Sampson

I’m not disagreeing that UK has been probably the biggest donar in that regard, my point is about relations when Putin inevitably starts turning the pressure on again a few months after the cease fire that seems like it’s coming. So many in the Uk and the rest of Europe don’t want to accept it, but it’s extremely clear the US is cutting ties with its alliances with Europe and is arguably even hostile towards them now, they’ve been extremely open about that. At which point it’s essential that Western and Central Europe create a strong alliance if they want to stand any chance of standing up to Russia. The problem is politically UK is still in the blowback of Brexit despite that being a pre-Russia-Ukraine war and the world and Europe have changed dramatically since 2016, so Starmer is so hesitant to commit to anything as as soon as he even talks to French or German leaders you get Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg harking up that it’s a betrayal of Brexit (and they seem to want to become a heel to the US and Trump instead). So Starmer continues to try this weak fence sitting and commit to neither strategy on are alliances with the US and EU.

Agree. Non-Russia/Belarus/Turkey Europe seriously needs to up its military spending and form a separate alliance right now. Starmer needs to seriously stop pandering to the Reform and Tory Brexiteers and actually get close to the EU on defence, it’s clear as day the US doesn’t care about Europe anymore and if anything arguably sides with Russia over Western Europe. Starmer needs to grow a backbone and realise the EU is by far our closest and most important ally right now and regardless of what Farage or Rees-Mogg crow about rejoining the EU every time he talks to them, it’s clear on defence we need to be a hell of a lot closer with them and he can’t keep spouting this “we can be close to both allies” while being close and making commitments to neither.

I personally don’t agree that you beat populism by ignoring it. I’m far from a master communicator, no one on this forum is, but I don’t agree that the solution is simply ignoring people spreading political lies and half truths and not trying to come back to them. For reference I do think about how I communicate with people and it’s not perfect but I think that you are trying to spin it on “blaming others” is the Catch 22 I’m talking about. No one, even the best political communicators in the West, have been able to solve this problem over the past decade, they all get called “the liberal elite” “who talk down to people” - because you can’t solve it, because as soon as you try and adress it you’re suddenly talking down to people and blaming others on others.Macron was supposed to be the one who solved it by swinging from one populist right position to one populist left position but all it ended up doing was giving those positions total credence. It’s a total trap and Catch 22.

Same. I’ve completely lost hope the past decade. People don’t believe facts anymore and believe lies and half truths and when you try and tell this to them you get accused of calling them stupid and get accused of talking down to them. I always believed in (and still do) Liberalism and Democracy and fell for the 90s/00s optimism that the world was going towards a federalised liberal democracy and autocracies were becoming rarer and rarer but since 2016 the world has flipped that on its head. I always believed humanity was ultimately good and would fix climate change and population ageing but I no longer believe that. It’s so hard to just not give up caring in the current political environment

The height of desperation when the dance of people trying to reason for Daka to start comes round every couple of months. We have this cycle every now and again where people seem to forget he’s shit and start reasoning he scored 4 against a bottom half Russian side once. He’s dreadful, one of the biggest flops in the clubs history, he barely looked good enough for the Championship last season, I know we’re not great atm but he’s not the answer.

Said it before and said it again - but I just think that the UK doesn’t have the money and there’s not really anything any government could do about it. There’s no money to put back into circulation in the economy, public services are already on their knees and penny pinching them even more will do nothing at best and make things worse at worst and we’re such an insignificant country at the geopolitical stage nowadays no one is going to care about it prioritise doing trade deals with us. Dunno if this leads to populist governments or what but I don’t see us improving economically at all right now regardless of what we try

I wonder if any of the moderates who’ve for years been saying “Trump/Farage/Musk are not fascists” are having the wobbles yet

There were people in this very forum arguing Trump was “the candidate of peace” during the election campaign. Not even sure who they were trying to convince. Setting fire to the institutions, checks and balances that were created after WW2 at both national and international level to help stop authoritarianism and the constant threat of both economic and military action against multiple countries doesn’t feel like how you go about creating peace to me. What is going to happen to those who don’t want to leave Gaza as it’s their home in Trump’s plan, forcefully arrest them and deport them from their own country?

Brits and other Europeans do exactly the same thing with Africa, The Middle East, Latin America, South East Asia etc. tbf. It’s only because we’re in Europe that we see the cultural differences more strongly in every day life.

”Keep politics out of x” is an inherently extremely political statement in and of itself. Politics affects everything and when you say you want to keep politics out of something what you are actually saying is you strongly support the political status quo and strongly oppose any political change in that field whatsoever.

Coffee is absolutely one of lifes greatest small pleasures. I try not to be too elitist when it comes to other foods/drink, but a tub of cheap instant coffee from your draw just isn’t the same as a cup of freshly brewed stuff. Almost every other European country has coffee brewers in their kitchen as standard like Brits have kettles. I’m the opposite to SpaceX, in that I don’t really get our obsession with instant coffee in the UK, brewed coffee should be the baseline.

Thanks for this. Better knowledge than me. i saw someone on bbc the other day refer to Europe (by which they meant non-Russia/Belarus/Turkey Europe) as currently being Jim Carrey realising he’s in the Truman Show with regards to US ally-ship. I thought it was a fun comparison. I don’t think we still realise just how profound an effect the Russian-Ukraine war has had on turning geopolitics upside down in the west the past 3 years or so. It feels like Europe has only very recently woken up to realising that America actually doesn’t have its back as much as we assumed.

American politics is so weird. All these people chanting with signs and politics with signs for RFK becoming health secretary. Imagine millions of people going crazy like a football crowd with placards and cheering on Matt Hancock or Wes Streeting being made health minister in the UK.

One thing I’ve been thinking about with Trump is that the geopolitical world clearly isn’t in the same place it was 20 years ago under George Bush when America was the undisputed world super power and were the poster child of “the west” (which included western and Central Europe). It really feels like we have 4 distinct geopolitical world powers again now in the US, the EU, Russia and China. Russia and China have more in common with each other and some sort of vague alience but disagree on a lot too to the point they feel always a moment away from falling out. And now it feels the same with the US and EU. I think this stuff with Greenland I don’t think we’ve seen really in dividing the West since the WW2, maybe the Suez crisis but this feels a lot more like one western country flat out gunning for another rather than trying to put their foot down for going rogue.

Looks like Trump pulling foreign aid includes Ukraine according to latest bbc. But “the president of peace” definitely isn’t just about giving Putin all he wants.

There were the same “AI is just a tool” comments about the internet in the 1990s. I think there’s a YouTube video with Jeremy Paxman and David Bowie and article with Bill Gates and Terry Pratchett having a discussion about exactly that. I don’t think it’s a human “flaw” to be unable to predict the negative ways the internet would wire our brains, I think it’s very difficult to actually predict or know that in advance and it’s the same with AI. To be partially to tongue-in-cheek I think an MP (I don’t remember who or for which party) was recently bigging up using AI to check tax and immigration declarations and applications in HMRC and the Home Office. And all I could think was if you want a Deus Ex style post-apocalyptic world where the world nations states all become run by AI which has no care for human life and does not take into account human emotions, then training them to be an objective 3rd party so you can remove the human from the decision making process in asylum processes and rules is probably how you’d start to go about it.

I’m not sure I want AI to become so innovative tbh. The internet has passed the threshold from being good for society to bad for society for me. And AI scares me even more. Recycling sounds like a much better thing than private corporations and nation states both aggressively trying to get ahead in AI Edit: Going off topic now though, I guess this belongs in the General News thread.

Oh I thought it was something to do with AI.

Maybe I’m being dumb but I don’t get what the bottle top refers to for the EU.

Yep and it’s something I’ve said many times on this forum many times . That Population ageing is one of the two greatest challenges of humanity this century along with climate change and we’re already seeing its impact in profound ways as states cannot economically support their ageing populations more and more. But at least politicians actually talk about climate change, they don’t even want to talk about population ageing, let alone deal with it, because by definition it’s telling a larger and larger swathe of the voting population that they’re too expensive for the state, and it’s way easier politically to blame economic problems all on immigrants and benefits scroungers.

Seeing Rachel Reeves scramble round making the most un-Labour of economic changes - reducing benefits and reducing taxes on the wealthy and saying growth is more important than climate change while refusing to budge on rejoining the single market, showing that growth at all costs clearly doesn’t mean growth at all costs is depressing. I think uk is just completely ****ed economically though. Like it’s not just that the money just isn’t there, but it’s that’s there’s genuinely absolutely nothing any government could do to even help get the economy back on track. Genuinely feel like we have the same conditions as the Weimar Republic and the same metaphorical powder keg waiting to go off right now sadly.

Not a massive fan of the concept of the Vatican, but the Pope seems to be one of the world leaders I agree with most these days which definitely hasn’t always been the case, and I agree with him a lot in this article. If nothing else, I completely agree that the American Christian Right is often inherently unchristian. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0jnz8q6p32o

TIL that it’s “shoo-in” and not “shoe-in”.

I’ve heard some variant on “don’t worry, they’ll never actually get the vote” enough times over the past 9 years to not trust it sadly.