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Comment by mrcwinn | Hacker News Reader

As an American, I hope you can identify strongly as an Australian. Why bother telling yourself you’re something of a European?

In any case, I hope countries form ties with Europe. Europe needs be economically stronger than it is. Better for the world, so long as they can slow their tendencies toward government control and censorship.

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FYI I don’t think anyone is accepting American critique on government control and censorship right now. Maybe leave it for a decade or two.

MAGA wishes it had the control over industries and speech that European governments have. Give me a break

It's, ah, not that simple. So for instance, on speech, see things like https://www.texastribune.org/2023/11/20/texas-ken-paxton-elo... .

In the US, some states are politically... out there (Ken Paxton there, you almost wouldn't believe he existed, he's like a caricature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Paxton#Legal_issues). And they can have an impact over the whole union; in this case, a DC journalism non-profit has to take this nonsnse seriously, and had to spend resources defending itself.

In the EU, some countries are politically... out there. For instance, see Hungary, particularly before they managed to dump Orban. But media organisations in, say, Denmark, don't really have to care at all about what Hungary thinks about their reporting; the sort of interstate anti-speech lawfare above simply doesn't really happen in Europe.

I mean — Brendan Carr seems to be able to bully the TV industry pretty successfully on behalf of MAGA. Trump shakes down businesses for a government cut — Intel for example. You are deporting foreigners based on their opinions. Trump shook down most of the major law firms for pro-bono work based only on a false perception of his mistreatment. He's pursued and pretty successfully harassed major universities into various forms of consent decree. People lost their jobs for exercising their free speech over Charlie Kirk (most of whom did not really see any kind of restoration). Trump extracted settlements from major news networks for content he didn't like based on his own fantasy misunderstanding.

The list goes on and on and on — Europe as a whole does not act in this thuggish, extrajudicial, capricious way.

People identify with other places, people, policies, and cultures — along with their own, or wherever they're originally from. Sometimes they don't even identify with their own, or say, feel alienated. It's perfectly fine, and in fact a very healthy state of being.

But there's whole communities of Americans who identify as Irish, or Anglo-Saxon, or whatever.

You're native American or why do you say something like this?

The civil national identity is wasting away. I'm less and less inclined to call myself Australian, as opposed to English, because Australia now is for everybody. An Australian doesn't even mean a funny accent anymore. It doesn't mean anything.

Censorship? Do you mean the fact that we hold platforms accountable if they post hate speech or misinformation, or is this something else?

> Censorship? You mean when we censor people for speech we don't like?

uh, yeah.

Speech inciting hatred, violence, or plain misinformation is harmful and so should be illegal or restricted.

Cool idea, feel free to run your police state of a country that way.

I'll continue enjoying my 1st and 2nd amendments though.

I like the small % of nutcases in my country. We also consider disinformation a national security threat. That way a foreign adversary cannot push the public into voting for an incompetent, ignorant and arrogant criminal narcissist. I don't want my country to turn into an idiocracy.

And concerning your 2nd amendment, I also own guns. The difference is that only sane, non-violent people can have guns in my country, and crazy people not. You know, crazy people that would take their guns to schools and start shooting.

Enjoy your freedom!

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