Defective chain of reasoning
What’s the thinking process here?
Greenland’s likely new prime minister on Wednesday rejected U.S. President Donald Trump’s effort to take control of the island, saying Greenlanders must be allowed to decide their own future as it moves toward independence from Denmark.
Jens-Frederik Nielsen’s Demokraatit, a pro-business party that favors a slow path to independence, won a surprise victory in Tuesday’s parliamentary election, outpacing the two left-leaning parties that formed the last government. With most Greenlanders opposing Trump’s overtures, the campaign focused more on issues like healthcare and education than on geopolitics.
But on Wednesday Nielsen was quick to push back against Trump, who last week told a joint session of Congress that the U.S. needed Greenland to protect its own national security interests and he expected to get it “one way or the other.”
What’s the thinking process behind need/want=entitlement? We all need or want lots of things, but that doesn’t mean we automatically get to have them.
Trump is focused on Greenland because it straddles strategic air and sea routes in the North Atlantic and is home to the U.S.’s Pituffik Space Base, which supports missile warning and space surveillance operations. Greenland also has large deposits of the rare-earth minerals needed to make everything from mobile phones to renewable energy technology.
Trump said during the meeting with Rutte that “Denmark’s very far away” from Greenland and questioned whether that country still had a right to claim the world’s largest island as part of its kingdom.
“A boat landed there 200 years ago or something. And they say they have rights to it,” Trump said. “I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t think it is, actually.”
How does that translate to WE have rights to it???
By that “standard”, Canada has a better claim to Greenland than the US does, even better than Iceland, when you see how close our Arctic islands are to Greenland in the north. Not that Trump really cares what reason/excuse/justification he uses, and whether or not it makes sense, is consistent, or whatever. “I WANT IT” is all he thinks he needs.
We know, Don, we know.
Never mind Greenland; by Trump’s ‘logic’ he should be handing the U.S back to the Native Americans any day now.
But White Europeans stole it from them fair and square, so that makes Native Americans losers who don’t deserve anything. If they’d really wanted to keep the land, they wouldn’t have shared, sold it, surrendered, or left it to anyone. They wouldn’t have let themselves be genocided, defeated, outnumbered, and forced off of it. Because others were able to take it from them, it never really belonged to them. Wanting, taking, winning, and keeping are all that Trump understands. Stiffing all those contractors? Repeated bankruptcies that he walked away from? All part of the same mentality. When he doesn’t have the most, the best, and the biggest, he lies and claims he does.
I’ve had the misfortune of hearing several White House press briefings presided over by Hitler Youth Barbie, and it’s disgusting just how much of any of them consist of Trump aggrandizement. He needs the constant inflation of his ego through praise and puffery, lest it collapse under its own flabby weight, all of it fueled and fed by a Gish Gallop of exaggeration and mendacity. Always harping on about how Trump received a “massive mandate” from “the American people.” Always going on about how things are now so much better than they ever were under Biden. How this is a new American “golden age.” If he wasn’t so dangerously stupid and stupidly dangerous it would be pathetic. It’s self parodying.
“By that “standard”, Canada has a better claim to Greenland than the US does”
The Greenlandic language is closely related to Inuktitut, one of the official languages of Nunavut, the territory of Canada close to Greenland. Maybe having that cultural link would make the Greenlanders consider joining Canada the best option.
Of course Trump would say he has a claim to Canada as well, so…
I wasn’t going to go there. Maybe if we give him all the cake nd ice cream, he’ll leave everyone else alone. Otherwise, we’ll all going to have to make a whole bunch of mashed potatoes.
But then, they’re all part of the Greater East American Co-prosperity Sphere.