We have to remember that we aren't all working from the same perceptual or moral framework. This is a struggle for me, as I love my parents but our believes have diverged considerably.
I think the challenge right now in the U.S. is that for many, it doesn't feel socially safe to question your own side. In reality, we need to feel free to judge actions individually, and judge leaders as a true accumulation of their actions. If we fear rejection from our party/family/friends for not walking in lock-step with the official party stances, that influences a lot of our thinking. No one wants to feel continually guilty about their own views (especially when there are social consequences for changing them), so we often shove aside conflicting details, make jokes, and signal to others that we're still a part of the tribe.
It sucks.
If you look at J6 attempted self-coup where people were chanting death threats agaisnt the vice president and had a hangman's noose ready and pipe bombs were found and say "that was a peaceful protest", while also looking at the woman who was shot dead through the side window of her car while departing from a group of ICE officers and call that "self defence againsy attempted vehicular manslaughter", you may have a problem.
If your reaction to "Punish them socially" is to claim "That’s the most facist thing I’ve ever heard." of the person who essentially just said "stop talking to these people, stop inviting them to parties and stuff", when your fellow citizens are dying at the hands of federal officers who are being given defacto immunity, you may have a problem.
The current administration already punishes people for thinking differently with a lot worse than not inviting them to dinner; is the kind of regime that creates refugees and asylum seekers out of its own citizens, who flee from it.
Half the country is outraged that leftists think just because they don’t like immigration law, as it is written and voted for, that it’s okay to obstruct deportations and drive vehicles into innocent ICE officers doing their job.
If Oklahoma declared itself a sanctuary state from unions and declared it didn’t have to adhere labor law would you agree with their right to do so? If Salt Lake City decided to be a sanctuary for polygamy and underage marriage and started obstructing the FBI when they came in to arrest people would you be cheering?
There is no such thing as a sanctuary state or sanctuary city. Imagine the chaos if every city just ignored the laws they don’t like.
Calling each other facists and nazis is just lazy, inaccurate, and an excuse for elevating oneself over ones political opponents.
Isn't this the entire point of having a separate between federal, state, county, and city laws? States rights and all?
> Oh yeah the coup where no one brought firearms and the only person shot was a protester?
Multiple individuals connected to Jan 6 were found with guns and ammunition: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/capitol-riot-weapons-deadly-dan... and https://www.npr.org/2021/03/19/977879589/yes-capitol-rioters...
> The cop who shot Ashley Babbit was given “de facto immunity.”
Video from inside the Capitol building showed her attempting to climb through a broken window outside the House chamber when the officer, who was guarding the entrance from the rioters, fired.
> Half the country is outraged that leftists think just because they don’t like immigration law, as it is written and voted for, that it’s okay to obstruct deportations and drive vehicles into innocent ICE officers doing their job.
Read this carefully:
Side. Window.
She (Renne Good) did not, and could not, have been driving the car into the person who shot her through the side window.
Because, and I don't know if this is news to you, cars do not drive sideways.
> If Oklahoma declared itself a sanctuary state from unions and declared it didn’t have to adhere labor law would you agree with their right to do so? If Salt Lake City decided to be a sanctuary for polygamy and underage marriage and started obstructing the FBI when they came in to arrest people would you be cheering?
What about! What about! What about!
The current administration is violating your own constitution. The behaviour of ICE is unlawful within your own rules.
> Imagine the chaos if every city just ignored the laws they don’t like.
I don't need to imagine, it looks like Trump.
> Calling each other facists and nazis is just lazy, inaccurate, and an excuse for elevating oneself over ones political opponents.
There are bronze plaques on the ground in my city dedicated to the victims of fascism. I don't speak for others, but I tell you this myself: Trump has been following the same footsteps as those whose dishonour is memorialised by the names of their victims upon those plaques.
Your telling of events makes it sound like he walked up to the side of the car and shot her dead for no reason. This is wholly inconsistent with the camera footage and damage to the car.
Please stop trying to inflame with your partial account of events.
Ashley Babbit was shot for breaking a window in a federal building, which is far less of an offense than obstructing an officer and assault with a vehicle.
And Facism starts with civilians who act as enforcers and intimidators, not with the police. Hitler’s brown shirts and Mussolini's black shirts elevated the Facists to power. The SS came afterwords. Antifa is far closer to the brownshirts than any other organization in the US. Power through intimidation and chaos. Facist.
Video clearly shows the wheels were cut before forward motion started.
> The officer suffered bruised ribs from the impact of the vehicle.
This seems to be an attempt to rewrite the laughably false “internal bleeding” anonymous propaganda leak CBS news laundered into something remotely credible; there is literally no reason to believe this true, and clear reasons to dismiss it, including video showing thet except for maybe his hand reaching toward the vehicle as it passed, no part of his body was impacted.
Here's a video of the people you refuse to recognise meet that exact description:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Capitol_riot-_Videos_show...
As you're not willing to listen to words, there's no point me wasting effort debunking the rest.
I never claimed the J6 crowd to be non-violent? I was referring specifically to the murder of Ashley Babbit.
The J6 crowd gathered once. They did not systematically intimidate fellow citizens nation wide while hiding behind masks.
I will reiterate Antifa and the coalition of masked and violent left wing protesters resemble hitlers brownshirts far more than the anomalous J6 morons.
You have, here, changed the subject and disregarded reality and projected what-about on me as rhetoric, and even on this comment are motte-and-bailey-ing:
> I never claimed the J6 crowd to be non-violent?
I started by introducing them as an example of a thing where failing to see that they were violent and dangerous was a sign of having a problem. You reacted explosively. You what-about-ed with Babbit. You deflected, you tried to diminish the riot, you claimed there were no firearms. You have a problem.
I maintain that your own words:
And Facism starts with civilians who act as enforcers and intimidators, not with the police. Hitler’s brown shirts and Mussolini's black shirts elevated the Facists to power.
I could also add:
The SS came afterwords.
> They did not systematically intimidate fellow citizens nation wide while hiding behind masks.
If you bothered to watch that video, you'd see many of them were behind masks.
If you'd bothered to watch the video of (or indeed still pictures from just before) the, to use your word, "murder", of Reese Good, you'd see she wasn't.
ICE however, do operate nationwide and do frequently wear masks. These days, anyway. They didn't used to feel the need to break their own rules. They didn't used to be the villains, according to not only "the left" but also other law enforcement.
I really should be going to bed rather than wasting the effort to write this down, but I guess the impending risk of the end of the world is weighing heavily on me.
Even if there was contact no one gets bruised ribs from a car going as slow as that car was moving at that point.
Consider this thought experiment. Take a two ton car with a flat plate on front, accelerate up to say 2 mph, and hit someone.
Now try the same thing but instead of a two ton car lets use a 20 000 ton freight train.
The train takes way more energy to get up to 2 mph. At the time of collision it has 20 000 times as much kinetic energy as the car and 20 000 times as much kinetic energy.
But for the person who gets hit those collisions will be nearly the same. They get accelerated to 2 mph with pretty much the same acceleration profile in both cases. The car is slightly less than the train because the person (especially if they are American!) might be massive enough to cause a slight but noticeable decrease in the car's speed.
Anyone, the key is that the body gets accelerated over a short time to 2 mph. If the body was a rigid body that would involve a very large acceleration for a very short time.
But humans are squishy. The muscles and soft tissue compress and that spreads the time the body takes to reach 2 mph greatly reducing the acceleration, which greatly reduces the damage. The way you get injured in such low speed collisions is by getting knocked over and injured in the fall, or knocked over and run over by whatever hit you, or by being between the colliding object and some immovable object so you can't be accelerated.
Another way to look at that collision is to replace the train with something really big, such as the whole Earth, and instead of accelerating the Earth into the person we'll accelerate the person into the Earth.
That can be done by holding the person horizontally above a solid metal plate and dropping them. If we drop them from 2.69 inches above the plate they well reach 2 mph at the time of collision. You aren't getting bruised ribs from a 2.69 inch fall horizontally onto a metal plate.
That way they could vote in Republican primaries. Many if not most of those districts actually have Republican candidates in the primaries who are center right but they lose because primary turnout is very low, largely consisting of just the most extreme voters.
For example consider Marjorie Taylor Green (MTG). In the primary the first time she ran against a perfectly normal Republican. I don't remember all the details, but I believe he was a decorated military officer who after the military was a successful businessman and who had server in state offices.
MTG was a full on QAnon and other conspiracy theorist believer. But it is mostly the fringe that votes in primaries so she won. And it is a heavily Republican district with many people who don't really follow politics so she got their vote in the general election because they always vote R.
Register as a Republican if you are in such a district and vote in the primaries and then maybe we can get back to having sane Republicans winning those districts.
For safe Republican districts where they do elect sane Republicans, it is still worth switching registration. Let the current representative from that district know that you are doing this, and promise that if Trump gets upset at their vote on something and bankrolls a primary challenge, you will vote for them in the primary.
Also these voters are dumb but they aren't that dumb. Unless you know a person who actually has presented as a Trump supporting republican for the last decade and is secretly willing to switch sides after the election, you're not going to trick them.
The point is that center right Republicans (the kind that used to win most Republican districts before 2012) could still win if they could make it to the general election. They often can't because most Republican voters, like most Democrat voters, aren't into party politics enough to bother voting in the primaries.
It is the voters who are most likely to be to be farthest from the center who vote in the primaries, and these are the ones who don't want a normal center right representative.
If Democrats switched parties and voted in the primaries they might be able to counter the usual extreme primary voters so a center right Republican could win.
Congress is too beholden and scared of Trump on the GOP side to do anything meaningful. The democrats are generally spineless.
The federalist society and GOP have created a severe ideological imbalance on the supreme court that will have serious ramifications for years to come unless there's a serious effort to pack or reform the institution.
The EU applies a 10% tariff on U.S. cars, while the U.S. applies 2.5% on most EU cars
The EU underpaid NATO while passing the buck and funding extensive social programs
The EU enabled the Dutch Sandwich and Irish offshoring trade scams which has become a tax haven
What happened to Harley is the commonly shared example
U.S. MSRP: ~$28,000 (base model, pre-shipping).
After EU Tariff (at 50% peak proposal): Adds ~$14,000, bringing landed cost to ~$42,000.
Plus 25% VAT: Applied to post-tariff value, adding ~$10,500 → ~$52,500.
Plus 150% Luxury Tax (on value above threshold, but effectively inflating the whole): Adds ~$71,500 (based on full calculations accounting for the threshold and compounding).
Total Retail Price in Denmark: Up to $124,000 (more than 4x the U.S. price).
It's not EU's fault US manufacturers can't keep manufacturing costs down.
Neither is it EU's fault Trump believes slapping tariffs hurting US consumers will improve US standing in the world.
Your post is yet another example of how USians don't understand how VAT works.
There is no VAT rebate on exports, there is a 100% reimbursement of VAT on any export. There is also a 100% reimbursement of VAT on any B2B sale. That way VAT is a tax only on goods that are sold to consumers in the EU, no matter where they came from and no matter where they were manufactured/processed/...
How this works as an example: You mine iron ore, sell a ton for 1000€. Buyer pays 20% VAT. But since it's B2B, buyer can get those 20% back immediately in his monthly VAT declaration. Buyer makes 500kg steel from that iron ore, sells it for 2000€. Buyer of the steel can get those 20% back, since it's B2B. Let's say the buyer makes paperclips from that steel and sells those. Now the buyer of those paperclips is the interesting thing here, because the buyer pays 20% VAT on those paperclips. He might be their end-user (either business or customer) in which case he won't get 20% VAT back. He might be a reseller, in which case he will get the VAT back. End-users don't get their 20% VAT, resellers and processing industry do. It's always only the last step in the chain who really pay VAT, everyone else doesn't.
And any border-crossing is treated as a sale, so the you get the VAT rate (different EU contries have different rates) from the country that the goods are leaving paid out, and you have to pay the VAT rate of the country you are entering on those goods. If you are exporting to non-EU, and there is no VAT in the destination country, you don't pay any, you just get the VAT back from the country you are exporting from. So it is totally symmetrical, totally fair, and totally neutral, independent from whether it is US, EU, Chinese or whatever the origin might be.
And if you think it's complicated, you might be right. But then again, look at the complete and utter mess that US sales taxes are. Every other town might have a different tax rate, system, catalogue of goods every other week. USians shouldn't complain about trade barriers as long as that mess is still in place.
> The EU enabled the Dutch Sandwich and Irish offshoring trade scams which has become a tax haven
That's a fault of Ireland and the Netherlands, the EU is just powerless to stop those practices. Same as the US is powerless to get rid of their own tax haven states like Delaware, Nevada or Wyoming. Just to cite Wikipedia, "Andrew Penney from Rothschild & Co described the US as "effectively the biggest tax haven in the world" and Trident Trust Co., one of the world's biggest providers of offshore trusts, moved dozens of accounts out of Switzerland and Grand Cayman, and into Sioux Falls" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_as_a_tax_haven
My understanding, dealing with VAT/GST in another country, is that a business customer still gets the VAT back even if they're the end user. If my company (which comprises of 1 person) buys paperclips, or a laptop or whatever for business use, I claim the VAT back. It's only the consumer who pays VAT. If I want to transfer an asset from my business to myself then I have to pay the VAT.
A subtle signal that war with United States is a possibility.
Trump will use this as a pretext to not only take Greenland but to invade Canada as well.
He has gone utterly mad. Congress needs to act. Yesterday.
After a short time, and some casualties, I think the US military would have real problems internally, not counting that popular support would disappear.
The question is what would happen to the US staff land-locked on NATO bases within the EU. They will automatically become under siege, vastly outnumbered by European counterparts.
Since any attack on Greenland is an attack on the EU country the Kingdom of Denmark, and any attack on any EU countries automatically trigger EU Article 42.7, which mandates the full support from all members, to which all EU countries have committed, it would imply full-scale war.
Also if any french military asset is present when the US attack, we will see how determined the french military is following it's own doctrine (which dictates a 'warning shot' 24 hours before sending the tactical nukes).
My guess is as yours - the US military's focus on middle east and east Asia is of great disadvantage for them. Do they even get below -20 C for any longer periods at any base located on US mainland? Alaska, and some regions close to Canada, perhaps, leaving them with only some 10.000 personnel having anything near arctic experience, majority of which are based at the bases, not trained for front-action in artic climate.
For some real-life insides:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Msfrit12u0M&lc=UgwDlvf-UEzzhBzZJ...
If we build a Rammstein- sized base the US would already outnumber the native population.
Would the Danes or French open fire on us while the US is setting up shop? Highly unlikely.
Trump is pushing a total takeover but I suspect he would rather leave a small pocket of southern Greenland to the Danes to continue supporting the indigenous people, and then taking the bulk of the rest for mineral rights, arctic sea lanes, and defense.
This isn't about building bases or military strategy or even resources. If it were about those things then the US could take over Greenland slowly with little effort. My understanding is the population there would have welcomed investment. The US could have done some minor leg work and in 10-20 years Greenland would have been closer / keen to join, or whatever.
Greenland is an island full of a vast nothingness, there is enough space for those kinds of bases. Greenland and Denmark have repeatedly said as much, and allowed the US to build any number of bases of any size. Building bases is totally possible, and always was possible, because Greenland and Denmark have always allowed it and would have continued to allow that.
I mean, they even turned a blind eye towards the US loosing a nuclear reactor and contaminating quite a bit of ice while trying to build tunnels for their ICBMs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Century
Why did you single mine out? Oh yeah, the default instinct to censor different ideas.
I support the US assuming control of Greenland because it would be incredibly economically beneficial to the US, militarily beneficial to the US, we’d be on the hook for defending it in case of a war as the EU hardly has any expeditionary force left, and we’ve propped up Europe for 70 years.
It could greatly delay the collapse of the American empire that I love and enjoy living in.
We haven’t been a humble republic since the close of WW2, maybe even WW1.
Because I thought some kind of curious conversation would be possible with the reply you made. The two other examples you posted are devoid of anything interesting; hopeless cases.
I should have consulted your posting history however, which consists mainly of short, combative and indignant responses like the one you just directed at me.
> it would be incredibly economically beneficial to the US
I fail to see how this is the case. The US and US companies have always been welcome to bid on mining concessions (at least, until recently), but the reality is that it's hardly profitable to do so, as there are ample cheaper opportunities available elsewhere.
Also, "assuming control" seems to be a euphemism for "invading" as the US buying Greenland is squarely out of the question. Invading is hardly humble, indeed, and you seem to be all too confident that such invading will allow for a republic and not lead to autocracy.
You immediately lose all of your NATO allies, and have the potential for an immediate war with not only all of them but also all the non-NATO members of the EU, which includes two independent nuclear powers, and who hold enough assets to cripple your economy without even firing a shot: both by fire-sale of bonds and other assets, and even just by ceasing trade with you.
China and Russia both have immediate and huge opportunities in both a hot war and an economic blockade. Of the two, I wouldn't put it past Russia to even attempt to use a nuke as a false-flag attack in this scenario, in either direction (US <-> former allies) or both directions. It would be really really stupid of them, but Putin's already shown consistent stupidity, so that's not enough to discount it.
If anything this is a wake up call for Europe to come to grips with how ineffectual they have become.
Any kind of financial maneuver any country would try against the US would mostly hurt them more.
France and Spain are probably the most independent of the US economically but the other member states not so much.
Any economic reaction would by symbolic or very short lived.
Governments protect themselves not the people. All those government employees need tax revenue.
All the rich people who run the world behind the scenes don’t want their assets to deflate.
The EU could fracture over any kind of major retaliation.
Estonia, Latvia, and Poland will want the US to stay in NATO at all costs with Putin next door.
Germany is dependent on exports. Their entire economy could collapse without US trade.
Don’t you feel the pantomime of it all? The leaders in Europe are saying what they absolutely have to say. Having the meetings they have to have.
There will probably be some kind of deal reached eventually so the leaders of the Europe can appear to have done something slightly better than giving Greenland away.
At best, you still lose all your allies.
At worst, why are you willing to make this gamble? You go immediately go from two nuclear armed nations who "threaten" US interests in Greenland, to four.
> Any kind of financial maneuver any country would try against the US would mostly hurt them more.
The former allies could cost you in the order of $1.3 trillion fairly directly.
Worth it, to defend their sovereignty. Especially as the other half of that trade is things they're already saying they want to move away from.
> All the rich people who run the world behind the scenes don’t want their assets to deflate.
And you think the US doesn't have this exact category of rich people, who will pull the US back from this seppuku?
There's a reason "TACO" was coined WRT Trump.
> The EU could fracture over any kind of major retaliation.
1. And you think the US is unified right now?
2. And you think the EU wouldn't be concerned about fracture over failing to retaliate?
> Don’t you feel the pantomime of it all?
No.
I am reorganising my assets on the assumption of a total, 100%, trade blockade. All potential backdoors in hardware and software being activated. All goods, all services, being subject to escalating tariffs to split the economies apart as fast as possible in order to show preparation and readiness for a hot war. With nukes being an open question by both sides, and MAD being relevant again, but preparing for that is beyond me.
How would the US respond to Russia trying this BS to get Alaska back?
The US is unified with one military, one economy, one budget, one State Department, etc. Europe is not. Internal division here is not the same as internal division in Europe.
UK, Germany, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, etc. will not substantively move away from the US even if they are hopping mad about Greenland.
Russia wouldn’t try because we are too strong. If the EU were strong we wouldn’t be trying to take Greenland.
That’s the whole point - if there is a race for control of the arctic with China and Russia the EU couldn’t do anything. You’d depend on the US to police the arctic for you and to enforce whatever treaties are signed with China and Russia. Better deal for us to do it ourselves.
I give 50-50 you'd have a military coup if they were given the order to invade an ally.
More than half of your own government knows that invading an ally is not OK.
If Russia isn't enough of a threat to take advantage of this, they're absolutely not enough of a threat to take Greenland either.
Us doing nothing is a direct signal to Russia to Blitzkrieg Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and as much of Poland as it can, because you're sure not going to help stop them.
> UK, Germany, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, etc. will not substantively move away from the US even if they are hopping mad about Greenland.
Which guns do we need to show you before you back down?
Do we need to fire a missile at Mar-a-Lago before you take us seriously?
If this were civ, I'd be saying "Back off, we have nukes."
Because we do, in fact, have nukes. Pretty much the only substantial military thing the UK has at this point, but it has them.
> You’d depend on the US to police the arctic for you and to enforce whatever treaties are signed with China and Russia. Better deal for us to do it ourselves.
Not for you, not for us.
For us: As a nation, by the election of Trump, you have proven yourself as untrustworthy as Russia. Which is really really bad.
For you: you now have twice as many hostile nuclear powers with the means to hit you, combining to more than twice your GDP backing up those nukes.
You could've built bases in Greenland for free at any time without threatening us. You chose the threat. You're now going to face the counter-threats. We'll see how far those escalate. This is a game you never needed to play. You call it theatrics, we're not laughing, we're arming.
China is much more trusted right now than you are. Like, sure, we know they see Taiwan as their own, but we also know they're not going to screw us over. Even when it was the British Empire handing over Hong Kong, China understood that while they could take it at any time, it was bad to be seen as one who would do so dishonourably.
If that's the best the EU can manage, the EU ends the same day, and all of the EU knows that. Ergo, they won't let that happen.
Likewise, all of NATO except apparently part of the US, knows that the US taking Greenland by force means the end of NATO.
Nobody really cares about Greenland.
Nobody is willing to allow there to be real consequences, or even real inconveniences, as a result of anything to do with Greenland.
The EU is primarily an economic and regulatory structure, not a military alliance.
NATO is a paper tiger anyway, people will invent some justifications and keep doing business as usual.
Perhaps, but nobody reasonable would have forecast this situation in the first place, what Trump is doing here already wildly outside of any recent precedents for the USA's behaviour.
> Nobody really cares about Greenland.
Nobody should, the inhabitable parts are tiny, the rest is a massive ice sheet, the population wouldn't even half-fill the largest single stadium.
> Nobody is willing to allow there to be real consequences, or even real inconveniences, as a result of anything to do with Greenland.
Tell that to Trump, he's the one threatening military force to get an island he's already allowed to build whatever bases he wants on. There's no good reason for him to have burned his bridges like this. Even if he doesn't invade, he's already severely weakening relations with people who thought they were American allies, who have already come to American aid when asked.
> The EU is primarily an economic and regulatory structure, not a military alliance.
Primarily, yes, but it does also have a mutual defence clause. Never been tested, of course. Why would anyone be dumb enough to threaten an EU member state with military conquest?
And yet, here we are.
> NATO is a paper tiger anyway, people will invent some justifications and keep doing business as usual.
Article 5 has been invoked exactly once, to aid the USA. NATO-minus-USA is going to be wild, almost certainly forces a lot of other members to rapidly develop nukes of their own even if this all goes "peacefully".
Since this was first proposed I still hold the position that it is up to the people of Greenland - not Denmark - to decide their path. I hope they will hold a referendum.
https://www.reuters.com/world/poll-shows-85-greenlanders-do-...
That's pure cope.
I’d say that I prefer him to go about it a different way, except that I can’t see what that different way looks like when you want territory from another country that doesn’t want to give it to you.
And I say this as a European. Europe is not credible from a defense perspective and lacks the will to do very much of anything quickly or effectively. The best you can expect is a series of talking shops and some policy documents to be drawn up while the ice continues to melt.