If Trump sent Troops to Liverpool. They will have no chance, the Liverpool people, especially the mums will run them out into Irish sea.
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How dare you criticise our paramilitary gestapo force for shooting innocent people in our streets!
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And now⌠immigration authorities at airports have been authorised by Us govt to give the name of passenger lists to ICE.
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Okay, thanks for your thoughts on the issue.
People nowadays have a lot of trouble accepting that two things can be true concurrently.
Putin is a fascist dictator (itâs not hyperbole, look up the dictionary definition).
Trump is a potential fascist dictator (not quite there yet, opposition has not been completely crushed, but well on the way).
The US is clearly an imperialist superpower and so is Russia. Both of them will do whatever it takes to strengthen their power wherever and whenever they need to.
I donât want to live under Trumpism or Putinism, and I doubt anyone on here does.
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Gulf of Mexico â Gulf of America
Greenland â Great Donald Island or Freedom Island or Melania Island or Baron Island?
Itâs almost funny, even if it is weak humour, but there we are.
There was an interesting time line that Bill Gates gave in terms of a turn around - 5 years. For him it is 5 years to turn this around or another Dark Age.
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Thinking this morning of the damage that will actually be done to the US as things progress. Tariffs, public covering the host of Venezuela, and his move away from renewable energy combined with the oil market. AI data centres will feed into that. What I dont know is how much fat exists, in the US economy that can absorb that combined with patience or apathy in the US public.
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Western officials did discuss and float assurances in early 1990 about NATO not moving eastward, but only in the context of German reunification (specifically that NATO forces would not extend into East Germany) Thatâs where the famous ânot one inch eastwardâ line comes from.
There is no evidence of a formal Soviet request, no agreed promise covering all of Eastern Europe, and no promise banning NATO enlargement more generally.
What does exist are legal documents that support this:
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The 1990 treaty limiting NATO deployment in eastern Germany
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The 1997 NATO Russia Founding Act, which explicitly accepted NATO enlargement and the right of states to choose their alliances
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Russia also signed the Budapest Memorandum and reaffirmed Helsinki principles, recognising borders and independent security policy (ie countries/Ukraine are free to join NATO)
And even if you accept the Russian version (which is contradicted by what they later signed), it relies on an informal understanding with a country that no longer exists. Thatâs like complaining the EU didnât build the UK a bridge it casually mentioned pre-Brexit.
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Actually itâs also worth mentioning the Russian narrative does not actually make sense for the time period.
Itâs a huge stretch to say, they had a foresight that the USSR would break up and those newly independent countries would join NATO. Makes no sense for it to refer to Sweden or Finland.
The only context it could make sense was east Germany
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We can also just take it from the man himself as late as 2005.
Vladimir Putin :â I think that NATO already has influence in many of our partners, including in Ukraine and Georgia. This does not irritate us. Russia is itself in the process of developing its relations with NATO and we have established the Russia-NATO Council within which we work together and are doing so quite successfully.
If NATO wants to expand to take in these countries as members, that, of course, is another question. If you are interested in my view on that question, I am ready to answer.
We think that simple expansion of NATO is a technical process that does not bring greater security to the world. There are modern threats we are all aware of â threats such as terrorism and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. I do not really understand exactly how a purely technical move such as the expansion of NATO to take in our Baltic neighbours, can bring greater security. If other former Soviet republics want to join NATO, our attitude will remain the same.
But I want to stress that we will respect their choice because it is their sovereign right to decide their own defence policy and this will not worsen relations between our countries. As I said, we are ourselves building up our relations with NATO. But certain problems of a technical nature could arise.
To give you an example, we work closely and have a great amount of military-technical cooperation with Ukraine. This is understandable because our defence industries worked, until recently, as part of a single country. We hope that our relations with NATO will continue to develop and that we will be able to establish a greater degree of trust. For the moment, however, our relations with NATO are at a level that would not make it possible for us to maintain certain defence production activities and keep certain sensitive technologies in a NATO country, in Ukraine, for example, should it join this organisation. This would require us to find additional state resources to organise the departure of these technologies and production activities to Russian territory. Our colleagues at home would be delighted by this, of course, but for the state it would be an additional burden to carry. This would also mean possible problems for Ukraine, as it could entail the complete winding up of certain production facilitiesâ activities and the end of work in some scientific areas. We donât know yet, maybe this would not happen. But we have to talk about all these issues in good time, talk with each other frankly, honestly and openly. That is what we are doing. â
(You can find this interview on the Kremlin archives - havenât put up the link, because itâs not a safe link, ironically)
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Facts noted here can be easily checked onlineâŚ
Former law enforcement officer, Kramer Hammy:
"It is clear that the ignorance of US citizens of federal laws and law enforcement duties, procedures, and limits of authority is getting to the point where it is deadly. I spent probably 3 hours watching and re-watching, and finding every single video and angle I could of the situation in Minnesota yesterday and came to one immovable conclusion based off of what I saw, and what I know from a professional standpoint. This is long, but please at least give it a read.
"As a former officer, let me make something clear: ICE agents ARE NOT police officers, deputy sheriffs, or troopers. They are not local/state law enforcement. They are not federal criminal law enforcement. They have an INCREDIBLY limited scope of authority, and that scope of authority exists in detaining and arresting with probable cause and/or SIGNED WARRANTS those investigated and suspected of being in the US illegally.
"This ENTIRE situation in Minnesota was outside of the scope of legal authority from the get go. None of it was done within the scope of authority of ICE. Every single behavior those agents made was procedurally incorrect, done without proper authority, and was based off of intimidation and the assumption that people do not understand the law and their rights in regards to interactions with ICE.
"On no planet should an officer, agent, or any human being ever step in front of a car in drive that is actively trying to leave, and use their body as a shield to prevent a person from LEGALLY LEAVING a situation in which they are not legally being detained. It takes maybe a week into any kind of actual law enforcement training to understand that in NO CIRCUMSTANCES do you ever place yourself in front of a vehicle in drive. That agent had every single opportunity to simply take two steps to the right and not be standing directly in front of a vehicle attempting to conduct their legal right to drive away.
"You can see the wheels are turned, [Renee] backed up and turned them to the right, moved forward a bit to leave, couldnât because an agent was standing in front of her, and continued to try to leave by TURNING HER WHEELS TO THE RIGHT and moving forward. He continually chose to stand there and not allow her to legally leave as she had every single right to do.
The officer pulling on her door and banging on her window and swearing at her had ZERO authority to order her out of her vehicle or attempt to make entry into her vehicle. None. A single day of actual training and regard to legal scope of authority and the LAW wouldâve prevented that from happening.
"You now have a frightened citizen being blockaded by immigration agents, with another person in her vehicle, who had zero obligation to follow legally invalid orders from that agent, being blocked in and having a fully grown, masked man attempting to make entry into her car. If this were reversed, every single person would immediately feel she had every reasonable expectation to fear for her safety. It doesnât matter if she knew it was ICE because the agents werenât even acting in their scope of authority anyway.
"Whether or not she made the right decision by very CLEARLY, based off of how hard her wheels were turned and how low and to the driver corner windshield that shot was fired, trying to drive to the left of that agent, is IRRELEVANT in the picture as a whole.
None of this would have happened if those agents had done even one single thing correctly. Not just correctly, but within their legal scope of authority. Every single moment of that interaction was escalated by untrained, unprofessional, procedurally inept âagentsâ who not only had zero control of themselves but everything around them. And not because they are helpless, but because their actions that did not fall under their scope of power CAUSED this. Their tempers, lack of training, and knowledge that they can get away with violating their own scope of authority caused this.
âI will always be the first to defend law enforcement when lethal force very clearly is required. But this was not even remotely the case, and as an actual TRAINED professional in that field with experience and understanding of both the law and procedures, there is no justification for this- and it would benefit EVERYONE to actually read up on the laws, scope of authority, and use a single shred of common sense to see that this situation was started, escalated, and caused these events to transpire by the ICE agents involved. I have zero respect for those in power who are ignorant to their authority and abuse it at the cost of lives around them.â
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What about the argument that the assurances you are referring to donât actually exist?
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The Russia Founding Act was not a treaty though. It was a agreement on cooperation that founded the Permanent Joint Council and designed to ensure peace in Europe. Part of the PJC agreement was explicitly that Nato would not place nuclear weapons or troop build-ups in new member states. That didnât happen. The confusion over the pledge stems from the agreement that states should be in charge of their own armed forces and be allowed to strike treaties with other nations. Nato says this gives them permission to join Nato while Russia says it means the opposite. So, yes it was an informal arrangement that should have been far more explicit.
The more you write about this, the more you look like a Russian bot/lunatic who has drunk all the coolaid.
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Your assessment is on the money. This agent (not a cop) broke every law covering law enforcement use of firearms on people in vehicles. He was out of control and having a woman disobey an order bruised his ego to the point that he decided her life deserved to be ended. He should be charged with murder by the FBI and if that doesnât happen then America has a bigger problem than it imagines.
We learn today from agent Rossâs father that he is a âcommitted, conservative Christian, an excellent husband and fatherâ. We donât know what his wife thinks because presumably she hasnât been able to ask his permission to speak.
Or maybe you have drunk all the Kool-Aid? Look I just get fed up listening to a one-sided arguments when the issue is more complex and Russian voices should be heard. Not that you have to believe them but at least have the choice. Iâm not a Putin fan by any means because I canât abide the lot of them. Trump, Starmer, Merz, Macron and Putin are all the same level of power-crazed lunatics in hock to corporate elites. I look at ALL the evidence and in the hope that everyone can see the mendacity they demonstrate.
Incidentally, this whole discussion grew out of one posters assertion that Putin, rather than Trump was the primary threat to global security. I had to challenge that.
That says it all. Starmer, Merz and Macron are not equatable with Trump and Putin. You kool aid crazies like to think this is âbalanceâ and âthey are all the sameâ and âthe flat earth antivaxers deserve their opinions to be given equal airingâ are all valid arguments. In truth you are just wrong and ignorant to boot if you donât realise this.
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All three of your angels are complicit in an ongoing genocide in Gaza though, right? And Starmer refuses to criticise Trump over Venezuela or anything for that matter. But why the insults and personal abuse. Is that how you argue your beliefs -Trump style? Try to calm down.
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Where are these nuclear weapons in new member states? Even the training facilities are still in the far west of Germany.
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