Oh hey, my family did this back in early 2010s Italy. The local gold and silver dealership proudly displayed a copy of L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics near the counter, that was fun.

A country like Argentina, beyond its meat industry, isn't really a country with a significant impact on the environment - but this will hurt the local population.

By design even, considering what the aim of the current government is.

Venezuela's economic crisis really began after oil prices fell drastically in 2014 and the west used Chavez's death/Maduro's election to increase pressure on the country via sanctions which for example made buying parts to maintain oil refineries difficult. Before that, it was doing about as well, or better (of course, failing to become independent from oil exports) compared to the other countries in Latin America.

Argentina was already in a crisis for the last ...20 years-ish, but this acceleration of the crisis happened in a week even as Milei backpedaled on some potentially damaging promises like cutting trade with China.

They will probably lose territory to Poland as well if this keeps up

Sigh

No they won't. It was a fringe position in the Polish far-right before the election and now that the libs have won it's even less likely to happen.

Or, the fighting will eventually stop and the current status quo will remain permanent. It's hard to tell.

0 chance. The SPD agrees, the CDU agrees, most of the AfD except the very nazi ones agree, the FDP and the Greens agree enthusiastically and likely even the Left Party is likely to have a sizeable amount of people voting for. Probably only the BSW (the left wing conservative splitter party of Sahra Wagenknecht) will vote against.

Easier yes, I suppose.

It's still a half measure that will at best delay the worst effects of climate change (such as many other mainstream proposals to combat it) and there's a difference between how radical the changes to society will be and whether climate change will be bad, very bad, very very bad or lead to Medieval death rates

Have fun trying to stop climate change without reducing meat consumption, not to mention other problems like desertification and soil degradation.

The earth is an ecosystem with a metabolism, and humans take out of it way more than return, and with capitalism that isn't going to change anytime soon.

You can go "sweetie, but meat tastes good!" all you want, not to mention your bizzarre comment on optimizing land usage for population growth. It's not a question of morality - it's a question of not being a fool.

He's not advocating Europe separate from the US, but become a military superpower in its own right by having as large a military as the US. I am sure both Petr Pavel and Joe Biden agree on enforcing the "rules-based international order".

To think that the EU suddenly wants to ditch the US because they see them as a burden/dangerous is wishful thinking. In fact the only countries willing to do that might be France, because the local bourgeois don't like to be limited by the US on pursuing their imperialist interests in Africa.

But yeah.

Additional Context: The state government of Bavaria (and several others around that same period, with similar ideas) passed a controversial reform of police laws in 2017-2018 (It was polemically called "The strictest police law since 1945").

It included changes such as:

• increased allowance of use of personal data by the police forces.

• allowing the police to openly film and photograph people participating in public gatherings.

• allowing the police to infringe on postal secrecy and to confiscate mail without a person's knowledge. (if given permission by the courts)

• allowing the use of police spies. Including even entering people's homes if given permission.

As well as making previous restrictions such as on "probable danger" way more lax.

Raising the interest rate (i.e. making loans more expensive) is the measure taken if there is a belief that there is too much demand for goods by the population (Keynesian inflation theory) or too much money in circulation (Monetarist inflation theory). It's taken in the hope that reducing the purchasing power of the population will slow the price increase down with falling demand. Which is why you had mainstream economists talking of say the need to increase unemployment (i.e. take people's incomes away) and how wage increases are bad due to the supposed theory of the wage-price spiral.

Cutting taxes is a measure taken with the hope that with reduced costs, private enterprises will scale up production and increase the amount of goods' supply as compared to demand, lowering or at least stopping the increase in prices, as orthodox economists hold the thesis that excessive demand (as supposedly caused by the 2020 Covid Crisis) is responsible for the currently high inflation.

Nowadays, it's commonly accepted in many studies, such as this recent one from New Zealand that a significant cause in the inflation is the desire for even higher profits compared to what they already had in years prior.

Lowering taxes in response to a stagnant economy in this case is, as I understand it, unlikely to affect inflation, but is rewarding a private sector that used the fuel and energy price crisis caused by the war in Ukraine to enrich itself even as those prices fell again, with more riches. Especially considering the currently stagnant economy, it's placing hope on a sector that has already failed to deliver out of an ideological belief that the state is unable to do what the private sector can, as well as the support it gets from and how many politicians have personal relationships with the private sector.

The government has more interest in pursuing the global power ambitions of the Standort Deutschland rather than accomplishing environmental goals, even in spite of one of the parties being named Die Grünen (which is basically just good PR for them and nothing of substance) - and the goals that are being pursued anyway are all to the slogan of Cem Özdemir "Zwischen Wirtschaft und Umwelt gehört kein oder". Environmentalism as long as it remains profitable, even at costs of +2, +2,5, +3 or more °C

The next elections are sure to be won by Merz, with or without the AfD, and very likely to have the FDP in influential ministries, so nothing will change - or perhaps even for the worse.

That's what happens when the main goal of production is not the goal of creating socially necessary goods, but to insert money into the labor process and end up with more than you had at the beginning.