What would make me even more happy is if we linked our foreign policy, especially our trade and aid policies, to align with our Constitution.
Other governments can do what they want, but we should prefer to interact with governments that share our values, and we should not reward or prefer governments that don’t.
ICC judge, the fact that he's French didn't have an impact. He's also far from being the only one.
In fact, the Executive Order that imposed these sanctions is very broad and gives "immunity" to pretty much everyone affiliated with the US. If the ICC tries to prosecute anyone from NATO or anyone from a "major non-NATO ally" (Australia, Egypt, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Argentina, the Republic of Korea, and New Zealand), the current administration will put sanctions on those judges.
So there's 40 or so countries whose governments are effectively "immune" from being prosecuted from the ICC, but the president has authority to add literally any country to that list.
> In Guillou's daily life, this means that he is excluded from digital life and much of what is considered standard today, he told the French newspaper Le Monde. All his accounts with US companies such as Amazon, Airbnb, or PayPal were immediately closed by the providers. Online bookings, such as through Expedia, are immediately canceled, even if they concern hotels in France. Participation in e-commerce is also practically no longer possible for him, as US companies always play a role in one way or another, and they are strictly forbidden to enter into any trade relationship with sanctioned individuals.
> He also describes the impact on participating in banking as drastic. Payment systems are blocked for him, as US companies like American Express, Visa, and Mastercard have a virtual monopoly in Europe. He also describes the rest of banking as severely restricted. For example, accounts with non-US banks have also been partially closed. Transactions in US dollars or via dollar conversions are forbidden to him.
I view this as a failure of the cryptocurrency industry to build products that allow people to effectively transact with ordinary businesses in violation of US law, and without using payment processors ultimately subject to US law. Because of course US law includes this detail about being able to sanction people, and people who are sanctioned by US law because they have become an enemy of someone in the US government ought to be able to make monetary transactions in ordinary life too.
I don't have a great solution for Amazon unfortunately, they really do just sell a lot of stuff and they're one gigantic corporation and they're based in the US and subject to US law. Buy from AliBaba I guess? Or for that matter French hotels using Expedia even when doing business in French with other French citizens.
To be clear, I don't think it is good that the US Treasury Department sanctioned this judge. But the US has sanctioned lots of foreigners for their local political decisions as well as many other things, and I don't necessarily trust that all of those people necessarily did anything wrong, or deserve to be cut off from payment rails across the US aligned world.
What values are those exactly? Because the current administration doesn't seem to be representing the values expressed in the American founding documents, or the values held by a majority of Americans, very well at all. In many ways, they're diametrically opposed to those values.
Values are case-by-case basis depending if trump (GOP?) likes something (most like got paid cash) or not.
Case in point - full pardon for former Honduran president on drug trafficking, while at the same time they are trying to use drug trafficking as pretext on war with Venezuela.
Same thing with arabs/muslims/immigrants being bad (look at how they were during Mamdami campaign), though literal al-Qaeda members and murderers acting as arabian royalty are "great leaders" and "things (murders) happen".
Even on "simpler" issues like family values - they preach against queers, about "traditional family values", kids, etc. But most of them have 3+ divorces, multiple kids that they don't take care of, imported/immigrant trophy wives, numerous scandals of adultery, while destroying policies for children education/health/food, etc.
America's founding documents only let white men vote, and in case their mentality wasn't clear enough from those founding documents, one of the first laws they passed was the Naturalization Act of 1790 which limited immigration to free white people of good character.
Just to be clear, who is diametrically opposed to these values, again?
That distancing is weird and worrisome. They voted for this bullshit, twice. Now they act surprised and distancing themselves from their politics while the whole country falls
I’m not an American, but I live in the US (for now!), and I’m the poster of the comment above.
Perhaps if you’re unfamiliar, you may not realize just how undemocratic the US is. The Economist magazine downgraded it from a full democracy to a flawed democracy about 9 years ago. The list of reasons and flaws is long and quite intractable.
This has compounding effects, a vicious circle. For example, there was a non-trivial number of people who sat out the last election, or voted for spoiler candidates, because they didn’t feel that either of the major parties represented their interests.
As a result of those kinds of factors, the number of eligible voters that actively and directly “voted for this bullshit” is about 32%. Two-thirds of eligible voters didn’t vote for Trump. And a substantial proportion of that 32% is explained by the flawed democracy, such as how political influence correlates directly to money due to legal rulings about how money is speech, corporations are people, and so on.
As such, I stand by my comment, and I don’t agree that the attitude I expressed is a distancing one, or would be even if it had been said by an American citizen. I think you’re just rather unfamiliar with the situation, or the realistic impacts of it. This is a situation that has been brewing since at least the Civil War, if not the Revolutionary War or even the original settlement. It’s not something with easy fixes.
I get what you are going at. But who if not the people could and would change anything? Letting all of this happen is basically the same as asking for it to happen.
Saying that people are "letting it happen" is misleading. What would you do about the situation if you were a US citizen?
People are working on these issues every day. I'm politically involved and my wife, who's a citizen, works on it full time. But as I said, the issues are many, systemic, and quite intractable. Systemic issues like the outsize influence of rural areas, the first-past-the-post system, the effective two-party system, the influence of money which has been ruled to be constitutionally protected, and so on mean that changing the system as a voter or even a large voting bloc is all but impossible. It's why some people believe that letting it burn is the only way forward - it's easier to motivate change when things are bad.
There are some positive signs recently, such as the election of Mamdani as NYC mayor, which is a much bigger deal than many people realize, being a member of Democratic Socialists of America, as well as a Muslim running in a city famous for a very strong Jewish constituency.
Mamdani ran as a Democrat, and powerful, well-funded elements of the party pushed back hard against that, or were weakly supportive at best. The previously Democratic ex-governor of New York ran a racist campaign against him as an independent. Hakeem Jeffries, the currently minority leader, didn't endorse Mamdani until very late, and said that he didn't view him as the future of the party. With political allies like that, who needs enemies?
The reality is that the Democratic Party is "controlled opposition", primarily serving capital interests. Mamdani's election did a good job of making that much clearer.
Having lived in four countries, in my experience, politics everywhere is messy. The countries that have it easiest are basically either relatively small (often with populations less than a single major global city) or else they're ethnostates that are often run by authoritarians.
If you look at Europe, the impact of immigration is fueling the exact same rightward shift that happened in the US. It's why some American billionaires, like Musk, Thiel, and the Murdoch family, are so interested in European politics - they see the potential for achieving the same success in much of Europe as they did in the US.
So unless you live in a country that's heavily multicultural as well as very democratic, you perhaps should be less quick to judge.
> "Trust and safety is a broad practice which includes critical and life-saving work to protect children and stop CSAM [child sexual abuse material], as well as preventing fraud, scams, and sextortion. T&S workers are focused on making the internet a safer and better place, not censoring just for the sake of it"
Definitely weird to be "happy" that the government is cracking down on people who help prevent the propagation of fraud, scams, and CSAM.
"If you uncover evidence an applicant was responsible for, or complicit in, censorship or attempted censorship of protected expression in the United States, you should pursue a finding that the applicant is ineligible"
If that sentence from the article is accurate, the parent poster's response makes complete and perfect sense. You don't have to like the current administration, to like a specific thing they are doing.
Now is this actually what is happening? I don't know. And of course, that's a different conversation, and not what the parent poster was talking about.
The problem is that this administration and their ilk have incompetently misinterpreted 'censorship' to mean 'not letting random strangers use your private property to publish things you don't want them to.'
The only way "an applicant was responsible for, or complicit in, censorship or attempted censorship in the United States" would be if they were an employee of the US government and they somehow violated US law to enact censorship.
To review: censorship is when the government doesn't allow you to say things with your printing press. Censorship is not when private parties don't let you use their printing press.
In the context of the Constitution, government censorship is the only thing that the United States cares about.
If we valued banning all censorship we'd make laws banning that. We don't: we value private property and free speech instead. Taking the rights of private parties to control what they publish tramples both of those rights. It's not complicated: you have a right to own your 'press' and do whatever you want with it. You don't have a right to someone else's press.
If I was on a telephone call which selectively declined to transmit certain words or topics to the receiving party, I would consider that a form of censorship, even if it wasn't the government doing it.
> You can just move to a different country that doesn't censor you.
The 'Network State' fascist bros (Balaji Srinivasan, Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, et al) are the powers behind the throne of the current regime. They want to dismantle the United States and create modern-day fiefdoms where your corporate overlords dictate your rights. They are serious about doing it.
"You can vote with your feet and leave our fiefdom if you don't like the lack of rights" is literally their stance.
In the past, when "private property" was literally property, a whole town owned by a company (used to be very common), American courts decided that the company owning the town couldn't restrict free speech in that town.
These days the "property" in question is just a fancy telecom system. And it's already an established principle in America that the phone company doesn't cut off your line just because you're talking some political smack.
When that "private property" is a larger business than many countries and can literally sway elections then yes we should not treat it the same as your personal blog.
Is this the foreign service officers or USCIS? iirc foreign service officers have pretty wide latitude on visa approval (whose really making sure they’re checking deeply?) and have 100 other more important factors to evaluate so if that’s the case; will this really amount to many denials?
Except they're under pressure to not exercise such wide latitude. A few months ago, many who had already passed the exam and were just awaiting placement found out they would have to retake the exam, a different one more to the liking of the current administration:
Displaying Nazi symbols is allowed (protected) in the United States, but prohibited in Germany. Does that mean that any German person involved in enforcing pr even tangentially acting on that restriction would be ineligible for a U.S visa?
Hopefully, yes. The free speech situation in Germany is ... not good. Completely useless and reactionary laws restricting speech of specific symbols are only a small part of it of course but any global pushback would be good.
> Completely useless and reactionary laws restricting speech of specific symbols are only a small part of it of course but any global pushback would be good.
You do know why these laws exist, right? And they are not useless. Many terrible things happened, and tens of millions died, because an extremely hateful ideology was allowed to take hold by assaulting civil society and democracy.
Banning anything related to that ideology is not only needed, not only common sense, but I'd argue the moral duty of the German people. And everyone else who witnessed it (so everyone). And for what it's worth, most developed countries have banned Nazi-related things. The US is an outlier in thinking that Nazi opinions matter, and allowing murderous types to express their desire to murder others is somehow a virtue.
And to be clear, yes, National Socialism is extremely agressive and murderous. One of its core tenets, probably its main one, is violent antisemitism and "master race"-ism, with their solution being exterminating "lower" "races". Nothing useful, nothing good, nothing redeeming. Just pure hatred and genocide.
Nothing good can come out of "debating" a Nazi in the "marketplace of ideas". Goebbels himself said so back in the 1930s, that they do not intend to play by the rules of democracy, but if democracy wants to give them the tools to spread their ideology, they'll happily use it. The world saw this happen and saw the results. Nazis have no place in any civilised society, and anyone espousing Nazi ideology or sporting their insignia deserves to ostracised at least.
Apple wanted to scan pictures stored on our phones using a perceptual diff algorithm and compare them by similarity to known CSAM. So basically there’s a world out there where the baby bath pics your wife took will get flagged and she’ll have to prove she’s not a predator.
When people say “our values” or “Western values”, it’s just a made up term that means European Christian values. When it should mean classically liberal values.
Always took it to be synonymous with "enlightenment values", created in Europe and by Christians. (Who I believe were at least somewhat secular). I am unsure if we are, at present, a bastion of said values.
What would make me even more happy is if we linked our foreign policy, especially our trade and aid policies, to align with our Constitution.
Other governments can do what they want, but we should prefer to interact with governments that share our values, and we should not reward or prefer governments that don’t.