Comments by "Archangel17" (@MDP1702) on "A Different Bias" channel.

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  21.  @GeorgeGeorgeOnly  So, given the combined European membership of NATO (if say they were to represent themselves as one under the EU flag), what are the proportions now in terms of balance of power? US would still hold the main power, however it definitely would be more like equals. At this moment EU members in nato would spend around 300-350 billion in their military if they spend 2% of their GDP (which would be the most likely target for a EU army), while the US spends 700-1000 billion into their armed forces (official budget is around 730 billion, but much of the presidents discretionary budget also flows to the military, how much this is exactly I can't tell) which makes up for around 3,6 to 5% of their GDP, so probably double that of what the EU would set as their goal. Now, in terms of strength it might get closer than you would think based on these numbers. The US spends a lot on maintaining many foreign bases and waging costly "large scale" military operations globally, while this offers more global power, it offers little to regional/base power in terms of bang for bucks, which is what the EU would probably focus on (more defensively orientated). And especially Nato would be focused on the region around Europe. Furthermore it isn't exactly clear how efficient US spending is used. If the EU spends it more efficiently it might in the long term match US "regional" or "base" power with lower spending. For example, Russia only spends 60-70 billion on defense, but is still considered the world second strongest military with several innovations.
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  28.  @Willywin  first it was, the economy will collapse as soon as you vote to Leave then it was the economy will collapse when you invoke Article 50 Just few people actually said this and this would was always more dependent on how markets would react and wasn't a 'collapse' as you say, rather a hit to for example the pound. The markets reacted better than expected, possibly because essentially nothing was clear or decided at those moments, for all they knew the EU and UK would reach a deal that would cause nothing to change in terms of trade. And for the record, the pound has been falling the last few years compared to the euro and there has been a lot of investment moved out of the UK to the EU or investment that was expected to be done in the UK put on hold or moved to the EU. Does this mean there was no investment? Ofcourse not. And again, a lot of bussiness wanted to first see what would happen, if you don't need to move production, work, whatever obviously it would be cheaper to not move it. Much will again depend on how bussiness will react now to the deal reached and the actual impact of brexit/end of transition. then it was the economy will collapse when we left on Jan31st Anyone who said this was just stupid, the transition agreement ensured essentially nothing would change in terms of trade for almost another year. So why would the economy collapse at that point? then it was the economy will collapse at the end of the transition period It would collapse without a deal, guess what, a deal has been reached, so any economic impact won't be as worse as could have been according to the worst case scenario. Besides this, only one day has gone by: a holiday during lockdowns, so a negative outcome can still come. Moreover most people that know what they speak about said the hardest hits would come overtime, initially not noticed, unlike covid which hit directly and has a direc huge impact, the brexit impact to the economy will happen over a prolongued time almost unnoticed while it is happening. 'There would be queues miles long from the get go - then when there are no queues - 'well there's no trade...' Well, yeah, there is no trade, get the numbers yourself if you don't believe it. It is a holiday, with lockdowns, uncertainty among hauling companies on what to do/what will happen especially after what happened last week, ... So obviously there aren't lines now. Sure some people said there would be queues immediately, the problem is, this was under the assumption that there would be as much trade as usual, there isn't. Last week we could already see how much impact a temporary closure had after a few hours, eventually the impact lasted for days after the border was opened again. That there will be delays at Dover is not disputed, even the British government has prepared for it. Now at some point I am sure there will be some minor disruption somewhere which will be quickly resolved as companies and Governments in Europe want to sell hassle free to the UK as well You do know that the UK governments position is to get deliveries into the UK as hassle free as possible (since this involves things like food, medication, essential supplies, .... things that will immediately be noticed by the population if missing), even if it means just waving them through upon entering the UK. It is the EU that plans to treat the border as it is: a border. The delays are expected to hit traffic coming from the UK to the EU and the EU can't care less about that. But you need to move on, everyone else has, Labor, Lib Dems, the EU Oh, don't worry, we have moved on and accept the UK is out, you already were out almost a year ago, and I am happy about that, I would have detested another extension. But just because we have moved on, doesn't mean we can't look at and expect/discuss the impact of brexit. Labor does this too, as do the lib dems, EU, ...
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  41.  @thepenguin305  the 2% was a guideline. Obama pushed for pledges that the other NATO members would try their best to reach the 2% by 2024 at the latest or something similar in 2014. However it unfortunately wasn't a written down agreement, but something another government could quitely ignore. Trump definitely hasn't been the first president trying to push NATO members to spend at least the 2% set in the guidelines. Anyway, the US didn't pay for the defence of NATO members, their expenses would be the same regardless because of their own choice. Even when no one saw any need the US upped its defence spending in the past few years and only a minority of Americans think the budget should be lowered. It is also ridiculous that Germany's armed forces have been so shoddily equipped that under VDL's time as defence minister they had to use broomsticks instead of machine guns. This is more likely then to do with bad (budget) management, considering Germany still spends (slightly) more on defence than France and still France has a (more) capable military. And it isn't like the German military is larger and thus needs more spending to be as efficient, the opposite, France's military is a bit bigger. So these stories of 'x% of whatever is badly maintained and not usable' or the 'broomsticks instead of machineguns' you mentioned shouldn't be due to a lack of funding, rather just mismanagement of the funds. Ofcourse Germany's military should logically be larger than France's which is what the increase propsed now will likely lead to, but the current funding for the current size of Germany's military should have been adequate.
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  53.  @Leszek.Rzepecki  Well, the Capitol police chiefs and sergeants-at-arms have resigned Yes, because of what happened, not necessaily because they or their subordinates didn't do the right thing. It is not unusual that after a failure, be it your fault or not, to take responsiblity and resign. The National Guard of Maryland says it offered twice and was refused, by Capitol police. And this goes directly against accounts of both the chief of capitol police and several other officials. So there either was miscommunication or someone from the Maryland national guard is lying. but police having selfies with rioters does raise more than a few questions. How many of those have you seen? I have only seen a picture of one agent doing that and like I said, there can always be a few bad apples. t's notable that Capitol security authorities have held no press conferences explaining their decisions and performance Why would they? They have to explain it to their superiors and investigators, not the public. And there are reports of rioters showing their police ID before being allowed in. It's probable, if these stories are true, that there were off-duty military and police among the rioters. This is something completely different, ofcourse there can be cops and military among the protestors. It is not like they are all immune to Trump fanaticism while many other parts of the population aren't. The US has 1,3 million active duty military personnel and around 700k police officers, even if just 0.1% of them are fanatic Trump supporters, it would still mean 2000 of them. Now they should just all be found, fired and charged if necessary. and the people responsible will have to await a thorough investigation, which won't happen till Trump and his henchmen are cleared out. I don't think so, the FBI is now apparently already busy arresting people. The president can't stop an investigation into this, just like he couldn't stop the FBI Russia investigation. Maybe the senators and house members implicated might not be targetted now, but that might also be more because their contribution is circumstantial at best legally speaking. Only the house and senate themselves can probably act against them. It is very notable, though, that the police preparation for the trumpanzees was a fraction of what it would have been - based on response to prior BLM demos - had the anticipated protests been by BLM. I don't entirely agree with these comparisons people make, obviously it could hold water, but if you want to compare this to BLM, you need to look at the very first days, during these the police in many places didn't respond well either and there was also a lot of chaos and police retreating to wider perimeters. That feels actually quite similar to this, underestimation of the situation, being overwhelmed and pulling back to regroup and get extra support, problem was, capitol police can only fall back in one direction: the capitol. Better comparisons would be to see what happens during future pro Trump protests. I believe the first largescale BLM protest at the capitol happened days after they started in general, so it was clear that these protests could erupt in violence (due to a few bad actors mostly), so they were better prepared. However there was no example for pro-trump protests in the days before the capitol push (unless I missed them?). And like I said, according to the interview of the capitol police chief (corroborated by other officials) he did actually request more support in the days before and asked the national guard to be on standby, to be ready and again requested support several times on the day in question. He claims calls for national guards were refused at least 6 times.
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  54.  @Leszek.Rzepecki  In my experience, officials resign when they have been caught doing something wrong, not just making a simple mistake It looks like your experience it quite limited then. Obviously it happens more that people resign because they just want to or make a mistake, but at that level, which such a responsability, it is expected you resign if something goes wrong, even if it is not your fault and did what you could. It looks better if they quit rather than being fired, or jailed. There is no way they would ever risk facing jail time unless they actively worked to support the riot. And in that case resigning wouldn't do anything. And yes, Pelosi would have demanded his resignation anyway, not necessarily because he personally failed, but because the capitol police failed in securing the capitol, whether they did what they could or not or whether they failed because of their mistakes or not doesn't really matter, something like what happened demands something to happen and usually it is the highest men in charge that become the fall guys. I think I'd rather trust the national guard And I rather trust someone whose story is corroberated by several other people from other departments/instances. But like I said, maybe there was just some miscommunication, or maybe the national guard (or people from it) are trying to safe face/shift the blame. They are still human afterall. Why would you trust them more than an experienced and respected person like the capitol police chief. It is not like there couldn't be some dishonest career people there. To be clear this is not an attack on the national guard in general, but even just one (or a few) person(s) there is enough. I don't really see why you would put their word over others just because they are in the national guard. That is similar to expecting the president to do what is right because he is president. Not everyone is as honorfull as his post/rank might make you assume. Usually, authorities do hold a press conference to explain their behaviour, if only to spin things their way. You said it right, usually. This isn't a usual circumstance and what would they say? "We were overwhelmed and didn't get the support we asked for, eventhough others say we didn't ask"? It would just turn into a blame game. Everything that had to be said in public was already said or speculated on, it makes much more sense for the capitol police to just stay quiet publically and report to congress and investigators. Capitol police is not the same as other police departments, their responsability is to congress, normal police departments is (or should be) to the public. Capitol police are more like guards/protection force. You aren't going to see the secret service bring out a press statement if something where to happen close to the president. No, they do their job, keep quiet themselves, have internal inquiries and leave it to the white house to decide what and how it should be made public. No, the reason they haven't held a press conference and resigned instead was because they know they were culpable. And this is a major assumption with the only evidence being your own opinion and others speculation. Honestly are you really this naive to think everything has to how you expect it to be/envision it or otherwise something nefarious is going on? Amazing. It didn't occur to any of these good police to arrest folk as they were expelled from the Capitol. Why would they? They were overwhelmed, the capitol was already breached. At that point their main goal is to clear out and secure the capitol, not let it become an even bigger 'warzone' where the rioters act like animals in a corner. More deaths are likely to occur if not that, then defintely more injured. What happens if rioters that felt cornered started a fire and the capitol went up in flames? yeah sure, there would be a fire surpression system, but what if they disable it somehow, or make the fires too intense? With the amount of security cams the capitol must have, images/video's from online, police cams, cellphone data, interrogation, ... It will be much more effective to pick them up one by one when they feel safe and are seperated from their 'comrades'. Clearly you don't know or underestimate what the situation actually was or you don't know how it is best to act in such a situation. De-escalation is paramount tactic, something the US police force is uses not often enough, causing all these tragic deaths/stories to happen due to police actions. In this case they used it right: first de-escalate and secure, investigate and arrest after. That's an astounding standard of policing you would never, ever, see applied to a BLM protest. roll eyes Did a BLM protest ever took the capitol or something similar, with the same number difference? Hell, even during BLM protests the main priorities were to disperse crowds, only arrest when possible, when you can do it in a (for them) safely manner. When the crowds can't overrun you. This is what mostly happens in huge crowds that turn violent (not just the US): make them disperse, identify them later, only arrest those you can in a good and safe manner. I actually did look at an analysis of BLM protests, it said 93% were peaceful, and 7% had violence associated, Obviously I refer to the violent ones. I thought this was a given no brainer. Yet here we have a WLMM (White lives matter more) riot where not only was there violence, but police death as well. And? Like I said, for so far I know this was the first of this kind (at least in the last several months), if I am wrong please show me. We'll see how police prepares and responds if they try something like this again in the future, for example on the 17th (I believe) they again want to do something. If you could provide references to the Capitol police chief asking for reinforcements Here you have his interview in full, open it in incognito and select free and you can read it fully https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/sund-riot-national-guard/2021/01/10/fc2ce7d4-5384-11eb-a817-e5e7f8a406d6_story.html What I am saying is that Trump or his supporters had corrupted many, including in the leadership. This is a cancer that needs to be extirpated, starting with it's source, Trump. Don't disagree with you here, but the chief of capitol police is directly underneath congress, not Trump.
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  60.  @greeny202ab  Our influence obviously has not suffered in fact disassociating ourselves from the other Europeans has probably improved our influence around the globe And why would that be? In fact the newly formed Italexit party is actually using improved British influence after Brexit as one of its slogans. It is easy to state something like that, doesn't mean it is true. Furthermore it is likely more about british influence on internal affairs, rather than international influence and this new party isn't even being polled yet, it isn't impossible they'll completely flop, it is waiting untill the next election to know that, somewhere in 2023. and looking at the figures Which figures? Hopefully not just the ones the UK government promises, because promises can easily be made, but are much more difficult to keep. Erasmus was actually a British creation Ehm, no? The idea of erasmus originated from Italy and was advanced by a Belgian councilmember in the 80's. Germany, France and the UK were actually rather opposed to it, because they as large countries already had their own exchange programs and there are moves to allow Erasmus countries into the much larger Turing program Again, at this point everything about the Turing program are rhetoric lines, there is no actual layed out plan released yet, so why the hell would the EU even consider opting in to it at this stage? It would make much more sense for them to expand the erasmus program instead. How the UK will be able to get 30k students and more of all backgrounds in it with only 100 000 million pound in spending and to more regions accross the world is baffling. This would make around 3300 pound per exchange student. Even just the flight might (depending on the country, but considering they don't work with erasmus, most likely it will be focused on further destinations) take up a fifth of that budget, leaving around 2700 pounds for all other expenses, that is very low. And this obviously doesn't take into account administrative costs, getting exchange rights, ... From everything I read about the Turing program I can only get the feeling the UK government is, like with so many other things, underestimating everything or maybe they know it is bullocks and just want to have some speech lines.
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  67. @Some Thing Monarchy and Democracy are exact opposites. No, they are not. Monarchy and republic are opposite. Whether a nation is a democratic nation depends on where the power lies. Normally with a constitutional monarchy the power effectively lies with the parliament, which is elected by the people and thus it is democratic. Monarchy is a form of government in which a legal person, the monarch, holds sovereign authority until death or abdication. What you are talking about is an absolute monarchy, there is no such thing anymore in Europe. With constitutional monarchies the sovereign authority lies with parliament and the powers of the monarch are determined (and can be changed by) the parliament. Or in other words, the powers of the monarch are either symbolic or can't be used without permission of the government or parliament (depending on the constitution). But you cannot call it Democracy because Democracy (rule by people) is a system of government where the citizens exercise power by voting. Exactly, and if the power lies with the elected parliament and the government formed by this parliament, it is a democracy. In a representative democracy the citizens elect representatives from among themselves. These representatives meet to form a governing body, such as a legislature. In a liberal democracy the powers of the majority are exercised within the framework of a representative democracy, but the constitution limits the majority and protects the minority, usually through the enjoyment by all of certain individual rights This is correct and almost always the case in a constitutional monarchy, therefor these monarchies are ALSO representative democracies. I live in a country with a king AND a representative democracy. Just because you seem to think they can't be combined, doesn't mean that's the case, but just a (wrong) opinion. It's either Monarchy or Democracy. NOT BOTH! Again completely fucking wrong. There are many non-democracies that aren't monarchies and there are plenty of monarchies that are democraties. You are completely missing the connection between both. Now if you had said "it's either absolute monarchy or democracy" I agree, but constitutional monarchies can be (and most often are) democratic. And don't say again they can't be, because reality already has proven you wrong (and your own words for that matter).
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  69. I think you give Cameron's choice too much honor. Cameron didn't initiate the brexit vote because he realised that it entails more than the parliament could decide (there wasn't a decision necessary really, because there was no real issue and parliament has made a lot of other important decisions throughout history), but he rather saw it as a way to shut up the parts of the tories that were leaning to Ukip and anti-EU. He never really thought the people would vote to leave (no one did, not even the leave campaign thought they could win, but they hoped they could manage it nevertheless). Ofcourse they aren't going to put "Do you think we should start thinking about, talking about, or considering, leaving the EU." on the ballot, the entire campaign was meant to consider and talk about leaving or not. It would have been the most ridiculous and stupid referendum ever. The difference between manifesto mandate and referendum mandate, is that a manifesto mandate never asks the electorate a question. The general election is in my eyes more important, because you basically elect the people that will make a lot of decisions that can influence your live, not just one. The people responded in record numbers. That is called a mandate. And what if in another referendum you have a record number of voters and remain wins? Doesn't this give a stronger mandate to overturn the previous mandate? That is the problem with referendums, if the difference is too small, within a few years, the mandate can be invalid and different and because of the "the referendum needs to be followed, another referendum is undemocratic" bullshit you can't ask a mandate to overturn the previous one, even if you'd probably get one. Now if Leave won by 55%+, it would be different, because how is that going to be overturned in another referendum in a matter of years? It is the manifesto mandate that is an advisory No it is not, an elected MP can't be voted out untill the next election and untill then their vote has legal authority and definitely isn't advisory. If a referendum was the legal mandate and the election an advisory one, you'd need a referendum on basically every little thing. Every month there would be multiple referendums. However there is no set time between a referendum about a previous referendum and the previous referendum. Besides, if the outcome would be same, what's the harm? Similar outcomes in both referendums: case closed and decision undoubtably made, but if the previous referendum is overturned with either 1) a much larger majority or 2) a much larger voter turnout, the previous referendum should be overturned. There is a reason why referendums are so rare: it's inefficient governing because people are fickle and often don't even know the far reaching consequences of their vote. If Parliament has the power to overturn the power of the vote, then we have an Oligarchy, not a Democracy. If there isn't a general election between the referendum and the overturning, it would be foggy whether it be democratic. However if the parliament that overturns the vote is elected after the referendum, you could make the case that the people have voted in a parliament that is meant to overturn it (or at the very least offer another referendum) because people made a mistake/changed their minds, or at the very least that people took the risk of voting in people that might overturn the vote and therefor it is a risk they took willingly. If there is evidence of election fraude (be it in the campaign or voting booth) or the vote was really close there definitely is a reason to hold another referendum. In the end your entire post basically comes down to the fact that parliament should be disbanded (seeing that they apparently have no right to make decisions about the nations future) and the UK should only be ruled with referendums. Or am I wrong?
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