Paul Cantrell
A request from somebody in the USA: if you live in another country, please start pressuring your government to institute sanctions against US.
Diplomatic sanctions, economic sanctions, whatever is possible.
I do not expect this to happen quickly. Start laying the political groundwork now so that it can happen at all, ever, while it still matters.
Parade du Grotesque 💀
Not gonna happen any time soon.
Sorry.
Paul Cantrell
I am asking people to try anyway.
maya_b
yea a little oops on that vis-a-vis oil - Canada is doing that already and we're the largest supply of "foreign" oil to the US - we produce the same heavy crude Venezuela does and previously supplied US refineries with, until relations between the US and Venezuela soured whenever it was.
trump picked a trade war with us and it's not going well for the US. We're already pushing back, and we're not backing down.
boycotts work. we're doing just fine without.
Paul Cantrell
Treating the US like a rogue state would be a seismic shift in international relations — a shift that slow-moving world will resist. But the US •is• a rogue state at this point, and other nations need to starting treating it as such. Like…yesterday.
Paul Cantrell
Keep up the pressure. It won’t work until it does.
Ms. Que Banh
@inthehands I've been trying to pressure our Canadian government since Trump's first week in office. It feels hopeless but I'm still trying because doing nothing frustrates me even more.
Paul Cantrell
@PhoenixSerenity I appreciate you!
Ms. Que Banh
@inthehands I am. I'm also doing a lot of other actions.
Solitha
@dmian And this is exactly why you need to disentangle from us. It gives us too much power.
The knowledge exists now, and steps have begun to divest from US tech. Dethroning it will help secure independence.
I don't want to see my country able to bully allies, ever again.
Dmian 🇪🇺
@inthehands The US controls almost all of the IT infrastructure of the world (through Microsoft and Google), most of the cloud infrastructure (Amazon) and payment services (Visa / Mastercard). And let’s not mention social networks. If your orange dictator decided to meddle with any of these services on a country level, the subsequent chaos and collapse could be difficult to contain. It’s difficult to go against the US and its unpredictable government, sadly.
Paul Cantrell
This is why internal pressure is so important.
Gary Houston
@inthehands They are scared, see how mild many of the responses are:
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/world-reacts-to-us-strikes-on-venezuela/ar-AA1TvNwV
Gary Houston
@inthehands The best thing they can do is probably increase cooperation with other countries to replace whatever they get from the US now, try to disentangle from US-dominated systems. In some cases, like mobile phones, which are now basic infrastructure, it's not easy.
Gary Houston
@inthehands Most of the world is dominated by the US in one way or the other. Politicians and business people in other countries wouldn't want to pay the price of resistance, especially economic. The US can tariff their exports and sanction their companies and high-profile individuals, and who knows what else (even short of bombing and invading.)
Elizabeth Tai | 戴秀铃 🇲🇾
@inthehands I wish geopolitics was that simple 🥲
Dmian 🇪🇺
@solitha @inthehands Exactly. We will do it, but it takes time. But the EU knows how to do it. We did it with GPS > Galileo. We’ll do it with Visa/Mastercard > Digital Euro. And there are efforts in other areas. It’ll be slow, but it will happen. We learned from the pandemic, and we’re learning from the actions of the current US government. The US can’t be trusted anymore, sadly. Insularity will be a consequence, but so be it.
Paul Cantrell
I appreciate the boosts on the thread above, which I take as support.
The defeatist replies make me despair a bit. Just to address some greatest hits en masse:
1. “Kick them out yourselves” → JFC, what the hell do you think we are trying to do, constantly, day after day, the amount of action and engagement against the federal invasion where I live is like nothing I’ve seen in my lifetime. WE ARE ASKING FOR HELP. Please do not be an ass about it.
impermanen_ 🕊️
@inthehands if it hasn’t already been mentioned, Cory Doctorow @pluralistic has been presenting a great proposal for how smaller nations can hit the US power base where it hurts (while helping their own people) by taking advantage of Trump’s shredding of free trade treaties: treaties that locked the world into using monopolized American tech. The locks are gone now.
Doctorow’s recent talk on the new possibility of a post-American Internet: https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet#t=9
Dave Wilburn :donor:
It's amazing to me that European countries continue to host US troops under the mistaken assumption that they ensure rather than threaten their security.
Paul Cantrell
@datarama
Please keep doing what you are doing!! This is exactly the kind of pressure-building we need. And yes, it will feel like it has no effect; changing popular political sentiment •always• feels like blowing into the wind for a very long time, even while, quietly and out of sight, minds are changing and attention is shifting.
It won’t ever work…until it does. Keep it up!
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