Thanks!

No. Some societies demonize condoms. Some schools have chastity clubs. Even in relatively liberal societies, the pill and day-after pills are very often available on prescription only. Even in relatively liberal societies, hospitals may just not perform abortions for religious reasons.

Although I suspect you trying to be sarcastic: You’re welcome.

With politics, there’s always more than a single topic. And while the chat-control topic and its persistence sucks, keeping democratic structures in place, this can be rolled back at some point. If democratic structures are no longer in place, this is just going to prove a useful tool to whatever authoritarian is in charge.

There are many motivations why people organize in right-wing movements, but protecting civil liberties, democracy, or human rights are not any of them. At least not in any honest way. They may use these topics as part of scare tactics and to paint scapegoats.

You: “The EU is getting too authoritarian, let’s vote for more and more vile authoritarianism!”

I so have a slogan for Hungary’s next presidency: Hungary’s Yuropean Presidency Exults Rednecks

Contact me, Orban! I am committed to licensing this.

This is so weird, not just in the Netherlands but in the UK as well: So many hardline anti-immigrant politicians are immigrants themselves or descendants of immigrants. Why?

LBBW is owned by The Länd the state of Baden-Württemberg. I.e., some of the money seized is tax money or at least public money. I think that’s why it’s newsworthy.

Habeck is a member of the Greens and the Greens are in fact rather sensible. They

a) have supported arming Ukraine (along with FDP, while SPD has dithered), almost from the start

b) are not at fault for the German Vote, rather that is the doing of FDP, silently supported by chancellor Scholz

Hungary’s government is gonna fit in much better with the EU crowd after the parliamentary elections next weekend, when droves of people will vote for the right-wing traitors of the ID and ECR factions. Yay!?

New nuclear reactors do not make sense as they routinely arrive late and massively over budget. They also steal away resources from cost-effective, realistic production with wind and solar. Also, CO2 is not the only environmental hazard there is: Humanity does not know how to safely store nuclear waste for hundred thousands of years.

Historically, reactors were sized like modern SMR concepts once. The issue was that they were even harder to secure and ratio of effort/benefit was worse than with fewer, larger reactors. Just like all nuclear projects, SMR construction will run behind schedule and outside of cost estimates, we’ve already seen that with the cancelled NuScale reactors in the US.

Governments need to stop throwing money at this deadbirth of a technology.

News websites often A/B test different headlines to see which one brings most clicks. In other words: Most online news articles have several different headlines associated with them.

The word “robust” is working overtime in this article, that’s for sure.

Besides that, I’d argue this article is a nothingburger: Both the minister of defense and the chancellor are SPD (who view more military involvement as bringing more risk). Meanwhile, the FDP-led ministry of finance wants almost every ministry to save money, and are already asking the ministry of exterior and the ministry of developmental aid to cut spending next year. Lindner won’t outright force military spending cuts but he certainly won’t allow increases either. Budget hawkishness trumps military hawkishness in FDP.

The Greens have almost no say in all of this, they hold the ministry of the exterior, which is not really a position of power.

Overall, Germany is going to be as uninvolved and fiscally “prudent” as NATO partners will allow, no matter the thoughts of representatives without real influence (i.e. everyone interviewed for this article).

If I may: The point is that the current generation of farmers is expendable to humanity. The ability to continue to generate food is not (as you alluded to in your own fallacy above).

If farmers are rapidly destroying their and our ability to generate food the way we have in the past millenia (by depleting soil, overusing water reserves, accelerating loss of critical biodiversity, and encouraging climate conditions not conducive to farming), we should maybe not be listening to their whining.

Not quite. Thanks for the correction.

I guess they’d need more of them though and try to get other EU members to spend money…? So it’s an industry politics angle?

Talk is cheap, let’s hope he doesn’t spend the money though.

That’s a hypothetical.

The non-hypothetical is that climate change is going to massively worsen outcomes of poor people, especially in tropical and subtropical regions. The rate of migration from Africa to Europe is only going to increase longer term, no matter how many dictatorships EU and UK are making deals with. Unless we act to limit climate change and help people in these regions to adapt. But in any case, we need to learn to better deal with migrants rather than try to keep them at bay at all cost.

It’s so weird. This Rwanda-deportations idea has been taken up by politicians in other countries as well, despite very obviously being completely illegal because of Human Rights. But as the UK government insists on pushing for this bogus illegal measure, “conservatives” all over Europe pretend like the idea is validated and supposedly it’s going to “solve migration”. Or something.

I don’t live in Paris but rain jackets, ponchos, even plastic bags are a thing.

Because they secretly like authoritarian systems?