Technically his material support to a genocide makes him complicit, it would not have been nearly at the scale without US support tens of thousands of women and children were murdered as a direct result of his decisions[1], if international law meant anything we would hang him for that. So no, he was a "bad dude".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide

The one part that is brilliant maneuvering now is the EU spending increases on their own militaries: You keep the dependency, US military bases and surveillance installations, including US nuclear weapons on your soil (or even more bases like in the case of Greenland), you align on every military intervention under the sun (including Iran, Cuba, Venezuela and the greater Israel project) and you get a perfect pretext to do large scale austerity? It is quite incredible they were able to sell all that with a straight face to the europeans.

You know I would have asked the Europeans if they are okay with another migrant crisis as a result of another US intervention in the middle east, or if they think it's fair they have to spend on their own defense but don't get to seek diplomatic solutions to conflicts if that goes against US interests. The rules based order is dead, might is right has truly won and Europeans can lick the boot that crushes them is the truth.

All of that to say there is a reason EU is falling victim to far-right fascist parties if that's the only alternative to this clusterfuck that is afforded to them.

https://youtu.be/izDAOvHz5Wc

What I meant was it would be more interesting to see any opinions that conflict with that above establishment consensus. For example on negotiated settlement of the Ukraine war vs. continuing the forever war. Like where do Europeans disagree with the strategic interests of the US, do they really 100% align as this poll makes it appear? How is that possible?

With universities it's similar, publicly funded research gets patented (including software!) and exploited by private enterprise, but even worse private industry dictates the areas of research so it's impossible for there to ever be a coherent research strategy in the EU.

The EU makes a lot more sense when you understand it's a neoliberal institution. Just giving people money to work on open source directly would violate state aid/market disruption rules, they aren't allowed to do that because that could negatively impact the profit of some shareholder somewhere. Member states that want to do that even have to ask permission from the commission if they want to give aid to companies [1].

Everything is like that with the EU, they aren't like China that can just put money whereever to develop or fix strategically, rather the EU can't do anything strategically, or fix anything. It's by design they aren't incompetent, that is what market liberalism is. It's core to what they mean when they say "European values".

[1] https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/state-aid/overview_e...

This might be the underlying hidden psychology: being more productive and efficient isn't benefitting the working class. It won't make them more money or make them work less hours, it just means overall more work for equal or less pay or less jobs for programmers outright. It doesn't make things cheaper or better, it just translates into more profit to the owning class. Of course nobody can articulate their anxiety's like that in a hyper capitalist society, but that might be the real reason underneath anti ai sentiment.

My appeal is just to realize that our implicit assumption that we can't do anything ever at all besides appealing to completely ineffectual individual action is in and of itself a strongly ideological and politically radical position to take.

https://www.epceurope.eu/post/epc-welcomes-landmark-cjeu-rul...

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2025/12/09/sha...

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/defender-f...

So this is presumably why they will never address this in npm itself.