M.A. English lit/lang, retired IT nerd. Passionate about patient safety, story telling, literature & film. Racism, sexism, etc. is not tolerated.
Denmark
Joined September 2009
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Hørt!
Tre veninder i 40’erne tager i spa og wellness. Vi har badedragter på. Fordi… ja, spa og wellness, ikås.
Vi har ikke været der før og spørger personalet, om man kan købe noget mad i wellnessområdet. En mandlig gæst overhører samtalen og blander sig. Selvfølgelig. Så serviceminded fortæller han, at vi bare skal ud dér, ned ad gangen, igennem hallen og videre ud til caféen.
Vi kigger ned på vores badedragter. Kigger på caféen fyldt med mennesker i alm tøj. "Så skal vi simpelthen gå hele vejen gennem bygningen i badetøj?"
Her ku et normalt menneske have sagt; Nå ja, det er måske upraktisk. Men nej. Han måler os oppefra og ned og griner klamt:
"Jaja, men I kan jo sagtens bære det. Det bliver da også rart for dem, der sidder derude, hæh"
Vi forsøger igen at spørge personalet, om der mon er andre muligheder. Men nu er manden lissom kommet ind i en fortælling, hvor vores mad åbenbart skal kombineres med et modeshow for caféens gæster.
"Kom nu, piger. I kan sagtens bære det. I ser godt ud. Det er jo en kompliment!"
Mine veninder er høfligere end mig. Jeg trækker mig fra samtalen. Vi beslutter os for, at pommes frites trods alt ikke er så vigtige, at vi behøver spankulere gennem en café med 50 påklædte mennesker for at få dem.
Vi går tilbage til wellnessområdet. Og hvem står ved vinduet og holder øje med, om vi kommer gående gennem hallen? Yæs. Vores nye ven.
"Nååå, turde I ikke?", griner han.
Vi går forbi ham; nu vil vi faktisk bare gerne tilbage til vores friggin wellness. Han fortsætter. Råber efter os, at vi sagtens ku have båret det. At vi er sølle, fordi vi ikke turde. At vi ser så godt ud i badetøj.
Ved siden af ham står en mandlig medarbejder, som tydeligvis er utilpas og ikke ved, hvor han skal gøre af sig selv. Da vi næsten er væk, hører vi så manden sige til medarbejderen:
"Det er godt nok lækkert med sån en efterårsferie her, hva’, når der pludselig kommer sådan tre lækre unge piger i badetøj"
Medarbejderen trækker sig. Mine veninder trækker mig væk, fordi de udmærket ved, hvilken vej JEG er på hen ad. For guess what.
Kvinder i badedragt i et wellnessområde er ikke et modeshow.
De har ikke taget badetøj på for at modtage nogens vurdering. De skylder ikke nogen et smil, fordi fremmed type kalder vurdering for "en kompliment". Og når de forsøger at afslutte samtalen og går væk, er det ikke en invitation til at råbe videre efter dem.
Hvis synet af tre kvinder i badedragter gør een så begejstret, at man ikke længere kan regulere egen mund, så er problemet ikke vores badedragter. Så bliv hjemme, tak.
Birgit 🇩🇰 🇬🇱🇫🇴🇪🇺🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ retweeted
Secretary Wright has discovered incentives, which is adorable. Russia, it turns out, has already heard of them.
Europe is holding 300 billion of Moscow's money and running the most punishing sanctions ever inflicted on a country. The Kremlin is entirely aware that ending the war would reopen a market of 600 million people and possibly return its own fortune. That is the carrot. It's the size of a continent.
Beside it, Wright is offering a coupon for discount diesel and calling it statecraft.
It won't touch diesel prices. It won't help Trump, who marched into a war with Iran with the preparation of a man ordering lunch. And it won't keep this administration out of the history books, where it has already secured the chapter on the stupidest government ever assembled on this planet. A ten-year-old would call this plan naive. A ten-year-old would also be insulted by the comparison.
.@SecretaryWright: "Russia exports, today, zero diesel. This is an incentive to Russia that if they can reduce the conflict with Ukraine — if they can get an energy ceasefire or reduce the conflict such that they have diesel to export — we'll allow it to flow to world markets. This is a carrot to try to end a war; it's not an economic lifeline for Russia."
Oops
MAGA: We want TRADITIONAL 1950’s American values!
Me: So new social programs? Infrastructure funding? Cheap college? No for-profit healthcare?
MAGA: What? No!
Me: Oh, so strong banking regulations? 91% tax rate over $2 million a year?
MAGA: God no, we just wanna be openly racist again.
Birgit 🇩🇰 🇬🇱🇫🇴🇪🇺🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ retweeted
This week I’ve seen men ridicule women for dressing “too provocatively” and other men ridicule Muslim women for dressing “too conservatively,” and its a reminder that maybe men should shut the hell up, stop worrying about how women dress, and instead expend their energy on getting men to stop raping and abusing women. This is not a high bar.
Integrity
When celebrity protest was costly and not done for naughty vibes and extra followers.
34 years ago this month, an Irish woman committed an act of defiance on American television that would make her one of the most hated celebrities in the world.
She tried to get people to pay attention to children being abused by the very institution that claimed to be their moral guardian.
On 3 October 1992, Sinéad O'Connor appeared on Saturday Night Live, one of America's most popular television programmes.
She was 25 years old.
Two years earlier, Nothing Compares 2 U had made her a global superstar. She had an extraordinary voice, enormous commercial potential and a future that could have made her fabulously wealthy.
Every incentive in the entertainment industry told her to keep smiling, singing, looking pretty and making money.
Instead, she chose to make people profoundly uncomfortable.
She performed Bob Marley's War, completely alone, without instrumental accompaniment, changing the lyrics to explicitly condemn child abuse.
At the end, she held up a photograph of Pope John Paul II.
And tore it to pieces.
"FIGHT THE REAL ENEMY!"
Silence.
The audience didn't know what to do.
Neither did the producers, who had no idea she was planning this.
Within days, the machinery of outrage was operating at full capacity.
Sinéad had insulted Catholics!
She had insulted the Pope!
She had insulted religion!
How DARE this young woman with a shaved head disrespect something so sacred?
Funny how much more offended people could get about a torn photograph than about children being raped and abused by people entrusted with their care.
Actor Joe Pesci subsequently appeared on the same programme and declared that, had he been there, he would have given her a smack.
The audience laughed and applauded.
A grown man threatening to hit a woman for protesting child abuse.
Apparently THAT was entertainment.
Madonna criticised her.
People destroyed her records.
Her career suffered enormously.
Two weeks later, she appeared at Madison Square Garden for a concert honouring Bob Dylan.
Thousands of people had come to celebrate a musician whose reputation rested partly on decades of songs about injustice, rebellion and refusing to submit to authority.
And when Sinéad appeared, a substantial part of the audience BOOED her.
For having actually rebelled.
Kris Kristofferson approached her and told her not to let the bastards get her down.
"I'm not down," she replied.
And instead of singing the Bob Dylan song she had prepared, she launched into War AGAIN.
What happened in the following decades?
Investigations revealed extensive sexual abuse of children by Catholic clergy and institutional efforts to conceal it.
Sinéad wasn't attacking the ordinary believer who found comfort in religion.
She was confronting the immense power of an institution whose moral authority had protected perpetrators and helped silence victims.
Der er intet som historisk hykleri
The American Revolution is the clearest example of the selective memory at work.
The Founders are celebrated as visionaries who understood that some conditions make revolution not just permissible but obligatory.
They wrote this down. In detail. In a document that is treated as sacred.
"When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government."
Duty.
They used the word duty.
And then built a country that, over the next two and half centuries, made it its business to prevent exactly this principle from being applied by anyone else, anywhere, to any power the United States supported.
The right to revolution is the founding document.
The prevention of revolution is the foreign policy.
Hold both of those in your mind at the same time and tell me what you see.
Birgit 🇩🇰 🇬🇱🇫🇴🇪🇺🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ retweeted
Washington is threatening European companies with devastating consequences if Europe reduces its dependence on American technology. Meanwhile, four of Europe's largest telecom operators are exploring a European alternative to Starlink. The political confrontation and commercial response are now unfolding in parallel.
Birgit 🇩🇰 🇬🇱🇫🇴🇪🇺🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ retweeted
Too clever by half. He correctly notes that Ukraine cannot give up its fortress belt because that'd give the Russians a "straight shot into Kyiv." Yet he insists the war is just about 11% of territory. No, the lie is in his explanation: Putin wants the 11% at the negotiating table because he cannot take it on the battlefield; and he wants it because it gives him another opportunity to make a play for Kyiv at a later date. The Russians don't want to end the war, they want the U.S. to create the more amenable conditions for the continuation of the war in future. The tragedy of Rubio is that he's in better command of the facts than anyone else in this administration but he nonetheless ends up acting a mouthpiece for policies he knows are wrong.
Birgit 🇩🇰 🇬🇱🇫🇴🇪🇺🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ retweeted
HE HAS NO CARDS!
Well, Trump's latest tweet has finally explained everything. His sudden, panicked, mysterious, and complete shift toward the Kremlin, along with his hysterical attacks on Ukraine and Zelensky, has nothing to do with hopes of persuading Putin to agree to a ceasefire, lowering diesel prices, or “supporting American farmers and ranchers.” And it doesn't require some elaborate conspiracy theory, either. The explanation, I believe, is much simpler: pure, personal, suffocating FEAR.
Fear that Putin might start “helping Iran” far more than he already does. And I suspect that this is precisely what the former KGB officer made unmistakably clear to our “genius negotiator” during their very long telephone conversation. Cross me, and I'll demonstrate just how much assistance Russia can provide its “Iranian partners,” conveniently timed to coincide with the critical election period. The resulting foreign policy and economic disaster could leave Trump completely screwed.
And the Great Orange Pumpkin knows it. He dragged America into a war that turned out to be nothing like the glorious little adventure imagined by a man whose understanding of geopolitics sometimes resembles that of an eight-year-old with delusions of grandeur. Now he has absolutely no idea how to get out of it. Shouting at reporters, renaming oceans, and posting ridiculous memes are one thing. Escaping a genuine geopolitical catastrophe is something entirely different.
Meanwhile, people around him may already be calculating that the more damage the Pumpkin does, the brighter the halo above his successor's head will appear.
But Trump's fear, at least, follows a certain logic. He understands that Putin has the ability to inflict enormous political and economic damage on him, and he may believe that the Kremlin is threatening to do exactly that. What he apparently fails to understand is that concessions will not buy him Putin's goodwill. He will get NOTHING in return. Absolutely nothing.
TRUMP HAS NO CARDS. NOT A SINGLE ONE.
In my view, he is now in the weakest negotiating position of either of his presidential terms. Xi Jinping must be watching this spectacle in disbelief. The president of the United States, the leader of the world's most powerful democracy, appears increasingly vulnerable to pressure from the Kremlin.
We may be witnessing something extraordinary: a situation in which Moscow is not merely trying to influence American foreign policy but appears capable of shaping Washington's decisions through threats and intimidation.
The Kremlin, which American presidents once confronted from a position of strength, now seems to have discovered how to exploit the fears of the man sitting in the Oval Office.
And the tragedy is that Trump appears willing to sacrifice Ukraine's interests, America's credibility, and the trust of its allies in a desperate attempt to protect himself from the consequences of his own decisions.
So much for peace through strength.
Look how things turned out, Mr. Reagan.
Birgit 🇩🇰 🇬🇱🇫🇴🇪🇺🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ retweeted
I'm getting sick and tired of these Putin apologists acting like the war in Ukraine is some kind of natural disaster that Putin just found himself in and that Ukraine wants to perpetuate.
Putin started the war. Russia invaded Ukraine. Ukraine wants to be free.
How is this difficult?
Og sådan kan man også manipulere valgresultater.
Når USA svigter tilliden.
It was easy to predict that Europe would look for alternatives to Starlink and Starshield, considering that the U.S. government has demonstrated a willingness to restrict these services when it suits its political objectives. Bullying Europe is unlikely to work when the U.S. has inflicted such a devastating own goal.
Europe is already developing its own alternative, IRIS2 (Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite), a sovereign satellite constellation designed to provide secure communications for governments, defense forces, and commercial users. The EU's GOVSATCOM system has also been operational since January 2026, although neither currently offers a complete replacement for Starlink or Starshield. Expect investment in these programs to ramp up.
European governments are likely to view their dependence on other American defense products in the same light, including the vaunted fifth-generation F-35 platform. Even without a remote "kill switch," dependence on U.S.-controlled software, maintenance, spare parts, and upgrades creates significant strategic vulnerabilities.
This will likely accelerate Europe's pursuit of greater defense-industrial sovereignty, including increased investment in and support for its own sixth-generation fighter programs.
The damage to American credibility as a reliable defense partner could have consequences lasting decades, well beyond the current administration. European governments will increasingly have to factor the political risks of dependence on the United States into their procurement decisions.
Birgit 🇩🇰 🇬🇱🇫🇴🇪🇺🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ retweeted
Så spørgsmålet er:
Var den hæderkronede, nu afdøde John Pilger også ‘putinist’? Eller begynder vores mediefolk og politikere at indse, at USA i høj grad bærer ansvaret for krigen i Ukraine?
For sådan bekæmpes Rusland (kommunismen) og destabiliseres Europa på én gang…
Birgit 🇩🇰 🇬🇱🇫🇴🇪🇺🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ retweeted
Remember when they sold us the slogan, “Go paperless, save trees, save the planet”? Now we've gone digital, and it's consuming enormous amounts of water, destroying ecosystems, harming bees, and contributing to environmental damage on a scale paper never did.
Birgit 🇩🇰 🇬🇱🇫🇴🇪🇺🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ retweeted
Anyone telling you the French protests are just a bunch of immigrants rioting is either too stupid to deserve your follow or is a malignant deceitful liar who is intentionally trying to trick you, either for clicks or for Israel and the Epstein class.
These protests are organic. They are a reaction to the rapid deterioration of material conditions. A million French people have taken part and France is famous for rioting. It’s literally their culture.
If you fall for the selective reporting, propaganda and outrage farming you have a weak mind. You are a liability to the freedom of humanity.
