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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   17468 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.)

Regardless of your feelings about Netanyahu's actions as PM of Israel, he is a democratically elected head of state who took office in a free and fair election. This is the first time the ICC has ever been so bold as to issue a warrant for a leader who meets that definition (prior recipients such as Putin and Gadhafi mostly dont even bother to wave the fig leaf of democracy), and IMO sets a terrible, no-good, very bad precedent that should be treated with utter contempt by all peace-loving denizens of the world.

Issuing an actual international arrest warrant because you don't like what the leader of a democracy is doing is dangerous and destabilizing to the norms of international behavior. The only people who can get away with it are those who have enough actual international muscle to shake up the playing field, and the ICC definitely fails that test. Our robed man of excessively signaled virtue fucked around and is now finding out. This is a good thing.

Regardless of your feelings about Netanyahu's actions as PM of Israel, he is a democratically elected head of state who took office in a free and fair election.

Not only that, Israel has mechanisms in place to hold leaders to account if they misbehave. In fact, Netanyahu himself has been prosecuted for some sort of minor corruption charge.

The ICC Treaty is not supposed to apply in situations where the country at issue already has an effective system to investigate and prosecute its own citizens for war crimes. But of course, anyone with a modicum of intelligence and intellectual honesty knew at the time that this provision would eventually be ignored in order to go after Israeli leaders.

Issuing an actual international arrest warrant because you don't like what the leader of a democracy is doing is dangerous and destabilizing to the norms of international behavior. The only people who can get away with it are those who have enough actual international muscle to shake up the playing field, and the ICC definitely fails that test.

I agree, but as I pointed out in another post, this is sort of the international law equivalent to Disney releasing yet another woke movie which will obviously flop. i.e. when an institution has been captured by progressivism, the resources of that institution are put towards progressivism as opposed to the interests of the institution itself.

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