I like to think that the ghost of some 15th century court vihuela player is watching over the raves with great approval

I don’t know about the 35th parallel thing either way, but I don’t think it matters here. The seaweed itself isn’t normally poisonous, it’s actually edible to humans and tastes pretty good. The issue here is what happens when it starts rotting in large quantities

Not being welcomed into an alliance or supranational union is not a sanction. Not being in them is the default state for a country.

At no point have I made the argument that the countries Russia has invaded and controlled want to keep Russia out of these organisations as a matter of moral principals. I explicitly said it was a matter of self interest. They are not telling Russia off, they are making themselves safe from Russia.

• That doesn’t mean that I said anything about colonialism being okay. Don’t put words in my mouth, and especially not those words

• The countries I mentioned were not, in general, colonial powers (there is an exception here for part of Latvia)

• It is still entirely rational behaviour for a colonial power to defend itself against colonisation. Even if they actually were colonial powers then seeking defence against Russia would be a perfectly sensible thing for them to do.

Huh, the line should have been open to the airport by then, it started operating in 2014 too. That said, if you were flying l;ate at night or very early in the morning then it might not have been an option, as there are no services between midnight and 6am or something like that. Also, I hope you enjoyed your time in Scotland!

It has! The core bulk of the system has been up and running since 2014. The construction was a bit of a disaster, but now that it’s actually going it seems to be a success. An estimated 12 million passenger journeys last year

Who said anything about colonialism and conquest not being bad? Countries seek to defend themselves. Russia has consistently been a threat to several EU and NATO states, therefore they seek defences against it

is it just a set of vague guidelines to keep the membership limited to whoever they like?

They don’t need guidelines to do that. Any member state can just say no

Scotland just handed out a whole bunch of grants for electric buses

Both the EU and NATO require unaminous approval of existing members to add new members. Both organisations contain several members that have been under Russian domination within living memory. Given Russia’s frequent aggression towards its neighbours in the post-Soviet period, why would the likes of the Baltic countries trust Russia to be a reliable ally?

Additionally, Russia just straight up does not meet the Copenhagen criteria to join the EU and doesn’t have any measure of the pre-accession integration that every other applicant does

The crucial difference this time would presumably be Polish agreement rather than the route

I’m gonna be honest, as a Brit I had just kind of assumed that we would come to Ireland’s defence if they wanted and needed it. As the article says, we’ve been doing aerial interceptions for them for about 70 years. We get to keep the UK safer if there’s not a relatively undefended area right next to us, and Ireland gets to be defended by a larger power that has already learned the hard way that it can no longer subjugate Ireland

If there was an effort to change them before, Orban would have vetoed it

National government debts are usually owed to a variety of domestic banks, private investors, and similar interests. I don’t know about China for sure, but I’ve never seen anything indicating that it’s different in this regard. Not much of it, as a proportion, is owed to foreign governments or investors. So far as I’m aware, the main unusual things about China’s government debt is that Chinese citizens have a high savings rate (meaning banks holding those savings have more to work with as creditors) and the provincial governments have quite a lot of debt (potentially almost as much as the central government when added up, though I don’t know where to get reliable numbers for this)

or alternatively they are just that rich

It’s this one. They do tax highly - not necessarily the highest, but up there - but they’re also ranked near the top of GDP per capita and labour productivity. Oil definitely does give Norway specifically an extra leg up, but the broader picture is similar across all of the Nordic countries (although I’m not so sure on the Faroe Islands, and Greenland is quite different)

Unfortunately that one is also blocked in the UK

That’s the same link as the post (which is indeed not available here in the UK)

I believe they’ve mostly come from Iran itself, with at least one being from Lebanon (so presumably Hezbollah, since the actual Lebanese military isn’t likely to have done it)

The British airbase. There have been a few different things fired its way now

No, they aren’t. We still produce oil, and whether or not to permit drilling to exploit known reserves has been an ongoing political issue for the last couple of years. At current rates of production we’ve got about 11 years of proven reserves and an estimate of another 20 or so unproven. If we were to bump production back up to our historic peak output in 1999, divide those numbers by 4.5 (so two and a half years proven - not long, but enough to set up a lot of solar)

Orban is against the recognition of Palestine even though Hungary technically officially recognises it and hasn’t withdrawn that recognition, and he’s also one of the loudest voices amongst Islamophobic and right-wing EU political leaders. Presumably Netanyahu figures that an ally like that within a bloc as big as the EU, which also has some more pro-Palestine voices who could potentially sway others, is worth the cost of Russia being in a better position. After all, while it is an ally of Iran, Russia’s attention is largely being kept elsewhere for now