EU [0], not US. There's a reason JD Vance was harping about "free speech" and "personal freedom" during MSC.
Hot take, but if we as Ds sacrifice Bruxelles to bring back Obama era tech donors who are overly impacted by the Digital Services Act, I'm fine with it.
[0] - https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...
Less than 40% of the adult population has a college degree. Less than 45% of voters have college degrees. Yet we took for granted the ascendence of ideas that few non-college-educated voters have been able to digest and see the evidence for. That it happened at all is pretty amazing, yet our only response has been to whine and moan that it hasn't happened faster or more completely. We could see that a lot of people weren't really getting it, and as long as we thought they were a minority, our response was who cares, they're losing. If they aren't educating themselves and keeping up to date, they're simply bad people and if they're confused and angry, fuck 'em, they deserve it.
It is not necessarily wrong as a moral stance, but it's not a strategy for succeeding in a democracy where those people can tip the balance of an election. As we felt more and more entitled to our triumph and got more and more angry and whiny about the bad people holding us back, surprise surprise, those people decided we weren't the best party to represent them anymore.
If there's any lesson we should take from this, it's that if we hold people in contempt, we can't count on their votes.
There's nothing coherent behind the shift to Trump except mutual contempt. I hope we are getting to a point where we can talk about our own political failings without reflexively changing the subject to the voters' moral failings.
Also, we should consider that when our definition of a good person includes the rapid assimilation of new information and ideas, the ability to be a good person is not evenly distributed. We're only a tiny way towards building a world where that ideal isn't elitist and exclusionary. A lot of people were not raised with that definition of moral goodness. Acting in good faith, they did not equip themselves with the necessary skills, because they thought they could be good people without them. What we're demanding from them now is that they either exercise intellectual skills and habits they don't have, or they speak and believe in obedience to those of us who have them. I don't see a good way around it, but we shouldn't be surprised if they're unhappy about it.
Right now, the POTUS is so much reducing freedom in US that it's enough for him to say that it doesn't like something (like DEI) for a lot of companies to trash DEI in the hope to please him. And it's enough for the WaPo to change what will be the content of its "opinion" pages...
And EU is the one reducing freedom ?????? You should really wake up guys
60 Minutes did a recent segment on German speech laws.
I don't buy JD Vance's argument, but I am fine sacrificing the EU if it means Dem-turned-GOP donors (especially on the Tech side) return to our party.
You can find TONS of examples of people in Europe being jailed or having cops come to their house for something they said on social media. In some cases for things as simple as criticizing a politician.
Here’s a high profile one, but I can find you plenty more examples.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Robinson
>On 25 May 2018, Robinson was arrested for a breach of the peace while live streaming outside Leeds Crown Court[170][174]
“Breach of peace” means he was saying something that they didn’t want him to say. This is a real curtailing of free speech.
>companies to trash DEI
DEI is often racist and many of its implementations in modern companies violate the civil rights act. Companies are correct to be ditching it because it poses a big risk for discrimination lawsuits.
I actually spoke with lawyers about this very recently and reverse discrimination lawsuits are a booming business right now because there are so many clear cut examples of violations of the civil rights act.
And that reason has nothing to do with J.D.Vance having any concern at all about free speech and personal freedom. Not just zero of it, his goal is to remove both. He would love Europe to become fascist which is incompatible with both.
What does not contribute to the conversation is to pretend otherwise. To pretend that he has a point or any other meaning then to grab power and punish dissent.
What does this mean? What does the US VP have to do with EU law?
Social Media organizations like FB/Meta and Google have historically been some of the largest donors to the Dems, and their flip was a massive reason why 2024 went the way it did.
Vance has been consistently lobbying against the DSA over the past few weeks, and that's where his "free speech" argument is coming from.
I don't really care one way or the other, but I care about ensuring that large donors who flipped from D to R return to the D fold.
What you end up seeing is the GOP raises nearly as competitive as the DNC when you add Trump PACs plus WinRed.
Not any more, it's been made quite clear that's over and is now an extortion racket against Ukraine. Long term consequences of this are unclear.
Again: what's the argument for trying to ram US social media right wing propaganda into an unwilling Europe, while banning tiktok?
To get the tech oligarchs back on the Dems side of course, just like alephnerd said above.
> while banning tiktok?
Is this ideological contradiction bothering you? Well, unfortunately the world is full of these. Norway is a huge oil and gas exporter and yet maintains very stringent standards on its domestic usage. Why do they profit off exporting O&G to countries with less state capacity to manage the externalities of O&G? Well them's the shakes. Pick your priorities. For me, I'm fine if tech companies stay unregulated if I don't get 4 more years of MAGA politics. I'd prefer neither 4 more years of MAGA politics nor unregulated tech companies but I also want to build affordable condos in Beverly Hills so ;)