That doesn’t mean that I said anything about colonialism being okay. Don’t put words in my mouth, and especially not those words
The countries I mentioned were not, in general, colonial powers (there is an exception here for part of Latvia)
It is still entirely rational behaviour for a colonial power to defend itself against colonisation. Even if they actually were colonial powers then seeking defence against Russia would be a perfectly sensible thing for them to do.
Ahh, my Beam NG custom car builder
Huh, the line should have been open to the airport by then, it started operating in 2014 too. That said, if you were flying l;ate at night or very early in the morning then it might not have been an option, as there are no services between midnight and 6am or something like that. Also, I hope you enjoyed your time in Scotland!
It has! The core bulk of the system has been up and running since 2014. The construction was a bit of a disaster, but now that it’s actually going it seems to be a success. An estimated 12 million passenger journeys last year
Who said anything about colonialism and conquest not being bad? Countries seek to defend themselves. Russia has consistently been a threat to several EU and NATO states, therefore they seek defences against it
is it just a set of vague guidelines to keep the membership limited to whoever they like?
They don’t need guidelines to do that. Any member state can just say no
Scotland just handed out a whole bunch of grants for electric buses
Both the EU and NATO require unaminous approval of existing members to add new members. Both organisations contain several members that have been under Russian domination within living memory. Given Russia’s frequent aggression towards its neighbours in the post-Soviet period, why would the likes of the Baltic countries trust Russia to be a reliable ally?
Additionally, Russia just straight up does not meet the Copenhagen criteria to join the EU and doesn’t have any measure of the pre-accession integration that every other applicant does
Their yawns and stretches look so incredibly satisfying. It is not fear that limits me, but a reticence to interrupt such bliss
The biggest disputes are Russia/Ukraine, Taiwan, trade dumping, and cyberwarfare. The EU wants Ukraine to win the war, the status quo to be maintained in Taiwan, to protect its domestic manufacturing, and to protect its computer systems from interference. I don’t know enough about the latter two to say the truth of what China and the EU are doing, I just know that the EU has disputes with China about them
I do think that a healthy China-EU relationship in the near future is far more likely than a Russia-EU one and even a little more likely than a US-EU one. There are disputes, but to my amateur eye they look more surmountable
It has been in general use across loads of areas of Europe - not just Celtic ones, even accounting for how widespread Celtic cultures used to be - and also since thousands of years before Celtic cultures emerged as a distinguishable group. I don’t think it’d be reasonable for any one group to claim ownership of it at this point
The crucial difference this time would presumably be Polish agreement rather than the route
A fascinating specimen. This particular cat-snail, a graceful grey tabby, appears to have acquired or developed a magpie shell. The causes of this unique combination remain unknown to us, but the joys of witnessing it do not.
You don’t need to apologise for me failing to read!
Oh it took me ages to figure out what this comment meant before I finally noticed who wrote it hahaha
I’m gonna be honest, as a Brit I had just kind of assumed that we would come to Ireland’s defence if they wanted and needed it. As the article says, we’ve been doing aerial interceptions for them for about 70 years. We get to keep the UK safer if there’s not a relatively undefended area right next to us, and Ireland gets to be defended by a larger power that has already learned the hard way that it can no longer subjugate Ireland
If there was an effort to change them before, Orban would have vetoed it
Money is only useful if people trust that they’ll get what they expect for it. A government can make a nationalised bank take a decision like that, but who’s going to use that currency if the government just snaps its fingers and makes 100 trillion yuan of everyone’s money disappear?
National government debts are usually owed to a variety of domestic banks, private investors, and similar interests. I don’t know about China for sure, but I’ve never seen anything indicating that it’s different in this regard. Not much of it, as a proportion, is owed to foreign governments or investors. So far as I’m aware, the main unusual things about China’s government debt is that Chinese citizens have a high savings rate (meaning banks holding those savings have more to work with as creditors) and the provincial governments have quite a lot of debt (potentially almost as much as the central government when added up, though I don’t know where to get reliable numbers for this)
or alternatively they are just that rich
It’s this one. They do tax highly - not necessarily the highest, but up there - but they’re also ranked near the top of GDP per capita and labour productivity. Oil definitely does give Norway specifically an extra leg up, but the broader picture is similar across all of the Nordic countries (although I’m not so sure on the Faroe Islands, and Greenland is quite different)
Not being welcomed into an alliance or supranational union is not a sanction. Not being in them is the default state for a country.
At no point have I made the argument that the countries Russia has invaded and controlled want to keep Russia out of these organisations as a matter of moral principals. I explicitly said it was a matter of self interest. They are not telling Russia off, they are making themselves safe from Russia.