6 ms·
Why are Americans letting their country go rogue internationally and risk going to war with Europe, Canada, or South America?
by baby 9mo ago
Why are Americans letting their country go rogue internationally and risk going to war with Europe, Canada, or South America?
- vkou 9mo agoBecause they voted a Republican congress due to egg price anxieties.
- nemomarx 9mo agoIf you can think of a good way to stop it happening before the midterms, I'm all ears.
- saubeidl 9mo agoYou could do as the Ukrainians did for a start : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euromaidan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euromaidan
- cmxch 9mo agoKind of hard to pull off in a country that helped orchestrate it and with a lot more people to defend the status quo.
- JasonADrury 9mo ago[flagged]
- boplicity 9mo agoNO. Just no.
- JasonADrury 9mo agoWhy not? We're presumably accepting the premise that the country is going to "go rogue internationally and risk going to war with Europe, Canada, or South America?". Would it similarly have been a horrible thing in your mind if someone had shot Vladimir Putin in January 2014?
- hackable_sand 9mo agoAmericans don't live in Russia. How does that comparison even make sense?
- JasonADrury 9mo agoIs it all about American exceptionalism then?
- JohnFen 9mo ago> Why not? Well, ignoring the moral questions around it, here's a good reason. Trump isn't really the problem. He's the figurehead. The problem is the people who are backing him and using him to further their agendas. If he were to suddenly stop being president, for whatever reason, it wouldn't solve any of the issues we're having. In fact, it might make them worse. If Trump vanished, Vance is president and Vance is, if anything, even worse than Trump if for no other reason than Vance is actually smart.
- JasonADrury 9mo agoVance would almost certainly not be interested in owning Greenland. In fact, it's very unlikely that anyone but Trump would be, owning Greenland simply isn't all that interesting. Of course Vance might be worse in other ways, but he doesn't seem all that into starting wars.
- JohnFen 9mo agoThe push for Greenland is coming from factions other than Vance, and those factions would remain. I'd expect Vance to go along with their desire just as much as Trump is. Why wouldn't he?
- JasonADrury 9mo agoWhich factions do you believe those to be? The US taking over Greenland is essentially an entirely new idea that hasn't really been broadcast before by anyone but Trump. This strongly suggests that the idea doesn't originate from any powerful "faction".
- messe 9mo agoI'm no fan of the US administration (I live in Denmark and am LGBT), but leave that inflammatory rhetoric off of HN.
- JasonADrury 9mo ago[flagged]
- messe 9mo ago> It's absolutely ridiculous to read my comment as expressing any opinion with regards to the US administration. It's simply an accurate answer to the question presented. Either you're being obtuse or you need to seriously reconsider how you communicate and how you expect others to read it.
- JasonADrury 9mo agoGo on, actually use words. Instead of saying "you're being obtuse", say "It seems that you're being obtuse here because ..." > reconsider how you communicate and how you expect others to read it. I think the problem is firmly on your side. If we're discussing potential approaches to dealing with political leadership that's on track to start a massive war and possibly get millions of people killed, violence is inherently going to feature in those conversations. Where would you even draw the line? If a hypothetical leader of a country came on the TV suggesting that we should build large camps where we will kill all the jews, would it be okay to shoot them then? What if we replace killing the jews with re-educating gay people?
- messe 9mo agoThis conversation doesn't belong here and will devolve into a flame war. It's not my job to teach you how to communicate. > I think the problem is firmly on your side The fact that you're getting downvoted and flagged to death would lead me to disagree. It seems most people didn't interpret it as you intended, which is a failure of communication on your side.
- ihsw 9mo ago[dead]
- linguae 9mo agoShort of enough Republicans finally declaring enough is enough and deciding on impeachment or the fourth clause of the 25th Amendment, the only other option is for pro-impeachment senator candidates to run as Republicans in the primaries, which begin as early as March. Theoretically, if enough Republican senators up for reelection get primaried due to their refusal to rein in Trump, this may put pressure on the rest of the GOP’s senators to remove Trump this year, and this may also encourage the House (which only requires a majority to impeach). Of course, the challenge is convincing the electorate in red states that Trump’s antics regarding Greenland are catastrophic enough to warrant his removal, given the stranglehold MAGA has on the Republican electorate.
- saubeidl 9mo agoYou're completely dismissing all extraparliamentary means of opposition. Protests. Riots. Strikes. Y'know, the sort of thing that toppled Yanukovych in Ukraine, lotsa Middle Eastern dictators during the Arab Spring, British rule in India, Soviet control over the Baltics, etc etc etc. Your politicians are use- and spineless. It's time for your people to step up.
- yodsanklai 9mo agoLast time I checked, only 56% of Americans disapproved Trump's actions. Not enough to trigger big riots... https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker
- nemomarx 9mo agoOnly 4% or so approve of going to war to conquer Greenland, so if it gets that bad you might expect sentiment to keep turning. but his approval floor has been pretty steady at no lower than ~30 percent through every controversy so far.
- yodsanklai 9mo agoI hope I'm wrong but I don't see American citizens rioting over international affairs unfortunately. Hopefully he'll be unpopular enough to lose senate, and his successor won't be as insane. That would be the best outcome.
- yodsanklai 9mo agoProtest every weekend? build momentum until this can't be ignored? perhaps write to congressmen? attend townhall meetings and ask questions to your representatives? try to raise awareness to your friends who don't vote? I have an American friend who keeps complaining about Trump. There was a protest in his city, but he didn't go because he had a BBQ to attend that weekend. Seriously, this isn't fun anymore and Americans should be extremely concerned and start acting one way or another. It may be symbolic but it's better than nothing, if only for peace of mind.
- nemomarx 9mo agoRepresentatives already either agree it's bad (and can't do much about it) or will not listen to the public (because they're Republicans and indented to trump for their careers. I don't have any friends who don't vote, really, and the midterms might not come soon enough to do anything here. My senator had a head injury and reversed all his opinions for some reason, so I've called his office a lot but he's very pro Invading Greenland now, and pro criminalizing his voters. Unhelpful guy. I would start preparing for all of this to happen, and tell your friend to get his passport up to date.
- throw0101c 9mo ago> Representatives already either agree it's bad (and can't do much about it) Representatives can draft articles of impeached for the President. Senators can start impeaching various Secretaries like Defence ("War") and Homeland Security. Or all of the Secretaries really, since they're not upholding the Constitution themselves by not invoking the 25A to get rid of a mentally unstable President. Where are all these much-vaunted "checks and balances" that I've been hearing about for so long?
- nemomarx 9mo agoDid you pay attention to his last impeachment? The much vaunted checks and balances rely on Congress and the supreme Court checking the executives power. Since the presidents party controls both, this doesn't happen. The Imperial Presidency has been absorbing power from the other branches since the 90s, and we are pretty close to the end of that process right now.
- drcongo 9mo agoPersonally, I'm hoping Danish special forces are currently building a replica of Trump's house.
- anigbrowl 9mo agoGeneral strikes. Technically these are illegal when called by unions under the Taft-HArtley act, but if done at the popular level they can grind the country to a halt. But mass protest is the most effective way to bring down a corrupt government, and doesn't require waiting for an election and being disappointed by another round of political scams. oh that isn't possible to organize No with that attitude authorities will brutalize the protestors freedom isn't free Americans are too comfortable/lazy to do mass political protest Well we'll see whether that's true I guess. what if this leads to civil war If the alternative is corruption and tyranny, maybe that's a fight worth having. Authoritarian governments do not historically reach a point where they say 'well that's enough tyranny, let's not get carried away lest history think ill of us.'
- swagmoney69 9mo ago[dead]
- NoGravitas 9mo agoGeneral strikes require a large and powerful labor movement to organize them, and to provide people with material support for as long as the strike takes to achieve its goals. One day of symbolic absenteeism by the most politically involved 5% of the workforce is not going to cut it.
- anigbrowl 9mo agoStrong labor movements help a lot, obviously, but general strikes are very often not labor disputes and not dependent on union infrastructure.
- insane_dreamer 9mo agoI think the only thing that would generate enough public momentum to stop Trump would be a US stock market crash.
- baby 9mo agoProtest
- ssully 9mo agoI keep trying to call the White House to express my disapproval but they just call me a dumb lib and send a gang of ICE officers to my neighborhood to kidnap my neighbors.
- ratelimitsteve 9mo agowe're in the streets every day being brutalized by the regimes masked, armed thugs. what else would you like from us?
- embedding-shape 9mo agoWhen Americans have said the same about Russians for a decade, who gave you the same response, what did the Americans reply?
- ratelimitsteve 9mo agoyou know, if i say one thing and a different american says a different thing that doesn't make us hypocrites, it makes us two different people
- embedding-shape 9mo agoWow, I had no idea, I thought people in the same country were the same person? Now when we've both shaken off our much pent in sarcasm, what would you say to them?
- ratelimitsteve 9mo ago"They" don't exist. There are no Russians who replied to me in any manner when I said "You need to just overthrow your government" because I never said such a thing to anyone. Nothing I said was sarcastic, it was all meant to be taken extremely literally. You're trying to catch me out as a hypocrite but I didn't do what you said I did.
- happytoexplain 9mo agoI think there is a communication issue - the parent is not using sarcasm.
- happytoexplain 9mo agoAmericans aren't one person. Regardless, this is whataboutism.
- testfrequency 9mo agoThe edgy conservatives who frequent HN these days will be notably silent in offering a response to this. They don’t view anything that is going on as incorrect or “the wrong direction”.
- hobs 9mo agoIn some ways some people are literally blinded to the problems they cause because as you say, they do not and some say cannot see the problem. A good discussion on the topic is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jooEsmOOm2k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jooEsmOOm2k tl;dw - authoritarianism and conservatism directly impact your cognition and ability to reason about the world and prefer abductive reasoning and avoiding new information. "Republicans don’t want to hear this, but there’s a pretty long-standing body of social science research that indicates people who have right-wing attitudes, particularly regarding religion and epistemology, appear to have lower cognitive capacity." (and it gets worse with age because you do not receive new information)
- testfrequency 9mo agoWhat makes this disillusionment even more difficult to claim is that it’s the same argument that’s used to counter liberals by saying they are all sheep, etc. Which, leads us to simply morals and ethics. Two sides with two different views who both are angry at the other for not having their views. That’s not to say both are right, but there’s surely one side that has a lot more care for us all as humans vs thee.
- tstrimple 9mo ago"They are all sheep" is rich coming from the most conformist group in existence. There is a reason they use "blue-haired" as an insult. Their rugged individualism can't tolerate deviating from the flock for acceptable hair styles. Conservatives are clowns. They would be funny, except they are destroying our country.
- cmxch 9mo agoSo basically ideological phrenology.
- lenerdenator 9mo ago"Why are Americans" If you think the average American has any real control over what comes out of the White House these days, I have some ocean-front property in Kansas City to sell you.
- boplicity 9mo agoWe can't give up our power just because the situation is difficult. We need to assert as much power as possible. Organize; talk openly about the problem; coordinate plans for voting (yes, I know its early). Pressure politicians. There are things individuals can do, right now. No, it's not enough on our own. But if we don't act as individuals, then we really are screwed.
- baby 9mo agoWhen something goes wrong in any country, you protest, you take it to the streets. It seems like America doesn’t know how to do that.
- apercu 9mo agoI've met all sorts of people and they're generally not dumb, so it’s not mass stupidity but maybe narrative capture. When media incentives align with wealth and power, propaganda becomes pervasive and people absorb it without realizing it. Social media algorithms and echo chambers amplify this. The myth of the American Dream (reinforced by the prosperity gospel and fused with the modern conservative movement) has turned greed and hierarchy into “virtues.” What’s strange is that the people selling it (Trump, Musk, etc.) come across as profoundly miserable.
- Herring 9mo agoI've met all sorts of very rational people, but when you bring up immigrants their brain reasoning centers turn off and they start frothing over Haitians eating dogs. You have to know how to trigger it, cause Trump knows it extremely well. Studies have shown for a long time the human brain is often wired to prioritize group loyalty over factual accuracy. Prior to Trump, most white americans only encountered this if they brought a black girlfriend home.
- NoGravitas 9mo agoI upvoted you, but there is a good counterpoint to the brainwashing narrative: https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/ https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/
- wavemode 9mo agoDespite appearances, Trump's power is largely political. If he didn't have the support of the Republican party, he couldn't do most of the things he's doing, since Congress would override him. But the reality is that he still has significant public support, from a public who get most of their current events from filtered, biased news media. In that way, we've actually become remarkably similar to Russia under Putin.
- boplicity 9mo agoTrump has around 90% support from Republicans. Honestly, this looks very much like 1930s Germany. I really wish that weren't an exaggeration.
- dragonwriter 9mo ago> Trump has around 90% support from Republicans. Republican ID is at around 27% of the electorate and on a downward trend; his support from independents who are much larger than either Dems or Reps is much less.
- whatevaa 9mo agoWith Trump admin being protected by ICE goons and surrounded by people loyal to him, TrumpPutin is exactly what is gonna happen.
- encom 9mo ago>filtered, biased news media There isn't a lot of unbiased media, in any political direction. Danish media is no different.
- rayiner 9mo agoBecause most Americans don't care about what's going on in the rest of the world and basically just care about inflation: https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/HHP_Dec2025_KeyFindings.pdf https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/HHP... (p. 16). Even after everything, a majority of Americans say Trump is doing a better job than Biden, who had worse inflation on his watch (p. 18). Americans don't care because they don't have to. In Germany, 40-45% of GDP is exports: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.EXP.GNFS.ZS?locations=DE https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.EXP.GNFS.ZS?location.... In the U.S., it's just 10-11%: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.EXP.GNFS.ZS?locations=US https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.EXP.GNFS.ZS?location.... Exports to the EU are just over 1% of GDP. To put that into perspective, if exports evaporated completely, that would wipe out just three years of American GDP-per-capita growth. For Germany, it would wipe out more than two decades of GDP per capita growth. That not only means that 90% of America's economy is domestic. It means that most people have no exposure to the rest of the world through their workplaces. To the extent they do, that experience is with Canada and Mexico--we have twice as much trade with those countries as with the EU. Canada and Mexico have essentially zero meaningful leverage over the U.S. So even for the relatively few Americans who have some exposure to the rest of the world, most of their exposure is to relationships where America is the utterly dominant party.
- hollerith 9mo ago>In Germany, 40-45% of GDP is exports . . . In the U.S., it's just 10-11% The contrast is even more stark than those numbers suggest because while the US is basically self-sufficient in petroleum these days, it imports and exports a lot of crude because US refineries are good at refining heavy crude and sour crude, which other countries struggle to refine. The crude produced in the US is the easy-to-refine non-heavy non-sour stuff so it exports some of that and imports an approximately equal amount of difficult-to-refine stuff because that way US refineries can take advantage of their comparative expertise to make a little money. The point is that it would be easy for US refineries to switch entirely to US-produced crude as their supply, and if they did that, that 10-11% figure would go down a lot. The reason people tend to think that international trade is important to the US economy is that during the Cold War, Washington used the ability to trade with the US as a carrot to tempt countries into allying with the US against the USSR. But the main motivation for the US to do that was not to enrich Americans but rather to increase the (long-term) military security of Americans.
- alistairSH 9mo agoBecause we, collectively, have abdicated our responsibility to elect thoughtful representatives who care about the rule of law and betterment of society. That abdication has lasted decades and led to what is essentially a cascading failure across multiple levels and wings of government.
- nh23423fefe 9mo agoBecause there is no risk of war. Hyperventilating online isnt reality.
- ryandvm 9mo agoI mean, I understand the frustration, but this like asking why don't the Russian citizens just, you know, make Putin stop invading Ukraine. I did my part, but I have 70 million compatriots that are just all too willing to allow the earth scorching as long as it means they don't have to see another black little mermaid.
- giardini 9mo ago[flagged]
- munksbeer 9mo agoThe reality is people all over the world are largely the same. This isn't some genetic or cultural makeup of Americans. The average person isn't going to be out protesting on the streets until something starts to direly impact them. Life is filled with complications and worries enough that human's just choose to allocate their capacity for worry to more immediate issues. (I'm not American and don't live in the US)
- baby 9mo agoWe do demonstrate pretty easily in France
- loeg 9mo agoIf Dems want to govern, they need to run on platforms that are popular with voters in marginal districts; not lefty fantasy stuff that is off-putting to normies.
- baby 9mo agoI don't think Kamala or Biden collapse was due to what you're talking about at all. Dems are always running on centrist/right ideas as far as we've seen. On the contrary it's because they prevented real left ideas (Sanders) from running that they lost trust in their camp. They're about to repeat this next elections with Buttigieg or Newsom
- loeg 9mo agoYou are mistaken.