I see… business as usual: the EU shooting itself in the foot and removing the one thing they actually have leverage in 🤦

Refusing to cooperate with the leftist parties, putting a right-wing PM in place and being dependant on extreme right wing votes for many of his recent proposals (because he refuses to cooperate with the left parties). Basically he is doing everything the Front National needs to win next time.

Yes from centrists like Macron that pave the way for the extreme right to take over soon 🤦

The argument about possible threats is good, but why this means we need to increase defense spending is completely unexplained.

Europe already vastly outspends Russia on defense, and for example Spain buying more Leopard 2 tanks just to have them rot in their baracks is not helping at all.

We need to get more efficient in defense spending and we need to invest in defensive weapons that can be easily moved where they are actually needed. Better locally produced anti-air defense, especially ones cheap enough to work against drone swarms are probably also needed.

But none of that needs 5% of GDP. We could probably significantly reduce current defense spending and still end up with an more effective deterrent against Russia.

Our infrastructure and social services are already massively underfunded. More than doubling defense spending will come at a cost to those services, especially with right wing governments in power everywhere. And the result of that is just as much if not more of a threat to our values and the cohesion of the EU than Russia.

Russia outspends the whole of EU in military built-up

This is blatantly false and it takes a lot of massaging the numbers to reach even parity in spending like the OP article claims (but it uses pre-war PPP figures, which is completely laughable).

Is military spending efficient in the EU? No. Do we spend too much on unreliable US made weapons? Yes!

But Russia is spending a tiny fraction of what the EU+UK does, and its troups are exhausted from a protracted war with Ukraine.

Maybe they will try to poke a sleeping bear to divide us further as a form of asymetric warfare, but in no way (other that nuclear) is Russia an existential threat to Europe right now.

This is just the age old cold war fearmongering back in action. Lots of profits to be made from that…

Before SpaceX, Ariane Space was pretty dominant in the commercial sattelite launch market. But they completely botched the Ariane 6 design and are now likely still decade away from having a reusable first stage, which is required to remain competitive.

They can be lucky that SpaceX is wasting their resources on a reusable second stage, which will likely never be economical.

That sounds like a plot that could include lemmy.ml somewhere 😅

Well, shit 🤦

Which, you know, is a great deterrance to would be attackers. Nuclear deterrance is 4D chess via game theory. Not being able to slowly escalate a nuclear war is a benefit that makes people think twice about starting one.

Ok, I can generally agree on that, but lets please not mix Syrian (or other) refugees into that, because those are really two different issues. Most of them are not employed in the sector you talk about, and in total numbers they make up an insignificant part of the work force anyway.

Sorry, but you are repeating right-wing nonsense here yourself. The syrian refugees had an neligible impact on European labour or “freedom”, what ever you mean with that exactly…

There was certainly some mishandling of those new arrivals, but that was mostly due to right-wing local governments who dragged their feet and obstructed were they could.

The much bigger issue that was Merkel’s fault is that she got scared of her own courage and entered into these shady blackmail deals with Erdogan later on.

https://www.taler.net/en/docs.html

If you want to exchange official fiat currencies you need something that libeufin can talk to via the standartized banking api. Everything else is included in Taler and ready to be used with unofficial regional currencies for example.

Basically yes, but the seller needs to register a business account with a Swedish Taler bank exchange, and if that bank figures out that the seller is breaking Swedish law they can terminate that account.

Ugh, another three percentage points more for Chega 😓

And the conversative government is not going to improve the housing problem, which is afaik the main reason why people vote for Chega, immigration is only a secondary reason.

No, the rules here do not suppress such differing opinions as long as they don’t advocate for genocide (or could be easily misinterpreted as such by the german police).

I personally agree that the German government has gone far beyond what would be reasonable in that regard, but feddit.org is not the German government. They simply try to find a minimal set of rules that do not directly endanger them of police raids in Germany and otherwise these are basic rules of respecting human rights.

If you openly endorse such bordering on genocidal positions then no, that would be very likely also a bannable offense.

If you endorse or deny the current ethnic clensing done by the Israelis you will very likely also get banned for that, yes.

Great, so why the big ruckus if you think so?

Nothing stops people from participating on feddit.org communities if they don’t use thinly veiled dogwistles for such or endorse organisations that call for ethnic clensing like Hamas and use slogans popularized by them.

Not relativising or denying the holocaust is hopefully a given, but it seems some people from other instances are also not so clear on that.

You might not considers the slogan as such, but there are many other organized groups that do (like Hamas), and thus assuming it is commonly meant as such is not unreasonable. Maybe try to look outside of your bubble a bit and see who else is using the same slogans as you.

I find the restrictions relatively reasonable, and in my circle of radical leftists outside of Germany (I don’t live in Germany), it is really rare that anyone would run into issues with those rules. Of course I am highly against the police raiding homes in reaction to such kind of speech, but this is the reality in Germany that I can’t change.

If it is normal in your personal circle to advocate for the expulsion of an entire group of people from a territory they have lived on all their life or to make comments relativising the holocaust, I strongly recommend you look for less shitty friends. And if you don’t see how that relates to the rules in question you need to seriously educate yourself about the fucked up situation in the middle-east.