Well they certainly could go much much worse. The regime and their base are so far from anything being based in reality I don’t think anyone can truly be certain where this will go.

And you can just read about early ish days fascism in Germany and see how that meshes with this Regime and it’s historical context. In no particular order :

• Legislature ineffective and captured/ aligned
• Judiciary captured /placed
• Executive controlled (by proxy)
• Intimidation / Terror Squad
• Industry leaders largely aligned
• Populous tired and under economical hardship
• Extreme militarization
• Strong and largely aligned surveillance system
• Scapegoating / internal Enemy phantasms
• History of ineffective Governance / Corruption
• Generally unrepresentative and unstable Political System
• Moderate / Ineffective International push-back
• Unpredictable and Hostile foreign Policy

There are also lines that haven’t been crossed yet but there are not a lot before we get to the really Bad ones. So yes Large scale incarceration and killing against internal resistance, or simply against the ‘racialized other’ are maybe already the next steps if MAGA(and the reaction to it) keeps on this trek.

There could be some kind of thing to fan the flames and lead into the big Bads including probably some external War as well.

Or there could be circumstances that stop this insanity before we get there. But holy hell Americans are way to chill about all of this currently and MAGA certainly won’t stop until they are made to stumble and fall. Could be self inflicted of course but if the pressure is higher the chance of a fumble goes way up. So every resistance is worth the attempt at this point, and if the ship can still be pulled around there have to be real consequences otherwise it’s just gonna be this again on a few decade cycle. I mean this shit is already worrying over here and in Germany well we seem to rhyme politically with the US of ten or so years ago so …

For me this certainly is Fascist and we all should know how that goes if it truly gets to go.

I live in a city that offers nearly any type of service/shop local to me so nowadays I’ll likely use them here unless what I’m searching for is overly specific.

My mom recently took me to a store selling minerals and fossils, which while not my scene, is quite an interesting place to just walk through.

Realistically I should probably get some of my food from a farming coop but my volume is so low and the supermarket is right in front of my door, to make that the main exception.

Prices sometimes are higher but typically not egregiously so, and for some things i find it within myself to pay that higher price.

Calling the plurality of political conflict from 45 to 90, and like several fields of study, semantics is kinda crazy work but you’ve got the spirit in general I guess. Good day as well.

on the left side of the political divide

There is no such political divide, at the minimum there are a couple of axis on which to place peoples and groups political position. There can be such a thing as three or more fundamentally opposed political positions(liberal, left, fascist, monarchist,…) and there can be a united opposition of two or more of these opposed to another. As would from some point of view ideally be the case with left and liberal politics being united against fascist politics. This does not make left and liberal politics the same or part of the same thing. They are fundamentally opposed in a way where the underlying assumption of the philosophy that defines them are incompatible so that accepting one of these assumptions makes accepting the other impossible.

refusal to unite against fascism

it’s not productive as you said but I think there can be much said about the concept of accepting that one can fight fascism without outwardly doing it towing a liberal party line. Said another way if liberals will not join leftists in their way of fighting fascism, why should the reverse be generally true.

In all honesty it just feels like a case of US brained political understanding or just like not well read. It’s the kinda environment where someone will call out Mamdani, sanders, obama, and bill gates for not uniting under one flag to fight orange hitler. Maybe they will but it should be obvious that it’s gonna be a temporary and strenuous marriage at best.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_politics paragraph 3 and 4 it should illustrate why Obama is not considered part of the Left even though part of his campaign and probably governance could be considered center-left

Ideologies considered to be left-wing vary greatly depending on the placement along the political spectrum in a given time and place. At the end of the 18th century, upon the founding of the first liberal democracies, the term Left was used to describe liberalism in the United States and republicanism in France, supporting a lesser degree of hierarchical decision-making than the right-wing politics of the traditional conservatives and monarchists. In modern politics, the term Left typically applies to ideologies and movements to the left of classical liberalism, supporting some degree of democracy in the economic sphere.

Today, ideologies such as social liberalism and social democracy are considered to be centre-left, while the Left is typically reserved for movements more critical of capitalism ,[9] including the labour movement, socialism, anarchism, communism, Marxism, and syndicalism, each of which rose to prominence in the 19th and 20th centuries.[10] In addition, the term left-wing has also been applied to a broad range of culturally liberal and progressive social movements,[11] including the civil rights movement, feminist movement, LGBTQ rights movement, abortion-rights movements, multiculturalism, anti-war movement, and environmental movement,[12][13] as well as a wide range of political parties.[14][15][16]‌

The problem is more that people conflate liberal and left through Obama. Like you are doing in this very comment. If you know what left politics is it’s obvious that Obama isn’t part of this.

If Obama is good or bad, whether he carried some better than conservative policy, or got something done really doesn’t matter because he isn’t a left politician, so placing him as one will generate resistance not because everyone on the left sees him as evil, but because he is obviously not left to people who understand what ‘left’ and or ‘liberal’ means.

It’s an error in categorization on the part of the one conflating Obama and left, not a failure of “left purity” on Obamas part, he never was left to anyone paying attention, at best he used left messaging and heritage to promote a liberal campaign. Which might be the second reason many are sometimes angry with him, he used left aesthetics and talking points, while in retrospect not caring all that deeply about them, which to someone starting out naively optimistic about the prospect of an Obama White house, feels like betrayal, not because Obama really betrayed them as such, more because over time they came to realize he was never really fighting for them to begin with.

I was at one of the best schools in Turkey for a week on exchange.

The cafeteria food i got to try was good but probably nothing special for Turkey in terms of dish selection and such. I really mostly remember eating sucuc scrambled eggs and sipping tea every morning.

We only had one dinner at the school while I was there which was very nice and fancy, but it also was separate from the normal boarding school dinner. So quite a bit nicer for just our group of 60 especially I’d guess in terms of presentation. The chefs running the show were the same tho so the taste should be quite good even for regular dinner.

The rest of the evenings as far as I can remember we were eating out and getting hammered in downtown Istanbul so the host students at least had some allowance to burn and so did the rest of us.

I don’t think I really ate anything that was close to bad or unappealing that entire week, but im also not that picky and Turkish food obviously slaps.

German (no menu unfortunately): https://www.istanbullisesi.net/ Turkish (with menu) : https://istanbulerkeklisesi.meb.k12.tr/

There are a few factors that stand in the way of this setup, but a milder version of this where we are generally trying to tie power grids together to transmit solar and wind power from places with favorable conditions to users is underway. I know for example of at least one large project where Singapore is installing large scale solar in Australia and building undersea cables for transmission (1). So we are going in this direction despite difficulty.

The main issues are:

• Transmission is difficult and expensive. High voltage power lines especially undersea or very long ones are expensive things to construct, and still relatively uncommon and therefore specialized compared to regular grid infrastructure.
• Oftentimes solar in the dessert is actually not that favorable in price especially if you factor in the transmission which is not 100% efficient. The site in the dessert might require security especially in places which are perceived as insecure or unstable and regular cleaning if the dessert is dusty. And solar obviously benefits from more sun hours and no cloud cover, but high temperature eats into that advantage somewhat, as solar cells are less efficient at high temperatures (2).
• The management and bureaucratic overhead rises for larger projects and projects involving several countries which is an issue for both regular grid interconnection but also purpose specific generation and transmission involving 2 or more countries.

There are probably other issues but work is being pursued nonetheless.

(1): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link

Other examples I could find with a quick google:

China: https://www.renewable-ei.org/pdfdownload/activities/GEIDCO_191126.pdf

EU: https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/breaking-borders-europe-electricity-interconnectors/

US: https://www.gridunited.com/projects/

(2):https://8msolar.com/solar-panel-efficiency-vs-temperature/

I wouldn’t think so, mostly because it’s long and not straightforward to read/pronounce.

I find my parents approach to naming to be quite reasonable : Give a short and easy to pronounce/understand first name, and a more creative/interesting and longer second name.

Short names generally make things easier, and about half of the people I know that have long first names (3 or more syllables) have adopted a shortened version of their name or an unrelated nickname for everyday use.

Steffie instead of Stephanie, tini instead of christine, Ulli instead of ulrich, johan for Johannes, max for Maximilian…