Declare a “special operation” against the major holders of their debt ?

Remember than last time the US shutdown, military in Europe were told to go to eat to the soup kitchens…

Myself, I think it would be really nice to be able to whip out a prompt in Dolphin, then tell it to, find all the pictures of fish in this directory and rename the filename to reflect the species of fish.

Maybe true if you don’t end up with just another version of Akonadi that do not work 3 times every 2 tries

If you are right, they started from the wrong place. I am pretty sure that in a corporate environment there are thing more important to be “corporate friendly” than the coreutils.

I think the distinction of legal and illegal immigrants serves as a foot in the door for culture war distraction. First there is about needing to surveil some immigrant communities because of terrorist acts associated with foreigners, then it’s about not wanting to take in refugees because other nations in the EU are not putting in enough of an effort, then it becomes an issue of illegal immigration – which is synonymous with undocumented immigration.

Ok, assuming you are right, what would be a solution to try to solve the problem with illegal immigration and all its consequences ?

The step after that is introducing legislation to make working visas less of a certainty, usually that’s coupled to worse working conditions. Lastly deportations, nowadays called remigration, strip large sections of immigrants and those with an immigrant background of citizenship. This furthers an erosion of basic rights and puts those affected in a position where it’s do or die, which means proving your worth as an immigrant to state and industry.

I think that here you are wrong. If you make working visas less viable the local worker gain something in my opinion. Companies still need workers and now they have a smaller pool to choose from.
What make working condition worse for everyone (local population, legal and illegal immigrants) is that when you have a lot of illegal immigrants an unscrupulous employer can simply hire one of them at a fraction of what he should pay a legal worker.

Furthermore, many currently legal and working immigrants have histories of undocumented migration, receiving government aid, and some even have engaged in illegal activity.

That’s true. And the difference is that these people enter the country illegally (perhaps) and then begin the process of regularizing their status.

Many voters of right wing parties don’t have a probblem with immigrants as long as they’re the right immigrants in their view.

Which basically means that people has no problems with people who work honestly and contribute to the society.

Immigrants are disadvantaged though and this makes some turn to crime. Crime that could be in large part prevented if these people had their needs better met. Trying to kick out criminal immigrants potentially makes the problem worse because it puts them in an even more precarious situation where they are even more incentivised to do crime. This creates pressure for the vast majority of immigrants who by the way are not criminals to conform even harder.

The question is: since a country can absorbe a certain number of new immigrant every year, why we should allow in people we know we cannot handle in a decent way ?
This way you are simply ruining the society (where people will start to look at extremist like a solution, think AfD) and the immigrant, both the already legal ones and the new legal ones, to not talk about the illegal ones.

Criminals doing petty crime are not able to find regular employment when the state cracks down on them. They walk into the arms of human traffickers, which does not decrease the crime rate in any way. At best, crimes are made hidden or moved geographically.

The point is to have less crime avoiding to have people on the country that need to live by petty crimes. And to do this you need to keep immigration in check.

The important distinction here is trying and being. As someone who works, you likely have rather few resources to fund a business.

I don’t need too much. The fund you need depends heavily on what you want to do. Currently I could easily open a consulting business that can sustain my family in the end, and I don’t need too much resources. I simply choose not because I like better to work 9-18 and then be free.

You won’t be able to provide as much collateral on loans as people with capital, i.e. people whose property works for them. You are significantly disadvantaged.

No, I am not significantly disadvantaged. Or better, it depends on what business you are thinking about. In certain cases you are right, in other you are wrong.

Certainly. But you have duties and in the army example those duties entail grave acts such as taking another’s life and giving one’s own.

If this is done to defend me or my familiy from someone who want to kill us, I honestly think is not wrong. It should not be necessary, I agree, but I would have not a problem to kill an enemy soldier who has as target to kill me and my family.

Then again the army is a low hanging fruit since they’ll take all kinds of people.

No, they will not take all kinds of people. To enter the army you need to meet a minimum level. In may case the problem is that I am too old now, but when I enlisted people were excluded because they were deemed unsuitable, for physical or psychological reasons.

It’s good that you realise that there are certain prerequisites that the vast majority of people do not have when we turn our eyes away from the army example. This gate is education and education is highly determined by the financial situation of one’s parents.

No, it not a problem of education, I met all the requisite regarding the level of education, I simply studied a branched that are not that requested (mechanical and then IT). But the minimum level required is basically the compulsory education, for which parents are helped if needed.

I don’t think so. The state, police and monopolies on violences are a recent phenomenon.

If you define “recent” as the last three thousand years, then I agree.
In every society starting with the ancient Egypt there were some sort of justice system that was handled by the state, and sometime with way more violence than today.

History is littered with systems where social conduct was shaped without purely punitive or violent measures. Who is to say that the nation state is the end-all-be-all?

For example ?

This does not really engage with the argument. States don’t have responsibilities like people.

But States are made of people.
Maybe the correct phrase would be “the people from UK created the problem…” but my point stand.

They don’t join private clubs as it were. The rules you are seeing are a result of negotiations based on leverage and generally this is in the interest of the most powerful nations. First the EEC (EU-predecessor) is created out of a strength in numbers calculation. The United States and the Soviet Union are blocks that could overpower any one member of the EU, but as a regional alliance the scales can be balanced. The rules of the EU are based on that. It’s not a rules-first thing, if it was Hungary would have long been kicked out for repeatedly flunking the rules of the EU flagrantly.

Even joining a private club is a negotiation, albeit a much simpler one: you agree to follow a set of rules when you join or you decide the rules if you are a founding member of a new club.

But the point is: UK founded the club, taking some advantages for itself, agreed while being a member to a certain set of rules and then exited the club thinking that the rules would be still valid. That is the basic reason why Britons were deported from other States and people from other Stated left UK.

Nuclear bombs were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the Nuclear aspect was legal at the time. Now there are many states that have pledged to not use nuclear weapons.

Nuclear is legal also now. What prevent the use of nuclear weapons is the Mutual Assured Destruction doctrine, nothing else. Nobody is so stupid (not even Iran or Putin) to belive that they can launch a nuclear attack and then survive the retaliation.

I remember that back then, a soldier was required to disobey an illegal order, it was one of the first thing that was said to a new soldier.

In fact the defense still works.

Only in a justice system that is a joke, like the US system.

No, like the OP The Guardian article, I was talking about larger cities which have decent public transport. They are also hotter than their surroundings which makes relief more important.

Stopping ICE cars only in big cities is a palliative if it is the only thing you do.
Take for example Milano: every day 600/700 thousand cars enter in the city simply because there are no (viable) alternatives. You have just shifted the problem in the immediate outskirt.

Maybe a better solution would be to mandate working from home during heat waves, this way you have way less people around, like with COVID, and way less people needing to use a car to enter the city. In the end big cities have not factories anymore, basically everyone can work from home. As a bonus public transportation would work better for the ones who need to go to the city

Nice try, but nothing what I wrote was an insult. Being uneducated, poor, or desperate is hardly one’s own fault. We need to start acknowledging that so many of us are being systematically disadvantaged by capitalism, which - surprise! - steals our knowledge, money, and happiness.

As I understand once translated in my nativa language it is implied. Calling someone uneducated or desperate is read as an insult in Italy.

We need to solve the problems they have, not the problems fascists want them to think they have. If you try to frame the AfD’s policies as actual solutions to legitimate problems you’re simply reproducing their propaganda.

Ok, so let we stick with real case.
Not so many days ago, a man raped a 13 old girl in a minimarket, and tried the same 40 minute earlier with another woman. He was arrested and a judge let him go just because he said he was sorry (and a couple of day after he said that he did nothing wrong).
It is obviously a problem if you cannot send your daughter to buy a snack for his brother without the risk of being assaulted.

Now, what do you think people would vote between someone who defend the man and someone who say that the man should be punished ? What could be an alternative solution to put him in jail or punished in some way ? Do you really think that saying that a party is fascist because they said “that man need to be punished or deported if illegally here” is the way to go ?

That’s like if you lived in 1933 and asked your politicians to deport a few Jews just in case, because those poor NSDAP voters had a problem (or thought to have a problem) with them.

No. That’s like living today and asking my politicians to punish, and eventually deport who are here illegally, the people who are committing crimes. I don’t care if they are jews, italians or whatever. You break the law you are punished. Simple as that.

Populism needs to be called out, dump policies need to be called out, lies and propaganda need to be called out, that’s the only way to handle them. Your misguided understanding won’t solve anything.

Yes, I agree. But if you only call it out you don’t solve anything. And since populism in the end have its roots in real problems, you don’t solve the real problem.

If you were head to a big party and decided today to “address the issues” of the AfD, which “the others choose to ignore” as you wrote, best case scenario you would become the AfD 2.0.

No, I don’t think it necessary would end up like a AfD 2.0 unless you think that if someone apply the laws he is fascist.
It could, I agree, but it is not the obvious end.

What good would that do?

A better country for every honest person, for example.

Works already fine for cities like Paris, Berlin, Copenhagen and so on. Driving a ptivate car for transportation is for max comfort, not for need.

If you think that using less than 2 hours to go to work using a car instead of public transportation (and the same to return home if you are lucky) is just only for max comfort feel free to do it, no problem, but you are joking yourself.
Yep, there are solutions to this but since people need to work also during heat waves, banning ICE car without the corresponding increase of the public transportation is a stupid idea. And the current state of most of the public transportation is that they would not be able to sustain weeks with a total ban of ICE cars, simpy there are not enough vehicles and drivers. And you cannot expand the fleet on a whim.

But now think how your idea can work in places (small cities, villages and so on) where a public transportation system is not feasible because it is not justified in cost and usage. How people move ? In small cities you have not all the services you may need like in a big cities, and it is logical, but neverless these services are still needed.

And also, heat waves are catastrophic emergencies which kill thousands of people. Wishes for mere comfort cannot have priority then.

True, but you were confusing a necessity for mere comfort in places that are not yet, and probably never will, ready to what you suggest.

Reasonable, few exceptions for really important things - I have no problem with that. But getting some bread rolls from a shop 1 kilometer away? Leave your Benz. Take the bike.

I can, and I do, if I have the shop nearby. But I am honest enough to understand that not everything can be done this way and that not everyone can do this way.

Heat waves are a problem, no doubt, but you don’t solve it only thinking to big cities, like for pollution.

We also need policies that ban all ICE cars - including Diesel cars - except emergency vehicles during and just before heat waves.

That would imply that you can satisfy the need of people to move (work, groceries, life in general) with the public transportation system, which I highly doubt.

The thing is, immigrants are the perfect victims. They often don’t have…

The problem is that people are not able anymore to discern things. What you say it could be true but the problem is that it applied mostly to illegal immigrants.
True, some people are assholes also to legal immigrants (stupid people alway exists).
Most people have not problems with the immigrants that work and partecipate in the society but with the immigrants that live by petty crimes.

Many nationalists force use immigrants because left wings (and other btw) parties make it too easy to use them as bogeyman: it is not too hard to point your finger at them saying “they are all criminals” when looking at situations in the cities (I always use the Milan Central railway station as example).
As I said elsewhere, years of immigrations left unchecked has caused the society to switch from the “they need help” mentality to the “they are all criminals, we don’t need them” mentality, offering an easy target to nationalist forces even because everyone else refused to look at the problem.

Would you commit a murder if you would be **sure ** to be caught, put in prison cell 2x2 meters and never ever exit, not even for 1 hour a day, until you die ?

I would not commit murder because I think doing it is enough of a punishment. My not-terrible upbringing has led me to dislike such acts. I have nothing to gain from just murdering people and that has rather little to do with punitive consequences

Or, let’s take a lighter crime: would you park your car in a no parking zone if you would be sure to be fined every time you do it ?

I don’t drive a car. I think it’s an outdated technology.

I think you understand perfectly the spirit of the questions, answering this way is simply childish.

The basic question is: would you think that people would do something illegal if they would be sure to be caught and punished proportionally to the crime ?

The phrasing here is a little unclear to me. I presume you mean that you want to preserve the potentiality of becoming a state servant or business owner. Statistically speaking (and logically speaking) workers don’t just move up the ladder. If everyone could the system as it is would implode and we know that it’s self-correcting against collapsing in on itself. As a worker it’s very difficult to start a business because you need money and time to plan. Oftentimes you fail because the real world is noisy and certainties are few.

No, I mean that I was s state servant (I served in the militay like every other man did up until 20 years ago) and I was a business owner.
But your point is wrong: everyone can try and that does not mean that everyone will succeded. There is nothing that can stop me to try to become again a business owner, only my choice to not be one.
And likewyse there is nothing that stops me to try to become a state servant again if not objective things: I am too old to join again the army or I have not the correct studies for a certain work in the state apparatus for example.

And society do not implode because someone move up the ladder.

But the punishment here does not come out of thin air. There is a monopoly on violence that is in the hands of the state.

The alternative is a never ending chain of personal vendettas.

It is a problem that the UK and the EU created. It is a problem of the contradiction between the local level and the international level. This problem is quite relevant for the EU, because it signals greater antagonisms affecting the entirety of Europe. /

The UK created the problem when decided to leave the EU. Think about EU like a private club: you could enter if you are a member. You leave the club, you can no longer enter. Who caused the problem ? The club which follow its rules of you that decide to leave the club thinking that you could still enter whenever you wanted ?

Assuming rules are static and respected: Wars cause innovation because either side seeks to win. Technical novelties are extremely important. You may not see mustard gas be used or soldiers being blinded by lasers, but you might have to deal with new technology for which no specific laws exist. There are these magical battle technologies called autonomous drones and autonomous turrets.

That does not means that everything is allowed. The use of every weapon, old or new, ultimately has a resposinble: who gave the order to deploy it.

I can also break the rules in favour of my superiors and hope I receive their good will. I can lie and say I was following rules. What’s important here is the authority judging me in the end turning a blind eye and that has happened time and time again throughout history. Operation Paperclip is a fairly decent example of this.

Obviously, you can lie or you can break the rules as long as you and your superior are willing to pay the price. And as you pointed out, it happened time and again.

It makes sense that rule breakers would use the following-orders defence since the rules are made by those declaring the orders.

Only if you are on the winning side. And also in this case I am not sure that if you follow an illegal order the defence works.

Meeting the AFD at their terms (“inhaltlich stellen”) is exactly what the CDU tried, and look where that got them.

Answering facism with “well okay maybe we do have too many outsiders and queer people” doesn’t solve facism, it simply creates more. And at the end of the day people still vote for the OG facists, so you lose across the board.

Correct, it does not solve fascism. Look at what Merz said: we will continue our way. Do you really thing that after this results this is the best thing he could have said ? Did he want to gift AfD also the next elections ?

What we really need is to stop offering populists and facists the stage.

And the only way you can do this is solving the problems people have, or think to have, so that populists and fascists can no longer use these as bogeyman.

We have to place the issues that are actually important instead of this fucking fear mongering. People don’t vote AFD for their legitimate policies! People vote facists if they’re uneducated, poor, and desperate.

Insulting who do not voted for you is the best way to win back their votes… sure.

So, where are all the intelligent and educated people who do not vote CDU anymore ?
Look at the historical data. Against last time (2024) it is true that AfD gained (about 14%) but the CDU was basically halved. And looking further back there is a balance between AfD gains and CDU loses.
My bet is that a lot of people who voted CDU last time simply voted AfD (or something else anyway).

And if the statistics about who voted who are correct, you have a list of thing to do to win back the preferences and to take away AfD political weapons.

We need to offer education and realistic opportunities of economical advancement and happiness. Want to guess which party doesn’t offer that at all and instead will make all three significantly worse for working people? THE FUCKING AFD.

Maybe, but at least they talk about them. And guess what ? People vote for the party that at least talk about the problems they have.

Is this anything a VLAN and Pihole can’t fix?

You can simply put it on a guest WiFi network that cannot see any other networks and just put a password on your main network, it is not that difficult.

Perhaps we could start addressing the issues that the AfD is using as campaign talking points and that the others choose to ignore.

Not every discussion about rules ends with citing immigrants. Immigrants are relevant here – see the article – and the rules that exist favour either rich immigrants or people with citizenship.

In this situation the immigrants (the Britons) were able to stay in Sweden exactly because UK was in the EU and then there were rules about this. Also a lot of people was forced to left UK for the same reason.

And migrants do make the world go round, look at doctors, people working in industry and so on.

I would like to discuss about this, if what you say would be true we would not have rise from all the parties that say to send them back. Now we can discuss about legal Vs illegal immigrants but I don’t think we could agree.

All of that is after the fact. After murders have happened. Murderers know they will be punished harshly and do it anyway. The interesting question is how to prevent murders without strictly relying on harsh punishments since that is something murders factor in…

Would you commit a murder if you would be **sure ** to be caught, put in prison cell 2x2 meters and never ever exit, not even for 1 hour a day, until you die ?
Or, let’s take a lighter crime: would you park your car in a no parking zone if you would be sure to be fined every time you do it ?

The problem is not how harsh is the punishment but how sure you are to be punished: you can have a death sentence for murder but if your probability to be caught is 1% it is not a deterrent.

So you do recognise rules are forced upon subjects by an authority, in this case the state.

Yes, and it is necessary.

I assume you are not a state servant or business owner, do you also recognise that the state wants to squeeze you of every ounce of labour so that it can do its deed to perpetuate its system of class rule? It’s hens OKing the fox guarding the hen house.

No. Simply because even if I am currently not a state servant or business owner (but I was both of them) there is nothing that stop me from being one once I had the prerequisites (for being a state servant) or I want to start a business.

Society is not merely a set of rules. Society is made up of relations between people and physical infrastructure such as housing and workplaces. What you think of as rules are at best for edge cases. Most people don’t go about their day thinking about rules, those who do are a small minority which most would generally label bean counters. You have a highly idealistic conception of why things work.

Maybe but I am pretty sure that if there was not a set of rules then society as we intend it would fall in a very short time frame.

Relationships between people work once the people know that if the do something wrong there is some sort of punishment, else it would become something like “the strongest rules” very fast.

Actually, no those who voted did not understand the consequences.

It is not an EU problem, it is their problem. Why we should try to solve a problem they created for themself.
Beside the fact that in my opinion UK voter understand very well what the possible consequences would be, they simply choose to belive that they were in a position to impose their will.

To understand the consequences you would need to spend time that most people don’t have because they work. Nationalistic thinktanks that position themselves against German (and French) competition pour a bunch of money into campaigns that say the UK will be paradise after Brexit and the people lap it up. Not that this is the thing that brought us Brexit, there was a nationalistic sentiment that existed before Brexit was even a concept. This has a logic, and it has very little to do with rigorously rational voting.

True. But what you are saying is that UK was so full of itself that they think that EU would beg to them to make treaties at their (UK) conditions.
Unfortunately for them it was (and is) not true.

But yeah, what you are saying, about needing to follow rules and whatnot, is exactly the same thing someone killings others for the military would say. “I need to follow the rules because if I don’t something bad happens or something”

No. Killing in a war has rules too. And a soldier can refuse to follow and order.
True, you follow orders but if the order is unlawfull you must refuse to follow it, since the “I was following the orders” defence does not work.

Oh yes, everything that is not left is obviously fascist in these times…

But in the world we live in, this is sadly not the case and we must stick to the rules that the people have agreed to.

Who says we must?

To be polite to others?

F the rules, it’s not like it’s in the interest of those who actually make the world go round. Immigrants for example.

Why every discussion about rules need to end with citing immigrants ?

The rules in this case are, the people of Britain have voted to leave the EU and all its benefits, so these new rules must be followed.

There was a poll about the death penalty some time ago in an EU country. The majority of those polled were in favour of the death penalty. Does the death penalty prevent murders?

Obviously not, death penalty alone would not work if you are pretty sure to not be caught.
What you really need is to be sure that if you break the law there will be a penalty, and a hard one if you commit a murder.

No it doesn’t. It’s just another terrorist tool that the populace OKs to have used upon itself in certain cases.

Like every penalty if you think about it.

Your logic is exactly the same of following orders and denouncing undesirables.

No. Following the rules is the base for a society to be functional.
Beside, when UK decide to leave the EU, they know very well what the consequences would be, they simply choose to ignore them, or they were convinced that the UK could have imposed their conditions on EU.

A shuter sound does nothing now that both cameras and phones with a decent zoom

Why would you want to put the onus of proving something illegal was done on the victims?

Because someone is innocent until proven guilty maybe ?

Banning pervert glasses solves the problem at the root. Plus it’s orders of magnitude more easy to prove someone wore them than proving something illegal was done with them.

Maybe, but this way you ban them also in situation where they could be usefull.
In a way you are punishing a technology instead of the people making bad use of it.

A lot of the intelligent people know full well the reason why, but that doesn’t matter as long as the old and senile generation keeps voting for the greedy bastards that created most of our problems in the first place.

And yet all these intelligent people are not able to build a credible alternative to the current parties, left or right that they are, which is what paved the way to AfD.

I would personally focus on the current policies of the left wing, with poverty as a consequence.

If we look at the situation without prejudices we would clearly see that the far right begin to rise in Europe (with various degree) when the left started to ignore the common people’s problems, if not making them worse.

It is not logical to think that people were right extremist but somehow never voted for a far right party (or a far right party was never founded to get these votes). True, in 10/15 years there is a change in the demogaphy but it is not a long enough time frame to have a radical change.

What happened is that people voted as usual, then the ruling parties (most from the left) decided to adopt policies that make life worst for almost everyone and when they ignored the people complain about them if not calling them stupid and ignorant, the same people then started to vote for someone who at least listen to them with the hope that the problem would be solved, paving the way to AfD rise in Germany and people like Vannacci in Italy