Would you be up for making recommendations?
https://european-alternatives.eu/
I self hosting almost everything, but for a complete suite of services take at look at Infomaniak : https://www.infomaniak.com/en
Protonmail (https://proton.me/mail) or Tutanota (https://tuta.com/) for end-to-end encrypted emails, Filen (https://filen.io/) for encrypted Cloud Storage
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one thing that seems tricky though, is smartphone OS software. Apple + Google is on like 99% of everything. i went few years with Sailfish, all fine.. but they support only 5y+ old devices, for a reason or another.. and i got tired of waiting, and switched to Android. hmmm
Thank you for the heads-up !
I don't want to continue to contribute to making richer companies that try in every possible way to steal data and wealth from their customers and other nations with unfair behavior at the edge (or beyond the edge) of the law.
And if that is not enough to also use every possible way to manipulate the people's beliefs with false claims and evil psychological tactics.
This makes it hard for US-companies handling data of EU citizens to comply with EU privacy regulations. Some legal provisions have been made to facilitate this, but, to answer your question, what changed recently is that the Trump administration recently effectively incapacitated the "Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board" that was central to these legal provisions.
Above is my interpretation of matters, for a large part based on posts by a Dutch expert in these matters, Bert Hubert. In particular see this post: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/you-can-no-longer-base-you... and this news article it links to: https://noyb.eu/en/us-cloud-soon-illegal-trump-punches-first...
This site is great for finding alternatives to any piece of software (not just OSS)
If you have the time and are interacting with the account, take the second to change it away from gMail. Insisting on doing them all immediately is setting up a Herculean task that'll almost certainly leave you demoralized. This gets your most-used (and presumably most important) accounts first,and feels much smaller and more manageable.
After 6 (or 18, whenever) months of this you can summon some motivation to change over the last 20 accounts and be done with it.
I believe that US firms see European tech companies as slow/lazy and think that good engineers only seek high compensation which is available to them in the US. Certainly there are some who are motivated by that, but I have known some great engineers in Europe which was one of my reasons for cautioning my American peers about pushing too hard for WFH; if they can do the job from home, then so can others in countries with lower costs of living.
If that were true then people wouldn't worry as much. It's because there is a fuck-you-and-the-world nationalistic theme going on and US tech companies are unable to escape — that makes people worry. No company in the world is a vehicle to pure financial rationalism, and no human or collection of humans are either.
Ahem … large US tech firms, that is.
FWIW we have had two customers (apologetically) terminate service in the past month citing nationalist concerns.
In Sweden, Russia has always been the enemy.
My prediction is that France and Germany will soon join the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF) and it will be the end of NATO. UK will probably join the Maximator intelligence alliance.
The death of Five Eyes and NATO in 2025 was not on my bingo card. Good luck with your new alliance with the Russians, Americans!
Their point is that OP likely underestimates the effect of their particular filter bubble on their perception of the universality of the discussion and sentiment.
When you ask the extremists, like some of the people in these threads, to list specific concerns about specific things that the USG is currently doing that they're unaligned with, they struggle. The biggest concern is, I guess, that we've banned trans men from womens sports and removed the X option from gender forms? Look, I think its a distraction for either side to be worrying about this so much. Those actions are a very, very far distance from anything remotely resembling human rights abuse. We've been playing world police since WW2 and we're $35T in debt; we have bigger fish to fry.
If you're mad that the United States is asking your country to contribute more to its own defense; or that its no longer going to get that $50M USAID contract for gender fluidity studies or whatever; I don't know what to tell you. Growing up is hard, but necessary. Europe can't keep relying on the US for everything.
If its ending the war in Ukraine; I think judgement should be reserved until we understand the terms of how it ends. Ukraine could lose some territory. Sucks, but again, America voted and does not want to be the world police anymore. Supporting peace at the cost of Ukrainian territory is not automatically "omg Russia and US are allied". Its a sad, horrible outcome of Europe utterly failing its neighbor; but sure, they can blame the US, part of the job of being World Police is also being World Scapegoat.
Most everything else the Trump admin is doing doesn't impact Europe. Its vague generalities about "vibes". You're oversocialized, and those vibes are probably courtesy of Russian/Chinese disinformation propaganda, not reality. Its hard to hear, you aren't going to believe it, but please just log off the internet and orient yourself on what really matters in your daily life.
Really? The biggest concern? Not wantonly cutting long-running programs (even international commitments) with no regard to consequences, just to see what happens?
To some degree I think it’s being treated as yet another line item in the long list of things that need to be managed in global companies of a certain size. I presume that the threat of retaliation (see story about X advertisers) is keeping voices quiet too.
It’s different this time… it’s going to get weird. And possibly dangerous. Talk of third term, crashing the economy as a pretense for parting out the assets of the federal government, finding a reason to cancel the next election, and being the war machine for our enemies may not feel like the purview of technology companies even as they angle for federal contracts to “support” some of these things.
We need more bodies at protests. Not everything announced has gone into effect, but they’re testing all the things they want to make happen. And they’re persistent.
The public haven’t yet seen the spark that may light the next resistance fire. It may not feel like we have moves available to us, but public boycotts, protests/ marches, calls to our politicians, honking for peace, supporting our neighbors — these are all reps in the resistance. They are recruitment and rallying measures. They are all little tiny sparks, from which something may alight. Look for something happening today and show up.
Musk is already pretty unpopular. A lot of the damage will hit MAGA territories. It may unravel the base for the GOP. They conspired well for a long time. It’s a daunting situation.
In terms of pensions - I think 99.9% of us have a huge chunk the S&P, so even though we're upset I doubt there will be any movement on that front at all. Money will win in this battle.
Personally I do feel betrayed as well and for the first time in my life I've started looking for where the product I consume come from. About a third is from the US. Stopped buying them, found a European alternative.
To all the Europeans out here - let them live how they want over the pond, let's use this opportunity to promote our industries and products as well as become as independent as we possibly can given our current financial and political constraints.
No hard feelings at all, live and let live.
Here's a particular dutch pension fund that dropped their us stocks: https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/dutch-pension-fund-ab...
Do you own anything made in China or have ever used oil and gas from Russia?
In addition, tariffs will be put on cars coming from the US.
Plus, US is now recognized as a very unreliable partner in terms of defense, that Europe regrets buying their systems.
I bought this car six years ago paying for the FSD feature upfront, and since then Tesla and their CEO have been constantly lying about it. I’ll never buy another car from this company just for this reason.
I think Musk probably sees the writing on the wall. Tesla’s brand is destroyed in Europe and they can’t ship these promised advanced features in this market. But he doesn’t mind giving up the European market because he’s got a sweet deal at home where his businesses are now part of a 1930s-style union between corporations and authoritarian government. The gains from that arrangement far outweigh the headaches of trying to sell cars globally.
Also, france has a first-strike policy.
So even without US troops, europe will be fine.
A sizable part of the population has wanted the US out of especially germany for a looong time now, so those movements have become pretty popular again. I haven't heard "ami go home" in a long time, but right now it's common.
If push came to shove, the only ally Ukraine needs to equal Russia (as it is today) is Poland.
They'd rather not have to as it would be expensive, but Poland could match 100% of current outside assistance for Ukraine[0] for a smaller fraction of their GDP than Ukraine itself is currently spending on the war[1].
The USA and Russia agreeing with each other to carve up Ukraine would be a much harder battle.
Well, it would be harder unless DOGE actually does make good on the claim of $2T cuts, because the only way of reaching $2T without touching the "mandatory" budget (mandatory = social security etc.) is to delete the entire armed forces and the CIA (and basically everything else) and just under half the interest payments on the loans, which in turn means they'd have no power to carve anything up.
[0] $380bn over the first 2 years according to Wikipedia, so lets say $190bn/year
[1] Ukraine plans to spend ~$53.7 billion in 2025, about 26% GDP
Poland's GDP is $915, 26% of that would be $237.9 billion / year.
So I guess my question is aren’t Europe already by themselves?
https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/dutch-pension-fund-ab...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/fewer-canadi...
America's image is toxic to everyone right now (including its own citizens). But I don't really see that many valid alternatives. It's not like Europe has done much to cultivate any kind of relevant software industry.
But you're kind of showing here why Europe doesn't have the software innovation America does.
Americans are not inherently smarter or more capable of doing innovative things than Europeans. It's just that whenever a European wants to do something interesting, there's a handy European regulation making it harder or less profitable to do it.
If this American administration is the impetus for that to change, that would be good! But I doubt it.
For independent indexes, Brave’s search came from a German company and Yandex certainly isn’t American.
It's a massive opportunity for European-based companies to compete. I expect a lot more funding to start materialising here as a result.
In other words, Europe's weakness and dividedness is a consequence of the soft power the US used to have. The EU has the capital (human and economic) to be a world power in principle, but never needed to.
This has all changed very suddenly. Whether Europe can rise to the challenge I don't know, but it's the first time in a very long time that there is a possibility of it happening.
I find the game theoretic view quite interesting here. Even if we interpret Trump's action in the best possible light, that he knows what he's doing and playing the madman strategy to get others to comply, the destruction of trust that this strategy causes makes it impossible in the long term to build mutually beneficial cooperative structures.
That is evidently not true. You being unhappy, doesn't make the whole world unhappy too.
Doubt it though
I fortunately also got rid of Facebook a while ago. This gave me a lot more time back. It's difficult at first, because there's a little fomo, but now I am very happy.
I never started with all the other social media. No Instagram, no Twitter. So that makes it easy.
My computers have always run Linux, very happy with that.
Streaming services are next. At least the US ones.
Replacing whatsapp with signal also. I noticed a lot of my contacts are already in there, just not actively using it. It's a question of just starting communications and groups there.
It's quite doable, but you have to really want to "vote with your wallet" so to speak. I think it's a worthwhile sacrifice. In fact, it rids you of psychological warfare, reduces anxiety, costs less money and gives you your time back.
If you think about it that way, it's a no brainer.
That is just the business part of things, the removal of DEI at all cost in conjunction with the Russian dealings and the statements from JD Vance are also a bit hard to be positive about.
We like the companies but the noise increases risk as opposed to European partners.
They will care very, very much when it bites them in terms of higher prices and loss of jobs because of decreased tech exports. Dollar hegemony has benefitted the US economy tremendously over the past few decades; money rushed _into_ US dollar denominated holdings in the 2008 crash as one big example.
Let’s stop pretending that the individuals who voted for this administration actually wanted most of what it is doing. The majority voted off of feelings and will not like the end result. There is a lot of explaining away the stupidity and I find it really annoying.
It’s not a difference of opinion that Tariffs will cause a rise in prices, no matter what the current administration says.
Max Hastings: The trauma of Trump: can we still do business with his America? - https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/the-trau...
FT: US tech will pay a price for Donald Trump’s approval - https://www.ft.com/content/2347e5d3-cbc2-4128-a108-bb89558e3...
FT: How Washington plans to defend the dollar - this is about Crypto - https://www.ft.com/content/bfafb8f7-bd1c-48bb-85f4-8ba25475c...
FT: Donald Trump considers tarriffs to counter Big Tech service taxes: - https://www.ft.com/content/558b5a20-c25e-483d-8fdc-bbfd2923a...
This is just the tip of the iceberg.
It seems clear to me now, that the dependency on US tech needs to be reduced _a lot_, and I sincerely hope this current political storm will bring renewed interest in protocols and European tech
It has many links to articles with an European viewpoint.
But you have to read between the lines as EU media does not like to write "this is too crazy to be happening, what are they thinking?".
E.g. a title like "Macron calls emergency European summit on Trump". How bad do you think it has to create a EU summit solely for handling the new US relationship?
tldr: large increase in EU military and which has to be EU made. US is seen as ending "rule of law" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_law) and has become an unreliable partner, great loss of soft power and prestige.
Suppose the war ends. Will the Europeans keep boycotting the cheap russian gas?
Tarriffs are a nuisance to the US - the US doesn't export much.
Technology, services, social media... the US export A LOT to Europe. Any iPhone sold in Europe is money that goes to the US, any app sold in Europe is money that goes to the US. Any Ad seen on the web/social in Europe is money that goes to the us...
"Apple recorded sales of over 101 billion U.S. dollars in Europe during FY 2024, reaching an all-time high across the continent. " [1]
If Europe would start tariffs on those, it would be a lot of money.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/349086/apple-net-sales-i...
I think they absolutely will, yes. It will cost some money, just like spending more money on defense will, but from what I can see, no one in the European politic elite imagines a world where we can go back to buying gas from Russia.
How fast can Ukraine scrap the parts of the pipeline going through their own territory?
Even those countries that would quite like access to Russian gas, may just not have a choice in the matter.
And given we've already seen some spectacularly poor decision making by whoever fires the various missiles[0] that end up hitting multiple different nuclear reactors in the area, there's a non-zero risk of the entire border region suffering catastrophic (though likely not Chernobyl-1986 level[1]) radiation leak incidents.
This also makes it somewhat of a moot point to consider any mineral wealth besides oil, or even a return to normality for food output, at this point.
[0] Zaporizhzhia: both sides blamed the other, and irregardless of who did it, the nature of the damage says it was done by shelling; more recently Chernobyl's outer barrier was also hit.
[1] I think Russia still has some reactors with positive void coefficient in Kursk (near where Ukraine's counter-invasion was), but Ukraine itself has decommissioned all their positive void coefficient reactors.
So it's not impossible for another Chernobyl, but it's really unlikely.
US to EU gas trade is insane right now due to pricing and a 20% tariff won't change anything.
For starters, they will shock well greased supply chains, that will cause shortages and thus price raises. Who suffer price raising the most? Then, protected industries will have quasi-monopoly power to raise prices (this is the populism behind tariffs). But other industries will suffer because they can't import their resources and have to switch to more expensive and/or lower quality locals. As an example: suppose that car makers are happy with tariffs protecting them from japanese cars, but now they have to buy expensive US steel, and have to move their assembly lines back to US where today is hard to find experienced and cheap workers. Because everyone always claim to want industry back, but then nobody wants a blue collar job if they can get a white collar one.
It’s possible all economists are wrong. It is more likely they aren’t. Tariffs are going to hurt middle and lower classes.
(Same goes for the other side of the geopolitical aisle: European politicians would have liked a much faster and much more comprehensive economic decoupling from China since at least the start of the Ukraine war. But feedback from the private sector was pretty clear that this would have been economic suicide. Hence the official stance is now "de-risking" instead of "decoupling")
America itself has its own problems. America is spending too much money. America has an inflation problem that led to one of the most unpopular presidents ever getting elected again. Many Americans think it’s time to solve America’s problems instead of being feted in European capitals. If that means the rest of world won’t use Gmail, YouTube, or Facebook, so be it. Those companies can take care of themselves.
America is voluntarily stepping down from the international stage by imposing tariffs, ignoring treaties, demonizing foreigners, bowing out of powerful organizations and then saber rattling about the rise of China as the world looks elsewhere for leadership. It's clearly an intentional agitation and eventual war footing by naive self-destructive idiots.
They end up achieving the opposite of their aims. They say they're going to lower egg prices, which is caused by the H5N1 bird flu epidemic, but instead they think it's from DEI hires and defund the USDA and organizations tasked with controlling the spread of bird flu and then egg prices go up. They then think "aughh! more wokeness! it's everywhere!"
This is happening everywhere, with every bugaboo they care about. They blame it on nefarious acronyms and then dismantle the institutions trying to fix things. This is really the time to leave. Start packing the bags folks.
They are all sitting ducks for black swan events, but I don't think getting roasted in Europe will be enough to trouble them.
You yanks might think this is some display of your upper hand. Just wait until the civilized world turns its back on the greenback as the reserve currency. You will be so fucked.
EMEA has always been a soft market for tech. And it's always been a cost center for regionalization and compliance.
A move away from US tech is not necessarily new or surprising. But it's also not as damning to the bottom line as one would expect.
I will say that the tech sector in Europe is not nearly as robust. While alternatives exist for some products, they are not likely going to find international markets of their own. (Overgeneralization, obv).
Soft power sounds like manipulation to me. So if we destroyed our manipulation, great. The United States has put its fingers on too many scales rather than respecting the rights of individuals in other countries to manage their affairs the way they see fit.
I welcome tech competition from Europe. Let the best products and services win.
Something like 40% of the humanitarian contribution in the world came from USAID, and Thanos just fingersnapped it out of existence last Tuesday.
Until that gap is filled, there will be tons of unnecessary suffering. A "more humane" way would have been to slowly wind down over a period of months/years, giving the market time to react. Even better would have been to work with foreign powers to spin off USAID-backed initiatives and transfer control+funding responsibility to them, but I'm just a girl with a unrealistic dream at that point
Wow. So hard power -- literally killing others -- is OK, but "manipulating" them is not?
The fact is, power is power, "soft" or "hard," and we are discarding ours for nothing.
Also, alliances are not "manipulation." Working together against a common foe is not manipulation. Trade agreements are not manipulation.
I'm not sure where you read that in my comment. That's not something I wrote, and it's not something I believe.
The first question is how broad is this shift; is it really everywhere on the street or just in the "early adopters"?
The next question is how durable is the trend?
The things I've noticed here are reports of AfD rapidly losing 5% in the polls after Vance spoke in Munich, and a French right-wing leader cancelling his planned speech at CPAC after Bannon did a Nazi salute in his talk. When the US wannabe-Nazis are too toxic for European pro-fascists, that is saying something...
I don’t know about people usage of tech.
But it’s now really clear that the US is not a reliable ally. ( not even getting into politics, just stability wise : it’s clear that a change of regime can have the country do a 180 in term of foreign policies. And it’s not a good look )
The issue in EU is Big Tech has many "minions" in public administrations and local critical online services (many dominant online services are theirs anyway). They manage to make hard dependent the "web" on their cartel of whatng web rendering engines (and their SDK).
The USA has a culture of startups because there you often get financially rewarded for winning. Startups are mostly a loser's game in New Zealand (Disclosure: I'm a very minor winner at the startup game over here - I have at least some skin in the game and some practical learning).
Improving regulations would help - however governments seem to lack the skills/incentives/motivation to choose good compromises.
> receive money from people like Marc Andreessen.
Money doesn't actually have morals: the point of money is it allows all of us to choose between morally conflicting choices based on prices and our bank balance. Money is a fungible representation of limited resources. I've never met Marc, but his writing seems fairly disagreeable to me.
Part of the reason Europe is economically losing is that Europe doesn't play economics to win.
Systems have their own emergent properties and Europe seems hell bent on regulating their systems so that European countries gift control to the USA for critical things.
Also, look at social media like reddit even outside of politics, Europeans constantly laugh at Americans for bringing up European heritage but when Europe is in trouble, it’s all “think of Europe!!!” Why? America is in its own safe bubble, Russia is not really a threat to us and personally I’m not even of European heritage so telling me to care so much more about Europe unlike Asia or Africa just falls on deaf ears. I get along with Russians just as much as I get along with the English or French, and this is true for many of us, we’re a country of immigrants but much of that isn’t European in origin and even those of European origin aren’t necessarily thinking of Europe in any regard except as a potential vacation destination.
The EU simply isn’t that important to many of us.
I also find this very strange, that people did not talk about doing the mass exodus after we found out the US is conducting mass surveillance on us, but just because they don't like the politics of the current president, they start talking about how bad the US is.
> The expectation is that especially US tech will be weaponized
That should always have been the expectation, that's why the basic idea of GDPR was a good one, too bad they have botched it in the end.
> I know people in the US are focused on DOGE, but over here in Europe, the impression is that the US completely destroyed its soft power this week.
It's just some politicians who are unhappy because things didn't go their way, a lot of ordinary people are just happy to see hope that the economic suicide might be coming to an end, maybe next year my energy bills won't be 3x of what they used to be 3 years ago, one can dream.
Keep in mind that most people don't even understand what current events are about, the vocal minority can be very vocal.
> so people are switching search engines
> Are people talking about this - do they take it seriously or believe there is no alternative to US tech?
Switching search engines is easy, try switching your whole office from Windows to Linux.
> What does it mean for US startups, California and global tech?
It will mean nothing, if I need to build a product that requires US tech and there is no alternative, I'm going to use the US tech, end of story.
As for the US dollar, floats against the euro and yen are still roughly in historic high territory, though not at peak, and recently edge up. If the US actually tries to default maybe there’d be significant flight to other currencies. Otherwise any large institution is probably going to wait out 4 years, possibly find the next bubble to pump up during likely deregulation of markets, and probably have it pop in time for the political right to blame it on progressives if/when the public pendulum swings the other way and they hold office again. The other way the dollar fails is if there is general wide spread world chaos in & out of financial markets, but in that case I’d expect little in the way of an alternative world reserve and more in the way of regional reserves, more insular and isolated.
I am a real transatlanticist - I was on the green card path (5 yrs with H1Bs), but returned to Europe for family reasons.
I don't want this split - I want to know, if people see it as an issue and I want to know the possible consequences and workarounds and how we can work together.
There isn't, broadly speaking. Oh yeah, gonna use OpenEuroLLM? Have y'all made the ePhone yet or is that still stuck in committee?
Other countries will moan for a bit, no one likes having their free money and handouts taken away, then realize that US technology is still broadly the only option, and its actually quite good and even other US companies cant compete with US big tech with all of the free money here, let alone the tech-backward eurozone. Right now its the UK forcing Apple to remove Advanced Data Protection for UK citizens (not the eurozone, to be clear, but adjacent and culturally aligned)
The "boycotts" are great for headlines though (don't worry, Apple's revenue this year will be larger than ever, as always). If y'all don't want to buy Teslas though, I get that; I feel the same way.
Europe also has the express disadvantage of having a rather combative and expansionist nation to their east, who is allied with China. It relies on the United States for something like 70% of aggregate defense spending in NATO. I think we'll see those numbers shift, I hope we do, but as you say: It won't happen overnight.
But sure; if you feel that the country which participates in the systematic forced labor imprisonment and forced organ harvesting of ethnic minorities is a better cultural ally than the United States, even considering what the United States has done recently... well, maybe JD Vance is right.
My hope is, genuinely, as you first say: Europe needs to get its act together and become more self-sufficient. That's been a major topic of Trump's, and it would ultimately benefit the world, most of all Europe.
We're a deeply interconnected world. Few parts of it can be self-sufficient while retaining the standard of living they're used to. This is true for no region more than Europe. Europe, broadly, relies more on the productivity, output, energy, and innovation of America and Asia for their standard of living than any other region, including America and Asia on each other or on Europe.
The iPhone is an interesting example because Apple's Asia sales did drop last quarter; but that drop was compensated for by a ~$3B increase in European sales. That's the trend I'd bet money on continuing. Europe doesn't have any other choice, and except on some fringe issues Europe's purported culture and values align far more with even Trump's America than China. Europe cannot afford to not pick a side in that adversarial relationship.
Tbh, Europeans broadly trying to boycott American companies gives real "toddler throwing a tantrum because his parents made him eat broccoli" vibes. At best, its unserious. At worst, its only going to harm Europe. Europe should make efforts toward reducing its dependence on the rest of the world, but their leadership is deeply unserious about doing so, and even if they became serious it would take many decades to reach even the only America or Asia is at.
People don´t care, never did.
Example: after Jamal Khashoggi was murdered, people still suck up to MbS. Money rules the world.
After what we learned about Guantanamo Bay, nobody should be allowed to call the US a democratic country. But we all decided to ignore the facts, as watching Netflix is way to nice.
Meanwhile our President also keeps threatening to invade sovereign territory (Greenland) of a NATO ally (Denmark) and using language w/r/t Canada that is almost indistinguishable from how Russia talked about Ukraine a decade ago. And Canadians are fucking pissed about it.
It's very, very different than his first term or even Iraq.
This time it is diplomats that are raising the flags. It actually has not yet arrived in the public sphere as drastically as it has in the policy side.
In the first term Trump was unprepared, now they had 4 years to prepare and it seems they are very methodical in dismantling US global influence, and but also dismantling structures internally.
As far as I'm worried about security of Europe or Far East allies (Japan, SK, Taiwan, Philippines), I'm worried about future of US itself.
Europeans see this as treason, and it is.
We definitely had a dim view of the Iraq invasion. At the time, I ran a Microsoft recruiting event on campus at University of Waterloo. Students made some widget using whatever framework du jour was popular in order to win a prize. The top-voted widget was one that showed how many Iraqi civilians had been killed by the US so far during the war. Still, we sort of understood: y'all had a legitimate grievance due to 9/11 (just, not, y'know, against Iraq...)
We had a dim view of the first Trump administration. Muslim ban? Trump's anti-vax horseshit during a pandemic? January 6?
And then Americans re-elected him. Whether it's the Nazi stuff, the tariff stuff, the annexation stuff, the trans stuff, the firing the blacks and women stuff, it's just exhausting chaos that was all predictable.
Now we have a dim view of Americans.
There is a benefit, in that I'm hopeful this will be the impetus for Canada to become a more serious country. Still, it's incredibly wasteful. If we retool to trade more with Europe and Asia, both Canada and the US will be poorer for it. But god, it will be worth it.
And mind you, that was without any Hitler salutes or calling astronauts "retards", that was "just" war under the pretense of being very concerned and wanting to avoid "a smoking gun in form of a mushroom cloud". We knew that was bullshit, but at least there was this pretense, that kinda softened and muddled things a bit. This time, it's also war, but it's in Europe. And there isn't even any tribute paid to decency even in the form of bald lies and hypocrisy, there is just a deranged snarl.
Example: Using starlink as extortion of Ukraine to allow USA to colonize them to retroactively pay for support.
https://www.reuters.com/business/us-could-cut-ukraines-acces...
Extortion and classic colonialism and imperialism.
Ukraine has been fighting for their life the last 3 years. And now USA opportunistically join with a new front.
I wish I was kidding.
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It's beyond clear that the AfD are a far right fascist group. So clear that it has caused the majority of their leadership to change - explicitly citing them being anti-democracy and pro-russian and extremist - and the actual government's protection arm to consider then a threat to the nation's democracy:
> In January 2022, after a lost power struggle, party leader Jörg Meuthen resigned his party chairmanship with immediate effect and left the AfD, as he claimed he came to acknowledge that the party had developed very far to the right with totalitarian traits and in large parts was no longer based on the liberal democratic basic order. Former party chairman and co-founder of the AfD, Lucke, had left the party in 2015 with the same remark.
...
> When party founder Bernd Lucke had left the AfD in 2015, he cited, among other reasons an "anti-western, decidedly pro-Russian foreign and security policy orientation" as well as increasing calls to "pose the 'system question' with regard to our parliamentary democracy" as reasons for his departure from the party.
...
> In March 2020, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (German: Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz) classified AfD's far-right nationalistic faction known as Der Flügel as "a right-wing extremist endeavor against the free democratic basic order" and as "not compatible with the Basic Law", placing it under government surveillance.
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That other commenter is either ignorant to the point of negligence or a fascist themselves.
I can tell you that the media cycle and conversation here (The Netherlands) has been very much about how we can move forward without the United States. People around me have been pulling out of American social media, dropping WhatsApp (which has been the biggest chat app here for a long time), and stopped using American exports.
It's even overshadowing the German elections, which would otherwise be the biggest news topic, as the election in Europe's largest economy.
A lot of people here have lost a huge amount of trust in the US, and I don't know if it can ever really come back.
It doesn't matter lol
