Based, thank you for your vote

Oh hey, my family did this back in early 2010s Italy. The local gold and silver dealership proudly displayed a copy of L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics near the counter, that was fun.

Iowa man hauls grain, becomes involved in a minor diplomatic incident. Meanwhile, someone else on the ship wonders if he’s fated to become his own ancestor.

Compare that with Ukraine’s 90% approval of independence in 1991.

71,5% for staying in the USSR in the March '91 referendum (83,5% turnout) - 92% against in the December 1991 one (84% turnout)

The public opinion turned around very fast in one year. Then the Communist Party and other left wing parties were the strongest in the late 90s. It’s like Lenin’s quote about there being weeks where decades happen. There’s no reason why it could not happen again or elsewhere.

Menthol, Pork and Pepper sausage, anyone?

A country like Argentina, beyond its meat industry, isn’t really a country with a significant impact on the environment - but this will hurt the local population.

By design even, considering what the aim of the current government is.

Venezuela’s economic crisis really began after oil prices fell drastically in 2014 and the west used Chavez’s death/Maduro’s election to increase pressure on the country via sanctions which for example made buying parts to maintain oil refineries difficult. Before that, it was doing about as well, or better (of course, failing to become independent from oil exports) compared to the other countries in Latin America.

Argentina was already in a crisis for the last …20 years-ish, but this acceleration of the crisis happened in a week even as Milei backpedaled on some potentially damaging promises like cutting trade with China.

They will probably lose territory to Poland as well if this keeps up

Sigh

No they won’t. It was a fringe position in the Polish far-right before the election and now that the libs have won it’s even less likely to happen.

Or, the fighting will eventually stop and the current status quo will remain permanent. It’s hard to tell.

It’s less wacky politicians (though there undoubtedly are some that actually believe that) and more nationalist propaganda - showing Poland as an island of righteousness against the removed west or something. It’s an attempt by the far-right Law and Justice Party to gain support via culture war and shocking people into disgust and hoping they back you based on that. Even at the cost of pretty blatant lies.

It works on my family, at least in part. 😕

0 chance. The SPD agrees, the CDU agrees, most of the AfD except the very nazi ones agree, the FDP and the Greens agree enthusiastically and likely even the Left Party is likely to have a sizeable amount of people voting for. Probably only the BSW (the left wing conservative splitter party of Sahra Wagenknecht) will vote against.

Well, there’s a bit of context behind it:

The name is a meme in Poland and comes from the 1969 adventure-comedy mini-series Jak rozpętałem drugą wojnę światową (How I unleashed World War 2).

In the second episode, the main character is in hiding insideof Nazi Germany after escaping from a Prisoner of War camp. He is eventually arrested for an unrelated reason and this is the fake name he gives to the German bureaucrat using the typewriter. Unsurprisingly, he is baffled by the spelling, especially once he gets it right… since he gets an even more difficult fake birthplace to spell by the MC.

Edit: If you mean Grzegorz, it means George and isn’t too difficult, I suppose.

Grzegorz is a perfectly normal name, and it’s not their fault if they have a difficult surname 😔

He’s not advocating Europe separate from the US, but become a military superpower in its own right by having as large a military as the US. I am sure both Petr Pavel and Joe Biden agree on enforcing the “rules-based international order”.

To think that the EU suddenly wants to ditch the US because they see them as a burden/dangerous is wishful thinking. In fact the only countries willing to do that might be France, because the local bourgeois don’t like to be limited by the US on pursuing their imperialist interests in Africa.

But yeah.

Additional Context: The state government of Bavaria (and several others around that same period, with similar ideas) passed a controversial reform of police laws in 2017-2018 (It was polemically called “The strictest police law since 1945”).

It included changes such as:

• increased allowance of use of personal data by the police forces.

• allowing the police to openly film and photograph people participating in public gatherings.

• allowing the police to infringe on postal secrecy and to confiscate mail without a person’s knowledge. (if given permission by the courts)

• allowing the use of police spies. Including even entering people’s homes if given permission.

As well as making previous restrictions such as on “probable danger” way more lax.

Raising the interest rate (i.e. making loans more expensive) is the measure taken if there is a belief that there is too much demand for goods by the population (Keynesian inflation theory) or too much money in circulation (Monetarist inflation theory). It’s taken in the hope that reducing the purchasing power of the population will slow the price increase down with falling demand. Which is why you had mainstream economists talking of say the need to increase unemployment (i.e. take people’s incomes away) and how wage increases are bad due to the supposed theory of the wage-price spiral.

Cutting taxes is a measure taken with the hope that with reduced costs, private enterprises will scale up production and increase the amount of goods’ supply as compared to demand, lowering or at least stopping the increase in prices, as orthodox economists hold the thesis that excessive demand (as supposedly caused by the 2020 Covid Crisis) is responsible for the currently high inflation.

Nowadays, it’s commonly accepted in many studies, such as this recent one from New Zealand that a significant cause in the inflation is the desire for even higher profits compared to what they already had in years prior.

Lowering taxes in response to a stagnant economy in this case is, as I understand it, unlikely to affect inflation, but is rewarding a private sector that used the fuel and energy price crisis caused by the war in Ukraine to enrich itself even as those prices fell again, with more riches. Especially considering the currently stagnant economy, it’s placing hope on a sector that has already failed to deliver out of an ideological belief that the state is unable to do what the private sector can, as well as the support it gets from and how many politicians have personal relationships with the private sector.

The government has more interest in pursuing the global power ambitions of the Standort Deutschland rather than accomplishing environmental goals, even in spite of one of the parties being named Die Grünen (which is basically just good PR for them and nothing of substance) - and the goals that are being pursued anyway are all to the slogan of Cem Özdemir “Zwischen Wirtschaft und Umwelt gehört kein oder”. Environmentalism as long as it remains profitable, even at costs of +2, +2,5, +3 or more °C

The next elections are sure to be won by Merz, with or without the AfD, and very likely to have the FDP in influential ministries, so nothing will change - or perhaps even for the worse.

That’s what happens when the main goal of production is not the goal of creating socially necessary goods, but to insert money into the labor process and end up with more than you had at the beginning.

Also the Iranian Revolution (which wasn’t entirely Islamist in nature, but they were the ones who won the power struggle in its immediate aftermath - the liberals were out of the picture by 1980, while the communist opposition got finished off in mass executions in 1988) happened due to the unpopularity of absolute monarch Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was stubbornly supported by the US to his last days.

And this has roots in the western-supported coup against Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, who was a social democratic reformer.

It’s a story that unfortunately repeats many times around the region, and globally too.