moderatecentrist
@moderatecentrist@feddit.uk
- Comment on Far-right activist Tommy Robinson says "Russia is not the enemy of Britain" as he travels to Moscow to meet Elon Musk’s father 1 week ago:
Fair enough. I agree with the point you said before about wanting an outcome where Ukrainians and Russians can live peacefully. But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is of course preventing that at the moment. I hope Russia withdraws their invasion of Ukraine as soon as possible but I guess that’s not likely to happen soon.
- Comment on Far-right activist Tommy Robinson says "Russia is not the enemy of Britain" as he travels to Moscow to meet Elon Musk’s father 1 week ago:
I think Russia is a pretty oppressive nation.
- Here’s an article about a Russian who publicly opposed the invasion of Ukraine, leading to him getting a sentence of 25 years in prison.
- Here’s an article about Alexei Navalny, an opposition politician, getting a Russian intelligence officer to admit that the FSB (Russian government agency) poisoned Navalny. Why is the Russian state poisoning opposition politicians?
- Comment on Far-right activist Tommy Robinson says "Russia is not the enemy of Britain" as he travels to Moscow to meet Elon Musk’s father 1 week ago:
ideally I would want for Ukrainans and Russians to live peacefully and in harmony with one another, like they mostly did under the USSR
What if Ukrainians don’t want to live under the boot of Moscow though?
- Comment on World Cup: Can I support England after far-right claimed the flag? 1 week ago:
Perhaps someone who supports the England football team, but who isn’t far-right, could get a flag made with a design like this:
- Comment on [Video] Hasan Piker gets LBC journalist Lewis Goodall to admit he values Israeli lives a thousand times more than Palestinian lives 1 week ago:
Thanks for that. I did use a VPN to watch the Imgur video but thanks anyway. It is annoying that Imgur is blocked for the UK.
- Comment on [Video] Hasan Piker gets LBC journalist Lewis Goodall to admit he values Israeli lives a thousand times more than Palestinian lives 1 week ago:
Imgur blocks itself from the UK, so Brits like me can’t see the video.
I assume the reason for Imgur blocking itself is the relatively recent law saying that websites have to verify people’s ages as being above 18 in order for such people to view adult content. I guess Imgur didn’t want to implement age verification for British users, so they decided to make all their content unavailable to UK visitors.
- Comment on The media smear campaign against Zack Polanski is working wonders 5 weeks ago:
You think Russia wants peace? Russia has been invading Ukraine since 2014. They launched a war against their neighbour so they could grab its land and subjugate its people. It’s imperialism, and who knows when Russia will decide to stop.
Actually yes there are some people in Russia who want peace, and who protested against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Such protests in Russia get you arrested though.
- Comment on The media smear campaign against Zack Polanski is working wonders 1 month ago:
I think the sad reality is that countries without nuclear weapons are at the mercy of nations with nuclear weapons. What would be gained if the UK and France, for example, were to get rid of their nukes? There’s absolutely no chance that the US/Russia/China will get rid of theirs. So then those countries would have a massive amount of leverage over Europe.
kill millions at the push of a button
I definitely hope nukes are not used. But the threat of vast destruction might be the only threat that the world’s authoritarian leaders are afraid of. If those leaders are afraid of nothing then they could launch their own terrible weapons at civilians across the world.
- Comment on The media smear campaign against Zack Polanski is working wonders 1 month ago:
I think we can fire them without US approval. Sure it’s a problem that the UK is reliant on US missiles to deliver British nukes. France is in a better situation because they have French missiles for their nukes - they’re not dependent on foreign missiles.
Maybe the solution then is to develop British or European missiles and bombs for British nukes, rather than scrap Britain’s nukes altogether.
- Comment on The media smear campaign against Zack Polanski is working wonders 1 month ago:
I think I prefer the Lib Dems and Labour (when they can get their act together) to the Greens. One thing I dislike about the Greens is this policy:
I think the UK should keep its nukes for now, given that we are threatened by Russia. In the future we could be threatened by China and even the US.
- Comment on 2/10 people on Lemmy, is that you? 1 month ago:
Yeah I guess they see it as the plucky underdog of Russia taking on the decadent oppressive behemoth of the West. Invading Ukraine isn’t taking on the West though. It’s just Putin’s attempt to subjugate Ukrainians to the will of Moscow.
- Comment on 2/10 people on Lemmy, is that you? 1 month ago:
This reminds me of talking to tankies on Lemmy, which is probably a futile endeavour.
For example, they seem to think that Russia’s imperialist invasion of Ukraine is justified. They think that Russia murdering Ukrainians with missiles and drones is justified. I can tell them that these actions are wrong, but they won’t listen.
- Comment on Dominic Cummings’ "moonshot" agency awarded £52m to US tech firms 1 month ago:
My impression of the Tories and Reform is that they want the UK to forever be a lapdog of the US. Perhaps it would be better for the UK to reduce our dependence on the US and instead increase our ties with our European allies. A friendship between the UK and any European country - even Germany, the largest European economy - is more of a partnership of equals, which can obviously not be said about UK-US relations (I wouldn’t count Russia as the largest European economy because Russia is Eurasian).
- Comment on Migration minister fails UK citizenship test question 3 months ago:
Nice, my sense of Britishness remains intact
- Comment on Migration minister fails UK citizenship test question 3 months ago:
Brit here:
spoiler
1. Marmite 2. Guinness 3. Michael Sheen? First Welsh actor that comes to mind. I think Christian Bale was born in Wales but considers himself to be English. 4. Frankie Boyle if I remember correctly 5. Ant and Dec? I think they’re both married to women, I don’t know 6. Tea
- Comment on Migration minister fails UK citizenship test question 3 months ago:
I’m British born and bred and I got 88%. Some of those questions are interesting and definitely better questions than asking the height of the London Eye.
Maybe the UK citizenship test should try to select people who support important British principles (rule of law, democracy, religious freedom, legal equality of men and women, etc). But I suppose somebody could pretend to support those things for the purposes of passing a test, and after the test they might decide they don’t believe in democracy after all. Also I’m sure there are born and bred Brits who don’t believe in democracy.
- Comment on I was on social media before web browsers existed. I am Legion. 3 months ago:
I looked that up, looks interesting. Apparently it’s not available for us in the UK though because they say they don’t have the resources to comply with age verification, which is now a legal requirement for social media in the UK
- Comment on Telegraph sold for £575m as German buyer elbows out Daily Mail 3 months ago:
Gammons won’t like this
- Comment on I was on social media before web browsers existed. I am Legion. 3 months ago:
You wouldn’t be in my Top 8
I chuckled. I miss MySpace. Choosing a song for your profile was great. Facebook should add that feature to their profiles. So should Bluesky and Mastodon.
- Comment on Britain’s war hawks are very upset that Keir Starmer isn’t personally riding a bomb all the way to Tehran 3 months ago:
I think that the UK should try to act in accordance with international law, which it seems Sir Keir is trying to do.
The reality is that the UK is not the most powerful nation in the world. If we decide to disregard international law, then it encourages the big powers (US, China, Russia) to disregard international law in their dealings with us. Do we want those powers to treat the UK in illegal ways?
- Comment on Green Party wins Gorton and Denton by-election with Labour pushed into third by Reform 3 months ago:
Yes the same issue has brought about Conservative governments. In 2015 the Tories got only 36.8% of the vote but this gave them 50.8% of the seats.
I’d like score/rank voting based mixed member
I will admit that I don’t know the details of the different kinds of proportional voting. As long as a system would result in a House of Commons that more accurately and proportionately reflects voters, I think that would be a good thing
- Comment on Green Party wins Gorton and Denton by-election with Labour pushed into third by Reform 3 months ago:
I think the German system looks pretty good. Their voting system leads to a much more representative legislature. Another example when looking at proportional representation is the Netherlands, but their system seems to lead to lots of lengthy coalition negotiations and squabbling before they form a government.
Germany, for much of the last 20 years, has had a coalition government between the big centre-right and big centre-left blocs. E.g. in the 2005 election, 69.4% of voters backed either the Union or SPD, who together made up the subsequent coalition government. Compare that to the UK where we have a Labour government who, whether you like them or not, were only voted for by 33.7% of voters.
- Comment on Green Party wins Gorton and Denton by-election with Labour pushed into third by Reform 3 months ago:
Yes the voting systems of both the UK and US are broken because they’re unrepresentative. Hillary Clinton in 2016 got about 3 million more votes than Trump did. In many countries that would have made her the president. But the anti-democratic electoral college system in the US meant that Trump was made president instead.
- Comment on Green Party wins Gorton and Denton by-election with Labour pushed into third by Reform 3 months ago:
True. I think voters want to see politicians who embody values that voters like. The pitch of “vote for us just because we’re not quite as bad as the other guys”, without stating appealing values of your own, doesn’t really inspire anybody
- Comment on Green Party wins Gorton and Denton by-election with Labour pushed into third by Reform 3 months ago:
They hope to pay on “it is us, or Reform” which is party before country and could backfire and massively damage the country.
True. I don’t think it’s a popular message with the public. Clearly people in Gorton and Denton thought “actually we don’t have to vote for Labour as the only alternative to Reform; we can vote for the Greens instead”.
- Comment on Green Party wins Gorton and Denton by-election with Labour pushed into third by Reform 3 months ago:
What’s great about those numbers is Con+Reform is soooo far behind Lab+Lib+Greens.
Because of our crappy first-past-the-post system though, the most likely next government (if an election were held soon) would be a Reform government, or maybe a Reform/Conservative government.
Reform’s support in recent polls has only been around 24% - 30%. So around 70% of British voters don’t support Reform. Nonetheless, because Reform polls better than any other individual party, they could run the next government. Like how Labour in 2024 only got 34% of votes, but this gave them 63% of seats.
If the anti-Reform vote continues to be split between Labour/Greens/LibDems/SNP (and even Tories, since there will be Tory voters who don’t like Reform) then Farage will be the next prime minister. Surely the best counter to Reform would be a big tent centrist or centre-left party with wide appeal.
- Comment on Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office 3 months ago:
I wonder where he celebrates his birthdays. Maybe Pizza Express in Woking.
- Comment on Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office 3 months ago:
When I saw this news my reaction was to say “lol”
He’s a bit of a silly billy isn’t he
- Comment on A succulent meal 4 months ago:
Add some veg, and some butter for the bread, and it’s a good meal
- Comment on What Is 'Pathways' And Who Is 'Amelia?' The Controversial Memes About The Viral U.K. Anti-Immigration Goth Girl Explained 4 months ago:
It’s just right-wing keyboard warriors wishing they had an anti-immigration girlfriend who looks like that character
