Meanwhile China is performing the exact pivot to renewables that needs to happen. When an authoritarian state is more positive for the future of humanity, Europe needs to quit the excuses and answer seriously. Saving the soul of democracy requires seriously muzzling capital and its capacity for destruction.

One thing I’ve noticed with Lemmy is that it feels way more like a social bookmarking and commentary platform. I see fewer posts that are “original content” here than for example Reddit.

Why are these migrants leaving their countries I wonder.

As far as understanding the kinds of thinking and preoccupations in the European military establishment goes, this is an extremely informative discussion.

89.5% apparently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland#Demographics

Greenlanders are 90% an indigenous Inuit people. They have every right to self determination, and to cast off Danish colonialism, that has a dark past: https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/02/1133382

But they are also well aware that the US is not a liberator and has been and is going to be an even worse colonial power: https://youtube.com/shorts/rlz2EOQWJgg

Trump’s “deals” are not worth the paper they’re printed on. He changes his mind whenever he wants. Take a lesson from Canada.

That’s exactly the problem of having to report what a crazy but ridiculously powerful person is saying. If you don’t take him seriously and just report that he’s just rambling incoherently then you’re going to be surprised when he actually uses his immense power. If you present his ramblings as a coherent declaration then you’re going to be discredited when he doesn’t follow through.

There is no easy answer here. I’m leaning towards the side that takes his sayings at face value because he’s too powerful not to.

By the way, it’s way less productive to direct your anger towards the journalists trying to make sense of what the madman is saying.

It is not a clickbait title. It is an attempt at explaining to normal people what the crazy boomer with nukes is rambling about.

Removed by mod

International law is dead, Kaja.

In fact, “computers” were women whose job was to do calculations in the era before electronic computers.

A heads up that, in 2026, a 70 year old grandmother could just as well have had a 30-40-50 year career in computing. Don’t use grandmothers as the go to trope for tech illiterate users :)

That’s frankly the least problematic bit of Greece’s relationship to Israel. Together with Cyprus we just signed a military cooperation plan with Israel, which also includes plans for a joint rapid response military unit (1k Greeks, 1k Israelis, 500 Cypriots): https://www.newsweek.com/israel-greece-and-cyprus-formalize-2026-military-cooperation-11277421

We’re also buying Israeli tech for a Greek version of the Iron Dome: https://www.ekathimerini.com/politics/foreign-policy/1286337/achilles-shield-defense-program-moving-forward-again/

This all stems from Greek and Cypriot insecurity vis-a-vis Turkish aggression. For us, Turkey is the big threat similarly to how Russia is the big threat to the northerners.

Sudo vibe coding in Bletchley Park.

Danish nukes?

Bullshit. If the US decides to grab Greenland militarily, there is nothing, nothing, Denmark can do. Like, I wish there were, but there just isn’t. The purchase of F35s at least is an appeasement play to Trump’s transactional amoeba brain.

OO Impress

Here is what the article says:

According to the indictment, Peterson and Rootsi, based on instructions received from Russia, knowingly and in an organized manner assisted Russia and people acting on behalf of Russian authorities in non-violent activities directed against the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Republic of Estonia from October 2022 to March 10, 2023.

What were those activities?

The defendants allegedly participated in a deliberate influence campaign aimed at creating a political association – the Koos party – in Estonia that supported Russian foreign and security policy narratives and propaganda messages.

Political speech. To create a political party. That would participate in Estonian democratic processes. The political positions of that party are, I think we would agree, very problematic: promoting Russian narratives, pushing the Estonian policy in pro-Russian directions etc. But political positions cannot be crimes in a democracy. And freedom of expression is a fundamental human right. And above all, this is about political speech in the context of a democratic political process, where other political parties would be able to counter it, pitch a better set of ideas to the electorate, and defeat this party at the ballot box. In democracies, you defeat political positions with politics, not with prison sentences.

The Prosecutor’s Office said there was evidence of plans to form a civil defense organization immediately after the registration of the Koos political party, which was founded in May 2022. […] It was intended to provide aid to people in crises and to fulfill local defense tasks in the event of a power vacuum. The organization would have involved individuals holding firearms licenses.

They didn’t create the organization. They did not do crimes. They were planning to create an organization with goals that frankly with a bit of good faith sound benign (aid people in crises, fulfill defense tasks in case of vacuum). But sure, they were probably not that benign and pro-russian stooges don’t necessarily deserve good faith. But that’s beside the point. Notice this very crucial detail: “The organization would have involved individuals holding firearms licenses.” In other words: the Estonian government could at any point control these people’s access to weapons. The police and security services could keep a hawkish eye on them and throw the book at them with the full force of the law the moment they step outside the law. But convict them for doing something. I mean, there is a LOT of space for the Estonian government to maneuver before rushing to sentencing someone to …14 years in prison for the thought crime of imagining a militia.

That’s it. Those are the two substantive allegations made in the article. The rest are about meeting with Russian politicians in furtherance to these aims. In other words, they are aggravating conditions to these two crimes. So we have two crimes: political speech and imagining a militia. Both of those should not be worth 14 years in prison in a democracy. Sorry, but this is not what justice should look like in an EU country. For comparison: the violent neonazis in Germany of the Revolution Chemnitz group received less than half of that for actual violent crimes. Nazis. In Germany. Violent ones. This guy’s 14 years is wildly disproportionate.

Democratic norms, rule of law, civil rights, freedom of expression and of association, freedom to play the democratic game, these are not jokes, they are not negotiable.

Only I didn’t. Here is what I actully wrote

[…] I don’t like this. This is antidemocratic and dangerous.

[a bunch of context to frame why I think that]

The guy’s crimes are all in the political sphere. Non violent. Subject to the democratic process. This smells very bad and will very likely backfire politically. The guy is now going to be treated as a politician prisoner by the Russian propaganda machine. Used as proof that European democracy is not all that it claims to be. This is bad. I hope he appeals to the European Court of Justice, gets released and then fades to the obscurity he deserves.

That’s it. It’s not a complicated comment either.

From my point of view, your response is passive aggressive innuendo that I am being suspicious. Maybe I’m a troll or a tankie or a putin stooge right? Because that’s exactly what the people who started riffing off what you wrote about pretexts and axes to grind started doing. They started talking about my post history, modlog, spin, and saying I’m engaging in bad faith and whataboutism. Fucking dogpiling. Am I wrong to demand clarifications?

EDIT: If your claim is simply that my historical comparisons don’t apply to Estonia’s security context, say that. That’s an argument I can engage with. But implying ulterior motives and then refusing to specify them isn’t critique, it’s suspicion-by-proxy. I’m here to discuss the post, not litigate my character.