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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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.

This game is dated but it is so good. It’s an RTS-RPG hybrid where you have a limited number of soldiers who gain experience and can permanently die. You get a few more along the campaign but you get attached to them and don’t wanna lose dialogue. So initially you start building your base and manning everything with your characters but late game It’s mostly automated tanks and turrets, to prevent death of characters.

The turrents and tanks are modular. You have different guns, missiles, utility attachments and they can be armored or non armored and have different types of power systems. Solar, diesel and later on, a sort of nuclear. The tanks become useless if they run out of power. People can change job at will by changing clothes and can be soldiers (with snipers, machine guns or rocket launchers), mechanics, engineers or scientists.

The story is pretty great. The US and USSR discover a new mineral that is power dense, non polluting and allows to build cool new things that manipulate time and space. Among these things is the ability to time travel. So they send soldiers back in time to the prehistoric time with the mission to move all the reserves to their respective homelands in the future, and then live out their lives and die. Both of them succeeded, in different timelines, and in both cases the loser sent soldiers back in time to prevent what the other did. This creates a war between two different timelines, the one where the US lost vs the one where the USSR lost in the past. You follow two campaigns one as the Americans who lost and one as the USSR soldiers who lost and they even have different names for the minerals. The Americans call it Siberite because in their timeline it was found in Siberia. The USSR soldiers call it Alaskite.

In the end (spoilers) >!you can have the Americans win, the Soviets win or a third ending where the Americans and Soviets make a new country and use the new resource to usher in an age of utopia for humanity educating the early humans and jumpstarting civilization.!<

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.

I used to be a both sides have a right to exist and we should strive to achieve that, but the longer i hear Israeli and Israeli apologists speak online and the more i see their actions the harder it is to remain of that opinion.

My opinion now is that if we manage to successfully create the conditions to allow an independent state of Palestine and a state of Israel, it will be only a matter of time until Israel starts illegally occupying the Palestinian state. So unless it’s a nuclear Palestinian state or a nuclear backed Palestinian state, it’s very unlikely we can see a world where Zionism can exist in peace. Even with a nuclear Palestinian state, the Israeli mind would sit ill at ease trying to come up with a solution to disable the nukes and take over Palestine somehow, because Israeli can’t fathom a world where they have to share the land that “god gave them”, especially to a group of people they so overtly consider inferior to them.

So unfortunately the state of Israel itself has made me believe a two state solution is impossible no matter who leads Israel. It’s the Israeli zeitgeist. Their culture is a culture of war, oppression and genocide and if their god is real, i cannot see it being anything else but deeply ashamed of who calls themselves its people, who act so brazenly contrary to the principles set by the torah. Were this not the case, i see no reason that we could not have two states. But it’s like they say, if my grandmother had wheels, she would be an electric car. There’s only one way forward left. One state ruled by both Jews and Muslims. It will be bumpy at first, but eventually they will figure it out, like we all did. The idea of a Jewish only state is a deeply flawed idea that has harmed Judaism deeply and should be abandoned. And even if Israel comes out winning with the help of the US and they manage to stamp out Palestine, i believe over time that is exactly what they will become given enough time, as the old guard dies and their flawed, bellicose and bigoted ideas die with them. And that is the irony thay everything they are doing, all the deaths, all the cruelty, will eventually be pointless because their ideal dream is flawed and unsustainable.

I get that, i really do, but sometimes you just gotta take the loss for being unpopular if the cause is right. Israel is less popular today than it was yesterday. Sometimes you can’t help that your core principles are not valued by the majority at the moment, for whatever reason. If events change the minds of people, there’s a steady alternative to go to. To debase one’s principles to appeal to the right wing voters will only make their constituency not vote. People who are right wing won’t vote left because they are more anti immigration or more pro Israel. But people who vote left won’t probably vote at all if the alternatives are right wing or right wing light. They just won’t see themselves represented at all. Then you get low voter turnout.

Yeah no wonder conservatives are winning victories all across the democratic world. It seems the left wing has suffered a collective lobotomy. We live in a world where the left is fragmented in purpose, condoning the unacceptable, and ineffective in climate action. It would be cool if the left was, you know, actually the left, instead of trying to be more like the cool right wing because they think that’s what would win them more votes. Have some dignity, guys. Nobody is going to vote for the second, third or fourth best party at being right wing.

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.

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