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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   17322 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 17, 2025

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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.

Guillou's daily existence has been transformed into a Kafkaesque nightmare. He cannot: open or maintain accounts with Google, Amazon, Apple, or any US company; make hotel reservations (Expedia canceled his booking in France hours after he made it); conduct online commerce, since he can't know if the packaging is American; use any major credit card (Visa, Mastercard, Amex are all American); access normal banking services, even with non-American banks, as banks worldwide close sanctioned accounts; conduct virtually any financial transaction.

He describes it as being "economically banned across most of the planet," including in his own country, France, and where he works, the Netherlands.

That's the real shocking aspect of this: the Americans are:

  • punishing a European citizen
  • for doing his job in Europe
  • applying laws Europe officially supports
  • at an institution based in Europe
  • that Europe helped create and fund

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.)

That's fascinating. Good news, though: China maintains a nearly full-stack offering, so you have options! I'm not even being entirely sarcastic - out of an excess of masochism, I turned down the usual offer of a VPN when visiting China for the first time and had to live entirely without the American tech stack for a week. It was interesting and entirely viable once you got used to it, though perhaps less so if you live in Europe.

(Caveats: obviously I wouldn't do this myself except in extremis because it's inconvenient and the Chinese will obviously use it to spy on you and control you, but I find it interesting that they saw the danger and the promise of full-stack control so far ahead.)

I did similarly this past summer. Wechat let me validate my identity with a selfie and a photo of my US passport.

Incidentally the Motte is accessible in China and I posted from there without VPN. I did not even have a VPN on the phone I brought.

I mean, if the Chinese censorship apparatus works off of blacklists, the motte is probably just too small to be listed.

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