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Comment by vadman | Hacker News Reader

Not sure why everybody is downvoting you, especially sicne you don't claim to be happy about the facts, just stating them.

Bolivia is, well, unimportant, and their complaints to the US will amount to nothing. There are exactly 2 countries in the world that the US cannot mess with. If it was a Russian or a Chinese plane, do you all think it would be denied airspace entry? (And EVEN IF it was denied entry and still decided to go through, do you think anything would happen to it?)

What should be downvoted is the state of affairs when a US whistleblower has to be escorted around the world by Putin himself to guarantee his safety.

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Well, I'm happy to see the downvotes. It suggests that idealism is alive and well on HN. Ironically, I speak from the experience of being the citizen of Canada, in particular, BC that had a number of disagreements with the United States (Air, Water, Lumber Tariffs) over 10 years. Issues that I'm certain 99.99% of the United States has never heard of, were front page news of the Vancouver Sun on-and-off for a decade.

There was a sense of anger, helplessness, and eventually resentment (but, to some degree, acceptance) that when engaging in disputes with much larger countries, you need to avoid going up against them head-on, because you will lose every time.

At least we got NAFTA out of it, which has worked out well for some percentage of the Canadian population.

Well, that's why he flew to Hong Kong originally, and why he's currently transiting through a Moscow airport.

The trouble for Snowden is: neither the Chinese nor the Russians want to keep him.

It's not as if Bolivia and the US live in a vacuum. The rest of the world can see what they are doing, and they might not be so impressed by it.

The rest of the world is the other 2 countries that matter (and shit like that doesn't happen to them), a multitude of countries that don't matter (the USA doesn't give a fuck what their impression is) and a handful of "allies" who are in it with the US.

It will take really coordinated efforts of multiple governments for the US to even start caring about "impressions" and so on. Highly unlikely to happen.

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