Sorry Catherine, you need to learn how to do your job without having everyone’s personal lives, private conversations and private details indexed at your fingertips in some government database. And she’s Belgian, like the guys who proposed chat control the last time around. What the hell is going on with Belgium trying to turn the EU into a surveillance state? Could you guys please not ?

I’m really not worried. Elon and Trump are about as in tune with European culture as they are with common sense. The only reason AfD is taking them on their support is because it’s any support at all. They have shown repeatedly, like most American CEOs who decide to come to Europe thinking it’s a slighly different America, thus same rules apply, that they fundamentally don’t understand anything about the EU. Not the laws, not the cultures, not the way of thinking.

It’s not even because Europe is obscure or difficult to understand. It’s this American CEO arrogance, thinking their way of doing things in America is the only way, the best way and all us lowly peasant non Americans of the world just have to look up and let the rays of American perfection and exceptionalism bathe our inferior barbaric ways of life. You know, right before they crash and burn and their companies don’t work.

As far as i know, those nukes weren’t able to be deployed without the soviet codes. Soviets maintained control both of the launch sequence and operational control. At most, Ukranians could have used parts of them. At the time Ukraine disarmed they had no nuclear program in place to produce more or retrofit the existing nukes to new launch methods. They would have had to start from scratch. It also painted a target on their backs that at the time nobody could have done anything about to protect them. I cannot imagine a better outcome for Ukraine in the present had they chose to keep the non functioning nukes. Russia was going to come for them had they not given them and Ukraine was coming to terms with its own independence happening just 4 years earlier.

So yeah, disarming in this specific situation was the only choice at that time for Ukraine. You can’t just grab another country’s nukes and use them. They are made specifically so you can’t do that, so that they can be deployed in allied countries without significant danger to the manufacturing country.

Well, they’re both evil in some ways but one of them has killed way more children than the other. Like way, way, way more children. So many children in so many ways. Some with bombs, some with hidden explosives, some with snipers.

The title doesn’t accurately describe what was said. Greenland is still not for sale, Trump will still not be able to bid on Greenland, but they are open to let the US build bases, mines and trade ports or whatever it needs (while paying the Danes, of course) and leave them alone, which is probably what was going to happen anyway.

It remains duly noted to all Europeans that a US president elect threatened a European ally with a military invasion, and that is something that all Europeans should keep front and center whenever we think of the US.

I personally also suggest KeePass2 for an offline vault storage that you can use with Syncthing to synchronize so the data never leaves your devices.

It’s worth mentioning that both these programs are subject to leaks in machines infected with malware like OP’s was, so maybe if malware is a problem you deal with regularly, i suggest the online options.

I really doubt any sort of US action could lead to the EU fracturing.

If anything, having to deal with the US has brought us closer together. On one side there’s Trump making a fool of himself and of the US. On the other side there’s Musk, thinking he can take on European unions and actually win, because he thinks he’s still in the US, and in the middle there’s what i like to call the sheep pen of tech companies. We shear their wool for fines on privacy violations every couple of months to fund our regulatory organs.

Russia is currently returning Ukranian POWs with organs harvested, so they are funding the war with organs. Nobody is denying that they’re not saving lives (what else are you going to do with organs?), the problem is, can the process be verified accurately enough to prevent criminal harvesting of organs ?

During a war, things are hectic. Hectic enough that if there are rogue members harvesting organs, claiming they’re doing on official orders, but much later are found out to be acting on their own accounts, they are not detected and acted on promptly. Even if everyone sees it, who will question it ? Even during peace times in highly regulated countries, doctors still go on for a long time doing things they’re not supposed to before being caught. By then several innocents have suffered. Where is a country with severe lack of manpower for war going to find more manpower to run an organ tracing and verification committee?

Additionally, Russians are currently running a disinformation campaign against Ukranians saying that certain Ukranian officials are involved in an organ harvesting scheme, which allegedly Ukraine wants to stamp out doubts through legislation.

Personally I’m against this. I don’t think there are enough mechanisms to prevent abuse and the potential for harm is immense. I wouldn’t even trust a country with less corruption issues on this, and Ukraine has considerable corruption issues. Organ donating is fine, but war is not the time for it.

Isn’t the law applied independently from the government by the courts in Poland ? If so, then wouldn’t the arrest be up to the judges, rather than whatever the president or government says ?

In one fell swoop the US would be dismembering itself from its most important geopolitical allies and secondary trade partners. There is absolutely no win here for the US unless NATO balks at US intimidation and decides to let Greenland go without a military response, which would open the door for more US bullying for lunch money. NATO must resist with force. Greenland is not worth the consequences, no matter how many minerals or shipping routes control there are in it. I suspect Trump will try the intimidation to the last moment possible, but i have big doubts that he will actually invade or be allowed to invade and intimidation never worked well against Europeans.

Here’s the problem when you say that in a war. You’re alive, you’re an enemy combatant and/or civilian, you are now dead, victim of a tragic mishap or some sort, and your lungs are still viable, cut the fuck out and sold to fund the war. If you were lucky, there was still anesthesia left.

It’s a terrible proposition to even consider accepting transplants from warzones. It’s begging for warcrimes. Even if the state says harvesting from live people is illegal, it’s a war. A lot falls under the cracks.

Honestly in political terms saying you’ll join at some undefined point in the future is not saying anything. That will be an entire new government who may or may not agree with it. Besides like another commenter said, everything about the EU is negotiable.

I was thinking maybe the problems with Canada would be more in matters of regulation voting, not so much wars or foreign policy. Canada has a different mindset, not exactly like Americans but in the same thought space, possibly due to their shared origins as an European colony with a vast continent to expand to and also because of US influence. Canadians just don’t like restrictive regulations. One could argue that equally as important as avoidance of wars and directly correlated is the regulation of commerce, seeing as the EU officially started as a coal and steel regulatory trade international organ. I imagine such a large body of population would clash with certain regulations we have in the EU, but nothing that couldn’t be worked out.

But organizations like the EU live and die on trade and that’s why i ultimately i don’t see why Canada should try for the EU, despite me thinking they would be welcome. It’s why i think the commonwealth is kind of useless nowadays as an economic tool. Their primary body of trade is the Americas, with Asia and Europe being secondary markets. Too bad the US is too far up its own back to cooperate with anyone without ruining it with greed. In an equal partnership of open borders and free trade, US, Mexico and Canada would be huge.

Poland, Sweden and the Czech Republic don’t use the Euro. It’s really not mandatory, but it’s beneficial to all countries at comparable economic development level. I think Portugal, Spain, Ireland, Greece and perhaps Italy would have benefitted from using their own currencies for a while longer. The minimum wage on some of those countries is incredibly low and the goods prices too high for the Euro. This is not the case with Poland, for instance, where goods are cheaper.

The biggest issue with Canada is population, same as Ukraine and Turkey as of this moment. The EU is scared that adding a member state that has a population size comparable to the bigger states already within will create a power imbalance. This issue is getting more problematic as time goes on since our population is currently shrinking. If the EU takes in Ukraine, they will probably balk at adding a state as big as Canada anytime soon.

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Head of health insurance company thinks he should be paid more by pushing policies that make his shareholders more money, but make life worse for everyone else, proving once more that health insurance companies are a fucking cancer on society that needs to be removed before it metastasizes and takes down the worker’s class. See this is why murderers go after these guys and it’s a popular thing.

Paratroopers are special forces, no ? My bet would be on the 2 paratroopers vs the 14 Russian regulars. Special forces train every day for all sorts of combat scenarios and they work out more than the average soldier. If you’ve seen a bar fight with a SF soldier in it, you’d see how irrelevant it is that they’re 14 up close.

I disagree that it’s similar. In the US, despiee the congress passing laws or not, which affects the general bulk of the legislative process, the president is a figure of extreme power. As demonstrated even recently, the president is free to pass executive orders bypassing congress (which Trump did 220 times in one mandate) and bypass the legal system by unilaterally forgiving people who have been convicted of crimes (which Biden used to bail out his own son) and appointing supreme court judges and heads of critical regulatory state organizations unilaterally without approval of congress (which makes the agencies like the fda, ftc, epa and usda essentially toothless and ineffective at carrying out their functions properly). This is no small power. You can trade off on massive quid-pro-quo on that. He CAN do it not because the party he leads is brainless and are unable to argue, but because they stand to massively gain on his decisions if they support him. Why ? Because the US president has a ridiculously disproportionate amount of power focused on one single person and the US people simply have to suck it up. What are you going to do, vote for the OTHER corrupt party ?

No position of the European hierarchy has even close to the amount of power the US president has over that many people. No one in the EU can unilaterally appoint heads of the European Court of Justice or regulatory organs, no one in the EU can say a convicted felon at the ECJ level now walks free because he’s the son of the president or the friend of the president. Nothing in the US works remotely similar. The US structure is, imho, made in such a way that it’s liable to incur severe corruption, a fact that is not only public knowledge, but lately both parties even overtly flaunt how much they can bend the rules to their personal gain and nobody is even doing anything. Look at Biden, look at Trump. It’s a travesty.

The funny thing about Elon’s and Trump’s strategy is that they still don’t understand the EU. Back during his first mandate Trump tried to get special deals with Angela Merkel and Angela Merkel told him no special deals, that’s not how the EU works. Trump’s weakness is apparently not being able to find the person or group of people in power and attempt a deal with them. He doesn’t understand how a union of countries can work where there are 27 governments needing to agree. He thinks someone must be the top dog and he needs to find them. Clearly he thinks it’s Germany (sorry France, most of us do too, cause at least they’re not French).

Now from what seems to be the case, they seem to be trying to change Germany so it becomes more pliable to their interests so they can manipulate the EU, but that’s still not how the EU works. Are they going to go around the EU trying to get at least 15 member states by propping up populist parties one by one ? If that’s the case, Russia has been doing that for ages. Several communist fringe parties receive money all across Europe. It also does not work.

Besides, there aren’t enough american favors or money to pull this off, people already hate Trump and Elon around here and it’s so overt that by the time they get to the 7th or 8th country all resolutions from suspected countries will just be vetoed. It’s a stupid idea from a country with an abundance of money for stupid ideas. Or maybe it’s 11D string theory chess that i don’t understand.

Your will will be enforced until such a time comes where nobody really cares anymore and the trust you set up ran out of money. Probably around the time when there’s no one alive that met you personally. I’m sure a lot of Romans and Egyptians, emperors, empresses, kings and queens had wills too. Even the pharaos had their graves dug up and put in a museum for everyone to see. Just embrace it, you’ll be gone, off to a merry afterlife or the quiet obliviousness of non existence. Why worry so much about bones.