I hate this quote with such a passion. It's treated as some enduring wisdom passed down through generations. When it's from a 2016 book you have probably never heard of.

Same pattern played out in Germany. The centrists were more concerned with leftists than Hitler. Big business thought they could cosy up to him and keep him under control. Opportunistic collaboration for self preservation or personal benefit.

Of course these all turned out to be grave miscalculations. I imagine that pattern will eventually play out this time too...

Is it possible their only miscalculation was not realizing how much of the world would fight back? Because if it hadn't, they would have continued enjoying the benefits.

No I don't think so. Broadly they hitched their cart to a genocidal madman. Their hubris convinced them they could maintain a steer on its direction.

The centrists ultimately lost when the Nazis banned other political parties. If they were not murdered first. And the Nazis took control of the German workforce, imposed harsh taxation on businesses, central planning, nationalization etc.

I'm sure the uneasy alliance worked well for a a little while though!

Yes of course this could've been done in photoshop. But a convincing Photoshop effort takes someone with years of experience working for likely hours. AI can churn out this kind of image in seconds, operated entirely by someone with zero skill or experience. It lowers the bar significantly, increasing the scope and scale of the output.

For the same reason a fully automatic weapon is substantively different from a bolt action rifle, despite both being guns.

It's also a fundamentally different scenario. Photoshoot-style touchups - likely at the request of the subject himself - for pure vanity, versus doctored images of an unwilling citizen (who presumably hasn't been convicted yet and is therefore considered innocent) as propaganda

And individual departments can/do have their own GitHub org. Eg the Office of National Statistics. Some work I did ~10 years ago can be found there! https://github.com/onsdigital

Just want to say your apps look great, and I am actually jealous that I use android!

This is a silly appeal to nature.

But to address the point. There may be base instincts to which we are all subject. But that doesn't mean we should embrace them or proudly wear them as a badge. Violence is entirely natural. And yet most will agree it should not be embraced. Someone proudly declaring themselves as violent will (and should!) be judged harshly. I say the same holds true for racism, whether it is "natural" or not.

Much (all?) of civilisational progress is characterised by moving away from the natural state to a higher strata. The civil part of civilization is entirely unnatural

Apologies I shouldn't have said "silly", that's too charged. More I don't think it's a good argument or justification. I think the rest of my comment outlines, along with counterexamples, why I think that.

Making this some left-right polemic has made me not want to continue this conversation further

Yeah this is one conspiracy I believe. There's this narrative at the moment that the UK is some dystopian hellhole where you'll get arrested for basically anything you post online. It's very pervasive to the point that fairly normal American people I follow online have repeated such things.

Now, the UK has plenty of problems, I do not deny that. But the situation is nothing like it is presented online.

My thinking is that this is meant to make people in the US feel that the rising authoritarianism isn't so bad in relative terms "well the UK is far worse!".

Yes, exactly by grinding people down. Making it exhausting to discern the truth, until it's not worth the energy exertion to do so.

Also perhaps it is not meant to convince Scottish people of anything, but maybe to make English people hostile to Scotland and its people etc

Exactly this. Or just obfuscating the question so much that people give up asking the question.

Not to exonerate him, but to condemn her. For being a woman, who did not know her place. For many that alone will justify her murder

Funnily, I felt the opposite when I learnt to read music a few years back - that even though I was extremely slow, I could now (theoretically) read and learn to play any music, just slowly! You'll get faster and better with practice, as with everything. I'm still slow. Just not as slow. But crucially I'm fast enough that it's not the bottleneck anymore, getting the notes under my fingers is.

Keep at it!