Oh, I see you shared an RT article, of to jail you go: https://united24media.com/world/eu-court-confirms-blanket-ban-on-all-rt-russian-state-media-content-20379 (this hopefully reads worse than it is…)

For instance if i want to visit my in-laws who live just two towns over: it’s 20 min away by car, 40 min by bike, or 1 hour 15 min with public transport, and that involves one bus, a train, and another bus, because there is no direct route, and that assumes i catch all the connections on time.

This is very true for most of northern Europe as well. I have relatives here in Sweden that live 40 minutes away by car but 2.5h if I were to travel by train/buss, assuming everything is on time - a complete joke.

For Spain I’d say outside of Madrid/Barcelona you’d like to have a car, having to stand and wait during eventual delays, or in between connecting transport is really impractical in the heat. Another issue is also the timetables, move out of the cities and there are definitely not 24/7 or 24/5 departures. In some places the best connections stop at 18 etc, even during the summer.

I am not sold on nuclear in EU…

France has had the capabilities to do it with blood-uranium from former colonies and also built up proper logistical lines to produce them at scale. This requires multi-year state-lead investments, organizing and backing - judging by how it looks in my country, this is not happening. My government are happy to throw a lot of money at their friends who all suddenly have companies building modular reactors and bla bla bla. A lot of talk about how the “free-market” will build and solve the energy crisis. So in the case of my country, I would not stand on the side of those who want nuclear at the moment.

If someone actually proposed a plan that isn’t just pissing away money on short-term projects then maybe I’ll consider it, but capitalist liberal-democracy isn’t good at things like this.

I am in northern Europe and we have it really warm but it is still somewhat doable without AC. I was in Spain for 2 weeks just now and would not have survived if the hotels and shops didn’t have AC, so it seems to be a thing in Spain at least. My work (regions largest hospital) is fully climate controlled, always cool and nice.

I think the effects of this will rapidly accelerate the European decline but noone seems to talk about it or understand this… We do not produce enough energy to keep whatever little industrial base we have left running, and the productivity of this industrial base will be further diminished by the extreme weather events. My guess is that when it leads to larger impacts on agriculture in southern Euope the circus really will start.

I debate, discuss and talk to my coursemates at University etc and noone thinks about this or even bats an eye. It is like I am living in an opposite world, and then I go to the local (trot) org and they spend hours talking about the ebil see see pee and how Putin is the reinkarnation of Stalins big spoon instead - just insane stuff.

And dont get me started on the military bs, well at least I am happy that allying with the US is a additional deadsend of accelerated austerity and degradation of the MIC base.

Sad to hear, I am starting to fear for what this meant for Europe the coming years.

This is the problem with spending 4 years antagonizing your population about the “russian threat” - now you have to pay a political price for pursuing peace. This was obvious to everyone from the start, but most of those voices have been denounced to the fringes of the debate, with the good ol’ european neocons setting the agenda in the mainstream media (the same which happens in the US everytime they initiate a conflict).

Germany’s industrial economy was built on trade with Russia. The destruction of Nord Stream and the subsequent severance of Germany’s trade relations with Russia have left Germany buying natural gas from the United States at prices several times higher than the Russian pipeline gas it replaced. This is industrial suicide. Germany’s chemical sector, its steel sector, its glass industry, its energy-intensive manufacturers — the very foundations of the Mittelstand — are losing international competitiveness day by day. Skilled jobs are draining out of the German economy. And the German taxpayer and the German consumer are making a transfer of national wealth from Germany to American gas producers at a scale unprecedented in postwar Europe.

As for the German economy, generally they can’t out-capitalism the contradictions arising from capitalism itself - or there is one way to do it, which we saw 100 years ago as well:

On top of this, the German government is now pledging an enormous defence build-up — hundreds of billions of euros over the coming decade — to arm for a war that diplomacy can easily prevent.

In a sense this might be the “easy” thing for mr Chancellor to do (at least in the mind of a liberal), the constant fearmongering gives him political leeway to go all-in on state spending, try to revitalize the economy and have military spending drive industrial activity. The problem here is two-fold though:

1. Military spending doesn’t have as good of a return as, for instance, spending on infrastructure or integration of vertical (civil) logistic chains. So it has to be even more justified than such initiatives.

2. Following from 1), having a large standing military is wildly expensive in and out of itself. Now if you are are war this could be justified to the populace (for instance in the case of an invasion), but even less so if it is military endeavours outside of the nations borders (see the US). Either you have to have the population heavily propagandized (well they are not so far off in that aspect are they), or you have to come up with some other way of justifing the expenditure to the public.

@cfgaussian do you have any further points here? Maybe I am missing the German perspective here. Not that professor Sachs letter will turn the tables domestically, but the coming months will be important, how does it seem internally?

We have much the same here in Sweden - do you think there is any ground to take considering the state of our societies? I find myself just contemplating moving out of here, which is a bit defeatist of course but it is tiring to permanently fight against the broader conscious of your country. Every news segment, every headline, every opinion article is just constant and constant ill disguised fascism, chauvinism, amerikkka-simping or something else.

Bro gave Israel nukes lol, might even be worse than Mussolini