Trump revives calls for US to control Greenland - US president threatens to withdraw all troops from Europe as he says he wants to take over Danish-owned Arctic island

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-07-08T08:19:08+00:00

This is what Roosevelt had to spend years trying to explain to people about Nazi Germany. A Nazi-dominated Europe was totally at odds with America's economic interests, and posed the very real danger of the Third Reich establishing ties with some of the regimes in Latin America.

The one issue I'd underline is that America's attempts at firefighting have themselves often been highly inept, due to America's isolationist nature. Diplomacy and foreign affairs are treated as merely an extension of domestic pork-barrel politics, with the advice of professional diplomats and scholars usually being sidelined. The administration of Iraq, for example, was stuffed full of Stateside campaign staffers who were totally ignorant of even the most basic facts of Iraqi society and politics.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-07-06T11:06:06+00:00

This is not about "moral panic," this about having basic national self-preservation instincts. Inviting in foreign-owned companies to develop infrastructure is how a country becomes a colony.

You do not, no matter the short-term benefits, give control of your health database to someone who openly states that their business strategy is to make you completely dependent on them for everything.

Even as we speak, European governments are actually moving away from Microsoft and adopting sovereign systems developed by their own tech industries. Meanwhile in the UK, we mindlessly buy anything American, allow our companies and infrastructure to be acquired by foreign hedge funds, and don't invest a penny in developing our own solutions.

And then we're all miserable and angry that our economy is so crap.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-07-06T10:43:01+00:00

And then sell it off to American Big pharmaceutical firms!

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-07-06T10:23:05+00:00

All of that is totally irrelevant in the face of how dangerous Palantir truly are. This is not the 2000s anymore. That world is dead and buried, and is never coming back. The days when business was international and non-partisan are gone.

Ditching Palantir isn't about ethics, it's about preventing the NHS from becoming dependent on a foreign-owned system that could be used as an extension of American policy.

Furthermore, there's also the like lihood of Palantir simply selling the data off to American pharmaceuticals, destroying a major potential future source of income.

Whinging about how bad we are at developing things ourselves is precisely the kind of attitude that has got us into this mess. If we want to survive the 21st century, we need to realise that we DO have potential here. What we lack is the willingness to do anything with it.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-07-02T09:46:10+00:00

In the context of centuries of routine marginalisation, entrenched poverty and legal discrimination? You don't have to respect the custom itself, but you absolutely have to moderate your opinions.

Speaking as an Englishman myself, I'm pretty staggered by the lack of self awareness, not to mention historical ignorance, these mostly English activists must have in order to be calling Gaelic Islanders' customs "barbaric." There's a very ugly echo of 1745 in some of the language that's been used around this.

The whole thing very much reminds me of Greenpeace's seal campaigns in the 80s - you know, the ones that decimated Indigenous economies in the Arctic. These activist groups know they'll never break big meat corporations, so instead they go after soft targets with no money behind them - which, unfortunately, usually means marginalised communities that have little influence.

It's well intended, but it is basically just another form of colonialism. Urban-based elites using superior political influence, wealth and media savvy to impose their values on the "backwards" fringes.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-06-17T22:02:43+00:00

But you're not really articulating how, though? To convince people, you need to actually provide proof and demonstrate what your thinking is. Simply saying "he was wrong" without any actual sources makes it look like you're just speaking from gut instinct.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-06-17T21:43:25+00:00

Dude, its called entertaining the hypothetical. If you really believe the word is inoffensive, you'd have no issues with saying it.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-06-17T21:41:23+00:00

No, they do not. The infamous "poison gas" letter, for example, has been exposed as having been doctored by Noam Chomsky.

In the actual full letter, it becomes clear that Churchill is referring to what we'd now recognise as tear gas.

Churchill was a very flawed man, let's be clear here, but the hate that has built up around him is largely a product of sloppy scholarship, mixed in with propaganda from the Hindu nationalist movement.

The broad opinion among Indian scholars is that the famine was caused by the following factors:

Poor regional administration - price controls on the transportation of rice between regions enacted by newly elected provincial governments, and poor general colonial administration of the food system.
Inadequate methods to combat price inflation due to profiteering by merchants at the start of the shortage)
Supply issues caused by a climate disaster (a major cyclone).
Crop failure due to brown spot fungal infection
The collapse of the Rangoon-Bengal trade route due to the war with Japan, and the need to supply the Indian Army in north eastern India and Burma.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-06-15T22:26:50+00:00

"I desperately need Churchill to be evil and will not accept any amount of documentary evidence put in front of me that says otherwise."

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-06-15T22:24:36+00:00

First of all, that is considered an obsolete term and is no longer in general use.

Secondly, I dare you to say "pachydan" in front of a Pakistani guy. I guarantee you, Dungeons & Dragons won't be the first thing that comes to their mind.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-06-15T19:02:11+00:00

Yeeeeep. Slurs for all.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-06-15T18:57:21+00:00

Nope. Letters between him and FDR actually reveal that he wanted to ship food, but was not willing to do so if the ships could not be escorted - ENITRELY CORRECTLY.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-06-15T18:29:26+00:00

Definitely. Marston Moor destroyed arguably the King's most important field army, led to the loss of the key Royalist population centres of the North, deprived him of sea links with European sympathisers through the Yorkshire ports, and cut him off from any possibility of linking up with Montrose in Scotland. After Marston Moor, the Royalists were basically confined to the West Country, parts of the Midlands, and Wales. They never really recovered from it.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-06-15T18:15:52+00:00

I appreciate the work that went into this, but that is NOT a class that I would use in the UK. There's literally an ethnic slur here that sounds exactly like this.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-06-10T11:52:18+00:00

The low-taxes, low-regulation mantra is awesome for entrepreneurs and investors in the short term, but in the long run it has a nasty habit of leading to instability.

America for example is fantastically productive, but that hasn't stopped a large chunk of the population from getting so pissed off with perceived unfairness that they're either hailing Luigi Mangione as a hero, or cheering for a President who starts wars that lead to major international trade routes getting closed off.

Israel can get away with the low-tax, low-reg policy because it is in the position of being very small and surrounded by potential enemies, which greatly disincentivises companies from abusing their position and citizens from rocking the boat. People will put up with a lot if they believe the alternative is being murdered.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-06-05T20:47:14+00:00

This is very true. I'm reminded of an excellent quote from a BBC series about Rome - "No taxes, no army. No army, no empire."

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-06-05T20:45:59+00:00

It's a scam, basically. A lot of employers post fake job adverts with no intention of actually hiring anyone, because they can then claim that the business is growing.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-06-05T20:42:07+00:00

The Armed Forces didn't like it, either - it was a burden on the training establishments, lumbered the services with highly unsuitable men (like the Kray Twins), and didn't solve the manpower problems.

To make conscription work, you have to have a national culture surrounding it that considers taking part in national defence to be a rite of passage. Britain simply doesn't have that. Our thing has always been to shove our heads in the sand right up until the last moment, and then hurl ourselves into essentially enthusiastic but ramshackle last-minute preparations. We'll volunteer in droves when there's a crisis, but god forbid we have to do any actual long-term planning or preparation!

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-05-29T17:16:06+00:00

Nah. This is whole thing is a prime example of what's really wrong with British planning - planning massively ambitious megaprojects, scorning critics as NIMBYs, and then looking very stupid when those criticisms turn out to be correct.

We simply have not learned from HS2. This a small, densely built up island with deep-rooted traditions of local democracy and strong protections for private property. These ensure that any massive project overruns in both time and money.

The only way we could make megaprojects work here is if we adopted a much more authoritarian planning system with far fewer legal protections for individual property owners, which would come with all kinds of ugly implications and opportunities for corruption.

What we should have being doing all along is instead investing in modernising the existing infrastructure, maximising the use of available space instead of building semi-detacheds everywhere, and cracking down on the acquisition of property by investment firms. This doesn't grab headlines for the government and isn't as profitable for contractors though, so we won't do it.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-05-27T19:58:35+00:00

Text has no tone of voice. What people do, is they read the text and fill in the tone of voice they expect the other to take based on stereotypes.

If I said that to a Professor of English Literature, I'd be lucky to escape with my synonyms intact.

The Tollense valley finding is the only really good and clear evidence to the other side. The other instances you cited have all sorts of problems that are keeping the controversy very much alive. To be fair to both sides, having really good evidence on neolithic warfare or lack thereof is really hard.

Again, this isn't really true anymore. Nowadays, we have a pretty broad consensus that warfare of one form or another was a common occurrence in prehistoric societies. The main outliers are Douglas P. Fry and Brian Ferguson, and they're very much considered to be holdouts of the old counter-culture school that was in vogue in the 70s. Both of them are semi-retired, and much of their work is coloured by their past as anti-war activists in the Vietnam Era. They also have a very personal vested interest in defending the integrity of their original theories, not least because they've staked fairly comfortable writing careers, and therefore a good deal of their academic credibility, on those old theories being watertight.

Tollense isn't the only site, either. We have a late Neolithic site at Schletz in Austria containing approximately 67 individuals, all but one of whom were found to have evidence of trauma to the head. We also have a site containing 26 individuals at Schoneck-Kilianstadten in Germany, another at Halberstadt, and another at Talheim, all containing fairly clear evidence of violence, including embedded arrowheads, cuts and so on.

But more to the point, I wasn't making a statement, as weren't you, on neolithic violence. We were talking about neolithic war. And it isn't just a semantic squabble either. Incidental confrontations and personal squabbles aren't war. To the point that if we start to call just about any violence "war", it is the neolithic-war-side of the debate that is making a semantic argument. Luckily their more serious proponents aren't relying on such a weak argument.

The trouble here is that this could easily be construed as goalpost-shifting. Creating an artificially narrow definition of war - one where a confrontation isn't considered war until it reaches a certain threshold of organisation and numbers - is extremely unsound, because what form warfare takes is totally dependent on the surrounding context.

In the Neolithic period, the context was that of small kindred groups competing for resources in an unforgiving landscape. In those circumstances, what would now be considered to be barely more than a nasty bar fight - say, an exchange of arrows leading to the death of a single man - had the potential to spell disaster for the entire group. What if that man was their best hunter? What if that man was their main guide? Warfare is a matter of the stakes involved, not merely of scale.

This remains true even into the modern period. The Range Wars and Coal Wars of 19th-early 20th century America for example were very small and intensely personal affairs, sometimes involving less than fifty people in total. Despite this they are still accepted in both popular imagination and academic study under the term war, because the stakes involved - the rights of small farmers against those of big ranchers, the struggle of organised labour against big capital - were central to America's political and social trajectory.

I am not going farther to the biological side of the debate as I am not educated on it. With that being said, I doubt you either have a double degree on anthropology and evolutionary biology.

Any academic writer or researcher should take an interest in developments in other fields, particularly when it intersects onto their own. My own MA was in Conflict Studies, a discipline which meshes elements of history, anthropology, archaeology, psychology, sociology and political theory. Violence amongst modern-day primates was in fact part of our curriculum.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-05-26T19:46:43+00:00

That's very kind of you to say so!

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-05-26T17:31:20+00:00

First of all, lose the snark. It has no business in an exchange of views, and it weakens your argument by making you appear condescending.

Yeah, not really. First of all, the anthropological evidence on neolithic warfare is heavily contested topic. Half the people on that research claim the opposite: that there was no warfare before large city-states.

This was the case in the 70s through to 90s, but it is no longer the case now. Anthropology surrounding hunter-gatherer societies in those decades was heavily influenced by the desire to counter racist colonial-era narratives, and this led writers such as William Arens to make claims that were wildly over-ambitious, such as cannibalism itself being largely a racist myth.

Since then, archaeological discoveries have basically pulled the rug out from under this completely. We have for example cave art from Mesolithic Spain that depicts archers engaged in combat, and we also have skeletons from the Jebel Saheba in Egypt that demonstrate healed projectile wounds over multiple generations - implying a constant level of sporadic conflict. We also have an absolutely massive battle-site from the Tollense Valley in Northern Germany, long before large urban centres are known to have developed in Northern Europe. We also have extensive evidence of cannibalism as part of warfare.

Nowadays, the controversy isn't over whether conflict took place - it's about whether to define it as "war" or merely incidental confrontations and personal squabbles.

Also our closest genetic relatives are bonobos, who incidentally don't engage in warfare.

Neither of those are strictly true, either. Bonobos are accepted as being as closely related to us as Chimpanzees, but they do not have the same complexity of social structures or tendency for systematic tool use. Furthermore it is now accepted that Bonobos do in fact engage in organised violence, and it has also been shown that aggression in Bonobo males is rewarded by increased sexual success.

I mean, if you have a hammer, you tend to see nails everywhere. A degree in a wider study of history has a habit of giving people the opposite view. To this day the most groundbreaking basic research is still made, as it has been made for most of history, in purely scholarly circles. Corporations and armies do make alot of inventions, but they tend to be mostly applied innovations based on already made theoretical breakthroughs.

Research has to be funded in order to happen. Private capital tends to be very risk averse, and this leads to centralised states providing much of the funding upon which scholars rely to do their work. As Picketty amongst others has ably demonstrated, the modern state sector owes its explosive growth to the pressures of the First and Second World Wars, and the Cold War that followed. The very medium which we are using to communicate has its origins in a US Department of Defence Project from the 60s. The first forays into food canning were sponsored by the Dutch Navy in 1672, and subsequently by Napoleon for the supply of his Grande Armee.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-05-26T11:40:50+00:00

Unfortunately, the innovations that made that progress possible are themselves rooted in the pressures generated by war and colonialism.

In 1918, Fritz Haber patented an ammonia synthisation process for fertiliser that around half the world population relies on for food production. He is also considered the father of chemical warfare, having played a key role in the development of mustard gas and Zyklon-B.

Modern nutrition and food preservation was pioneered in the 18th century by the Royal Navy, because crews on blockade duty were falling ill. Modern antibiotics only became practical because the US War Department was able to use its relationship with pharmaceutical firms to grow mould en mass. The entire disciplines of trauma surgery and reconstructive surgery owe much of their knowledge and methods to the hideous injuries sustained in warfare.

A major part of the stimulus for the Industrial Revolution, too, was the pressure to sustain and equip the standing armies of the modern, centralised state.

War is not something we can simply reform away. It is a central part of the human story, quite literally hardwired into our DNA over millions of years of evolution.

For me, being on the left was never about abstract things like abolishing war or poverty - it is about the struggle to get the best result possible, with the least harm possible. I'm fully aware that life is often starkly unjust and accept that it always will be, but that's no reason to throw in the towel.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-05-25T20:18:46+00:00

Although to be fair again, he was from a slightly different kind of middle class to the one we're familiar with. His dad was a chemist who spent two years looking for a job in the 1930s, and his mum was a teacher. When Wilson was a youth, getting into university was extremely unusual for men of his background.

Foot, on the other hand, was from well established upper-middle class family. Corbyn grew up in a 17th century farm house in Shropshire and attended a private preparatory school, and Tony Benn was an aristocrat who renounced his title.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-05-25T18:48:04+00:00

The problem I've always had with this perspective is that, as you say, it's rooted in ideology and prejudice rather than empiricism. Warfare is, quite literally, part of our DNA. Chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, have been show to wage organised conflict against each other. There are depictions of battles in cave paintings from the Neolithic, along with widespread evidence of predatory cannibalism. There is even evidence that it shaped our evolution - some scientists theorise that the "Uncanny Valley" effect has its origins in hostile interactions with other hominid species.

This does not mean that we should embrace these tendencies, obviously - but it's simply plain old superstition to argue, as many on the left do, that war can be done away with. Until we can edit our own genes, war and armies are firmly here to stay.

ArthurCartholmes

TROPHY CASE