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Another case of culture war cancellation dropped, this time somewhat more important than the usual cases.
The case of Nicolas Guillou, French judge at the ICC, cancelled by Marco Rubio personally.
If your French is not sufficient, here is Xitter summary.
Can it happen to you?
Not in this way, not even the most IRL important mottizen is worthy of Marco's personal attention.
If it happens, it will happen because AI analyzed your online activity and decided it crossed a threshold of dangerous nihilist extremism (and you could do about it just as much as Nicolas Guillou, this means nothing at all.)
Just shows the importance of having your own versions of the services which are necessary for daily life. Europe made the mistake of funneling its resources to paying for the welfare of low human capital instead of developing indigenous service providers. Now it's suffering the consequences. The hope would be that they learn their lessons, cut welfare and move the money into long term US (and China) independent services. Payment processors are a good starting point, even places like Nigeria have fully functional home grown versions like Verve.
In the short term they really should force the American companies to lift these sanctions or suffer just as nasty consequences in Europe as not following the sanctions would inflict upon them in the US. This would basically force a divestment of the EU business by the company which would give the EU a good starting point for their own versions of these services.
This would require unchaining their private sector to provide them, which in turn changes the balance of domestic power.
These things are all linked, you can't just manage an economy like you're playing SimCity.
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These companies are much more beholden to Secretary Rubio than to Eurocrats. These are Americans in America. Violating official sanctions is not an option. Million dollar penalties and federal imprisonment are the possible punishments for purposefully violating sanctions.
Talk about being between a rock and a hard place.
Yes, but their EU operations exist because the Eurocrats allow them to. Such a proposal would mean their EU operations are no longer viable and they have to choose between the US and EU. Yes of course they are going to choose to keep the US operations but that means a full sale of the EU operations to an entity which will be EU based and therefore comply with the Eurocrats.
This will give the EU ready made versions of their own services that they don't need to build up from scratch, a bit like how McDonald's still exists in Russia after McDonald's International left the country, the restaurants just changed their name but offer basically the same food at basically the same prices, Russia didn't need to build up their McDonald's replacement from scratch.
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