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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   18454 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.)

To me this post seems to be a reflection of the absurd dominance of American power, how all of EU is America's bitch, and pointing out how crazy this is without taking sides. But most comments are about defending American actions as moral and proper and how this asshole Frenchman started shit anyway. Have I badly misread this or is everybody else crazy?

Have I badly misread this or is everybody else crazy?

This is the "just build your own financial system if you want to [political act]" finally deployed against the outgroup.
Which is why people are cheering it. It's that simple.

But then again, this is what happens when you willingly outsource your technology and financial system to the Americans. It doesn't come for free; just like membership in NATO, the cost is not "X% of GDP on military", it's "the US gets to fuck around in your country, delete your sovereignty, and there's fuck all you can do about it".

If Europeans didn't want to be vulnerable to this, they can build their own system. Oh, but that costs money and requires paying for the kinds of talent that run to the US at the first opportunity, and if there's anything European elites hate more than being told "no" it's having to pay their countrymen at fair market prices. So the response to this will be impotent at best- maybe more EU sanctions/finger-wagging to American tech companies because their AI can deny the Holocaust or whatever (and I'm sure it was coincidental that the French launched an investigation against Grok for that around this time).

This is the "just build your own financial system if you want to [political act]" finally deployed against the outgroup. Which is why people are cheering it.

While I agree that there's an element of this, consider:

"the US gets to fuck around in your country, delete your sovereignty, and there's fuck all you can do about it".

This Nicolas Guillou is spearheading an effort to fuck around with Israel's sovereignty as well as to set up precedents that will inevitably be used to fuck around with American sovereignty.

Certainly as I Brit I find it hard to see the EU as a guardian of national sovereignty.

I was very against Brexit at the time. But much of the behaviour of the EU* since then has done a lot to disabuse me of the notion that "European" is a synonym for enlightened/benevolent/compassionate. I'm not sure I'd support rejoining.

*To be fair, it mostly seems to be France.

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