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Comment on Belgium Targets Internet Archive's 'Open Library' in Sweeping Site Blocking Order

General_Effort@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

People, including many Europeans, make a lot of assumptions about Europe.

Americans in particular seem to assume that issues fall along the same political Dem/Rep divide as in the US. That gives them bad ideas. European countries have more solid social safety nets, more accessible and cheaper health care and education, more developed and usable public transport systems, …

On other issues like immigration or racism, they are on a MAGA-level. There is no big controversy because it is widely taken for granted that European nations are ethno-states. This is less so in the former colonial powers Britain and France. But they have their own baggage that gnaws at them from within, just like the history of racial segregation undermines the USA.

Another area where Europe is just different from the US is freedom of information. It’s just not respected in the same way. Intellectual property, on the other hand, is held in much higher regard. That’s how it has been for a long time.

Now that the copyright industry is waging an all-out lobby battle against citizens, you can expect much more like this.

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grue@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

On other issues like immigration or racism, they are on a MAGA-level. There is no big controversy because it is widely taken for granted that European nations are ethno-states. This is less so in the former colonial powers Britain and France. But they have their own baggage that gnaws at them from within, just like the history of racial segregation undermines the USA.

What about Spain and Portugal?

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- dreadbeef@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Exceptions that prove the rule
  
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  - grue@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Are they exceptions?
    
    (I didn’t mean for that to be read as a leading question, BTW. I wasn’t necessarily expecting Spain or Portugal to be different from Britain and France; I just asked about them because they were the other major colonial powers but weren’t mentioned.)
    
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- Saleh@feddit.org ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Somewhat better but not great. In Spain there seems to be a strong regional divide as well. Northern Spain is having a lot of racism too. Southern Spain has its problems too, but it seems to be less strong and is quite absurd as people look more like Arabs than like White Europeans.
  
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- ICastFist@programming.dev ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  My passing understanding is that they’d really prefer if the people from their former colonies remained an ocean or two away. Portugal recently passed a new law that made it harder for immigrants (the vast majority are Brazilians) to get a worker visa and full citizenship
  
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- General_Effort@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  In short: IDK.
  
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vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

Americans in particular seem to assume that issues fall along the same political Dem/Rep divide as in the US.

Yes. As someone who grew in Russia, if I’d talk freely and casually about politics in the way we do here, with Americans IRL nearby, I’d probably be literally lynched regardless of those being majority Democrat or majority Republican minded, and if those Americans were sufficiently inattentive, even by a mixed crowd. Things associated with freedom and dignity and just human treatment of each other here are associated with fascism there, and the other way around. And it’s very counterintuitive. And also honestly Americans and continental Europeans (but not Brits) generally feel more like peasants with pitchforks than like Russians, in every political-minded discussion. It really feels that they’d be perfectly fine with everyone disagreeing being relocated six feet under, and the purpose of the discussion is usually to let you atone and ask for mercy. Despite all the stereotypes about Russians, this is not the case here, you might get insults, but not that heavy unwillingness to accept your side’s existence.

Though that was 10 years ago, now in the Russian-language space there’s much wariness of propaganda and legal problems for speech and so on, so people speak less freely, while a loud minority of bootlickers likely outside Russia repeat some combination of American points, more similar to a Republican set, but at the same time certain they’d be loved by Democrats. It’s weird.

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- cecilkorik@lemmy.ca ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  The billionaires are the real enemy, regardless of what flag flies over your land, and they’re trying like hell to make sure no one realizes it is the billionaires everywhere that are not only happy to see, but in many cases actually behind all of this chaos and strife. War is good for business, we are cannon fodder for their ambitions. The story hasn’t changed in centuries, only the dollar figures involved have.
  
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