That’s treading dangerously close to a specific kind of conspiracy theory there.

The EBU has pretty strong financial ties to Israel, not least of which their main sponsor Moroccan Oil. But at the end of the day you can count on the ghouls in charge to always find the coward’s way out and follow the money. It’s the exact same pattern of behavior they had with Russia in 2022, which they initially allowed to compete before backpedalling.

Pretending that this is an issue solely because of some conspiracy is not only baseless, but it also unfairly lets most European broadcasters off the hook for refusing to uphold the set the same hard lines with Israel that they set with Russia. Israel competed because European broadcasters were happy enough to include Israel. Simple as.

Well to be fair if my electoral choices directly and irrefutably contributed to the death of thousands, I’d be going cuckoo-crazy from the cognitive dissonance too.

Eeeeeh. I mean sure, we do have stricter requirements, but not nearly as much as fantasized by Americans. My grandpa still has a license that he got where the whole test was saying “I solemnly swear that I can drive”. Here in Belgium the country is extremely car-dependent so license suspensions are actually vanishingly rare, requiring you to get caught red-handed more than 40 km/h above the speed limit (50 in practice due to radar correction), and even then the suspension is only temporary; I have never heard of anyone who lost theirs permanently. Most people here do consider driving to be a right. Until a few short years ago temporary license suspensions could even be scheduled only on weekends and holidays!

Another angle to see this problem: I see Dutch people driving in Belgium daily. And they’re absolute menaces. But they’re so chill when they drive in Holland! What gives? Well most roads around here have more in common with American roads than Dutch ones… Give a dutchie in a BMW a wide straight line and he will do 75 km/h in a school zone without a second thought before changing lanes without signalling, then barrel through a roundabout while ignoring right-of-way. They aren’t better drivers, they just have such good road infrastructure that forces them to drive one very specific way: slowly and carefully.

It’s multifactorial. Cities like Helsinki and Amsterdam are poster children, but Europe also has plenty of areas (especially suburbs) that are as car-dependent as equivalent US cities.

However traffic deaths remain much lower than in the US thanks to less idiotically-designed streets.

Step 0, by far the biggest impact-to-cost ratio, is narrow the damn streets. Take the biggest road-legal vehicle allowed on that street, mark down the path of travel, and put some plastic bollards a few inches on either side. Watch as everybody instinctively slows down even though the flow of traffic is not even impeded or redirected in any way. This policy - by itself - doesn’t even reduce car dependence! If you do it as part of the regular road repair schedule, it’s literally free.

America’s wide-ass roads constantly astound me with their profound stupidity. There’s literally no tangible gain, and so many downsides to public safety. I understand (though I strongly disagree with) the usual refrains for why the US is car-centric, but making streets too wide is simply inexcusable and unconscionable.

And I want a unicorn for Christmas.

Look, right now I don’t even have a good reason to hope that Israel will be stopped before they finish their genocide. But step 1 is to get a permanent ceasefire in place. Whatever fantasies we might have beyond that is a moot point. But recognizing both parties as sovereign would go some way towards facilitating the terms and enforcement of that ceasefire.

If you’ve got a plan to achieve that and doesn’t involve genociding israel, shoot for it. But I don’t think “unrecognizing” Israel is a particularly productive step towards that.

In this context? Someone who is currently on the good side of the current apartheid system in Israel/Palestine.

Don’t play dumb with me, you know full well what I meant. If you have a point, make it.

So no Israel, just Palestine? That would leave Israelis a majority population in Palestine. Do you expect Israelis to magically not outvote the Palestinians, or are you proposing an autocracy or an apartheid system stripping Israelis of their voting rights?

I would also strongly suggest you do some reading on the factors leading up to the Rwandan genocide. A “just” peace isn’t enough; after generations of life under apartheid, there are no easy or quick paths to lasting peace. I won’t commit the hubris of pretending I have a definitive solution, and I think it’s important to underline that as outsiders to the conflict, the best we can do is offer to safeguard peace. That’s what the Two-State Solution was meant to do, that’s what arms sanctions are meant to do, that’s what the threat of economic retaliation would be meant to do (granted each with their own significant shortcomings). Denying the practical existence of either Israel or Palestine is antithetical to building a path towards lasting peace and a meaningful international effort towards safeguarding said peace.

For a practical example, assuming a peace treaty ever gets signed, sending UN Blue Helmets would be diplomatically easier if all parties involved recognized Palestine and Israel as sovereign states. Even if that all seems like a moot point right now what when neither Israel nor most Western nations are actually looking forward to peace.

So there are two interpretations I could make of your comment, one of which is more charitable than the other.

1. You are using the Chinese and Israeli playbook of weaponizing statehood recognition as a value judgement. That is profoundly problematic, both on a practical and a philosophical level. De-humanization should not be a tool we have to use on our enemies. Our moral high ground should speak for itself.
2. Your are dog-whistling for the genocide and/or deportation of all Israelis. In which case our conversation is done here.

To be clear, Israel is committing genocide and every single member of its government and of the IDF should be tried at The Hague. But laws and international order exist for a reason, and trying to circumvent them like this is a very bad look that Israel has been rightfully criticized for for decades.

The first part applies to… Most of the world outside of Europe?

The second part applies, to lesser degrees, to a large part of the world. Such as the USA.

What even is this argument. Israel’s not a state? Well fucking great, so following that logic which state should we hold responsible for Israel’s crimes then?

Europe’s colonial past is a whole-ass subject but amongst all the potential ways to try to make up for it, “stop formally recognizing former colonies because we fucked it up too badly” is one of the worst takes I’ve heard.

If I am not mistaken the 47.0.0.0/8 ip block is for Alibaba cloud

That’s an ARIN block according to Wikipedia so North America, under Northen Telecom until 2010. It does look like Alibaba operate many networks under that /8, but I very much doubt it’s the whole /8 which would be worth a lot; a /16 is apparently worth around $3-4M, so a /8 can be extrapolated to be worth upwards of a billion dollars! I doubt they put all their eggs into that particular basket. So you’re probably matching a lot of innocent North American IPs with this.

As a European software developer I would love to see that.

Unfortunately I’m afraid those most likely to cry foul aren’t Americans, but the majority of European tech businesses who are either reselling MSFT bullshit or completely locked in AWS/Azure/GCP. Open-source/sovereign software services are the exception, not the rule.

With what money? NPPs only get built on public funds, private equity cannot make the economics viable due to the multi-decade amortization. It’s fine on public debt but breaks down if you have to pay shareholders for billions of euros of loans over 20 years which amounts to so much money the cost is uncompetitive with fossil fuels + renewables. Private equity has been trying to make private nuclear power for 20 years now, mostly with SMRs, with little success and nothing to show for it up to now.

If Belgium ever builds a new NPP, it will be because the government voted on a multi-decade funding plan, which is not guaranteed to happen when the left wants no nuclear and the right wants fiscal austerity. Until then there’s nothing that Engie can do but wait.

TBF work was done to keep it sound until 2025 and it was possible to extend the operational life further (basically you can just keep throwing hundreds of millions at them every 10 years for a long time to come).

What’s fucked up is that in the last few years a bunch of maintenance wasn’t done because the government said “no for real though super pinky promise we’re not extending the contract again they will definitely be shut down in 2025 it’s the law”.

So now Electrabel/Engie is rightfully super pissed because this flip-flopping is going to cost us billions just to keep the existing reactors running. And they have zero guarantee the greens won’t come back into a government coalition in 2029 and fuck the schedule up again.

This is terrifying. Americans are running headfirst into the Greatest Depression, except this time they are the Nazis and they have enough nukes to eradicate life on Earth.

And their political discourse oscillates between “serves us right” and “yes daddy”. Republicans are complicit and literally everyone else will refuse to resort to political violence or disobedience even as Trump orders nukes to be fired at whoever he’s mad at that week.

I just thought of a reason why trying to explain the downsides of solar power generation always goes so poorly for me.

Where I live, solar=good is a given. No amount of oil lobbying can overcome the simple fact that thanks to historically heavy subsidies, PV is free money and therefore anti-solar sentiment is fringe because everyone loves free money.

(Which is its own can of worms because ungoverned PV has externalities which the owners may not be bearing or only partially, while people who can’t install PV are essentially using up some of their own taxes to give a tax break to the bourgeois down the street with a solar mansion, and sure that’s more solar which is environmentally good but it’s also another indirect tax on the poor which is socially deleterious).

Anyway my point is that in a country where nearly everyone has PV or wishes they did, I don’t see any issue with plainly stating “PV is causing major headaches to grid operators”. Because pragmatically we need to justify solutions like dynamic pricing, solar taxes, and the phaseout net metering which are predictably unpopular policies with PV owners who were promised endless riches.
But I suppose from a North American perspective where “renewable energy is good” is somehow the fringe opinion and PV deployment is pathetic, then it makes sense to push back against such messaging.

You’re more likely to win the euromillion than to successfully shift norms away from the 8:30-18:00 working hours. This shit is baked into every employment contract out there. I work an office job where it doesn’t matter so much, but anyone who works shifts or a time-sensitive job is stuck there basically forever regardless of the time zone.

Kind of the whole point of nuclear dissuasion is that we are not, in fact, going to ever do that. And ignoring the existence of nukes (lol), attacking the US on their hometurf is such a monumentally stupid idea people still wonder what went through the Japanese High Command’s mind 80 years ago.

Stop asking Europe for help, because you’re not getting it. You’ve alienated your allies and broken your democracy beyond repair. Either use that 2nd amendment of yours to the fullest extent of its spirit or STFU with the “pwease stop him we’re scawed :(((” rhetoric. We have way more reasons to be scared because we don’t live next door to white cishet male Americans to shield us from his madness. Stop with the victim blaming. Either you stop this child or he starts a war with your assent.

All Russia did was give a nudge to the literal trillions of dollars in capital held by elites who wanted nothing more than full-blown fascism. All the Kremlin had to do was finance whoever could sow the most distrust in democratic institutions and wedge themselves in existing divides within the US. It’s the most boring coup in history, people voting for Hitler not because of Bolshevism of whatever but because they’re triggered by fucking vaccines and pronouns.

Conversely even if the EU went full hybrid warfare (which we aren’t because we can’t even do anything about the open fascists in our own Union), the counterplay is rebuilding trust which is harder by orders of magnitude than just buying up a social media, deleting moderation, and promoting the Nazi stuff.

Best we could hypothetically do is sanction y’all into autarchy and hope the subsequent recession/depression acts as an electroshock to the population, but you’re already doing it to yourselves and besides I see no reason why the two thirds of y’all who either don’t care or actively support fascism would change their minds. It will be just like Putin Orban or Erdogan, 15 years from now shit will be worse than ever for the 99 % but Republicans will still win elections without even needing to cheat much thanks to their complete control over state propaganda. Your democracy is dead, you should be moving through the stages of grief and planning your next move.

I’d love to be proven wrong but there’s too much historical precedent, and zero precedent to Americans being even remotely close to politically conscious enough to engage in “forceful” political change (unless the force is being exerted on Black people, then the “well regulated militia” comes out the woodwork). Hell, the videos from “protests” I’ve been seeing this week in your major cities look so pathetic it makes Denver look like a large village.

For Ukraine yes, but as far as Ukraine’s allies go? Only in principle. In reality we help Ukraine because it fucks up Russia, but we don’t give Ukraine the support it really needs or asks for because of [insert litany of excuses for years of delay on new weapons systems].

Proxy wars are nasty business, and Ukraine has precious little say in any of the macro decisions. Russia and Russia’s ennemies collectively hold all the negociation leverage.
Zelenskyy’s only hope is that domestic pressure will force the West to make a genuine effort at preserving as much of Ukraine’s sovereignty as possible, hence this media intervention.

And he’s right to be worried, because the situation in Palestine shows, again, that most Western governments only stick to their stated principles when it’s politically convenient and shrug at literal genocide when it’s not. And the Russian propaganda machine is going to work overtime to make us think that any Russian concession to Ukraine would be against European interests.