting from anxiety.

¹ Is that where the “lizard people” thing comes from?

If anything, more potent weed is less harmful because you are putting a smaller amount of burned plant material into your lungs to get the same effect.

Yes. The actual issue is the THC/CBD ratio, CBD being antipsychotic as well as blocking the metabolisation of THC into more psychoactive variants.

Add to that criminalisation and the desire of dealers to impress clueless customers with head highs and you get selective breeding for high-THC strains. I’d say the main reason I stopped back in the days was because there was essentially nothing but white willow on the market, ~20% THC ~1% CBD. And that’s not even the worst of the strains.

Hopefully legalisation cuts back on that BS, with every satchel coming with test results showing people how off-kilter or balanced the weed is. There’s certainly no shortage of CBD-heavy seeds available, the market is obviously there.

The Chinese are making a lot of noise about Taiwan and that’s why Taiwan is the last place you should be looking at. Look at Outer Manchuria, instead, especially in the face of Russian weakness and looming chaos.

They tried that before, the Verfassungsschutz will say, publicly, something along the lines of “Two of these 500 quotes are from our moles”. That way they protect their sources, vanishing in the general soup, while the court can see that it’s party sentiment, not something injected into the party by the Verfassungsschutz. Judges will be able to see the whole uncensored thing one way or the other though it might not necessarily the judges actually judging the case: There’s special in camera senates in high courts for when some agency really doesn’t want to show stuff. They can look at absolutely anything, and all they have to judge is “yep, it was indeed 2 of 500 quotes”.

I was talking about the foundation itself, not foundation+subsidiaries. And yes ever since the writing was on the wall wrt. google funds they’ve been putting more and more money in investments to make sure they can survive, as opposed to grants. Still keeping with the foundation’s mandate, though, e.g. all their VC investments into AI are the polar opposite of what the likes of OpenAI are doing. Kinda sceptical e.g. huggingface will ever turn a profit, much less a significant one, but it’s important to have them.

Firefox is a way for them to make money for their charitable projects. Always has been.

They’ve been opening secondary streams of income – also via Firefox, like pocket and stuff, but it’s unclear whether that would even allow them to keep developing Firefox. It certainly would mean that Mozilla doesn’t have any money left over to give to others which is their main purpose of existing.

If you actually had a look at their actual numbers, they’re a charity you know, they’re public, you’d see that the bulk of money is spent on charity. Mozilla has never been a charity to develop Firefox, Firefox has always been the breadwinner for Mozilla’s charity operations.

The article, most of all, misses that it’s about CBD to THC ratio, not raw overall cannabinoid content. CBD is an antipsychotic and on the cusp of getting the stamp of approval for treating schizophrenia. Strains on the street, in the meantime, have been bred for THC at the expense of CBD because it’s THC which gives a head-high, makes consumers believe they got strong stuff.

The deeper question, overall, is why we live in a society which prompts people to take anxiolytics to cope.

Not really any more, mostly though because other companies got into the business and aren’t charging an arm and a leg for carbon dioxide. Other manufacturers also aren’t pointlessly incompatible to each other.

Sparkling water, of course, is still ridiculously popular over here, and carbonating at home is convenient. Then, though: Tap water + soda stream co2 is more expensive than store-brand bottled water.

Back in the days the Spanish Inquisition would become suspicious of people who seemed to not eat pork.

In other words, yes, precisely, they’re trying to sus out heretics. Don’t want to be mistaken for one? Perform the rites publicly, then.

Legally, the only thing that happened is that the BfV can now use their whole toolbox of covert instruments against the AfD. The federal government, parliament, or a majority of states can always starts proceedings before the constitutional court to ban a party. Of course you don’t want to do that if you have a flimsy case, but in principle there’s no requirements at all.

Politically, it means that politicians have less of an excuse to not open proceedings.

Side note I doubt those 1100 pages are all the BfV has on the party: In their press release (the actual report is still classified) they only mentioned the AfD attacking human dignity, while for a court case you’d definitely also want to argue the wanting to dismantle democracy part, and if that was in the 1100 pages then the press release would’ve included language saying so (that’s just how bureaucracy works in Germany, summaries don’t randomly leave stuff out).

I very much doubt Germany could grant Netanyahu immunity from arrest without withdrawing from the ICC, which is not going to happen. Just because Merz says he’d like to do something doesn’t mean it’s going to happen, he’s running his mouth all the time.

Nah there’s also plenty of mismanagement, in particular spending the cold war being a one product economy and thinking that the USSR will be around forever, overpaying for sugar and sending industrial goods in return.

Venezuela messing up royally and not being able to subsidise Cuba with their oil any more is a more recent problem, but pretty much the same pattern.

Cubans are masters of improvisation and the party is smart enough not to interfere with the people’s capacity to self-organise to get around acute problems, unlike Americans and Russians they don’t micro-manage for the sake of micro-managing, but they’re very much not masters of strategic planning.

Over long, better short, Cuba has to increase its value-add and labour productivity. Export fewer resources, more and most of all more high-value finished products, also become energy independent. It’s nice that they can help out Venezuela with toilet paper but truth be told it’s not really a product that’s highly sought after on the world market because by and large, countries are better at not fucking up their economy than Venezuela.

Or, differently put: Wake me when Cuba exports electric buses. That, preferably, look weirdly like 40s, 50s American cars, in a retrofuturistic way. Or something more niche, but have something that’s not rum, tobacco, or honey. Oh, pharmaceuticals, gotta give them that.

and to do that, we need to fight disinformation and far-right propaganda on social media.

Nope. I mean it’s not wrong to do that, but it would be mistaken to see that as anything but a flanking measure: You can’t fight affect with cognition. We need real-world policy which alleviates people’s anxieties.

A hypothetical Maltese jet could take care of it, yes.

Malta isn’t part of NATO but I’d guess they have an air policing deal with Italy in one way or the other.

The Commission already has an instance and the ECJ also has an instance. I didn’t find one for the parliament, they might not even want to have one but instead leave it to the parties. A parliament instance would amount to the EP president policing parliamentarian’s speech not just inside parliament but also outside of it, kinda iffy.

It wasn’t necessary for previous cases: The SRP (NSDAP successor) and KPD (run by the KGB, laid siege to parliament) had no political hand-wringing attached to them, legally they were also pretty much open and shut cases. Banning the NPD was never politically contentious, but needed some work for the legal part so it took a while for proceedings to be opened.

That is: It’s not necessarily a long and arduous process.

The reason it’s such a slog with the AfD is because it didn’t start out as a Nazi party – it slowly, over multiple internal putsches, turned into one. It got normalised, simply by people becoming accustomed to its presence, at about the same speed at which it radicalised. Had it started out with the programme it has now it would have long since been banhammered.

Oh, well, add piracy to the list.