The efforts to divide and weaken the western world have been so massively effective that I sincerely wonder if there is not a state-sized adversary orchestrating all of it for years or even decades. The myopic glee with which people deconstruct their civilizational home from within is astounding, and it is hard to believe that is organic.
It's an informal coalition between the alt-right, the dirtbag left, the extremely wealthy, and Russian, Iran, and China.
Basically everyone selfish and myopic enough that they'd rather upend the table than lose the game was elevated, amplified, and funded by legitimate adversaries. Though, at the end of the day, the real perpetrators are, have always been, and will always be our moronic electorate(s).
Oh also our lazy, clout-chasing fourth estate bears a significant portion of the blame, though I'm convinced their initial contributions were accidental.
No grand conspiracy, just a lot of assholes and idiots and people who should have known better found out that it doesn't take all that much power to damage institutional trust, and got addicted to the sensation of destruction.
> It's an informal coalition between the alt-right, the dirtbag left, the extremely wealthy, and Russian, Iran, and China.
> Basically everyone selfish and myopic enough that they'd rather upend the table than lose the game was elevated, amplified, and funded by legitimate adversaries.
Yeah, I kinda agree with this. You definitely have people who hate their domestic political enemies so much that they'll throw themselves in with foreign powers who oppose them.
> Though, at the end of the day, the real perpetrators are, have always been, and will always be our moronic electorate(s).
Perpetrators? No, come on. People seem to love to hate on the common man for some reason (maybe beating down on other common men makes some common men falsely feel bigger). But they're just easy targets, because they can't fight back.
The real "perpetrators" if you can call them that, are the elite people in places of power, who are trusted with responsibility but too-often prioritize their own parochial interests.
Case in point: the Democratic party. They've been screaming from the mountaintops since 2016 about the dangers of authoritarianism, many of which have come to pass. But what do they do? Compromise to form a broader coalition to meet the existential threat? No, of course not. Instead they cater to divisive special interests; wag their fingers at everyone they turn off who doesn't vote for them; and look no father than hoping they can eek out narrow, unstable partisan victories by turning out their base.
> alt-right, the dirtbag left, the extremely wealthy, and Russian, Iran, and China.
This is absurd.
The alt-right doesn't do anything. They have no power or funding and are suffering actual casualties through repeated assassinations. Pim Fortuyn was murdered, Trump's survived a few attempts, Charlie Kirk was murdered, 7 German AfD candidates mysteriously dropped dead before the election, and something like 30 politicians were outright murdered in Mexico ahead of the last election. To say nothing of the bodies of dead whistleblowers that have been piling up.
You say the alt-right are the bad guys, yet they're the only ones getting killed in broad daylight over demands to...enforce immigration law? Investigate NGO fraud? And all of these deaths just so happen to align to keep neo-Marxist agents in power across the west. Nothing to see here, I guess.
You cite an "informal coalition" between a bunch of unrelated groups while simultaneously blaming everything on the stupidity and greed of the electorate. You're not making a coherent argument, just throwing a bunch of lies at the OP and seeing what sticks.
> You say the alt-right are the bad guys, yet they're the only ones getting killed in broad daylight over demands to...enforce immigration law? Investigate NGO fraud?
Speaking of lies, this is a big one.
1) Heather Heyer, Renee Good, Alex Pretti, just to name three that were killed in broad daylight. Two of them were killed by fascist paramilitary agents of the government in broad daylight. So the first part of this statement is blatantly untrue.
2) I’m not sure if you differentiate the “alt-right” from the current fascists who are in power, but the president has publicly called for the extermination of an entire civilization. So that’s something they want to do, not just the things you list. So again, another lie, or at least a deliberate omission if I’m trying to be charitable.
It's not organic. A country's occupants are only taught that they are evil and should be ashamed of themselves as a means of subjugation after they've been conquered.
Self-destruction is the point of critical theory, and the explicit goal of its architects. For some reason this curriculum is only pushed on western countries.
Though I don't agree with them, I do salute them for making drastic sacrifices for their beliefs. Too many people do nothing more than post angrily online about how somebody else should do something about problems.
That title tells you that neither the person making that comment nor the one that gave them the time of day ever lived or know what it’s like to be in an actual dictatorship and it’s disrespectful to those who did. If this is a dictatorship then wow, North Korea must be great.
I would never, ever renounce my citizenship voluntarily. It gives me access to what I call home, my friends, my family, a massive job market. Politics are a bit rough right now but imagine if that clears up in ten years time and you can't go back. Keeping my passport will always assure that I can get back to The Netherlands.
Your Dutch citizenship doesn’t come with an obligation to laboriously file taxes to your home country even if you live abroad, and you are in no risk of being denied a bank account in any EU country. This is something US passport holders uniquely have to deal with, hence the phenomenon of dual citizens renouncing the US citizenship.
Having to file taxes in my home country would be worth keeping my citizenship. The bank accounts aren’t a big issue, plenty of Americans in the EU seem to manage.
This article is about people renouncing citizenship based on the current administration. That is very short sighted.
PS: The Dutch government can still tax my assets, regardless of the 183 days rule. So there is a risk to me for keeping my passport.
First you must have another nationality to use its passport.
Then, if you do not plan to ever go to the US you can just forger about your US nationality and do not file any documents there, including taxes (which you pay in the country you are in, and hush away your US citizen obligations).
This will not work in Europe, though, where anything financial has a question about you being a US national - and things get gross if you are. I don't know if you have such questions elsewhere.
> Then, if you do not plan to ever go to the US you can just forger about your US nationality and do not file any documents there, including taxes (which you pay in the country you are in, and hush away your US citizen obligations).
This is illegal from a US perspective. US personal income tax is on worldwide income, regardless of where a citizen happens to be living. Some countries have mutual agreements with the US that mitigate that, but that’s the fundamental legal position.
> in Europe, though, where anything financial has a question about you being a US national
What I just described is precisely and entirely why those questions exist.
Take GDPR. If say a US website serving pages to the EU does not follow it at all, or even does everything the other way (collection, ...) the only thing the EU can do is wave their finger. Except if the site has options in the EU.
If you cannot enforce a law it is either dead, or you resort to bully actions like the US does (an example was Trump going account Iran the first time agent an agreement was signed, and telling the EU companies that if they continue to do business with Iran, their US subsidiaries will be fined)
> What I just described is precisely and entirely why those questions exist.
This is simply because we are chickens. Hopefully we will get rid of that someday.
No other country has such advantages like the US with the question about citizenship in financial documents. This is a disgrace.
My point is that the US law is limited to the US, whatever "illegal" is for the US is contained to its land.
The exception being bully tactics they still can afford (less and less, thank you Mr Trump), or the fear countries have to annoy the US and who agree to extraterritoriality, as it is the case with the tax law.
There is one single country in the world that bullied its way into imposing its tax regulations into the heart of European banking systems.
If you have similar tax regulations in any other country in the world, it has zero impact on you in Europe (say if Vietnam required double filing like the US and you were German-Vietnamiese, you could ignore them when living in Germany because no bank will ask you "are you a Vietnamese citizen?")
This is too say that Europe has been a doormat when it comes to such extraterritoriality and this is slowly changing over the last US presidency. At last.
The efforts to divide and weaken the western world have been so massively effective that I sincerely wonder if there is not a state-sized adversary orchestrating all of it for years or even decades. The myopic glee with which people deconstruct their civilizational home from within is astounding, and it is hard to believe that is organic.
It's an informal coalition between the alt-right, the dirtbag left, the extremely wealthy, and Russian, Iran, and China.
Basically everyone selfish and myopic enough that they'd rather upend the table than lose the game was elevated, amplified, and funded by legitimate adversaries. Though, at the end of the day, the real perpetrators are, have always been, and will always be our moronic electorate(s).
Oh also our lazy, clout-chasing fourth estate bears a significant portion of the blame, though I'm convinced their initial contributions were accidental.
No grand conspiracy, just a lot of assholes and idiots and people who should have known better found out that it doesn't take all that much power to damage institutional trust, and got addicted to the sensation of destruction.
> It's an informal coalition between the alt-right, the dirtbag left, the extremely wealthy, and Russian, Iran, and China.
> Basically everyone selfish and myopic enough that they'd rather upend the table than lose the game was elevated, amplified, and funded by legitimate adversaries.
Yeah, I kinda agree with this. You definitely have people who hate their domestic political enemies so much that they'll throw themselves in with foreign powers who oppose them.
> Though, at the end of the day, the real perpetrators are, have always been, and will always be our moronic electorate(s).
Perpetrators? No, come on. People seem to love to hate on the common man for some reason (maybe beating down on other common men makes some common men falsely feel bigger). But they're just easy targets, because they can't fight back.
The real "perpetrators" if you can call them that, are the elite people in places of power, who are trusted with responsibility but too-often prioritize their own parochial interests.
Case in point: the Democratic party. They've been screaming from the mountaintops since 2016 about the dangers of authoritarianism, many of which have come to pass. But what do they do? Compromise to form a broader coalition to meet the existential threat? No, of course not. Instead they cater to divisive special interests; wag their fingers at everyone they turn off who doesn't vote for them; and look no father than hoping they can eek out narrow, unstable partisan victories by turning out their base.
> alt-right, the dirtbag left, the extremely wealthy, and Russian, Iran, and China.
This is absurd.
The alt-right doesn't do anything. They have no power or funding and are suffering actual casualties through repeated assassinations. Pim Fortuyn was murdered, Trump's survived a few attempts, Charlie Kirk was murdered, 7 German AfD candidates mysteriously dropped dead before the election, and something like 30 politicians were outright murdered in Mexico ahead of the last election. To say nothing of the bodies of dead whistleblowers that have been piling up.
You say the alt-right are the bad guys, yet they're the only ones getting killed in broad daylight over demands to...enforce immigration law? Investigate NGO fraud? And all of these deaths just so happen to align to keep neo-Marxist agents in power across the west. Nothing to see here, I guess.
You cite an "informal coalition" between a bunch of unrelated groups while simultaneously blaming everything on the stupidity and greed of the electorate. You're not making a coherent argument, just throwing a bunch of lies at the OP and seeing what sticks.
> You say the alt-right are the bad guys, yet they're the only ones getting killed in broad daylight over demands to...enforce immigration law? Investigate NGO fraud?
Speaking of lies, this is a big one.
1) Heather Heyer, Renee Good, Alex Pretti, just to name three that were killed in broad daylight. Two of them were killed by fascist paramilitary agents of the government in broad daylight. So the first part of this statement is blatantly untrue.
2) I’m not sure if you differentiate the “alt-right” from the current fascists who are in power, but the president has publicly called for the extermination of an entire civilization. So that’s something they want to do, not just the things you list. So again, another lie, or at least a deliberate omission if I’m trying to be charitable.
It's not organic. A country's occupants are only taught that they are evil and should be ashamed of themselves as a means of subjugation after they've been conquered.
Self-destruction is the point of critical theory, and the explicit goal of its architects. For some reason this curriculum is only pushed on western countries.
Though I don't agree with them, I do salute them for making drastic sacrifices for their beliefs. Too many people do nothing more than post angrily online about how somebody else should do something about problems.
That title tells you that neither the person making that comment nor the one that gave them the time of day ever lived or know what it’s like to be in an actual dictatorship and it’s disrespectful to those who did. If this is a dictatorship then wow, North Korea must be great.
I would never, ever renounce my citizenship voluntarily. It gives me access to what I call home, my friends, my family, a massive job market. Politics are a bit rough right now but imagine if that clears up in ten years time and you can't go back. Keeping my passport will always assure that I can get back to The Netherlands.
Your Dutch citizenship doesn’t come with an obligation to laboriously file taxes to your home country even if you live abroad, and you are in no risk of being denied a bank account in any EU country. This is something US passport holders uniquely have to deal with, hence the phenomenon of dual citizens renouncing the US citizenship.
Having to file taxes in my home country would be worth keeping my citizenship. The bank accounts aren’t a big issue, plenty of Americans in the EU seem to manage.
This article is about people renouncing citizenship based on the current administration. That is very short sighted.
PS: The Dutch government can still tax my assets, regardless of the 183 days rule. So there is a risk to me for keeping my passport.
First you must have another nationality to use its passport.
Then, if you do not plan to ever go to the US you can just forger about your US nationality and do not file any documents there, including taxes (which you pay in the country you are in, and hush away your US citizen obligations).
This will not work in Europe, though, where anything financial has a question about you being a US national - and things get gross if you are. I don't know if you have such questions elsewhere.
This is highly illegal and could get you extradited back to the US if you're unlucky. Get advice from a real lawyer before doing anything like this.
If you are a French citizen, you will not get extradited to the US for tax reasons.
For the record I am not a US citizen, fortunately.
> Then, if you do not plan to ever go to the US you can just forger about your US nationality and do not file any documents there, including taxes (which you pay in the country you are in, and hush away your US citizen obligations).
This is illegal from a US perspective. US personal income tax is on worldwide income, regardless of where a citizen happens to be living. Some countries have mutual agreements with the US that mitigate that, but that’s the fundamental legal position.
> in Europe, though, where anything financial has a question about you being a US national
What I just described is precisely and entirely why those questions exist.
> Some countries have mutual agreements with the US that mitigate that, but that’s the fundamental legal position.
What mitigation are you talking about? Does it apply to Sweden?
According to a simple search, yes:
https://www.state.gov/06-831
> This is illegal from a US perspective
Yes. It also need to be enforceable.
Take GDPR. If say a US website serving pages to the EU does not follow it at all, or even does everything the other way (collection, ...) the only thing the EU can do is wave their finger. Except if the site has options in the EU.
If you cannot enforce a law it is either dead, or you resort to bully actions like the US does (an example was Trump going account Iran the first time agent an agreement was signed, and telling the EU companies that if they continue to do business with Iran, their US subsidiaries will be fined)
> What I just described is precisely and entirely why those questions exist.
This is simply because we are chickens. Hopefully we will get rid of that someday.
No other country has such advantages like the US with the question about citizenship in financial documents. This is a disgrace.
> or you resort to bully actions like the US does
Yes, so your point is? You seem confused.
My point is that the US law is limited to the US, whatever "illegal" is for the US is contained to its land.
The exception being bully tactics they still can afford (less and less, thank you Mr Trump), or the fear countries have to annoy the US and who agree to extraterritoriality, as it is the case with the tax law.
Not sure where you seem to be confused.
One more comment following the downvotes.
There is one single country in the world that bullied its way into imposing its tax regulations into the heart of European banking systems.
If you have similar tax regulations in any other country in the world, it has zero impact on you in Europe (say if Vietnam required double filing like the US and you were German-Vietnamiese, you could ignore them when living in Germany because no bank will ask you "are you a Vietnamese citizen?")
This is too say that Europe has been a doormat when it comes to such extraterritoriality and this is slowly changing over the last US presidency. At last.