Andy_Ross
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Trump's US Threat to Greenland (which belongs to Denmark)
- Thread starter Vixen
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....and your claim is more plausible.
a_unique_person
Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning
I was there. I can guarantee it happened.
Clutch Cargo
Muse
I don't believe you. Do you have any evidence for this?
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Muse
The subject is Greenland.
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Muse
I don't believe you. You made that up and my credibility exceeds yours.
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Andy_Ross
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A legend in your own lunchtime.
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Muse
I am looking at the skyline of Copenhagen from my balcony as I speak to you right now.
Pixel42
Schrödinger's cat
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Muse
Reuters? Schmoiters.
Jack by the hedge
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Yeah, but he didn't see all those headlines saying 85% of Greenlanders rejected Trump's advances and only 6% were in favour of becoming part of the US. He was too busy looking at the Copenhagen skyline.
Jack by the hedge
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Did you manage to find a source of news which failed to report on that opinion poll result? Remarkable if so.
I live in Copenhagen. I would be impressed if you had talked to ten Greenlanders, but when you say you have talked to “hundreds” I know you are lying.
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Muse
- and -
I can clearly see that these two statements set the preferred tone in which the subject is expected to proceed.
Jack by the hedge
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Aw, bless. Look at you, pretending to get all offended because you pretended not to know Greenland told Trump to ◊◊◊◊ right off and then ◊◊◊◊ off some more.
Kneejerk contrarianism can be a lonely path.
Kneejerk contrarianism can be a lonely path.
Hercules56
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More than you do.
a_unique_person
Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning
If you look carefully you can see me waving to you.
I saw him meet them! It was the day before yesterday as they arrived on the 17:15 dogsled from Nuuk.
ponderingturtle
Orthogonal Vector
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Yea her job was to trash talk her base personnel and she should have done that, supporting them is right out and the kind of crap we can't have in the American military.
I lost trust in 60 Minutes' reporting when its 'investigations' of the 'Havana syndrome' aired, but this one about Greenland is okay:
Maliina Abelsen had an American grandfather and is the former minister of finance in Greenland.
For his sake, I hope he didn't expect to meet any bikers in Greenland. Even in Denmark, motorcycles aren't much fun from November to March.
In spite of the clickbait headline, this is an excellent video! It deserves many more views than it has got so far.
In fact, even though I have been actively searching for what Virgin Islanders have said about this issue, this is the first time I see anybody - other than myself - make the comparison with the US. Virgin Islands :
In fact, even though I have been actively searching for what Virgin Islanders have said about this issue, this is the first time I see anybody - other than myself - make the comparison with the US. Virgin Islands :
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If you haven't already heard about this, the story about Greenland on 60 Minutes was so good and to the point that Donald Trump complained about it on Truth Social, April 13, 2025:
It would have been nice to hear exactly what he didn't like about the Greenland story, but he doesn't say. I guess he'll leave it to his lawyers to come up with something. He is probably pissed off because the U.S. media wasn't restricted to reporting that the ten Greenlanders paid by Don Jr. to wear MAGA hats all appeared to be Trump fans.
But watch CBS 60 Minutes and decide for yourselves what upset him:
grunion
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Is it a Greenlandisher custom to hold up the middle finger like that when waving?
I'm not sure! It's not one of the Five Greenlandic Traditions That Will Surprise You (PolarQuest, Feb 23, 2023)
It isn't even among the 6 Greenlandic Traditions That Will Surprise You, or the 6 Commandments for Living in Greenland (MatadorNetwork)
It's also not mentioned as one of the Special Greenlandic Cultural Experiences (TopasTravel)
It may have something to do with this:
It isn't even among the 6 Greenlandic Traditions That Will Surprise You, or the 6 Commandments for Living in Greenland (MatadorNetwork)
It's also not mentioned as one of the Special Greenlandic Cultural Experiences (TopasTravel)
It may have something to do with this:
So if Usha and JD Vance ever return to Greenland and the welcoming committee throw decomposing seagulls at them, they should appreciate it and know that it's not meant as an insult:
Vixen
Penultimate Amazing
You don't wanna know!
"Made by fermenting small seabirds called auks inside a seal’s carcass."
In much more detail:
Kiviak – the fermented birds from Greenland (Disgusting Food Museum, Nov 7, 2024)
(No video but a couple of photos.)
"Visitors are often fascinated (and sometimes repelled) by the idea of eating fermented birds, feathers and all."
I am 100% in the repelled category! By the way, it's compared to Swedish surströmming.
Now I can't help wondering how this preservation method came into being in the first place. Much like the way agriculture is supposed to have evolved from religious sacrifice, I imagine this may also have been the case with kiviak.
"Made by fermenting small seabirds called auks inside a seal’s carcass."
In much more detail:
Kiviak – the fermented birds from Greenland (Disgusting Food Museum, Nov 7, 2024)
(No video but a couple of photos.)
"Visitors are often fascinated (and sometimes repelled) by the idea of eating fermented birds, feathers and all."
I am 100% in the repelled category! By the way, it's compared to Swedish surströmming.
Now I can't help wondering how this preservation method came into being in the first place. Much like the way agriculture is supposed to have evolved from religious sacrifice, I imagine this may also have been the case with kiviak.
With subtitles in English:
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Jack by the hedge
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Utter desperation is a remarkable condiment. It makes the repellent appear more palatable. I'm pretty sure it was semi-regular starvation which drove the discovery of what was a viable preservation method and what was not. A bit gamey, or game over? When there's another month of winter and it's literally this, or grandma or your boots, you're about to find out.
Vixen
Penultimate Amazing
We are all only mammals after all, and thus, eat whatever is in our environment. The Saami, for example, know how to use absolutely every part of a reindeer. Given that polar bears exist almost solely on seal blubber (the fat) without nutritional deficiency, I expect that seal fat contains essential amino acids which have been broken down in the seal's digestive system, which likewise, is also useful to the Inuit in their relatively barren land. They do add cultures in the fermenting process - as per the video - so that means sugars are broken down into alcohol, itself a natural germ killer and probiotics. This seems to be done in boxes, and wood is a well-known anti-bacterient. In the old Catholic days when monks in the nordic regions survived on rye and molasses for the 42 days - six weeks - of Lent, this concoction (still popular today) was served in birch bark boxes (now just imitation birch) and that stopped people from going down with infections and food poisoning (although it's not perfect cf. the death of the explorers from eating fermented auks). They do pluck the feathers before eating raw, so yes, I can see it could work as nutrition and perhaps, even tasty. Gravlax and pickled herring are still a thing.
The video is a bit hyperbolic. Nuuk is hardly the most northern location of the world; Rovaniemi in Finland is two degrees further north, and the Arctic Circle doesn't even start until 18km to its north. (Santa Claus Village: well worth a visit!).
You don't want to know how hamburgers are made!
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Apparently it's the most northern capital city in the world, not the most northern location.
No, desperation isn't a condiment, but hunger will even make people eat their neighbors once they begin to look delicious enough to eat, but it does not explain how the Inuits came up with this particular method of preservation in the first place. Besides, desperation making you not only willing but also eager to eat anything is how people die of botulism much like the people in Siorapaluk.
And remember that nowadays kiviak is not a food of desperation, it's a delicacy, in spite (or maybe because) of the smell. (Personally, I can't even overcome my revulsion at the smell of 99% of all cheeses.)
Yes, I'm sure semi-starvation would have been part of it, but it doesn't explain how they came up with the idea of stuffing a seal carcass with hundreds of auk carcasses in the first place:
"By utilizing fermentation—a process that creates an anaerobic environment to prevent harmful bacteria from growing," is not a sentence you would expect to hear from Norsaq Nikkulaannguaq, head of the Igloo Academy of Sciences, Engineering & Medicine. Mainly, because he wouldn't have had a word for or any knowledge whatsoever of bacteria or anaerobic.
In the case of agriculture, it's pretty easy to imagine that the hunter-gatherer worshippers of Mother Earth would sacrifice grains to her, and that Mother Earth would then reward them with even more grain when they returned to the holy site next year. It's a fairly simple process, humans are pretty smart, and you are much less likely to die when you are dealing with plants than with dead animals. (But only less likely, it's not impossible: see ergotism.)
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No, we aren't only mammals, and far from all mammals are omnivorous, and many other animals besides mammals are. Ordinary peasants in Europe also used to know how to use every part of farm animals. In Northwestern German, I once had a dish made of (almost) every part of a pig gone through a meatgrinder. It was quite good, actually.
In Eastern Greenland, there are communities of people whose diet consists almost exclusively of meat and fish. However, whether the Inuits would get enough essential amino acids and vitamins is not the problem here, and it's not the reason why they came up with the custom of eating dead birds stuffed inside a dead seal buried in the ground. The main point was calories. However, the video mentions that traditional foods like kiviak provided Greenlanders with some vitamins that they don't get from imported industrialized food nowadays.
The seal meat fermented in wooden boxes is for the dogs! Wood or wooden boxes aren't used when making kiviak, and no fermentation cultures are mentioned in that context.
No, it isn't hyperbolic. They are talking about Siorapaluk, not Nuuk:
I do know how hamburgers are made! I worked for a couple of years at the Hotel & Restaurant School, situated in the meatpacking district of Copenhagen.
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Jack by the hedge
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Well obviously I can't say how the process to make kiviak was invented but the wikipedia article does offer a hint. It says the sealskin is sealed with seal fat to repel flies. If you're storing up auks to eat in winter it would be a big problem if you find they're steadily getting eaten by fly maggots, so wrapping them up tight in something seems like it might occur to someone as being a good idea to try. If it turned out as a consequence this winter's batch had fermented in storage then however strange it looked or smelled, you're going to try eating it anyway as you don't have much choice.
When it doesn't kill you but rather turns out to be nutritious food, that's going to catch on. I suspect a lot of food regarded as a "delicacy" has its origin as the last weird bit of potential food someone had which surprisingly turned out not to be poisonous.
When it doesn't kill you but rather turns out to be nutritious food, that's going to catch on. I suspect a lot of food regarded as a "delicacy" has its origin as the last weird bit of potential food someone had which surprisingly turned out not to be poisonous.
In post 743, it was Denmark hitting Trump hard. In the new video from The New Diplomat, it's Greenland:
Most (but not all) of the YouTube comments are from Danes and/or Greenlanders. So far, only one MAGA poster, very ill-informed as almost always: "No threats. Just a buyout. Everyone has a price. Even you!"
As always, the video from The New Diplomat about Greenland is much better than the clickbait headline, well-researched with several quotations and references.
Most (but not all) of the YouTube comments are from Danes and/or Greenlanders. So far, only one MAGA poster, very ill-informed as almost always: "No threats. Just a buyout. Everyone has a price. Even you!"
As always, the video from The New Diplomat about Greenland is much better than the clickbait headline, well-researched with several quotations and references.
Vixen
Penultimate Amazing
Whilst I see no problem with Greenlanders supposedly eating 'revolting' delicacies; this type of thing makes my blood boil. The idea that US$10,000 will be an irresistible offer to these 'poor peasants', which they can't refuse is characteristic of sofa boy Vance's highhanded attitude, as if the Greenlanders are just going to roll over and let the US in for a poxy sum of money. At least make it a half-decent offer, such as $100,000,000 each, and even then, I doubt it would be acceptable to most.
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Hlafordlaes
Disorder of Kilopi
World history has gone from the postwar "How could they? Surely we are better than that!" to today's "How could we? Surely we were better than that!"
Twice fooled. We can, we do, we will. We are brutal. Is this the implacable law of the universe, of survival? Intraspecific predation rules!?!
Predatory social aggression is, in the end, a form of cannibalism. No wonder we associate that with evil and codify it on stone tablets (apocryphally). What is imperialism if not predation? More importantly, what is it when it is done via disproportionate violence? The American Way.
As it was in the 1619 beginning, is now, and shall ever be. Recommended: Exterminate All the Brutes.
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As for the food, I don't have a problem with anybody "eating 'revolting' delicacies," as long as I don't have to. (And I wouldn't want to sit next to somebody eating kiviak on a plane.)
I hadn't heard about the HBO series, but it sounds interesting.
However, I always strive against the "we" as you use it here. For the most part, I'm fine with humanity taken as a whole. In general, people tend to be empathic and not deliberately harm their fellow human beings. Even during slavery, there were people who not only objected to it but sometimes did their utmost to put an end to it.
If there's one thing that's wrong with "us" as a species (and I'm not sure that there is), it's a tendency to ignore the brutality of the psychopaths among us as long as they don't harm us directly - and sometimes not even then. There are economical and political systems that encourage psychopaths to become rulers and some that try to limit the damage they do. Psychopaths always desire to dominate and profit off of other people, but some societies give them free range to do so - Musk's DOGE is an example of that - and currently the people in charge of the USA are as extreme as they come.
Notice also that psychopathic rulers never tell the truth about what they're doing. The whole history of racism is an example of that. The psychopaths know that they have to lie for the majority of the population to comply with what they're telling them to do. And again: the majority of that majority of people are much too willing to buy into those lies even when it's to their own disadvantage. Often because they are too afraid to consider the truth of what is going on.
This is a point where people who call themselves skeptics ought to play a role, but many of them ('us') are also too afraid to look at reality and take it for what it is.
I hadn't heard about the HBO series, but it sounds interesting.
However, I always strive against the "we" as you use it here. For the most part, I'm fine with humanity taken as a whole. In general, people tend to be empathic and not deliberately harm their fellow human beings. Even during slavery, there were people who not only objected to it but sometimes did their utmost to put an end to it.
If there's one thing that's wrong with "us" as a species (and I'm not sure that there is), it's a tendency to ignore the brutality of the psychopaths among us as long as they don't harm us directly - and sometimes not even then. There are economical and political systems that encourage psychopaths to become rulers and some that try to limit the damage they do. Psychopaths always desire to dominate and profit off of other people, but some societies give them free range to do so - Musk's DOGE is an example of that - and currently the people in charge of the USA are as extreme as they come.
Notice also that psychopathic rulers never tell the truth about what they're doing. The whole history of racism is an example of that. The psychopaths know that they have to lie for the majority of the population to comply with what they're telling them to do. And again: the majority of that majority of people are much too willing to buy into those lies even when it's to their own disadvantage. Often because they are too afraid to consider the truth of what is going on.
This is a point where people who call themselves skeptics ought to play a role, but many of them ('us') are also too afraid to look at reality and take it for what it is.
Yet another one about 'Greenland HITTING Trump SO HARD' ...
The video reuses parts of previous videos, but they work fine in the context of this new one. And there is much new information, not least about the role played by China and Russia in Greenland and the Arctic region:
Even though Trump recently learned the word reciprocal, he seems to be unable to understand that it means that what might benefit the USA should also benefit the countries that he wants to strike a deal with. China seems to be much better at this than he ever was:
This is the reason why he resorts to the threats of a colonialist, like when the USA acquired the Danish West Indies more than 100 years ago:
He has nothing to offer Greenland, so he threatens Denmark and Greenland instead. 'It's a beautiful piece of real estate you have there. It would be a pity if something happened to it.'
Trump and Vance pretends that Denmark hasn't done enough to protect Greenland, but Greenland isnt threatened. What is threatened is America's desire to control the waterways opening up in the Arctic region where the USA is inferior to countries like China and Russia:
And Trump's own threats haven't exactly endeared him to Greenlanders, who have a much more positive view of China than Americans do.
In 2024, their view of America was still better than their view of China, an advantage, which Trump appears to have forfeited:
The video reuses parts of previous videos, but they work fine in the context of this new one. And there is much new information, not least about the role played by China and Russia in Greenland and the Arctic region:
Even though Trump recently learned the word reciprocal, he seems to be unable to understand that it means that what might benefit the USA should also benefit the countries that he wants to strike a deal with. China seems to be much better at this than he ever was:
This is the reason why he resorts to the threats of a colonialist, like when the USA acquired the Danish West Indies more than 100 years ago:
He has nothing to offer Greenland, so he threatens Denmark and Greenland instead. 'It's a beautiful piece of real estate you have there. It would be a pity if something happened to it.'
Trump and Vance pretends that Denmark hasn't done enough to protect Greenland, but Greenland isnt threatened. What is threatened is America's desire to control the waterways opening up in the Arctic region where the USA is inferior to countries like China and Russia:
There have been no threats or actual challenges to Greenland's sovereignty from Russia or China, and there have also been no actual threats to the USA. What seems to concern the Trump administration is "potential," i.e. hypothetical "challenges" to America's desire to control the Arctic Ocean where it doesn't have much of an actual presence - apart from the Pituffik Space Base.
And Trump's own threats haven't exactly endeared him to Greenlanders, who have a much more positive view of China than Americans do.
In 2024, their view of America was still better than their view of China, an advantage, which Trump appears to have forfeited:
And why would they? He has given them no reason to trust him.
Safe-Keeper
My avatar is not a Drumpf hat
Even with Ukraine, a fellow industrialized, democratic Western (okay, maybe people associate it more with the Soviet bloc) country, a lot of people are talking about them as if they're nothing more than an American territory or a European colony. As if they have no free will or sovereignity, and they're fighting because NATO has ordered them to and they have no choice in the matter. Ukraine is a sovereign country. Zelensky isn't a governour answering to Brussels or Washington, he's the president of a free country.
a_unique_person
Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning
Bad idea. It gives Trump an excuse to act overtly.