Yes, the IOC, along with FIFA and other major organised crime syndicates with sports as a cover story, is fine with authoritarianism, often even openly supportive.

In all honesty I wouldn’t call this a “defeat” by any metric. While Pakistan’s air force is generally regarded as having performed better than expected during the recent clashes, neither side could effectively control the air space or even really contest the other’s air space for any significant time. The main advantage Pakistan has seems to be a doctrinal one. They appear to put greater emphasis on aerial radar and long range reconnaissance. With the age of flight by sight and dogfighting long over, the Indian approach will need amendment. India seems to currently be converting several former civilian A321s for military use in order to equip them either with the Israeli made Radar system they already employ on their dated IL-76s or with a domestic radar system, that we can’t yet evaluate. When that capability is online the IAF should be able to bring its numbers advantage to bear more easily.

I’m afraid there’s no single German word to describe this feeling. The best I could come up with is “Scham über mögliche Fremdscham”. It could obviously be compounded into “Fremdschamesscham”, but the average German likely doesn’t understand that without additional context.

“Fremdscham” is what your old friend may be feeling. It’s a feeling of embarrassment on behalf of someone else. “Scham über mögliche Fremdscham” then translates to embarrassment at the potential feeling of your friend feeling embarrassed on your behalf.

Buy a used one, ideally refurbished. Those can be incredibly cheap. Feel free to slap any basic out of the box os on there, free os’s like Mint or Zorin are very beginner friendly, and you should be good to go.

I run Mint myself and it’s fairly idiot proof. While I don’t have as much free time as I used to, running most of the games I enjoy on steam is possible there. I’ve heard good things about Bazzite, as it seems to specifically cater to the gaming crowd. I haven’t tried it out myself though, since gaming isn’t my biggest priority.

I absolutely cannot stand the kind of people who answer a brief and simple yes or no question with a wall of text or a two minute voice note. If it’s that complicated, because your pet chihuahua just had a stroke and you then fell in love head over heels with the veterinarian and that you’re currently at the airport to fly away for your spontaneous honeymoon, just say no and tell me about the details in person.

Thank you for this great answer! It’s something I intuitively felt but couldn’t put my finger on with the same surgical precision you just did.

Anyone who doesn’t have children is breaking a million year old family tradition. I regard it as willfully dying out.

I’d rather interpret that as the rational actors trying to increase cooperation among each other in order to reduce the risk from and exposure to an increasingly irrational actor.

Yes, I can attest to this from my own experience. I speak so much German all day every day that, when speaking to my Dutch friends and family, I sometimes start using false friends or even awkward sentence structure.

While asking an LLM can yield results, it may just as well kill your OS entirely. Consulting old forum posts or engaging with a supposedly snobbish in-group also has issues. I see your point.

However, I believe the key drivers that make Linux more accessible for average users are the increasingly stable nature of out of the box style solutions like Mint, an ongoing trend to make applications browser based and therefore much easier to use across platforms and, finally, a real push by valve to finally break the gaming barrier.

Italians have a proud history of hanging fascists in public spaces. Maybe they can try and tap into that part of their history?

The moment both the Europeans and China declined this entire exercise was already pointless. With Pakistan already accepting the invite, I get the feeling that India will decline on principle, making the dictators’ club even more pointless.

I’m absolutely with you on that point. The primary concern for the vast majority of people will always be for themselves and their loved ones. It’s the reason fatalistic compliance is so common in dictatorships. I’m convinced that in most countries, including modern day Germany and the modern day United States, people can be led into fatalistic compliance. In France on the other hand I wouldn’t be so certain. Imagine a scenario in which Marine or one of her stooges wins the presidential elections and tries to pull off the same march into fascism as we’re currently seeing from the party formerly known as the Republicans, there would be a general strike and major upheaval in no time.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the US for work about a decade ago, mostly in the midwest. I’m fully aware of the spread out nature of the country. Even “cities” often feel like a patchwork of suburbs outside of the urban core and population density is generally quite low. Nonetheless, things like strikes require people to actively not do anything, which should be possible. Even the yellow vest movement in France was most successful in the rural and suburban areas, more similar to the US in density. I believe it’s more about a culture of compliance, complacency and fatalism.

The French would have general striked and yellow vested the country to a grinding halt by now. Folks in the United States either lack the courage or confidence or interests or all of the above combined.

It’s hard to make that distinction. Even in Germany under the jackboot of National Socialism there were still good people, some even dared to take action while others dragged their feet as much as possible without endangering themselves and their loved ones. This is where the difference between guilt and responsibility arises. In my opinion not all US Americans are guilty, just like not all Germans were, yet all US Americans share a responsibility to rid themselves of their political polarisation and the hatred at its root, just like the good people of Germany managed to do in the decades after the war.

Since most European businesses already own a letterbox in Ireland or Luxembourg, I suppose they can use those for their exports in such a scenario.

That’s what I was thinking as well. If the Americans are as incompetent as they look we’ll see a surge of European exports from Poland or Spain rather than Germany or France. It may suffice to just drive the same goods to Gdansk and ship it from there…?

I always thought that India uses both Bharat and India with English still an official language. Has the current government made the switch to only using Bharat?