@brownliberite I’m not a labour supporter but Starmer has been the ‘adult in the room’ amidst the chaos over last 12 months. I don’t think the obvious glee of Beth Rigby and Chris Mason about the issue should be of relevance !
The fact that the White House overtly backed a pro-Moscow, pro-Russia, pro-Putin leader of an EU, Nato member state is terrifying.
The fact that Orbán is now gone is one mildly shining light in a terrifying state of International affairs.
Congratualtions Hungary!
Too on point not to share, “Aussie reply to Trump rant about NATO not being there for us.
Mate. You run a country with 600,000 homeless people sleeping on the street tonight. A country where 40% of adults can't cover a $400 emergency without borrowing money. A country where insulin costs more than a car payment and people are rationing it to survive. A country where medical debt is the number 1 cause of bankruptcy. A country where women are dying in hospital car parks because doctors are too scared of abortion laws to treat a miscarriage.
You lock up more of your own citizens than any nation on earth. More than China. More than Russia. More than North Korea. The land of the free has 2 million people in cages, and a quarter of them haven't even been convicted of anything. They're just too poor to make bail.
Your life expectancy is going backwards. You're the only developed nation where that's happening. Your infant mortality rate is worse than Cuba's. Your kids do active shooter drills between maths and English while you sell the gunmaker's stock to your mates.
Your minimum wage hasn't moved in 15 years. You've got teachers working 2 jobs and veterans sleeping under bridges and you just spent a trillion dollars flattening a country that didn't attack you.
And you’ve got a convicted felon, adjudicating raping, paedophile protecting, porn star shagging insurrectionist running the biggest dumpster fire war campaign since the Taliban thanked you very much for losing again.
And you're calling Greenland poorly run?
Greenland has universal healthcare. Free education. One of the lowest incarceration rates in the world. Nobody goes bankrupt there because they got sick. Nobody dies in a waiting room because their insurance said no.
"NATO wasn't there when we needed them." When exactly was that, champ? September 11? Because NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in history FOR YOU. Soldiers from dozens of countries deployed, fought, bled, and died in Afghanistan FOR YOU. Australia wasn't even in NATO and we still showed up. For 20 years.
And you pulled out at 2am without telling anyone and left them to deal with the mess.
So maybe before you start calling other countries poorly run, have a look at your own backyard, you spray-tanned aluminium siding salesman. The only thing poorly run in this picture is your fucking mouth. Credit (borrowed from) Jim Scroggins - original author 📷 unknown”
Trump, Putin, Farage… your boy took a hell of a beating.
Congratulations to the people of Hungary for showing that populist extremists can be defeated – even despite Donald Trump’s best efforts.
I never thought I’d see a U.S. president and vice president actively back a European leader caught collaborating with the Kremlin at the expense of Europe’s security.
That will forever be the legacy of Trump and Vance in Europe. We will not forget.
The worldwide reputation of the US has been badly damaged. But the success of Artemis II reminds us there’s another America, clever, bold, open to the world, which we love and admire.
MAGA calls Europe freeloaders. Here’s what they’re not telling you.
1. Ramstein Air Base, the most important US military hub outside America, is built on German land provided rent-free, with Germany contributing hundreds of millions to its upkeep. The US couldn’t replace it anywhere in the world.
2. Every US military operation in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia flows through Ramstein. Lose it and US power projection in the Eastern Hemisphere is crippled.
3. The UK provides and maintains RAF Lakenheath used almost entirely by the US Air Force. Italy provides Aviano. Greece provides Souda Bay. Turkey provides Incirlik. European land. European infrastructure. American operations.
4. The US Sixth Fleet depends entirely on European ports for fuel and supplies. Souda Bay, Naples, 11 Greek ports. Without them the Sixth Fleet cannot operate in the Mediterranean or project power into the Middle East.
5. The majority of NATO’s intelligence and surveillance capacity is hosted on European soil and fed directly to the CIA, NSA and Pentagon.
6. Early warning radar at Fylingdales, UK. Missile tracking in Greenland. Norwegian monitoring stations near Russia. All dependent on European goodwill.
7. It would cost America MORE to bring the troops home than keep them here. European hosts subsidise roughly a third of all basing costs.
8. Europe is America’s largest arms customer. Stop buying American and part of their defence industry goes bankrupt.
9. The bases aren’t charity. They’re America using European soil, European money and European goodwill to project power across the world.
10. We’re not the freeloaders.
The White House wonders why Europe won’t rally behind America in Iran. Maybe start by asking why your Vice President is flying to Budapest to have a warm chat with Viktor Orban, the man running a Russian influence operation from inside NATO’s borders.
While Europe has been bleeding money and weapons to stop Russian aggression, Hungary has been blocking NATO decisions, sheltering Russian intelligence, and doing Moscow’s diplomatic dirty work at every turn. Orban isn’t America’s friend. He’s Putin’s man in Brussels.
And JD Vance calls him a “good friend.”
Europe is supposed to line up behind a war that had no plan for day two, no strategy for the Strait of Hormuz, and no consultation with allies beyond Israel. A war that has already sent oil past $100 a barrel and left one of America’s most powerful warships reportedly retreating toward the Indian Ocean.
You don’t get to lecture Europe about loyalty while embracing the man working to destroy the alliance from within, and then demand backup for a war you started without asking anyone.
Gandalv / @Microinteracti1
No serious nation in the history of warfare has spent fourteen months insulting its allies, siding with their common enemy, and then knocked on their door expecting them to rescue a catastrophe of its own making.
You abused the UK. Threatened Canada. Tried to grab Greenland. Called the EU an adversary. Praised Putin. Hosted Kremlin officials in the Capitol. Abandoned Ukraine. And did all of it loudly, proudly, and on camera.
And now you are surprised that nobody is returning your calls.
You want European boots on the ground? Start by explaining why America is more aligned with Moscow than with Brussels.
Take your time. We will wait.
Gandalv / @Microinteracti1
Starmer is facing the wrath of the right wing press and gammon central by seeking closer ties with the EU. I say go even closer. Rejoin. The noise and abuse will be the same. But the benefits to all will be huge.
The country is overwhelmingly on the side of rejoin. Go for it!
A sitting US president just publicly said he has a better relationship with Russia, a nuclear-armed adversary, than with the 31 democratic allies who built the post-World War II security order alongside America.
Trump praising his relationship with the country holding 6,000 nuclear warheads, while threatening to exit the alliance that has kept nuclear deterrence stable for 75 years, is not just a diplomatic controversy. It is a fundamental restructuring of global security, happening in real time, in the middle of an active war.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio separately told Fox News that after the Iran conflict concludes, the US will have to "re-examine the value of NATO" for America.
Europe's refusal to join the Iran war is clearly the breaking point. Spain closed its airspace to US planes involved in the Iran war, Germany's president called the strikes a "dangerous mistake" in violation of international law, and France said it "cannot approve" of the strikes because they were carried out outside the framework of international law.
(source: AI Web)