Aceticon

First I mainly agree with you: I lived in Britain as in immigrant for a decade, which was preceded by a decade living in The Netherlands, and my opinion of Britons (especially the English, more so their upper middle class and above) is very negative by comparison with my opinion of the Dutch in general and my impression of British society by the time I left was basically "The country of Europe closest to Fascism, only it's disguised with posh bollocks from posh people with a posh accent".

However this shit the current government is doing there of arresting people demonstrating against the Genocide as "terrorist supporters" doesn't have the support of most of the population. Further, 1.5% of the people of a country coming out in a demonstration for the benefit of completely different people and in no way whatsoever for their own personal benefit shows that at last that many people over there have incredibly strong principles.

It doesn't prove that most people are quite that good people, but it still seems to me that most aren't quite as bad as being deemed uncivilized.

As I see it, the point you're making is really that pretty much the entirety of the non-elites there lack a spine, both as people and as a group - hence not doing much to overthrow the power structures of that country - which is not the same as not being civilized people, though as we can see both path lead to similar outcomes in situations like this one.

Frankly, I couldn't agree more with that view! Countless experiences I've had over there speak of subservience towards the upper classes and even towards society in general (the level of concern with "what will other people think of me" there, especially amongst Middle Class women, is quite extreme when compared with, for example, the Dutch) and maybe explains why they're so good at Theatre: a lot of people over there spend their lives behind a thick complex façade so it's unsurprising when so many make a hobby and even a profession from it.

Further, they're relentlessly indoctrinated with both Nationalism and Respect For Authority (in other words, for the elite dynasties) by the local Press, which is maybe why the Brits are actually the least trusting in the local Press of all of Europe.

However, lack of a spine - which in my opinion is mainly a learned trait from growing up in such a society - though not exactly positive in Psychological and Freedom terms, isn't the same as being uncivilized.

Sure mate, Germans are a superior people with not a single sociopath attracted to both children and power amongst them (unlike lesser people such as Americans), Epstein was a fucking saint and if he wasn't it was only an "amazing coincidence" that there were several members of Israeli Security Services photographed with him and if they were actually using his child sex ring to gather blackmail material they would only ever target America and Americans in power circles and never Germany and Germans in power circles and, besides, the entire concept of pedophilia is a massive conspiracy.

It could never be the case that both Israeli and American (the latter actually caught eavesdropping on Merkel's mobile phone some years ago) espionage services would love to have blackmail material on the politicians of the largest and wealthiest country of Europe and that Epstein's organisation was designed exactly to acquire such material on people in positions of influence and power in Western nations, even if it's actually entirelly logical and well within the kind of thing the espionage agencies playing the Great Game do (the most well known being how Russia's security services used sex honeypots to gather Kompromat for decades).

Any such ideas of state actors using sex (involving chidren or otherwise) to blackmail people in power in wealthy and influent countries such as Germany can only ever be "conspiracy nonsense" (except if that country is the US)!!!

I think the previous poster was talking about "trust" in the sense of the politicians and fatcats trusting those newspapers, rather than in the sense of the public trusting them.

Certainly it's the only way that post makes any logical sense since a newspaper that choses to selectivelly hide unlawful actions by the Politicians from the public cannot be trusted by the public, but they certainly look much more trustworthy to said politicians and the moneyed elites who own them.

This Administration, the last Administration or any Administration.

In a real Democracy the Press is an independent Pillar from both the Political Pillar and Judicial Pillar, hence serving as an oversight over the other two.

This explains why in the US Politicians do whatever the fuck they want with little real pushback unless it negative affects some American Money elite or other: the Press in the US isn't at all independent.

Never said it was Merz personally and very explicitly said "members of his party".

If you think German power elites are any less likely to have the kind of sociopath who looks at a child and sees a potential source of personal pleasure than unaccountable elites elsewhere, you might want the really ponder on your nationalist prejudices - no one nation is more or less likely to have such people, the only difference is how much accountability there is for those who do such things, especially when they're in positions of power and nations with widespread "our people are different" prejudices on such things tend to be worse in terms of accountability for it because suspicions are much more likely to be dismissed with "that doesn't happen here".

If there's one thing the Epstein revelations are showing is that people in positions of power with that very specific kind of thinking are spread all over in the West and were being activelly enticed to act on such fantasies with a honeypot controlled by at the very least Israeli intelligence and, quiet probably, also the American one and Germany, both due to its size and wealth and its links to Israel, is a prime candidate for such targetting.

Yeah, well, look at Britain which had a massive demonstration of half a million people against the Genocide in Gaza and yet their supposedly "leftwing" "moderate" government is arresting people for "terrorism support" when they demonstrate against it.

The people ARE civilized, it's their elites (political or otherwise) which are unreformed barbarians by comparison, especially in those countries were the structures of power mean such people have been an entrenched and unchallenged elite for generations.

So I would say that the countries are CIVILIZED, however they're controlled by elites whose minset is still the same as the ancient monsters from the past (hence why, for example, British governments and Press have a mindset of colonialism towards the outside and "born to rule" towards their own citizens whilst German governments and Press support the Genocide of a "lesser people by a greater people" and both deploy authoritarian means to suppress dissent even tough they're supposedly Democracies).

This is also why I expect plenty of members of those elites will have broken the ultimate tabu of our era - they have the same principles of the ruling elites of centuries past, feel themselves above the law and firmly believe everybody else are nothing more than tools for their own personal upsides - including pleasure - and for many that would include children.

PS: As I see it, the solution for the problems in Democracies is MORE Democracy (more transparency, more accountability, more independent oversight, more variety and change) but we're going in the opposite direction and the actions of the ruling elites in the US and the support from the political elites in certain countries for that all matches with the moving away from Democracy towards Might Is Right and Authoritarianism

Yeah, well, Spain is also one of the few European countries that are very openly against the Genocide in Gaza.

Meanwhile the "party of the pre-revolution Fascists that decided the pass themselves as 'democrats'" government of the disgrace of a country right next door - Portugal - which sadly is my homeland, makes non-comittal noises. I trully hail from a nation of spinless subservient boot-licking provincials (an impression I've had since I went to live abroad), especially the sold-out political class which are very corrupt by European standards.

Anyways, congrats Spain and the Spanish for once again going against the tide of political and societal enshittification in Europe.

AI is definitelly the "Thing of the Year" in terms of its impact.

Doesn't mean it's a good thing though, just high impact (and impact which is going to be even higher when the bubble collapses dragging the rest of the American Economy with it).

In my experience one needs to be a senior developer with at least some experience with their own code having gone through a full project lifecycle (most importantly, including Support, Maintenance and even Expansion stages) to really, not just intellectually know but even feel in your bones, the massive importance in reducing lifetime maintenance costs of the very kind of practices in making code that LLMs (even with code reviews and fixes) don't clone (even when cloning only "good" code they can't do things like for example consistency, especially at the design level).

• Inexperienced devs just count the time cost of LLM generation and think AI really speeds up coding.
• Somewhat experienced devs count that plus code review costs and think it can sometimes make coding a bit faster
• Very experience devs looks at the inconsistent multiple-style disconnected mess (even after code review) when all those generated snippets get integrated and add the costs of maintaining and expanding that codebase to the rest, concluding that "even in the best case in six months this shit will already have cost me more time in overall even if I refactor it, than it would cost for me doing it properly myself in the first place".

It's very much the same problem with having junior developers do part of the coding, only worse because at least junior devs are consistent and hence predictable in how they fuck up so you know what to look for and once you find it you know to look for more of the same, and you can actually teach junior developers so they get better over time and especially focus on teaching them not to make the worst mistakes they make, whilst LLMs are unteachable and will never get better plus they're mistakes are pretty much randomly distributed in the error space.

You give coding tasks in a controlled way to junior devs whilst handling the impact of their mistakes because you're investing in them, whilst doing the same to an LLM has an higher chance of returning high impact mistakes and yields you no such "investment" returns at all.

One is left wondering for just how many members of his party does America and Israel have compromising pictures of them fucking children taken via operation's like Epstein's and similar.

Bet there's a lot of compromising evidence for corruption too (I mean, at one point selling yourself to Russian interests was THE thing to do for German politicians), but them being blackmailed with evidence of pedophilia more neatly explains the desperate subservience of this German government to America and Israel.

Encouraging more democratic leaning voters would’ve made a difference however, you don’t have to assume linear proportional effect

Which is exactly the job of the Democrat Party leaders, which is done via amongst other things offering potential voters the things they desire and assuaging their concerns, things which are clearly not "Unwavering support of Israel and its Genocide", "Do whatever is good for Finance and Tech-bros" or "Supporting the Cheney family, legacy and political ideology".

The people with by far the most power to convince leftwing leaning non-voters to vote for the Democrat Party were the Democrat Party leaders and they, with all that power they had, actually did the very opposite of trying to cater to the desires and concerns of such non-voters.

Yet around here whenever american politics pops up as a subject we get a rabid pack of mindless useful idiots blaming non-voters literally for not convincing themselves to vote for a party whose leaders activelly tried to reject them, never blaming those fucking leaders for activelly rejecting said potential voters.

Fuck the subservient, bootlicking Democrat Party tribalists who keep on excusing the profound incompetence and greed of their tribe's "chiefs" and parroting the DNC propaganda line that pushes the blame to non-voters rather than accept that the blame for a fucking monster like Trump having been elected a second time is overwhelmingly of the DNC and the rest of the Democrat Party leadership who once again chose to "stay pretty close but just below" in the Evil scales from the Republicans

Maybe it's not so obvious for those living inside America and its Politics, but from the outside it's obvious that both of Trump's presidential election victories are the end product of decades of the Democrat Party leadership getting away with representing ever fewer people whilst relying on a "vote lesser evil" strategy, all of which supported by the very same useful idiots who now, once again, come out relentlessly parroting the "everybody but ourselves is to blame" mindless bullshit that only an acephalic tribalist muppet would believe.

It is fucking obvious for anybody who knows just a bit of World History that Trump or somebody like him was bound to be elected sooner or later in the US when the strategy of the competing political force there was nothing more than invariably sidding with the handful of moneyed elites just limited by the need to stay just one step below in the Ladder of Evil from the other political force.

So enjoy the Fall Of The Empire you created for yourselves (by supporting a "Greater Evil" vs "Lesser evil" political power structure) and for the other 340 million people over there, whilst the rest of us batters the hatches and endures the side effects of the "Empire overextending itself militarily whilst the homeland becomes ever empoverished and authoritarian" phase of such Fall until America fizzles in power (if you're lucky) or breaks up.

I doubt it's just the Israelis who have compromision photos of top European politicians fucking little kids that they got using operations like Epstein's.