https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/en-masse

You’re indeed wrong about Germany, the different attachments don’t follow the iron curtain at all. Both west-and east Germany have regions with different attachment color.

Most of the regions with a strong regional attachment seem to correspond to the larger independent states before German unification in the 19th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unification_of_Germany. Mecklenburg, Wurttemberg, Bayern and Upper Saxony are all 4 recognizable on the map of the op. The bit below Denmark was ruled in a personal union by the Danish monarch before the unification wars.

France tried their best to split Saarland off from Germany several times, which might explain their strong regional attachment.

The generally refers to the exceptions where no consent is needed. Had the ladies been committing a crime, then no consent was needed to start filming. Had they been filming some landmark and the ladies walked through the frame, again no consent needed from them. But generally speaking, consent is required before you may start filming a stranger.

In Belgium people do have an expectation of privacy in public, what they did is straight up illegal under Belgian law. If they want to film or photograph a person (not as an accidental passerby, but as the subject as was the case here), then they need to get consent from that person. If they want to share that footage online, then they need consent for that as well.

The wikipedia page of the program that is being cancelled: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_Observatories_Initiative

I’m neither an astronomer nor an astrophotographer and I do this. The sun always rotates in the same direction, it’s not exactly rocket science.

But if I were to ever visit the southern hemisphere, then I’m practically guaranteed to pick the worst possible sitting spot at least once.

And some other excerpts:
Demonization: The portrayal of Israel as a criminal collective directly connects to the antisemitic interpretation of the accusation of systematic child murder.

The image portrays violence against “the Jews” as just “resistance” and a necessary reaction to a supposedly absolute injustice.

Questioning the German government their continued support for the Palestinian genocide is officially antisemitic, see „NIE WIEDER… FÜR WEN?“ on page 60 of the brochure. https://www.verfassungsschutz.de/SharedDocs/publikationen/DE/allgemein/2026-05-antisemitische-codes-und-chiffren.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=9

The writers of the brochure also try really really hard to equate criticism of Israel with anti Jewish racism. That page 60 meme is about Germany and Israel, and their explanation tries to make it about Jews. It’s jarring.

He identified $385,000 worth of transactions that might be “unreasonable director-related transactions … in favour of a director, a close associate of the director or to a person on behalf of [either]”.

The company has debts with everyone (customers, government, talking head, sponsors), definitely a fraudulent* bankruptcy. The director’s name (George Zacharia) is unfortunately too common, I wish that I could have found some cringe social media that was definitely his. Damien Costas and his many bankruptcies are easy to find back. I wouldn’t be surprised if Zacharia was a strawman for Costas.

*Edit to add: that disappeared money wasn’t splurged on anything fancy, it was siphoned out.

My favorite ship of Theseus example is the Roman Empire. They started out as a Latin speaking polytheistic + republican empire with Rome as capital; and hundreds of years later they had become a greek speaking monotheistic + monarchistic empire with Constantinople as capital. When did they stop being Romans? According to themselves, never.

There is no direct adjacency needed to spread seeds from one plot of land to another, that’s one of your made up hurdles. Small seeds naturally get blown far in the wind. Larger seeds still get carried large distances by animals, which was why I specifically copy pasted the bit about birds carrying acorns …

To claim that it would be difficult and expensive to let a wild forest grow in those meadows is absurd, that’s what this was about for me. It’s a convenient excuse to do nothing, but it’s not a very good excuse.

To give another example:
…
Instead, the trees at Knepp Castle Estate in southern England were allowed to spread naturally. Birds such as jays can disperse as many as 7,500 acorns in four weeks. “Not a single tree was planted, no saplings were bought from commercial nurseries, no tanalised wooden stakes, no polypropylene tubes and plastic ties, no direct financial or carbon costs – no effort,” says Isabella Tree, co-owner of Knepp Castle Estate.
…
Chazdon, who has studied natural regeneration for more than 30 years, questions the commonly held assumption that trees need to be actively planted to tackle climate change and biodiversity loss. “There’s a perspective that humans did this damage and it’s our job to fix it, and that we should govern the process, and just let nature help when it can,” she says. “Another view is that forest restoration is fundamentally natural, and that humans can assist it, but ultimately it should be governed by natural processes.”.
…
Proponents are arguing for natural regeneration to be taken more seriously in national and international efforts to mitigate the climate and biodiversity crises. Recent research has shown that natural regeneration can potentially absorb 40 times more carbon than plantations, and provide a home for more species. It is also significantly cheaper than tree planting, with different studies in Brazil showing costs reduced by 38%, or even up to 76%.
…

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210524-the-reason-wild-forests-beat-plantations

The reference to a woman was me misremembering the op, I don’t use alts, not everyone acts like tankies.

About why the authoritarian label applies to you: You oppose liberalism, which makes you illiberal, which makes you authoritarian.

Hey, I looked it up in a few large dictionaries and Wikipedia to confirm the meaning, I can’t help being able to read. If that women says that she is liberal, then she probably means what is understood by that word by mainstream society, not whatever nonsense your authoritarian cult has come up with for it.

I’ve seen forest sprout up in abandoned dead areas without any human assistance. It takes about 2 decades of being left alone to get enough young growth to start being called a forest, but not really more than that. And it would take generations more to be called an old “real” forest, but it has to start somewhere. To rehabilitate long dead soil it might take what you describe, but turning an old meadow into a wild area that will eventually turn into a forest, does not need human intervention. It just requires to be left alone. In my climate that is. Claiming that forests can’t grow without human assistance is absolute nonsense, forests grew just fine before humans came along.

And as further proof that I don’t live in fantasialand with my belief that forests can grow without human intervention, here’s 2 links with examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_rewilding https://www.rewildingmag.com/passive-rewilding-natural-reforestation/

Making wild forests in a temperate climate is not complicated at all. Stamp a bunch of seeds into the ground, fence it off to keep grazers away, wait a few years, and boom there’s a new forest. Once it gets started, nature knows just fine how to grow forests, they’ve been around far longer than our meddling after all. The problem is humans, who need capital and incentives to let nature do it’s thing. Making the forest is cheap, buying the land is expensive. And a wild forest has little earning potential, so for private landholders it makes no financial sense.

But if there were incentives, then these solar panels could have been put above existing hardened surfaces (roads, parkings), and the unhardened land could have been returned to nature. We’d have both the solar panel fields and the forest. It requires a much larger up front investment, which is why it’s not going to happen without government incentives, and to get those, political will is needed, which is why it’s not going to happen anytime soon.

And we should absolutely be making more forests from scratch, Europe has a massive deforestation problem. Reforestation is already an official policy goal in the EU and in most (I assume) EU countries, and this could be one of the ways of achieving those goals.

They also use lots of irrigation from aquifers in the Great Plains, so they’ll need less irrigation and the shading will help a tiny bit with replenishing the aquifer.

In northern Europe these solar fields make no sense at all to me though. When I see something like the fields below in my temperate marine climate, then I can’t help but think of the forest that could have been there.

What i stated is what the word means. If someone says “I’m a liberal and I hold liberal values”, then the values that they profess to be holding are wanting rights for the individual, consent of the governed, liberty, equality before law, …

There were indeed self-labeled liberal parties in the 19th century that opposed giving equal rights to common people/women/minorities. Those self-professed liberals had recently acquired their rights, but were then opposing equal rights for others, which wasn’t very liberal of them at all. Claiming to be liberal while acting illiberal means that they were hypocrits, but it did not change the meaning of the word liberal itself. If a totalitarian dictatorship like North-Korea calls itself a democracy, then that doesn’t automatically mean that they are democratic. The meaning of what it is to be a democracy hasn’t changed just because some authoritarian states misappropriated the label. People professing to hold certain beliefs, but then acting opposite of those, are common. So common that we even have a saying for it: “actions speak louder than words”.

The picture in the op doesn’t look like agrivoltaics though. Compared to the agrivoltaics examples of the wiki article, the panels in the op are more densely placed, placed flatter, and placed closer to the ground. Nothing is getting harvested there, the most they could do is keep rabbits under them. From what I’ve seen in person, the non agri kind with panels over monoculture grass fields is much more common than agrivoltaics with cultivated fields.

That’s literally the meaning of the word, what it has always meant.