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Posted24 days ago
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Even the British survived the end of the British empire, and that was bigger relative to the world than the US is now.
Here in 2025, you live in a globalized world. The rats are soon to be out of ships to flee to. There's no free society in the Sol system that survives rampant and unchecked authoritarianism in the triad of the US, China, and Russia. Europe is a military vassal of the first, an economic vassal of the second, and an energy vassal of the third.
The UK may be something close to a military vassal, what with its "independent" nuclear deterrant relying on US missiles, but the French deterrant is not and France is not.
Economically, we're all interdependent right now: China depends on the US and Europe, Europe depends on the US and China, the US depends on China and nad Europe. Current US policy is pushing everyone everywhere to disconnect from the US, ironically without even doing the one thing tariffs are supposed to be a tool for which is protrcting strategic domestic industry.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has pushed the EU away from Russian energy much faster than it would otherwise have done from decarbonisation efforts. Given who the world's factory is, I'd expect a lot of our PV and wind turbine components to come from China, and even if they don't directly for the Chinese supply to substantially impact the price.
What an hyperbole.
There are also other places in the world besides Europe, the US and China.
Comically bad take though. Show me where Trump supporters are talking about rounding up and slaughtering liberals. On the other hand, a liberal did kill Charlie Kirk in cold blood because the killer had a trans girlfriend and was mad about Kirk‘a opinions. So, maybe some people should be afraid of violence.
“Not getting my way on everything == literal nazi genocide”
What worries me is how much the political “team” you seem to identify with considers it justifiable to kill. Be honest, how many people in your personal bubble expressed annoyance that the Trump shooter missed?
The party system has devolved from theory and ideas into absolute tribal barbarism, but I can’t believe it’s the Democrats, who I used to count myself among, and saw as the peaceful and mature ones, leading that charge. There’s a rot in the Democratic Party, and it’s in the morality department.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/palantir-boss-...
It's very twisted, and fortunately not all liberals have this perspective. Some are actually liberal in their beliefs.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-democrats...
It's a fact of voting that most folks can vote in every election they can for their entire lives and never make any difference whatsoever, as in, change zero outcomes.
We have social pressure and propaganda otherwise to get people to do it, because if too many people rationally stay home then the system works poorly (in aggregate, that does change outcomes). It'd be much better to just mandate voting, because it is individually irrational and it's not great to base a system on tricking everyone into behaving irrationally.
This feels different because they're not bothering to even count them, but it's not materially different from any voting.
(barring the "sometimes not even counted then" part, of course)
Also, it's a mistake to think that the only result of voting is to produce the winner of the election. The margin matters also. A politician winning by a large margin (or even a majority) can claim a 'mandate'; one who only wins by a plurality will have more spirited opposition.
We've seen this in the most recent US election; imagine if small percentage of those who didn't vote in the solid blue states because their vote didn't matter (a refrain I've heard from many people) actually voted, and Trump swept the swing states but lost the popular vote. The entire political landscape would be different, and we might even have momentum in the coming years to abolish the Electoral College.
So if we are fans of liberal democracy, we should be doing everything in our power to structure the system to make people feel as though their voice and vote matters.
Better for everyone to stay and fight. But the issue right now is, everyone is stopping anyone from fighting.
So isn’t the fight already lost?
I'd recommend establishing that in a swing state.
So I'd be interested what he means too.
What is for sure better in the US: There is way more space.
if you want other landscapes, you can travel outside of switzerland... it's easy...
Scenario 1: You fall head first from a 10th floor. US healthcare has higher chance of saving your life. Scenario 2: You are an average person that hopes to get preventive medical care. You will die in the U.S of the most basic medical condition.
Unlike the US, Switzerland has the added bonus of having a very stable democracy.
However if you are willing to go with de facto rather than de jure, plenty of places in Africa and Latam can be freer on these points, especially if you have a little coin.
Financially though, places like Dubai blow away the absolutely dystopic USA controls like FATCA and world taxation/filing, KYC, AML and other madness USA uses to keep an iron grip on tradfi.
But I suspect that the people who care about these things care about them a LOT.
Same goes for being a victim of a criminal offense.
Against what/who are your defending with those firearms in the US?
No one knew who he was until he was arrested and for the most part until he was dead. His european friends would be saying the same thing as you, "don't know anyone with guns..."
Lots of guns in Europe by people who aren't supposed to have them. Either because they are criminals thus don't care about gun laws, or if they are 'good' people then they should know not to pull out a gun unless their other option is to be dead -- at which point 'fuck the law.'
Most guns are owned by relatively few people. Nobody from the common crowd here thinks about owning fire arms, virtually nobody does. Maybe that's a cultural gap hard to imagine from an US perspective.
The question remains, against what and who are you even defending? Maybe it's different in Europe because it's densely populated, but people generally don't consider fire arms being a net plus to the security of themselves and that of their family.
It also just doesn't seem useful to move to a state with loose fire arms laws - it's much better to move to a state/city/neighborhood with low crime rate instead.
Fire arms is the very last measure you want to rely on when a highly militarized police force is prepared to deport you and your family.
I take it as a given that being in America in general means you could be shot randomly, with a uniform, but low probability distribution. It doesn't really matter what the state's gun laws are. So outside of notoriously "unsafe" areas, it doesn't play into my mind at all.
If I'm not allowed to have guns, then I am physically unsafe, because someone from government will use violence against me if they both discover it and have the ability to do something about it. I wouldn't feel safe anywhere violence is used for malum prohibitum 'crimes.' In fact I don't feel safe basically anywhere a government exists because they all do this; this is part the reason why I live in a rural area with basically no government services, no police, no public utilities or anything like that with involvement by the state beyond the bare minimum possible in the USA.
Your proposition also relies on the place itself not changing, and my and my offsprings atrophying their practice of skills of self defense and therefore not needing them when moving elsewhere. But sure if you had a magic wand and could trade 'no guns' for anyone for world peace, I'd take it.
This is a statement so far removed from reality that it makes anything else you say immediately suspect.
You appear to view "government" as an entity whose primary purpose is to bring violence against anyone who cannot resist that violence with lethal force. There is no possible justification for that as a blanket definition.
If you are omitting, perhaps, the fact that you are a wanted and dangerous person, who has, for instance, committed a string of murders, and that is why the government would "use violence against you", then that would seem to make anything you say quite inapplicable to anyone else's situation.
IF the government decides to use violence against you do you really have a chance with a gun? or 10?
To your specific question, probably not, but the better question is that do you have more of a chance with or without a gun? If you look at the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising for example, having a gun bought those people hours to days, which is better than nothing. Of course if you look at places like Chechnya, it bought them outright years that they were able to obtain independence from Russia as a result of militia activity in the first Chechen war.
If I understand correctly, the reasoning is a kind of long-term best-practice thinking?
And that best-practice is a high enough priority that it would prevent you from moving someplace that was otherwise better than a place that would let you have guns?
Is it only reasoning, or it there also a psychological component, like you'd also feel unsafe without guns, maybe due to past or current threatening situation (e.g., physical danger, or economic)?
If I understand correctly, you have both practical (near-term or long-term) and also philosophical objections, to the power imbalance between citizen and state, when citizens can't have guns. And it's a high priority.
FWIW, I sympathize with vigilance. Though my own priorities around guns are different. I live in a fairly safe city, with good police. Where I live, the prevalence of citizen guns seems to create more problems than it solves. The problems I have don't seem to be solvable with guns. I might feel differently, if I lived in a less-safe place or in different circumstances.
It's much more likely that you shoot yourself or your kid shoots you or your husband/brother/other-troubled-man has a bad day and shoots you than a criminal shooting you.
"Virtually all of this risk involved homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance."
Kudos for engaging civilly and earnestly on this even though the majority here seem to disagree with you. It’s rare that I encounter someone coherently articulating a belief system so wildly divergent from my own.
i myself am a maximalist about this and i don't feel safe unless i carry some strains of ebola with me. it would be nice if you could support my ebola open-carry efforts (dm me for details).
And how your gun can prevent this now? If you are allowed to carry a gun police will act like you have one lane shoot you. While in other case they will just beat you with stick.
Where I live in Arizona you can 3d print a handgun, load it, stick it down your pants, and walk around with it around town all day doing basically whatever (as long as you don't go to a school, jail, or courthouse basically). All with zero background checks, licenses/permits, or even needing to carry an ID. Can I do that in Switzerland? I doubt they would let you do that even with a long rifle, unless you are going to/from some sort of approved activity.
The only euro-controlled place I know where you can basically do that is Greenland, as long as it is a bolt action rifle. Greenland is actually looser than USA in that regard, you can buy a bolt rifle like a hammer from a hardware store in Greenland with zero checks or license (IIRC, even as a foreigner) whereas in USA you could only do that if you bought it privately or made it yourself.
The domestic intelligence service can monitor or restrict anti-democratic parties, and Germany’s civil society, courts, and media are structurally hard to capture. An AfD-led government would hit legal and institutional tripwires long before it could rewrite the system.
Even in a hypothetical total Russian victory, Moscow wouldn’t “gain” a second army. It would inherit a hostile, traumatized population and an ungovernable territory, not a usable military force. And in any case, Europe’s combined militaries (and economies) are still far larger than Russia’s, so the claim simply doesn’t hold up.
Nobody's going to ask them. Since 2022, Russia has forcibly conscripted 300 000 men from the occupied parts of Ukraine. https://www.euronews.com/2025/11/07/moscow-inches-closer-to-...
Of course such coalition has a big number of ultra expensive and effective weapons like planes, ships and tanks. That number of weapons will last for 3 months or so. Then what? Ruzzia is not a Taliban or Hamas, you can't just bomb them with impunity. Even half a century old soviet SAMs are valid threat to anything in the air, let alone newer ones. Plus Ruzzia is not alone, they have whole Axis manufacturing power potentially behind them - Iran, China, NK etc.
I would be very concerned about Ruzzia, if I were you. Just a thought experiment, what would Germany do when Ruzzian force will appear on the Poland-Lithuanian border, annexing all Baltic states?
The bottom 80% is also going to find it hard to move to another rich country. Countries in general want highly paid professionals, not a 50th percentile desk jockey.
Even poor people carry phones that have the internet, news, weather, and a million useful apps. Food is available to everyone, nearly every church has a food pantry. Even cheap houses are climate controlled. Even the homeless have shelters in most places.
For garden variety household emergencies, GoFundMe is democratized charity. It seems it often comes to the rescue for people suffering terrible luck.
Healthcare is expensive, but ACA makes it more available than before. Even early retirees get it.
Cars are expensive, too, but the get great mileage, better performance, and last longer than what we used to have.
Having grown up in the 6s and 70s, I can say with confidence that even less fortunate people have better lives than almost everybody 50 years ago. ( At least as far as material things go. )
The people who are unhappy are often comparing themselves to other people as portrayed by media and social media. That’s a sure way to feel you aren’t doing very well.
It actually can't, not generally at least for US labor.
One of the most important measures of quality is work-life balance. Basically, your life kinda sucks if you work all the time, and then you also get fat and sick and die young(er).
People in the US work a lot, and often the more wealthy, but not most wealthy, work A TON. In programming, it's not atypical to have "superstar" staff engineers putting in easily 60-70 hours a week. Of course, not including the commute.
But then there's the time off. Oh, where to begin. We're at a point where 10 days of PTO accrued a year is considered decent. It's work work work, and you can put in 20 years of service... and get, like, an extra couple days. Maybe.
None of this scales down. For example, I'm supposed to be working 40 hours a week. I'm not of course, the baseline is 45 because 9-5 is actually 9-6. And I haven't left at 6 in at least a year, so even that is underestimating it. But suppose I do work 40 hours a week.
Would I take a 50% pay cut to work 20 hours? Fuck. Yes. Yes. In a heart beat. But I can't, I'd actually be taking an 80% pay cut if I do that, so I couldn't live. And it's like this for literally ALL jobs. I can't just "move up", because the work-life balance doesn't get better, it actually just gets worse! And at no point can I take a "step down" and work less, because then I'm flipping burgers.
https://www.brusselstimes.com/1862716/542-days-brussels-brea...
> if not further along. The only places further along are China, Russia, Georgia, Venezuela, and Hungary. Even Slovakia or Poland or Germany aren't as bad (though still troubling). It's really hard to be more authoritarian than the US is now still. The Feds claiming they'll keep going at Comey yet again really seals the deal there .
Not saying it's worth it for you, but there are lots of places.
But the courts ruled in Comey's favor. There is no reason to think that, if the feds try again, the courts won't rule for Comey again. That's still "rule of law", no matter how hard the current administration is trying to make it otherwise.
Now, sure, in an ideal world the case should never have been filed. In a just world, he would not have been put through that. And in an even-somewhat-ideal world, the case would not be re-filed. Absolutely. But for all that, the situation in the US is not (yet) as dire as you are painting it.
The safeguard against this is supposed to be that Congress would eventually put a stop to it, or that the people wouldn't vote someone in who'd abuse the power of the executive branch to extrajudicially punish opponents. Neither of those safeguards have worked. Courts can tell them to stop but they have to keep telling them with each case, after everyone goes through all the motions (so to speak).
And there's a statute of limitations here. It has already elapsed, in fact, though the administration is trying to argue that they way they're doing it allows for an exception. If that doesn't fly, then it's just over.
Also, with the sole exception of Hungary, no place in Europe is remotely on the same authoritarian track as the US. And the democratic systems and institutions are much more robust, too.
I know what the comments will be.
And the US is one of the top immigrant countries in the world. Always worth reflecting why people choose that.
It's nowhere the top as a percent of the total population. It's at the top in absolute number because it's the largest developed country by far.
E.g. Switzerland has an unusually high immigrant population, but also an unusually high emmigrant population.
The U.S. 52m immigrants and 4.8m emmigrants. [1] Nowhere else even approaches that ratio.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_im...
Even adjusted for CoL and public benefits, the U.S. pays well, at least on the upper end.
With the €100k fees for certain visas, with all the news about ICE, with the requirement to have public social media profiles to get in combined with the other news about people getting deported for having politically unacceptable opinions?
According to this, the USA was net-negative on immigration by 1.4 million people between Jan and June 2025, but I don't know how seasonal things and partial data modify that: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/21/key-findi...
Blip, or long term change? I also don't know.
Go to Eastern Europe, Switzerland, Scandinavia, maybe Italy or Greece.
Where you can expect salary to be a half of salary in Netherlands and even less returns from your taxes, which are anyway >30% Good choice!
:)
Learn something new every day.
To be clear, I just didn't think anyone would refer to someone from Paris specifically (rather than, "French").
I mean, a lot of places you would add "-ite" but I'm guessing that would be a less-than-ideal suffix for this particular city lol
Below the teaser blurb ending "The Netherlands offers one way out," and the byline, where you'd expect the article to start, is the text "Your window is closing."
Fortunately, if you scroll further, the ominous warning turns out to only be for the paywall.
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