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Comment by lawlessone | Hacker News Reader

Look for the same with Greenland or Canada next :/

the rest of the world is weirdly too passive, there's a smell of shock

IMHO the rest of the world isn't asleep. Denmark's prime minister said the same as you, for example. US just got roasted at UN by inter alia, France, with ~20 countries either speaking the same or asking to speak on it. That's just from 30s with front page of nytimes.com.

That just sounds like more 'strongly worded letters' which never go anywhere and they never do anything about.

It's over for the EU. They rested on their laurels for too long and cowardice rotted them from the inside.

I don't think Denmark will put even a smidge of resistance up. Trump is going to bark some orders, boots are going to hit the ground and it's fait accompli.

What does action (i.e. not-strongly-worded-letters, i.e. not words) look like?

Capture Trump?

Invade the US?

The idea the EU is some bureaucratic hellhole incapable of anything is really odd and nigh-universal - I'm used to righties adopting it from Brexit & antipathy for social demoracy, but I'm not used to see it as a despondent wailing from people otherwise sympathetic to it.

Note no one even mentioned the EU - it's so universal a reaction to "US is acting bad" that it came out of nowhere. Not to pick on you: when I was first replying, I also replied as if it was the EU! Had to go back and read the comment I was replying to and corrected myself before posting.

Action probably looks like crash-starting multiple nuclear weapons programs. With or without the help of the british/french. Probably with.

I'd imagine programs from: the Nordics and Poland+Baltics. Maybe Germany, probably not.

What happens when you start making nukes and the US doesn't want you to?

Ssetting aside the whole non-proliferation thing, or expense (see NK), etc.

Let's get serious, please.

Why set aside expense? You do it anyway by whatever means necessary, like the DRPK. And if you’re a “western democracy” (also known as capitalist dictatorship) and you’re part of the ruling class, you still have the incentive to protect your assets, things you exploit in your country, land, natural resources, etc, that the US won’t be sharing or that they want to decrease supply when they take over through puppets or multinationals, and you can always force the public to pay for such a project, like all the times western peoples had to bail out or spend their taxes to benefit private corporations, but now it would look like it’s to protect sovereignty, which is a bonus of course, it would be to protect the local ruling class’s interests, but anyway. It’s clear the Americans will stop at nothing to acquire whatever it is they want, including indirectly violent means like ordering their financial institutions and tech giants to destroy whoever is on the way. The monster was always there since the Cold War and just now it dropped any pretenses.

We would then hack you.

Sanctions come to my mind.

Any sort of pushback at all would be an improvement.

Even now, the EU Commission is trying to 'defuse' the Greenland situation by trying to invoke NATO's fifth article, as if that's worth anything without the will of the USA behind it. You know, instead of like actually drawing out plans for a military alliance, economic retribution (remember all those sanctions against Big Tech which fell apart the moment Trump made even the slightest comment against them?) or… just about anything.

Laws are worth even less than the paper they're written on, and no amount of naïve idealism (and calling it that is me being generous!) will change that. NATO membership is worthless other than as an aesthetic signifier.

The EU aren't a member of NATO, so that's simply not true.

One non military but economical retaliation that would affect our industry is to stop respecting American’s intellectual property. Some variation of the trade bazooka. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Coercion_Instrument

> What does action (i.e. not-strongly-worded-letters, i.e. not words) look like?

Europe withdraws from the non-proliferation treaty, publicly resolves to building and maintaining a European nuclear deterrent and greenlights members who have been militarily threatened (the Baltics, Poland and Denmark) to start clandestine programmes.

The last part doesn't even have to happen. Hell, none of it has to happen. But that would be playing from strength.

Unfortunately, Europe is not politically unified enough to do this. (Same for Asia.)

There are much faster responses available.

For example France could gift or sell Denmark some nukes, possibly with a Rafale as a launch platform. Denmark would be an instant nuclear nation-state.

I'm not sure there is the political will though.

Isn't this comment just confirming GP's sentiment that the EU is a toothless sitting duck that's begging to be plundered? Yes, when another country threatens your sovereignty you're supposed to vigorously defend it through shows of force, prepare for war and possibly impose economic penalties on the aggressor. The most the EU can do is put out some mild condemnations on Twitter (without mentioning Daddy).

In EU, so far I believe only the PM of Spain had the backbone to speak properly with anything that could be considered "strongly worded", proving that it's possible.

The others have been variants of "Celebrating liberation of the Venezuelan people from the illegitimate dictator, a new dawn for democracy! (oh and everyone (not naming names) please behave and try to be mindful of international law and human rights from now on)"

Not a single word about the dead, for one.

While the NYTimes headline names France as critical, here's Macron (still only posting) on Twitter: https://xcancel.com/EmmanuelMacron/status/200752538697719404...

Meanwhile POTUS is over there talking literally and openly about how US are "going to run things" and motivating it with taking the oil and how they don't really care about democracy one way or other.

This has happened because the party that rules Spain has ties to the dictatorship.

This goes so far that one of the ministers of the government met in Spain with Delcy Rodriguez, bringing her a few briefcases of something that hasn't been explained yet, despite her being subject to a travel ban in the EU.

Of course this is a progressive government so the EU said absolutely nothing about it.

It’s really dumb I’m sitting at -2 and the top reply is about a Macron tweet from 2 days ago, lying and saying no one else from Europe has said anything, and lying and saying anything besides the King of Spain was actually celebrating. You’re making stuff up. Full stop. You could easily have googled either thing I mentioned. You didn’t, choosing to free associate instead. May you reap what you sow.

Given that the nukes topic came up ... Will the US/Trump be so aggressive if Denmark has a few nukes that can hit the US? Or at minimum sink a invading fleet?

These actions by Trump are only reinforcing that we will see even more of a push for everybody to get their own nukes, even in Europe.

People do not need to yell "bad trump", to have his actions result in decisions being pushed forward like this.

Theodore: "speak softly and carry a big stick"... and nuke(s) is a BIG stick.

I don't think anybody cares any bit about Maduro.

understandably, it's more about the acceleration in aggressiveness from Trump clan and the precedent of crossing the usual international red lines

Almost every country made some repudiation note. But I don't think we'll see anybody doing any actual thing because of that.

Canada has a strong army and can defend itself. Greenland on the other hand is not well defended and I doubt Denmark really cares (e.g., if they’re willing to send tens of thousands of troops to die for it) if it was occupied by China or Russia in the event of a war.

Greenland is a massive strategic liability for the US and Europe (although the EU still has its head in the sand they are starting to wake up some).

Frankly, the right move (before Trump did as Trump does, and fucked up our foreign relations) would have been to straight-up buy Greenland. The people of Greenland have the right under Danish law to vote for independence, and there's not that many of them. Paying individual people for the votes probably would have cost the US $10 billion, and then we could give them Puerto Rico-esque status.

Not sure why this got downvoted; we're threatening it again, credibly enough that the Danish PM is telling them to shut up.

Yesterday:

> Adding to the alarm, Katie Miller, a right-wing podcast host and the wife of Trump adviser Stephen Miller, posted an image of Greenland superimposed with the American flag and the caption "SOON!"

https://www.nbcnews.com/world/greenland/trump-venezuela-atta...

> Not sure why this got downvoted

Fragile egos. Narcissists desperately need to feel good about themselves. They're caught in a cycle: feel worthless -> do bad things (feed the ego) -> feel worthless.

It's not only downvoted, it was flagged, and dead. (flag accepted by moderator, no one else will see this comment thread without expanding)

Mr. Trump good.

Trump derangement syndrome bad.

If Mr. Trump does what you say eventually, then it was good. (see rule #1)

I see this frequently on HN since the re-election, won't speculate as to why: only way around the downvote is to criticize policy generically, untethered to time, with some sort of micro-focus like you're sharing new information about how things work, not discussing current events.

Of course, because this site is control of Mark Eggman Andrreesen.

> this site is control of Mark Eggman Andrreesen

You're mixing up your VCs?

Ill speculate as to why, paid astroturfers are posting it. Look at Twitter, most accounts that post that insane trump loving crap are in third world countries.

Probably just a coincidence that Garry Tan and Marc Andreseen have so publicly aligned themselves with a cabal of pedophiles.

Whose egos?

a16z.

Same reason this post got flagged and died.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46356858

wait whose a16z. Can you provide me more context about it?

Also what was written in that comment if you can tell and why it died?

Another quick question but is there no storage of flag/died posts on hackernews? Seems like its possible with things like https://hn.live/ or I saw some other website like this as well. Perhaps, something like this can store flag/dead posts but I am not really sure if it has any use case but I am just curious what was written in that post.

>is there no storage of flag/died posts on hackernews?

they're not deleted, just hidden. you can toggle "showdead" in your profile settings.

I'm curious. Are you saying that tech bros on this site will just downvote/flag stuff like that's against their "heroes", that would be pretty standard I guess. Or are you implying a conspiracy where somehow they exert influence on the moderators to kill the posts/comments?

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