Europe is a fucking joke

[wooley12]

Yep.

Thankfully, we have the 2nd amendment to fight Govt lawlessness and tyranny. But that's down the road still.

[tkarhu]

@mca80 Looking from Europe, the current US freedom of speech looks weird, too. Your government has banned words like gender, bias, socioeconomic and Gulf of Mexico. For example, word bias has been banned from research, where it is a core concept of statistics, mathematics. That makes such decisions looks ignorant.

@fisheater The Vance München talk took place on a military forum in Europe. It was surprising that he preached freedom of speech on a military forum. For many in Europe, it looked like he was talking to his American audience, not the people in the front of him.

Is freedom of speech most important to your leaders, when it serves their own interests? Does it then override other important values, like honesty and truthfulness.

[wooley12]

In America, DisHonesty and unTruths are now the new norm and worthy of praise by some. Lies are a more valuable commodity than truth.

[chris_the_wrench]

In America, DisHonesty and unTruths are now the new norm and worthy of praise by some. Lies are a more valuable commodity than truth.

Unfortunately a good percentage of folk seem to be ok with that.

[fisheater]

@tkarhu i think some American leaders think censorship is a big deal. I do, I saw a lot of censorship during the pandemic. I know what I saw. I know half the country would disagree
I oppose censorship, strongly. I think Vice President Vance was quite accurate in his statements, including when comparing historical totalitarian regimes, with political movements in the United States, and perhaps what Mr Vance spoke about in Europe.
It certainly happened here.

[CwmRaider]

@fisheater
Apparently press freedom is more restricted in USA than in Europe. Partly because big corporations exert more control on the media? Anyways let's admit that they are close by being on the same order of magnitude.

General freedom of expression is about comparable.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_P ... edom_Index
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/free ... sion-index

Notice that there are some countries which are drastically different colour from "ours". People with different opinions get jailed, people writing about different ideas systematically get shot. But somehow they escape any criticism with instead Europe here getting random pot shots based on single anecdotes.
I am grateful for a take home message though, Europe has to take care of it's own security. Long overdue.
No one wants their country's color in the above maps to flip to the bad side by force or by externally orchestrated subversion. I imagine you also don't want your country to flip to dark red in the one map or pale yellow in the other.
Do you know about the regular subsea cable sabotage in the Baltic Sea? Who does it serve and who does it harm?

[fisheater]

I am aware of the cable damage.
I have not seen any listing how countries are affected, not one mention of affect.
Am I supposed to believe a couple of people rented a boat and blew up the Nordstream II Pipeline as well?

[CwmRaider]

Yeah the pipeline, what a mess.

[Lhartley]

Joe Biden blew up that pipeline. Common knowledge. Sticking it on a Ukrainian was just convenient, nobody would question it, because Slava Ukraini

[wooley12]

Joe is a bit long in the tooth to dive that deep. Common knowledge.