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Europeans are effortposting on X right now, centering around a reported $140 million fine apparently for how X changed the blue checkmark and restricted API access to researchers. But this comes at a time when Europeans are bearing down on Musk for not curating feeds based on the opinions of paid 'misinformation experts', an industry effectively invented post-2016 election.
It is a terrible look for Europe. They are falling behind China and the US economically while acting as the global regulators for industries they are no longer capable of building themselves. Their posture has become so hostile to business that Apple is now withholding major features from the European market. Jamie Dimon just sounded the alarm on how their hulking regulatory regime is dragging down their ability to innovate, warning that they’ve effectively driven investment out.
My impression of European bureaucrats in the last 24 hours is of a body staffed by a bunch of snooty has-beens. The economist Robin Brooks has been noting the deep hypocrisy here too: their moralizing doesn't match their actions on things like Ukraine, given they are still buying endless amounts of Russian oil via backchannels and refineries in places like India.
The free speech thing is really annoying too. I was actually surprised to see Trump hold back on this when meeting PM Starmer in Scotland. There is a real and serious difference in free speech between our nations. As an American, I can express myself without fear that some busybody will knock on my door.
It’s upsetting because while things might have been less turbulent under Harris, I’m truly glad that the attempt to codify a global regime of 'acceptable' online speech has met resistance. It’s odd to think that we nearly saw a unification of US/EU efforts on this front, importing their safetyism to our shores.
Europe is and always will be our friend, but they’re not on their game right now. The reactions aren't principled—they’re distasteful.
I am not the biggest fan of European attitude towards free speech, but it's amusing to see how it just displays the ignorance of Americans to think that something has fundamentally changed in Europe in relation to the treatment of free speech when it has always been like this in Europe. Nowadays the issue is just that speech is increasingly online. I think it's far to criticize Europe, but I think most of the dunking coming from US actors are in terribly bad faith and nonsensical. You have the most brazenly corrupt president in the history of US and country full of non-White immigrants (with VP's wife being Indian for god's sake), and we get lectured for seemingly failing to be democratic and preserving our cultural identities. As far as European weak military goes, this is has been fully devised by US policy. I think dunking on economy is fine, but even there when Musk makes snide remarks about how EU should be dismantled in favor of sovereign nations, you know he is full of shit. EU is the best thing that could've happened to a business wanting to export into EU with the exception if you favor Putin-style cronyist regimes where single people can be paid off. I am self-critical of Europe as an European, but most of the criticism I'd take as fair if it came from a country like Japan, not US.
A) If AfD wasn't facing bans and there weren't firewalls against anti-immigrant parties across most of the continent you could make this point without looking like a left-wing journalist.
B) it's highly disingenuous of you to fail to acknowledge the historic break in attitude to wholesale imports of aliens represented by the Trump administration. Prior to Trump, USG was a huge promoter of moving the 3rd world into the first.
a) Firewalls so hard that one of the most actual effective anti-immigrant parties is leftists? Also if you actually familiarized yourself with actual policy as of latest for whole of EU, illegal immigration in and refugee entries in particular has decreased significantly due to measures taken by current EU governments. Getting in legally isn't too easy of a feat either. b) What is this historic break represented by the administration? Crackdown on illegal immigration and putting a pause on some 4th world countries? Won't move a real needle on legal immigration.
Denmark is pretty much unique in Europe. It's the single place where social democrats didn't outright sell out their previous base. Germany has a firewall. France has a firewall too. If those two countries came to their senses, it'd be possible to start doing something about the millions of people who were told to leave but didn't leave.
You sure about that? 5 years back even debating whether H1B is desirable was totally beyond the Overton window. Now it's up for debate. You need to pray that US doesn't get wise, because if it reformed its immigration to be pre-1965 pattern, it could do to Europe what EU did to Bulgaria - drain most of the productive people away,
Look at that chart. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Asylum_applications_-_annual_statistics
Oh yeah, brutal efficiency. They got it back to half a million per year, wonderful. It was at 130k in 2008. They fucked it up and did the bare minimum - stopped fucking it up progressively more because they're all getting scared 'populists' will slaughter them in elections. Wake me up when per capita, EU is deporting as many undesirables as USA. Then I'll admit Trump admin admonishing its vassals about this is baseless.
Have you awoken from a coma perhaps? 5 years back, USG was all over George Floyd. Today, USG is officially angry at the government of South Africa for its wilful refusal to even pretend to care about the farm murders. Which, sure, aren't wholly ANC's fault but they deliberately made the situation worse.
Insane Civil Rights Act related judicial decisions are getting cancelled by supreme court. DoJ is suing businesses for discriminating against native Americans (by that I mean the sort of people who founded the US, not the tribesmen it conquered and grudgingly made citizens decades later). Overall, very positive and notable changes. Wake me up when EU stops kissing the ass of the 3rd world and starts deporting illegals the way it was done in 19th century - arrested, marched to the border under police guard and ejected.
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Europeans since the invention of the internet: You silly Americans, why do you think you need that huge military now that the Cold War is over? I bet it's just to oppress oil countries. Here in Europe we enlightened souls prefer to spend our budgets on our social welfare systems.
Russia: (rolls over and farts menacingly)
Europeans:
Yeah remember when Trump went over there in his first term and asked them to hit their NATO spending obligations and they basically laughed in his face? I do.
Or when Obama and Bush told Europe the same about defense spending.
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?????? Hasn't usa always asked europe to pay more money into nato and they always don't?
Americans didn't give a shit when it was just european despots imprisoning their own people for memes. But now that they want to fuck with memes on American platforms, Americans are pissed.
Look at AUKUS (where the Americans and the UK undermined French submarine sales), or the recent Palantir contract in the UK (where the US undermined UK AI development). America wants cheaper, more easily defended vassals, not peers. Paying for a standing army (controlled by the Americans, natch) is expensive and doesn't really have any use except when the Russians are actually literally invading, which isn't really a concern for most of Europe at the moment since the rich nations who fund the thing are on the opposite side of the continent. Development is where the money, influence and power projection is, and the Americans guard it jealously.
None of which is to say that the Europeans don't also shoot them/ourselves in the foot by working hard to destroy their own industries and repel investment at all costs.
As I understand it, the French submarine sale deal wound up being... pretty horrendous, cost-wise. Granted, AUKUS may also wind up being do, but the French deal was not exactly an amazing bargain for Australia.
I’ve heard different stories from different people. The French broadly say that the Australians kept changing their mind on the specs they wanted, the Aussies say the French were costing too much and taking too long. I haven’t done a deep dive myself.
My understanding is that AUKUS happened because the Americans and the UK decided to offer nuclear technology which is usually verboten, basically to split off Australia from France.
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Is there a term where only one party is ever granted full moral agency, responsibility, and blame, while everyone else is treated as passive, contextual, or structurally determined. In the United States itself it's white men at the end of the agency chain, internationally it's the United States.
Privilege, in the woke sense?
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Ultimately, the US is a big elephant in a small room. A single change in policy by the US can and has torpedoed entire sectors in foreign countries.
To take an extreme example, if you receive a letter from your landlord telling you that you are going to be evicted then in a sense your choosing to leave peacefully rather than squat or lay makeshift pit traps under the welcome mat is a moral choice. But only in a sense.
And a corollary, there will always be an excuse.
If you are uninterested in actually discussing the phenomenon, you may of course use any term for it that you please.
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I don't know, it feels like something changed with respect to speech between 2010 and 2020. Like, people would look down on you for saying non-PC things loudly in public, but you didn't get arrested for it. And as for the VP's wife being Indian, for a while we had in the UK:
All either Indian or Arab, at the same time.
The laws themselves aren't new, the enforcement has changed.
Before everyone was on the Internet, enforcement was hardly necessary. The media oligopoly was on board with it and self-censored. Any would-be politicians would need the de facto consent of the media to run a campaign. They didn't bother listening in on pub conversations to find people to arrest. Commoners had no reach anyway, so there's no real point going full Stasi. That left a handful of enforcement actions against a small-time publisher here, a politician who goes off script there, but that was it.
Nowadays people can find each other via the Internet, and there's a lot of discontented people who know there are more and can organize. It has removed the media's role as approval committee, and upended politics. So now in some places they suddenly find it worthwhile to arrest people at their house over tweets.
The early 2010s were a transition period, where the media lost their grip but the enforcement had not yet been stepped up.
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It is not only about free speech. During 1990s and early 2000s there was a huge discussion of how will the EU look like post Maastricht, labeled as Europe of Nations vs federal Europe - with the former being labeled as "eurosceptic" and latter as proeuropean of course. The eurosceptic side basically lost with 2007 Treaty of Lisbon. The new empowered EU beurocracy started churning regulation at breakneck speed - doubling the already burdensome regulation by 2024 so now majority of national laws are passes just to implement EU regulations. It now borders with comical, such as the latest EU Space Act which despite declining EU space programs boasts how it will bring about safe, sustainable and green space exploration or something silly like that. EU institutions and bureaucrats are unironically proud of EU being regulatory superpower, some of them really believe in how they are essential for regulating the whole world.
EU is basically a paradise for bureaucratic structures - the so called Deep State - with byzantine rules hiding responsibility behind layers and layers of structures and almost no real oversight. Just look at this simplified graph of EU institutions from wikipedia and keep in mind that each of this rectangles hides layers of equally byzantine rules of how they are constituted. I'd say that with EU institutions gaining more and more control, the whole thing is turning into something akin to ancient Chinese system of true bureaucracy or maybe something like late Soviet or post Deng and pre Xi system of collective leadership, where it was not dear leader, but party structures controlling the state.
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No need to list examples of these Indian or Arab mayors in UK. It's just hypocritical to hear it from US and even current administration. If it came from Japan, sure.
As for feeling, possible, but not enough if you are critical. Mind you, haven't looked into data proper, but it wouldn't be damning to the change in free speech standards if the feeling coincides with clearly people communicating more in online spaces and issues that seemingly would have been censored anyway having become more prevalent.
I am personally skeptical myself about there being that many ardent defenders of free speech in principle. I identify myself as a principled one (at least now), but time and time just shows that people are just interested in their version of free speech. These days it's even exemplified by US President himself.
This is not just mayors. These are the leaders/president-equivalents of the UK, Scotland and Ireland: the most powerful people in the land.
What I am trying to say is that, if we were talking about alcoholism, then maybe Japan is teetotal and the US sometimes comes home drunk from parties, but the UK is an alcoholic drinking fortified beer at 9am. Is it hypocritical for the US to tell the UK they drink too much? Sort of. But it's still true.
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