moderatecentrist

Reform UK is only supported by about a third of the electorate at the moment. More than any other single party, but if there was an election for a British head of state, and that election ended up being a choice between Farage and one other person, Farage could very well lose.

Also you said in another post that "President Farage could remove elections". I think that if we have an elected head of state then they should only have similar powers to what the King has now. Parliament should still be sovereign.

I think one of the best aspects of the UK is political freedom. Perhaps I am a subject of the King (I don't know if that's legally true but it might be), but in any case, I can still say that I hope the UK will get rid of the monarchy and replace it with a democratically elected head of state.

Fair enough, but according to a couple of sites that Wikipedia refers to, Churchill originally didn't know that the outward facing gesture was rude until he was told about it. If true then I guess his gesture was intended to mean "here is a V for victory" instead of "fuck off you lot" or "fuck the Germans".

It depends on the context doesn't it. Lots of people will fly the England flag or wear an England shirt during a football tournament, and all they mean by that is "I support the England team" without a further political meaning. But the meaning of the current flag-flying from lamp posts seems to essentially be "we don't want immigrants in the UK" which can make the flags intimidating (which is probably the exact intention).

Here's another example of context changing meaning. Churchill used to give a two-fingered salute (see picture below), and his intended meaning of that salute was that it was a "V" for "victory" in WW2. But of course these days, that same outwards two-fingered salute means "fuck off". Context changes the meaning.

Since we're in a thread about Farage I feel obliged to post this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uovt1sC3rtM

This reminds me of the hubbub surrounding Rishi Sunak's Englishness and David Lammy's Englishness.

Maybe anyone who lives or has lived in England could reasonably call themselves English. Just like if you live or have lived in Liverpool then you could call yourself a Liverpudlian, regardless of your ethnicity or anything else.

You might be right about short-sightedness. I read this article a couple days ago which talks about short-sighted cuts to the F-35 programme, which then add costs in the long run. For example:

A cost-saving move to delay by six years building infrastructure for the naval squadron that operates the F-35 jets means the cost for that construction will almost treble to £154m from £56m.

A lot of the training received in the reeducation centers was vocational training that modernized the labor force of Uyghurs in Xinjiang enabling them to get better jobs than they used to have

If the USA forcibly put Muslims into camps and tried to justify it by saying "we're giving them vocational training to modernise the labour force and enable these Muslims to get better jobs", would that be okay? Anyway we're obviously not going to agree on this topic so maybe there is no point in pursuing it further.

I think it's credible that China has been detaining Uyghurs en masse and I think it's credible that many rapes have taken place. Maybe we will just have different views.

Interesting, I googled for reports of Arab emissaries going to Xinjiang and I found this from Time magazine, published in 2022:

Arab states are not only lending rhetorical support to China, they are also actively assisting Beijing in its global campaign of abuse and reprisals against Uighurs. At least six governments in the Arab world—Egypt, Morocco, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and the UAE—have detained or extradited Uighurs at China’s behest. According to our dataset at the Oxus Society for Central Asian Affairs, around 292 Uighurs have been detained or deported from Arab states at China’s behest since 2002.

Also you mention "multiple western* countries" as if western countries are automatically wrong. I don't think that's true. I think there are certainly biased media outlets in the West, but I think there are genuine and reliable media outlets too. I think the BBC is reliable. If someone proves their reporting to be plain wrong then I will re-evaluate them, but I haven't yet seen that happen.

I think the testimonies of rape are credible and major news organisations from multiple countries clearly think that leaked police files from Xinjiang are credible. I'm not aware of similar accusations regarding American prisons concerning black inmates.

Anyway, I expect you just won't believe anything the BBC says (which I just linked to). I think the BBC are credible and reliable, but if you don't think that, okay. I can't change your mind of course. We will just have different views.

are there any ONGOING acts of mass mistreatment of Uyghur in Xinjiang?

I don't know. But even if the detention camps have closed (whether they have, I don't know), the treatment of Uyghurs for a while still seems to have been bad. I'm not trying to say "China is worse than the West" or anything like that. I just think that massive internment camps for ethnic minorities, where rape allegedly happens, don't seem like a great thing - whether they appear in China, the USA, or anywhere else.

there was a series of terrorist attacks in China in 2013-2014 onwards, coming from Islamist radicals linked to Al-Qaida and ISIS. The government responded later with a big reeducation program in the province of Xinjiang

If the US had done the same thing in their country after 9/11, I bet you would have criticised it.