Eight democracies. One message to Beijing.
Australia, France, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, Poland, South Korea and the UK issued a joint statement on September 22 opposing any unilateral change to the Taiwan Strait status quo. It came out of a meeting on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, where officials called today's security environment more volatile than a year ago.
Their language was direct: "We encourage dialogue and oppose any unilateral attempts to change the status quo across the Taiwan Strait."
The same day, the US, Japan and South Korea issued a separate statement making the same point, and also backing Taiwan's participation in international organizations.
Taiwan's foreign ministry welcomed the statement and said it would keep building self-defense and deepen ties with democratic partners.
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LATEST: ⚡ Revolut has begun rolling out its first stablecoin, euro-pegged EURR, to selected customers in Denmark, Poland and Portugal, with a broader EEA rollout planned later this year.
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“But the Nazis weren’t socialists because they crushed labor unions!”
It wasn’t until 1980 that the first independent union was legalized in the Soviet bloc. “Solidarity” in Poland reached 10 million members in a year which was absolutely terrible for the commies.
So in 1981, the Communist Party declared martial law. They sent their tanks into the streets, shot protesting miners, and jailed tens of thousands just to keep their grip on Poland.
Jaruzelski cut the phones, sealed the borders, banned the union, and imprisoned the their leader Lech Wałęsa for 11 months. 3 days after that, riot police stormed the Wujek mine and killed 9 strikers who refused to accept the crackdown.
Internments, censorship, and surveillance continued for years afterward.
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🚨🇵🇱SHOCKING: Poland have just sworn in
their new President.
He believes in National Sovereignty.
He believes in Protecting Borders.
He promotes Family Values.
He is unashamedly Pro-Christian.
The Polish people are celebrating they won't become like the UK. 🇬🇧
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POLAND!!! Loves some
@ciara
I see you my love! 🎶🎤🎵 #
YES#
Humalike x StrefaRP
We gave every NPC in Poland's biggest GTA roleplay server a voice and humanlike behavior.
Tonight, the city plays back.
Voltaire – the fake antidote to Rousseau
He is the most entertaining man of the eighteenth century and the most seductive trap in Western intellectual history. He seems like the cure for Rousseau. He is the other half of the disease.
1. Where Rousseau is emotional, Voltaire is rational. Where Rousseau weeps over the noble savage, Voltaire mocks. He is the master of devastating wit, precise irony, surgical ridicule. Candide dismantles every naive optimism in ninety pages with the efficiency of a guillotine – which is fitting, since the guillotine is partly what his work made possible.
2. His great weapon is mockery. Écrasez l’infâme – crush the infamous, meaning the Church, tradition, inherited authority. He crushed it. With wit, elegance, and devastating precision. He was right that the Church was corrupt, that the aristocracy was parasitic, that the old order was indefensible in many of its particulars. Being right about what to demolish is not the same as knowing what to build.
3. Voltaire is the demolition crew without an architecture firm. He tears down, magnificently. He offers no replacement – only rubble, and the advice to cultivate your garden. Private. Disengaged. The conclusion of Candide: after every horror, every injustice, every system failure – grow vegetables. This is not wisdom. This is elegant surrender dressed as philosophy.
4. His irony is a solvent. It dissolves corruption, yes – but it dissolves everything, including the things worth keeping. A civilization marinated in Voltairean irony learns to mock every claim to authority, every appeal to tradition, every invocation of duty. This feels like freedom. It is actually vulnerability – a society that has learned to be ironic about everything is defenseless against the person who believes something earnestly enough to act on it. Robespierre was not ironic. He was a true believer. He won.
5. Rousseau gave the revolutionary the emotional fuel: the pure victim, the corrupt oppressor, the righteous rage of nature against civilization. Voltaire provided the intellectual solvent: he dissolved the legitimacy of every institution that might have contained that rage. Together they cleared the ground completely. Robespierre arrived and found no Church, no tradition, no inherited authority with enough credibility to resist him. He simply moved into the vacuum and filled it with the General Will and the guillotine.
6. And when he wasn’t playing "champion of liberty", he was on the payroll of kings, literally. He spent years at Frederick the Great’s court and corresponded adoringly with Catherine the Great, flattering both in print as enlightened monarchs of the age. While he was writing these letters, Frederick and Catherine were carving up Poland – dismembering a European nation, erasing it from the map and subjugating an entire people in one of the great crimes of the eighteenth century. Voltaire knew. He didn’t care. Écrasez l’infâme — crush the infamous — unless the infamous is paying well and lives in a palace in Berlin or St. Petersburg.
7. The contemporary Voltaire is everywhere: the late night host who dismantles everything with devastating wit and proposes nothing. The enlightened cynic who sees through every institution, trusts nothing, builds nothing, and considers this sophistication – while cashing checks from the very system he mocks. The fake antidote doesn’t kill you. It leaves you without defenses when the real disease arrives. Rousseau is the fire. Voltaire is the man who dismantled your fireplace and called it progress – and then went to warm himself at the tsar’s.
Together they produced the French Revolution, with the Terror, and the template for every ideological catastrophe that followed. The most dangerous intellectual partnership in Western history wasn’t a conspiracy. It was two men who despised each other and destroyed the same thing from opposite ends, leaving the ground perfectly prepared for those who came after them with a plan.
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Alex Karp is right. There is a deep nihilism among European elites to an extent European citizens would find shocking.
The shopkeeper, the farmer, and the car mechanic think there will be an England or a Poland in 2100; the university professor, journalist, and prime minister does not.
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Age of each of these countries:
USA: 250 years
Netherlands: 445 years
Sweden: 503 years
Spain: 547 years
Monaco: 729 years
Switzerland: 735 years
Thailand: 788 years
Mongolia: 820 years
Portugal: 883 years
Hungary: 1,026 years
Poland: 1,060 years
Denmark: 1,061 years
England: 1,099 years
Norway: 1,154 years
Russia: 1,164 years
France: 1,183 years
Morocco: 1,238 years
Bulgaria: 1,345 years
China: 2,246 years
Iran: 2,575 years
Japan: 2,685 years
Ethiopia: 3,000 years
Egypt: 5,125 years
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This is not the truth. It is easy to verify the facts.
As of today, the so-called “affected users” are limited to the jurisdictions where Binance has chosen to implement these restrictions: Italy, Spain, France, Poland, Belgium, and Sweden.
Users in the rest of the EEA can still sign up, deposit, and trade.
Binance appears to have chosen to ignore ESMA’s public statements and prioritize its business interests over regulatory compliance. This raises an important question about the consistent application of MiCA across the EEA and how cross-border compliance expectations should be enforced.
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