there needs to be some kind of broad holding of Universal Humanist Principles

I agree, and those principles are the basis for the welfare system, healthcare for all, livable minimum wage etc.
But also all EU countries are committed to those, it is mandatory for being a member of EU.

UK has a long history of not respecting such values particularly with their colonialism, and not letting go until they couldn’t hold onto it anymore.
USA has a similar problem with slavery way beyond what was acceptable in other countries that called themselves civilized. USA has even gone so far as to keep oppressing minorities, first with less voting power, but later exploited as cheap labor, which is probably why we see such a low minimum wage even today.

Take those general humanitarian principles, and you will see the leading democracies also being leading in humanitarian values. An example obviously being the Scandinavian countries. Just as authoritarian countries have disregard for humanitarian values.
We see that clearly in both USA and UK that are both dysfunctional democracies.

By that metric and looking at the awful position of Denmark in regards to the Israeli Genocide

And what awful position is that? Denmark has not helped Israel in their genocide, there was a reaction against the Hamas terrorist attack a couple of years ago, but the tune has changed a lot since that. I agree that personally I think our prime ministers initial reaction was disgusting and tone deaf 100% supporting Israel (but only morally and at the time), but Denmark has not supported Israel in their violent attacks on Palestine. And Denmark has also criticized Israel very strongly, and OFFICIALLY accused Israel of genocide in for instance UN.

The knee jerk reaction to support Israel is something that most western democracies suffer from, we were responsible for the creation of Israel, and somehow see it as our responsibility to protect Israel. Although Israel has become the villain we originally wanted to protect them against.
But Denmark is in no way like either USA in this situation, that have laws that they are required to protect Israel. Those laws may have seemed like a good idea at the time, but in this situation they need to be removed.

I must admit I am not nearly as informed about Portugal as I am about Northern Europe. But despite that I know they have some pretty strong policies protecting the weaker parts of civilization and workers, as misunderstood as they may sometimes be compared to the Scandinavian model that seems to work better.
The Portuguese may not be protesting as much as the Brits, but I don’t think the Portuguese system is as inherently bad as is the case for UK. In Portugal most things can be improved through the democratic process. Denmark is also a country that has a very low degree of protests, and I believe that coincides with being one of the best democracies in the word. If it works don’t fix it.

But apart from that, I agree with you.

Well IDK if VW is better in that regard, what I do know is that it’s to save fuel, and ICE cars are on their way out anyway. So it’s kind of a moot point to talk about improving on them now IMO.

Oh sorry for the mixup, mistook it for another line of debate.
But still other countries have had similar systems and changed them. Including my own country, that also used to have a 2 part parliament similar to what UK has now.
That was changed in 1953 after more than a hundred years. Here they were called first and second chamber, and that two part distinction had existed since the 16 hundreds, from before we had democracy.

I don’t see why it would be harder to modernize in UK than other countries. Except for the British exceptionalism, and the British holding almost religiously on to their traditions.

Wow that’s a very cool looking cabin on the Suzuki!
We had an Opel Vectra from the same year, with leather cabin and manual 6 shift gear. We really liked that car, and would have kept it longer. But safety regulation required some pretty expensive repairs to keep it legal, and the yearly tax on petrol cars that don’t have high mileage is becoming pretty significant here in Denmark.

But our VW ID.4 is a far cry from as bad as the EV you are showing.

Everything required for everyday driving has buttons and levers like traditional cars.
VW is already doing it pretty well IMO, improving further on it to include for instance air condition is nice, but no biggie IMO.
But again your Suzuki look REALLY nice. 😎

Complaining about making less pollution. And demand improvements on ICE cars that are going obsolete.
Wake up FFS! This is not the 90’s.

OK that’s very different from start/stopping the car, which is an actual function of modern cars. He should have specified he was talking about the engine.

massive, complex, centuries old, highly resilient power structure

The constitution was supposed to be a living document, that was supposed to be improved upon.
This is the exact opposite of your claim. USA was supposed to improve, Americans just chose not to do that.

Which I suspected, so I started out asking what the “feature” actually is!
Turns out it is NOT automatic start stop of the car, but of the engine. Very poorly formulated post IMO.

a grand total of 49.8% of the vote.

OK I suppose that the claim is based on that he got more votes than the Harris.

They thought even if he did win, he’d only be as bad as his first term,

There were massive warnings about exactly that part not being the case. If they thought that they were disregarding very clear warnings. And it doesn’t change the fact that they let the malignant narcissist win. I wrote numerous times here on Lemmy: “As a rule of thumb, don’t vote for the sociopath.”
It’s insane that such an easy to understand rule was not heeded.

as a Democrats didn’t really campaign with the desperation they needed to.

Even if the Democrats had the lamest campaign ever, people should not have allowed Trump to win. It’s a basic matter of insanity over sanity. Sanity is more boring, you can’t blame the democrats for that part. It was also a matter of sanity versus sociopathy, and that brings us back to the “rule”.
100% the American population as a whole is to blame for the election of Trump, all excuses are bad excuses. The only ones that get to complain are the ones that actually voted democrat. And why would you and how can you defend those that didn’t, considering the facts I mention?

Fascism taking power doesn’t mean it is popular

Problem is that it is actually pretty popular in USA! It may not have a majority, but my guess is that about 30% actually support a fascist regime in USA, no more power to the libs!!
A lot of people would love that.

The American society is mentally ill, the people indoctrinated with freedom and wealth as the ultimate highest achievable values, and they see sociopathy as an expression of ultimate freedom, and they idolize the rich as a higher class of society.
When I write the American society is mentally ill, I do not mean that figuratively, I mean it literally. It may be hard to understand and accept as an American, because in USA extreme evil is seen as normal. Gun shootings, removing food stamps, taking away health care, having an unlivable minimum wage, 3 times and you’re out, stand your ground, taking away voting rights, giving tax cuts to the 1% when they already pay lower tax than normal people.

The list goes on and on with systemic problems in USA. Systemic problems that ALWAYS benefit the rich and hurt the poor.

Wake up!

Europe has no interest in Venezuela, as I’ve mentioned before, nobody likes Maduro.
Why would Europe sacrifice anything to help Venezuela?
We have no alliance or obligation towards Venezuela.

How does this automatic start stop work that you don’t like? And what brand of car is your experience with?

I have a VW ID.4 and I have no idea what you mean? If I use adaptive cruise control it will stop if the traffic stops, and it will start again automatically when traffic moves again. Working exactly as it is supposed to.
However if I don’t want that, I can touch the break at any time, which obviously disables cruise control, and release the break to roll slowly forwards like a traditional automatic in drive gear position.
Or if I hold the break for a short while, it will engage auto hold, and only go forwards again if I use the speeder.
Auto hold can be disabled if I don’t want it. But I like the feature, as I’m used to drive a manual.

Everything works perfectly and intuitively, I’ve only had the car for a month, and it’s so nice to operate compared to an older car.

If I don’t want the adaptive cruise control, that too can be disabled, and it will work like a traditional dumb cruise control.

Edit: The post I responded to is apparently about start stop of the engine, which was in no clear, especially since automatic start stop of the car is a common feature of modern cars, just saying start stop in no way indicate the engine more than the air condition.

That’s absolutely insane!
Why don’t they just use Google?
/S

1.5% of the people of a country coming out in a demonstration for the benefit of completely different people and in no way whatsoever for their own personal benefit shows that at last that many people over there have incredibly strong principles.

Yes there are some, but it’s a minority, you have to judge a country by the majority and their government. Because those are the ones representing the country.
There can be exceptions where the people are oppressed, with military force, but UK is NOT such a country.

both as people and as a group

No individuals are individuals and have different traits, this is 100% as the group we call UK.

which is not the same as not being civilized people

I would argue that having something like the house of lords is an expression of being uncivilized as a country.
Again the people consist of individuals, but as a group of people we call UK they definitely have traits in their society that are immoral and to me immoral equals uncivilized.

Now all countries can have elements that are immoral, the problem with UK is that it has elements that are deeply fundamental to their society, much like USA.

So what if we could make a vaccination against the ill effects of vaccinations, would that be alright?

Robbery by daylight.

He got slightly less than half of the vote

No he won the popular vote, there is no evidence otherwise.
And all the ones that didn’t vote who could have, were OK with Trump winning, or else they would have turned up to vote against him.
So 2 thirds either wanted him to win or were OK with it.

Unfortunately you are obviously wrong.
Trump got the majority vote, Republicans have behaved like sociopaths for decades, and Trump even turned it up to a whole new level.
It was very obvious, and despite that he got the majority vote. That clearly shows the Majority of Americans accepted these sociopathic policies. There is no way around it, it was too obvious to claim afterwards that “this was not what we voted for”, because USA got EXACTLY what they voted for. And lame excuses like it’s only half the population that vote are frivolous. Because despite the clear danger, people did NOT turn up to vote against Trump.

Everybody who didn’t vote but could have, accepted that Trump might win, and was OK with that.

If you didn’t vote, or voted Trump, you don’t get to whine about it afterwards. It’s not like he changed character after the vote.

I think EU has demonstrated that we can act in concord when needed. We can’t beat USA militarily, but we can make it very expensive for USA if they invade Europe. Europe is already working on independence from USA both economically and militarily, if USA invades a European country, I guess we have no other option than to work with China instead of USA.

I have no idea how Trump see it as a good idea to get former allies to turn against USA. It is already happening to some degree, the alliance is very uneasy now, in a way that has never before been the case between Europe and USA after WW2, and the exact same with Canada and USA.
USA has no real allies left, only allies of convenience. And at some point USA will learn the difference. That point will probably be pretty instant if USA invades Greenland.

I 100% agree with that last part but:

The people ARE civilized,

Not really, if the British people were civilized they would have introduced democracy instead of the bullshit excuse they have for it now.
And they would have removed the house of lords which is an extremely undemocratic and moronic institution.

In Danish Lord and lort are very close verbally, and lort means shit. So to me it’s the shit house.
But that’s not the only problem, first past the post is also undemocratic and is creating a system dominated by 2 parties that take turns governing, this is not democracy but at best a deeply dysfunctional democracy, and is as bad as USA only realistically having 2 options when they vote.
UK is so behind as a society, compared to other Western European countries, the only way they may appear good is by comparison to USA. UK inherited a strong economy from the early days of industrialization, and the colonies, without that UK would have been as poor and backwards as Ireland was prior to joining EU.

however they’re controlled by elites

In UK that is way more the case than other European countries, because the population accept it. The continued existence of the house of lords is clear evidence of that.
But again ONLY because the population is accepting it. No other European country will have you arrested for peaceful demonstrations, and I agree it’s an atrocity that this continues under a labour government. And I agree it is a result of the people having lost power because democracy in UK isn’t working.
Yet the solution is only a few hundred kilometers away, with plenty examples of better democracies in Europe, IMO especially the Scandinavian model.