HN readers from USA, what the hell is happening. How do we "get back to normal"?
To a certain degree, that is what’s happening. Denmark should bolster its military presence on Greenland, potentially up to and including by putting it under a nuclear umbrella. (Ideally European. Pragmatically, homegrown.)
nuclear umbrella would be a choice between Russia (practically impossible)
Let's say the Russia/Ukraine war is over. Russia mends its ties with Europe and says it will be good from now on. The US is ready to annex Greenland. Denmark is powerless and will lose Greenland. Russia calls Denmark and says it can help. If you're Denmark, what would you do?
It would certainly trigger a collapse of NATO. But if the US is serious about taking Greenland, that automatically starts the collapse anyway, right?
Anyway, just all hypotheticals. Interesting to think about. I don't think chances are 0. History has shown us that countries make surprising decisions, including allying with historic enemies, when pushed against the wall.
But people don't actually believe in lesser evil politics, they believe in loyalty (to sides, not to principles). That goes for both politicians and people. Danish politicians will not switch geopolitical alliances, and they'd honestly be color-revolutioned out if they tried, without even the CIA having to lift a finger.
Anti-US propaganda won't fill Danish newspapers, for the aforementioned loyalty reasons. Media people in Denmark (as elsewhere in the West) identify on a personal level with the sensible establishment. Sure, it's awkward that Trump isn't part of that and is currently in charge in the US, but they are convinced things will go back to normal over there, and then it'd be really embarrassing to have failed the loyalty test to the US. "Losing your glove" and all that.
Why wouldn't the US do the same in Denmark or any other Western country?
What a load of tripe.
Unless the weapons are under Copenhagen’s control, they’re Potemkin protection. Paris won’t risk its economy being destroyed by sanctions, much less its military destroyed by the American war machine, to protect Danish interests in Greenland.
Build then pull. Or don’t. It’s a treaty from a falling world order.
> quite possibly giving a state like the US pretext to annex Greenland
If you believe America would wait for pretext, you don’t need the umbrella.
Also, Denmark should now kick the US Military Sites off Greenland until the US climbs out if its psychotic break.
Mad rulers are also quite normal for much of human history, the theory was that Democracy would relieve us of that particular problem.
I don't think that was the theory. I think the theory was something in the middle of the wisdom of the crowds and the fact that non-violent hand overs of power are less bad than violent ones.
The main flaw is that democracy can be undone by democracy whereas autocracy in principle can be made to last forever. Of course autocrats eventually kill the host organism so there too there is a built in fuse but it can take a long time (centuries?) to burn.
I think Athenian democracy was explicitly built by Solon to relieve gridlock among entrenched, corrupted families.
Mad rulers are also quite normal for much of human history, the theory was that Democracy would relieve us of that particular problem.
This is one of the most insightful videos I've ever seen on society and governments. It describes Anacyclosis, where political systems evolve in a recurring sequence driven by corruption and decay.
Democracy will eventually decay. It's not permanent. You can see it now live where democracies elect more and more radical leaders.
Even this "decay" isn't inherently "bad" (assuming you are pro-democracy). There are numerous other decision mechanisms, and many of them are inclusive and transparent. Some of them might work for various levels of civil organisation, should The People want to give them a try. If a country replaced its democratic voting system with one of these others, you could still call that a "decay of democracy", but it might actually be good for the country.
(For the record, I don't think authoritarianism and its associated decision systems are good for large, general purpose bodies like countries.)
Can a (more or less) two party system where the population hovers around 50/50 support for each side truly be called a democracy?
Unless democracy has never existed, and thus has evidence for being unable to exist, sort of like communism, yes. It’s flawed. But it’s more than in line with historic systems. (Not all of which failed due to populism.)
I think a lot of it has to do with inertia; people have made such a great job in the past in the wester world, with infrastructure, education, law, medicine, and so on, that even when real proper idiots take power, most things just continue being good enough. It takes a lot of time for idiots and autocrats to make their impact, which when (hopefully) voters will switch and get good people back in power.
For instance the Romans are thought of as a great, cultured civilisation because their histories won out, but the Gauls and Carthaginians would’ve disagreed.
Like Lord Palmerston said, countries don’t have friends v or enemies, only interests. Russia and China get along well now, definitely didn’t 50 and 150 years ago, but did in intervening periods. Yet they would both consider themselves as in the right regardless.
Country? Probably not. Society? Yes. America’s treatment of Europe post-WWII, and even Japan and Germany, together with its restraint when it was the global nuclear hegemon, was benevolent.
From that society? The people who were in power when we were the global nuclear hegemon?
My point is societies corrupt, and great societies emerge from the corrupted. America before and after was not benevolent. The Americans at the helm during and at the end of WW2 were, as an aggregate, as expressed through our republic, benevolent. (Benevolence doesn’t require faultlessness.)
The Empire bit the dust, Europe ruined - and the US and CSSR divided the world upon themselves.
It is not narrative for us to hear, as there have been many sacrifice that came to liberation of Europe. It is much easier to see them trough less less of the good guys, the liberators. But there are many sides to history: it also was a change of guard in the strategic geopolitical sense… and even after WW2, the US did a lot to accelerate the Empire’s demise …
The liberation of Europe owes more to the Soviet Union than the USA, perhaps the current situation there foretells where we are heading with the USA?
The Soviets helped in a major way to defeat the Germans - on par with the US.
But it's also true that they did not liberate anyone in Europe, just replaced the German occupation.
This is sort of like arguing Belgian colonialism was fine because there was one village they forgot to enslave.
Also, we were jointly occupied [1]. (Austrian-Indian American.) The reason we weren’t Polanded is the Allies, who controlled part of us at the end of the war, argued we were victims of Anschluss. If the Soviets controlled Austria, it wouldn’t have been spared.
> The Soviets never liberated anyone
A universal statement can be disproven by a single counterexample.
Sure. Pedantically. To the extent we can say Belgian colonialism was great.
Saying the Soviets were fine is a stupid argument if the best you can come up with is Australia wasn’t fucked because the Allies got half of it first and then forced Moscow not to fuck it.
And Allies gave others in the country their freedom. And pushed the Austrian constitution in other ways. What you’re saying would be like a West German arguing Germany was mostly liberated by the Allies, because they happen to be on the side that they got to first.
I'm not denying that. I'm just saying it's wrong to say the soviets never did.
That's why they left, Austria agreed to became their trojan horse and lobbying arm in Europe, constantly torpedoing nuclear energy projects[2] and Schengen membership expansions.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56280898
[2] https://www.euractiv.com/section/eet/news/austria-gears-up-t...
It really doesn’t. If America abandoned Britain the Nazis would have had a one-front war.
The Soviet Union got their equipment and supplies mostly for free from the US.
All nations the Soviet Union “liberated” were not so sad when it finally fell and they were actually liberated.
It is also estimated that 30-40%† of the tanks used in the Battle of Moscow were British (Matildas). The Soviets were especially dependent on US on (a) trucks, and (b) raw materials like aluminium.
† Alexander Hill, “British “Lend-Lease” Tanks and the Battle for Moscow, November–December 1941″, The Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 19:2.
Oh yeah, just ask Poland about it! F*cking revisionist
I agree something needs to be done but as it stands its not a easy solution. And I would assume if Denmark through nato put nukes on Greenland the US (and I would assume Canada) would treat it as some level of Cuban Missle Crisis.
Who is it that Denmark should consider their enemy in this situation? Is it normal in your mind that the US should be considered the enemy?
Some of the things Trump has done—like tariffs—I actually agree with.
Sometimes you need to do stuff out of left field to break out of a rut.
But the purging of good civil servants is what enables Trump. And many of his voters fervently believe these civil servants are “the swamp”.
> I doubt they voted for _this_.
They most certainly did.
First, they love the retention of the tax cuts and the OBBB.
Second, they were repulsed by most/all things that liberals embraced: DEI, language police, gender topics, loose immigration policy, an obviously over the hill Biden, perceived weakness abroad (Afghanistan, Ukraine, Israel/Gaza), etc.
> They voted for a vague promise of a better life through some cool sounding measures, at the time.
Ehhh… I don’t think so. They wanted tax cuts and anything that was the opposite of liberal social policy. They got it.
As for the people who didn’t vote, I’m not sure anything has changed that would get them out to vote for an opponent to Trump (Biden, Kamala, or whoever other milquetoast candidate lined up).
> Now that people are starting to realize the demon they have given full power to, I doubt he would win another (unrigged) election.
I think he wins by more if the election is tomorrow.
Large swathes of the monied classes in the US are largely ok with the direction things are going.
Tariffs, harassment of immigrants, neutering the federal government, and chaotic diplomacy just seem like unfortunate collateral damage to them.
Imho, the US is in the midst of a constitutional crisis. If the Dems or some other group don’t approach 2028 accordingly, they may be watching from the sidelines again for who knows how many more years.
Imho, “T” only has enough gas in the tank to enrich himself and his family by any means necessary while protecting the same group from legal consequences.
The real question is whether p2025 is the answer. The deafening indifference to p2025 makes me think that this is the direction we will be moving for a while — likely past 2028 if an opposition party does not create a compelling and unified response.
Many people said the same thing between 2017 and 2021.
Revolution is required.
For the vast majority of Americans, life is “normal”, but perhaps in a slightly different key.
Outside of educated liberal circles, there is no discussion of the gutting of our democracy.
Privileged people have a bad habit of assuming they'll be outside of any significantly adverse effects - or may even think "Well, this kinda sucks, but maybe this is actually pretty good for my wallet (read: social-economical status)".
In case he tries another coup, one thing you could do is organize and obtain arms (and train with them) and have you and your group, as well as any other groups you can muster, near DC around late January 2029. The rule of law cannot be taken for granted.
There is only one language that tyrants speak.
Much of what Trump officially destroyed should never have been built in the first place. Most of the damage he has wrought is not from his actual platform, but from his sheer stupidity. Covid and Russia both come to mind immediately, but also the irreparable harm he has done to the ~century-old carefully crafted global illusion of American legitimacy. As far as we can tell, he doesn’t read, including without limitation the daily intelligence briefing. There is no way to act strategically if you don’t avail yourself of all of the relevant information or you purge the administration of the messengers of news you don’t like.
As we know, stupidity is far more harmful to society than malice, as malice is at least zero-sum: someone gains when you lose.
Stupid people through their actions simply harm everyone, themselves included.
Think of what an improvement it would be (over Trump) to have someone hyperintelligent as POTUS, but with the exact same platform. It would be bad, but not the catastrophe that Trump has wrought by being a moron who can’t think more than 15 minutes in advance and fundamentally doesn’t seem to understand the concept of strategy.
It of course includes the social services you speak of too, but those are barely a drop in the bucket compared to the public-private wealth transfer that is the military-industrial complex.
The president simply isn’t permitted to dismantle it; there are too many stakeholders way more powerful than the holder of that single office that will not permit it.
In case he tries another coup, one thing you could do is organize and obtain arms (and train with them) and have you and your group, as well as any other groups you can muster, near DC around late January 2029. The rule of law cannot be taken for granted.
If there had been an armed conflict outside the Capitol on Jan 6 between pro and anti Trump citizen groups, American democracy would have been better served.
Meet strength with strength. Some progressives forgot that.
Behind his back, the same ghoul (Miller) will still be holding the reins.
Trump was a catalyst for Project 2025, he's no longer instrumental im afraid.
If Trump expires, Vance will take the helm.
If he wins, why would he resign
No, I don't think he will be removed from the office - he's still beneficial to Republicans, Putin and US oligarchs.
Edit: Getting downvoted now. No clue why. It's not me who is making these suggestions. This administration has literally said these things themselves. If you downvote me, at least have the balls to explain why.
But I'm trying to understand this... any American here who can elaborate how he would feel "great again" and re-vote for GOP if the US flag was planted in the center of Nuuk?
The project 2025 mandate for leadership enabled a dictator in the making to establish himself.
The Republican Congress removed the checks in the Supreme Court during Trump’s first term; and refuse to legislate in a way that works against Trump.
And this second term, he’s been purging all of the civil servants who are more loyal to the mission than to him.
What I’m dreading is 2028: Will he make good on his threat to go for a third term? Will most of the nation be too apathetic?
I've never seen a country disasembling itself with such speed. It took Putin 20 years to get the country and society to where it is now, I am not sure USA will be in a better state after 4 years full with nepotism, oligarchy, anti-scientific freaks in administration, corruption and ignoring laws on a daily basis.
He came into power 1st Jan 2000, and by 2004 people were no longer speaking openly, from fear.
Which 1 year after he invaded Georgia.
I think processing our feelings around covid could help a lot.
I do think you're right that the effects of covid will have long lasting cultural and political consequences, but the zeitgeist behind the backlash was already well established, and one must remember intentionally orchestrated to benefit certain political interests.
Unfortunately the US has a strange system in which the most populous and economically vital parts of the country have the least influence in Washington...
We had to keep the slaveowning states happy or else they might secede - wait...
It keeps populist demagogues from taking over - wait...
I got nothing.
What makes them more civilized than the other states? I think this elitist atitudine is exactly what got Trump supported from the other states.
At least in my life I've never met anyone who would like me if I declared myself more civilized than them and they wouldn't spite me back for it.
There's probably a good reason South Park crators depicted Californians as smelling their own farts in that episode.
We can start with the fact that NY & CA still protect women's right to choose.
But now Denmark is apparently upset that an even bigger, greedier bully is trying to take it from them?
I don't care about it one way or the other. I imagine an agreement will be made where USA gets something like 80% of the resource rights in exchange for Denmark getting to keep the title and then we'll all forget about this.
It's all so ironic considering Denmark took control of Greenland purely by conquest/claim and many Greenlanders view it historically as colonial/imperial.
But Denmark isn't the one that should be complaining about their ill-gotten loot being taken from them.