Chat control and any similar proposal should be killed once and for all before such big statements are made.
In the land of the blind, the one eye is king.
Sure, it could be better, but it isn’t better anywhere else.
“The best in the world” but with a footnote describing how low that bar actually is.
France should take the statue of liberty away from us tbh
It’s not that they’re free. It’s that they’re exceedingly privileged from exploiting the global south. And then racist against their victims. Basically the same as USA. It was never about “freedom” but rather genocide, slavery, exploitation, etc.
- Deported From Europe, Murdered by Israel
- Germany Turns to U.S. Playbook: Deportations Target Gaza War Protesters
- Nearly 9,000 migrant deaths recorded last year by UN migration agency, real death toll likely higher
The Economist is an imperial rag promoting pseudo-scientific capitalist ideology. They only care about pale skins.
Already was. While the us was occupied with cosplaying as freedom freaks and destroying countless democracies for the sake of freedom, europe actually became free.
It’s a different idea of freedom. In the US it’s about freedom to X, in the EU it’s freedom from X.
For example, in the US you have the freedom to say just about anything you want. In the EU you’re free from people making you unsafe by misinformation, lies, etc. In the US you’re free to take pictures of anything you want that can be seen from the street. In Germany you’re free from having pictures of your property posted online without your consent. The result is that Google’s Street View covers everything in the US and almost nothing in Germany. In the US people or companies are free to take public information and hold onto it or publish it as they see fit without interference. In the EU, you’re free from having that information out there forever beyond your control. You’re free to demand that it be deleted under certain circumstances.
In the end, the European way is more about regulating things. It asks what kinds of things prevent people from living their lives freely and without worries, and tries to regulate those things. The American way is more about removing every regulation and rule possible and saying the end result is freedom so it must be good.
I think it’s more that in Europe there’s freedom for citizens, in the US there’s freedom for corporations.
No, there aren’t special rules that give corporations more freedom. Citizens have the same freedoms. The difference is that they’re freedoms that may intrude on other people’s privacy, or on their mental well-being, etc.
The thing about Europe is its economy is permanently stuck in the doldrums, a global cautionary tale. And no wonder. Europeans enjoy August off, retire in their prime and spend more time eating and socialising with their families than inhabitants of any other region. Oddly, surveys show people in countries both rich and poor value such leisure time; somehow Europeans managed to squeeze their employers into giving them more of it. Even as they were depressing GDP by wasting time playing with their kids, the denizens of Europe also managed to keep inequality relatively low while it ballooned elsewhere in the past 20 years. Nobody in Europe has spent the past week looking at their stock portfolio, wondering if they could still afford to send their kids to university. Europeans have no idea what “medical bankruptcy” is. Oh, and no EU leader has ever launched their own cryptocurrency.
This whole paragraph had me on edge, a little unsure of whether The Economist, (edit for clarity: from presumably) an American publication (wing), legitimately thought these were good things or not.
I kind of got both that impression and its exact opposite, like the whole paragraph feels like a long wink and a nudge, like the author would like to say “maybe fixating on ‘line go up’ distracts you from all that is good in life” but that would negate The Economist’s entire raison d’être.
It’s like Schrodinger’s argument.
The Economist is a very Neoliberal British magazine (I should know, I had a subscription for almost a decade) and as such they have the vices of both:
- The magical thinking of Neoliberals, were the solution for the social and economic problems caused by deregulation is even more deregulation.
- The almost universal practice amongst the British Press and Political class of claiming everywhere is a shithole compared to Britain, especially Europe (and by that they mean Continental Europe).
So yeah, of course for them America sliding into Fascism isn’t the fault of the explosion of inequality and total freezing of Social Mobility there, which was the direct consequence of 4 decades of Neoliberalism and the destruction or defanging of all powers in the land (including Unions and the State) except for the Power Of Money, and of course Europe is “problematic” because they haven’t destroyed enough Unions, Worker Rights and other non-Money powers and workers are still entitled to things like a month of vacations, retiring before they’re dead and time for activities other than sleeping and working (oh, the horror!).
These guys have basically the ideology of the Democrat Party leadership, but only on Economics and with a British twist, possibly even harder Neoliberal (so, even more Rightwing, though towards Oligarchy rather than Fascism), and they certainly see it as their mission to “make opinion” (not Journalism) so their stories are almost invariably spined in some way to sell their ideology.
Anglo leftists will be like: “No.” Because hatespeech and racism is only good when they do it. And many EU countries ban hatespeech.
wat? nobody on the left supports hate speech.
Except when it is against Jews and minorities they feel are collectively complicit in being counterrevolutionaries.
