Greenland Is a Beautiful Nightmare
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The article 'Greenland is a beautiful nightmare' shares the author's mixed experiences visiting Greenland, sparking discussions about the country's unique culture, harsh environment, and the author's biases.
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Sep 27, 2025 at 11:46 AM EDT
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Definitely worth opening the shade for if you have the opportunity
this is not going to end well
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0j9l08902eo
https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-polit...
The same thing is happening in Alberta. It is unsettling and disturbing
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
Edit - for those who don't get it, Alberta derives most of its wealth from oil. Successive Liberal governments have both restricted our ability to sell oil while taking significant amounts of money from Alberta in transfer payments. Since Alberta has a border with the US, we have pipelines going south. All the while the Canadian economy has been severely under-performing relative to the US government. The last 2 points naturally push Alberta away from Canada towards the US, without any potential political interference.
You could say the "benefit" could be that getting approvals for pipelines and higher production of oil might be easier to get in the US. That's really just an "if" though. The Keystone XL pipeline was blocked twice by US government.
What it should have done is adopt Norway's model. It would have half a trillion in savings already if it had, and wouldn't even need oil, as raw investment could finance its budget alone.
But putting all that aside as well. Your average Albertan wouldn't be better off. They'd lose healthcare, education would be more expensive, they'd have a worse retirement fund, and so on. They'd have to pay more tax and get less benefit in return. Plus, there'd be a higher influx of immigrants low balling the jobs and lowering wages.
But it’s not too late to change course. If Alberta seriously committed to a Norway style model now, it could still build a fund big enough to make oil dependence temporary. That alone could justify building pipelines to the coast, use it as a bridge until the Heritage Fund becomes a self-sustaining engine of prosperity. It's a convincing argument for the other provinces, and would be great for Canada overall.
You ever needed surgery? Ever tried to use healthcare for anything non trivial or not immediately urgent?
I've lived in BC and Alberta. Things take years in BC, maybe a single year in Alberta, and days to weeks in Europe...
We pay into Canadian healthcare but use EU healthcare (while paying more out of pocket)...
I've lived in both Canada and US and to be honest, I never found it was much better in the US for how much you pay, and for which so many people simply can't even afford it. With the exception being urgent care and routine things definitely have less wait time in the US. But most major thing seem comparable, like maybe a little faster in the US, but like I said not to the proportion of how much more you pay. And the treatment itself, quality, how you are cared for, basically the same.
I'm glad to hear it's better in Europe!
Not 6 million, only 60K
It's like a small city population spread out much further
Much easier to disappear opposition than try to recruit people pro-oppression
This is not going to end well because it's not about the mineral rights
It's about the northwest passage, which will then be another cold war with Canada
I hope all these countries understand the vast majority of US population is not okay with this
Where are the protests against the current regime in the US? I see more support rather than outrage. If the US in its current state was any other third-world shithole, you'd be invaded by 2003 US.
I think US ownership (not necessarily of land) is inevitable, but it is going to take a couple of decades of these kind of polarising pieces.
You might expect them to have christian values, but it would be a mistake…
What would that even mean? Especially the use the word 'ownership'?
I think there's zero chance of US long-term influence on Greenland. They simply have no reason to prefer foreign domination, when they can simply be sovereign. I would place independence + EU membership as more probably than any association with the US, and I think them staying within Denmark is much more likely than them becoming independent.
The reason is they require subsidy to live there. The economy appears to run at a net deficit. The same reason the Vikings gave up on it.
Some Swedish regions also have a net deficit relative to other Swedish regions, but that doesn't mean that they don't work out economically. After all, not all economic activity in region is taxed there. A firm in Örnsköldsvik pays their taxes to the Swedish government, and then the Swedish government distributes part back to the region.
It's around 600 million USD per year, on 56836 people. Around $1000 per head. But GDP per capita is $58,498.
Continuing to lose money leads to bankruptcy.
It would probably be fine. Furthermore, I don't think Denmark plans on dropping it. They want reasonably strong government services also in this sparsely populated arctic region.
No, they can't. The likes of Palau are (barely) viable as sovereign countries, because at least the geographic size is as small as their populations.
It is absolutely, positively, completely impossible for 50K Greenlanders to by themselves maintain a the world's largest island, even aside from the completely frozen-over aspect. The $600M annual subsidy by Denmark does not include the funds Copenhagen spends on also running Greenland's foreign relations and defense. But in reality, Denmark spends a relative pittance on those things (like "six dog sleds" pittance); the vast majority of the cost of defending Greenland is borne by the US, as has been the case since 1940. Why should the US shoulder the burden without commensurate political power?
The petroldollar has been amazing for every citizen of US… somethings just give and take.
US can choose to jump out of Nato whenever it wishes.
The real danger here is that we might all be chatting against llm bots…
We get expanded military rights and potentially some mineral/drilling rights, while Greenland gets protection, lots of money, access to USPS domestic rates, and probably increased tourism in addition to the independence they desire. Their citizens could also live and work in the US indefinitely.
Native Hawaiians would escape the continued mistreatment:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/hawaii-no...
I think Radio Free Denmark should launch a soft power campaign.
But hey, maybe I'm wrong and the Danes will successfully integrate a large group of people that don't share their values. They've already done that, right?
That's your mistake.
Does the US? They don't seem to have a great track record of that
I mean do you even remember Pearl Harbor?
/S :^)
Not sure why Greenlanders would care at all.
They can already do the same in Denmark, which is a country with far better standards of living.
You may not want to come here and that's fine, but it's a huge draw and will continue to be. Administrations are fleeting, but the allure of opportunity remains. You're posting on a forum that is somewhat of a monument to exactly that.
EDIT: some of this made a bit more sense prior to your hasty edit
The US is not.
Sure, there's allure in going to US if you're from a poor country, or if you have an ambition your country cannot satisfy (some scientists and entrepreneurs will find America only in America, that's true).
Greenlanders are neither of those two categories.
If they don't care moving to Denmark or rest of Europe you can be sure they don't care coming to US either.
It is also protected by Denmark's membership in the EU and the CSDP by virtue of the EU's collective self defense clause (which protects all of all member states territory, not just the parts in europe).
The status quo - apart from the part where the US is threatening to violate its NATO treaty obligations and invade something it is obligated to protect from invasion - is just fine.
You are talking about getting a colony and stealing their resources.
If a country other than Denmark was to claim Greenland, either Iceland or Canada would make more sense.
We're also really not interested in annexing random things.
And also glad to hear that random annexations by Canada are currently off the menu. Though who knows if Canada might become "interested" in some bits of Oregon or Maine in the future ;-) These might might not be "really" American....
When American Idiocracy (AI) fatally weakens their southern neighbor would be the time for Canada to conquer their rightful claims. The Burning of Washington will rise again.
(just kidding, to be sure)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aroostook_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_boundary_dispute
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_Washington
Like so (source Wikipedia)
"... there were three basic tenets behind the concept:
The assumption of the unique moral virtue of the United States.
The assertion of its mission to redeem the world by the spread of republican government and more generally the "American way of life".
The faith in the nation's divinely ordained destiny to succeed in this mission." ?
That's a very misleading phrasing for what's essentially an influence operation. Your wording of "get rid of people ..." implies there's some assassinations/violence going on, but there's nothing to suggest that's happening. If Republicans/Democrats or even Russia was running an influence operation in the US, nobody would characterize that as "getting rid" of opponents or whatever.
Greenland is another level.
https://www.facebook.com/p/Kunuks-P%C3%B8lsevogn-61575713986...
This is only true of the area around the airport. Even his pictures further into the article show how misleading this description is. I was actually very surprised how little snow/ice there was. Now when I think of Greenland, I think of something similar to [1].
Of course, in the winter, it's a completely different story (I was there in July). But he was there during the warm period as well (as is obvious from his photos).
> The city itself sits in a landscape so dramatically inhospitable it makes the surface of Mars look cozy.
If you look at a map, you will notice that Nuuk is at the same latitude as Reykjavik. There's a common meme about Iceland being green and Greenland being icy, and that's definitely true if you compare inland or northern Greenland with Iceland during summer (during winter, both are icy and dark), but hiking around Nuuk is a very "green" experience. Yes, there's a ton of mosquitoes, but nature itself is very inviting. I did not get any of the "inhospitable" vibes he mentions.
> But again even riding the bus around it is impossible to escape the feeling that this is a fundamentally hostile to human life place. The sun is bright and during the summer its pretty hot, with my skin feeling like it was starting the burn pretty much the second it was exposed to the light. It's hard to even dress for, with layers of sunscreen, bug spray and then something warm on top if you suddenly got cold.
This whole section is just overblown BS.
All in all, I enjoyed it a lot. Compared to Iceland, it's definitely a lot less "user friendly" and you need to prepare better, but I have never been to a place that is less affected by humans, and in our age, that is something worth experiencing.
[1] https://truewindhealingtravel.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08...
> This is only true of the area around the airport. Even his pictures further into the article show how misleading this description is.
At least as far as trees go, Greenland is reasonably famously lacking in trees (if you are the kind of person who cares about such things). All chopped down by the Vikings and only now are a few sections of forest being regrown. Iceland is basically the same.
A few links:
- https://www.globalforestwatch.org/dashboards/country/GRL/. "In 2020, Greenland had 0.00 ha of natural forest"
- https://www.reddit.com/r/geography/comments/14notoe/the_prog...
- https://greenlandtrees.org/
Southern Indiana is another beautiful part of the state. It's mostly rolling hills with lush green forests and farms.
The whole stretch though from Chicago up to Traverse City is basically where Chicago vacations.
I actually stopped to stretch my legs and bag another national park at the Indiana Dunes National Park last Friday on my way back to Michigan from Wisconsin. Maybe AI was in a sour mood due to my poor decision to drive through Chicago from 3 to 6pm on a Friday, but I wasn't that impressed - Holland, Muskegon, Hoffmaster, Silver Lake, or Ludington State Parks up the Michigan coastline are all superior.
It only looks fantastic though a Chicagoan or Hoosier perspective because the rest of the area is a rust belt.
Different strokes I suppose :)
Having grown up in that area of the Midwest, I largely agree with the author's categorization, except that "people on their way to somewhere better who got tired and decided this was good enough" describes a LOT of the midwest, not just Indiana. Significant chunks of Michigan, Ohio, and Missouri, most of Iowa/Kansas/Nebraska, etc.
If you read the history of westward expansion, "got tired and decided this was good enough" is literally true for how much of the area got initially settled (by white people)
https://www.google.com/maps/@41.6196019,-87.2547571,3a,75y,3...
However, Michael Jackson is from there. So there’s that.
> However, Michael Jackson is from there.
There are no coincidences.
And even before Gary Cooper there were people using it for Gerald (spear power), Gerard (spear hard/brave), and (old) Gerbert (spear bright). It is a cousin to, but believed not historically derived from, Garrett/Garrod. It is unclear whether German/Germain derive from this root or not. It is usually unrelated to Jared (which is usually a Hebrew name, but does have spelling variants that overlap Garrod).
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qUW1pabZpLE
Carbondale is slightly better, but I think it’s a notorious party school for very good reasons. Small town Midwest has a saying that “there’s nothing to do here except drink, fuck, and knock over mailboxes”. Most Iowa this is especially true, but Carbondale also gave me that vibe. Also that’s a fucking long drive. St Louis too. Nobody appreciates that Illinois is half as tall as California (not that anyone appreciates how long a trip up and down CA is either).
The Midwest is many things, but for quite a lot of it, "where anyone really wanted to get stuck" is not one of them.
Spend some time not just driving through them, and one may be surprised to find plenty of diverse and interesting people that live full lives with rich family and social bonds, reasonably priced housing, ample winter outdoor activities (a lot of people actually want snow because it's beautiful and you can do fun things with it) and plenty of nearby nature and recreation opportunities, which I would contrast less unfavorably than the zeitgeist against the crowded, expensive vagrant culture that tends to dominate the more popular places on earth.
Wasn't it just that it wasn't yet settled, so you could settle there and claim some land? That implies that Indiana or anywhere else on the way would have been at least as desirable, but someone else got there first.
Source: I lived in Nebraska and Indiana.
I've traveled a lot through the area. I was throughout Ohio earlier this year, spent two weeks in Illinois last year, etc.
The last night there I had dinner at one of the professors' houses in a very nice neighborhood that was absolutely lovely, and in general I thought it was a solid middle class place to live. If it was plopped in the middle of Silicon Valley it would be considered one of the more bucolic and put together cities in the area. And unlike Greenland, the weather is quite good for much of the year and there are trees.
My personal experience does not match the image of tired, doomed NPCs living in a wasteland that it's painted as in this blog post and in these comments.
Ann Arbor is a nice town. Bloomington sounds like a nice town. The vast majority of Indiana and Michigan are sparsely populated and full of people who distrust anyone not like them and are not interested in broadening their experiences.
"Got tired and decided this is good enough" is literally true - small town midwest America is full of the kind of people who don't want to travel or experience new things because they're content in their house with their hobby and their 6 friends and trying to do something like understand how to ride a bus is terrifying.
This is not a stereotype. I know tons of these people. I got out of the midwest to get away from them.
If your experience is different, it may simply be the product of cost pressures. It's easier to have a simple life that consists of smoking weed and playing video games with your friends if you don't have to figure out how to afford an expensive house. And something tells me people in Indiana, even their dullards, could figure out how to ride a bus if they really needed to.
I'll side with the "Indiana ain't bad" crowd on this.
I would argue that this could also be said to people (mainly from more rural parts of the US) who like to disparage large cities. If we're going to lecture city dwellers about how they talk about places like Indiana, maybe it's worth encouraging Hoosiers to go east or west and experience the vibrant neighborhoods and offerings of large coastal cities rather than just assuming they're cesspools of crime and poverty just because they heard a politician say places like Portland, Oregon, are "war ravaged"
I thought the Indiana aside was odd as an objective assessment, but it worked well as a flavorful bit of travel writing to help me understand the perspective of the visitor to Greenland.
Vs. say some parts Cleveland, where I've been robbed at gunpoint the second my vehicle broke down and people noticed I'm not from around there.
https://youtu.be/eClMVj9GLAA?si=IxXxgdWfCsGge9yT
I think the people who have found their "good enough" place to live have more down-to-earth personalities.
And people living in "the best place to live" places or "all the people who do X should live here" places have different personalities (not always good).
Illegitimis non carborundum?
Earth has a lot of nice places. The flatness of Indiana can be calming and beautiful. But if you're driving on main roads, it's not very exciting, and it's not the kind of exciting people will fly across the world to see. And that was the point in the article.
I'd say the caves in that region of the state are interesting, but options like Mammoth Cave are not that far away in KY (and they have better hills too).
I'm not saying Indiana on the whole isn't flat. When I was growing up, their ad campaign was literally "there's more than corn in Indiana". I'm just saying, he couldn't have picked a worse map location to make the point with.
Then again, our state motto did used to be "Crossroads of America", so I guess that's kind of fair. These days it's the more aspirational "More to Discover".
There is a lot to shit on Indiana for but its natural beauty isn't one of them.
Indiana and other midwestern states have some awesome nature, but it's basically taken for granted by people from there because you grow up having your family show you all those places. Imagine if aliens showed up to a megacity, and declared there was no food anywhere -- a local would show them places called "restaurants" that actually have more varied and competitive tasty foods than about any farmland areas you'd find, but the aliens would think there's food only in the farmlands and declare the city worthless for finding something to eat.
If you drive out west, you don't even have to look for them; astounding nature is evereywhere.
End result is people from midwestern states appreciate the beauty of their state, but people who haven't lived there for years generally don't. Even after leaving the midwest, I have a high appreciation for the natural landscape, but that's only because I know where to go when I get there.
Calling some states good states and others not is just a silly thing to do anyway.
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