Comments by "Peter Lund" (@peterfireflylund) on "EU Made Simple" channel.

  1.  @miersdelika5016  How on Earth are you counting Die Linke as a Democratic party? And at the same time NOT counting the AfD as one? Can you read? Do you know history?
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  2. No, it makes the European Parliament look really bad. This is an extremely stupid idea and it will only create (well deserved) EU disgust.
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  3. Ireland joined at the same time as the UK. Even if Ireland also left, English would still be an official EU language because it’s one of the two official languages in Malta. Only if Malta also left would we have to come up with a special rule to keep English as en official EU language — which we would immediately do, of course.
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  4. Poles apart.
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  5. There is nothing “far right” about being anti-Islam.
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  6.  @joshuafalken3312 they are. Much better. That they are also mostly women, children, and the old also helps a lot.
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  7. The US also thinks red = not Socialist and Socialist = not red. They are a bit confused sometimes.
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  8.  @JessicaDainese  it's better and cheaper and more environmentally friendly. There are no good reasons to be against it.
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  9.  @lucasgrey9794  China is far behind in semiconductors and will remain so far at least a decade or two (and likely much longer). China’s economy is stagnating (or contracting) now that all the easy growth is over and it’s debt has ballooned, likely to more than Greek/Italian/Belgian levels. Chinese will never replace English for another reason: its absurdly difficult writing system. It takes years upon years to learn how to read and write, whereas you can get pretty far with just a few weeks for English. (I am actually learning Chinese at the moment…)
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  10. The member states can do a lot to keep migrants out if they want to. Turns out that many in the West didn’t want to. That’s not the fault of the EU. I personally wish they would do a lot more.
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  11. Good. Southerners would just be spending Northerners' money.
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  12.  @nero1727 not very realistic, despite Norway’s extreme oil and gas revenues. I know Norwegians think Norway is rich because the Norwegians are so good at being Norwegian Norwegians in a proper Norwegian way — but, really, it’s the hydrocarbons. It’s not their manufacturing industry or farming or fishing.
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  13.  @torbene.3858  there is one valid way of looking at it (Die Linke not Democratic, AfD very Democratic), one conciliatory but wrong way of looking at it (neither is Democratic), and a very wrong way (Die Linke is Democratic).
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  14.  @JessicaDainese  yeah, I don’t like earthquakes and tsunamis either. They are dangerous.
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  15.  @Rilcy2003  we are almost at the stage where nobody can have an important EU level job if they don’t speak English. France’s first choice for the European Commission was rejected partly because her English was almost non-existent. In fact, we are almost in a situation where you can’t be a top politician in France if you don’t speak English…
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  16.  @JessicaDainese  lots of destruction caused by earthquake and tsunami. Huge and utterly unnecessary mass evacuation (that did kill some fragile people). Very expensive cleanup due to very dumb and unscientific environmental standards. Practically no real damage caused by the nuclear reactors. The reactors were safe because they had a strong encapsulation of reinforced concrete (several meters thick) which kept almost all the radioactive matter safely inside. Chernobyl famously did not have such an encapsulation because it was a true Soviet tech disaster with no regard for safety. The encapsulation has been standard everywhere else since the 60’s. It works.
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  17. Draghi is too old. Iohannis is the better choice of the two.
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  18. That's incredibly dumb. People are not fungible, you know?
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  19. What can we do about it? Fix the fucked up labour laws in the south.
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  20. Italy was used to ferrying "refugees" from the African coast home to Italy and then help them move up to Northern Europe. It still does that, unfortunately, but we have become much better at resisting the Italian Importees so now Italy (finally!) has to foot more of the bill itself. That is a good thing. A very, very good thing. Perhaps Italy should just stop ferrying migrants from the African coast to Europe? Oh, the Italian judiciary won't permit that? Perhaps Italy should get better judges... this is not a problem that the EU can solve for Italy.
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  21. Not enough. Mass deportations are also unnecessary. And asylum seekers should, by default, be locked up (gender separated). Exceptions can and should be made on a case-by-case basis but they should be rare. If they are real refugees who get permission to stay (and they are considered to be safe and non-violent) then they can be let out.
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  22.  @den15423 the “respectable” and “democratic” parties of Germany, especially those on the far left.
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  23.  @JessicaDainese  Wind isn't stable. That means the more wind turbines we get, the more do we need something else that can take over -- at very short notice! -- when the wind doesn't blow. That is water reservoirs in places where the geography makes sense (mountains) -- with all the associated environmental problems -- and natural gas, which comes with both environmental problems and geopolitical problems (Russia, Qatar, Libya, Morocco). The whole package is a lot more expensive than we are usually told in the media. Using nuclear power instead is a much better choice -- no need for foreign gas from nasty countries, much cheaper, much safer, huge future stability (we have plenty of uranium in Europe + it is super easy to stockpile decades of fuel), essentially zero pollution.
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  24. He is also generally known to be... "not the most power consuming light bulb", so to speak. Quite dim, in other words. I want the current Energy Commissioner to continue, even if that results in two Commissioners from Estonia. They are both very qualified for their jobs.
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  25.  @TheOnlyPilm  I know and I am generally very much in favour of that rule. But in this case, Estonia actually has two very qualified people -- and they are both women, which some people mistakenly believe is very important.
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  26.  @JessicaDainese  again, get a high school education in physics and look at the evidence. Nuclear power is safe. You may have reasons to be skeptical but you have zero good ones. The Soviet Union ran an extremely successful disinformation campaign against nuclear power in the West… while building nuclear power plants like crazy back home, precisely because it was so cheap and safe. Unfortunately, they also built some very dumb and unsafe designs, too, namely the Chernobyl type Google “void coefficient” if you want to know more about why the Chernobyl design was so unsafe.
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  27. The Muslim mass immigration should concern you more. You’ll see when you arrive — I assume you are currently in a former Soviet country or Turkey.
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  28.  @felixgarcia9650 France and Russia.
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  29. Other possibilities: Valdis Dombrovskis, Thierry Breton, Josep Borrell Fontelles. Breton and Fontelles are too old but Dombrovskis is perfect. He is even Eastern European!
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  30.  @_o..o_1871  keep lying, you are doing such a good job. Nuclear testing has got nothing to do with nuclear power, so that’s not a real argument. It’s pure demagoguery that only works on the naïve. You’ve also got your timescales for nuclear waste very, very wrong. You are also implying (without saying it outright) that there is a lot of nuclear waste (there isn’t) and that it is very radioactive (it mostly isn’t). You can make anything artificially expensive with a hostile regulatory climate. That’s what happened to nuclear power. A smaller part of the cost came from lack of standardization and mass production. Look at the costs of nuclear power in South Korea if you want to see what happens when the regulatory climate is less hostile (but still very, very hostile!) and when there is more standardization and mass production. Go on, I dare you, take a look. It completely destroys your case…
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  31.  @tomorrowneverdies567  only if you allow false definitions.
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  32.  @tomorrowneverdies567 the thing about Russia is unfortunately true… but it is also true of Die Linke, Bündnis Sarah Wagenknecht, and large parts of CDU/CSU, SPD, and B90/Die Grüne. The Soviet infiltration of Germany casts long shadows :(
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  33. And what exactly is wrong about Kurdish parties?
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  34.  @Davide.B that’s what navies and weapons are for. A shame we don’t use them :(
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  35.  @LetoxxIant your last sentence ruins your otherwise very fine comment.
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  36.  @EUMadeSimple  unfortunately, the ones in Europe do have more kids on average and they tend to be low quality people (with the second generation being worse than the first). Immigration would be ok if we had a good sorting mechanism either at the entrance or concurrent with the immigrants’ stay here. Unfortunately, we don’t.
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  37. The European Parliament IS involved in the election of the Commission President. The Council picks a candidate but the newly elected Parliament has to confirm (“elect”) that person. There is an intense game of political give and take involved and the Parliament can indeed reject the Council’s candidate. Von der Leyen was not resting by the pool in the months between her being nominated and being confirmed (“elected”)!
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  38. Hopefully never -- but if the Turkish Empire falls (and enough of its criminals punished) then maybe some of the smaller fragments may.
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  39. Fines for their helpers is not enough -- criminal organizations who help them must be disbanded and the people running them must go to prison (that includes organizations like Red Cross and Save the Children). The migrants themselves must also be targeted. Confiscate their belongs (including phones, money, and jewelry) and cause them physical harm (pain + temporary problems like broken bones or paralysis in some of their limbs via botox injections) -- and maybe dump them somewhere really inconvenient like at the edge of the Sahara.
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  40.  @jonathanvilario5402  as if people were fungible!
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  41.  @Micha-qv5uf  How about we stop letting the migrants in and the global south stops having so many kids they can't afford? And how about we STOP giving them money until they grow up?
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  42. Montenegro is corrupt, there is no rule of law, its political leaders are mafia bosses, their main income is cigarette smuggling, they are BFFs with Serbia...
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  43. Seems fair to me. If any country should pay asylum-related fines to the EU, it should be Germany. Certainly not Hungary. Why punish them for doing the right thing?
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  44.  @KityKatKiller and yet Germany still pretends Die Linke is a legal party! Germany also pretends it is completely legal to import millions of very problematic Muslims.
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  45. Zionism is wrong. Being anti-Zionist is good.
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  46.  @JessicaDainese  Albanians are not known for being smart, are they? That really matters, since intelligence is mostly genetic. Take a look at the PISA and TIMMS reports if you want to get a good idea of how intelligent people are in various country. Or aren't, in this case...
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  47.  @jammin5563 no, he was far left. Just not as far as the Communists.
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  48. Azerbaijan deserves nothing.
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  49. The EU is also a military organization. What do you think Borrell does? And what do you think DG DEFIS is?
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  50. The Sweden Democrats are not "Far Right". They are just not "Far Left".
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  51. I hope this directive gets shot down in court. It’s a dumb idea — and it is in violation of the EU treaties.
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  52. Correct. Die Linke should not be accepted.
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  53.  @JessicaDainese  Again, you don't know the first true thing about nuclear power. Get a high school education in physics or get started reading up on reactor design and actual harm from nuclear power (extremely little). While you are at it, look into the extreme harm from massive and unnecessary evacuations (Fukushima). Regarding Russia, it wasn't us who chose to invade Ukraine now, was it? And it wasn't us who orchestrated terror in Europe (Lockerbie), was it?
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  54. The Council (a mix of directly and indirectly elected people) and the Parliament (directly elected). You don't get to vote for your Prime Minister, either.
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  55.  @JessicaDainese  it’s not my fault you are wrong (and scientifically illiterate). Perhaps look into how and why one of the Chernobyl reactors went wrong (and why the others didn’t)? And how it required an immensely stupid reactor design, with essentially zero monitoring sensors, incompetently operated by people who tried to idiotic things? And how no other reactor design before and after was so stupid and unsafe? It is possible to build all sorts of dumb and unsafe chemical plants (remember Bhopal? Seveso? Minamata? Chernobyl was a tiny rounding error compared to those). It is also possible to build safe chemical plants. Nuclear power is no different, except that it is probably a lot easier to build safe nuclear power plants.
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  56.  @tomorrowneverdies567  I think you are the very definition of a smartass.
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  57.  @tomorrowneverdies567  stop digging.
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  58. The Danish Social Democrats are much more sensible on immigration in the media than they are in reality — especially in the foreign press. It’s just really good spin, that’s all it is. We still have plenty of the usual suspects, causing all the usual problems, and we are still getting more of them — fast.
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  59.  @matti8633  you should expect China’s PLA to be even worse than Russia’s military… they are far more interested in “internal power projection” than in having a capable defense or a military that can successfully invade Taiwan.
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