I do believe there is also the concept of export taxes, though its much rarer than tariffs and generally only used to avoid increases in price of a locally producted product due to high demands from countries which can pay much more for it.

Luke was a late bloomer whilst Anakin was a child genious.

I’ve lived in Britain for over a decade until Brexit.

I can guarantee you that the British Press, including the BBC, is one of the most propagandistic in Europe by a long margin and pretty close to the American Press (just go check how the BBC or the Guardian spin news about Iran and then check the NYT - they all use the exact same Manufacturing Consent techniques as often exposed in !ManufacturingConsent@lemmy.ml

It’s not by chance that the British Press is literally the one least trusted by the locals in Europe.

From what I’ve heard the German press is also highly propagandistic and even Racist, especially Politico (which is owned by the same people as the Bild newspaper, a very right-wing tabloid).

Shit, even in my own country - Portugal - some of the press is doing exactly the same use of differently charged words depending on the side, unquestioning trust of sources on one side but not the other and selective reporting as the BBC (though some is impeccably unbiased).

Your best bet is to determine yourself how much a news source is by looking for things like use of differently charged words and passive versus active for different sides or clearly different implied trust for sources depending on the side (for example).

Yeah, well, they only got power thanks to the interaction between the Mathematics of FPTP and the Far-Right vote being split between Tories and Reform, and then promptly decided that what Britain really needed was more authoritarianism and more rightwing policies, splitting the vote on the left of Britain’s political center (which by European standards sits somewhere in the hard-Right space), especially the actual Leftwing vote.

If both Labour and the Tory Party were annihilated maybe Britain would actually politically evolve into the XXI century.

This is the guy that very openly said Germany had a duty to support a nation committing a Genocide because of the dominant ethnicity of that nation.

This shit is pretty close to the NAZI mindset and nowhere else in Europe - not even the in countries with actual far-right governments - would the head of government actually say something like this.

Mind you, in Germany even the Green Party supports Israel based on exactly the same reason as Merz gave, so having a “Race justifies anything” mindset (a core element of NAZI thinking) is a much broader problem in Germany than just this guy.

“Macht macht recht”

Trump class battleships

Fat, with blingy fake guns and engines installed the wrong way around so that they go faster backwards than forwards?

Can’t do: Jesus was picked up by ICE and deported.

Is the media talking about the Epstein files?

No?!

Looks like their Pedo War plan is working perfectly!

Discontent only turns into Revolution when enough people voice it and act on it, as they feed each other’s confidence in changing things eventually turning into a critical mass for change.

An external enemy that attacks for no reason, more so one which is so murderous and immoral that they would mass kill children, will make a lot of people not voice their discontent with the only structure capable of unifying them in defense against the external agreessor, much less act against it.

Then on top of that, that murderous foreign aggressor has actually voiced their the desire for said Revolution.

If before in Iran voicing opposition to the regime might actually inspire others to also voice their own discontent, now it will inspire others to attack that person for doing what that foreign aggressor wants.

So what before was growing into a critical mass for change amongst the general population has now been rolled back into what is most small groups of like-minded extremelly anti-regime individuals surrounded by a general population that sees them as working for a foreign aggressor which is so evil that they blew up a school full of children.

In that racist muck of how you expressed yourself one does find the bright jewel of a point that in the West (especially America, IMHO) there’s a overwhelming tendency to “blame the foreigners” in some way or other (be it “immigrants” or “foreign states”) for things which are first and foremost the fault of 100% local people, the 100% local system that puts them in power and the 100% local citizenry who went along with all of it for decades.

Specifically on what America is doing now, none of whatever Russian influence (much less, the far, far, vaster Israeli one) would at all work if the quality of the local politicians which people kept putting in power for decades (all the while going along with the stupidly obvious nationalist propaganda of how special America) wasn’t so abysmally bad.

Americans in general are first and foremost to blame for this shit, mainly for their cheerleading of a system which started flawed and got increasingly broken over time without them doing anything to fix it (when was the last time there was a General Strike in the US???!).

This admin is full of individuals that the anybody running sex honeypots, including with children, has kompromat on.

FIFY

I used the expression “claimed to desire” for a reason.

What Trump (or, in fact anybody in his administration) says and reality are totally unrelated things which at the best of times are about as related as boats which pass each other in a thick fog.

Israel, having done this multiple times in Gaza, knew with absolute certainty that they’ll get away with it once again.

America and Israel’s attack almost certainly snuffed out the rebellion in Iran, especially after they bombed a school full of children.

People aren’t going to overthrow the local authorities when a foreign country unilaterally decides to attack their country and even targets their children.

I expect this had the exact opposite effect of what the Trump administration claimed to desire.

Then again, I seriously doubt that the real objective of the Pedo War was ever related to Iran itself.

The EU Commission is rotten to the core, hence all the shit that comes from it, from authoritarian measures and bending over to America faster than a speeding bullet to custom-made regulations to benefit specific very large companies with an historic of giving gold plated “consultancy” positions to ex-commissioners.

The EU Parliament, on the other hand, is as Democratic as it get, being elected directly by EU Citizens using Proportional Vote.

So this surprises me not one bit.

I lived in Britain during the period leading to and after the Leave Referendum and, IMHO, Brexit was the consequence of amongst other things a very strong strain of prejudice and delusions of grandeur in British (especially English) society, rather than the cause.

The ill adjusted to the XXI century society and power structures were what caused Brexit, not the other way around.

The UK is somewhere in between most of Europe and the US when it comes to moralism.

In most of Continental Europe “if you’re not harming anybody, we don’t care”, but Britain’s period of increasing moral openness just lasted 3 decades with only enough steam to make same sex marriage legal, and then stopped and turned weirdly transphobic. Further, the moralistic vein of their society never really stopped, it’s just that for some limited domains (pretty much just homosexuality) it’s unfashionable for the middle class to be openly moralistic, but just about any other sexual behavior which isn’t common will get criticized even in newspapers, often by the very upper middle class people who call themselves “liberal” because they’re non-judgemental about homosexuality.

Having live in Britain as well as in Northern and Southern Europe, British society stands out for be more judgemental, prejudiced and moralistic that even Southern Europe (which far less moralistic today than 4 decades ago and unlike Britain isn’t ultra selective about the things it’s non-judgemental about).

I think American support for the Far-Right all over Europe has been ongoing and pretty openly so for a while now: some years ago Steve Bannon even came to Europe with money to - as he himself said - grow the Far-Right in Europe.

Israel being an ethno-Fascist country are also very interested in the growth of the Far-Right in Europe as plenty of warm welcome of European Fascists in Israel attest to, including some who have often openly made anti-semitic statements.

I suspect the horse of CIA + MOSSAD support for Far-Right parties in Spain (and the rest of Europe) has long bolted from the stable, in which case it won’t be any worse if leftwing and even centrist European leaders cut off support for those nations, maybe even the opposite since those nations are already actively supporting their political adversaries.

PS: Whilst I’m not in Spain, I am in next door Portugal, and you can be pretty damn sure that America as a nation are total buddy-buddies specifically with the mainstream Portuguese supposedly center-right party (only not really center anything, plus they have been drifitting even further rightwards in the last decade or two) which is the equivalent of the PP and is currently in government in Portugal (which is why Portugal has been supporting both the US and Israel, including in the slanted coverage - very much using the same tricks as the BBC and NYT - of the Genocide and the this war in the local Media aligned with that side of politics).

Guess now we know which government in Europe doesn’t have politicians who are being blackmailed by Israel and/or the US with proof of some crime or other (including pedophilia, which judging by who supported Epstein is a specialty of both the MOSSAD and the CIA)