In the second, a cult grabs hold of the person and isolates them from their families and loved ones so they can brainfuck them. And, I suspect this has happened to the UK. England doesn't want to be a land for the English, because to do so would make them racist. They have strength in their diversity. Blah blah blah. And the English can't be allowed to talk with anyone else or they might realize how fucked-in-the-head all that nonsense is. They are under the spell of a cult, not as individuals, but collectively. And that cult won't be done with them until it's taken everything from them and coerced them to sign a "billion year contract". And to top it off, you're blaming it on them.
Venezuela showed everyone what happens when you're a toothless country. USA shows up at your door uninvited, fucks your shit up, takes your oil and kidnaps your president for good measure, just to tack on some extra humiliation.
Don't get me wrong, Maduro deserved an even worse fate than what he got. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. It's still a cautionary tale for nations worldwide. It can happen to you. China continues to erode the economic power of the USA. They could very well discover one day that their military might is all they have left. Who's to say they won't suddenly decide to capitalize on their advantage before it evaporates?
Is there a nuke authority that I did not know about who decides who should and should not have nukes?
Which country do you believe could possibly qualify for such an impossible task?
The UK has the 6th highest GDP in the world. Pretty high bar if that make you economically irrelevant.
A quick comparison with [1] (using 1 GBP ~ 1.30 USD) shows that London would rank #8 in Europe (between Denmark and Norway), while the rest of the UK would come in somewhere around #25, between Spain and Italy.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1168072/uk-gdp-per-head-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Eu...
Despite its problems, the UK is still a sixth largest economy, a cultural powerhouse (how many Hollywood actors are British?), with a lot of soft power, a capable and currently renewed nuclear arsenal (Astraea and Dreadnought are on track), a globe-spanning network of alliances (from AUKUS to Japan deploying to the UK first time in their history to being one of the closest and most unwavering allies for Ukraine), and a constitutionally healthy and adaptive system of government (we just passed another constitutional change and it's not a big deal, we can just do that).
Frankly, this meme stinks of projection. Going from a shining city on a hill to a place where public executions by state backed paramilitaries are just another partisan talking point, that starts Special Military Operations with no plan or goal, that threatens to annex territory of its allies in about a year is an achievement. I guess projecting this free fall on the UK makes living through it more bearable.
[0] https://www.madisontrust.com/information-center/visualizatio...
Why would you use the economy to defend the UK's status and then point to a bunch of non economy stuff to try to knock the US? The US is the largest and has been for awhile. Isn't that what mattered to you? Plus, pointing out that a bunch of prominent UK residents leave to participate in US industry hardly seems a point in favor of how well the UK is doing.
The "prominent UK residents" don't "leave" the UK. Benedict Cumberbatch lives in London, despite constantly starring in Hollywood films. It's an example of the UK culturally punching way above its weight in proportion to its population.
They're just lashing out, emperor has no clothes, their empire is collapsing, and those who are paying any attention at all, are fully aware of it. All they have left is to go on the internet and shit on Europe for daring to regulate their precious social media companies (that elsewhere they generally admit we would be better off without). They are desperately clutching onto this tech-company-based nationalism. It's absolutely pathetic.
An example in microcosm: a local village suffered road flooding due to failed maintenance of water pipes. Our rent-seeking privatized water company effected the minimum repair required by regulation.
The next section of old pipe burst almost immediately, flooding the road further for most of January, utterly destroying the surface, through the road base in many places. Even at a crawl it's difficult to avoid tyre damage.
Over a month later the water repairs were effected. Then shortly after some local roadwork notification signs were put up.
Those expecting repairs to the moonscaped road were disappointed: instead the relentless bureaucracy of British local government installed traffic calming measures on top of the broken road, as the work had already been booked and could not be stopped by any means as even basic roadworks lack any degree of dynamism in their execution.
All this still needs to be made right. These small scale failures will compound and compound until the entire state is drowned in the consequence of its incompetence.
But the rant is entirely counterfactual. Britain is a very rich country with beautiful and recovering nature, a healthy and educated population, one of the more capable armies in Europe, a functioning deterrent, and a relatively healthy political system. We just got two new parties becoming credible threats to the "main" two (regardless of the parties' views, the political competition itself is a much healthier situation than the American duopoly)! We just abolished hereditary peers, which is a constitutional change (and it can just be done)! Below the everyday media noise, we're doing alright as a democracy.
Your example only compares against the UK past.
It has zero relevancy because it says nothing about relative change against other countries.
Anecdotally for the USA, I went to New Orleans last year, and I was stunned at the rotting infrastructure. Coming from New Zealand, the USA seems to be trying to copy the trajectory of Argentina.
Then again, I see serious problems in my hometown (e.g. sewage treatment plant) and country (e.g. big problems with rail, ferry, air, electricity, 3 waters). Apart from the societal issues that it seems all countries are facing.
Texas, California (the richest state lmao), Puerto Rico, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi etc
Allow them to have nukes, who are you lol
[0] Yes, the UK can fire them without US approval, but the actual hardware is maintained and supported by the USA, and they have to be shipped to the USA regularly for maintenance. If the USA decided that the UK should not have nukes, there's not a lot the UK could do about it, the Trident system would have to be scrapped entirely and replaced with some completely different system. Which the UK doesn't really have the capability to do and it would cost a fortune to acquire that capability.
The UK and France have long had a project 'on the shelf' to substitute the missiles with the French M51 ballistic missiles.
They don't want to do it, they'll do it if they have to.
So yes, if the US withdrew support then the existing nuclear program would be pretty fucked for a while, but the US couldn't unilaterally de-nuclearise the UK.
The US.
Who else on the planet would have the effective power to possibly even think about who should and shouldn't have them, while plausibly being able to do anything about it?
We can't give Ukraine their nukes back because they were decommissioned (and they were rotting at the time), but there'd be no nation more deserving.
Corollary: no individual nation is able to shoulder such responsibilities.
I really hope this wasn't posted by an American....
