Yet no developed country with high taxation on high income earners and women in the workforce has ever managed to even come close to the success the US had back then. Something you see, for instance, in several wealthy European countries. No, that’s not why. They had an entire continent of developed but destroyed countries paying off humongous loans under the Marshall’s plan and similar investments thereafter.

Yeah it’s true but they also always kinda sucked militarily. Today, they’re struggling against Ukraine. Their peak was during cold war soviet era and even then, they got their ass handed to them by the Mujahideen, which is seen as the event that broke them up. In ww2 they struggled against Finland and just barely made it out of their fight with Germany still a country. Only because the nazis were too confident and got into a two front war. In ww1 the eastern front was basically Russia stacking up defeats. Before that they got their ass kicked by Japan. In Napoleonic times, France handed Russia several defeats, even with other countries helping it. In pre Napoleonic times, again, just Russian defeat after Russian defeat.

It’s just a matter of fact that for as long as Russia has existed, they have always been a big unmaterialized threat. Even far back in the congress of Vienna in 1814 everyone was already assuming Russia was going to industrialize and how powerful Russia will become and in the end… nothing.

I seriously don’t think Europe needs even half of what the US has, even to face Russia. Nobody does, US military expenditure is ridiculous. I also think Russia is only still a country because no country in history ever wanted to occupy undeveloped tundra. Even the mongols only sorta occupied it by asking them for tribute and leaving them mostly alone.

Should Europe become complacent ? No, but seriously all Europe needs is a half decent unified army and a cooperating industral military complex for domestic use to go with it and i don’t really think Russia will ever be that big of a threat.

Hard disagree that we’re better off with relations restored. Even if Trump was not in the white house, the current internal political situation in the US is a powder keg ripe for abuse.

The US helped Europe in post war but it made enormous amounts of money with it. Why do you think in the 50s and onward Americans had a massive a massive golden age of prosperity where you could support a full household on a highschool diploma which led to a massive baby boom ? It was all piggybacking on the massive loans Europe took to rebuild itself.

Did they have to do it ? No, but if you know anything about Americans is that they love money. They didn’t do it out of the kindness of their hearts or because they feel Europe is such an important ally, they did it purely and exclusively for money. They wanted money and Europe could give it. When matters of money align, and we both stand to profit, no issues there - we should cooperate with Americans. But make no mistake, everything the US does is for its own benefit and nobody else’s and if they don’t stand to gain anything from cooperating, they will throw their allies under the bus first chance. Americans must be kept at arms length at all times.

They are not European allies, they have never been European allies, we just stood to gain together in the past. It was profit, pure and simple.

Holy fucking smokes. This was without a doubt the cringiest, most uncomfortable display of lack of professionalism and pure second-hand embarassment I’ve ever seen from a president and a vice president.

I have so much respect for Zelensky for putting up with that. What an absolute circus. Americans were made to look so feeble and insecure.

Romania denies any corruption, but assures the Tates pinky swear that they will come back to spend 15-20 years in jail, no problem. Our Romanian police correspondent could not provide more details as he said he had to go to the bank before closing time to make a deposit.

Gonna be honest, i haven’t agreed with that in 20 years, on account that the US can and will fuck over any ally it has if that has the slightest marginal gain for them. Any time the wind blows a different way, the US will throw all their allies under the bus. They are a greedy nation and poor allies.

They’ve spied on the EU, they applied tariffs on the EU, they have threatened the EU with invasion after we helped them in their fruitless war in the middle east and had to deal with the migrant crises that resulted from it basically alone ? Now we have to deal with meddling in democratic elections? Never again, i say. We go at it alone, we trade, but that’s it.

My theory is the following, i think what saved the US from being stuck on cold war propaganda was the internet. For a long time the US was truly great. It was a steadfast ally, a reliable trade partner and it helped rebuild the EU post WW2. It had railroads everywhere, cable cars everywhere, struggled and won against prohibition and oligarchs, treading ground on worker’s rights and rights of minorities.

Then the cold war came and things went seriously downhill. Because of the cold war a lot of things were done in secret and a lot was invested in propaganda. Corporations were allowed to do many things in secret. People in the US were told they were the best at everything and everyone else sucked. They never heard what the world really did think of them, only here and there by immigrants, who were seen as an inferior class anyway.

Then the internet came and finally the US heard what the world thinks of them and boy, it wasn’t pretty. Took a while too, many places didn’t have the infrastructure ready. The world wasn’t happy, the US had been doing very bad things in secret and so, US people finally saw what their country leaders had been doing.

The US isn’t a hopeless case but the US is at war with itself. A war that started in the 1800s and still rages on against an oligarch class that managed to inflitrate itself within the higher echelons of the government. Who took their railways away and their cable cars. Who took their days off and their workers rights and in some cases, even took away their right to strike (like the railroad workers).

They can’t vote their way out of this, both parties are deeply corrupt. The ones that could stop it, the regulatory agencies, are currently being gutted out. Now is a critical time for the US to change and make regulatory organs apolitical and independent from the executive branch. What is done now will define if the US will become an oligarchic dystopia or will return to its roots. I believe the destruction caused by Trump will invariably lead to the demise of the oligarchy, for oligarchy persists in denial and secret and what Trump is doing is reckless and obvious. But a time of shame has come to the US for what has been done.

Once people in the US realize that the bipartisan struggle is an artificial struggle and that no president is coming to save them, republican or democrat, hopefully protests will spring up everywhere and when they start, real meaninful change can appear. Every American knows the establishment is everywhere. Every American knows they’re in a class war.

Every American wants to fight it, but the Republicans say Democrats are the establishment and the Democrats say Republicans are the establishment. To overcome this both Republicans and Democrats must recognize they are fighting the same enemy and it’s not each other. The republican party and the democrat party are both artificial constructs of many political views that don’t translate to anything in the real world of politics. They’re amalgamations of parties that have differing political views who might win elections but won’t effect meaningful change on account of that. It serves the interest of the oligarchs that no matter which party wins, they win.

The guy is a jackass and a narcissist of the highest order, but apparently, the couple didn’t do the donation through the proper available legal channels, which legally doesn’t clarify him as a donor. The article says

Both women supported naming Albon. The non-biological mother said the world needed to know the risks associated with unregulated sperm donation, calling the two-year court battle a “nightmare” and a “horror story”.

The world knows. It’s why most people don’t have unregulated donor children, because this can happen. It’s why you pay the legal fees for private donors or the premium price of fertility clinic spunk. I don’t wanna victim blame here or anything, but getting a random to donate sperm off the internet carries this exact risk and it was a very obvious oversight. What they saved in upfront money came back to haunt them and even broke down their relationship. It’s a very sad story all around.

“He [Trump] thinks about investments and money before thinking about a person’s right to a decent life, before he thinks about the tortured, orphaned, and wounded children of Gaza.”

Classic American way of thinking. They even do this to themselves, making a social system that puts money above happiness for everyone involved, for when people are unhappy, they consume things, services and medicines they don’t need compulsively. We see this in rats in the famous rat park experiment. Happy rats are moderate consumers. Miserable rats are desperate consumers of anything.

Even billionaires live unhappy miserable lives, doing drugs and constantly competing over the new thing even at the cost of their own peace of mind over clout and mindless pursuit of a bigger number that largely lacks any meaning to them anymore. They hop on the grindset and they become the grindset, unable to be anything else anymore. The free market needs guard rails or it consumes the consumer base on which it depends to live. Gaza being sold for profit represents the loss of guard rails at a state level.

I would prefer if Germany stopped exporting weapons to Israel asap and that Germany makes good on what those ministers both said. I would also be happy if anti genocide peaceful protests were not acted against.

I would say he’s right if he meant Germany would move past it’s Nazi guilt, stop funding a goddamn present day genocide and arrest the perpetrators of the currently ongoing one, like the ICC has told them to do.

Can you imagine, Germany standing against genocide one of these days ? That would be a grand step forward.

The reaction to these things is always too slow but this has irreversibly damaged the image of Israel, the US and Germany for the times to come in ways we’re yet to fully understand. Unfortunately these events have also changed how people see the Jewish faith and it wouldn’t surprise me if that triggered a major change in it. Nothing is without consequences.

Also violating their own anti genocide agreements by supporting Israeli proven genocide by several third parties at this point. I guess it’s rules based approach when it’s convenient and when it’s not, we’ll just ignore those rules.

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.

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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.

At some point someone will stop paying for the cemetery plot and that plot will go to somebody else, usually 50 years after the person is dead and all their direct relatives don’t care anymore. The old bones are buried deeper or cremated and the grave stones will be recycled. Corpses don’t become permanent owners of cemetery land. Maybe in some honorary great war cemetery as a recognition of the sacrifices, but not as a norm. They’re leased for the purposes of decomposition.

Some families can buy mausoleums, which are like little houses on the cemetery, where they end up keeping all the bones of several people all piled up in jars after the bodies are decomposed, but these mausoleums have to be paid for by someone who is alive and at some point there are no descendants or the descendants are too poor to pay or don’t care to pay thousands of euros every so often for the plot and maintenance dues on dead people, so they are torn down and the bones put into the deeper parts of the cemetery with everyone else, where, depending on the soil, it takes between 30-50 years to decompose the bones, provided the cemetery is built on appropriate decomposing ground, but sometimes over 100 if the soil is not appropriate for a cemetery.

Any attack or occupation of a country member of the NATO treaty may trigger an article 5 declaration to which all NATO member countries are forced to answer or risk the breakdown of the NATO treaty alliance. Denmark is a NATO country. If Trump decides to pull an Israel, he risks a loss of military, geopolitical and trade allies, as well as a possible war and perhaps even the support of his constituency. If the US tried, it would be like chopping both of its legs and then one of the arms. The downspiral would be catastrophic.

Fat chance the Trump wranglers would let it get that far. He’s a useful idiot but his powers aren’t unlimited and i like to believe the people who actually govern the US aren’t complete idiots. Greedy, inhumane, arrogant, ignorant, cruel and warmongering monsters, yes, but not complete idiots.

And it’s still crazy that the irony has not dawned on Germany. They wanted so bad to avoid being seen as evil they ended up supporting the very evil they are running away from.