The political inclinations of monarchist Germany weren't anything to brag about. The German Colonial Empire was just as racist, vulgar, and blood drenched as anything the rest of the continent produced.
Nazis brought the imperial tendencies home to Berlin. They didn't invent them from whole cloth.
The European World Wars only produced losers. WW1 signaled the beginning of the end of the British Empire, the escalated decline of the French Empire, and the total collapse of the Russian Empire. WW2 obliterated a century of industrial development and squandered a generation of young people on a pointless pissing contest, only to hand the continent to a pair of foreign superpowers.
The US came out ahead in both wars primarily because they were the last to join and the only ones to escape virtually unscathed.
I’m not a fan of any appeals to gatekeep energy use to “just essentials” instead permitting growth
There's a huge gulf between essential and wasteful.
hostility never changed anyone’s mind
Chronic abuse absolutely shapes human perception and behavior.
In this case, a lot of Lemmy has been so battered down by "China Bad" propaganda that they'll straight up deny the threat of climate change to justify rejecting Chinese manufactured goods.
The argument is always "solar/wind still use chemicals" and never "this is the net reliance on extractive industry by energy source".
That said, general energy conservation is still important. You can't cut emissions if all your new power just gets funnelled into Grok style AI.
They were at the inflection point back in 2008. They've been full tilt towards the improvement side of the curve for nearly two decades.
Europeans demolished their manufacturing sector when they stripped all the wiring out of the walls during the austerity years.
You can't blame people for buying foreign when you've been defunding domestic infrastructure for over a decade.
Honestly, no. It was exactly this bad in the early '00s
Once Twitter has been (hopefully) de-platformed we can talk about Mastedon and the Fediverse and the idea of a non-corpo platform.
BlueSky is as prone to enshittification as Twitter. If you're waiting for BlueSky to take off, you're just setting yourself up for the next rug pull.
I mean, go to BS and enjoy it while it lasts. But don't think this is the future.
For the price of the bundle? Sure.
This but unironically. I've got a coworker who took vacation days to help build a temple up in Pennsylvania. He was incredibly proud of his contribution and happy to participate.
We exported fascism into Europe initially. America has a long and horrible history of fascism, straight back to the colonial era. By the early 20th century, guys like Henry Ford were quite literally churning out the textbook definition of antisemitism (The Protocols of the Elders of Zion) and shipping it all across the Old World, to stock the furnace of racial animus and ramp the continent up into a second world war.
Then we harvested the remnants of fascism back into our own country after German Nazism failed. The open-borders policy extended to German military and science officers was a shocking reversal relative to our naked hostility towards Jewish refugees and other European dissidents in the run up to the wars.
We weren't destroyed by fascism. We were its wellspring. We sent it out abroad, like the seeds of an evil dandelion, and then we reaped what we'd sown when those seeds blossomed.