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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   10078 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 30, 2026

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Trump specifically looks like an idiot from a European perspective

I'm old enough to remember very similar comments about the Bush administration. The Internet wasn't quite as culturally ubiquitous, but every phpBB forum, mailing list, or similar seemed to have a smug European or two (usually German, it seemed) that made everything about the Culture War: Iraq, per capita carbon emissions, then-current issues like stem cell research, state surveillance, or the war on drugs.

Bush was certainly not the best president, but the degree to which these folks prostrated themselves at the beginning of the Obama administration was almost laughable, especially given how little actually changed: from my seat in the US here, none of those changed drastically, but the smug commentary on it certainly did. Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if an Internet forum like that turned out to be part of the JD Vance origin story.

I'm old enough to remember very similar comments about the Bush administration.

Every republican administration prompts them.

Americans have a slightly mythological view of Europeans as a separate and independent culture, when in reality the European consensus is just what's on American TV told back to you in an exotic accent.

In hindsight, a lot of European commentary of the era was almost certainly heavily filtered to competent English speakers, which may have skewed it heavily towards certain countries (UK, NL, DE) and education levels.

Long-term I'd expect those filters to start fading (see Twitter and auto-translating Japanese recently), but the above bias is probably true still today in places like this one. I'm curious if our LLM rules apply to pure translations, but it doesn't immediately impact me.

Well, the EU really really wants to be on good terms with the US. Do not underestimate the delusional capabilities of people who desperately want a certain narrative to be true. I am not even sure if this time is different. Maybe in four years, with the election of a charismatic democrat, the EU countries will have blissfully forgotten about everything and returned to being America's lapdogs.

the degree to which these folks prostrated themselves at the beginning of the Obama administration was almost laughable

Not almost laughable, it was laughable. He got the Nobel Peace Prize for not being Bush.

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