Corvos
6d ago
No, that's not what I meant to say. I think you are treating the subject in a mature way, albeit one I disagree with.
What I'm asking for is more recognition from others that free speech must ultimately involve trade-offs which different countries are handling in different ways, and less chimping out from certain people (not you @KMC) about how America is glorious land of Free Speech and England/Europe is a contemptible tyranny.
In America you (plural) have broadly decided that it's terrible if the government can punish you for speech, but ok if your employer does. In Europe it's the other way round - it's the governmnt's job to step in and tell your employer that they don't have the right to fire you if they dislike your politics.
Corvos
6d ago
That's a perfectly valid perspective. But we're now talking about the real tradeoffs and decisions that America makes: we can't protect your speech from retaliation by your employers because that infringes their rights.
America has a particular, limited right to free speech which says that no government can legally punish you for your speech. And that's fine, that's a perfectly valid conception of free speech. I personally happen to disagree with it: I think many people would rather spend a night in a police cell than be blacklisted from their career. That's just my opinion.
What irks me is silly "in America unlike Europe we have Free Speech" comments which ignore the complexity in both countries.
Corvos
6d ago
It's not a meme, it's just straightforward blasphemy. You are not supposed to suggest that you or your friends are basically like the Son of God for the purposes of self-aggrandisement, especially when you and your friends are neither holy nor christlike in their behaviour.
Comparing people to Jesus in order to learn from his example is obviously different.
Corvos
6d ago
If free speech is protected in America, why do people get fired and blacklisted for the things they say?
Come on, be serious. There are compromises made in every country on Earth
In practice, the UK has more legal protections against being fired or discriminated against for your views, even when those views are right-wing. That is why people who go to employment tribunals tend to win their cases. It doesn't usually give them their jobs back.
The UK has less protections for tweeting in a way that makes the government worried. This is not good.
Broadly, in the US you are more likely to be ruined, in the UK you are more likely to get arrested. Neither of these are good.
Jordan Peterson is Canadian and Cathy Newman is a resident of the planet Idiot - it's too pat to boil it down to New and Old Worlds.
Especially since free speech is defended by law in both England and apparently Brussels, as it says in the article. The defendant wins most of their cases if they actually get to court.
The issue is informal sanctions and discrimination producing a chilling effect, something which is at least as prevalent in the US as it is in the 'Old World'.
Corvos
6d ago
I had a guy at a party bring this up. I think he's a communist from what others said. Literally :
Me: Awful business.
Him: Is it? [Grins]
Me: yes? He was going to kill a hundred innocent people.
Him: but there are thousands dying in Gaza.
I have never actually cut somebody in mid-sentence before. It's surprisingly cathartic. But I feel tainted just having talked to this man.
Corvos
6d ago
That's kind of what I'm saying. Think of yourself as a professional investment banker for a very boutique firm.
Corvos
7d ago
Science-fiction uses it a lot: anyone who knows about 40k knows about Necron gauss weaponry, and that's a lot of men.
This is true for most signals. Guys prefer "looks effortlessly beautiful at 9am with her hair disarrayed" over "drops from an 8 to a 6 at night when the makeup comes off".
Most of these signals are about fundamental fitness, so faking them is both natural and something people select against.
Corvos
7d ago
One note: don't disdain social signals. Get some nice clothes, a good jacket (or whatever is culturally appropriate for well-to-do young men where you are), pay to have your shirts ironed by a service if you don't want to do it yourself. Wear your nice watch every day because that's what you do with a good watch - I've worn my nice watch every day since getting it on my 18th birthday. Get some good leather boots or expensive trainers or whatever.
It will send the true, correct message to your friends and family: I'm all right, my current lifestyle might be unconventional but it's working out, you don't need to be worried about me or pity me.
And by doing so, it will relax you a little as well.
Thank you, I appreciate the thought. I feel similarly - I have a backlog of replies from @FCfromSSC and others that deserve thoughtful responses but my emotions have cooled and I don't really want to get into more arguments this second.
I owe you an apology as well, my OP in this thread was not polite and was in the tone of somebody spoiling for a fight.
Certainly many Europeans are very ignorant, or mindkilled, just as much so as many Americans or more. And there are enough smug Europeans and Anglos (many of them my friends) that I have to bite my tongue on a regular basis just to get on.
I think there is also a surprisingly large cultural gap that get masked by the appearance of a common culture, which is what you seem to be saying also. Americans and Europeans think they understand each other and share the same moral intuitions, much more than they would if they were talking to somebody from Kazakhstan or Laos, and they're often wrong about that. A discussion for another time!
Corvos
9d ago
Slow Horses is British, as is most of the BBC. Non-British don't think about the Troubles at all, they weren't there.
The UK is still about 85% British, and would be about 93% if we refused to give Citizenship to people who don't have it yet. It's the demographics of the young, and in the major cities, that is concerning.
Corvos
10d ago
What I'm trying to say is that there's no semantic box in the British mind which contains both the IRA and the 'Sons of Albion'.
It would be like saying, "To understand the current reaction to Patriot Front, you need to understand America's history of white violence: the Italian Mafia ravaged America for nearly a decade".
No American (IMO) would write that. The Godfather portrays violence by whites, but it's not the same kind of violence and they're not the same whites.
Rightly or wrongly, there's a semantic cluster in the American mind which goes 'KKK -> Jim Crow lynchings -> Patriot Front'. There isn't one that goes 'Mafia -> Patriot Front'.
In the UK there is a semantic cluster containing 'Enoch Powell's rivers of blood speech -> Oswald Moseley -> the BNP and EDF -> Sons of Albion'. There is not IRA -> Sons of Albion.
But if you took a man off the street and gave him "recent severe organized terrorism performed by Whites" I doubt the IRA would leap to his tongue. He might get it eventually.
Corvos
10d ago
I think you are correct in your suspicion that an annoyance with FTP is biasing you. The reason that Europe has so many parties with only marginal differences is that the policy platform of parties is broadly the policy platform of the people who make up these parties. Broad cultural consensus causes these people to all think basically the same thing, and then they create new parties with some bullshit differentiator to try and get an easier climb to the top.
Corvos
10d ago
And on paper why couldn't she do it ? On paper Tesla, SpaceX, and Theranos do not look that different from each other : 'Autistic savant finds space with lazy legacy players, blindsides them with a technology leap and cleans house despite expert insistence that the technology simply wasn't there yet.'
Now, if you're from the valley, then you immediately see the folly in that reasoning.
This reminds me of the people who talk about 'growth' a lot in government. They're not necessarily stupid people, but they seem to see 'growth' as this thing that just turns up when you prepare the ground right and want it really really badly. It doesn't seem to occur to them that growth might correspond to something: to individual discoveries that compound into innovations, to solving problems that actually exist and actually matter, to synergies that grow up between quality home industries.
Which makes it very difficult for them to tell growth from financialisation.
Lastly, while the UK obviously has some stupid and exaggerated fear of right wing extremism, it's not as stupid as it seems because they actually have had white people committing acts of terror is recent memory (the troubles).
I don't think anyone thinks like that here in the UK. The Troubles were Irish separatists, and were not considered 'white' (or non-white), nor 'right-wing'. Irish violence (both terrorism and Mob-related) has been common enough in the last century to have its own category.
Just going by your message, what Slow Horses is doing is mixing the British fear of skinheads and working-class hooliganism with the fear of Islamist extremism. The IRA never used videoed beheadings as a method of stoking fear, they used shootings, bombings, torture and mutilation. Whereas al-Qaeda and ISIS were famed for it.
Whether reversing the races to present crimes committed by muslims against whites (to instead be crimes by whites against muslims) should be considered Culture War is something I leave to the reader's judgement. I suspect the primary reason for doing it is that it's politically easiest. Right-wing whites (especially working class ones) have no special interest groups worth a damn.
Corvos
12d ago
Firefly (the meeting transcription / note takes service) being the most recent and relevant example. The CEO literally used to join calls as "Firefly AI" and make the notes by hand, but now the product works and it's great.
No, I misunderstood you, and thought you were saying that being fooled by a gotcha quote was reason #3,001 to hate Europeans. I apologise.
I do think that performative hatred of Europeans has grown up on the American Right as a response to performative love of Europe on the American Left. @FCfromSSC has been very open about this and the internal dynamics behind it, and I understand, but it doesn't make it any more fun from this end. I'm a little prickly on the subject.
Turkey is... very much regarded as a necessary evil, especially after Erdogan's promises of reform turned out to be lies. Turkey is the Token Evil Teammate, the guy who is provisionally on your team for reasons of his own and you recognise he doesn't wish you well but you can't get rid of him because you need him (to defend your southern border).
From my perspective, America is moving towards that position with a speed that honestly is quite shocking to people who were alive in the 90s and who still broadly believe in the America of "Tear down this Wall!" and Hollywood and WW2 and the Berlin Airlift. I don't think Americans quite see this, and those who do tend to dismiss it as TDS*.
*One reason it looks like TDS is that many Europeans can't quite believe that America has changed in this way, and have convinced themselves that it's all the fault of one specific man and that once he's gone the 'real' America will come back. Personally I think that's the logic of an abused spouse, but Boomers love their illusions.
It's not like you have to care, of course, and plenty of people on this board have made it clear that they don't. But being broadly pro-Trump was very common for younger Reds in Europe in 2023: Farage rallies etc. were full of Trump supporters (like me) and now you can barely find any.
Corvos
13d ago
Accepting that, isn't that partly because civilized people had always been on the positive end of population transfers?
It also effectively sweeps the Soviet Union under the rug
I'm not being snarky, but a big part of America's historic pitch during the Cold War was that you guys were genuinely better than the Soviet Union. Not just in a Capitalists vs. Commies way but in terms of genuinely caring about the relationship between larger states and smaller states. That was always a propaganda-augmented talking point, it swept a lot of stuff under the rug, but I think also the need to appear the moral superiors of the USSR constrained America in a lot of ways. America no longer seems to consider that relevant. I'd go so far as to say that a big part of Trump's appeal for Americans is throwing off the voluntary constraints that the USA placed on itself during the Cold War, eliciting predictably negative international reactions.
what is America even supposed to do with that?
Just... don't? It's totally rational for America to want Greenland. Hell, I'd love the UK to have Greenland if we could swing it. But if we offered to buy Greenland we'd get the same reaction that Trump got, and not just because we couldn't afford it.
Again, I'm not being snarky here. The world is full of things that people want and can't have. I wasn't being melodramatic talking about people's daughters: everyone understand why you might want somebody's daughter, and historically it used to be perfectly acceptable to buy one, even if you had to dress up the transaction a bit. Now it's not. And if you say, "What am I supposed to do with that? I don't have children and I'm in love with her and I really, really want her," what kind of reaction do you think you'll get?
Because this is the most peaceful disruption possible to the ideal of stable borders, and if Europe can't negotiate these things rationally it will not like when America also decides to get irrational.
I'm aware, and this is the other element. You think people have forgotten this even for a moment? Even the most idle request from America comes with the implied threat of economic sanctions or even military sanctions on refusal. Ten times so for Trump because, as mentioned, he's clearly uninterested in norms and self-constraint. That's why people are so sensitive to this behaviour from America specifically. Like, seriously, you're telling me you wouldn't have a negative reaction if Xi said those kinds of things while trying to buy American territory?
Errata:
Peaceful land deals are historically normal, the United States was built on them, Europe was built on them.
Historically normal, yes.
Do you have this same attitude when Spain asks the UK for Gibraltar?
You're asking a British guy if he's offended when Spain keeps trying to steal our territory? Of course I do. We went to war for the Falklands barely thirty years ago.
Yes, but not for being arrested. IIRC the only people who were actually put in prison were arrested for directly calling for violence in the middle of riots. I don't approve of that, I think it reflects vast hypocrisy on the part of the government who would never treat non-English rioters this way, but I'm fine with that principle if it's applied evenly.
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