- In the UK we told the EU bully bureaucrats to go f*ck themselves in 2016.
The same thing is possible in all EU nations - never give up hope.
The EU bureaucracy stunts growth on the continent. It's undemocratic (only the executive can originate and repeal law - and they are appointed, not elected), protectionist, bullying, expensive and unnecessary.
Successful nations like Switzerland and Norway (#3 and #4 highest GDP per capita in the European continent) show that you don't need to be an EU member state to prosper, maintain peaceful government and strong human rights protections.
- If you've ever read Thierry Breton's personal (and public) threats towards Elon Musk you'd understand who the real "bully and borderline sociopath" was.
Breton once threatened Musk simply for hosting an interview with the democratically-elected President of the US on X:
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-elon-musk-donald-trump-in...
EU bureaucrats have behaved terribly and deserve our contempt.
- As a European I’m pleased to see consequences for these arrogant unelected bureaucrats. Breton, in particular, seemed to delight in attacking free speech.
Breton once threatened Musk simply for hosting an interview with the democratically-elected President of the US on X:
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-elon-musk-donald-trump-in...
- I don’t understand why these agents lack a “second level” agent that oversees their commands and is able to veto anything dangerous Even models from several years ago would be able to understand whether an “rm -rf ~” made sense in the context of the task in hand, and would understand the consequences sufficiently to be wary of it.
- It’s mostly the Tories that were responsible for the drafting of the Online Safety Bill, and let’s not forget the downright evil Investigatory Powers Act. Another Tory creation.
The OP was correct. The Tories were left wing and authoritarian. They raised taxes, and failed to shrink the UK’s bloated state and civil service.
Only Reform have made a stand against the Online Safety Act and other creeping dystopian measures.
I don’t know if I fully trust Reform to deliver, but by a country mile, they’re a safer choice than Conservatives, Labour or Lib Dems in 2029.
The next General Election cannot come soon enough.
- So much to examine in this comment.
Firstly "homeland":
The last owners of "Palestine" were the British. But if we trace the history of the region further to see who the real indigenous people were, you'll find it were Jews, who were there for more than a thousand years before the religion of Islam even existed. The fact that there are mosques on this land is only a symptom of the colonial conquest of the land by Islam. If you want to know whose "homeland" this is you need to go back further in time.
Secondly "open air prison":
Egypt prevents Gazans from leaving Gaza over the Rafah border crossing due to the political and security issues Gazans have presented to Egypt - not because Egypt is deliberately "imprisoning" Gazans. Obviously, the Israeli border with Gaza has to exist, because if it didn't, the terrorist regime in charge of Gaza makes no secret of the fact they would repeat the October 7th attrocity, and many more thousands of innocent Israelis would be killed by Gazans. And that's on top of the rocket attacks from Gaza to Israeli towns, which have been going on for many years.
The fact Israel provides Gaza with energy, water, jobs, and telecoms always baffles me. Gaza's government literally wrote in their Charter that they existed to see the "annihilation" of the Jewish state. It is extremely magnanimous the Israel provides Gaza with ANY services whatsoever.
- It's going to be hard to reason with each other if we just exchange the extreme examples we've seen in propaganda (on both sides).
That's why I quoted Hamas themselves. Because that's not Israeli propaganda. It's a factual account from a primary source.
And if you like I can provide the Hamas-supplied footage of attrocities committed against more than a thousand Israeli civilians on a -single day-.
Let's stick to primary sources if we're going to compare the horrors happening in Israel and Gaza.
- Some casual unscientific research - a question to my fellow autistic HN contributors:
Do you have a "mind's eye" - that is, can you close your eyes, and voluntarily visualise mental images?
If you can't, you have a condition called "Aphantasia"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
When I found out about aphantasia, I was fascinated. I'd always imagined that "mind's eye" was a metaphor. I never knew it was literal, and that most of the population are able to visualise imagery in their head.
Could there be a link beteen aphantasia and autism?
Since I'm unable to visualise the faces (and thus expressions) of people, maybe this contributes to my lack of empathy and ability to predict other people's emotional state.
If you have autism, do you also have aphantasia?
- Another factor the author didn’t mention: Cancel culture.
Some of the biggest Scala companies and institutions have been heavily captured by the Left, and they have wreaked puritanical havoc on their political rival contributors, and anyone deemed to associate with them.
Typelevel, in particular, has taken politicisation to the next level. And the Scala Center made a political sciences grad with no commercial or academic Scala experience their executive director.
Typelevel’s Travis Brown (the activist who notoriously doxxed LibsOfTikTok) made it his mission to identify anyone in the Scala community who had rightwing views, or associated with any rightwinger, and then systematically try to destroy their career. He was so blatent about it, he had GitHub repos with names like “cancel culture” where he would use his insider knowledge of the Twitter social graph to smear people by association. Absolute psychopath.
So Scala’s ecosystem fractured down the middle, with anyone who didn’t share Typelevel’s puritanical worldview being ousted, and many moving to the competitor ecosystem of Zio, run by John De Goes (one of the victims of cancellation). John even created a parallel community of conferences and Scala training, which became very popular. But ultimately the toxicity of the language ecosystem and the Scala Centre’s failures under Darja Jovanovich and lack of commercial savvy of Martin Odersky led John to the point where he all but quit Scala, and embraced Rust instead.
https://degoes.net/articles/splendid-scala-journey
The cancellation of Jon Pretty was the thing that disturbed me the most. It ruined Jon’s life (not just his career). And ultimately, when Jon took some of the protagonists to the UK high court, they admitted they had no concrete evidence of any wrongdoing.
https://pretty.direct/statement
To see the “community” rally around the destruction of an individual more enthusiastically than they rally around the language itself - that is what convinced me that Scala is a dying language. A language cannot survive with such a toxic ecosystem.
- X.com is not a "breeding ground for racism and hate" any more than Reddit or Facebook (I've seen some hair-raising content on all the main platforms).
The difference with X.com is that is doesn't systematically censor anti-establishment / rightwing voices.
That's why the Left hate and fear X.com.
- > At this point, with the tech now available, almost everyone gets rich by doing net zero
The likes of Dale Vince (Ecotricity), certainly get rich by doing net zero. Significant levies have been placed on taxpayers and consumers for years, with the money flowing into the companies of politically-connected individuals like Vince.
> the child benefit cap was itself introduced back when parents with too many kids were the scapegoat.
Parents that choose to have more children than they can afford are not "scapegoats." They are breaking the social contract.
The benefit cap was not retro-actively applied. It didn't put any existing children in poverty. It only applied to future births, to parents who were choosing to have children at the expense of taxpayers.
That's why the cap is a popular policy: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/survey-results/daily/20...
> Scrapping a one off payment to save money in the short term, at the cost of worsening long-term economic benefits by failing to improve national logistics [HS2].
The project cost has ballooned to the point where it will exceed the long term projected economic benefit (benefit-cost ratio of 0.9, as per a 2022 review). It is a white elephant.
> Do you mean asylum seekers?
No, I mean illegal migrants, as I said. Genuine Asylum seekers don't throw their documents overboard and illegally enter the country on a dinghy from France.
Take the war in Ukraine and and the post-war threat from the Taliban in Afghanistan for example - in both cases, the UK government made advance provision for documented, background-checked individuals, including the elderly, women and children (as you'd expect from genuine refugees). And the UK made safe routes available for those people. That's how the system should work.
Those who illegally enter the country via the Channel are 88-90% male, most of whom are fighting-age, and most of whom originate from countries that are not currently at war.
You still believe they're genuine asylum seekers?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Channel_illegal_migran...
> that's a whole one billion per year you might save from not letting UK hotels rip you off, or two if you let these people work and support themselves.
If these people are allowed to economically benefit from illegally entering our country, it will send completely the wrong message to the third world countries they came from.
I don't want low-skilled/unskilled unvetted immigration that lowers our country's productivity, makes women and girls less safe, impacts public services and housing, divides our finite welfare spend and causes ghettoisation and (eventually) Balkanisation of my own country. Why would I want that?
> Brexit (and consider who owns Reform) has cost the economy an estimated 6-8% GDP by this point, per year, in lost growth opportunities — around £200bn/year.
I've heard various figures bandied around by continuity Remainers. They vary wildly, because at this point, nearly ten years later, it's impossible to scientifically compare a Brexit/non-Brexit scenario.
All we can know are the facts - Brexit gave us a huge opportunity to align our regulation with the precise nature of our economy, and an opportunity to avoid burdensome EU regulation (this is already happening in terms of the EU's hapless AI regulation). It's also an opportunity to avoid paying tens of billions of pounds annually into the EU's black hole unaccounted budget every year (consider the lifetime cost of that expense!)
The fact that the Europhillic Tory and Labour establishment failed to capitalise fully on Brexit is their fault - not the fault of the majority of voters who voted to leave the EU.
Luckily we have a party in 2029 who is unaligned with the Brussels and Strasbourg establishment, and who can make the bold decisions required to capitalise on our new freedoms and sovereignty. I relish this prospect.
- Seems you've found a leftwing historian who chooses to endorse the violent Islamic conquest of Southern Europe, re-imagining it as a vibrant exchange of cultures, predicated on extreme timeline distortion.
The Renaissance is defined as follows:
> The Renaissance was a European cultural movement from the 14th to 17th centuries, marking a "rebirth" of classical Greek and Roman learning after the Middle Ages. It was a period of significant innovation in art, literature, science, and philosophy, with key developments like humanism. Notable figures include Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael, and the movement began in Italy before spreading across Europe.
Islam did not even exist in the time of the Classical Greek and Roman periods.
Neither Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael ever met Muslims directly, travelled to the Islamic world, or interacted with Islamic institutions.
- > Removing ILR for example?
You mean replacing it with renewable five year visas that have reasonable salary thresholds and English language criteria, and which still allow the holder to apply for citizenship?
Why is that lunacy?
ILR is the immigration equivalent of "squatters' rights" - completely immoral IMO.
> the small possibility of being a Russian asset of course
The Left tried that with Trump too. It didn't work out for them, and I doubt this tactic will damage Farage either. It smacks of desperation IMO, just like all the silly childhood racism heresay.
- The below are conservative estimates of the money raised by Reform policies:
* £10bn+ per year - Adjusting how the Bank of England (BoE) treats reserves — e.g. stopping interest payments to commercial banks that receive money under quantitative easing (QE)
* £11bn+ per year - Rolling back expensive "net zero" policies
* £9bn+ per year - Alter eligibility for welfare
* £25bn - Scrap HS2
* multiple billions - Reducing foreign aid budget and cost of housing illegal migrants.
It's likely that pro-growth Reform policies such as lowering corporation tax to make the UK more competitive will significantly increase the corporation tax take - as was shown when the Tories entered power in 2010, lowered the corp tax rate and corp tax revenue increased significantly. In general, Reform's tax cuts are aimed at increasing the tax base.
- The “Health Ministry” is literally run by Hamas terrorists (Hamas is a proscribed terror organisation), and it fails to distinguish Gazan combatants from Gazan citizens.
This fact seems to be lost on The Guardian and other Western leftwing “news” outlets, in their peculiar fondness for regressive Islamist regimes.
It shouldn’t even need to be said - we do not take facts from terrorists. We take facts from neutral observers.
Sadly we must therefore also discount UNWRA and other UN affiliated observers, since they have been linked to Hamas - to their deep shame.
- The only link between the Renaissance and Islam is this:
When the Byzantine Empire fell to the Ottomans, many Greek scholars fled to Italy bringing:
• Greek manuscripts
• Knowledge of ancient philosophy
• Classical Greek language expertise
This boosted the revival of classical learning.
The Renaissance had far more to do with the Catholic Church than it had with Islam, and I’m curious to know who it was that told you otherwise?
- The classic populist political policy was the creation of the NHS in 1948.
Would you say that was "extremely short shortsighted and a wreck in a long term."?
Both the Tories and Labour have squandered the opportunities afforded by Brexit. Both parties are weak globalist shills.
Current polling suggests the situation in 2029 will be very different, and we will enjoy an administration that puts the national interest at the forefront of every policy decision. No more narrow-minded focus on the EU27, and much more focus on our service export to the dynamic English speaking economies of the world.
No more growth-killing EU directives lingering on our statute books.
No more deference to foreign human rights lawyers. The UK is perfectly capable of administering its own improved British Bill of Rights.
No more unskilled immigration lowering our national productivity and hammering our limited infrastructure and public services. Targeted legal immigration at the volume we need and no more.