2025-03-30 Don't visit the USA

When people talk about minimal laptop installs, burner phones, and the mess of US border crossings, I wonder where they habe been the last twenty years. A dude from work flew to the states to work for HP as a student, got turned back at the airport and put on a flight back. He got to make one family call, his dad called HP, they called some lawyers and by the time they go there he was already on a plane. And those were the good days, before 9/11, Homeland Security and all that.

Have you seen the forms they have you sign on the Visa Waiver program? The border agents have total discretion over you. Those are not "passenger rights" but "small mercies". And that was long before Trump. It's terrible fuckery now, but it wasn't great before that. Not travelling to the states? I've told people at the office that I won't be going to the states for work ever since 9/11. The last time I went happily was, uh, when The Phantom Menace came out?

I went once more when my wife wanted to go to Hawaii. Somebody there held my hand and prayed for me on a parking lot. Somebody there gave me an ad for an underground firing range. I learned how the US treated the locals. No, visiting the US was never an easy call to make. And those were the good days.

And what about boycotting the US? It is with despair that I see my employer buying more and more into Windows and Microsoft and Azure and Amazon S3. Have they not learned anything from Snowden? American IT is not to be trusted. I mean, it's probably not be trusted anywhere, but when give a choice, there is no reason to trust the USA. The agencies can get all the information they want and hand out gag orders to prevent the well-meaning corporations from warning you. From the outside, they are just as bad as the rest of them. And they will use their power against you. And Snowden was during the good years!

And yes, Fortress Europe is not great, either. Two things being not great doesn't make a right, though. The first step is to realise how bad the situation is, how bad the situation has been.

And now the situation really is fucked up.

If you look at the attempts at regime change in recent years, I think the lessons are obvious: It can only succeed with long, weekly mass demonstrations, in broad coalitions.

The only way out of a corrupt government that controls access to jobs, controls the institutions, controls most media is weekly protest. It takes a long time to grow. You have to be there, every time. "Pumpaj!” Keep the pressure up.

Join whatever protest is on this week.

I also think it is important to not conflate the man with the mob. Name no names! Because it’s never just one person. If it looks like one person then that person is the face man of the mob. The people that need kicking are all those that got their jobs from the mob. All these greedy incompetents whose only qualification is how far they can bend over.

Yeet them into the sun. Send them off to Mars. Whatever.

To think that Canadians or Greenlanders want to be part of the USA is about as absurd to me as Taiwanese wanting to be part of mainland China or Ukrainians wanting to be part of Russia. The only ones not getting it are the sympathisers of the dread regimes in China, in Russia -- and in the USA.

​#USA

**2025-03-31**. I keep learning new things. This is from a post about US politicians visiting Greenland.

Americans might chuckle at that idea, but such arrogance is unwarranted. We are the only ones ever to have invoked Article 5, the mutual defense obligation of the NATO treaty, after 9/11; and our European allies did respond. Per capita more Danish soldiers were killed in the Afghan war than were American soldiers … and of course defending against a Russian attack is the NATO mission. But right now the United States is supporting Russia in its war against Ukraine. No one is doing more to contain the Russian threat than Ukraine. Indeed, Ukraine is in effect fulfilling the entire NATO mission, right now, by absorbing a huge Russian attack. … Denmark meanwhile has given more than four times as much aid to Ukraine, per capita, as does the United States. … The US is is 24th in the world in the happiness rankings. Not bad. But Denmark is number two (after Finland). On a scale of 1 to 100, Freedom House ranks Denmark 97 and the US 84 on freedom — and the US will drop a great deal this year. An American is about ten times more likely to be incarcerated than a Dane. Danes have access to universal and essentially free health care; Americans spend a huge amount of money to be sick more often and to be treated worse when they are. Danes on average live four years longer than Americans. In Denmark university education is free; the average balance owed by the tens of millions of Americans who hold student debt in the US is about $40,000. Danish parents share a year of paid parental leave. In the US, one parent might get twelve weeks of unpaid leave. – The Imperialism Has no Clothes, by Timothy Snyder

The Imperialism Has no Clothes