US Politics Mega-thread - Page 5406

On January 04 2026 15:27 ETisME wrote:

that will never happen, and honestly a very naive take to the whole situation.
Madurors wasn't in it for the money itself, but that Russia and China etc are giving him plenty of staying power.
Power comes before money/wealth.

There's a tiny fraction of venezuela population who would be against this, the nation had been suffering a F ton.
2025 nobel peace prize winner herself wanted US arms intervention to force the transition.

The whole thing is controversial move, but not only was it a power move against Russia and china,

Russia asked US to stop targetting tanker a day before
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/russia-asks-us-to-stop-pursuit-of-fleeing-oil-tanker-claims-authority/ar-AA1TpN1F?ocid=BingNewsSerp

China top diplomat literally met with Maduro hours before the strike
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/china-condemns-us-strike-in-venezuela-hours-after-top-diplomat-met-with-maduro/ar-AA1Tw96J?ocid=BingNewsSerp

It also ensures national interest of the US there in the region.

Also those who are talking like the US wants the Oil and therefore they intervene, what do you think Russia and China are there for? welcome to politics in the real world.

Some of you want checks and balances against the US, it's a good reminder the past couple of decades of relative peace wasn't because Russia/China was a strong check and balance against the west. It's because they had arms superiority and geopolitical power.

On January 04 2026 22:40 maybenexttime wrote:

We should kick American troops out from Europe, cancel non-essential military equipment deals (and find alternatives to the essential ones ASAP), and decouple from American-based IT services.

On January 04 2026 23:10 KT_Elwood wrote:


I understand the idea and would be fully for it.. but this would tear the EU apart, NATO would cease to exist and this guy:



would have won the cold thanks to agent Krasnov.

On January 04 2026 23:18 Simberto wrote:


He already has. NATO (or at least the US part of it) is gone. Does anyone really believe that Trump would honor the alliance?

To keep relevant and save, the EU needs to be independent of the US. We need to be able to protect ourselves, using european weapons. And we really need to be independent of US tech, because anything we are dependent on is blackmail material for the US to force us to do things we really don't want to.

The US has already stopped being an ally. They might not be a full opponent yet, but that could easily happen in the next 5 years.

It is sad, it is stupid. It would be much better for everyone if the US had not gone insane. But they have. So that is the reality we now need to deal with. Closing our eyes and pretending the US of today is the US of 10 years ago is not going to work.

We need european weapons, we need european IT infrastructure, and we need europeans nuclear deterrent. Anything from the US must be viewed as a potential weapon that will eventually be used against us.

On January 04 2026 23:44 SC-Shield wrote:


EU is too focused on consumer-related brands instead of IT. EU's IT industry is a dwarf compared to US and I don't see this changing anytime soon as a software engineer.


These are top 15 European companies by market cap. You can see what EU actually values.
Edit: There is also a popular saying: "The US innovates, China replicates, the EU regulates". I'm wondering if this is the reason tech isn't a thing here. From my point of view, EU is behind with AI while US and China make progress.

I also understand your concern, but I hope US elects a better president in a few years, so I wouldn't exclude US as an ally for now.

On January 04 2026 23:18 Simberto wrote:
It is sad, it is stupid. It would be much better for everyone if the US had not gone insane. But they have. So that is the reality we now need to deal with. Closing our eyes and pretending the US of today is the US of 10 years ago is not going to work.

On January 05 2026 00:50 Artesimo wrote:

The saying is wrong imo. It is describing the state of things and not the reason for it, at least not completely. It just happens that with the latest 2 big trends, big data and AI, the countries that protect their citizens data the least and care about laws less when it comes to companies are king in those fields, thus its impossible to compete with the US and china. And if you want to seriously progress those fields, you gotta go to one of those 2 countries to do so. And its difficult to get a foothold when there is already a very dominant player, especially in a field like software where it is incredible easy to just absorb talent. In engineering and manufacturing, its never just the engineers. You got specialised machinery, specially trained people. With software you just gotta poach the engineer, and if you are the biggest you can do that more easily. And we see that in other industries as well, latest example that comes to mind, the first corona vaccine from biontech, largely developed and paid for by the european public, then partnered up with pfizer. Most americans I talk to believe the US developed it, when in reality, pfizer helped with the trials, manufacturing, and distribution (all important things, esp the trials, not discrediting that. But for the vaccine itself pfizer at best deserves partial credit imo). These kind of moves are common, but within the software world nobody in the EU can compete with the US ones when it comes to that, simply because they ain't got the dough to throw around.

There are fields fields where european countries are doing well, but they are not as flashy and thus can escape getting poached off. Process mining for example has most of its significant contributions in the last decade or so coming from EU as far as I know. There is this dutch guy Wil van der Aalst who's name is impossible to avoid when going into pretty much anything relating to process mining. Its just not as big and flashy so you don't really hear about it outside the industry. Some of it will probably get superseded by AI as well now, but I firmly expect the guy to become a household name for utilising AI with process mining as well.

So yeah, some regulation hinders invention, especially when it comes to AI and big data. Pretending that the EU countries can only regulate, when in reality its just the only thing you can do when someone else invents something is shortsighted. And the China part is not even worth talking about imo, its just an old stereotype. I am not a big data guy, but I heard multiple times that china is the furthest ahead there, and the reason given is that they have the most access to data in many fields. They get to care even less about the rights of their citizens.

On January 04 2026 18:01 Acrofales wrote:

I'm not a historian, but I'm well enough travelled that I can at least take a stab at this. It was a combination of many factors. The first of which was that the industrial revolution turned economies upside down and inside out. Having colonies was still super profitable, but it wasn't absolutely necessary anymore: the really profitable step was not having the resources (for almost free) to create a product, it was having the factories to build the final product at scale. And over the course of the 20th century even that changed with global supply chains, information technology: you don't need to have the factories physically, you just need guaranteed access. This kinda does away with the need for colonies for resource extraction. It still helps a bit if you own all the raw resources, but that's where the next bit comes in, which makes it a lot more costly than it used to be.

The second part is that western philosophy and learning spread across the world. Some of the first colonies to gain independence were the USA and very soon after all of South America. In a very brief nutshell, they all followed a similar pattern: European colonial elites felt they were being economically exploited, their interests were being disregarded in the Homeland, and they'd studied these new ideas from the enlightenment and French Revolution (often having been sent to Europe for an elite education). They then applied ideas such as humanism, emancipation and particularly nationalism to their native regions. The American Revolution was a bit earlier, but they can roughly be grouped together as early examples of how enlightenment ideas, when applied to colonies, lead to revolution. Education worldwide has accelerated: it is no longer the elite that learns to read, but over the course of the 20th century, schooling boomed for everybody. Ideas also evolved, and refined and this caused the further seed for decolonization of Africa and Asia: there was a growing local understanding of how European rulers were oppressing them and this fed sufficient local resistance to European rule to make it increasingly costly for European colonizers to maintain their control (insofar as at all possible in the first place, bringing us to the third reason).

The third is politics. The major waves of decolonization were at the beginning of the 19th century and midway through the 20th century. Contemporary to the Napoleonic wars, and the second world war. The colonizers were embroiled in major wars for survival. Either during or in the aftermath they didn't have the military capacity or will to quell colonial revolutions.

While Trump is clearly not limited by the third, the predominant thinking has been that reason (1) is sufficient to no longer really need colonies for modern prosperity, and (2) that the extra gains from having them are offset by increased costs of holding them. But clearly that thinking isn't universal. China fairly obviously disagrees. Whether it's due to sound economical reasoning or some misplaced idea of imperialist pride (similar to Russia's calculus in Ukraine)... I cannot say.

On January 05 2026 01:21 maybenexttime wrote:

This could spark a civil war in the US itself.

On January 04 2026 23:44 SC-Shield wrote:
EU is too focused on consumer-related brands instead of IT. EU's IT industry is a dwarf compared to US and I don't see this changing anytime soon as a software engineer.


These are top 15 European companies by market cap. You can see what EU actually values.
Edit: There is also a popular saying: "The US innovates, China replicates, the EU regulates". I'm wondering if this is the reason tech isn't a thing here. From my point of view, EU is behind with AI while US and China make progress.

I also understand your concern, but I hope US elects a better president in a few years, so I wouldn't exclude US as an ally for now.

On January 05 2026 01:01 JimmyJRaynor wrote:

meh, the USA has been this way a very long time. They brought in Werner Von Braun knowing he was deeply involved in the administration of the Mittelwerk underground rocket factory. Project Northwoods, OPeration Mocking Bird, MK Ultra, the Gulf of Tonkin ... the list goes on and on. There were no weapons in Iraq yet they fucked around in the the middle east for how long?

Vietnam was a war spawning from false pretenses and every American knew it. "All In The Family" was an extremely popular TV Show. Here are the 2 big stars discussing Vietnam; it starts at 3:10. The ratings for this situation comedy were through the roof in the 70s and the same protests going on today were happening in 1971. "i think they don't like the idea of American fighting in an illegal and immoral war", Meathead Rob Reiner, 1971 about the Vietnam war on the most popular TV show of its time.

The USA is a killing machine.

Throughout all the interviews Trump has done about striking Venezuela he keeps hammering away about all the drugs coming from Canada. Imagine if he creates a pre-text for invading Canada and then does it. There is no country in the world that can stop him... least of all Canada.

On January 04 2026 18:01 Acrofales wrote:

I'm not a historian, but I'm well enough travelled that I can at least take a stab at this. It was a combination of many factors. The first of which was that the industrial revolution turned economies upside down and inside out. Having colonies was still super profitable, but it wasn't absolutely necessary anymore: the really profitable step was not having the resources (for almost free) to create a product, it was having the factories to build the final product at scale. And over the course of the 20th century even that changed with global supply chains, information technology: you don't need to have the factories physically, you just need guaranteed access. This kinda does away with the need for colonies for resource extraction. It still helps a bit if you own all the raw resources, but that's where the next bit comes in, which makes it a lot more costly than it used to be.

The second part is that western philosophy and learning spread across the world. Some of the first colonies to gain independence were the USA and very soon after all of South America. In a very brief nutshell, they all followed a similar pattern: European colonial elites felt they were being economically exploited, their interests were being disregarded in the Homeland, and they'd studied these new ideas from the enlightenment and French Revolution (often having been sent to Europe for an elite education). They then applied ideas such as humanism, emancipation and particularly nationalism to their native regions. The American Revolution was a bit earlier, but they can roughly be grouped together as early examples of how enlightenment ideas, when applied to colonies, lead to revolution. Education worldwide has accelerated: it is no longer the elite that learns to read, but over the course of the 20th century, schooling boomed for everybody. Ideas also evolved, and refined and this caused the further seed for decolonization of Africa and Asia: there was a growing local understanding of how European rulers were oppressing them and this fed sufficient local resistance to European rule to make it increasingly costly for European colonizers to maintain their control (insofar as at all possible in the first place, bringing us to the third reason).

The third is politics. The major waves of decolonization were at the beginning of the 19th century and midway through the 20th century. Contemporary to the Napoleonic wars, and the second world war. The colonizers were embroiled in major wars for survival. Either during or in the aftermath they didn't have the military capacity or will to quell colonial revolutions.

While Trump is clearly not limited by the third, the predominant thinking has been that reason (1) is sufficient to no longer really need colonies for modern prosperity, and (2) that the extra gains from having them are offset by increased costs of holding them. But clearly that thinking isn't universal. China fairly obviously disagrees. Whether it's due to sound economical reasoning or some misplaced idea of imperialist pride (similar to Russia's calculus in Ukraine)... I cannot say.

On January 05 2026 03:48 maybenexttime wrote:
Not to mention some of the more transformative AI innovations (e.g. AlphaFold by DeepMind) were European innovations.