I’m sure Farage will order the demolition of the wind turbines on day one of his Musk-ordained premiership

Taller, more aggressively-styled SUVs with poorer visibility is the best we can do

They had this some 20 years ago, only then it was called “The Rules”.

He believes that, as one of the Owners, it’s his prerogative to appoint the viceroys who will rule on his behalf. And that he owns enough of Germany to veto any reluctance they might have of having another Nazi government.

Removed by mod

I believe so, though I think that’s the case for Switzerland as well. There everyone does some military service every year, and where possible, in whatever their day job is. (One example is that the military service of civil engineers building bridges and tunnels is to implement ways of quickly destroying them with explosives in the event of invasion.)

Standard Orc operating practice

Sweden only conscripts a small proportion of suitable people, to the point that if you don’t want to serve, the only thing stopping you from saying no is whatever social pressure you may feel from your peers, as they’ll just move on to the next candidate and have no problem filling places. Not sure how Finland is, but IIRC, they shut down conscription after the fall of the USSR and only reestablished it a decade or so ago, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it was still a piecemeal system as in Sweden

The Baltic States will probably need to militarise their entire societies along Israeli/Singaporean lines: all adults (with narrow exceptions) are in the military, have sidearms and can be mobilised at short notice.

So, a more righteous than average Mastodon instance?

Not to be confused with St. Tib’s Day, which is the leap day in the Discordian calendar

That’s all very well, but we live in a democracy, which means that if public opinion isn’t managed, everything can be overturned. We have seen the US reelect an egregious crook and convicted rapist who promised dictatorship, partly out of anxiety about the price of eggs: telling several hundred million European voters that they need to become more evolved and less selfish as the spiking price of gas hits their cost of living will go down about as well, sweeping the likes of Le Pen, AfD and other Putinists and Nazis that aren’t even on the radar yet into power.

In order to tell the Qataris that we expect them to honour human rights, we need to be able to get away with it. We need to decarbonise, but that will take time (we could do it more quickly if the population was more willing to make sacrifices, but this isn’t Communist Cuba with its secret police, and a significant proportion of voters who even worry that they won’t be able to enjoy their little luxuries will have no qualms about going fash), so we need to pull our punches for now, but decarbonise as rapidly as feasible, and also build up reserves of gas to cushion any price shocks for when we tell the fossil despots what we really think of them. (And the more reserves we have, the sooner we can do that.)

Except that, as we’re frantically building out alternatives to gas, our economically stressed voters will be way pickings for the numerous Russian-backed populist parties, so we need to hold off until we can tell the Qataris to go jump with impunity.

As somebody once put it, politics is the art of saying “nice doggy” until you can find a rock

It doesn’t have to be competitive any more than the room rates at the Trump Hotel in DC.

Sweden only made the change gradually about a century ago, with it happening first in urban areas. The merchant Clas Ohlson, after whom the dry goods chain is named, was the son of Olle something-other-than-Ohlson, and the first in his line to make their surname a family name.

Surnames that describe the individual (“son of Olaf”, “the blacksmith”, “from up the river”) work fine in small-scale societies, but are a problem for bureaucracies and other systems. IIRC, a lot of the pressure for standardised family names in Europe was to make things like taxation and conscription more manageable.

Technically, the daughter of Frostí, which is a recognised masculine name in Iceland. And also her father’s name: they don’t use family names in Iceland (other than about 7 surnames grandfathered from the Danish colonial era, but those are uncommon), and people have one or two given names and a patronym, a system which has so far scaled well enough for Iceland.

Mullenweg shat the bed again?

Looks like he won a stupid prize

Or, “this is not Russia”

Ireland is more likely to face sanctions within the EU than even Putinist Hungary (due to Germany’s historic obligations to Israel and Ireland not having veto buddies, as Hungary has in Slovakia and Italy)