Absolutely nobody is checking the god damn patents for the name of either variety of chip
That said, in British English, chips and fries are different things. McDonald's don't sell chips. Those are the thick-cut ones. Fries are the skinny ones.
It makes a fair bit of sense for someome that already speaks English to want to claim asylum in an English-speaking country, and a lot of people already speak at least some English. They've got a far better chance of being able to make a life for themselves if they can already converse with everyone.
Gazprom went from a profit of 1.2 trillion roubles in 2022 to a loss of 630 billion in 2023, so I'd say that the current effots are already paying off too. If the EU can do more, fantastic
I will give you a heads up that if you buy vinegar powder (acetic acid, basically) in an attempt to make your own, be very careful. I made salt & vinegar popcorn once, but the seasoning was too loose on the surface of the popcorn and if i breathed in at all while eating I got a hefty dose of burning lungs
Not quite candy but I think it's close enough to count here: Co-op's own brand salt & vinegar kettle crisps. They're so vinegary it hurts. It's wonderful.
Fair enough. The whip is a reasonable point to bring up, though I would suggest that if it bothered him that much he wouldn't have stayed in the party for ten years. After all, he had switched parties beforehand. I get where you're coming from though.
I'm not sure that makes him not right wing, surely that just means he wasn't the kind of right wing that succeeded in the political landscape of the UK in the past 20ish years? His voting record is generally in favour of less regulation (outside of a few issues), lower taxes, military intervention, isolation from the EU. He's pro-environmentalist, but that hasn't always been an exclusively left-wing thing. Similarly, anarchists and Marxist-Leninists are both left wing, even if they wouldn't necessarily get along well in a single political party together
I will have to preface this with the fact that I have not read any of his books, but former British politician Rory Stewart is one of the people that comes to my mind when reading your description. I don't think that he comes to the right policy positions, of course, but whenever I listen to him he does seem to at least have a degree of empathy for all people. He seems to at least generally see the problem even if I think that his solution wouldn't work. He has an effective way with words in interviews and his writing is generally very well reviewed too.
Using any of them in war is far too likely to lead to escalation. Someome on the receiving end of it doesn't necessarily know what they've been attacked with, and seeing that the other side is using chemical weapons will retaliate with their own more serious ones. Civilians are unlikely to bring their own nerve gas to protests, so this isn't a concern in civilian contexts.
Killing your enemy is usually necessary in war, but torturing them isn't. As such, using weapons that are only intended to cause pain is just wanton cruelty rather than simply a means to the ends of winning the war. Police theoretically don't want to be killing or permanently disabling people, so again this isn't applicable to civilian contexts.
They are wildly uncontrollable. The carveouts for civilian use of tear gas and the like in the Geneva conventions require them to disperse quickly because of this.
It's not unfounded. To be clear I don't think that police should be allowed to use such weapons, but there are reasons that it's considered more serious in warfare.
To a degree, but recent years have definitely shown the flaws of the EU model as it currently is. I do have some faith that the EU can and will reform itself to overcome those problems, as it is still a very young entity in the grand scheme of things and is generally quite effective legislatively. Things like Brexit and Hungary's obstructionism show that it is currently far too easy for governments within the EU to scapegoat it for local problems, and the Syrian migrant crisis really tested the unity of it.
It may well be that you loving spicy food is protecting you. I imagine the exit hole can develop a tolerance in just the same way that the entrance hole can
It's worth remembering that WW2 was an existential threat to the Soviet Union and most of the people living in it. This war isn't. See how the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan turned out.
And, of course, Ukraine was also part of the Soviet Union. Russians weren't the only ones fighting the Nazis on the Eastern Front
Fascinating how Finland has one of the best literacy scores and worst behaviour scores. Apparently Finns understand how to be financially responsible and simply do not care for it
Absolutely nobody is checking the god damn patents for the name of either variety of chip
That said, in British English, chips and fries are different things. McDonald's don't sell chips. Those are the thick-cut ones. Fries are the skinny ones.