Yes, the one authorities are struggling to contain because of recent withdrawal of resources, and consequently predicted to be more prolonged and at greater risk of wider spread.
They have a head start on you, but you're catching up quickly! Worth remembering they have been shooting peaceful protestors recently in the US too.
Trump and Hegseth are explicit in their admiration for Putin and Xi. So being technically right here is largely to miss the point. The trajectory the US is on is pretty clear.
I'm not from the US and neither do I try to defend the current US government.
Just pointing out that Putin has systematically turned Russia into a full-blown fascist autocracy, but even in Russia this took nearly two decades until all opposition was crushed.
MAGA has the same goal (turning the US into a fascist autocracy), but I bet it will be much harder and would take much longer to dismantle the checks-and-balances system in the US as completely as Putin did in Russia.
Democracy is about more than elections. Having a functioning public sphere, justice system, and media are all part of it too. From a Northern European perspective, the US hasn't been a functioning democracy for quite a while now — it's just becoming more and more obvious now that the republicans have stopped even pretending those principles and institutions are important.
The flagrant corruption and voter suppression efforts underway at the moment make the next 2-3 years the final chance to bring it back from the brink. That doesn't just mean a Democrat winning. It means an actual democrat (lowercase) winning and building a coalition to repair what has been broken. I don't personally think that looks very likely, but I hope for all our sakes it can happen.
I think this is complacent. The rest of the world is actively seeking opportunities to decouple. The US is so embedded in defence ecosystems at the moment that is a delicate balance because we are all still dependent on US space and logistics capabilities. But Ukraine and Eastern Europe and building the foundation for conventional forces to be supplied without the US, and although it will take longer, Sweden France and Uk have the aerospace chops to reduce dependency on the US too.
We are unlikely to reach parity any time soon, if at all. But that isn’t needed for the goal to be worthwhile.
> Mind you, it's one man, and not the nation or state, but he does have a lot of backers.
My 2ct:
He is the duly elected leader in a representative democracy. He speaks on behalf of all U.S. Americans, he acts on behalf of all U.S. Americans, and all U.S. Americans share the same responsibility for the actions of his government.
He isn't the only problem, though. It has now been proven that the U.S. Constitution is not worth the paper it is written on. In my opinion, that's the real concern. Trump will not be around for long. The U.S. Constitution, the U.S. Supreme Court, the people that allowed that to happen and the Republican Party will.
Edit:
At least the U.S. Constitution needs some amendments, and I don’t see that happening, but there may be some plans to amend it I’m not aware of.
Edit-2:
Of course, there will still be cooperation with the U.S. after Trump, but fundamentally, something is broken. We will not return to the pre-Trump state.
People outside the US understand that Trump is a temporary phenomenon. And there's no evidence that Trump has any interest in post-Trump politics, except insofar as it insulates him from repercussions.
I don't see how anyone can think Trump is a temporary phenomenon, it's been a decade since he got into politics and things have only gotten nastier. On the scale of a person's life, this is definitely not a temporary thing.
I see no evidence that Trumpism will survive Trump. To the extend that Trumpism exceeds the bounds of normal partisan politics, it's driven by a cult of personality. Once the personality is gone, the unique aspects of the movement dissipate.
Trump could be elected for a third term and it could still be a temporary phenomenon, because the movement fails to transfer beyond one individual's personality.
This is incredibly complacent. The Heritage foundation view of where the US is going has been thoroughly inserted into American public life by a thorough politicisation of all public agencies. It would take an equally dominant and ruthless force to cleanse what Trump has done. I don't see that happening. Your judiciary and corporate interests have a momentum that should not be underestimated.
Breaking things is much easier than making them. American democracy is going to take a long time to recover.
It is not. The unlimited authority, the supreme court that goes along with it, the party that supports it all, and the citizenship that enables it in the first place will be there long after Trump is gone. It's not Trump pulling the trigger.
It's not Trump alone. There was the Tea-party before him and there will be fascists after him. We are not talking about the USA doing some shady things. We are talking about a country that gave up on shared values and norms, that kills people left and right without due process and that assaults countries without reason, all while threatening the next assault(s) and being openly racist.
The problem with Moodle is that it's terrible. Yes you can customise it, but the core must be 20+ years old now, and it really shows. Universities don't have the talent in house to do anything more than bodge solutions for local bureaucratic knots. That doesn't generalise into an improving system over time.
By most accounts Somalia is a beautiful country. It’s currently at war, in part because of its colonial legacy. But if that stopped I would love to visit.
I’ve found recent Claude to be much better in this regard. I think a lot rests on the quality of the harness and the work behind the scenes done to RAG up to date docs or search for docs proactively rather than guessing.
I also don’t have issues with quality of Python generated. It takes a bit of nudging to use list comps and generators rather than imperative forms but it tends to mimic code already in context. So if the codebase is ok, it does do better.
Snide comments like this are easy to make, but navigating the political complexity involved in this is non trivial. I’m glad they’re starting the conversation. Even doing that is an important signal.
We’re only 18months into realising and having clear evidence that the US is an untrustworthy partner and in fact actively hostile to European interests. Hopefully the process speeds up from here, now that we don’t need to pretend we can ever trust the US.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/29/friday-briefin...
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