It wouldn’t at all be surprising if part of the US actually survives and prospers as an independent nation whilst other parts fall down to an Economic level that matches the wealth producing capability of their economic frameworks and their workers (I reckon a post-Oil independent Texas would be at basically the same level as Argentina).

Better even: an outcome such as Britain after the Empire - a long drawn fizzle from primacy into mediocrity with delusions of grandeur - is realistic and possibly the best possible one.

Even post Imperial Britain had periods were most had a pretty decent life, such as the one that followed WWII and the rebuilding of the country, though the societal structures that underpinned that have been progressively destroyed since Thatcher and the results are pretty visible by now.

American merely stopping being top dog ain’t too bad, but some of the other possible outcomes can be pretty nasty and that’s just the ones were one or more Democratic nations are what’s left of it. Descent into Authoritarianism would be the really ugly shit, not just for America but also the rest of the World on account of all the nukes.

Whilst in 2 millennia we massively evolved the tools we use, we barely evolved socially and did not at all evolve Psychologically or Physiologically.

I’m pretty sure it had equally stupid moments, like the still today infamous moment where Nero played whilst Rome burned.

Whilst when it come to History decades blur into a handful of stories and us non-Historians just learn it like that with explanations about why it happened, living in the actual thing moment by moment without the benefit of hindsight and an overview of the whole thing to put all pieces together is a very different experience.

I wouldn’t at all be surprised if in the fullness of time all of what’s going on now will be pieced together with what came before and what comes next, with some nice explanation about, say, how the the neoliberal political experiment of the late XX century with it’s heavy emphasis on weakening Governmental oversight of the Economy re-enacted in the early XXI century many of the same problems with the Economic structure and the Political capture by the Merchant class of the early XX century causing a similar resurgence in Fascism and the fall of Democracy in several nations. (Certainly History seems to rhyming again).

Future generations will mainly see it as bunch of high level descriptions of the main events knowing fully what the outcome was, without the fear and anxiety of experiencing it as it develops without knowing what comes next.

“Israel is saving Palestinians like me from the Hamas terrorist regime”

I was going to suggest that it would be done with lots of tearful emotion, but then I remembered that Gal can’t actually act, so maybe it would be more of a “after saying the words, turning and looking towards the horizon in an heroic pose” medium shot moving into a panorama showing little children in the background.

(With the right music to pull people’s emotional strings, obviously)

I suspect it’s a mix of both.

On one hand and as you say more tenured people cost more and hence if they go, there is a bigger positive impact on the company’s bottom line, on the other hand the upper management often do know that it is highly likely to end up causing massive problems that easilly ofset those cost savings, only they expect that they themselves personally will have moved onwards to a better job by the time things blow up and “it will be somebody else’s problem”.

In fact a lot of the problems in modern management (enshittification, cutting down on support, just coasting along on previously earned brand reputation whilst cutting down on quality, outsourcing and so on) can be explained by this “the company saves money now, I get more bonus and when problems from this come due I’ll have moved to better pastures and it will be somebody else’s problem” mindset in upper management - burn the Company’s Future for immediate personal gains in the form of higher bonuses because that manager’s Future is not the same as the Company’s Future.

I don’t think most upper management are stupid, I think most are just malicious sociopaths with not a shred of Ethics and hence are knowingly playing the flaws in the rewards systems of modern publicly traded companies for personal gain.

That 4 classes thing definitelly matches my impression of the place (and in fact I think Brexit was to a large extent the product of the cross between foreigners - including Europeans - being seen as the lowest of classes and the way the English put a lot more energy into “keeping in their place” those they see as below them in the social ladder than in actually climbing the ladder themselves).

That said, nowadays there is a Middle Class, who do not think of themselves as Working Class (though they actually work for a living), the higher part of which (the Upper Middle Class) think of themselves as Upper Class, though said Middle Class which was the product of the strong turn Left of the country in the post-War period is now being destroyed along with the things that allowed its emergence out of the Working class in the first place.

America at least did not have the whole idea that “people should know their place”, quite the contrary even.

Here’s an interesting comedy sketch from back in the 60s, which is satirical hence based on how people think (and then taking the piss out of it) rather than pure fantasy and illustrates some of this mindset which as far as I can tell is almost the opposite of the mindset that American (used to) have.

As I see it, modern Britain somehow managed to combine the worst aspects of Europe with the worst aspects of America.

Well, considering non-western countries primitive and uncivilized hence needing to be treated as such was a very popular “civilized (white, always white) man vs savages” centuries old fable used all over Europe to justify inhuman treatment of those in cultures deemed “uncivilized”, and still is today - for example, why do you think Israel as always pushed so hard the idea that Palestinians (not Hamas, the actual Palestinians) are “violent” and even “human animals”, which is really just a “civilized man vs savages” framing of their white colonialism (and hence justifies stealing the land from the “violent savages” and even the Genocide as “self-defense” from said “violent savages”).

If you think about it, claiming that your own culture is superior hence it is moral to members of that culture to lead “lesser” cultures, with the conquest and domination of said “lesser” cultures being used as proof of one’s cultural superiority culture is self-serving circular logic. I mean, it’s fair to claim that such culture is “martially” superior, but that’s not at all the same as “civilized”.

One needs to be very, very weary of self-serving proclamations of one’s own group’s “superiority” in any way (be it Culturally or Racially) as justification for conquest, pillaging and even murder of those in cultures one claims are not “superior”.

If one learns a bit about British History, the word “civilized” isn’t exactly they one that emerges: absolutelly, they were and are heavy on their own version of ritualism in the exercise of power (as seen in things like judges and barristers wearing wigs in High Court) but highly refined rituals isn’t the same as being civilized, at least not by the standards of the later half of the 20th Century when ideas like Humanitarianism and Environmentalism (more specifically “the love of Nature”) became widespread. As I said, Britain ditched Slavery (good) but did so by paying compensation to all slave owners (bad) and 30 years later created Indentured Servitude (almost as bad as Slavery) which almost nobody else had so in practice the didn’t stop slavery, they just replaced Chattel Slavery with a different kind of Slavery and yet nowadays they really try an extract the maximum positive optics from the first (and only good) of those acts whilst never mentioning the other two.

If Hollywood ever did a film about Gaza they would unironically use Gal Godot in the role of a Palestinian woman.

I bet that most of those people if told there was a country (without telling them which country it was) whose constitution says they must “promote the general Welfare” would say that it must be a Communist country.

Still UK has a tradition of a more humane society and not as cutthroat brutal as USA, so I think the level of sociopathy in society is lower in UK than in USA.

That’s the thing, it doesn’t.

The UK was incredibly inhuman in the time of the Empire, committing several genocides abroad (to the point that Churchill, before his greatest and highly celebrated moments during WWII, presided to once such Genocide in India) not just against the people who they ruled abroad but also against their own people (for example, they replaced Slavery with Indentured Servitude, a similar system but targetting their own poor and based on Debt, and who can forget the Workhouses of the 19th Century).

The post war period with a genuinelly leftwing Labour party, the growth of Unions, Worker Rights, broadenning coverage of Education and the creation of the National Health Service and Social Security, was the exception to literally centuries of crushing, extreme inequality and has been in reversion since the 70s.

What Britain does have is amazing cultural propaganda (unsurprisingly in the nation which IMHO, has the greatest Theatre culture in the World) that relentlessly pushes a whitewashed version of the nation (for example, all of productions about the Victorian era embelish it with none showing such details as how back then, when the lord and lady of the manor passed servants in a corridor, the latter had to turn to the wall and could not look at them).

The problems of Britain are far deeper and more ancient than mere Russian Propaganda (though that was a wonderful excuse for the local parties to excuse their at best ineptia after Brexit) and are entrenched in just how deeply stratified and conservative British Society (especially the English one) is, not to mention the quite high levels of Nationalism and delusions of National Superiority that are constantly fed by both the Press and Politicians.

(I was there during the Leave Referendum campaign and one of the problems the Remain side suffered was that the politicians campaigning for it - mostly from New Labour - had been in Government themselves and had used the EU as scapegoat for their own unpopular measures as well as eagerly participated in the whole blame-the-EU trend from the Press, so they if they openly mentioned most of the good things about the EU and British membership of it, that would go against the lies they themselves had once said about the EU)

Not to exonerate Russia, but most of the external support for Brexit came from America - for example Cambridge Analytica was paid by rich Americans, not Russia.

I mean, I used to think like you, and then I went to go and live in the bloody place for more than a decade and English society isn’t at all “social”, unless by social you mean Racist and incredibly stratified (think the Indian Caste System, though a bit less bad and not as overt). Things there really are massivelly rigged for inequality and very low social mobility. Probably explains why the social conquests of the post-WWII period were so easilly reverted and now even Labour is running around parroting “the Poor are lazy” propaganda and passing laws to punish the poor for being poor, IMHO the very opposite of “social”.

I could go on about the general behaviour I’ve observed in British society when it comes to were one is in the social ladder and others elsewhere in that ladder, or about the process through Public Schools and Oxbridge which makes sure the scions of the elites remain elite, but this is already far too long a post, so I’ll leave you with “just” this wall of text.

I went to the UK in the 00s were I rode the boom, then the 2008 Crash, then Austerity and all the way to Brexit, leaving just before it came into effect.

My opinion of Britain when I moved there was very good, my opinion when I left was the the country had entered the final stage of post-Imperial decay and was fucked. If you look around at nations who were once heading empires (Italy, Egypt, Greece, even Spain and Portugal), IMHO you can get a pretty good idea of were ex-Empires end up in and how long the decay can last.

Corbyn elected leader of the Labour Party was my last hope for that country and the massive campaign to oust him involving pretty much the entire Press and most of the Parliamentary Group of his Party (who were all from the New Labour faction of the party) for me pretty much proved that the entire system is completelly rigged an unable to move anywhere but further rightwards. The behaviour of the New Labour faction after they stole power back from the leftwing of the party - mainly the purges - and subsequently in Government - more rightwing than ever, in some way straying into the far-right - just confirmed that impression.

Frankly given the highly propagandistic Press environment in the UK and what was already a deeply flawed partial implementation of Democracy to begin with, I really can’t see any path were the UK would become merely more like Scandinavia (i.e. more Social Democrat) rather than more Fascist - the tendency of the elites in Britain was always towards Fascism (just look at how much the loved the Nazi ideas back in the 1920s before Germany started invading neighbouring countries, with there even being a picture of the previous queen as a child being taught to do a Nazi salute by her uncle, the then King) and the “know your place” mindset never left the society, and to me all that has been happening since Thatcher - from the destruction of Unions to the capture and consolidation of the Press, down to the capture of the Labour party by the moneyed elites, consolidated by the anti-Corbyn coup and subsequent internal purges - has been the elites in Britain wresting back control by subverting the few working mechanisms of Democracy in Britain.

So far what I’ve expected when I left Britain in disgust after the Leave vote has been happening (though Corby was unexpected and a bit of hope, but the methods used to crush him just confirmed my impression of how thoroughly captured and subverted the system is in Britain), just slower than I expected.

I’m sorry for anybody who is a Leftwinger in the UK and doesn’t even have another nationality to be able to move to a place with an actual Future for themselves and their children.

The kind of people who leave because they’re dissatisfied with their employer are the ones who more easilly find jobs elsewhere, and those are generally the most competent and/or in higher demand hence harder to find replacements for.

Whilst there is a subset of highly competent and in high demand people who just stick with their employer no matter what (be it because they’re highly adverse to change or just fearful), in my experience those tend to spent most of their professional career in one or two employeers and professionally suffer from the problem of “never having seen more than one way of doing things” so are IMHO (and as far I could see when I crossed paths with such people) limited in how far they can grow as professionals because they only really know one or two styles of working environment.

That said, “modern” management is short-termist and doesn’t invest in people, so they repeatedly short-change and generally shaft people for the sake of their own next bonus, in the process losing the capabilities for competitive advantage versus the competition or merely mid and long term efficiency.

The Leave Tory government pretty much aped the first Trump presidency in terms of policies, only as public school educated scions of the moneyed elites they were posh(ish) rather than loud and brash like Trump.

The New Labour government is currently aping the Democrat Party after Trump, only they’re possibly even more rightwing than the Democrats were in that period.

(And overlaying all this there are things like Britain having a far more extreme civil society surveillance system than the US and which, unlike in the US, was not walked back after the Snowden revelations but instaed was rectroactivelly made legal, plus Britain does not have a written Constitution so a simple Parliamentary majority gives close to absolute power).

If the trend continues the next UK Government will be led by Farage or an even more radicalized Boris Johnson trying to tear down whatever little Democracy the UK still has.

The core difference to the US is that Britain is and has been for long far more culturally heavy in “know your place” than the US (it now seems the post-War period of worker rights and a more egalitarian society was the exception, not the rule) and the British moneyed elites are far more dynastic in nature than the ones in the US (we’re talking centuries of upper class status being inherited, not a mere 2 or 3 generations).

As I explained above, the leadership of the party currently in Government in Britain - the Labour Party - and hence the entire cabinet, literally owe their posts to a campaign of accusations of anti-semitism against the previous leader of their party (who was from the leftwing faction of the party rather than the neoliberal faction - aka New Labour - as the current one) with massive help from Israeli-linked Jewish Organisations in the UK.

That campaign was so extreme that at one point a Jewish Holocaust Survivor was accused of being an anti-semite as means to taint said previous leader by association and was kept going at full throttle through an election causing the Labour Party to lose it which ultimatelly brought down that leader. Over time it was shown that the party under that leader was actually less anti-semite than the general British society, but by then the damage was done and he had been ousted, with the neoliberal faction taking control of the party again (they have an anti-democratic system for controlling who gets to run for party leader, so they’ll make sure no leftwinger ever gets the chance again - the other guy only got to run as candidate to party leader to be the token opposition since nobody expected him to win it, but he did).

The current PM is the guy who got elected to lead the party following all that.

Effectivelly the British Government was bought by Israel, not with money but with Propaganda that leveraged the large Jewish community in Britain, specifically the most rightwing amongst them who are rabidly pro Israel. This is why the current British Government unwaveringly supports Israel and their mass murdering or amongst others tens of thousands of children.

I’ve lived for over a decade in Britain (and left with Brexit) and was even involved in politics there before I left (fair disclosure: I was a Green Party member) as well as having lived in other countries in Europe and in my opinion Britain has already gone “as corrupt malignant and stupid on us as USA” years ago, they’re just far posher about it (than both the US and pretty much all far-right politicians in the rest of Europe) plus they have far slicker propaganda, so people outside the country can’t really spot it easilly and those inside the country - most of whom are stuck in an English-language bubble as most Brits speak no second language - generally can’t tell how far to the Right not just their Politics but their Press is compared to most of Europe.

And don’t get me started on how the civil society surveillance aparatus in Britain revealed by Snowden was worse than in the US and in Britain, unlike in the US, they didn’t walk back on it at all but instead just passed a law to retroactivelly make the whole thing legal, the Editor of the main British newspaper in reporting those relevelations - The Guardian (which, by the way, is Liberal not Leftwing) - was kicked out and the Press suddenly went quiet on all of it and haven’t mentioned it since.

By the time I left Britain, I tought it was the country closest to Fascism in all of Europe (except perhaps Hungary) and the transition from a Government of the Tories (who were worse than Trump during their first presidency IMHO, only far posher) to a New Labour government (i.e. Labour under the Israel-installed leadership) barelly walked it back.

If you think about it, in some ways British politics is somewhat a mirror of the politics in America (and remember that Britain too has a First Past The Post electoral system) only less brash and loud, partly because the culture of the elites in Britain (especially England) is very heavy on inculcating in their children a certain way of being which is heavy on presenting a false image of oneself and saying the “right” things (just look up what the Brits mean with “Public school educated”, which by the way doesn’t mean educated in state schools but actually in private and very expensive schools).

The current leadership of the British party which is now in Government has a MASSIVE personal debt to Israel and Israeli-linked Jewish Organisations in Britain for their campaign to oust the previous leader of the party - the first actual leftwinger elected to it since the 80s - using accusations of anti-semitism which were so wild that at one point a Jewish Holocaust Survivor was repeatedly said to be an anti-semite for what he said in a conference for Palestine, as a means to claim that Labour leader was an anti-semite by association (they sat in the same panel in that conference).

Israel delivered Sir Keir Starmer the top position at the party which was the next in line to get into Government and hence his premiership and Sir Keir Starmer is paying them back by having Britain help Israel mass murder Palestinian children.

The very Prime Minister of the British Government (as well as pretty much the whole of the Labour leadership) has been bought by Israel, not with money but with the greatest favour in their lives.

New Labour has fully transitioned the Labour Party to a Ethno-Fascist Genocide supporting Far Right party.

Almost every other week I get reminded of just how good my decision to leave Britain with Brexit was.

I vaguelly remember reading that Germany made Copyright Violation even for personal use a Crime, rather than merelly a Civil Law affair like it is in most countries.

Mind you, I might be wrong on the countries or on the details (i.e. maybe it’s only a Crime if it’s for profit).

Edit: So I searched for it and from here I got that:

Are there criminal copyright provisions? What are they?

Copyright infringements under German law also constitute criminal acts, which are punishable by fines or up to three years’ imprisonment. If the infringement is done on a commercial basis, the maximum punishment is five years in prison.

According to German copyright law, unlawful exploitation of copyrighted works, unlawful affixing of the designation of an author and the infringement of related rights are subject to imprisonment of not more than three years or a fine. In addition, any attempt shall be punishable.

The unlawful exploitation of copyrighted works on a commercial scale is subject to imprisonment of not more than five years or a fine.

The infringement of technological measures and rights management information is subject to imprisonment of not more than one year or a fine.

As I said, in most countries copyright infringement is not a Crime, just a Civil Law matter (i.e. you can be sued by the owners of the Copyright for damage but you won’t be sued by the State to pay a fine or even be jailed for it). Frankly judging by what it says there German law is very draconian on this.

You’re off by at least 2 decades.

That post reads as “Fascism is fine as long as its untermeschen are not people I care about” which is, funnily enough, the same way of thinking that MAGAs display ,just with different “favored groups”.

The tribalist (rather than principled) Democrats aren’t all that much different in mindset from Republicans: “It’s fine so long it’s only those I dislike who suffer”