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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   19306 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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The UK

The UK has a different legal tradition to Continental Europe and of course rather notably isn't part of EU. They are in general not representative of the rest of Europe in anything when it comes to laws (anyone using UK as an example of European laws almost certainly has an agenda to grind and isn't participating in good faith).

Here in Finland there was a notable case involving a blog post (written as and literally titled "a bait to the chief prosecutor") which in the end lead to a trivial fine and the author getting voted into the parliament and eventually becoming the leader of the then second largest party in the parliament (because of the resulting large publicity). A rather different outcome from "throwing natives in jail over tweets".

The UK has a different legal tradition to Continental Europe and of course rather notably isn't part of EU

Still beholden, though, to the ECHR, and I'm not sure the degree to which the stuff like "we have to protect rapists because his home country will treat him badly" is homegrown UK idiocy or downstream of ECHR idiocy. That was the other thing I had in mind.

There's also Germany's interesting relationship to speech and democracy, but I hear there's some historic reasons there that don't necessarily apply to the rest of Western Europe.

Ireland is still part of the EU and has had some... issues... but I suppose is closer to the UK's legal tradition than Continental, though occasionally they try to do whatever the opposite of the UK is out of spite.

Here in Finland there was a notable case involving a blog post

I'm not sure the Nordics count very well for generalized European purposes either, given Denmark's... Denmarkness. Then again Sweden is at the opposite end of that spectrum. But I don't think it's bad faith to cite them even so.

To be fair, I was talking about the UK.

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