Blind Spot Discord debates: The case of Greenland’s independence

The Blind Spot officially gets back into full operating mode tomorrow, but our Discord channel remains an informal venue for testing out our views and/or highlighting news developments even when we’re off.

It’s important to stress, however, that thoughts expressed on Discord are often half-baked and should not be taken as gospel. Indeed, the entire purpose of the Discord channel is for community members to share information that might otherwise be missed. Equally important, it provides a space to surface gaps in one’s own knowledge or thinking by inviting critique and debate over assumed positions. The objective, in other words, is to learn from confrontation. To ensure such interactions remain mutually beneficial, a key rule is that debates must always be respectful, with participants erring on the side of granting one another the benefit of the doubt when emotions run high.

But because Discord is a real-time digital venue, it also inherits the legacy Twitter problem: people interacting without facial or tonal feedback, and without a shared understanding of the situational context others may be operating within.

In my experience — over sixteen years of debating people online — this lack of context is one of the primary drivers of offence, hostility, and unintentional blow ups. People who, in physical settings, might readily make allowances for others’ missteps instead become defensive. Conversations spiral as participants assume bad faith, talk past one another, or worse, take it as a matter of pride that they must not lose the argument, digging themselves into ever greater holes. Much of this has historically been avoided offline with a smile or respectful intonation — signals largely absent online.

I am as prone to failure on this front as anyone else. And indeed, last night I found myself breaking my own rules when a longstanding community member highlighted a flaw in my argument in a debate about Greenland’s independence. We’ll get to the thrust of that argument later on below the paywall, but the context about how I arrived at my conclusion is also important.

Rather than accepting the point and integrating it properly into my response I got a bit defensive and carried away. This was due to a combination of factors, that I think are worth recounting to help others understand how these civil debates can descend into civil war.

In the first instance, when my counterpart failed to acknowledge there was any merit to my broader argument by highlighting a technicality that undermined it, I took it personally. I interpreted his response as petty obstructionism aimed at aggrandising himself via a gotcha moment that mocked my intelligence.

While I felt the technicality was irrelevant to my broader point I failed to counter in a coherent way because, frankly, I was not in a position to do so. I had made the cardinal sin of inadvertently beginning a complex argument while encumbered with other real-world responsibilities. It doesn’t really matter what I was doing, whether that was hosting a dinner party, looking after kids or walking the dog. The point is that a reasonable debate is impossible when one side has a situational advantage (ie they’re in a position where they can concentrate on the argument and fully leverage archival support) and the other one does not. Yet, online it is often impossible to determine this. Counterparts who feel they are correcting narratives in good faith and with accurate information but whose own points are then ignored can feel slighted and frustrated themselves. They can then make impulsive demands for others to “do the reading” there and then, insinuating that failure to do so immediately surrenders any advantage and amounts to capitulation.

This is how things can descend into the sensation that one is being trolled. On both sides.

The problem extends beyond a lack of awareness about the situation of one’s opponent. The internet’s tendency to emphasize the importance of immediacy over accuracy also plays a role. In reality, any debate that requires supplementary reading or digestion of new facts to take the argument on requires pause and reflection. Expectations that the other side should drop everything to intake broader information sources immediately just to keep the argument flowing are unreasonable. Even in legal cases, courts retire when new facts become apparent.

The scourge of armchair expertise

Which brings me to a secondary point: the general breakout of armchair expertise that is afflicting the quality of international debate (especially among journalistic classes) and the degree it is itself suscpetible to informational asymmetry and non-preparedness.

This is a key phenomenon of our time. By its nature, the hallmark of these breakouts is the elevation of non-experts — often armed with peripheral facts or narrow technicalities — to the same standing in a debate as experts who have devoted their lives to a topic or issue. Access to information is conflated with understanding, and the ability to puncture an argument at a single point is mistaken for a command of the broader terrain. The result is not better debate, but a flattening of epistemic hierarchy that rewards immediacy and confidence over depth, preparation, and judgment.

Back in the day this phenomenon went by the name parachute journalism. The informational asymmetry it produced was often expertly exploited by the powers that be, who were themselves domain experts and understood how to steer public discourse by appealing to non-expert intuitions and sensibilities. In other words, it was recognized as a journalistic weakness and vulnerability.

Today, thanks to social media, everyone is effectively a parachute journalist — or, at the very least, selectively immersed in the views of non-experts whose interpretations best align with their own ideological priors.

This helps explain why experts so often bristle when a new “current thing” sweeps across the internet and hardens into zeitgeist. The frustration is rarely with the merely uninformed expressing opinions. It is with the mid-tier public intellectuals whose role increasingly consists of performing expertise rather than possessing it, and who nonetheless come to dominate the conversation.

Is the answer then to block non experts from debating in public settings or influencing the public? It’s tempting to think the answer is yes. Debates over whether, for example, it is fair or not for the U.S. to pursue Greenland maybe should be left to the public intellectuals who are truly experts in the field. The rest of us should just trust what these bodies of experts determine and take it as gospel,

And yet, I don’t think that’s right. People have a right to express opinions based on the facts they have to hand, even if they are misinformed or arrive at illogical conclusions due to lack of broader knowledge. Over time, an uninformed body undergoes broad education as the holes in their argument are exposed as part of a national debate, or as events prove them wrong. Even if, temporarilly, the underinformed hold sway of the overall public opinion, in the long run, the lessons for the public at large are real.

Moreover, experts are not immune to blind spots or political agendas. Indeed, precisely because they are narrow experts, they can lack visibility over broader dynamics or adjacent developments that fall outside their specialization.

Armchair experts — such as general news and political journalists — can be deeply irritating, but their broader scope of engagement can sometimes surface perspectives specialists miss. Not all broad-brush thinkers are merely gullible or ideologically captured. Some are genuine systems thinkers, capable of seeing structural interactions experts overlook. Others may possess pockets of deep but widely applicable knowledge — finance being an obvious example — that many political or regional specialists lack. I’d like to think I fall into that latter category.

Can such minds always be ready to go to war in defense of their arguments at a moment’s notice? Not really. They require preparation time, particularly when facing opportunistic trolling or straw-manning rather than good-faith engagement. What ultimately matters in terms of the knowledge they bring to the table is not exhaustive familiarity with every fact or historical detail, but the mental model through which they process information.

Their minds function more like tools than archives — instruments that can be applied to a wide range of problems or news stories in order to interpret them from a systems perspective. But for that output to be useful, the tool must first familiarize itself with the terrain it is being applied to.

What would Poirot do?

Poirot, the archetypal non-expert systems thinker, does not arrive at a crime scene and immediately announce that he knows who the murderer is. He may have a hunch, but he must then gather evidence and testimony to determine whether the hunch has legs. In doing so, he effectively becomes an expert in the case at hand, whether it involves complex financial arrangements or Egyptian archaeological sites. And when new information emerges that jars with his working theory, Poirot is not expected to resolve the contradiction instantly. He reflects, recalibrates, and only then arrives at the moment when “all can be explained.”

But in this day and age, the internet would be inclined to treat Poirot much the way his loyal friend and frequent companion, Captain Arthur Hastings, so often does. Hastings fixates on a detail that feels emotionally or morally salient but is not, in fact, logically relevant. He proposes an alternative suspect or motive that contradicts Poirot’s working theory, or voices a familiar skepticism — “But surely that doesn’t make sense if…” — mirroring the reader’s own doubts.

Most of the time, Poirot explains why Hastings’s objection is misleading, rooted more in assumption than in psychology or facts. Occasionally, however, Hastings’s interjection forces Poirot to clarify or sharpen his reasoning — even if Hastings himself never quite realizes he has helped.

If Poirot were placed in the situation I found myself in last night, the contrast in response would be instructive. Faced with a Hastings-style objection — technically framed, intuitively appealing, but ignorant of the larger architecture of his reasoning — Poirot would not have rushed to defend himself. Nor would he have attempted to resolve the objection on the spot while distracted or encumbered. In the canon, when Poirot is interrupted prematurely or pressed on a detail that does not yet belong to the solution, he almost always does the same thing: he pauses, deflects, or withdraws. He understands that a theory exposed too early is weakened by explanation, not strengthened by it.

Crucially, Poirot also understands something I momentarily forgot: that the technicality raised may be right, even if its significance is not yet apparent — either to the interlocutor or to Poirot himself. There are many moments in the novels where Hastings alights on a detail Poirot had not previously considered. Poirot does not reject these moments out of pride. Instead, he allows the irritation to pass, returns to the detail later, and only then discovers whether it is genuinely irrelevant — or, as sometimes happens, the missing piece that forces a reconfiguration of the entire picture.

That is the lesson I intend to take forward. Not every objection requires an immediate response. Not every technicality deserves to be fought over in real time. And not every misunderstanding is a provocation. In future, I would like to behave a little more like Poirot: more willing to pause, more comfortable deferring explanation, and more attentive to the fact that many of the people I am debating are not adversaries but companions — Hastingses rather than hostile examiners. If the goal is understanding rather than victory, then patience is not a concession. It is part of the method.

The actual debate

Seen through that Poirotian lens, last night’s Discord debate looks rather different to how it felt in the moment.

The disagreement began, on its surface, with a narrow question: whether Greenland could legally choose to leave Denmark and potentially federate with the United States — and whether such a process would be meaningfully different from Ukraine’s westward alignment toward the EU and NATO.

My initial claim was that the two cases were structurally analogous. Greenland, while not formally independent, has long sustained an independence movement and possesses the right under Danish law to hold a referendum on its future. As I put it at the time, Greenland is only Danish by the popular will of its people; should that will change, Denmark would be politically constrained from preventing a new alignment. From this perspective, Greenland choosing the United States would be no different in principle from Ukraine choosing the EU rather than remaining within Russia’s orbit.

My opponent’s intervention took the form of a legal technicality — precisely the kind that can feel Hastings-like when raised mid-argument. He grounded the discussion firmly in Danish constitutional law, pointing to the 2009 Act on Greenland Self-Government, which states that while a decision on independence rests with the people of Greenland, any actual independence agreement must also be concluded with the consent of the Folketing, which is the Danish Parliament. From this angle, Greenland’s right to self-determination is conditional rather than absolute; Denmark retains a formal veto, which at the time I didn’t appreciate as I myself had been misinformed by somebody else’s analysis. If parliament can withhold consent, my opponent argued, then Greenland does not possess a clean, unilateral path to independence.

At the time, I failed to fully acknowledge I had missed this detail, and instead became dismissive about its importance. Even if Denmark retained a technical veto, I argued, exercising it would be politically and reputationally devastating. Denmark lacks the military capacity to enforce such a decision in the Arctic, and blocking Greenlandic independence would make it appear overtly imperial and anti-democratic — a particularly acute contradiction for a state that prides itself on liberal norms. Whether Denmark can block independence, I argued, is almost beside the point; what matters is whether it could do so in practice without intolerable consequences.

But in retrospect — and this is where my opponent’s technicality proved more Poirotian than I initially appreciated — his insistence on formal legal structure forced me to confront something deeper. The real issue was not Danish law in isolation, but how prior agreements, precedents, and inherited constraints shape what is politically imaginable. This is where the comparison with Ukraine, and with the legacy of the Soviet Union, becomes critical.

Ukraine’s independence did not emerge from a vacuum. It arose from the collapse of the Soviet Union through elite consent and negotiated unwinding, rather than through a clean act of popular self-determination unburdened by prior commitments. The decisive moment came with the Belavezha Accords of December 1991, through which the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus formally dissolved the USSR and recognized one another as independent states. These agreements, reached under the leadership of Boris Yeltsin, were not merely legal instruments of separation; they were political settlements shaped by assumptions about the post-Soviet order.

While the accords did not explicitly prohibit Ukraine from future Western alignment, they were underpinned by shared understandings among post-Soviet elites that the newly independent republics — Ukraine foremost among them — would remain strategically non-aligned, avoid entry into Western military blocs such as NATO, and preserve dense economic integration with Russia. These expectations and conditions were not codified with the legal precision demanded of Danish constitutional law, but they nonetheless exerted real political force. Ukraine’s sovereignty was recognized, yet embedded within a web of inherited dependencies — particularly discounted Russian energy, integrated industrial supply chains, and preferential access to Russian markets.

In this sense, Ukraine’s independence was real but conditional. Its legal sovereignty masked a deeper structural dependence, shaped as much by precedent, expectation, and the circumstances of its birth as by formal statute. Those inherited conditions framed — and constrained — the political meaning of any later westward realignment, just as Denmark’s statutory authority over Greenland cannot be cleanly separated from the precedents and political consequences that would attend its exercise.

Seen this way, my opponent’s focus on statutory vetoes illuminated — rather than negated — my broader point. What is legally permissible within a domestic constitutional framework is often constrained by precedent and international expectations. Just as Ukraine’s alignment choices could not be disentangled from the conditions under which its independence was recognized, Greenland’s future cannot be understood purely by reference to Danish statutes as if they exist in a geopolitical vacuum. Law does not operate on a blank slate; it accumulates commitments, expectations, and implied red lines over time.

Brexit all over again?

If Greenland were to leave Denmark and fall decisively into the US orbit, that move would not merely test Danish constitutional law; it would reverberate through the same international logic that Russia invoked, however cynically, in contesting Ukraine’s westward drift.

Britain’s disupte with Argentina over the Falklands serves as a useful contrast precisely because it highlighted this interaction between consent, precedent, and power.

At the time of the Argentinian assault, the islands’ population overwhelmingly identified as British. Moreover, the UK demonstrated both the will and the capacity to defend that claim militarily. Greenland, by contrast, possesses a distinct national identity, Denmark lacks credible force projection in the Arctic, and the United States already dominates Greenland’s strategic defence environment, since it is effectively a part of NATO. Sovereignty, in practice, rests not on law alone but on the alignment of local consent with enforceable power — and in Greenland’s case, Denmark’s position is structurally weak.

The debate ultimately crystallized around a dilemma rather than a disagreement over facts. Denmark may retain legal authority over Greenland’s independence on paper, but exercising that authority will come at the cost of moral consistency and political credibility. Conversely, allowing Greenland to choose freely preserves liberal principle but risks ceding strategic control.

Framed this way, Denmark’s predicament begins to resemble — uncomfortably — the position Russia claims to occupy with respect to Ukraine.

If Denmark were to block Greenland’s independence, or burden it with onerous conditions designed to constrain its future alignment, it would invite charges of hypocrisy and weaken the EU’s broader moral posture on Ukraine. In doing so, it would hand Russia a rhetorical victory, reinforcing the argument that Western commitments to self-determination are selectively applied.

If, on the other hand, Denmark were to respect Greenland’s choice, even at the cost of losing strategic control, it would lay bare the EU’s limited leverage vis-à-vis the United States and the collapsing appeal of its own system. Yet it would preserve moral consistency and sustain the EU’s ability to distinguish its position from that of Russia — a distinction that rests less on raw power than on the credibility of liberal principle.

In the end, my Discord opponent was right about the formal legal structure. Denmark does retain constitutional authority. But the technicality he raised also exposes the limits of treating law as a self-contained system, detached from precedent and geopolitical context.

My broader claim — that authority unenforceable in practice is authority in name only — I think survives his objection. Like one of Hastings’s better interruptions, the technical point ultimately forced a clearer articulation of the deeper tension at stake: between what law formally permits, what politics practically allows, and how past agreements continue to constrain future choices long after they are signed.

For the islanders themselves, however, the calculus may be far more straightforward. The question may ultimately come down to economics.

During the Brexit debate, the EU’s remainer argument was explicit: leaving the Union would make the UK poorer over time, and rational actors should therefore remain within the larger, more prosperous system. Applied consistently, that same logic now cuts in the opposite direction. If Greenlanders judge that continued association with the European Union offers lower long-term growth, fewer opportunities, and weaker strategic leverage than integration into the United States, why would they choose to remain?

This is not an appeal to sentiment or identity, but to the EU’s own economic reasoning. If the case for remaining is ultimately about growth, subsidy, and future prosperity, then it follows that a small polity should rationally seek alignment with the system best positioned to deliver those outcomes. On those terms, the argument for Greenlandic exit becomes difficult to rebut without abandoning the very premises on which the EU previously defended itself.

Seen this way, the situation approaches a checkmate for Europe. To fend off American encroachment, Denmark would be forced into one of two unattractive options: expend military resources it does not possess, or offer an even greater and politically fraught wealth transfer to an island that many within the EU do not instinctively regard as European — risking resentment both locally and across the bloc.

If Donald Trump, or any future US administration, were to offer Greenlanders materially transformative wealth in exchange for strategic alignment and resource access, that would be extraordinarily difficult for Europe to counter. This difficulty is compounded by recent precedents — not least the Chagos Islands, which the United Kingdom relinquished with little resistance.

In a world where leverage increasingly trumps legality, such signals should not go unnoticed. And the debate in Europe, for now, appears one sided and ignorant of the greater historical forces at hand.