Statement by Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, UK

> I am more than willing to listen. You seem to be the one who ignores words.

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.

describe the J6 crowd, who are your civilians acting as enforcers and intimidators.

I could also add:

  The SS came afterwords.

Today is 5 years later than J6.

> 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.

The energy needed to get something up to speed is not really relevant to what happens when the thing hits a person unless the person cannot move.

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.

> The US could take Greenland by force tomorrow and the EU response would be a poetry recital.

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.

> 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.

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.

The rest of us doing nothing is a direct signal to Russia to Blitzkrieg Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and as much of Poland as it can, and to know that "as much as it can" is as far as the tanks roll without refuelling.

Doing nothing about you invading our land, means our own death.

> 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.

Any attack you make on us, your treaty-bound allies, causes whatever treaties you sign with anyone anywhere in the world to be not worth the paper they're written on. China and Russia will immediately know this. Everyone will. Nobody will trust you.

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.

Actually the european car comes to the show floor with VAT already paid by the store selling the car. VAT is end user tax, it's paid by last one in the chain. So it's only after the shop sells the car when they get the VAT back from the sale (and they get back only what VAT they paid before).