https://archive.vn/RlPp9 unherd BY ARIS ROUSSINOS Saturday, 9 January 2021
The Twitter purge moves us closer to a civilisational internet
Donald Trump has been banned from Twitter
Great American political divorce:
There’s no point American conservatives whining about free speech or unfairness or hypocrisy: American politics has moved beyond such abstractions, whatever anyone involved claims to think. It’s as pointless as complaining about the dissonance between the policing and reporting of one side’s riots versus the other: each side wants their riots supported by the state, and the other side’s quashed; their own rioters handled with kid gloves, and the other side’s shot: there’s nothing deeper to it. There are now two popular factions, who hate each other and wish for the other’s total destruction: Trump and Biden are just the avatars in wrinkled flesh of the two opposing popular wills.
Great European/Silly-Con Valley divorce:
To this end, an important point was made by the EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell Fontelles this week. The debate about European strategic autonomy has hitherto focussed on the EU’s adoption of independent military capacity from the US, but its true ramifications are far deeper. First urging the return of strategic and medical industrial capacity to Europe from China, Borrell goes on to urge the avoidance of “excessive dependence on external suppliers” in the “strategic sectors” of “digital networks and cloud computing,” a clear reference to Europe’s dependence on the political whims of Silicon Valley oligarchs. As he states, “the aim is not to embrace autarky or protectionism, but to safeguard our political independence so that we remain masters of our own choices and future.”
At least someone in the Europe sees things clearly. A cucked EU official no less.
Californian globalists btfo
The EU just wants to enforce their own tyranny.
Is that just an EU official complaining the US imperialism gets in the way of EU imperialism, though?
Absolutely.
But I'd rather be at the whims of EU imperialism, which can at least be held accountable in court, than the whims of corporate kleptocrats who have an absolute immunity for every kind of censorship they impose.
You may be right, but don't get carried away. EU courts have been really quite obedient to the wishes of their masters over the years.
Eh don't put all your eggs in one basket.
Insult the US on the EU server, insult the EU on the RU server...
Their owns courts. It's like investigating yourself. The EU courts have already ruled that calling Mohammed a pedophile was not free speech, even though it would be considered free speech in any sane society.
Pretty much, and considering how the EU is actually run you should think of it as German imperialism primarily.
Because they don’t want to be humiliated by Twitter like the United States just was. What a pathetic country we live in now.
Bullshit. Order of events matters, severity of events matters. If you fire a gun at me, and I return fire, we're not "the same".
Conservatives watched leftists riot all over the country last year, sometimes with literally no justification whatsoever. Those riots generated two billion dollars in damage and more than a dozen deaths, most of them innocent people. What was the response? Total institutional support from democrats, corporations, and the international community.
So you'll have to forgive conservatives for thinking a single and comparatively small riot, that generated very little damage and resulted in the death of one rioter at the hands of the state (in what even Shaun King described as a bad shoot), really wasn't inappropriate. This is what our political discourse looks like now, and leftists were the ones who spent last year normalizing it.
What we're seeing now is nothing but naked selective coverage, outrage, and enforcement. Trump called antifa a domestic terrorist group, and nothing came of it whatsoever. Democrats call Trump supporters domestic terrorist, and there's legislation ready to roll.
This is not a "two sides" issue. It's especially disingenuous for this European douche to suggest as much in the very same statement in which he sounds the alarm about silicon valley, which is overwhelmingly radically left.
Good catch.
Even the EU wants away from this BS. Not that I trust anything that comes from the Brussels oligarchy or the Merkel Reich to be any better, but I guess they would control it themselves.
Russia already has a lot of their own things, I suppose it helps to have a different alphabet and a western world that hates you to encourage some independence.
The irony that the 'NO BORDERS!' crowd is going to bring about the balkanization of the internet is not lost one me.
Bolsheviks were no borders but pro-genocide.
if the coup of the big tech billionaires could happen here then they can repeat it there too. EU pulling his dick out as fast as possible from big techs is the right thing to do for them.
We may be seeing the internet get balkanized, not seeing that will happen but this seems like the early rumblings of it. I remember journalists concernedly writing about that back in the 2000s. Funnily enough that's just how the net in Cyberpunk 2077 is ' the parts that weren't yeeted to oblivion anyway.
No idea if that's how it is in the original Cyberpunk ttrpg book but given the blurb in it on why the US split being eerily prescient, I wouldn't be surprised if it was on the mark too.
Europe can NEVER successfully pursue strategic autarchy because the continent is too resource poor for modern needs. This can ONLY lead to war! Free and global trade is essential for Europe to be relevant at all. I am all for getting rid of dependency on Silicuck Valley but it's pointless to do it if you only pick worse alternatives.
Yeah, because if you do international trade all your internet has to be from California.
As if Russia and China hadn't managed the herculan, legendary task of setting up a few servers and websites.
I don't mean just internet, the EU is clearly trying to reduce their dependence on strategic goods - oil and other energy sources, precious metals, important technology, skilled workers, etc. Internet is one of those things you can definitely do on your own, but where are you gonna get semiconductors for new phones from? Where are you gonna get your precious metals for phones for?
From an economic perspective, Germany and Japan both had the wish for economic independence in WW2 and it lead them both to the same conclusion: If other people won't trade it with you, you just have to take it by force. Economic interdependence is the best bet for peace. Of course you want some industries and sectors to be local (food!) but yea.. I think that reducing interdependence has the potential to lead to more serious conflict and I don't want that
Yeah, having your own servers and making at least some of your own medicine and protective equipment so they can't be held hostage, means World War 3 lol.