Your country is the second largest weapons exporter to Israel.
Adopting English as legal secondary language in every EU member state would maybe be a good first step.
Shares values AND Ally AND Being attacked AND Attacker is evil
I think you'll continue to be safe posting on HN
I think you’ll find that threats of violence (which is what your comment is) need to be much more unhinged to be effective deterrents. Remember you’re warning off barbarians (eg us Americans or the Russians), not civilized folk.
I can already hear people storming out of the woods, ready to write how the EU itself is undemocratic, or how free speech isn't real in western European countries. I disagree with you.
And unlike you, some random anonymous poster on this polite version of Reddit, everyone knows what they do.
Have you ever even met anyone from either country?
Will we also sanction Elon Musk and other pro-MAGA individuals after the current rift between the EU and the US? Why not include Chinese ones, too, who are actually quite active? Also, far-right influencers? Far-left? They are nazis/communists after all!
Or, if you are German, consider that saying something offensive about a politician is "attacking democracy" and sentence people to prison because of untasteful memes.[0]
Of course, all of this can be justified and most undemocratic/less democratic countries get along with those rules, but at least let's stop pandering to "values" that have become pious words without any real meaning.
>Will we also sanction Elon Musk and other pro-MAGA individuals after the current rift between the EU and the US? Why not include Chinese ones, too, who are actually quite active? Also, far-right influencers? Far-left? They are nazis/communists after all!
Fantastic idea, unironically. But IMHO the far left is way less of a threat to humanity than the far right is right now. But extreme political fringes are never good.
>I don't like "Kremlin influencers", that said the Streisand effect is real, and the slope is very slippery from here to include other people along the ride.
The rules for not being sanctioned are easy to follow. Don't be a russian asset - that's basically it. Shouldn't be so hard.
They also sanction who they perceive as western assets, by the way. And see nothing wrong sending dissidents to jail with similar vague hate speech laws that we have in the EU [0]. In fact, they even eradicated their far-right! [1] Navalny was prosecuted because he was "extremist", for instance.
So how do you feel being in such ideological proximity with Putin's Russia? Just like others, you enjoy gloating about feel-good "values" but don't believe at all in them, which would require some discomfort and radicality.
[0] https://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/freedom-and-restriction-s...
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2017/12/16/the-death-of-t...
As for your other points: Democracy must not fall to the Paradox of tolerance.
[0] https://www.newsweek.com/russia-ukraine-war-invasion-protest...
You cherry-pick an example: posting online or holding a sign with "Merz is a liar" would expose you to a lawsuit and jail. Just like saying the N word in private in France. You get jailed for crimes without a victim.
Each territory has forbidden speech: in many countries, for instance holocaust revisionism is forbidden and punished with jail sentences. It's tolerated to justify the murder of Palestinians, including in national media, of Jews, it isn't.
It's funny that you mention protests: French military police commonly kills or cripples protesters with semi-lethal weapons, and the government uses similar tactics as the Russian one to justify crackdowns (forbidding problematic protests).
The issue with such thinking is that, just as the frog in the kettle, the water will heat up and heat up as politicians increase their use of this very convenient tool, just like Putin did. Singapore is an advanced version of this, where problematic criticism of the government action is met with diffamation lawfare.
You can see this happening in Germany, with the drastic increase in lawsuits against the AFD, or diffamation against politicians. Same with the UK, which before was good example of spotless freedom of speech.
By the way, I hate to mention this but since you are German, I'd like to remind you that the Weimar republic had stringent hate speech laws and censorship. It didn't work at all. When will you start to learn?
Regarding the EU, the only elected representatives don't have the right to choose which laws they will vote for. If it was in a soviet country no one would call it a democracy.
That said, yes, I would defend Europe against the US, even though I think that fight would be short, deadly and decisive if it really came down to it.
What a fucked up world we live in, just because idiots voted for a convicted felon.
And also, our whole military recruitment strategy here outside of drafts has been "the GI bill" – paid tuition in exchange for lining up to go to war.
I don't know that the gap in morals is as wide as you think.
Which historically has worked more for us, than against us.
Russians are much, much worse than Americans in terms of their eagerness to kill others, in my opinion. I wish it were not so.
I don't think EU vs Russia would be a "good vs evil" situation. Russia/US seem pretty similar to me, dictatorship/propaganda with a majority of the population being regular people not in favor of any war, and 30% of indoctrinated people.