You think I am actually advocating for this nonsense?

As an American I certainly hope not

Pro succession movement in Greenland? I very much doubt it. They can influence all they want, and if they are that only shows imho that they fundamentally misunderstand how other countries work.

I doubt it very much also. But I am saying in concept, if the vast majority of the people in one place don’t want to be a part of the country they are part of, in general they should be allowed to leave.

Given that it is a part of our mainland continent, I would be less enthusiastic than if, say, Hawaii or Alaska wanted to secede.

Nonetheless, self-determination is a solidly American value. If an overwhelming majority of Californians wanted to leave the union, then in general I believe the rest of the country should let them. Otherwise we are forcing them to be subject to a national government they don’t want.

American here. I’m sure annexing Greenland would be very useful to us for all kinds of reasons. I don’t want to do it.

Unless the people in Greenland want to become part of the United States, I don’t believe we have any more right to declare Greenland ours than Hitler had a right to declare France his, or Russia has a right to declare Ukraine theirs.

If the people of Greenland want to become part of the United States, verified with an election monitored by multiple disinterested third parties, then by all means welcome to the party guys.

However given the timing of this ridiculous idea, I can’t help but think the whole thing is just a distraction from the Epstein files.

Or that Ukraine is holding them off with basically scraps of obsolete Western military equipment, very little first line hardware. Attack Europe and you find the full weight of NATO’s first line military hardware shoved up your ass. Somebody pushes a button somewhere and a few dozen Tomahawk missiles destroy your ability to wage war in an afternoon. Nukes not even needed if every airfield and military supply depot within 500 mi of Europe is a smoking crater.

Hey I really appreciate that, seems like these days most people double down on the cynicism rather than walking it back. Sending tons of good vibes your way.

I agree it would be difficult to complete a democratic process in an authoritarian state. I think the process would have to be those areas revert to Ukrainian control, and the election will happen in 4 to 6 months or something.

It might also be totally impractical, for the simple reason that those areas have been contested for so long they are probably largely war zone rubble and much of the civilian population has fled. So you would have to restrict voting to anyone who lived in the area before the fighting started, because if you allowed anybody who lived in the area at vote time to vote you no Russia would just pay a whole bunch of people to move there and vote to switch to Russian rule.

Basically my thought is Russia should not get to expand its territory by force, but at the same time if people in those areas genuinely prefer to be part of Russia that should be taken into account too.

US is certainly no angel. Saying that as an American.
At the same time, there’s a difference between shit we did in the 70s (and so did many other nations including RU) and today. In this millennium the closest we came to conquest was Iraq but we dumped that pretty fast.

‘We’re going to conquer this territory by force and add it to our own’ hasn’t been an internationally recognized valid move in decades. We should not validate it.

Have you seen Russian ‘democracy’ before ? Gee whiz 100% of people voted to join Russia shocked

Obviously there would have to be some kind of neutral 3rd party overseeing the vote…

Yup. And the only reason for Russia to insist Ukraine never join NATO would be so Russia could attack them again in the future without consequence.

Exactly.

How exactly is this going to be worse? Putin keeps a bunch of territory, gets welcomed back into the global economy, Ukraine gets hard limits on NATO membership and they’re on military in exchange for a weak non-guarantee of security. You could sum the whole thing up as ‘let’s all agree Russia won’.

It’s bullshit. It legitimizes military conquest of territory. The only compromise should be that Russia stops their illegal invasion, Russia’s internationally held funds are 100% given to Ukraine for reconstruction, and the border territories get to hold a vote to decide which country they want to be a part of.

As this is now, it’s just legitimizing the occupation. As an American I am very disappointed that our President would push such a thing.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/corneliawalther/2025/06/09/intelligence-illusion-what-apples-ai-study-reveals-about-reasoning/

https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/illusion-of-thinking

There was actually a paper recently that tested this exactly.

They made up a new type of problem that had never before been published. They wrote a paper explaining the problem and how to solve it.

They fed this to an AI, not as training material but as part of the query, and then fed it the same problem but with different inputs and asked it to solve it.
It could not.

AGI would be able to learn from the queries given to it, not just its training base data.

Absolutely. Moral rights? Rights of respect? This is taking a giant leap down a very slippery slope. I am sure whoever came up with this had their heart in the right place. Doesn’t mean this doesn’t lead somewhere awful.

Yeah but think that through. If you want to get rid of Dad’s gun, you have to get rid of pretty much every Dad’s gun. And that has significant effects beyond just school shootings. It means every parent who used a gun to defend their family from harm now is defenseless.
Every year there are about 10,000 to 15,000 firearm homicides. 100 or less are due to terrorism or spree shooting. In contrast, per Wikipedia, there are somewhere between 67,000 and a few million defensive gun uses each year. Most are where a criminal sees a gun and runs away. Take away Dad’s gun and you get rid of almost all those defensive uses. And maybe you stop some or most of the 100 spree shooting deaths. Seems to me like doing more harm than good.

Why would you think that? That a psychopath who often spends weeks or months planning to kill people is going to be dissuaded by that, when there are black market ways to purchase or construct a firearm of their own?

Evil men will always find the tools they need to dispense their evil.

Actually school shootings is a good reason for more guns not less. There have been a number of would-be mass shootings that have been stopped by armed Good Samaritans, either off duty police or civilians with carry permits. Much like overall crime, this is a distributed problem and you don’t usually fix distributed problems with centralized solutions.

The reason you shouldn’t been weapons is very simple - you can’t.

Look at alcohol prohibition in the early 1900s. Virtually all alcohol production, storage, transport, sales, and consumption were banned. And what happened? Did people stop drinking? Did crime go down as predicted? No, quite the opposite. Crime went up because criminals now had a market for illegal goods. Prohibition was where organized crime got its real foothold in the USA.

Same thing is true with weapons. If you ban weapons, all of the law-abiding people will turn theirs in, and the criminals will not. This does not improve public safety. In fact it reduces public safety because now the criminals have weapons and the means to acquire more weapons, whereas the law abiding citizens are unarmed.

Just the first one I could find, there were a few of these cases

https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/23/europe/shamima-begum-appeal-loses-intl

What a shocker. This is like the handful of Western teenage girls who went to Afghanistan to try and be good Muslims, then discovered that meant being married off to some Islamic State soldier twice their age. Like what the fuck did you think was going to happen?