Comments by "seneca983" (@seneca983) on "Rus Amb Polyansky: Only Outcome Kiev Surrender, Duma Discuss Harsh Peace Terms; ME Escalation Coming" video.

@jeffmaxwell7391 "Finland used to require a referendum to join NATO" There was never such a requirement. That may have been the opinion of some politicians, that's all.
1
@micnorton9487 "in the past Russian energy has allowed those Finnish corporations to bloom" Russian energy has played a much smaller role in Finland than e.g. in Germany.
1
@jeffmaxwell7391 "It was always Advised to have a referendum on such important matters" Advised by who? In any case, advise isn't in any way binding. Also, referenda haven't been very common in Finland. To my knowledge, there have only ever been 2 nation-wide referenda in Finland during her independence.
1
@jeffmaxwell7391 What does any of that have to do with Finland. None of that means that a referendum would somehow be a requirement for Finland joining NATO.
1
@jeffmaxwell7391 That was just their opinion, nothing more.
1
@jeffmaxwell7391 There is nothing wrong with them. I think in this case the politicians probably thought that the situation is somewhat urgent. In any case, the public opinion had swung decisively in favor of applying for membership which is probably one of the most important reasons why Finland applied.
1
@jeffmaxwell7391 We do, in fact, know it with high enough precision. Early this year the support for joining stood at about 80% and opposition at about 10%. There's always a few percentage point margin of error but it's not large enough to significantly change the result even if you assume statistical errors that start to be extremely unlikely.
1
@jeffmaxwell7391 "BS, a poll means Zero" You're not very familiar with statistics, are you? A sufficiently large poll with sufficiently good randomization gives a reliable indication of what the population thinks. You're grasping at straws if you think there can be a 10-sigma deviation from the poll results, or something.
1
@jeffmaxwell7391 "Depends on the people you ask" Pollsters use randomized samples. "and how you word the question" Whether Finland should apply to join NATO or not is a fairly simple matter without that much room for interpretation. Also, different polls haven't found radically different results. In any case, MPs have been elected by the people and the constitution empowers them to make decisions like this.
1
@jeffmaxwell7391 "Trudeau didn’t get the majority" But that's in no way a comparable situation to Finland's NATO application. In Finland the opposition was probably even more in favor of NATO application than the government (because at that time the Left Alliance party was in the government). Also, a very clear majority of the public was in favor of NATO membership (and we know this with a very high certainty) so it was a rather uncontroversial decision unlike the typical political decisions like whether to raise or lower taxes.
1
@jeffmaxwell7391 "The problem is you don’t know that" But I do know that. If you mean the opinions of the political parties, we know how they have voted and what they have said about the matter. I think only a few Left Alliance MPs (+ one other MP) voted against applying for NATO membership. If you mean the public opinion, we know that it's overwhelmingly in favor of NATO membership. Polls have always some statistical uncertainty but you can't realistically use that to explain away 80% support vs. 10% opposition. A measurement error that large is so unlikely that it doesn't matter. "Would South American or Caribbean Countries joining some military alliance with Russia or China make the world safer and would NATO be OK with it?" Predicting what would happen in that case is rather difficult. But if you mean that, by analogy, Russia is not OK with Finland joining NATO, I would reply that Russia has only itself to blame. Before the 2022 invasion there was more oppostion than support for joining NATO in Finland. The invasion made the public opinion swing decisively in favor of joining NATO. If Putin hadn't invaded Ukraine, Finland would almost certainly still be outside NATO.
1