The three countries that have been attacked, including civilian infrastructure, are Ukraine, Lebanon and Iran

Surely that has to be the default position. They all have a right to defend themselves and a valid claim for reparations.

Yet months of co-ordination and training between various disconnected groups / gangs / militias, was completely undetectable.

The regime may be horrific, but the only route out was through supporting and encoraging change and opening up and progressive forces.

It's a country with 90 million people, and many groups and external influences. Could end up like Iraq.

and it's Europe that will experince the political chaos as result of pressure from refugees, not the US.

At least for several decades after independence

The level of integration of everything, including trade and supply chains and finance etc, is so big as to be almost total.

In addition, I'm pretty sure that EU would not welcome another hard border with England, it's already waisted far too much time and effort on the issue in Ireland. I'm sure it doesn't want to have to go through that again.

And a very simple way of de-legitimising any anti-establishment position, and protecting the status quo.

We can look at independence movements in Europe, Brexit, Trump, republicanism in the UK, any sort of heterodox economic or foreign policy.

Even if you disagree with these positions, it is helpful to you to steelman your position and your arguments. And just dismissing them as Putin's work drops you into a trap. It's arguably one reason why Trump got re-elected. People spent his entire first term assuming he'd be exposed in some complicated Russian plot and put in jail; rather than thinking hard about why he got elected in the first place. Same thing happened to some degree with the Brexit vote.

Yet none of them are being prosecuted under the terrorism act, or on any charge related to terrorism.

Do you have the name or names of the person accused of 'attacking police with sledgehammers'?

I've heard a lot about this, but it's difficult to get to actual sources about exactly what is alleged.

Even if this did happen as you say. attachking police with sledgehammers is assault, potentially even attempted murder. There's plenty of laws for that.

It's not terrorism.

Their actions do not follow the conclusion you state.

What is clear now though to any Iranian is that they should get nuclear weapons asap. Diplomacy is just a tool used by the west to string you along while they get ready to bomb you

Not dismissing SMR for commercial use, but don't see how military subs / ships are relevant

The arguments you are using for attacking Palestinian infastructure and people are more than applicable to Israeli infastructure and population.

In international law people have the right to resist occupation through millitary means. In a small area under occupation then there is no means to create a millitary setup that matches what the 'good guys' consider to be legitimate.

If you want to be consistent then allow Palestinians to have a millitary, air space, airports, ports, navy, jets, nuclear weapons etc. And then you can fight them on equal terms.

You should maybe research where key millitary apparatus of the Israeli state is located. The headquarters of the IDF for example.

I listened to him being asked a question on UK / US trade and his answer was very generic - something something Amazon.

To be a forex trader, you would live and breathe detail on stuff like this. To be in the top 1% of forex traders you would be far beyond that.

yes he isn't in that position now, but I expected some novel insight that you could only get from a specialist, not something that anyone could come up with.

This isn't the only example.

I don't disagree with most of what he is saying, and I'm very happy for him that he has managed to break through in a small way to get his message out.

but still something iffy.

but "tax on savers ie the rich"

rich normally are rich enough to protect their savings from inflation. e.g. by putting it in an effective monopoly - land or housing (housing is a monopoly if you also are rich enough to have some influence on what / where houses are built / not built)

in the UK case then £895 of the debt is owned directly by the bank of England. So in the case of about 1/3rd of the debt the 'creditor' is your own central bank.

The government can of course pay interest on gilts by simply issuing more gilts. It's one of the advantages of running a country, intergeneration debt.

> The total tax burden is probably over 100%

Compared to what? income? capital gains? GDP?

total tax in UK through all taxes is 36.1% of GDP.

Taxes are not high in historical terms. USA for example had much higher tax rates (90% top income tax band) while it was arguably undergoing its phase of highest development.

Roads (and everything) get worse if governments do not invest in roads, or they invest in roads, but have outsourced to multiple layers of contractors who end up extracting a lot of the investment in profit and squeezing of labour costs and not in quality of road building.

A country cannot go bankrupt. After the war the debt to gdp ratio was 250%, and from that position the government nationalised 20% of industry, built houses, create the NHS and welfare state and developed a nuclear programme.

> corporate tax rate of 25%

on profit yes, but if you are big enough you declare as little profit as possible.

> personal income tax of 45%

that's the highest band there is, payable only on income over £125,140

> sales tax of 20% Yikes.

well it's a tax on added value on every step thorough the retail chain, collectable by the end retailer. It's zero rate on food and child clothes and some other things.

Taxes are indeed on the wrong places in many cases: e.g. dividend tax on unearned income should be equalised with income tax, income tax thresholds should be increased in line with inflation / wages and not frozen as they currently are. but I don't think overall tax burden is the issue here.

Local authorities are forced to sell off assets and fire direct employees, then get charged a fortune to provide basic services and child and adult social care.

And for contracts and outsourcing, the ownership of the contract itself is the thing that gives value, not providing the actual service. Creating a whole set of perverse incentives.

A council should look at a pot hole in a road as a massive opportunity. Here is a chance to provide good quality work for local people and local resources, but the opposite happens.

We have a whole layer of service retailers e.g. for electricity and gas and communications, who are not more than a spreadsheet speculating on long term prices, a call centre and a web site. Their entire business model being based on a) not messing up the spreadsheet calculation b) enough people being lazy and not renewing or switching their contract every year.

Our financial services industry has massive positive PR, seen as a net good for the country. When in reality it is focused not on basic things like providing banking and direct insurance, but in attracting our best and brightest individuals from around the country and instead of having them put their talents to something productive. Instead reward them for creating and maintaining complex systems to move wealth around, asset strip regions, hide it from tax and create a layer of gambling and financial products on top of these systems.

I could go on.

The Eurozone included economies as diverse as Greece, Spain, Lithuania and Germany

These are some of the self-contradictions I'm referring to.

And the basic issue is that you cannot have a single monetary policy and impose half a fiscal policy, without political unification. And IMO that will never be squared.

I suppose the new glaring contradiction is that environmental policy and net zero policy has primacy (rightly in my view), but now so does making bombs.

on the macro level though I can't see it myself.

EU area had everything going for it in terms of being able to make drastic progressive shifts forward in multiple areas. but instead since 2008 its been doing little but dealing with the contradictions of its own self-imposed constraints. be that debt crisis, energy policy, fortress border policy, emigration issues, Brexit and endless political dramas over reactionary political movements. It's now fixated with re-armament, something that threatens to produce yet another lost decade.

Meanwhile, China and other parts of Asia have taken these same 20 years to create entire new sectors and lead the world in them.

20th century history unfortunately tells us the answer is containment, not direct engagement.

From handing over Poland and eastern europe to Stalin in 1945, or refusing to protect Hungary in 1956 or interfere explicitly in the soviet sphere of influence, in exchange for them not interfering explicitly in western sphere of influence.

It's not a nice lesson, but that was how we achieved some form of peace for decades.