Nah you’re good, hopefully other people reading will find it interesting. You’re right, English usually works better across that border, unless they speak Platte in which case it can be a tossup if someone doesn’t have great English.

I’m talking about Dutch, sorry for being unclear, I thought “man” rather than “Mann” would make it clear. I’m just saying the phonetic sequence “die man” is something many Germans will have heard before from nearby and related languages. I understand that it could be surprising the first time.

I’m a native Dutch speaker and have a German partner and live in a German speaking country (although my standard German isn’t amazing, B1-2ish) so I’m not totally ignorant of the parts of speech in Germanic languages.

Yeah, but die is also “that” so people say “die man” all the time.

That’s weird, Germans have usually heard Dutch before which also uses ‘De’ for most things (except randomly some words still have vestigal neuter article ‘het’), same in plattdeutsch in their own damn country (they have ‘dat’ for neuter).

Um, that event has been moved forwards to August this year

You haven’t provided any pro arguments. “They collaborated with ICE” is not an argument that the purpose of the university system is to contain people against their will. It tells us the administrators are evil, sure. It tells us about the role of universities in enforcing the kind of discourse allowed in our society. But the jail that ICE takes people to is the carceral institution, not the university they take them from.

Sorry, no, I’m on your side regarding the morality of all this stuff but that doesn’t make university a carceral institution.

Uh yeah all that stuff is bad, but you can leave university if you want

like i said, i agree completely, but he was not the only person with a few million dollars in the 90s

those links basically say exactly what i said lol

i think that’s kind of a dangerous attitude. plenty of nasty fucks have a couple million dollars, every single small-town republican politician and racist car salesman in america would love to do what musk has done. it’s not good to underestimate your enemies. on the plus side he is becoming deranged enough to take himself out sometime soon (fingers crossed)

he made up the emerald mine to sound cool, he is way more pathetic than that, he just lucked into money with paypal really. anyway i’m not claiming he’s actually smart or anything, but not every grifter succeeds grifting this much

yes, i agree with all that. but lots of people, maybe millions of them (one in a hundred people being an asshole is not really overstating it…) would love to scam the government and don’t succeed as much

it’s nice to imagine musk as incompetent but he did manage to become the richest person in the world, i dont think that happens by accident. although we see through him plenty of people do not, and if those people themselves are powerful then it doesn’t in the end much matter what we think

Voting system helps but it’s not a magic bullet. I’m from NZ. We’ve always been ten years behind the rest of the world, I’ll hit you up in a decade to claim my thousand bucks. Germany is ramping up for fascism for real and they have the same MMP system as us, we copied it almost exactly from them.

Just because American conservatives are Nazis now doesn’t mean that all conservatives everywhere are as well

They believe all the same stuff, they just know they can not yet bring it out in public.

You’re right that they wouldn’t try to overturn an election but it is only because they can’t get away with it, not because they actually respect any law other than “fuck you I’ve got mine”.

And your attitude of complacency is what makes it so that Australia will also become like the USA - you’re not special somehow, this is happening everywhere.

ACT will never be as popular as AfD, they are simply not relatable to normal people on that way. They would have to dramatically overhaul their image, not saying it’s impossible, but definitely not happening in two elections. They have been treated as clowns by the media and they occupy a particularly niche spot in politics. To relate it to German politics, they are actually more like the FDP, and their role has been to work together with the CDU who promotes them for Wahlkreis votes in the areas with the richest people, to make sure they take a few extra seats in case they come in under the threshold, which happens regularly. So they are seen as the party of the financial elite, and they often do the dirty work of the centre right party when they don’t want to smear their own image. Historically their brand of extremism has been financial, not openly racial, and it would take a huge PR operation to get poor people to vote for them, even if they bait them with racism.

NZ First, the centre populist party is much more likely to take that role of the and shift to the right, but they are hugely centred around the cult of personality of their leader, who is 80 years old now. They are pretty likely to fall apart when he retires or dies since nobody knows who any of the other.

Additionally, poor White New Zealanders are simply not quite as racist towards Māori as White Germans are towards Muslim immigrants. They live closely together in the same communities and always have, and that makes a difference.

A truly popular right extreme party emerging in Aotearoa is absolutely a threat that I am taking seriously, but I think due to the specific conditions it would have to be a fresh young party like the AfD that captures the imagination of the youth. It will probably be an American style illiberal conspiracy troll fascist type movement, not European style fascism, we are simply too removed from that cultural context. It would probably have to include Māori to some degree, and play on anti immigrant / China sentiment. We saw that in our anti-covid-restrictions protests, a certain branch of Māori nationalism was very involved in that, and it was very important for their “legitimacy” even when the protests included hardcore racists too.

What do you mean? This government sucks, but a right extremist party which only got 8% of the vote pushing forward a racist bill is business as usual everywhere in the world…

it’s a kinase which regulates glycogen synthase (and a bunch of other stuff)

It wouldn’t be possible even without the distraction