MudMan

Billionaires were quite shy about being right wing political activists in an environment where fascist activism was bad for business.

But when Thiel, Murdoch and their cronies went ahead and not only didn’t get dinged for their crap but became more powerful because of it that became not just easier, but their default stance.

The neofascist movement didn’t start with billionaires. It didn’t even start with Steve Bannon rotting away at Breitbart. It started in 4chan and crappy websites and extremist online groups deploying relatively subtle examples of what we now recognize as culture wars and then the far-right media learning that lesson and leveraging it to take control of right wing politics.

Nobody in the left deployed those tools anywhere near that successfully at the time, and they still don’t. And now there are fewer billionaires willing to bankroll them as a PR move, so it’s harder.

I’ll go one further, I reject the entire framing. It’s the Trumpist framing where Europe wasn’t pulling its weight because its military investment in dollars was too low.

The change Europe needs to make isn’t just about investment (although there is that), and certainly not about investment at the expense of lower standards elsewhere. The change is the decoupling from a major ally in all sorts of areas to secure some semblance of an independent strategic position.

The problem is that process isn’t finished. Orban is blocking European cohesion more than Trump is. Romania is about to join that club. Germany isn’t looking great going forward. I’d put money on the UK effing it up before they do, though. How does a liberal European alliance come together under fire from external pressure and internal fifth columnists? This isn’t a cold war of blocs. At least not yet.

We have bigger questions to answer than whether we should have spent more money on tanks, unfortunately. Should definitely be spending more money on tanks, though.

Nope. Pure denialism there. The liberals with resources were as willing to suppress the extreme right as the extreme left. They’re both outsiders. Why is the far right capable of mounting a populist response to that suppression but the left wing cannot?

This got weaponized by the far right, from 4chan to Reddit to Twitter, into a extremely effective PR machine to discourage political opponents and ingest potential supporters into a cult-like zeal. Even assuming that isn’t the goal for the left (and isn’t it?) why is it not capable of mounting a similar system with the same tools?

Well, that’s a problem for me, because any political system that relies on individual ethics (or in the ability to take specific actions politically that are seen as ethical by a wide range of ideological views) is doomed to failure.

The system can’t depend on some centrist amalgamation of forces that somehow magically does all things for all members of the spectrum. There needs to be a solution. There needs to be a dragnet of leftist forces converting disaffection with centrists into political power.

If the path to fascism is depending on centrist grey men somehow fulfilling the expectations of leftists with no fallback option then we’ve failed already. How do you stop fascism when that hope does not materialize? Why is there no left wing answer to that question but there is a very successful right wing answer?

Nah.

Not even as a joke, and this is extremely not a joke, unfortunately.

And whatever, then the question becomes why that. Why is the left wing trapped in endless variations of a prisoner’s dilemma but the right is able to weaponize modern social dynamics effortlessly. Either way it’s a failure of the space.

I am so mad.

When are we intending to learn that “turning away” no longer works and “turning towards” is the only workable system that doesn’t end right back in fascism?

Look, I get it, it sucks when you support a politician with a mandate and then they don’t deliver. Or when you support someone as an alternative despite misalignment on the mandate and then it turns out they’re not doing your agenda but the one you supported while holding your nose. It sucks.

But it’s now a legit functional electoral strategy for extremists to be ousted, have the middle-of-the-road centrist frustrate their progressive one-time electors and result in a return to power of the far right everybody agrees is a worse alternative. That’s objectively worse.

The real question is not why centre-right liberals keep frustrating progressives with broken promises and slow action. The question is why does that translate into disengagement instead of left-wing alternatives gaining support. It is a constant throughout for the far right to effectively capitalize on every single bit of discontent by either converting right-leaning people or disengaging left-leaning people from the system altogether. Where is the left-wing populism? Why are they absent from this conversation? How much do you need to suck at politics to fail to build any amount of momentum under these circumstances?

I mean… could also be done by… not doing that?

To be clear, because some poeple are going to misunderstand. This is a EU rep currently negotiating with the US, not a US rep. He seems to be saying they could meet whatever arbitrary fantasy for trade balance is in Trump’s head tomorrow because the EU spends enough on a couple of US exports that meeting their request is trivial or at least possible.

Thing is, it is a fair expectation that those goalposts will keep moving. And we now know for a fact Trump will blink because he’s not just blinking but cowering in a corner while begging for mercy on the back of China telling him to go trim his toupée.

The question for the EU is whether they want to kick this can down the road or fix it permanently.

Just because it’s only mentioned in some reposts, they had the grid back up and running at 100% in like six hours after this was published, so about 24 hours after the event itself (and it was at about 30%-50% when this was published already).

I mean, I still think it’s interesting to learn about this, but I do think it’s fun how much more pessimistic the article’s estimate is than how this actually went down. It’d be interesting to see a follow up covering how they went about pulling that off.

No, I saw a piece of data that doesn’t match my experience, which meant I must be missing something, so I asked.

You should try it sometime, it’s super useful for figuring things out. It’d help.

Finally data! Fig 2 in your link tells the entire story, I believe.

For the record, my point is about the EU. The idea I’m trying to impress is that respondents to this thread seem to look at EV positioning and penetration globally, but if you’re just looking at the EU that will be very different than North America, and the perspective people keep repeating seems very, very, VERY North American to me.

No wonder that’s the case, because yeah, the differences are huge, as you say. Not just for overall penetration, raging from 90% to 5% of all cars registered in your chart. Also in the types of EVs. Plug-in hybrid goes from 10-ish percent of new EVs in Norway to 75%-ish of all EVs in Romania. That’s a big swing (and some egg on grumpy "plug-in-hybrids-are-no-longer-a-concern guy up the thread).

The spread is also… consistently inconsistent? Northern countries seem to definitely take the lead, but the rest is strange. Why is Portugal so much higher than Spain? Why is Romania plug-in hybrid heaven? Why is there such a sudden break of almost 10 % between the top and the bottom half of the table?

And that’s even before we try to break it down by brand. I bet the Tesla dominance thing is also weirdly spread. Would love to know if there is a correlation with how those two numbers shake out one way or the other.

In any case, thanks for looking that up and being, astonishingly, the first person to actually check their assumptions in this whole thread.

See, again what I’m missing from that statement is location.

Tesla had a lead where? You couldn’t buy a Tesla at all where I lived at the time. Visiting North America everybody wanted one and I knew multiple people who did have one, but there were even more European EVs there than in Europe. First BMW i series I saw was in Canada. Last one, too.

So when did all of this reach Europe? Where in Europe? How fast did it grow in some parts versus others? Was it inconsistently fast but Tesla was ahead everywhere consistently or was the Tesla growth desynched from EV growth in general?

People are feeding me very reductive one-size-fits-all views of the EV market as a global thing in this thread while also giving me very good reason to suspect the EV market isn’t globally uniform (or even uniform across Europe, for that matter) at the same time, and no resources to tell which is which beyond anecdotal observation.

Huh. And even with that Tesla was dominating the space? That’s a shocker.

Besides telling me that every other manufacturer was massively screwing up the big thing that would seem to indicate is that penetration was extremely uneven. I came into the thread wanting to see a chart, I’m coming out of it wanting to see a map.

Or viceversa. Hence the point of even asking in the first place.

I flagged that my impression was anecdotal up front, but the most interesting takeaway of the way this thread ended up playing out is that people are super happy assuming everybody else’s fragmentary data or observations are anecdotal but theirs are a typical, statistically significant sample.

Bit of an unexpected way to lose faith in humanity this fine morning, but here we all are, I suppose.

Hey, I’ll say this, if you want to have this pointless argument with someone who isn’t me by just typing “TLDR” and making up some shit you have my wholehearted blessing. Beats having to comb through obnoxious quote blocks to nitpick the smaller fallacies, so go nuts.

Call me when it gets to the full-on name calling, that’s always the most exciting part.

Yes, indeed it is anecdotal.

Did the sentence “In the two or three European countries I visit often you definitely see more of those, at least anecdotally” tip you off? I find that very observant.

You’re telling me a cool story about how the Tesla business model is supposed to work. My question is why I’ve seen a grand total of one Tesla on the road across three countries and yet somehow it was seemingly the top EV brand.

Troed’s answer above going “Teslas and full electric EVs in general are popular in very specific regional pockets” goes much further towards answering that question, I think.

Cool.

So, anyway.

I mean, plug-in hybrids are what they are, and in Europe in particular there’s way less charging infrastructure, way more people living in apartments without the ability to set up a home charge station and way more anxiety about charging full electric EVs as a consequence, depending on the region. Hybrids are whatever, plug-in hybrids seem like a reasonable way to bridge that gap.

But I’m already entertaining this conversation way more than I want, because it’s going to lead off on a tangent and I don’t want to go on that tangent and we’re going to end up in how public transport is the real answer and there are millions of threads here to go rehash that conversation.

So anyway.

Fair. That’s the problem of reporting about Europe or even just the EU as a unit. Big place, lots of cultural differences, lots of size differences in economies and populations across those cultures.

Tesla was the top EV seller in Europe? I’m surprised.

I’m guessing the top electric-only vehicle excluding hybrids and plug-in hybrids? In the two or three European countries I visit often you definitely see more of those, at least anecdotally. But maybe London City techbros and finance bros outweight everybody else? That seems plausible.

I have to say, I find all of these reports and investor analyses on Tesla’s PR woes way too optimistic about how well they’ll recover if and when Musk “steps away from the government”. I really don’t think that genie is going back in the bottle, guys.

It’s fine, but I think I either didn’t play deep enough to get to the hook or it didn’t grab me as much as it did other people, because it does feel a bit overhyped to me.

I think in this vein I’d recommend Return of the Obra Dinn before I do Blue Prince. Not that I think Blue Prince is a bad game in any way, just a bit… soft around the edges, I guess?