Great speech

Politics
1

The smug, cosy eurocrats in the audience needed a kick in the arse.

1 - Europe needs to be able to defend itself, as Macron has been arguing for years.
2 - European leaders have not been listening to voters, Vance sees that as suppression of free speech curtailing the rise of the right, when in fact the moderate politicians have not been active enough in defending moderate views. More smugness.
3 - The Ukrainian hubris has to end. It’s over and it should have been over after the initial invasion was repulsed.

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John, you’ve probably read this too

But have you read this about how JD Vance stands up? The guy flirted with the Mormons before opting for the Dominicans - he’s an evangelical who’s converted to become a neo-con Catholic. I think he’s potentially more dangerous than Trump and only a heartbeat away from the top job.

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Well Vance certainly has some brass neck !
I wonder how he can justify lecturing Europe about democracy when he himself is not from a democratic country. The USA is NOT a democracy, it is a Constitutional Federal Republic.
“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America
and to the Republic for which it stands,” etc.

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Vance is far more dangerous than Trump, who is letting Muskrat be acting POTUS, anyway.

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For someone whose President bans journalists that do not toe his line from his Press briefings, he is in no position to harangue Europe on free speech.
All European governments should point this put to him in very plain words and make it very clear that
Europe is not going to have their democracy railroaded as is happening in the United States.

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I agree with his first two points, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

It’s a shame if those two good points get lost because someone like Vance made them.

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As I’ve ranted on about before, I’m very worried that our centrist politicians haven’t been doing enough for neigh on a decade to stem the European shift to the right.

Italy, Finland, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia and the Czech Republic already have rightwing parties in government and we’ve Geert Wilders :roll_eyes: in the Netherlands.

Starmer, Reeves and Badenoch are doing a wonderful job of recruiting for Reform. Scholz is busy pushing Germans into the claws of the AfD. Le Pen (or maybe Bardella) is hanging over our heads but, despite all the naysayers, I think Manu has done what he could to derail her. The only positives I can see are Tusk taking the reins again in Poland and Meloni not being as bad as expected.

I think our centrist politicians have been smug and complacent. They are making the Hilary Clinton mistake of assuming the moral high ground and dismissing those that are fooled by, and vote for the Right as deplorables. Well the Right are leveraging the deplorables and the Right is winning. It’s about time moderate politicians targeted the deplorables and tried to turn them around, by whatever means available.

Deputy Führer Vance couldn’t have been clearer yesterday. His boss and his acolytes want a right wing Europe, and they are going to take action to get it. Through “freedom of speech” (read lies), US social media reach and interference, if necessary.

Sadly, Europe lacks a leader to steer us through this dodgy time. That’s one of the reasons I was disappointed that von der Leyen got back in.

I hope Vance’s speech was a major wake up call, but I’m not confident.

This is a time for tough decisions, taken quickly. Europe has to strike back, banning or curtailing X, for example no political content, would be a very good start. If Trump could bang out Truth Social in no time, then the EU should develop and deploy our alternative to X posthaste too.

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Good NYT article. Shows how dangerous the Catholic Church still is, especially when they get their clutches on a useful fool. Vance is a disturbed person and his ideological fervour makes him all the more dangerous.

I heard Rory Stewart taking about this bizarre exchange on radio 4. Vance is a basket case.

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Worse and worse, and at lightning speed too.

Europe pays, but Europe gets no say.

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From an article in the Irish Times…

"The AfD’s secret weapon here is how it has mastered TikTok like no other party. Its clips can clock up 500,000 views – 10 times the average of other parties’ content.

Bypassing mainstream media, this is where the party reaches its voters, and channels outrage over a series of knife and car attacks in Germany."

I hope it’s not paywalled.

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I truly hope Europe collectively gets their considerable ass together and determines a scorched earth policy for the US moving ahead until such time as the Present Occupant leaves office. Playing nice with bullies never ends well, so trying to be friendly is just plain, well, stupid.

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Indeed, they are saying no appeasement for Putin and falling over themselves to appease Trump :roll_eyes:

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Good for Macron, Starmer better turn up.

" The French president, Emmanuel Macron, was on Saturday night seeking to convene an emergency meeting of European leaders, including the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, as concerns grew over Donald Trump’s attempts to seize control of the Ukraine."

" * Donald Trump’s administration has proposed to Ukraine that the US be given 50% of the war-torn country’s rare earth minerals, NBC reports, citing four US officials. According to two of the officials, instead of paying for the minerals, the agreement would be a way for Ukraine to pay back the multi-billion dollar weapons and aid packages that the US has provided to it since Russia’s invasion in 2022."

Some serious shit going on here :thinking:

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‘Pay back’ is ominous and also non-sensical as it implies lack of future support in exchange for what the US previously has given/sold. Whereas previously Trump was talking about a future exchange of rare earth minerals for continued support.

However Zelensky and Europe won’t agree to that.

These statements and policies are being made on the hoof largely for domestic consumption without any thought for the consequences.

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Thanks for the link. I’d never heard of him but I’ll read more.

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Vance has only just become a Catholic, but he’s already fallen out with the Pope, maybe he’ll establish an alternative papacy (hopefully not in Avignon). All this Trumpish imperialist stuff’s getting very pre -C20th…

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I had been anticipating the vigorous and the unpredictable from the new US administration, but I am still deeply shocked by the rant produced by their vice-president at the Munich Security Conference on Friday 14 February. In asserting that European countries were suppressing free speech, he displayed a contempt for the considered policies of democratically elected governments which was wholly unacceptable. It is hard to judge which was more unexpected – the patronising and provocative manner of his delivery, the recklessness of his misrepresentation and misjudgement, or the evidently genuine hatred that lay behind these; and the singling out of Britain for particular attack was a surprise.

There were possibly earlier indications of this in remarks by Mr Musk. And one may perhaps assume that it is largely driven by a convenient persuasion that profit is the only value, and that US firms have been unreasonably trammelled by European legislation aimed at public protection, for example in public health. But we ought not to be expected to allow our citizens to be poisoned by dangerous dietary additives, or driven to obesity by the greed of food corporations; nor our children’s minds to be mutilated by pathological websites driving them to suicide, or to mass violence and murder in their schools.

It seems that we have to conclude that the United States has now effectively abandoned all international agreements. It has become like China or Russia, driven by nothing but self-interest, and what remains of the democratic world should seek to get together to defend our values against all three of these threats. I hope that, to make a start, readers will join me in avoiding the purchase of US goods and services whenever they can.

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What saddens me is the apparent lack of any effective political opposition in the US itself. Seems like Vance JD and Trump PP (Putin’s Puppet) can say whatever they want with impunity.

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I think it’s there, I just think it’s a bit shell-shocked at the moment (as often happens after an electoral defeat - e.g. look at the UK Tories now and Labour in 2010) - and also it’s having to work out a way of countering a régime that is showing zero respect for any of the norms of political procedure, international relations, and for basic human decency.

Trump and Co are operating to a plan that’s based on creating “outrage fatigue” - do so many irresponsible and selfish things so quickly that your opponents don’t know which way to turn and cannot land any metaphorical punches because the next outrage displaces the last before they can respond.

There is a calculating brain or two behind this (shades of Dominic Cummings?) and it’s not Trump or Musk or Vance, they are too dumb (and in Trump’s case too lazy) to plan all this on their own.

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As Chris says, it’s there but the problem is (IMO) that the Democrats (and I think the EU are guilty of this as well) think that the right is still made up of honourable gentlemen (and gentlewomen) who will fight a fair fight and that, if they lose at the ballot box that is democracy in action.

This is a problem because that situation does not pertain and I do$.& &hi$k i& has per

Excuse me, I’m having a very odd problem with my keyboard in Firefox

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