Everyone thought the reason he’s making a fuzz is because he wants to sell more US gas. Which I still think was the reason: It’s not like he cared about anything else Russia did, or worried about Europe at any other point in time.

The German strategy of economic entanglement was successful in the sense that it successfully destroyed the Russian economy (making them reliant on imports instead of developing their own capacities), that entanglement stopping aggression was contingent on the Russians being rational.

As to the gas thing: Lots of long-term contracts. E.g. Austria is to this day I think receiving Russian gas, thing is if they stopped receiving they’d still have to pay. Germany got out of that conundrum because the Russians stopped delivering so Germany could cancel the contracts without penalties. You might ask “it’s war, why are we caring about contracts”, and the answer is it’s the Austrians.

Ukraine is no less European than Norway or the UK. Or Belarus, for that matter. Or Russia. The trouble we have with Russia is that they’re the only one of the family not having sworn off imperialism, or at least switched to soft-power imperialism, and before Euromaidan it wasn’t clear how much of a grasp Russia’s empire still had in Ukraine. Seemed to look better than in Belarus, but not to a degree one could count on.

Also there’s some wibbles about Western Europe thinking Ostpolitik would work with Far Eastern Europe, after all, it worked so well with Central Europe. Poles and the Baltics have been shouting “you’re idiots” from the top of their lungs, we ignored them, considered their shouting to be the result of PTSD. Which yes I mean it is but also they were right.

Meanwhile, Nestle is currently asking the Commission to please not dilute the supply chain act. Nestle, fucking Nestle, saying that regulations that require companies to enforce human rights standards abroad are good for their business, please keep them, don’t listen to the lobbying of smaller companies.

Not everyone is so caught-up in supply-side trickle-down economics as the US. Nestle sees profit in African markets, that’s a giant pool of consumer demand, they don’t want to be seen as slave holders, they also don’t want others to have a competition advantage in markets that don’t care as much about slave labour, so they’re arguing that those standards they profit from should apply to everyone, everywhere.

The OG Nazis never felt state repression. They would murder people and then judges set them free again because they were “obviously acting in the national interest”. The whole judiciary back then was trained during monarchy and did not consider law passed by mere parliament, the mob, as valid, they basically saw the Nazi’s autocracy as a downgraded version of having an emperor, but at least it wasn’t, *shudder*, democrats.

Loses something in translation like that. I’d say

JUST DO BAN THAT SHIT GONE ALREADY

AWAY INTO THE SHADOW REALM

Extra points for the use of capital Eszett.

These public funds should be subject to conditionality, and not be spent on “AI hyperscalers” or “lighting-fast growing unicorns” that eventually reproduce exploitative business models and further consolidate the economic and political power of large tech corporations. Instead, they must be reserved for open digital infrastructure, software, hardware and standards, similar to what the NLnet Foundation and the Sovereign Tech Agency are already doing on a smaller scale.

Boring. Good. Boring is good and Europe does boring well.

What about it not being about “someone else” did you not understand. Also, sounds like Russian copium.

We have common elections, we have a common citizenship, we have a common identity, in many areas it’s even common to identify as European over the nation state. That is, regional identity first, then European, then whatever nation state the region ended up in.

All just a treaty.

Nations, towns, families, your left hand agreeing with the right, all just treaties, got you. Maybe go a bit easier on the reductionism.

The EU is way more than just a treaty.

The church providing public housing where things like men kissing men could happen… not going to happen. It’s nothing or a monastery. Also doesn’t Italy have a right to housing.

If the Vatican was the size of the US I very much doubt they would have the policies they do.

The US can’t project power without aircraft carriers which would be gone quite quickly. Noone has a counter against stealth subs and Europe has both the best and plenty.

NATO could crumble and Germany and France would still come to Lithuania’s aid, they’re an EU member. With NATO gone UK might technically not be on the hook any more but they’d still get into the fray, despite their faults and their insistence that they’re not they’re still Europeans.

The actually difficult part would be stopping Poland from bee-lining for Moscow, nukes be damned. They don’t spend 4.7% of GDP because they plan on sitting back.

If you were born on the Google campus, would you expect them to give you citizenship? A job?

…Vatican City is not a state like any other, it’s a pet protectorate of Italy. Don’t compare a tiny speck of land with one of the biggest countries in the world, a country whose economy is reliant on the immigrants it wants to expel now. All that does is create a situation where employers can extort workers by saying “what’s the phone number of ICE, again”?

Vatican City is literally an office complex with a garden and a plaza with a whopping 764 residents in attached worker housing. They could enforce the same thing even if they were not sovereign.

“in einer Aufmachung, die geeignet und den Umständen nach darauf gerichtet ist, die Feststellung der Identität zu verhindern”. “Identitätsfeststellung” is an official act. If that is too fuzzy, have a look at the context which this is an extension to (“it is also forbidden”), and that is “Vollstreckungsmaßnahmen eines Trägers von Hoheitsbefugnissen abzuwehren”. And if that wasn’t clear enough have a look at jurisprudence which interprets the law in the sense “targeting at preventing identification by police”.

Also have you ever seen someone arrested just for wearing a clown costume.

And who knows maybe the police even identified every single Nazi before they started marching.

It’s only illegal if intended to counteract identification by police and, alas, they have a good argument that that’s not the reason why they’re masked: They want to avoid identification by antifa.

Of course the whole thing in principle applies in reverse, but tough chance not getting the whole counter-protest confused for a black bloc then. Much better in these instances to keep it peaceful anyway so you get maximum participation of the general population, numbers very much trump bruises when it comes to Nazi egos. If possible, go for straight humiliation.

Categorise Xeer then, please.

Not interested enough in the topic to actually watch the video but from the first seconds and description: Sucrose is made up of 50% fructose and 50% glucose. You can split it apart, producing inverted sugar, with nothing but water and heat, you can help that along a lot by adding acid, of which there’s a decent amount in coke. Any bottle of coke, even if made with 100% straight sucrose, will contain detectable levels of separate fructose and glucose before it hits the shelves.

The issue with HFCS btw is the “high fructose” part, fructose goes straight to the liver and gets turned into fatty tissue: At equal sweetness, HFCS is metabolically more dangerous, especially if you never dig into your fat reserves, than sucrose. inverted sugar is equally as good or bad as sucrose. It’d get split apart in your stomach with acid, in your mouth with enzymes, you name it.