You say you're independent, but you refer to far-right propaganda as fact, which suggests you're not as independent as you believe yourself to be.

Furthermore, the aspect of you referring to Biden's center-right policies as being "radical left" and "extremist" suggests you're more accurately positioned somewhere between the hard-right and the far-right. Sure, the center-right, seen from the perspective of the hard-right, is to their left. But being to the left of the hard-right is very different from being on the left.

It's quite telling how immensely to the right the whole Overton window of American politics is when a lame party such as the DEM, with its grand total of zero left-wing policies, is considered as not only "the" left, but even as the "extreme" left. Go figure...

Ah! A GB News regular, I see!

Are they still following the old trick of taking one single isolated event, and talking about that one single isolated event non-stop for ten years straight to give the gullible the impression that one single isolated event happened twenty thousand times?

Nope, see Alexandr Dugin's Foundations of Geopolitics.

They don't want to, but they want to cause the impression they want to. The more afraid individual NATO countries are they're going to be invaded, the more the invest in their own military strength, and refuse to share their stockpile of weapons and ammunitions with Ukraine, after all, what if they need those stockpiles? Better to hard them in fear a future hypothetical war, than to spend it on the current real war that, if won, would stop the future potential aggressor cold.

Hence, threatening NATO countries is an extremely effective psy-op for Russia. And European leaders are quite the idiots for not perceiving that's what's going on.

Ah! Another American whose history lessons were limited to learning that, I dunno, George Washington once cut a tree and that the US saved the world all alone twice! Nice!

Me, I'm quite amused when I see the US doing such things for roughly the same reason I'm amused when I see its pseudo-conservatives destroying its welfare system. The result will be, respectively, what happened to the British Empire and to China after WW2. As the old saying goes, never interrupt your adversary when he's doing something stupid! ;-)

It's not hard to understand. Three things have been happening all at the same time in Europe, and each one of these are, all by itself, of the kind that prompts governments to go into authoritarian mode. All three put together make this exponentially more the case:

a) Risk of Russian invasion.

Russia has already been attacking NATO countries via invasion of their airspace via drone fleets and military aircraft, plus several cases of cutting oceanic data cables, and other forms of harassment, including explicit verbal threats against several members.

Preparing for war requires managing citizens morale. Completely free flow of information is detrimental to this effect, since either true of false (propaganda) content telling citizens the war is going bad can become a self-fulling prophecy. Hence, governments see the need to start implementing all the technology needed for effective control of information flow right before and during a war if it happens.

b) Rise of internal threats.

First and foremost, the far-right parties on those countries have been growing in popularity and power, being financed as a 5th column by Russia. If victorious, they will fracture the EU, weakening them all against aggressors. Additionally, European leaders fear losing power and, in the extreme, losing their lives and freedom to far-right extremists.

As such the see the curbing of those propaganda efforts as absolutely necessary for the survival of their, well, everything.

b) Betrayal by a former major ally.

The US has sided with the enemy of Europe, Russia, on a number of fronts, having been undermining the European effort in the buffer zone between Europe and Russia (aka Ukraine), helping to fund the above internal threats, relentlessly pressuring European countries on all economic fronts, and actively threatening to invade and conquer European territories, meaning what was a risk of a war on a single front has grown into a serious risk of a two-fronts war. Additionally, the US controls most of the information exchange technology Europe uses, meaning it can advance the propaganda mentioned above way more effectively than Russia alone could, and get intelligence on Europe at levels Russia alone absolutely wouldn't be able to.

As such, transferring control of information channels from US national security associates to European ones became urgent, with an immediate need to reduce as much as possible the power the US has to advance those contrary goals, which again requires controlling information flows.

Hence the recent push.

Notice I don't agree with any of the above. I'm of the "the best counter to bad speech is more speech" school of thought myself. But that's what I see as the core motivations behind this movement.

As for the US, it's trying to implement a Fascist political regime. As any such movement, it uses the tools of freedom to raise, then once in power destroys those tools. As such, what we're observing over there is much simpler than what's going on Europe, even if the end result, if it arrives at its goal, is pretty much the same.

And other countries are following so many variations of the same issues.

It's in the name.

Summary of the entire silly discussion:

a) If one favors cats over birds, cats are pets, birds are food.

b) If one favors birds over cats, birds are pets, cats are pests.

Options not included in the discussion, but welcome to make things even livelier:

d) If one favors both birds and cats, both are pets and cats walk with bright red collars and bells so the cats can roam freely and the birds can survive.

e) If one favor neither, all are hunting targets.

f) If one favors dogs, they need come and say something offtopic.

g) If one's a fundamentalist Christian nutcase, all animals are automatons whose existence serves the sole purpose of pleasuring humans, and they won't be in Heaven because they lack souls.

h) If one's a Muslim, cats are clean and you're a sinner.

i) If one's...

Etc. etc. etc.

Kinda. The US had no officially designed language from July 4th, 1776, to February 28, 2025. English was the most used language, but not a legal requirement.

Since March 1st, 2025, there's an Executive Order signed by Trump determining that English is the official language of the United States. Executive Orders are valid until a President cancels them, so we can presume that at least in the period from March 1st, 2025, to January 20th, 2029, the US will indeed have an official language. Coming January 21st, 2029, depending on who was elected for President, it may cease having one, thus going back to its traditional approach.

To make this truly a new default would require a more permanent law than an Executive Order, preferably a Constitutional Amendment. That's unlikely though. So we may well see a situation in which the US alternates having and not having an official language in timespans of 4 to 8 years each.

Let me get this straight: you're actually, for real, in favor of hidden fees, so a business can tell you that you owe them $x more than you agreed to pay for, and now you're obliged to pay?

The right-wing ones too.

On the bright side, most Chinese people, including those in the governing party, believe in some form of reincarnation. If that exists, here's to hope all supporters of such practices may enjoy being reborn in their future-proof schizophrenic autistic sleep-deprived blood-clotting-prone monkey-dog chimeras as those scream in agony while wandering the ruins of now extinct humanity.

They can. There are laws that prevent how much they can make based on the percentage of "something-something-whatever" they put into a central banking, so there's a ceiling of sorts. But other than that, it's all magicked up, yes: Fractional-reserve banking.

Interestingly, that makes extreme sense. Capitalism in general, and Shareholder Capitalism more intensely, requires exponential growth. A company that makes (I'll throw random number for simplicity) $1 billion/quarter to grow 3%, means increasing revenue by $30 million in that period, whereas a company that makes $1 trillion/quarter needs to increase revenue by $30 billion to meet the same 3% growth. Needing to make $30 million allows for a much larger window of "good enough quality" before enshitification quicks in compared to needing to make $30 billion, so the later is way more prone to enshitify their products as soon as possible, if not before, otherwise they miss that target.

If this is how it works, then enshitification also follows the same exponential curve, and we'll definitely see more, and more, and MORE, AND MORE of it, in the next years, until the entire thing collapses as big corps all around start failing to meet their shareholder's expectations over and over again.

You're not thinking creatively enough. The way things are going, the argument will be that uncontrolled installation of unregulated Linux distributions empowers pedophiles to distribute CSAM, so government will start demanding new motherboards to only allow the installation of properly vetted operating systems that implement extensive, impossible to disable, system monitoring to make sure no CSAM can be distributed with it.

Only big corporations with a proven need for maximum performance (and governments, evidently) will be able to buy special, unrestricted motherboards, and they'll need special authorization and a proven internal governance system, subject to periodic government audits, to show they aren't allowing CSAM on their systems.

Evidently, politicians and CEOs will be free from such obligations, because they're Very Important People acting in the National Interest.

And once this is in place, the tightening will continue at a slow but steady pace.

You're under the delusion this would work under a falling population.

The total quantity of money flowing in the economy is a representation of the total amount of goods and services in existence. Your savings, as an absolute number, is meaningless. What matters is what percentage the total quantity of money, which is to say, of all goods and services, your savings represents.

If the total number goes up faster than your savings number goes up, all those savings of yours will represent a lower percentage of all goods and services in existence, so you'll be able to purchase less. You'll experience it as inflation, rendering your savings, once you retire, more and more worthless as time goes by.

If the total number remains the same, meaning your percentage of all goods and services in existence remains the same, but this total amount of goods and service itself becomes smaller and keeps diminishing after you retire, you're also going to be able to purchase less.

And we currently live an economic and sociological environment that does both things: the total number goes up faster than your savings number goes, and the total quantity of goods and services is falling due to lower birth rates, meaning less workers, meaning less production. Plus a higher percentage of retirees versus the working age people, so more competition between retirees themselves for less and less resources.

All of which adds up to saving for retirement being exactly as much of a Ponzi scheme as social security: both require more workers than retirees so the later have access to the goods and services they need to live in their older age. Any difference you perceive between them is subjective preference that doesn't alter the end result, for mathematically they're strictly equivalent.

So, no, going for savings won't solve anything. And the solution that would fix savings-based retirement, namely, higher birth rates, would also fix social security-based retirement, making the point moot.