I’m god times infinity! (Infinity factorial.)

Well I declare myself One-above-god + 1! You are inferior deity!

The US has given up captured territories before. Including the Panama Canal Zone, the Philippines, Cuba, and others.

How many children in the 1980s were acutely aware of Trump? I imagine very few. You’re talking about people who were in their twenties and older in the 1980s. And if you were 25 in 1984, you were 65 in 2024. A lot of the electorate is simply too young to remember Trump in his 1980s incarnation. And while older voters do vote at higher rates, the difference is massively overblown.

Abduct him and put him on trial in a European country. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

I consider this trope to be cover for Trump. Evil people are perfectly capable of multiple evils.

If they had any balls at all, potential Democratic hopefuls for 2028 should be announcing now,

“If Trump takes Greenland or any other country’s land, I’ll give it back immediately if elected.”

Have you petitioned your government to send MANPADS and other concealable, man-portable weaponry to groups in the US?

Because that’s realistically what it would take. The US and NATO countries started helping Ukraine it its fight by sending in these types of man-portable weapons, drones, etc. They’re they type of thing that’s small enough to be snuck over a border in large numbers. And they’re the types of weaponry that could actually allow militia groups in the US, armed with civilian weaponry, to plausibly resist the military in any real capacity. Of course, the only source for this type of weaponry is other nation states.

Realistically, any rebellion would need extensive foreign support. Just like every other rebellion/insurrection that’s happened over the last century or more.

So, I ask again, how many letters, emails, and phone calls have you made to your leaders, encouraging them to send military grade weaponry to US resistance groups?

The US military will be defeated financially, not on the battlefield. In the end, the US empire is collapsing for the same reason every other empire in history has collapsed. Ultimately they are not financially sustainable. When you build your whole economic model on continued expansion and exploitation, the whole thing collapses once you reach hard limits and can no longer expand.

The US is great at invading other countries

Be careful. The US actually is fantastic at invading other countries. At least we’re really good at the “bomb the existing regime to hell and topple it” part of the process. We’re great at invading other countries; we’re just not so good at running them after.

But this is the type of invasion the US actually is pretty good at. The US isn’t proposing taking invading and then hoping to set up an independent democracy that for some reason remains our friend. That’s what we tried in Iraq, and it failed because you can’t just impose your will on a foreign population. You can’t make someone love you. You can’t make a nation willingly adopt your style of government.

But invading Greenland? This isn’t a Middle East misadventure, invading a highly populated country. This is the US coming to a territory and saying, “this is ours now.” This means a few things.

First, winning hearts and minds doesn’t matter. Once annexed and legally part of the US, if they try to break away, they’re not just insurgents, they’re rebels. Look at General Sherman for how the US has treated rebel territories. In Iraq, the theme was always, “at the end of the day, we’re not going to be running this place, we need the Iraqis to be able to run it, hopefully without hating our guts.” With Greenland, the theme would be, “we’re here for the land and resources. This is US territory now. If some Americans want to secede from the rest of America, well we know historically how to handle that…”

Second, do you know why Greenland’s mining resources are so underdeveloped? It’s because there are only 56,000 Greenlanders. If they wanted to seriously open up their mining resources, they would have to bring in outside companies to really develop them. And this would require bringing in large numbers of foreign workers, mining experts, their families, etc. Realistically, the existing Greenlander population would likely become a minority group. Hell, the existing number of Greenlanders is so small, a rebellion could likely be dealt with by the US criminal justice system, the military wouldn’t even be required.

The annexation of Greenland would look nothing like the invasion of Iraq or even a hypothetical annexation of Canada or Mexico. Making the territory a US state would mean any American citizen could move there. Any company could bring in workers to start exploiting mining claims. It would look more like the annexation of Texas. (Where the US had thousands of US citizens illegally move to the sparsely populated territory, and then push for annexation.) And if there was any kind insurgency, the US would treat it far harsher than it did the insurgencies of Iraq or Afghanistan.

That’s not to say this would be a good thing, it wouldn’t. In many ways it would be much worse than the invasion of Iraq. It would be far more brutal and would result in the existing Greenlanders becoming a small ethnic minority in what is now their own country. And any insurgency would be brutally repressed in the manner of the US Civil War. And while insurgencies can pull off wonders, scale still matters. Whatever tiny insurgency a group of 56,000 people, people completely dependent on imported food and goods, can manage to produce? That is not something that can credibly stand up to the US military. Hell, it couldn’t even stand up to the FBI. They could raise some heroic 5,000 man rebel force, and the US could just have them all arrested.

At the end of the day, 56,000 people cannot resist the might of 330 million. Smaller nations can drive out larger foreign invaders, but only if they’re at least of a similar order of magnitude of population. Ukraine can plausibly fight off Russia. A tiny city state can’t.

We should just ship all the religious crazies from every country off to go live in Antarctica. Don’t worry, their gods will protect them.

Seriously. It’s criminal to not include a summary in a case like that.

The truth is that the strength of a democracy has little relation to the birth rate. If you live in the US, for example, you only live in a democracy if your income is in the top 10%. This has actually been studied. The opinions of the poorest 90% of the population have absolutely zero bearing on what government policy is implemented.

The US and China actually have similar levels of democracy. China forms all its policies from the CCP, an organization of about 100 million people. The share of the population in China that has any impact on policy is actually quite similar to the share that does the same in the US.

In the US, we just call our social credit scores credit scores.

Most malls ban unaccompanied minors. And most places where kids used to hang out similarly discourage their presence. The death of third places is a well-documented phenomenon, one that goes back decades before anyone dreamed of social media. And while kids have been forming their own communities since the dawn of time, kids haven’t been raised in suburban hellscapes since the dawn of time. If you can’t drive. If there’s no way to your neighorhood except a giant highway that’s impossible to bike on, how in the hell are kids supposed to meet up with each other in person? Digital technologies are really the only way kids have to socialize nowadays. We’ve taken everything else from them.

These laws are written deliberately broad to enable mass censorship. They don’t just ban sexual material, but use vague statements like “objectionable material.” Actual real-world news is being censored and kept from the eyes of teenagers. Pretty much anything on the Gaza war is considered objectionable material and inappropriate for children to learn about.

Nah. It’s not an age issue. It’s a social media issue. This stuff is bad for everyone. If you want to protect kids from the dangers of social media, start regulating how social media works for everyone. Why is it ok to start poisoning someone’s mind the minute they turn 18?

Yes. The societal level solution is the parents of the society choosing to do their jobs.

And the suicide rate of queer and other marginalized kids will skyrocket. What’s a few thousand dead kids in the name of protecting the children, right?

No you ass. What do you want, for the parents to hover over their kids 24/7? There’s is no realistic way even the most well-intentioned parent could ever keep their kids off this stuff.

My parents had a two hour per day limit on using the computer. The one exception was if we were using it to do homework.

You’re just not very imaginative.