I lived in the UK as an EU immigrant before Brexit and I can tell you that they were already well on their way before that.

Just go have a look at the Stasi-like civil society done in the UK as shown by the Snowden Revelations: it was actually worse than the US and, unlike in the US, none of it was rolled-back in the UK and instead new laws were passed to make the whole thing retroactivelly legal.

This is far from the only way in which Britain hasn’t really been a proper Democratic nation for quite a while (for example, did you know they have a Press Censorship system called “D-Notices” or that there is not right to legal counsel when interrogated at a border crossing?).

Brexit was not the cause of Britain’s increased authoritarianism, it was a consequence of it (though indirectly, due to things like Press ownership concentration, the BBC to quite an extend a Propaganda outlet for the party in government and the pain of the Austerity that was chosen in the aftermath of of the 2008 Crash as a way to pay for the costs of saving the wealth of the rich and the bonuses of bankers).

It’s just that unlike in places like the US or Hungary, the culture of the elites gives a huge importance to “keeping appearences” (hence the “English gentleman” stereotype, which at least nowadays is all about how one presents oneself and not at all about morals, ethics or honor) so you get a posh kind of Fascist rather than the raging strongman populist style of fascist you get in other countries. Also Britain is far more likely to hide the use of force for oppression with “It’s the Law” and “Proper procedure” than the others - again a form of managing appearances.

A second parliamentary chamber whose members are not elected but instead get their seats by being nominated for life for one by a sitting government or inheriting it.

There goes a man who knows who butters his bread and has no problems in getting his nose brown…

Personally, I think this is more appropriate.

Also there are generaly very specific requirements on how things are made for them to fall under a Protected Origin, so for example in the age when pretty much all industrially made smoked meats are filled with nitrites and other preservatives, Parma Ham is literally still only made with pork meat and salt, nothing else (so the quality is far greater than the modern version of similar products which do not have that Protected Origin, many of which even have chemicals added to them to “accelerate the cure” so that they can be made faster).

Another example: Manchego Cheese isn’t just cheese made in specific area of Spain, it’s actually has to be made in a certain way using the milk of a specific breed of sheep called Manchega (hence the name of the cheese).

Doubt it.

They’re not actually handy to put a grilled beef patty inside, since they size is all wrong and they get soaked and mushy with the juices.

The Dollar went down.

Convert that S&P 500 to Yuan and it’s a whole different picture.

There’s a lot of Economics in Economics.

For example Behavioral Economics actually conducts experiments to determine how people tend to react to various situations (for example, they’ve actually discovered that at least for some forms of medicine the price when told to the patient can influence how well it works, effectively having a placebo and even a nocebo effect?), so it’s pretty similar to Sciences such as Physics or Chemistry.

The rest of Economics, not really, especially the stuff directly and indirectly linked to political decision making (so, Central Bank stuff, Think Tanks, Financial Press, “Economists” in the mainstream Press) - that shit is Politics using Mathematics as a Smoke & Mirrors to make the policy-supporting unsupported and unproven claims look like they’re actually the outcome of a rigorous scientific process.

The situation is so hilariously bad that when a guy from Behavioral Economics - Richard Thaler - finally got an Economics “Nobel” Prize (which is not a prize instituted by Alfred Nobel but actually a prize from the Swedish Central Bank “in honor of Alfred Nobel” which they convinced the Nobel Committee to endorse) they didn’t give it to him for his edifice of work that disproves that real humans behave as the theoretical homo economicus human model that supports pretty much the entire mathematical edifice for Free Market Theory, but instead they gave it to him for just his work on Nudge Theory which is all about how to influence people in aggregate to do more of what people in power want (so stuff like making the desired behavior - say, “donate organs when you die” - be opt out rather than opt in to get a higher percentage of people with that behavior).

All this to say that whilst most of Economics in the present era is a Shit Show of Politics passing itself as a Science, a little bit of it is actually Science, though that little bit is almost never the stuff the “Economists” in panels in the News or in Central Banks talk about to the public or politicians.

I couldn’t agree more and had exact the same experience.

In my case I was actually in the Finance Industry when the 2008 Crash happenned and seeing what was done (the state unconditional saving Asset Owners by sacrificing the rest, in constrast with the whole Free Market stuff I had been reading on The Economist for almost a decade) and their take on it, really opened my eyes to the complete total self-serving bullshit of not just The Economist but also the whole edifice of Free Market Economics (a skepticism further boosted by me actually starting to learn Economics - especially Behavioral Economics since it’s the only “Mainly Science rather than Politics” part of it and my background is party in Physics - and deepening my understanding of the Finance Industry as I tried to figure out the Why and How of the Crash).

That shit is Politics hidden behind a veil of Mathematics purposelly misused in a way eerily similar to how I saw pricing for over the counter derivatives being done in Finance: designing models so that they yield the desired results under certain conditions and further controlling their output by feeding them with cherry picked inputs and then presenting the output of the models as “Mathematical proof” that things are as as you say they are, so basically circular logic with some complex Mathematics in the middle to hide their true nature as unsupported claims.

It’s pretty insidious Fake Science stuff if you don’t have a strong background in Science and access to the right information to pierce through it.

Well, after he got a Nobel Peace Prize, it makes sense that he moves onwards towards his next great wish: King Of The World.

Given Trump’s relation with reality and mental age, the formalism are irrelevant: in his mind if he has the shinny thing then the prize is his.

Notice how the EU just succumbed to lobbying from part of the European Auto Industry and cancelled the whole “ICE car sales ban from 2035” having even before that put extra tariffs on EV cars from China (so, not quite as extreme as the US, but none the less a caving to EU auto makers) to help big auto makers in Europe who refuse to transition to EVs (and this at a time where Diesel polution kills about 10,000 people a year in the EU, so they’re literally putting the interests of large auto makers over the lives of people).

You know what they could’ve done instead?

Subsidies for European auto manufactures with a large percentage of EV car sales relative to ICE cars (which, if high enough would mean lots of money for subsidizing smaller companies to grow and replace the larger ones if the large makers don’t increase their EV sales rather than keeping on extracting juicy margings from ICE SUVs).

The problem in Europe is political capture by dinossaur businesses which would rather make believe the next great Tech Revolution - around Renewables - isn’t happening and have pretty much bought politicians to make sure Europeans and smaller European companies can’t easilly benefit from it.

Europe has the Tech capability to go there but the current political structure (late stage Neoliberal Capitalism) were politicians mainly represent large economic interests (not only above citizens but even above small and mid-size businesses) means that at best politicians simply refuse to send serious money to forward-looking disruptive businesses or forcing the pricing-in of things like Environmental costs in products made by large companies, whilst at worst actually making laws to reduce everybody’s options to move away from buying the products of said large companies.

It might look as an economic and progress problem at first sight, but dive any further and you’ll see Economic options being shaped by Politics (in some cases simply by Politicians in Europe choosing “not to intervene in Markets” but only for markets dominated by big players, in other cases by making laws which de facto activelly obstruct adoption of improved Tech) and in turn Politics being shaped by Big Money.

I think the previous poster was absolutelly correct in their interpretation of the West’s problem in this as broader societal problems.

Mind you, I don’t even think that China’s political system is all that great - rather I think that in the present day the power structures in the West (more in the US, but also to quiet an extent in Europe) are actually hindering the moving forward even whilst there’s plenty of capability to do so (certainly in Europe which mainly has invested massivelly in things like Higher Education).

The US was already been past its peak as an Imperial Power since at least the 2008 Crash (though if you look at things like social mobility in the US, the seeds of it go all the way back to the 70s when the country started becoming ever less a “land of opportunity”), but Trump has definitelly accelerated the decay by a huge factor.

That said, at some point a far-right populist portraying himself as “man of the people” who will “bring back national greatness” like Trump getting power, is historically pretty common in nations which have reached a peak of great power and started decaying from there - in other words, if it wasn’t Trump, this stage of the circle of prosperity and decay would in the US have delivered power to some other similar character.

They have nothing to lose in doing so.

At worst “conversations” delay an American invasion giving more time for Denmark to prepare.

Any half-competent diplomat will ignore “pride” as a consideration for a chance at stopping a war or at least giving their own side’s military more time to prepare, with no actual downside (if that fails they get the exact same outcome as if they didn’t engage in “conversations”).

Also no doubt a lot of “out of the spotlight” work is going into convicing the members of that Administration who are actually intelligent types putting on a “derranged far-right populist” act for Trump and the American Public, that such a move will indirectly be bad for them personally because of the downsides for the people who own them - big American businesses - of turning Europe into an Enemy rather than merely a trade competitor.

The immediatelly obvious reason is that you can’t really have resource extraction operations in a nuclear wasteland, so Greenland (which is what I assume you were trying to spell) would become useless for them.

The next big reason is the same as why Russia isn’t doing it in Ukraine - any nation that agressivelly uses nukes will be turned on by everybody else and end up nuked themselves, because if nuclear aggression is not severely punished, other countries will go nuclear ASAP with more and more countries actually using nukes in war, incentivising even more countries to go nuclear and use nukes, a vicious cycle which is guaranteed to end with all life on planet Earth dead. Specifically in the case of Greenland, it would be an attack on Europe which not only already has 2 nuclear armed nations but also is the region in the World with the most non-nuclear countries with the knowhow and technology to go nuclear very fast if they feel threathened, so the delay between America attacking European territory with nukes and ending up a nuclear wasteland itself would be a lot smaller than if America had attacked with nukes, say, countries in Latin America (and even that would end up with America turned into glass, it would just take longer).

Obviously the highest levels of the American Military know this (its not as if they haven’t run countless scenarios on it) and would be far more likely to choose to assassinate Trump if he ever gave such an order (which would be even easier to do than the whole “Kidnap Maduro” thing) than to nuke an European nation and start a cycle that would end up with cockroaches being the dominant species of this planet.

America totally sucks at actually annexing territory (so, not merely conquering, but actually all the way to making it part of its own territory), with the last successful instance of doing it being Puerto Rico during the Spainish-American War back at the end of the 19th Century.

So of those you listed, maybe Greenland would be possible to actually annex due to its tiny population - Americans could literally just kick everybody else out, by which point the place is just empty land which can be treated like some kind of North Atlantic oil platform that just happens not to be floating, which is fine if all you want to do there is exploit mineral resources that don’t require much manpower to extract - as well as the small european occupied islands like Azores (though what would be the point of getting Azores since it has zero mineral resources and the only real value of its economic exclusive area is for Fishing which is a low economic value activity that requires quiet a lot more manpower than oil extraction).

Certainly actually annexing a South American country would almost certainly turn into a quagmire for America in the same style as Vietnam.

I mean, if you currently look at Venezuela, for all of Trump’s strutting like a rooster on it, it’s not actually occupied by America (zero boots on the ground) and any real American gains extracted from it (which in reality are far less than Trump’s proclamations would make it seem) come from literally blackmailing the individuals in leadership there with “if you don’t do what I demand I’ll do to you personally the same I did to Maduro” - that situation is not at all one where America owns Venezuela.

Might as well declare himself the Queen Of Sheba.

Obviously it’s needed to refuel the Nuclear Subs on their way to Russian waters.

More in general, “American support” isn’t necessarily a positive thing in the mid or long term, especially in Latin America and even more in the present age when Fascism is normalized in American and Fascists get elected to lead the US.

For her it risks being like a drowning person getting a nose to put around her neck to be pulled out of the water.

Yeah, I’m surprised that she actually asked the Nobel Comittee about it - just give Trump the medal and shut up whilst he loudly harps about how he has a Nobel Peace Prize.

It’s not as if that guy cares about objective reality or rules (or even has a fully adult mind) - having the shiny token is more than enough for him to go around showing it and saying he has a Nobel Peace Prize.

The most logical option for her is just giving the medal to Trump, telling him he now has a Nobel Peace Prize and letting his infantile mind twist that into him feeling like a Nobel Peace Prize recipient.