from breakfastmtn@lemmy.ca to world@lemmy.world on 13 Feb 2025 23:31
https://lemmy.ca/post/39078633
German political leaders have reacted with alarm to U.S. President Donald Trump’s bombshell announcement that his administration will conduct peace negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin over the head of European leaders.
“To be clear, peace must last over the long term. It must secure Ukraine’s sovereignty,” said German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Thursday. “That is why we will never support a dictated peace. Nor will we accept any solution that leads to a decoupling of European and American security. Only one person would benefit from that. President Putin.”
Scholz, whose Social Democratic Party (SPD) is in third place according to polls ahead of a Feb. 23 national election, called for more spending on Germany’s defense and military aid for Ukraine, and urged conservatives to relax the country’s strict spending rules — a theme he has touched on repeatedly during the election campaign — in order to do so.
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Yeah idk how this is being taken so tamely by fucking everyone. It’s insane.
Everyone is calm because any analyst worth the name should have seen this coming since November, and its far too late to stop at this point.
I dont know why Europe didnt start rearming eight years ago, but now they are going to suffer for that oversight.
Because eight years ago nobody really cared about russia.
Which was a mistake, since it was already after the Crimea annexation.
everyone shoulda been gearing up to defend the world from russian imperialism ever since it became clear putin was dictator for life in 2007 or 8. there have been clear and obvious signs this was coming for nearly two decades now and yet all our leaders are somehow shocked, appalled, and on their backfoot. like where y’all been? putin became dictator for life, invaded Crimea, anexed it, fucked around in everyone else’s politics giving us donnie dickhead, donnie dickhead extorted Ukraine, them and all their authoritarian buddies bungled (perhaps purposefully) flattening the curce, putin invaded Ukraine wholesale seeking to wipe it off the map, put even more money into the streets to get donnie dickhead back, and now we’re here. with people somehow surprised by this latest step in russia’s path along aleksander dugin’s foundations of geopolitics. how are any of these leaders surprised? its all laid out in foundations of geopolitics, project russia, and project 2025. i’m just some farm country idiot in the hills of appalachia, but somehow i can see all this and these world leaders can’t?
You arent wrong. Obamas great sin wasnt the tan suit, it was playing defense against Russia. It doest matter how strong you are or how weak your enemy is, if they only need to land one lucky shot to win you cant let them shoot indefinately without firing back. Then Biden made the same mistake…and here we are.
and not saying how bad things had got until after trump won the election. it made him look like the democrats were just being sore losers to a lot of the right wing base, and then they were further entrenched in 2024 when the manipulation was more naked and more obvious. yet somehow nothing has been said at all. i guess because foreign powers like russia and israel interfering in our elections is just politics as usual now
And who’s going to defend the world from American imperialism?? (42 invasions since the end of WW2, 5 invasions since 2000, Canada, Mexico, Panama, Greenland…)
We Europeans have an enemy and that enemy is usa (it’s always been)
all imperialism is a threat to everyone everywhere, be it russian, american, or chinese
Because we can’t do anything about it.
Europe needs to put boots on the ground in Ukraine. You need to stop this now.
Partly to stop the invasion of Europe. Partly to gear up Europe for war in the hopes of preventing a larger conflict later.
Europe won’t though, since they expect US/UK/AUS to do all the military heavy lifting and always have.
Literal propaganda
The US fostered this and the EU was happy to accept it. It worked out reasonably well for everyone until about checks watch right now.
The EU got to under fund and under prepare their military, and the US was effectively buying soft power and security around the world. It’s why the US able to basically unilaterally drag a coalition into Iraq.
This makes no sense.
When did European leaders ever say that the US should put boots on the ground in Ukraine?
biggest military lifting in europe was done by germans.
That would risk direct conflict between nuclear powers. I’m not sure that’s a gamble we should take.
I’m not sure we shouldn’t take it either. I don’t know, really. But it’s scary.
Because nobody believes it can actually happen. 70 years of continuous peace makes people complacent. Which is good in itself, but when shit hits the fan we just sit back and expect it to blow over.
This time Germany may need to save the world from America. Please don’t fall like we did.
We’ll have an election in a few days here in Germany. And we’re already stumbling. The polls don’t look wo good.
So sad to hear.
History is doomed to repeat itself.
Hopefully you have much more robust fraud and manipulation systems of review than the us. Musk very likely compromised the systems and all investigations are stopped in their tracks
Don’t worry on that angle we’re using paper ballots, always have, always will, as the constitutional court decided that it must be possible for a voter with basic education and no specialised knowledge to ascertain for themselves that the vote is kosher. The constitutional court recently got reinforced, too. Not to mention that the federal level has preciously little power if the states really decided to tell it to fuck off. Also, as a Nazi you shouldn’t trust a military that names bases after Stauffenberg.
Can a voter verify their ballot was counted and for who the votes were cast?
Yes. You can observe the whole vote, keeping an eye on the ballot box all the time until it is emptied on a big table, where it is sorted, and once sorted things get counted, there’s a whole procedure to minimise confusion and with that errors, double counts etc. Unless a magician comes along and teleports your ballot out of the box you can then be sure that it has been counted.
What you can’t do is prove to anyone that you voted a certain way and that’s a good thing.
But can you prove to yourself that your vote for candidate a was cast for your name and no nefarious acts led it to go to candidate b instead?
Yes. I just described how.
Clueless comment of the day. Has no idea whats happening in the world.
Any chance yall can turn back on your reactors so you can actually be energy independent again?
We’ve got tons of uranium over in Canada and you’re welcome to it.
We don’t need to. But nice try. 😘
Germany does not need reactors to be independent. Where did you get this weird information from.
From Swedes that are paying noticeably higher energy prices because the German grid went from a net exporter to a mixed grid that can have a surplus when winds are high but usually needs to burn gas that’s imported indirectly from Russia when it’s low driving up energy prices in nearby regions.
Germans love to talk about how they never needed Nuclear power and there seems to be an irrational hatred of an incredibly clean form of power but it’s clearly a problem:
euractiv.com/…/swedish-minister-open-to-new-measu…
It’s not hatred, it’s fear. Many Germans lived through the fallout of Chernobyl. You might still say it’s irrational, but it’s not “hatred” and it’s not unfounded.
I don’t get this weird obsession with labelling everything “hate”, even if it’s driven by other simple emotions.
It’s very unfounded and stupid.
Nuclear plants are all over the world, with much better designs.
No, it’s objectively not unfounded. Again, you might call it irrational, but that’s not the same thing.
Arguing about Chernobyl is about the dumbest thing to do.
It was very old reactor, no other like that is in Germany, therefore it’s unfounded.
No, fear doesn’t work like that. Just because something is unlikely doesn’t mean it can’t happen, and fear tends to be about just those things.
Again, you can call it irrational, but it is objectively not unfounded. There is a foundation, even if it’s unlikely. You don’t get to change the meaning of the word “unfounded” just because you think something isn’t likely to happen.
Again, there aren’t those reactors in service. End of story.
Coal puts out more radioactivity into air, yet nobody mentions that. So fuck this ‘founded’ fear. It’s not real.
I don’t know if you’re trolling. Of course people aren’t afraid of exactly these reactors blowing up again. They are afraid of nuclear accidents in general. There’s always a chance for things to go wrong, otherwise we wouldn’t have had Fukushima a couple of years ago. Some link in the chain can always fuck up.
“Coal puts out more radioactivity into air” is an incredibly stupid point. “More radioactivity” than what? People aren’t going through the same precautions they had to when they lived through the last fallout. That’s not real in this context.
Were there any precautions in Germany after Chernobyl? I’m from eastern Europe and there weren’t any.
Nuclear disasters are not happening despite there being hundreds of plants in operation. It’s all just FUD spread by the fossil lobby.
Yes, lots. After the accident a bunch of places in Germany measured far higher-than-normal radiation levels. There were lots of unclear signals going through the government and media - the different states had different recommendations and there were lots of confusing/opposing signals going through the government and media. Some examples:
All of this happened during the formative years of a large part of our population. Can you understand how this does give a foundation to the fear?
One happened a couple of years ago, and I guarantee you more will happen - as long as humans are involved in the cycle, things can and will go wrong. Modern designs make this far less likely and hopefully reduce the worst outcomes by a lot, but how sure are you that all our reactors are secured against e.g. sabotage? What if an enemy nation invades and gains control of the reactor? What if individual systems get attacked by drones? We’re entering a new age - don’t underestimate what terrible things can happen this time around.
Also, Fukushima happened due to natural disasters. Climate change is changing what magnitude of disaster happens where, so they might hit reactors that aren’t prepared for these disasters. Is every nuclear reactor worldwide safe from a Fukushima-type accident under all possible conditions?
I’m not that well versed, but I would expect modern designs be unable to be used as a weapon, at least easily. When someone brings heavy equipment (and I will file Fukushima under a ‘very heavy forces’), they can do anything. Putting the blame on nuclear is again just fearmongering.
Thank you for providing me more info about the Germany at that time. Did that happen throughout, or just the west part? Because IIRC the east block was celebrating First May like it was no big deal.
I get that people may be scared, but again that’s now how things work. Coal is 100 times more radioactive than nuclear plant, so building them to 100% put radioactive material around them is absolutely stupid, when the same people are scared of one nuclear plant blowing up 39 years ago.
Dude, the places that measured 50x the normal amount of radiation aren’t measuring 50x the amount right now. I’m aware that coal adds radioactive material to the air, but that’s just not relevant to the topic. But I’m tired of explaining that, have a good one.
I consider it relevant when the topic is germans being scared of radioactive fallout replacing nuclear with coal.
Then you’re still entirely misunderstanding the point.
So what you’re saying is that no German reactor would ever be online for years while its backup power supply, critical for safety, was offline? Because yes that happened. Or that this is a proper way to store nuclear waste? Because that happened, too. Just as the water incursions into that salt mine.
Long story short humans can’t be trusted with this shit. If you think we can, you’re naive.
Sounds like sweden is just pushing the blame to germany. Populism at its finest
Turning the existing reactors back on is not an option anymore, they are already being dismantled. Building new ones would not be worth it when investing in renewables is cheaper
And that’s why you didn’t want to provide tanks, opposed strikes into russia and didn’t provide Taurus missiles.
Can’t wait to see whether we’ll get the corrupt clown again as the next chancellor or the other corrupt clown who hates foreigners.
Or maybe even the lesbian clown who hates foreigners and thinks women belong in the kitchen.
Such visionaries. So inspiring. So smart.
And yes, that is why. The corrupt clown thinks not poking the bear will appease him.
The lesbian clown would also rather deliver tanks to russia than to ukraine.
Yeah man. That’s always been Trump’s deal. Those of us warning against him are left with nothing to say but “we told you so” and to ask “hey you got any of those civil liberties? We’d like some please”
Does Trump want the Sudetenland?
I don’t get. What’s Trumps bargaining chip. If Ukraine and Europe doesn’t approve their peace plan, what is his leverage? Stop supporting Ukraine? He and his goons have already said that it will eventually happen.
He is Putin’s stooge. Trump LOVES dictators and billionaires, because he wants to be, or be seen as, both of those things. You might ask why the Israelis preferred Trump over Biden/Kamala even though the latter were as much supportive of Israel as Trump is. The reason is that Trump’s rhetoric is stronger and more direct, and on top of that, he is a VERY easily manipulatible bitch despite his reputation and personal belief that he is uncontrollable. The other elites know this, and this is why he is popular with them even if he is an absolute disaster for most people.
So he just wants to go tickle Putins balls. Unless he’s there trying to sell Europe and NATO.
Germans are profiting off the war and they can suck my european Schwanz