Trump wants adulation, not conquest. Push come to shove you can get him out of the oval office by making him figurehead Emperor, as long as it comes with immunity he’ll accept.

On a scale of Mussolini to Hitler, he’s like 250% towards Mussolini.

In one incident, after two video game companies cancelled their sponsorship deals with Neom, Nasr threatened his communications team, saying that he would “take a gun from under my desk and shoot you” unless he was told who was responsible for the deals falling through.

Now if they were trying to make deals with me, I’d say you. Nasr, you’re responsible.

I mean… people in Berlin are complaining that Swabians aren’t integrating. The question is less whether there ever was cultural homogeneity anywhere in Europe (there wasn’t), but how many new-comers people are accustomed to, how many can come in over some time-frame before people go “wait, this is too much, we’re getting overrun”. By and large, at least in Germany, people don’t really move between regions. It’s not common to see a Bavarian taking up a job in Holstein. The Bavarian might move to the city, or to another village around the same city, maybe to the big city, anything else is an exception.

An often quoted statistic is how in the German east, where anti-immigration sentiment is highest, there’s the fewest foreigners. That fails to mention both the outflux of east Germans towards the west, the steeper rise in percentage of foreigners in the past decade, as well as this being the east’s first immigration wave. Total number still is and probably will forever be smaller than in the west but the perception is way different, and the west never had an immigration wave following right after an emigration wave.

Honestly for the majority of people the problem would be solved if this is simply accepted as fact. That it’s not wrong to feel a bit like you should be protecting culture a bit, and then maybe join a club to practice some local tradition. If, “It is important to me that local tradition is preserved” is immediately met with “you hate brown people” then people are going to be pissed, and rightly so. As the German saying goes: “Is this available in one size smaller?” Let people run around in fancy three thousand year old masks or whatever the fuck.

Lack of politics benefitting, and this is a broad term, left-behind people, be that economically or socially. The whole republic had a severe right shift after reunification with people calling themselves socdems introducing a whole new low-wage sector and that’s just the tip of the iceberg, together with the east never getting properly integrated, politically speaking, and having their economy forcibly dismantled by western competition (no those weren’t just market forces) that’s a triple whammy for them.

Voters aren’t necessarily actually ideologically aligned – they’re just out of options when it comes to protesting, and, well, they’re largely easterners they somehow don’t even consider founding whatever party they actually want to see. That is, for example, the average easterner is anti-immigration, but not anti-immigrant: They have zero beef with that black lesbian running a Kebab shop, heck in their village she might be the only one holding up the flag on a Sunday, it’s a “let no more in until we’re being taken cared of” kind of attitude. The political class by and large, both left and right, completely fail to see the distinction to xenophobia proper, there, deepening the – correct – impression that noone actually cares. That breeds a rebellious attitude, “vote where it hurts the establishment”.

The BVerfG can be surprisingly fast if things are sufficiently clear-cut and/or urgent. For one, the AfD will have to have sufficient discipline to not make death threats over this, siege the court, such things. I’m sure their higher-ups have game-planned this but I would be surprised indeed if fascists manage to not be, well, fascists, when backed into a corner.

The legal question isn’t actually complicated, there’s been enough cases so that the court won’t have to develop law. It’s mostly going to be hearing evidence.

Didn’t bring in the motion. The Bundestag will vote on it and if it passes the Bundestag officially filed a criminal complaint so to speak with the constitutional court.

Other options would be the Bundesrat starting the procedure (vote-majority of states) or the government (cabinet majority, presumably), but the general preference is for the Bundestag to do it because it has a direct, federal, democratic mandate (government is indirect (elected by the Bundestag) and Bundesrat is state governments).

I won’t argue against him being proud. But he’s also going to be pissed.

Oh they were shaming him all right. How he personally thinks about it is quite irrelevant, he still has enough wherewithal to understand how it’s meant and what impact it has on other people.

Don’t look at what they said. Look at what they did, like showing nudes of Melania on state TV.

Well there’s no explicit ban there’s simply no Rechtsgrundlage. Also, a decision of the constitutional court which I can’t be bothered to unearth now regarding the establishment of the ZDF, which was initially supposed to be a federal broadcaster because the ARD was too left (according to the CDU).

All those stations, radio or TV, broadcasting in the whole republic (ARD, ZDF, DLF) are based on inter-state treaties because only the states can set such a thing up. It gets even more complicated because originally DW was a short-wave station set up by the ARD, then it became fully federal, now it’s still federal but also part of the ARD, but as said doesn’t broadcast domestically. Internet doesn’t count, there, just actual airwaves.

The target audience is all abroad, both the diaspora (hence German language programming) as well as general foreign propaganda. As in “broadcast the German view of things”. Similar to BBC World, France24, Voice of America and… RT. Just that RT sucks donkey ass, even more than VoA, because the Russian regime does suck even more than the CIA. Can’t divorce those broadcasters from the states running them.

Their reports on Gaza are quite unambiguous in who’s suffering and who’s at fault, but that’s by presenting facts, not interpreting them, or doing much drilling. Generally speaking they avoid talking about Israeli politics as much as they can: If the foreign ministry doesn’t want to talk about it you won’t see it on DW, there’s no direct ties just some kind of telepathic connection.

Compare that with their reports on e.g. the reparations discussion with Namibia, it’s night and day when it comes to covering detail.

They’re in fact forbidden from broadcasting within Germany, doubly so: First off they’re not public but state TV. secondly, they’re federal while broadcasting is state prerogative.

Expect their editorial policy to align with Germany’s foreign policy, and there’s some selection and framing going on occasionally in the sense of “we’ll report about a problem but only in the context of it being addressed” kind of deal. They’ll report about arguments within Germany, but they won’t start any. When it comes to raw factuality they’re highly reliable.

I think the ARD membership is just about access to each other’s programming, there’s zero overlap when it comes to editorial staff, running the channel etc. That would be highly unconstitutional.

Arte does have some English, Spanish, Polish, and Italian stuff but it’s quite limited and generally only subtitles. Other languages if they happened to have bought it from somewhere else, say a documentary about Kafka where you can select the original Czech audio. News won’t be among the English subtitled stuff but there’s a good amount of documentaries, background and big-picture stuff. Not just society and politics, all kinds of topics.

Just go browse. And, separately, a metric fuckton of live concerts from all genres.

Algorithmic patents amount to patenting maths which, by very longstanding precedence, is not a thing, for good reason. Same goes for business methods and other stuff.

In the EU there’s only one way to patent software and that’s if you’re using it to achieve direct physical ends. E.g. you can patent washing machine firmware in so far as you patent a particular way to combine sensor data to achieve a particular washing result. Rule of thumb: If, 30 years ago, you’d have an electromechanical mechanism to do the task then you can patent the software that’s now replacing it.

Oh: It’s also possible to patent silicon, that is, you can patent your hardware acceleration methods for video decoding. That doesn’t extend to decoders running on general-purpose hardware, though.

If you want to monopolise your brand-new hash algorithm there’s a simple way: Don’t publish the source, use copyright to collect royalties… though that doesn’t mean that reverse engineering is outlawed, especially if necessary for interoperability. Practically speaking nope hash algorithms just can’t be protected which is fair and square because it’s academia who comes up with that kind of stuff and we paid for it with taxpayer money. Want to make money off it? Get tenure.

Just for the record, and context: That wasn’t misogyny, it’s not calling any woman anything (though using a word vulgarly referring to female genitalia), it’s the established insult for Merz. Really doesn’t translate well, not so much word-wise but connotation and implication-wise. Cf. the American vs. English vs. Australian usage of the word, doesn’t translate at all and that’s within the same language.

It’s an imputed high-school nickname calling him, in my reading, an immature braggart. You know, 12yold brags about their extensive sexual experience, gets called “pussy hunter” in return to make fun of him. There’s also the additional linguistic quibble that the word, to the amusement of the rest of the republic, simply means “face” in Bavarian and can be used there more or less in the sense of “gob”, as in “shut your gob”. He indeed has a big one.

The EU is a defensive pact in itself and while “defend our brothers” sentiment is not tightly woven, there’s a tripwire cascade. You cannot attack Estonia without every single Finn being personally offended, and you cannot separate Finland and Sweden in military matters, the list goes on and on. The effect flattens out the further away you get but you’d be hard-pressed to find a member thinking twice about sending arms and MREs. Poland would have boots on the ground before Spain gets the call.

Estonia. The fuck has Estonia ever done to anyone. They’re essentially a mascot of the EU: Them being, willingly, part of the pack is witness to the EU actually being a post-colonial project. They’re way too precious to be left hanging. I can’t even bring myself to make an alcoholism joke right now.

They aren’t strong enough to take on each separately, either. For Russia to attain their coveted superpower status they’d need to stop fucking around and actually invest in themselves. They do have more than enough land and resources, they have a reasonably well-educated population, it wouldn’t take that long trouble is they’re a kleptocracy and the chief kleptocrat thinks being a superpower is measured in land mass.

The EU accepts countries with border disputes into the union (in fact there’s a couple very fun ones between member states, generally low-intensity though, e.g NL and DE even agreed to disagree in perpetuity), the EU is also a defensive pact, trouble being getting into the EU is quite a bit harder than getting into NATO: Vastly stricter rule of law and democracy standards, on top of that trade integration, economics and everything.

OTOH the EU is also not above creating new ad-hoc treaty structures with unimaginative names so a… DCENSV, “Deep and Comprehensive European Neighbourhood Security Vehicle” is absolutely within the realm of possibilities. People are basically waiting for Trump to move while preparing responses for every scenario, very little if any of this kind of preparation will reach the public eye.

NATO member Finland has a land border of many hundreds of kilometers with Russia’s mainland territory. That doesn’t seem to be hurting anyone or anything, except perhaps Mr. Putin’s ambitions to one day reconquer Finland.

Fun fact: The border is essentially unmanned on the Russian side, they moved pretty much everyone to Ukraine. Doesn’t look like they’re expecting to be invaded. You may or may not be interested in what military installations exist up on the Kola peninsula and how many roads and rail lines go south.

DeepL has always used machine learning, and they already switched to LLMs for some language pairs – not rebranded ChatGPT, but their own stuff. They’re also quite open about the model not being perfect, they’re advertising with things like “blind tests show our results sound more natural than the competition”, “our model output needs fewer edits than the competition”, etc.

And yeah they definitely didn’t edit this one much from the English original. English sentence structure and American idiomatics all over the place, it’s tedious to read. Quite, but not entirely, as bad as this.