It is frequently discussed to ban far-right parties. Decades ago, the NPD could have been banned but it was turned down because they were too insignificant (only getting a few percent in elections, if at all).

With the AfD, it’s a different story. They are rather too significant (getting double digit percents). Politicians are worried that if a ban fails, it could give them even more fuel. Some subconscious thought nags me that this wasn’t the actual reason, but it’s the best I can do right now.

Yeah, basically the US can decide who gets how much of an advantage in this war by simply dialing up or down their military aid.

Ukraine not willing to negotiate? Dial it down. Russia not willing? Dial it up.

So they can end this war if they are willing to invest accordingly. But not this conflict. Will that lead to a stable peace, or just another war in the near future? Without satisfying answers to these questions, Ukraine is probably better off to keep fighting, even without any US aid, which repeals the first sentence of this paragraph.

legitimizing Russian aggression and undermining Western alliances

Yup, sounds like Trump; that russian asset.

So Ukraine needs to get nukes to deter a 3rd invasion in a few years? Just great.

I think the most important insight is that you can achieve the same result with far less effort if you stay on Earth.

On Mars, you’re basically building survival shelters with no trade network to rely on in a hostile downright deadly environment. In a place where we don’t even know how to get there, and how to bring all the stuff we need, and many more unknowns.

It might just be that the same effort can achieve more on Earth. And no matter how bad Earth becomes in terms of climate, toxicity, heck even if atmosphere AND oceans fully turn into dead zones, it’s still far more suitable than Mars (you mentioned two important factors), and the transport problem is nonexistent or already solved.

[Edit, emphasis: Even assuming decades of nuclear winter after WW3, it’s still far more practical to build a bunker shielded against radioactivity on Earth. On Mars, you’d had to do a similar thing.

Interestingly, this argument becomes stronger the more Earth is made uninhabitable. Because any Mars colony would heavily depend on reliable supplies from Earth for decades, if not longer. Which becomes increasingly harder / more unreliable the worse the situation on Earth becomes. At some point on the scale of how bad things can become, we cannot sustain space travel any longer.]

I hope we colonize Mars some day, but it makes zero sense as a means to escape an ecological catastrophe, since Mars is orders of magnitude worse and orders of magnitude harder.

This extremely high entry barrier might possibly seem as a good thing for people who are super rich and afraid of other humans, since it makes it practically impossible for all the poor and desperate to attempt to raid their luxury bunker. Best moat ever. But again, for the same budget you can easily get an automated army of killer machines which rivals most nations, if you simply stay on Earth.

Given how much noise exit parties, or generally anti EU sentiments can cause, I’d also prefer a higher bar. Be welcomed if you join, but please be sure about it.

Because religion evolved to thrive in us.

It’s like a parasite, and our mind is the host. It competes with other mind-parasites like other religions, or even scientific ideas. They compete for explanatory niches, for feeling relevant and important, and maybe most of all for attention.

Religions evolved traits which support their survival. Because all the other variants which didn’t have these beneficial traits went extinct.

Like religions who have the idea of being super-important, and that it’s necessary to spread your belief to others, are ‘somehow’ more spread out than religions who don’t convey that need.

This thread is a nice collection of traits and techniques which religions have collected to support their survival.

This perspective is based on what Dawkins called memetics. It’s funny that this idea is reciprocally just another mind-parasite, which attempted to replicate in this comment.

What do you mean? Of course they do. It’s not a contradiction, because they are adversaries.

In Germany, whenever the discussion about wether to deliver a specific weapon system or not extends to a “new” weapon system, this usually is an argument against. Hurr durr, it could be used to poke too deep into Russian-held territory, or beware, even strike native Russian soil. Russia might not like that and pull Germany into the war or throw a nuke or whatnot.

The day this country’s tensions between conservatism and liberalism die is the day the USA ceases to exist. That tension is at the core of our republic, literally since its founding, and it’s what makes us great, unlike any other nation on Earth.

That sounds as if this tension was somehow unique to the united states. It’s not, it’s everywhere. Even worse, the US have less of a political spectrum than most other nations, just shy of dictatorships.

Nice! The market and climate need clear signals like that.

I think that’s fine. Unless we’re talking about greenhouses or urban indoor gardening, food grows in the environment. If you want to protect the food, you implicitly have to protect the environment, which makes you an environmentalist driven by food. There are lots of hazards which have little to do with climate (or at least which also have other, climate-unrelated causes), which can affect food. Invasive species, plastic, overfertilization, corporations, general socioeconomic disparities, just to name a few.

While continuing to tap new oil fields and failing to make sufficient progress. Also, this one isn’t about climate, but healthy and sustainable food. Connected issues, but still.

All that aside, to come back to the somewhat dodged question, what would make things go faster?

This is not the way to go about that

What is your way to go about that?

If you aren’t doing anything, what way(s) would you deem acceptable? If you know acceptable ways, why aren’t you following through? Honest if-questions, not meant as assumptions.

Healthy and sustainable food seems to be a decent goal. People should be able to get behind this. So if all the disagreement is about the right approach, where are the people with the right approach, and where are all the people voicing their concern about art supporting them?

Please help me out. It feels as if people are more concerned about pieces of art which they may never see, than about healthy food, the climate, or other major issues which affect everyone.

I get why it puts people off, these points exist. I just wonder what the “right” alternative to these “wrong” approaches is, and wether the critics walk the talk.

Adding a comment so people can experiment more in this thread.

Today, it makes more sense than ever. There was the critique answer “Yeah, but you cannot deport a Nazi, because he’s a German citizen!”.

Now that the Nazis were busy making plans how to deport millions of German citizens …

Not saying we should, at least for the sake of the receiving country.

;-]

Not sure what country you had in mind. Some do have a “no negotiation” stance: https://www.chathamhouse.org/2022/01/we-do-not-negotiate-terrorists-why. I also had the impression it was a widely accepted idea by the general population.

Arguments can be made either way which decision is at their people’s expense.

So I understand your area/bubble never favored “no negotiation”, but then I’m not talking about your area/bubble. My question was about the change in attitude.

Has the general consensus changed about how to deal with hostage takers? I think it was “don’t negotiate with terrorists” not long ago. Very tough for the relatives, but meant to prevent more harm in the future, by spoiling the plans of the terrorists.

When reading reports and comments about the Israeli hostages in Gaza, I get a different impression. Why is that, what is different?
Are there no concerns for encouraging more hostage taking this time?

Depends. Don’t try at home! Keep your drones in line of sight, which probably means much less than 1000km.

More than 100k across Germany?

AFAIK it was 160k in Hamburg alone.

An attempt to reconcile both views by comparing it to a structural collapse of, let’s say, a bridge.

In the end, it collapses. Before that, the cracks begin to show. Before that, invisible micro-cracks form. Before that, pressure exceeds limits.

Now, at which point in this story does “collapse happen”? Some use this to refer to the actual collapse, after the cracks began to show.

But since collapse is inevitable after too many micro-cracks have formed (or maybe even earlier, since those are already symptoms of an underlying cause), some refer to this long, unspectacular build-up phase as “collapse happens”.

I’m neither an economist nor a civil engineer. Bridges are complex, economies even more so. I still think these two views explain how the same term can refer to different things, or different phases of the same thing.