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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25575 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026

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What is the AfD position on German Irredentism?

With AfD the problem is less their policy on German Irredentism than what their policy on Russian Irredentism is.

This is indeed the real question, and is likely to be more important than their policy on immigration, even though immigration is their defining policy plank.

Such accusations against the AfD merely mean in practice that mainstream political parties in Germany are willing to sleepwalk into another big and disastrous European war for the third time in the span of 110 or so years and the AfD is the main opponent of that. In that sense they're the perfect counterexample of the stereotypically warmongering idiotic Germans.

That's unserious. Russia is already failing to take on Ukraine; I strongly doubt they'll pick a direct fight with the EU anytime soon; i.e., in this century.

If Russia makes peace with Ukraine, Russia would almost certainly have the military strength to rapidly overrun 1 or all of the Baltics at the very least. Going to a drone-based force has made Ukraine and Russia much stronger than they were previously. Other nations will only slowly assimilate this into their own militaries. Russia would sweep aside Baltic resistance quite easily, and then the only question is whether NATO or the EU would come to the rescue. NATO barely exists at this point with Trump at the helm for both ideological and practical (Iran) reasons. The EU loves can-kicking and deferring collective action. If Russia accomplished their operation quickly, which they probably could, then the rest of Europe could say "whelp, guess it's a fait accompli" and then blame America with "w-w-we trusted you to rescue us!".

It's happening the other way around, I think.

What way is that?

The EU leadership seems to be convinced that they can force a Russian capitulation by escalating the war.

Yes, that seems to be the ideological bit they have committed to. Regardless of whether that plays out as they imagine: Russia is not winning in any way that indicates that they could pick a fight with the EU and succeed in it.

The can't win, but they do likely have the capacity to ensure everyone loses.

Are you implying they'll roll into Estonia and threaten the US and NATO into submission with nukes?

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Are we still doing that? Russia has fought Ukraine to a stalemate, suffering hundreds of thousands of combat deaths. They are in no position to threaten anyone.

Russia is a red herring. They are not even in the top 5 of Germany's problems, and not even the most dangerous foreign adversary, which is China.

Yeah. Unless you're a subscriber to the 'Russia has completely solved social media marketing and somehow is completely controlling the algorithms of every online news source' tinfoil hattery then if anything Russia-Ukraine should be indicative of how difficult it would be for Russia to project power beyond it.

Also, isn't Germany still effectively funding Russia via Green energy policy?

Mostly only very indirectly by the fact that they're still using natural gas and that usage drives up global gas prices.

They've gone from ≈55% Russian gas to ≈5-8% Russian gas (blended from Belgium), replacing their russian gas with mostly American and Norwegian gas.

As a separate note, how does one report issues with markdown/html rendering? The current post markdown regex removes the ability to escape single tildes.

Also, while natural gas was (correctly) pushed at some point as being greener than other fossil fuels, These days the state of the art for a heating system is a heat pump.

Heat pumps are air conditioners, just running in reverse, so forgive me for asking this- but since Germany doesn’t have air conditioning, why don’t they just run their heat pumps in reverse for the week or two of the year they need it?

  1. German heat-pump installations are often air to water, not air to air.
  2. Online discourse isn't representative of reality, it's mostly insane people screaming into the void.

In reality it's mostly just a question of lag in infrastructure buildout for something that didn't use to be necessary.

One thing I hadn't considered until it was pointed out to me recently is that a lot of domestic heating in Europe is done with in-room radiators circulating hot water. You can't just reverse that and cool using cold water because you'll get condensation that it wasn't designed for.

I recently had a discussion with a heat pump owner and this seems to be a big issue. If you have floor heating and a wooden floor, then you very much do not want condensation, which would lead to your floor rotting.

For new houses, I think it is possible to design them with air conditioning in mind (so you have interior units which directly change the temperature of the air and pipe any condensation to the drain), but for a lot of preexisting homes things are more complicated.

That part is definitely true, but adding a drain to the inside coil of a heat pump is much easier.

Are you sure any places using per-house / apartment heat pumps don't already use them for cooling during summer?

Certainly here in Finland "cool your house during modern hot summers" is why 99% of customers buy a heat pump in the first place.

the state of the art for a heating system is a heat pump.

Using electricity from a natural gas turbine, or a different source?

(And yes, burning it in a turbine, generating electricity, transmitting it, and running a heat pump is usually more efficient than burning it directly in a furnace. )

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