Right. Anyone who thinks this is not a real threat is sadly deluded.
However, if you think through the scenarios, the US is in a very strong military position and there's not much Denmark or the EU as a whole would be able to do about it. They could threaten a direct military response, on the basis of making the annexation more trouble than it's worth, but then you're just playing chicken with a significantly crazier enemy.
Most likely the EU would try to calm the waters, and offer a compromise peace / surrender plan along the lines of the one the US has offered Russia in Ukraine.
The biggest obstacle ought to be political opposition and public protests within the US itself, but right now the US government is in a position to just move fast and make things happen, what with the weak Congress and compliant Supreme Court.
I hope and believe it'll become much less likely after the midterms, with a Democrat-led Congress motivated to push back against the executive's excesses.
It would start off with a complete boycott of anything US made and that will result in a lot of irreversible damage.
This is a path to madness and I'm really surprised that there are no saner heads in the US putting a stop to this before it gets even further out of control. I'm even more surprised at how many people in the US support this, either tacitly or even outright.
A number of European countries have PUBLICLY come out to say they are suspending cooperation on a number of different fronts. You can only imagine what it’s like in private.
We’re entering a multipolar world. That means more border wars, not less. Everything I’ve seen indicates more demand for American military and intelligence sharing, not less, despite the paradox therein.
Just general EU political news, I remember the UK not sharing some intelligence in Trump 1. I presume that a lot more of that happens behind the scenes.
I totally take your point around border wars, but I would expect to see substantial efforts to reduce the need for US intelligence, given the caprice shown by the current administration.
Possibly it was, though I don't think Elon Musk is an ideologue in the Project2025 sense. Rather, he saw an opportunity to "solve government" and bought an election to do so, and then it didn't turn out the way things he wanted (turns out "solving government" is not a technical problem to be fixed by bringing in a bunch of Monster-fueled trigger-happy coders).
If it was his goal, it doesn't make much sense as to why -- it doesn't advance Elon's other stated goals in any way.
Right. I don’t know why people call nazis socialists just because they supported a state led by government, socialized government program take over like healthcare and education and production, and they have socialist in their name.
I can see how it is easy to confuse by let’s be reasonable. The nazis could not have been socialist because that would mean a corruption one time of a system that is based on ideals.
No they didn’t, they were the prevailing socialist party. They imprisoned party members who didn’t play ball with them but they were the socialist.
How could you not know the Nazi’s were socialists? That was their whole thing, socialism would only work in a culturally/ethnically homogeneous society
> He's connected with liberation theology, which is what the KGB was promoting in Catholic countries to recruit for militant groups. [...] I think the Soviets actually claim to have invented liberation theology, but who knows.
Any reputable sources for these claims? Sounds like American Cold War propaganda.
Some of their activities are described in this interview [0]. The claims come from 2015 not from the Cold War. And they're from a communist intelligence defector, not America.
There's no shortage of interviews from former intelligence people talking about Cold War era South America and much of it is well known. The basic gist is it was before modern ICBMs, the USSR wanted nuclear missiles close to the US and they wanted military bases there. This is where the FARC, Fidel Castro, Che Guevera etc all come from. And famously it's what led to the Cuban Missile Crisis and Bay of Pigs Invasion. A lot of this can best be understood in the context of what ideas the Soviets were promoting in other parts of the world, like revolutionary Islam.
There are also many essays on the connections between Marxism and liberation theology, many (maybe most?) of them written by liberation theology proponents during the Cold War years.
Some of the claims made in the interview
> On October 26, 1959, Sakharovsky and his new boss, Nikita Khrushchev, came to Romania for what would become known as "Khrushchev's six-day vacation." He had never taken such a long vacation abroad, nor was his stay in Romania really a vacation. Khrushchev wanted to go down in history as the Soviet leader who had exported communism to Central and South America. Romania was the only Latin country in the Soviet bloc, and Khrushchev wanted to enroll her "Latin leaders" in his new "liberation" war.
> The movement was born in the KGB, and it had a KGB-invented name: Liberation Theology.... The birth of Liberation Theology was the intent of a 1960 super-secret "Party-State Dezinformatsiya Program" approved by Aleksandr Shelepin, the chairman of the KGB, and by Politburo member Aleksey Kirichenko, who coordinated the Communist Party's international policies. This program demanded that the KGB take secret control of the World Council of Churches (WCC), based in Geneva, Switzerland, and use it as cover for converting Liberation Theology into a South American revolutionary tool. The WCC was the largest international ecumenical organization after the Vatican, representing some 550 million Christians of various denominations throughout 120 countries.
and so on.
There are lots of details you can check out and try to fact check. But it would be a research project and my guess would be hardly any of the classified information is public now. As a general rule, we get books and interviews from defectors and former intelligence officers, but they're based on first-hand recollection and contemporaneous notes backed by still-classified information.
So it's up to you to decide how much weight to give the various pieces of evidence. But certainly what he says in the interview is consistent with how the KGB operates. But we can't know things like whether he was lied to by the KGB at the time, or whether he's misremembering facts, or whether he's embellishing here or there.
> Migraine can even drive full-blown visual hallucinations similar to the ‘reflections of the living light’ painted by Hildegard von Bingen, a twelfth-century abbess who was thought to have experienced a condition that is now called migraine with aura.
I don't think the aura effects are usually considered hallucinations?
I get mild migraines sometimes, with hardly noticeable headache, but with aura. In a way, it's pretty cool. You can directly perceive the abnormal brain activity and how it develops in real time. (I get the classic zigzag lines wandering across the field of vision.)
I also have migraine with aura. There are visual effects but also when I am looking into the mirror I can't see half of my face and give this is a wrong perception of reality you might consider it a hallucination?
Same, the fortification aura is really kind of amazing, putting aside the debilitating pain that's quickly approaching. It's really weird to have a part of your vision just "not there" as opposed to being black. It's even stranger when looking at a face or some recognizable object, and half of it disappears into nothingness while the other half still exists. Fun to play with.
the first time i had this, everyone's nose was missing. for ten seconds it was funny and then i hid in a bathroom stall at work, and texted my wife goodbye. i was positive i was about to die. its really stressful to have bodies.
I happen to be a man who gets migraines with aura, but I do think they’re more common in women. They started when I was 14.
I get visual issues like tunnel vision and sparklies, but I also get numbness in my face and extremities, confuse my words (right parts of speech, not what I intend to say), and often vomit.
Needless to say, the first one scared the crap out of my mother and I.
I may or may not have a headache when this happens.
Neat, eh? I was talking to a guy who suffered from seizures in college, and apparently his “aura” is very similar, and I've always wondered if there was some connection since my father also suffers from epilepsy.
> I get visual issues like tunnel vision and sparklies, but I also get numbness in my face and extremities, confuse my words (right parts of speech, not what I intend to say), and often vomit.
I’ve experienced migraines for years, but last year had my first instance that messed with speech. It certainly unsettled the friend I was with at the time.
Migraines and epilepsy have a lot in common, including some symptoms and triggers. Drugs and things that lower seizure threshold also tend to cause migraines. Some epilepsy drugs also act as migraine prophylactics.
I'm male and I get visual auras with migraines (not often, only once or twice a year). It's like a small area of old TV static or (as I call them) "dead pixels" in my vision. It's usually centered right in the middle of my vision, so reading becomes impossible but I could do something else.
It usually spreads a little bit before dissipating. They can happen with or before the actual migraine pain.
I sometimes but not always get an aura before a migraine.
Which was pretty fun the first time i got an aura, as i was working in a chemistry lab. I described what was happening (loss of vision, flashes of light, rapidly oscillating black and white patterns) to this greybeard lab technician and within 5 minutes the entire lab was evacuated, out of fear of some weird chemical poisoning us all.
Y Combinator is mostly ideologically aligned with Musk and the Trump administration.
If you don't believe me, look through the tweets of Garry Tan, for example.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g0zg974v1o
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