An economy bloc that is on decline makes a trade deal with economies that have been in shitter for almost a hundred years. I mean I approve it. I love Brazilian and Paraguayan beef and Ron Zapata is quite drinkable. But that idea that it will bring economic might to the two regions enough to push the USA out has yet to be seen if it is realistic.
You have no idea what it's like to be American right now. The propaganda information war that's being waged in us is overwhelming and it appears to be working. The world needs to start preparing for a reality where the US can no longer be relied on for security or economic stability. For the sake of all of us, I hope that our European allies are taking serious steps to become more independent from US power and security.
I know there is a lot of good and brave people in the US - I lived there for a long time and call many of your compatriots good friends.
We're trying our best over here, but y'all can't give up at home either. I know it sucks and it's hard, but don't give into the temptation to just tune out. If you don't like what is happening with your country, do your best to change it - don't wait for others to do it for you!
We are trying. Please realize that the second largest conflict (based on spending) in the world right now, behind the Russian invasion of Ukraine, is DJT’s ICE attacks on the US. That is how much he is spending to attack his own country. More than Israel spends to occupy Palestinians.
Sadly, if you look at polling, none of this is remotely unpopular with US Republican voters. Our country’s union is hanging on by tattered threads.
Maybe your country's union was a bad idea? Feels like it's allowed the regressive parts to keep control over the greater whole. Maybe y'all should've just let secession happen - at least the worst parts of America would've been contained.
It's easy to look at the politics of individual states as a means of breaking things up if you ignore the economics. Things get very complicated, very quickly when you set a political threshold for breaking up the country.
The South wasn’t punished enough after the civil war is where a lot of this stems from. There was no cleaning house like what happened with Germany after WW2.
Are you familiar with America's history with eugenics? Contemporary with Denmark's human rights abuses in Greenland you're bringing up (1960's–70's), America's government was doing very much the same thing, to their own vulnerable minorities.
> "Between the span of the 1930s to the 1970s, nearly one-third of the female population in Puerto Rico was sterilized; at the time, this was the highest rate of sterilization in the world.[120] "
> "An estimated 40% of Native American women (60,000–70,000 women) and 10% of Native American men in the United States underwent sterilization in the 1970s.[125]"
As a Dane, while slightly angry, and gravely concerned for the people of Greenland, I'm still more fearful of the safety and mental well-being of my US friends and colleague than I am for my own.
Our Congress and Supreme Court are beholden to him. State and Individual resistance will be treated as rebellion. The legal pathways have us waiting until elections. The line of succession is GOP 40 levels deeps.
If we successfully revolt the US doesn't survive in any form to stabilize the world built around us and there is no guarantee that the ruling party isn't MAGA-like.
I hope you are right but I don't have any confidence in a Democratic party controlled Congress. I have never seen a meeker group of politicians. They will struggle to get everyone on board and some of them will defect and vote with Republicans like they did recently to end the government shutdown.
Legally speaking, the Republicans have been losing in court over and over. That doesn't mitigate the damage they're doing during the lag, and the consequences for breaking the law have never been as strong as they should be when officers of the law and elected officials are the ones breaking the law.
But it is important to acknowledge the wins. They do have an effect, and that's the only path we seem to have toward slowing down the march to autocracy.
Would that it were so easy to blame the flyover states. Almost half the people who cast votes voted for this - and at the same time voted for the status quo legislators who opt not to keep him in check.
The blame extends equally to everybody who supported this but due to the way American elections are set up, those people on the margins are “how” this happened.
...among the people who voted. There are a lot of folks who opted out that bear responsibility for the way this country and its power is being dismantled.
He wouldn't win the popular vote today! Why is it that when you call yourself a Republican, you take a very narrow margin of victory and consider it a mandate to only listen to your fanbase? I bet it feels fun at first, and there are a few people who get very wealthy and powerful as a result, but reality always comes crashing back down.
I suppose that if the talk of suspending mid-term elections bears fruit, that changes the equation.
The truth is that on average Republicans have way more guns that Democrats.
Anecdata but… I’ve personally known many Republicans who have massive gun collections and even personal shooting ranges in their basement. I’ve never met a Democrat with any of that.
Only one side of this conflict is meaningfully armed and they are already in power.
Well 40% of the population or so approves of the administration, so it's more like "to save themselves from their government and 40% of the rest of the population". That means resorting to the 2A is, at the very best, a rather weak bet.
There have been multiple instances of exactly what NRA members decry as federal tyranny: Waco, Ruby Ridge, etc. At not a single one did any number of people exercising their second amendment right ever show up to actually do anything, even to peacefully protest.
The idea that the 2nd amendment exists to keep alive a threat of rebellion against a tyrannical gov't is a joke.
“Second Amendment solutions” are only OK to talk about if you’re a Republican (I.e. “Real American”).
I’m being sarcastic, for the record. Back during his first term, Trump talked about “second amendment people” doing something about liberal Supreme Court justices (iirc) and the right wing media treated everyone as crazy for thinking that was wildly inappropriate.
It's really interesting how the same propaganda is applied by fascist governments everywhere. The ones supporting the "nationalist" government are the patriots and the others are enemies
The average Waco wacko can’t possible to fight even a small contingent from the local national guard, let alone a military with trillions of dollars of meteriel
All the assault weapons you can store in your shed are useless when an f35 takes them out from 300 miles away.
Yes, that is exactly how the US "lost" in Vietnam: Not having air power take them out from 300 miles away. I put "lost" in scare quotes because that "loss" is debatable, but that's a debate for another time.
The broader context was that the Indochina War was partially concurrent with, and the bulk of the combat only a little more than a decade after, Chinese intervention in the Korean War. The White House was simply terrified of the Chinese and put all sorts of restrictions on US forces that effectively guaranteed the US could never win an outright military victory.
Hanoi was declared off-limits to US bombers while Soviet and Chinese materiel flooded into the DRV, foreign pilots (including Soviets and North Koreans) were allowed to operate with impunity, airbases just over the Chinese border were used as safe havens for combat missions yet were off-limits to US pilots, over 180k Chinese troops rotated through Vietnam operating AAA batteries and such, etc. etc.
So yes, US unwillingness (arguably, inability) to apply air power where it could actually achieve strategic effects played a very large role in ensuring the US could never win an outright military victory in Vietnam. It's an open question whether the proper application of air power could have enabled such an outright military victory.
Certainly the US could and would apply air power to any serious domestic insurrection. There would be no targeting restrictions for fear of foreign escalation. There would be no influx of foreign aid and materiel. There would be no foreign pilots flying training and combat missions and no foreign troops manning foreign SAMs. There would be no foreign safe havens for rebels.
The conditions that IMO prevented an outright US military victory in Vietnam simply do not exist in a domestic context. Barring the coordinated defection of a significant portion of the US military, any armed insurrection in the US would be quickly crushed.
An "armed insurrection" is not required to deter a state's monopoly on violence - even the mere decentralization of arms across the populace objectively accomplishes this impressive feat.
You can still call your congressman, senator, local political, councilman, or someone else, spend 30 mins watching a demonstration, donate $10 to Amnesty, tell a random dude in fatigues "grateful for your service but please don't invade Greenland". The more people that do these kind of things the harder it gets for the Fascists to brand those that do as left-wing terrorists.
I’ve been tear gassed. I’m out here trying. I just know it’s gonna get a lot worse before it gets better. The regime is losing its grip and the only way out that fascists know is to escalate the violence.
Invading Greenland is a symptom of us on the ground fighting back. It’s to prove to Americans that we’re now isolated.
The Americans you’re trying to reach are not here. They’re in Facebook and right wing social bubbles with a constant influx of fresh slop propaganda. It’s unprecedented in the fact that it’s affecting people at the family unit level with people tearing off into political parties within families that cut off all contact from each other.
I believe you’re right but at this point it’s a single issue cult for a lot of folks. For instance, I know a very rational, personable guy that seems generally progressive on a variety of social issues but calls for the extermination of trans people with a straight face. There’s no reasoning with these people, even the ones swayed by rational opinion in other parts of their life.
That sounds extreme. Do you mean extermination as in mass murder? Or do you just mean he rejects the underlying ideology and would like to see policy that does the same?
No, not without an amendment allowing a third term, but even if there were an amendment probably still a No because he is too old and his very blunt and impolitic manner is not sustainable long-term in national leadership.
According to the WSJ, thr President has lost about 8% of his voters, so he should make some adjustments.
WSJ POLL: 92% of people who voted for Trump in 2024 are giving him a positive job rating today, including 70% who “strongly approve”
Thanks for being honest. It is truly beyond my comprehension how someone can believe this. I don’t see how right and left can get along peacefully going forward when there is such a fundamental difference of core beliefs.
Do you agree that Trump instigated and directed the insurrection attempt as evidenced by him sending people to the Capitol, and making threatening phone calls to Senators while the mob advanced through the Capitol and the Senators and others begged him to tell the mob to go home?
I don’t wholly agree with that statement. He repeatedly asked for people to remain peaceful in the run up to J6.
Even in his infamous 70 minute speech on the day of (which by the way was still going when most of the protestors were already at the capitol) where he called on people to “fight like hell” he called for peaceful demonstration.
“I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
He did not call any senators. He called McCarthy and had a very heated conversation and when McCarthy told him to call off the protestors immediately the President barked back that he believed Antifa breached the capital, not his supporters (not true but that’s what the President believed at the time).
So you partially agree that Trump is an insurrectionist?
>He repeatedly asked for people to remain peaceful in the run up to J6.
>Even in his infamous 70 minute speech on the day of ... he called for peaceful demonstration.
One "I'm sure you will be peaceful" at the beginning of a 70 minute speech is not an instruction to be peaceful, it's verbal window dressing for a speech where he told the crowd the election had been stolen and if they did not fight like hell they wouldn't have a country any more. He then directed them specifically to election proceedings he was already working to end either via the false slates of electors or having Pence unilaterally call the election fraudulent. He and his lawyers had created and submitted utterly false vote results from the states, and he repeatedly, publicly and privately, pressured Mike Pence to (illegally) reject the count itself as fraudulent.
>He did not call any senators. He called McCarthy
You missed out the part where McCarthy told him they were his supporters and the President ominously replied, "Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.”
The most damning part of the timeline that indicates Trump's use of the violence to get his way is how long it took him to say anything to the protesters. Well over an hour since the capital was broken into Trump tweets: "Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!" This tweet was made after aides had been "unsuccessfully trying for up to 20 minutes" to get him to release a calming tweet.
Two more generic calls for peace via Twitter as he watches violence on TV for hours and is begged by multiple parties to intervene. Finally he's talked into a video call because the delay has been achieved and no more pressure can be applied to the Senators after Ashley Babbitt was shot, and the crowd begins winding down.
Then another round of calls to allied Senators to pressure them to vote against certifying the vote.
And all this is before you get to testimony that asserts that Trump's team was aware of the participation of the literal insurrectionist Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, that Trump was informed many, many times by his people there was no stolen election and no evidence, and that multiple Trump staff sought and received pardons for their actions.
So what part of this whole situation reads like someone trying to stop a riot, rather than someone using it a situation they created as leverage over America's most sacred political process? If you think there’s an innocent explanation, what is it? Why all the delays, and pressure, and false electors?
I don't think anyone's ever assumed left wing consensus here. When's the last time you heard somebody here talk about public ownership of the means of production?
While you're remembering things you shouldn't forget, pay attention to how the Black Panthers are out in Philadelphia, and ICE isn't messing around over here. We chased those Patriot Front clowns out immediately, too.
But yeah, focus on the peaceful citizens making their voices heard, if that makes you feel more secure about how things are going.
Even if any of these claims were true (they aren’t) how exactly does that justify the US annexing an EU territory that clearly stated it does not want anything to do with the US?
Several European countries are also hosting American nukes on their soil. What happens to those in case the US starts an open war with those countries?
I think it is past time for Europe to ask the USA to leave their countries. That is something they can do which will significantly reduce the ability of the USA to project their power.
Rampant propaganda bots and consolidation of communications channels in the US is a real problem. Half the country is getting fascist cheerleading 24/7. When you can monopolize the communications channels there is effectively no free speech. Because dissenting views are priced out. Thanks to lax oversight on merging communication companies and the Citizens United decision that equates speech to money in politics, we are in the middle of it now.
Literally cannot. The asymmetry of technology which we have allowed to grow and flourish makes it infeasible. Flock and other manifestations of this beast sends shivers down spines and prevents any serious resistance.
I think it's ridiculous framing to call this Europe escalating.
The US has been escalating non-stop for a year. This would be Europe responding for once. Constraining Washington is in their interest as Washington is a malign actor now.
> it's ridiculous framing to call this Europe escalating
Shredding a trade agreement outright is absolutely an escalation relative to tariffs. It’s both more comprehensive and includes raising tariffs.
> The US has been escalating non-stop for a year. This would be Europe responding for once
Sure. By escalating.
> Constraining Washington is in their interest
Agree. But there are smart and stupid ways to do it. It’s in America’s interest to constrain China. Nuking its own oil production to raise oil prices, as an extreme example, would be a stupid way to do it. Ends not justifying the means is more than just a moral argument.
The tariffs already constitute shredding the trade agreement. This again is dishonest framing. There's no trade agreement as soon as one side breaks it. The side to break it wasn't the EU.
The parent of your comment is only one of the many here who go by the following scheme:
"WE can dishonor any part of any agreement but YOU have to fulfill all of your obligations according to our interpretation and under our direction... OR ELSE"
I don't know if these are real people or bots but I pity them for their lack of basic reasoning abilities.
Once one side starts removing obligations from themselves they will never stop, especially if the other side keeps being in compliance, it's just an incredible opportunity to corner the compliant side and drain it completely... and then it'll experience the "OR ELSE" part anyway but at the most damaging time and in its worst form.
There's only one choice when an agreement is broken - act as if it never existed while positioning yourself for a fair renegotiation.
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