541–550 of 604 posts
Why is this not on the front page anymore?? It has more upvotes and comments than anything else posted since it’s been posted 2 hours ago, and has been on the front page for an hour before disappearing Also go EU!
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At this point, I'd say terms rather than generations. I mean, I'm old enough to remember people saying "Never Forget" about 9/11, but it's barely in any discourse at this point, and that was a single generation ago and had two major wars a bunch of PoW scandals, war crime scandals that led to Manning, and domestic surveillance that led to Snowden. And yet, despite all that, I've only heard 9/11 mentioned exactly once…
There's how the people in general remember, and then there's how the politicians and the institutions remember. If nothing else, the changes in institutions will have effects reverberating for decades, with the most obvious institution being the military in each country that expected to fight a war under a NATO umbrella with an American general in charge. If I'm a German or French or Swedish officer, especially if I'…
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/find-the-story-going-around...
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/trouve-les-articles-de-pres...
This isn’t really about Greenland’s strategic value; it’s about the category error. You can trade goods, sign treaties, and negotiate basing rights. You can’t “buy” a people or their sovereignty especially when they don’t consent. That’s why Europe responds with process and principle: normalize coercion-as-bargaining among allies and you’re reviving a pre-1945 model of politics Europe built institutions to prevent. I…
The US has some grace here as most of the negative feelings towards it dies with it's government. You're going to pick better next time, right?
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You are talking about the US, the others do not.
I'm saying "never forget" fades. That's a human condition we all share. I mean, I live in Germany these days, and this country absolutely got the multi-generational thing, and I'm from the UK whose empire ditto, but… the UK doesn't spend much time thinking about the Falklands War and even less about the Cod Wars.
What you describe is called "to historicize an event". The WW1 has been historicized by WW2 (some argue it's the same war). But not even WW2 has been historicized yet (at least in Europe) and it already ended 80 years in the past, so I doubt an atlantic conflict is going to be forgotten in the next few decades.
Edit: I originally linked to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicization, but this does not describes what I mean. It is weird, because the supposed German equivalent does. The German article is about a concept from the science of history, while the English article is about a literature concept.
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Picking better next time won't be enough unless a lot of work is done to put in place safeguards to make it impossible for a future government to act the same way.
I think people should realize that, in a democracy, it is virtually impossible to put these safeguards in place if people at large don't want them. The reason Trump is able to get away with so much right now is because Congress is letting him. They could easily constrain his tariff powers, or his warmongering powers (they actually were close to doing that WRT Venezuela before some Republican Senators caved like a bun…
E.g.:
- no direct elections of a president with such broad powers.
- Separating the head of state and head of government, and split their powers.
- Proportional representation to reduce the chance of the largest party obtaining so much power alone.
- Not letting the president appoint supreme court justices.
- No presidential pardons; basically removing the chance of getting out of protections against legal sanctions after leaving office, and removing one of the strongest means of protecting loyalists.
The US isn't uniquely vulnerable, but it is a whole lot more vulnerable than governments in countries where the head of government is easier to replace and have fewer powers vested in their own personal mandate.
A direct election of a single powerful leader is also fundamentally creating a less democratic system - it reduces the influence of a huge minority of the electorate far below what their numbers justify.
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That or decades of picking better. Regardless, we are looking at a long time before the world doesn't look at our government in disgust (rightfully).
Indeed, but it might be many decades - once this lesson is first learned, it will take a long time to unlearn because it tends to become self-reinforcing. To give an illustration of how long institutional memory over things like this can be: As of when I went to primary school in Norway in the 1980's, we were still taught at length about the British blockade of Norway during the Napoleonic wars due to Denmark-Norway'…
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I'm saying "never forget" fades. That's a human condition we all share. I mean, I live in Germany these days, and this country absolutely got the multi-generational thing, and I'm from the UK whose empire ditto, but… the UK doesn't spend much time thinking about the Falklands War and even less about the Cod Wars.
Nobody disagreed with that it eventually fades, they were all saying it is going to take decades. The consequence of 9/11 of was mostly TSAs, following the USA into wars and the erosion of privacy at the mention of terrorism. The first and the last are still ongoing and I think the current US admin is still using the latter as a narrative, the second one may come at an end currently, because the USA is trying to use…
> so I doubt an atlantic conflict is going to be forgotten in the next few decades.
If it gets to one, yes. Was writing late at night, so sloppily, sorry about that.
Right now, I think we're not that far gone yet. Absolutely agree it becomes as you say if it becomes hot war. Not sure about which step between will be the drop that overflows the bucket.
People are saying withhold ozempic, and sure maybe. But what about the 38 TRILLION in US debt. I'm sure the Europeans could dump that on whatever sucker wants to hold it - forcing rates into the stratosphere.
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On the other hand, China sold off most of theirs and nobody even noticed. I think you're exaggerating both how much EU holds and the potential effects of them selling it.
Deutsche Bank made a statement recently that Europe holds about double what the rest of the world does combined in US bonds and equity.