Ah, Europe, so close to Marx, so far from G-d. And sanity. And freedom. And–
This is not how I wanted to spend my Christmas day, but here we are. This happened: State Dept. Bars Five Europeans for ‘Extraterritorial Censorship of Americans’ and the worst kind of Europeans lost their tiny addled minds and took to twitter to pound their pigeon chests, show off their three chest hairs and attempt to wag their shriveled micro penises in our faces.
Which in turn gave me heartburn and caused me to slap them around twitter like a cat with a catnip-infused mouse. This is probably not the charitable attitude I should exhibit on a holy day. But here we are.
Faced with stuff like this:
I had to respond. All the wrong assumptions and unearned superiority in that post are so densely packed they could easily cause a black hole to spontaneously occur. (And probably have. in the poster’s mind.)
I didn’t even answer all of them with this:
Unfortunately we ALSO have a welfare system Our higher education is about as rotten as yours, because you can’t help guzzling up what ours puts out. But I guess ours is more creative? Europe has sucky public transport, but since they all live on top of each other, they can all travel in sardine cans. Europe has “higher life expectancy” because they kill a lot of babies born at marginal weights. Europe has lower cost of living and WORTH EVERY PENNY — it sucks. They’re not even aware how much it thoroughly sucks and how constrained. However, more power to them. Europe has cheap health care. You get what you pay for. And the last time they innovated in anything is… the nineteenth century, I think. Europe has constrained speech codes Europe is committing suicide through their belief in the cult of global warming. I used to be European and I CAN say this: Europe is like being an adolescent who is profoundly depressed and on the verge of committing suicide, while throwing a tantrum about not being the best ever. They’re senescent teens. I wouldn’t live there for double the money and half the time. Thank you for playing though. We DO need a sucky example of how not to commit suicide by socialism. You did not live in vain.
But I could have unpacked a lot more. Like say, the fact our life expectancy mostly refer to recent imports having it out with other recent imports, or higher accidents caused by recent imports, or–
Seriously. the myopia is amazing. The truly fun part was in the responses to his post idiot Europeans saying “I visited America. I would never want to live there.” From which I have to assume they’re either lying with every tooth in their mouths, or that they visited East St. Louis, Detroit, and the South side of Chicago, exclusively. Or they think our homeless are homeless through lack of housing or the inherent cruelty of the system or whatever, instead of because they live in a society so affluent and full of charitable people that they can afford to be drug-addled raccoons in human form.
The truth is that the first time I read The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress and Heinlein said that there was nothing in the Soviet Union that The US didn’t have bigger and better in Podunk, I rolled to disbelieve. I was, after all, European at the time and I had no idea what Podunk was like. Now? I’d extend that to ALL OF EUROPE.
Children. I’d rather live in a low-income trailer park in the US than in a luxury high rise in Europe. Much of the same problems, but in the US there would be a pathway up and out and fairly easy if you stay off drugs, are willing to work your ass off and don’t disdain those trying to help you up.
While in Europe there simply isn’t a way up. They’re bound up with self-righteousness that demands they commit suicide. And their media lies about the US so much they have no idea there is an alternative to their suicide by socialism.
It’s like talking to people who say “Well, of course we drink a little bit of poison at every meal. What would you want us to do? Guzzle the whole bottle at once?” And they can’t hear you when you shout “JUST STOP TAKING THE POISON.” Because they heard that over here where we don’t take the poison — or to be fair, take less poison than they do — we’re dying like flies. AND THEY NEVER CHECK.
More shocking though, is the spate of telling us that we’re SOMEHOW controlling their speech by not letting them control ours. It’s bizarre and makes you fell like you fell down a rabbit hole.
I think their belief they can somehow discern “bad speech” and “things that shouldn’t be said” is at best naive, and at worst outright evil.
To any European reading this: it’s not that we believe everything everyone says is good or true. It’s that we believe when all speech is legal, the bad nonsense — say the Communist manifesto, or Mein Kampf — obviously shows itself for nonsense.
Also, that we don’t trust anyone to make the decision on what we should see or read. After all, Biden tried to create a disinformation czar, mostly to silence people like me about how Covid wasn’t really a lethal pandemic and how the vaccine was worse than the disease. Gestures at what has come out the last three years. As I was saying: when people decide what is true and control speech, it’s easy to fall down the rabbit hole of your leaders’ crazy beliefs.
In this case I’d like to point out to everyone from Great Britain that just because your king wants you to go extinct/be genetically swamped it doesn’t mean he’s right. Also he’s an idiot who doesn’t understand what culture is and how it affects people.
BUT beyond all that, if Europeans want to keep their people blindfolded and keep feeding them lies about the US, that’s as may be. They just can’t ask us to do it for them. They can restrict their people’s internet access like China does.
And they certainly can’t come over here AGAINST OUR LAWS and punish our people for things that are within the law for us. That’s a no no. It would be a no no even if they were at parity of force with us, but they’re not. If they piss us off, we can swat them and not even feel it.
Which is why they’re trying to use moral superiority.
Unfortunately for them? They have none.
According To Hoyt 
One idiot European elsewhere said the “moralistic” thing to be done is to support the Ukraine against Russia.
And that was More Important than “Free Speech”. [Very Very Big Frown]
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I do support the Ukraine against Russia, because Russia is insane and started it.
BUT what does that have to do with the price of Europe?
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IMO it’s a sign that he doesn’t give shit about Human Rights.
IE He only cares about supporting the Ukraine not about anything else we (Americans) might see as important.
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Bingo, and also the Europelanders are just insane.
The general assumptions for peace can be shown to be broken, and basically academia in 2020 was an industrial accident (1), that hasn’t fixed the root causes that lead to the accident.
Russia, we should kcik them as much as we can in ways that are cheap, low risk, and honorable. Autistic mode for them should be locked onto ‘we can and probably should kill Russians, but it must not be in our top ten priorities’.
The politicians and academia caused an academic industrial accident, and they are locked into the mindset of ‘nothing bad happened, it is your fault anyway, and we don’t need to change what we are doing’.
We are really badly burned, the academics additionally a) frustrated a lot of pragmatic argumetns for peace b) came off as too homicidal towards the ‘uneducated’ and/or the alleged ‘non-indigenous’. While prosecuting actual indigenous persons of nativist sentiment.
We don’t necessarily need to resolve these disputes with warfare, and certainly don’t need to try to immediately resolve them with warfare, but the academics and the politicians will need to work on actually persuading people should they wish to stay in power. This thing of trying to terrorize obedience is a crock of shit that radicalizes folks against those regimes.
(1) I’m not talking biological research, I’m talking academic positions on expertise and on economic intervention, and on legal theory.
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There were people arguing “don’t kick the bear” to mean that you can’t expect Russia to put up with the same treatment that other nations did (especially from Russia.)
They seldom have an answer when told, no, you put bears in zoos. Or shoot them.
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There’s a lot of “Stupid Eurocrats and US leftists support supporting Ukraine. Therefore it is safe to conclude that support for Ukraine is stupid and wrong.”
It doesn’t help that the stupid Eurocrats et al want to support Ukraine with “boots on the ground” and more meat for the meatgrinder – which is about the stupidest way possible to support Ukraine.
And my working theory continues to be that Biden and his administration wanted a quick Russian victory, so that they could go back to corrupt business as usual in Ukraine. When that quick Russian victory didn’t happen the Biden administration was buffaloed into supporting Ukraine via bureaucratic infighting with various parts of ‘The military-industrial complex’ who had both statesmanlike and venial motivations for wanting to support Ukraine and thump Russia. But the Biden administration did their best to slow-roll things, hoping to ultimately cut off Ukraine in a way that deflected political blame onto the Bad Orange Man and his evil MAGA semi-fascist followers.
I’m also old enough to remember how a certain Senator Biden was in the thick of getting South Vietnam cut off from US help as North Vietnam invaded in the 1970s.
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Europe would very much like to have the US put it’s boots on the ground. In short no, to be more precise no way in hell. Can Europe put its own troops on the ground? UK claims to have ~20k MFD (Medically fully deployable) troops so 4-6 Brigades depending on composition that’s roughly 2 divisions so we need 6 Brigadier(one *) generals (or Colonels) and 1 Major General (2 *). There are 210+ General officers (2-4* they weren’t even counting the Brigadiers). Total forces seems to be 74000 so slightly better than a quarter are deployable. Just for grins the USMC lives around 180,000 members so 2.5x the whole UK army. Germany (the other one I could find information on) is hoping to deploy a single brigade (looks like one of US Armies Brigade combat teams ~4500 soldiers) to Lithuania by 2027. Russia has on the order of 700,000 troops deployed to the Ukraine front so numbers (especially UK/FDR numbers) aren’t likely to help. The war itself has gone to static techniques reminiscent of WWI with drones (wired and wireless) playing the part of machine guns in WWI pinning troops down and making advances and maneuver warfare expensive. Russia in its usual tradition is quite happy to let the soldiers pay in blood (lots of it). Honestly, I’m with Trump on this, rational players would fall back to the Status Quo ante as of 2014 and call it a day.
Putin can’t because if he does he figures folks will turn on him. Its a combination of idiotic greater Russia goals and riding the tiger, he dare not let go lest it turn and eat him.
Zelensky seems to want everything back including land lost in 2014. I understand where he is coming from the US and others went to great trouble in 1991 to protect the borders an annoying little country called Kuwait and Legalistically the Ukraine is in the same position. Unfortunately the Ukrainian leaders believed Clinton when he promised that if they gave up their nukes we’d protect them. To paraphrase from Animal House “You f****d up you trusted Bill Clinton (and or Barack Obama)”. Realpolitik is such that NO US administration (except perhaps one run by a brain-dead sock puppet a la Biden) is going to pour US troops into a bloodbath that also skates on a global war with a near peer without some clear political goal.
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I know someone who came across with his family on a 15-foot fishing boat when he was five. He LOATHES Biden more than anyone else I’ve seen.
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I’m sure they wanted a quick Russian Victory.
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YEah, I saw some of the insty coverage yesterday morn.
My thinking ysterday was a little bit wild. Insomnia, then watching a bunch of vid of this one free speech lawyer in this one state who also has English bar admission, then a bit more chocolate than was really ideal. Luckily I did not do a bunch of writing in that frame of mind.
One of the interesting key details is the self-evident to many Americans detail that we do not consider being emailed a way of being legally served. Apparently in Europeland, none of their legal ‘experts’ nor their ordinary scrubs think about the basic technology of email, nor about the challenges of establishing that such and such notification was emailed in an adversarial court system. Sure, if everyone’s computers have a government trojan, or if the courts are rubberstamps and do not require that the bureaucracies prove receipt, then maybe email is a ‘functional’ way of ‘proving’ that someone was fairly notified.
There is a basic problem with the argument of appealing to the Ukraine conflict when it comes to disputes between the USA and the EU, particularly on freedom of speech. That being that covid showed up first, that the Russian invasion was being prepped for in 2020 by exploiting the covid lockdown, and that the PRC and Russia are clearly cooperating in Russia’s war against the Ukraine. The pipeline hack was clearly Russian state actors trying to disable the USA Army’s capabilities in Europe prior to war, and just as clearly took advantage of suddenly switching the whole IT infrastructure of the US to remote access.
It’s just wacky that our possibly PRC coopted allies went so all in on preventing covid-19 misinformation speech, like our own elites, and do not think that doing so could possibly exacerbate American paranoia about American leadership.
Covid, and especially the push against related misinformation, just broke so many of the ‘common sense’ assumptions that our cultures had had.
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Just as importantly, even if you can prove that an e-mail was sent, that doesn’t guarantee that the e-mail was *received* in a timely fashion (or at all). At one job I worked, we had an important daily e-mail from another company that always arrived hours after it was sent. This continued until I took a look at the header, and noticed that it was getting stalled at the same spot in the on-line path that it took to reach us. After I notified the sender, the issue was resolved. Things happen to interrupt e-mail or chat messages, and you don’t know that anything has gone wrong unless the recipient tells you.
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My husband has sent me an email from the computer in the office, while I’m on the social media computer in the living room. It takes three days to arrive.
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It’s got to be “moralistic” to do, or he might have to face why five years earlier the thing to do was let Russia eat any neighbors that caught its eye.
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Great post! Those people are so clueless about life outside of their little bubbles it’s ridiculous. And they seem to happily believe whatever nonsense they are told by their governments and press. The few who stand up against the system are pilloried and likely to face legal action to silence them. A sad state of affairs as their countries implode under an invasion of incompatible foreigners from the third world.
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I could say a lot but I’ll say four words. Central heat, central air. Granted some folks don’t have that but that’s the exception not the rule. My mom skipped central air for decades in Hawaii because the climate didn’t justify it. Except there was that one heat wave in…20something, then she had it put in.
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Add: Ice. We visited Nice, France once and had to get ice from the local fishmonger, and even then we had to find someone to explain to him why we wanted a big bag of “ice,” which translated as “glass.”
Europe is by and large a ghetto.
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I’m sitting here in a ‘midlevel’ house with my refrigerator with an automatic ice maker. Yep. I spent four years in Germany and kind of got out of the ice habit but by George I have ice when I want it.
Midlevel is in quotes because my blue state housing prices are…don’t ask. Glad I bought in the slump.
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The vast majority of people living in trailer parks in the American South have air conditioning & refrigerators with ice makers. Apart from the addled homeless (whether from drugs or mental illness) our poor live above the level of the EU’s middle class.
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I initially read that as ‘live in ‘medieval’ house’ , and since we were discussing Europe, that made perfect sense. Would make a great upgrade for many an EU house that only had a ‘basic’ fridge…..
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Yeah, the only reason we have a house is because we were waiting for the crash—and had familial assistance with a down payment.
Expanding that, this is also why we were able to afford more than a single kid. Rental prices are currently FAR more than we’re spending on our mortgage, and even with our house that is a bit smaller than can handle us properly, everybody has a separate room to sleep in. (We do have a set of bunks in one room, but since the boys are 17 and 11, they have different sleep habits and a separate room is the best option.)
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That and screens on windows … lived in a duplex in Spain that had no screens on the kitchen window. The flies drove me mad, until I paid the husband of one of my friends to build some frames and nail screen to them…
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The Best Western in Sibiu, Romania didn’t have screened windows, despite bats and rabies both being endemic. It is Transylvania, after all.
We arrived on a Saturday night, in the dark, in the middle of a thunderstorm at our hotel in Transylvania. Dracula didn’t make an appearance.
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To the best of your knowledge.
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Has anybody checked out how she’s feeling about garlic lately?
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This! We were in a small(ish) hotel in Wasserburg am Inn in Bavaria for a business adventure. Previous trips were in December and March, but the June 2002 trip featured high heat and mosquitoes. Hungry mosquitoes. Seems the anti-breakin* blinds in the hotel didn’t feature window screens, and we were assured that mosquitoes were not a problem. The bugs didn’t get the memo.
We also discovered how hard it was to get cortisone cream with the limited ability of the “best” German speaker (raises hand, gingerly) who relied on 30 year old high school memories. “Cortisone” and “Steroid” and/or “Antihistamine” were not words brought up in high school German. Wasserburg didn’t get many Anglophone visitors. Pretty town, but…
We did find something. Vile ointment, but it worked, sort of.
(*) “1st” floor, AKA “2nd” in America. Not sure if they’d do well with bats.
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Upstate NY. I’d given birth via c-section on Friday. Left the hospital on Monday. The weather had switched from nice spring weather to hot-humid summer weather while I was in the hospital. Our apartment had no A/C. I was at church the following Sunday after leaving the hospital. Everyone stared at me and asked what in the world I was doing out in public with a newborn that soon after surgery. Two words: air conditioning. By the next day our landlord had provided a window unit for the back of the apartment and some church friends had provided one for the front end.
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Blessed St. Willis of Carrier is the unofficial Patron Saint of the South.
I love it when some Newyawker bitches about us Southerners and our central air, knowing full well that if said Newyawker is in a normal apartment building in Newyawk that they have minimal heating and no air.
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Bwahahahahahaha, no really Bwahahahahaha. I needed that.
Dear Europe;
Were through saving your ass from yourselves. We’re following are own visionaries, the ones who want to go to space and colonize other planets, you can have the Earth after we leave. If there are any of you left that the Russians haven’t fooled into suicide so they can ruin the rest of Europe like they ruined Russia. It’s actually hilarious, at one time Europe wouldn’t have listened to a thing coming out of Russia because they were so backward, now it’s like gospel from heaven. And they claim to hate Putin… you just can’t make this shit up. Bwahahahahaha
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How are those traditional European Christmas markets doing?
And New Year’s in Paris? C’est dommage.
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I do not want to concede Europe to either Mohism or Commieism. I blame Napoleon and Bismark, with a flinger to Marx and Engels
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“Just stop taking the poison” sounds like another thing we can tell them to get a puzzled look
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And the thing is, I am pretty sure Sarah is not aligned with the wackier Temperance Americans, so I think the essay is not intended to bring in that whole difference of culture and of mores.
But, yeah, European market interventions, and also speech controls that inhibit economic activity, are a pretty significant difference of cultural perception.
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The French will think you are telling them to stop eating fish.
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Over at Insty someone asked how you respond to calls to prayer five times a day and public preying that blocks traffic.
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install a smoker and serve pulled pork BBQ every Sunday. Make sure to set up fans so that the smell surrounds the church on all sides.
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You missed the most simple item. If the church has bells in the steeple, have them ring every hour.
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3. A Chinese philosophy?
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I won’t address them all (probably been done better elsewhere, anyway), but gotta respond to a couple of points.
#s 2 & 3 – You get what you pay for.
#s 4 & 6 – See above. Also, Europe may have a higher life expectancy – so long as you are not born with, or develop later in life, a fatal (even if treatable) condition. In those cases, it seems that ‘gentle, caring’ euthanasia is the protocol of choice, and don’t even think about taking the patient elsewhere for treatment even though that treatment may be provided at no cost to the ‘health care’ system.
# 5 – ‘Europe has a much lower <del>cost</del> standard of living’.
OK, a handful of points . . . 😁
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Regardless the quality, all those freebies that nutbag is listing are in fact paid for by the taxpayers. They just don’t see that, because they’re used to paying over most of their income to the Glorious State.
We have a somewhat different attitude about how much of our income should stay in our pockets.
Taxation is theft.
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“There is no such thing as ‘Government Money’. There is only TAXPAYER money.”
Oh, Government can just print more? That causes inflation which devalues the currency… and thus steals value from the taxpayers.
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Not to mention, they can afford all those freebies because the US handles most of their defense budget.
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Responding to assertions by some on Quora, I have pointed out the when the EU was formed it had a larger GDP than the United States and a comparable per capita GDP. Now, their GDP is about 2/3rds of that of the US and the per capita GDP is even lower.
Looking to the UK, it has a lower GDP than Mississippi, the poorest state in America.
The European elites have always despised America. The continent-spanning republic seemed a rebuke to their visions of caste and aristocratic rule, and our rambunctious populist politics were messy and distasteful.
In the early and mid-19th Century there may have been some justification for this distain as we tolerated slavery, were highly agrarian, and had a mere constabulary military. Post Civil War these perceptions began to change a bit. The European working class and middle class supported the cause of the Union and embraced it as their own – as did many European radicals, even Marx!
The elite attitudes to the vast flood of European immigrants to the US seems to have met with only a “good riddance to bad rubbish” attitude – unaware that these striving masses helped fuel the emergence of an economic colossus.
As AJP Taylor put it in the introduction of his book, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe: at the turn of the 20th Century “All except a few Englishmen made the blunder of ignoring the United States. They failed to realize that, if they quarrelled [sic], America might step in to knock their heads together – and would be strong enough to do so. This error brought European history in its old sense to an end. . . . Henceforward, what had been the centre [sic] of the world became merely ‘the European question’. ” (pp xxxii-xxxvi)
European elites have never forgiven us for the destruction of their imperial pretentions and demotion from the status of the cockpit of history. Even more, they cannot forgive us for three times saving them from the folly of their own political and diplomatic blunders. Meanwhile, they have erected an new nearly feudal aristocracy based not on birth but accreditation and adherence to “acceptable opinion” among an insulated monoculture
It appears that these mandarins anxiously suspect that the common man in the street harbors a sneaking admiration for their brash, optimistic, energetic cousins across the waters. Hence, the ever increasing totalitarian measures used to keep these guilty thoughts in check: two tiered justice, speech restrictions, delayed elections and even threatened and actual cancelation of elections – all in the name of protecting “our values and our democracy”.
Frankly, other than members of our own elites who admire the pretentions of their European counterparts, most Americans could not care less about their opinion of us. On the other hand, it has been in our interest to support a prosperous and democratic Europe in the name of maintaining peace in western Eurasia.
Now, as the current leaders of Europe push the continent into a more and more shambolic state of decline, our interest in defending Europe fades along with our ability to do so effectively – short of intervening in another major war precipitated by their idiocy.
Where will this end? I am not a classical scholar, but I read once that the Romans, who generally admired Greek culture, did involve themselves in Greek affairs and militarily occupied the peninsula three times. Twice those occupying forces were withdrawn, often with great fanfare. The third time, rightly or wrongly, the Romans had had enough and Greece became a Roman province.
Mark Twain may or may not have said, “History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”
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One caveat. That GDP pre-EU was HIGHLY doctored. My opinion? EUROPE NEVER HAD A HIGHER GDP than the US. EVER.
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One, we were effectively funding and being their actual military. Two, we gave them free stuff and free money.
Those two things alone give away the lie. We could dig into the data, but as stated, pointless. They lie as a moral duty and assume everybody else is already doing it, and much worse besides.
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Very Likely – exacerbated by different calculation methods in the various nations pre-EU and by the fact the most corrupt and incompetent were striving to “qualify” for membership. Our own numbers are not exactly squeaky clean (see Hayek’s Information Problem and note 1 below).
But let’s take them at their word – as they would likely insist we do – it paints a very unlovely picture of the impact of their policy decisions. Europe is facing civilizational collapse.
I do not gloat or take any pleasure in this. I would rather America face the future with strong and determined allies – not the current lot of pusillanimous lemmings.
Note 1 – In my first job out of Grad School back in the 1970s, I worked for a economics research and consulting firm. Pre-internet, I had to type data from hard copy sources into our computer database to support our research. I discovered errors in the National Product and Income Accounts. Nothing too egregious but common human errors where details did not add up to the published component total – fortunately, components that were not even rounding errors on the total GDP. When I reported the errors to the individuals responsible, I could hear them over the phone crunching the numbers into the big mechanical calculators on their desks followed by: “Oh, you’re right!” From my experience these were all competent and conscientious folks. I can only imagine how the sausage was made in certain European states.
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Government a spending goes directly into the GDP calculation.
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I have a couple contrasting (in theory) thoughts.
So, it is ‘commonly understood’ and seems correct to me that American physics and perhaps engineering capabilities got a huge boost from Hitler being a murderous Jew hater, and also perfectly happy to compromise academic science by injecting his favored political adherents into publishing influence.
Why am I not supposing now that the USA must try to succeed by a policy of importing foreign elites?
Some of the international graduate students now are still here because they think that American security situations are still better than certain foreign security situations. I don’t really have a problem with these particular students.
Those are not the whole of the entire academic world.
Importing academics is not unconditionally good, and American academics are not unconditionally good.
Some of both are wackjobs, perhaps violently inclined, and both excitable and favoring stupid stunts where US security is concerned.
Fundamentally, academics who are deeply invested in the mind game theory are perhaps unwilling to just act as an honest proxy for whomever.
Academics who are willing to be honest, who do think they have a future beyond the drum circle for tinkerstalin, and who will treat the Americans as people who have alien customs that they should try to understand are maybe still a service to the american scientific establishmetn.
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I guess this Euro-doofus never actually looked at the chart comparing IIRC new inventions and the companies developing them in the US and the European nations. The European nations look pretty lame, in comparison. I think the only robust development of any significance was by Nokia…
I lived on the local economy in two European countries for more than a decade,,,
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Once we start asking questions that aggregated about inventions, I have enough questions about methodology that I would be hard to persuade that we had definitely excluded all possible confounding factors.
UN has a bunch of ‘societal challenges’ in a lsit, which I hate for reasons. But, one among them is that academic errors are clearly now a massive problem for modern societies to navigate. (The absence of this from the list is notable.)
That leaves me huge ‘who bells the cat’ questions when it comes to pricing the value of this or that or the other academic result where human society is concerned.
I do not trust the academics to assign a book valuation. I also do not trust academic aggregations of book valuations.
I’m not sure whether ‘unforce transactions are the only valid estimator that can be aggregated for the value of a new design’ is necessarily austrian economics, or if it can also be valid neoclassical economics.
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It’s almost getting to the point that before you include any research from the last 30 years, you better confirm it’s reproducible first.
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Can I quote you on that?
(No sure whether I want to, but this is so much coloring my MO, that it might be amusing to share with any bosses or audience I may have for certain things. )
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>confirm it’s reproducible first
Bad news for the entire field of infertility research…
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Oh hush.
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Someone throw carp at Taciturn. I’m lazy.
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The Reader suggests it is the season to be merciful, Sarah. Spare the carp.
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Yep, the carp hasn’t done anything to deserve being thrown at somebody. 😉
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Too late. :)
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Hate to break it to you, but ’tis the season to serve carp on Christmas Eve, fresh from the bathtub. (Polish tradition; you keep the carp in the bathtub for a few days so you can clean its diet. My cousin found out ALL the fun details.)
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“Carpapult team! The boss gave the order. Prepare a load.”
“Loaded and aimed. Ready to launch, sir.”
Twang!
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…Oh dear. That wasn’t carp, that was lutefisk! Our action was inhumane!!!
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Mmmmmm . . . Lutefisk . . .*
*The way Grandma used to prepare it
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Indeed. Related: How many know X-rays were discovered because one physicist decided to attempt the impossible, just to make sure, and had a glorious accident?
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If you remove Scotland from European science and engineering things start looking pretty dire.
A ridiculous number of the stars of the Industrial Revolution and later were Scottish or Scottish emigrants.
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:insert moustache boxer man meme:
“Scotland? You mean autism with borders?”
:end meme:
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(This grew out of a conversation with my father– who grew up with a large portion of the region’s population from his grandfather’s generation being straight out of Scotland– discussing symptoms of autism. Short version, 50/50 on if it’s a symptom of autism or of being Scottish, even the ones that weren’t relatives; note this doesn’t mean the English don’t pull strong on the Autism train, nor the Irish….)
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And earlier, Civilized Europe felt the same way about….Germany. or, “the Germanies.” Bumptious, ignorant, unsophisticated clowns. Alistair Horne in The Fall of Paris, pointed out the French, at the World Expo just before the Franco-Prussian War, showed a wildly popular play portraying Germans much the way they portray us.
Turned out to be a Bad Idea.
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And they certainly can’t come over here AGAINST OUR LAWS and punish our people for things that are within the law for us.
Yeah, they tried that trick – in 1812-1815. They really want Round 2, they’re going to find we were playing nice last time, because we were on our turf. This time, it would be on theirs. Given how much of Europe we flattened twice saving their ungrateful posteriors, they should rethink that strategy.
Which is why they’re trying to use moral superiority.
Better rethink that strategy, too. As noted, they have no moral superiority, and their morality is pretty doggone weak as things stand. Can’t rattle a saber when you don’t even have a scabbard – and most of the swords they’ve dug up so far don’t have a sheath. If they want any morality at all, they’re going to need to polish whatever they have left up first. Then we might be willing to talk. Maybe. No promises.
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My daughter attended an EU-sponsored graduate program in Germany. It was intended to train upper-class Europeans (along with a few Americans, Canadians, Turks) to be high-level bureaucrats in the EU. They were very proud of their “soft power,” very critical of the U.S., but also convinced that if the EU got into real trouble (e.g., another Hitler), the U.S. Army would of course come and save them. “Don’t count on it,” she said (prophetically, as it turned out).
Later, several of her friends from the program visited her in our home. They could not believe that a public school teacher’s family could afford a forested half-acre lot and a 1200-sqft house in a nice suburb, with central heat and AC and two SUVs. They assumed we had inherited wealth. (eyeroll, if only…) Most of their upper class has a lower standard of living than our lower middle class. Their snobbery is all they have left.
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What Europe in general needs, especially France, Germany, and Britain, is a spiritual revival. One that gives them a belief in a future, and says that the past, and all the culture that comes with it, is worth fighting for and saving.
It is my opinion that WWI and the sequel gutted that belief, in part because of the problem of state churches. “G-d is on our side!” And then when they lost, or won at a terrible cost, were was G-d? Marx and secularism tried to fill the spiritual gap, and it looked OK-ish on the surface. Then the older generations died out, and Islam began flowing in (Eurabia, anyone?) Whatever you think of it, Islam is very clear about beliefs, and posits a future that is worth fighting, killing, and dying for. The state churches of Western Europe are struggling because of the state part, and because the lunatics watering down the theology to avoid offending anyone.
The US has troubles, but we do NOT link Church and State. The two are often in opposition, sometimes in agreement [“Which church? Which state?”]. That spared Christianity the opprobrium of guilt for WWI, and all that followed.
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bingo
Europe ‘kicked out’ a bunch of people who they did not feel were willing to fit into their status quo of internal peace consensus.
EU is still a confederation of nations, whose internal peace consensuses held, and are the most stable scale of peace cosnensus. Those peaces were all dependent on not screwing very much with the established (government captured) churches. That is a common factor that makes them alien to US.
But, they also went in hard, among the university set, in believing that the university drum circles and the cults of the univesrity sets were preventing france from warring with spain, or spain from warring with france. This also makes them alien to us, because in place of that supersition, we don’t care.
We are more concerned about internal hazards to peace than external, we are perhaps overly confident that we could whup the external hazards if we really needed to. We know that enemies domestic are pretty seriously dangerous in potential.
Anyhow, they don’t have Jesus, and do not model the Jesus element of American subcultures. Which is pretty relevant to our actual behaviors.
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Either that guy is so ESL that he can’t understand “free” as in zero cost vs. “free” as in actual freedom…or he *can* understand it and he’s being incredibly obtuse because it’s not even a good pun. It’s like all those people quoting Soros-funded stories that the EUwww has the “greatest freedom of the press.” “Freedom of the press” != “freedom of speech” no matter how they try to obfuscate that.
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no, it’s the whole Obama “positive freedom” i.e. we have more gimmes.
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“You don’t like the Goths?”
“No! Not with the persecution we have to put up with!”
“Persecution?”
“Religious persecution. We won’t stand for it forever.”
“I thought the Goths let everybody worship as they pleased.”
“That’s just it! We Orthodox are forced to stand around and watch Arians and Monophysites and Nestorians and Jews going about their business unmolested, as if they owned the country. If that isn’t persecution, I’d like to know what is!”
― L. Sprague De Camp, Lest Darkness Fall
Apply this toll logic to “censorship” and it’s “That’s just it! In the US our Europhile brethren have to put up with all those stupid and crazy people expressing all those stupid and crazy right-wing MAGA ideas as if they owned the place. If that isn’t censorship and suppression of free speech, I’d like to know what is! And we won’t have that here in Europe!”
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Ostrogoths, not Visigoths. And mostly just Theodoric, IIRC.
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I always suspected that De Camp pulled that out of his “rear-end”. 😉
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their cost of living is not lower than ours, not by a long shot, and their income is about that of Mississippi. I suppose their “free” higher education explains why they can draw conclusions completely opposite the data.
such BS, Of course, I have the advantage of having lived there with the great comfort that I had US health insurance so we could get the care we needed when we needed it and the glory of the dentist … I know what life there for the common folk is like. Dire mostly. Middle class life there is not so bad, about upper working class US. Upper class life is excellent since they have the installed capital, nice houses, and a class system that insulates them from the commoners. Come the revolution they’ll all become muzzys and life will go on with minarets in the cathedrals.
As for “free” education and healthcare, In the US we access to scarce commodities mostly by price, they do it through rationing. The fish don’t see the water they swim in so the spivs who won the rationing game don’t see it that way.
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‘free’ education has a time cost
So, there are aggregates of raw intelligence, and there are types of raw intelligence.
Training in certain details of 3D shapes can be more valuable if someone has the mental shape rotation ability, and without that ability it might be hard to teach someone certain tricks. There are like two sub-populations worth throwing certain types of shape training at, and a bunch of people for whom certain details are a waste to try to teach them. Leaving aside the labor costs of paying the instructors, some of the students not only would have a more difficult time learning, but no interest in learning, and none in cooperating with the instructors.
You can avoid that with gatekeeping competitions, and allow a subset of those capable to go through the programs. But, if you are paying students in status, connected status seekers mean a certain amount of self selection by the uncapable and uninterested. More fraud in educating the so called elites.
Anyway, inherent capability, current interest, and official gates are all rate limits on learning this, that, or the other theoreis of academic interest. Family wealth is not that big a deal all considered.
US system allows borrowing absurd amounts of money to ‘pay’ for tertiary education, and one can borrow more to pay for cost of living.
And, if one has the ability to do engineering, the time cost of engineering school gets expensive, compared to the opportunity cost of working as an engineer. The freaking problem is that regulatory cost of employment, and the eployment market, can screw over a great many graduated and theoretically competent students of engineering.
My understanding is that US/UK, US/French, US/German, etc., dual nationals can get a BS in engineering in the USA, and then go get a MS in Europe and have the government pay for the MS. (This info was from a guy who was playing to go do this, I think around 2015.) I have questions whether this makes very much sense, if one is trying to work in the first world, and if the tax adn regulatory regimes are prohibitive enough. OTOH, maybe one can just get an entry level engineering position in the third world working for an international firm HQ’d in the first world?
In US graduate student circles, there was a bunch of hearsay about how German companies often had official leaders who were PhDs, or something. Novel research in engineering always struck me as being a very different thing from being a people person, and a good manager. So I always had a question about what the real economic trades of such a policy would be.
Are the PhDs fraudulent, and disbursed to politically connected businessmen, or are the companies badly run? Badly run companies might be dependent on connections with a very interventionist government.
Anyway, faculty jobs and tenure track are very expensive in time, at least if you are doing courses, research, and leading graduate students. I do not see how it is possible to be successful and competent as a tenured faculty, without being a fairly pure specialist. IOW, hanging around faculty for years getting a ‘free’ education has the opportunity cost of learning about a wider range of the world’s ‘common sense’.
It doesn’t seem possible to build a very good and accurate model of the real world by just sticking to consensus mainstream of fields, or to only a single field. A conventional education that is purely academic is going to be fragile to breaking if the human society shifts into a part of the state space that academic theory predicts poorly.
If you know your academic training well enough to throw it away when it no longer works, one maybe has a non-counterfeit education. But, the academic theory people who are too rote to throw it away are probably ill served by a counterfeit education.
Free education with time cost that is counterfeit is a destructive waste. Whether it is primary, secondary, or tertiary years that are so wasted.
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At least in the ’80s, it was practical for a US-born engineer with a BSxE to find a job where the employer would pay for MS schooling. Hewlett-Packard did this, with the particulars and the school dependent on star potential. The gifted/rising star ones got a good deal for Stanford, while others (me included) could go to Santa Clara U. Motorola in Illinois had a similar program; a roommate from college ended up with a PhD through them.
Non-matriculation courses were also paid for; SCU never bothered to offer a course in C (I hate Pascal with the fire of a thousand suns), but UC Berkeley had an extension program that sufficed. Pay upfront, keep the receipts, get a tolerable grade and get reimbursed. Worth it.
I have no idea if any of this is still offered. (There were some unpleasant incidents of people getting their MS, then immediately leaving for greener cubefarms. At least for me, I had no requirement to stay post MS a few years after that flustercuck, so I assume they ignored the abuse.)
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Oh dear, more moderation. I’ll try a short version:
US engineers with BSxE might find an employer willing to pay for MS education. The details varied, ranging from fellowship, to “You front the money, get a good* grade, and we reimburse.” All true as of mid 1980s. No idea if it is still current.
What schools varied with circumstances. Silly Valley had a lot, all through the spectrum.
(*) My case, B- or better.
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Yes.
I think that US schools are significantly more employer funding friendly than the Euro ones, but I have no source of info about the practice on the European side.
The tl;dr of my ‘I dunno’ is that question of whether the non-thesis masters is a good thing, or is a bad thing. I understand that Europe is significantly less positive on those than America is.
Thesis is harder to do after work and on the weekends. There are still people doing theses around holding down real professional jobs, and I do not think that they are wrong.
I tend to figure that a working student with real world exposure who takes longer is probably more likely to have great positive economic impact than a young crazy student who blazes through a degree and then does not adapt to the real world.
I find the economic aggregate vulnerable to enough confoundign that I don’t really know.
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As I understood it per my German coworkers back when I was still in semiconductor cubeland , the Eurotrash higher edumacational thing is pretty much a system of academic predestination, where your grades and testing results slot you into a track of trade school, or business school, or engineering school, etc. with little choice unless you want to bail completely on that free part.
Really want to be an engineer? Can’t do that unless you nailed the path down with grades and tests, since it’s “society’s” money not yours, so you can’t be allowed to waste it.
Unless your family are connected of course. In yoorup that goes without saying.
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When our kids were young, we had a number of European – mainly German – au pairs as both my wife and I worked.
One in particular was shocked to learn one night watching a news story about a local middle aged woman who decided to go to law school, graduated, passed the bar and began practicing law.
“Can you do that?” she asked incredulously.
We explained yes you can if you can afford to pay for the education and if you can find a school that will accept you.
Turns out that she was borderline when tested pre-secondary school level. Her teachers talked her into not going to the gymnasium which would prepare her for college but rather the school that would prepare her for an administrative or clerical position in business. As a result she could never attend a university.
Years later she called and asked to speak to me. It seems that she was vacationing in Hamburg and saw an ad for a job in an industry that interested her. On a whim, she applied and was offered the job. Back home all her friends and family told her she was nuts as she had a job for life as an office worker in a local business.
She wanted to know what I thought. I told her to take the job.
“But why?” she asked plaintively.
“Because” I replied, “if you take it and it doesn’t work out, you will have learned something, and if you don’t take it you will wonder for the rest of your life if you should have taken the chance.”
“You are just saying that because you are an American!” she shot back.
“That’s right,” I said “And, you called the one person on this planet you know who would tell you what you wanted to hear.”
After a brief pause, she replied quietly, “You’re right.”
She took the job.
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And that attitude is why AI is going to hit Europe like the fist of an exceptionally angry god who’s altars have been desecrated. (probably one of the copybook heading ones)
No concept of adaption or mobility means……… you have no concept of adaption or mobility. So when your little planned economy doesn’t quite go the way you intended you’re just screwed.
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Yep. the tracking started in 4th grade for me. even then you had to be in the top 0.5% to go to college.
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just so, and the only way to get into the top .5% is to go to a school that makes it possible, which means that you have to come from a family with access to those schools and the wherewithal to plan accordingly.
there’s a thing in the yookay about there being no working class actors anymore after a large number in the 60’s and 70’s. Why,. RADA you have to go to RADA to get work and you have to have gone to the right school to get into RADA.
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OR have tutoring on the side.
My mom being my mom told us we’d get in or else — that was the sum total of the help. BUT she did maneuver to get us put in the best public schools. Even then most of our friends in college had been tutored out the wazoo, and in fact while in high school I made a considerable amount tutoring others.
Eh. We got by. But it was as amazing as son getting into medschool from all the wrong schools and a not very wealthy family.
Of course, I didn’t realize it at the time. only that my mom would kill me if I failed.
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“Everybody wants to rule the world.”
Except none of them seem to want to develop the intelligence and wisdom to rule it well. Or even adequately.
And so the world is ruled by dimwits that never get punished for the egregious failures of their misrule.
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I don’t actively despise many songs, but that is one of them. (Imagine is another.)
No, I don’t want to rule the world; I have enough challenges dealing with my own life, I do not want the headache of dealing with everybody else’s problems. I just want those pinheads who do want to rule the world to stay off my lawn.
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anyone with the wisdom to rule the world would understand that the world can’t be ruled.
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The classical Latin cover is my go to version. As one commenter noted on it, imagine Augustus signing it to the grave of Iulius:
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Yeah, I’m with Ozzy: “I don’t want to change the world; I don’t want the world to change me.”
Don’t forget Jonathan Edwards: “You can’t even run your own life, I’ll be damned if you’ll run mine!”
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I’d love to change the world
but I don’t know what to do
So I’ll leave it up to you.
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Okay. New laptop (yea!). WP being a PIA (situation normal, right?) OTOH finally got Nook for PC Windows installed (colossal *PIA). Have too many books to want to not have it even with everything de-drm and loaded on Calibre.
(*) For those who don’t know, B&N removed Nook for PC off Windows Store and their site as of 2023. It works, if you can get it installed. Finding it OTOH … FWIW there is a Redit conversation that ends with a link to a site with a ZIP file containing the APPX file to get it loaded and working. With a “Trust it or not” comment.
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c4c
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New one coming out is “40% of young women in the US want to leave permanently.”
…well, to start with, their definition includes everyone under 45. I’m flattered, but goodness, no, not a “young woman.”
To follow in to that, I went to check how they did it– was a phone survey (which is at least better than the ‘curated’ online one) split into four groups, male and female under 45 vs 45 and over.
I don’t know about anyone else, but in the 2024 election this “young woman” ended up filing FCC complaints. Plural.
The only folks I know who actually answer phone surveys are being chaos goblins and giving insane answers.
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Well, wouldn’t it be transphobic to say that I am not a young woman?
One of the last phone surveys I answered, I think I honestly thought that the democrats were as invalid to vote for as the nazis were, and that for that reason I could not in good conscience vote for Donald Trump.
There are ways of inferring that I am not, in fact, seventeen, Japanese, female, and attending a Japanese highschool that trains people to pass exams for literary universities.
Are you allowed assume that what I have previously said about my biological sex now means that I probably cannot have the biological female sex? What about my previous statements about being a robot, and or a Dalek?
When anyone can be speech policed, or if people get paranoid about what the surveys are used for, polls become an invalid estimator for reality. Even if we were using good methodology, and polls had previously been plausibly a valid estimator.
Anyway, suppose that we really had gone hardcore misogynistic, and not simply just offended the feminists. Suppose that females really would become subjects or second class citizens.
There’s a massively multiplayer game theoretic analysis.
Scenario one, this is happening, and the females stay here to fight. They have their current procedural tools to fight with, if they don’t lockstep with female leaders, and if female leadres haven’t already betrayed them.
Scenario two, and the females who oppose this leave. That means, say, sixty percent of women are neutral to positive on misogynistic oppression, and that, say, near one hundred percent of men are. Permanently leaving may involve renouncing citizenship.
So, formerly American women living in Europe, Japan, etc.
Why wouldn’t the remaining hypermisogynistic Americans invade these countries, subjugate the populations, and recover control over these women?
It is basically the succession dumbassery of analysis all over, if you no longer have peace inside the country, you cannot count on peace magically holding by leaving one way or another.
It is not a very well thought out piece of information warfare.
Yeah, sure, the intent is to get people to take it at face value, and conclude that we are genuinely wronging a significant number of young women. But, what happens if the audience is not as lockstep as the people who thought it up are?
They might come to some different conclusion. Like, an easy naive model is that having girls and young women at government schools is incredibly abusive, because of how ‘following role models’ they may be, and of how toxic and insane the provided role models are.
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Not to mention that a sample size of 1000 in a country the size of the US is… very small.
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They’d need at least 1000 women under 45 to hit the usual guideline of “probably won’t become more accurate enough from higher sampling.” (standard practice is 10% or 1000, whichever is less)
A problem that frequently comes up is they do a survey with that 1000 people…and then break it into a lot more demographics, taking the sample size way low, and if they publish the demographics you sometimes find their sample for a stated hard to survey demographic is a few individuals.
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The 4.4% margin of error might also be a red flag. 3% is the usual baseline for “the data are good, as was the sample size and results.” Note that’s before the “revised weighting” that people have been tossing in for many political polls.
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It’s been around 80 years since Europe threw a shoe, and a few million died to satisfy some bizarre purpose. The next time that happens, it’s best the United States stays on the sidelines. It’s looking like it will happen soon.
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I have described before my attempts to explain US politics to my siblings (I live in the US, they do not).
Their view is that the US is violent and uncivilized and that Trump is an unhinged bully. My attempts to remediate this view have failed. I am not attempting to convince them that Trump is an amazing politician, merely that he is a creditable politician.
They remain convinced by what are largely the Democratic party’s views which appear in the Guardian (unsurprisingly, it is unashamedly left-wing, or as they put it, centrist :-)) and the BBC (more surprisingly since it is meant to be neutral).
The dangerous part of this is that these views permeate the monolithic cuture infesting the civil service, media, education, professional organizations and NGOs, governing and shaping the UK. The monoculture is resistant to any challenging views; for example, despite the supreme court of the UK (yuck, what a concept) finding that sex is biological sex, many organizations continue to defy the ruling event to the extent of harassing those not sharing their views.
Worth noting that this monoculture is being challenged by, among others, Reform (UK). Whether Reform can form a credible government remains to be seen.
The recent expulsion/banning of a number of people from the US has largely been seen as an own-goal; a country celebrating free speech banning people because of their speech. I agree with this view. The banned people did nothing illegal, merely distasteful, and I certainly do not agree with them. It doesn’t matter to me that the UK and Europe are limiting free speech and have no grounds to criticize; this is about us not them.
Some of the EU/UK reactions are the result of the EU and UK having found themselves largely irrelevant in world affairs (the posturing of the UK prime minister is amusing). However, the European view of the US has been negative for many decades.
Does this matter to the US?
In the short term, probably not. In the longer term, it would be nice to think that the Europeans would continue to recognize the strengths of the US.
Given the dead hand of the European Union, and it’s embrace of the ever expanding bureaucratic state, I can’t see this changing any time soon. Sadly, right-wing activity to challenge this has been fragmented and, where it exists, is subject to vigorous suppression; for example, the actions of the EU with respect to Viktor Orbán and Hungary and the German state with respect to the AFD. We have seen similar issues here in the US.
So this current spat over free speech is likely be only an initial skirmish (unless the Democrats regain the presidency). I would hope for continued and vigorous reaction to any attempt to suppress free-speech by the UK or EU. Long live Gerbil bedding.
I liken this activity, however, to cleaning the Augean stables and am concerned about the future. We have had a lucky escape here in the US, I just can’t see it leading to long term changes. I live in hope.
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On the contrary. The people expelled were guests, inciting violence against citizens.
THAT is reason for expulsion.
Don’t like it? Too bad, so sad.
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They incited violence? I didn’t see that. If they were breaking the law then throw the bums out.
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yes. They were specifically inciting violence (mostly against Jewish students.) So, yes.
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So, the email from a university mentioned that the public universities in state had x, y, and z, students deported, and that the university was not immediately informed why.
Well, I know for a fact that someone had reported to that university’s harassment bureaucracy the ‘globalize the infantidia’ and ‘oppose settler colonialism’ protest being advertised in a university mass emailing after the election. Said bureaucracy did nothing, partly for lack of further communication from the person who made the complaint.
It would technically be possible to be a Jew Hater that favors murder of Jews in Israel without advocating for the murder of anyone here, if not for the many stupid academics that have been too vocal in saying that they also mean for the mass murder to be done here.
As such, in that context the academic speech has to be understood in terms of the academic war on mainstream America, and in terms of US domestic efforts to incite political violence. If we had not had Crooks and Routhe, or had not had the 2023 onwards celebrations of mass murder, then the specific dumbass international students who were perhaps being directed in their protests by foreign security organizations might have a fig-leaf of deniability.
We can’t do anything about US nationals advocating mass murders while on American campuses, first amendment. But, unless the international students take special care to distinguish themselves from the people advocating US civil war, or advocating the murder of Jews within the United States, we can maybe conclude that visible involvement in a protest means that they are saying such things.
Anyway, I immediately understood that the deportations are simply and easily explained by foreign security organization involvement in these campus protests. So a pretense of ignorance by university administrators comes off as deliberate speech on behalf of these mass murderous causes. They are not doing the international students favors by giving the international students such terrible advice when it comes to US politics and when it comes to US law.
We’ve long, autistic like, required the visa holders and the naturalized people to say that they are not currently advocating or involved in committing acts of mass murder within the united states. We require that they indicate that checkbox, so we can kick them out if we find evidence that might convince us that they were lying.
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Thierry Breton, and the other four are another matter.
That is politics, and their perceived involvement with political efforts by European regulatory bodies.
There’s a dude, https://prestonbyrne.com/blog/ who is involved in some relevant legal disputes. Obviously he has an axe to grind, but obviously also some of the things he says are common sense as correct within US culture.
The first amendment cannot protect the rights of Europeans to speech while on European soil. If it did, that would require the US federal government to supersede all European sovereignty. So if we start from the premise that US presidents are not constitutionally required to do the special military operation to London, Paris, etc., then Breton does not have a first amendment right to speak on the internet from a Paris or Brussels apartment or office.
Then that just leaves the question of whether the US can deny visitors entry visas for whatever speech.
And attempting to file a fraudulent court order might be considered to be a crime.
If Mr. Byrne’s factual claims are truthful, then the five who are denied entry visas could be considered to be white collar criminals, and conspirators involved in directing a white collar criminal conspiracy.
US view could easily hold that this was a conspiracy to violate human rights, and that this could be a finding of the US government. Which actually allows more serious remedies that those that the state department has pursued. Obviously, sanctioning everyone in Europe with a university degree under the magnitsky act would eventually destroy the utility of the magnitsky act.
Anyway, we are not trying to extradite and execute Mr. Breton, so we are actually being very sedate, and are trying a minimalistic intervention with the least legal novelties. Does not come across to Europeans that way, because the people responding are crap intelligence analysts, and screwed up their modeling with the mirroring hypothesis.
Americans right this moment are wildly paranoid about American First Amendment protections, even by ordinary American standards. If any of these granite laws pass, I am sure it will seem serious to Europe, and they will underestimate how deliberate and narrow these laws might be tailored.
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Taking all that as given, it really does not matter one whit. There is no universal human right to a U.S. Entry Visa. Denying any person such because it’s Tuesday is a “good enough” reason.
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I mustn’t be tracking super well because I immediately went to the Hamass supporting “Students.”
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Yeah, revoking any visa because it’s Tuesday works for me as well, let alone for specific behavior.
A visa is like at-will employment – we can decide that due to changing circumstances it does not work for us anymore and show them the door. If they want to come back they can reapply from foreign soil and wait in line, and if the reason was specific to behavior we can just say no.
As far as I am concerned, only when someone goes through the hoops to get a green card and/or becomes a citizen do they get access to all the due process on any type of removal.
But obviously I am not a Federal Judge, so I don’t have insights into the intricacies and specific penumbras that enable foreigners granted a visa to gain all kinds of protections.
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One of the first high-profile individuals that you’re talking about led the anti-Israel protests on his university campus as part of the demonstrations that erupted during the initial Israeli response to 10/7. As part of that, he and people under his direction seized one of the campus buildings (iirc, the library), vandalized it, and trapped a couple of janitors inside for several hours.
Good riddance to him.
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You’re making a category error. These are not private individuals. They are current government officials responsible for implementing this policy. And they are attempting to impose their law on us as superior to the Constitution, which IS illegal.
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I always figured since Augeas had left his stables filthy for 30 years, his palace probably wasn’t in much better shape.
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Got set off again by a few more things in the original eurotwit.
One, I do not value European style ‘free healthcare’, explicitly because of the usual American preference of not giving people leverage to vivisect me or mine. There have been times in my life when the down’s folks in my narrow cohort were clearly more gainfully employed than I was. The down’s which Euros have ‘cured’ by killing the kiddos. All of the MAID stuff, I find very concerning, not least because of discussion of whether I am disabled, and amount of angry depression in my life. I am not suicidal, and would never commit suicide, but it would certainly make me concerned about being in custody of hospitals.
Nobody talking up US socialized medicine, or talking up the Euro style medicine has any idea what my true preferences actually are, and on paper I am exactly the sort of person that socialized medicine might be intended to ‘help’. No, I would rather have the US options to pay cash, so that I might find caregivers who are not being pressured to off me.
Two, frustrating transportation.
‘great public transport’
This is an area where anyone who thinks that they have an apples to apples comparison, and that that is an objective result, and that it is clearly in Europe’s favor is simply ignorant.
If we exclude goat carts, and if we exclude foot traffic, this is a situation where we are talking about machines, and so in academic theory there might still be an engineering objective reality, and that we could have a simple conclusive argument to make from whatever evidence.
The problem is that we cannot really have this conversation with Europeans who are both engineers and also economists enough to understand the theoretical case for common American understanding of personal or private interest. There are Americans who are both engineers and rooted enough in American culture to follow these arguments. But, in general academics are specialists, and also the cultures are alien in their differences. Therefore we would expect very few Europeans of this intersection.
Engineering wise, you have machines moving persons between sites, and you have the maintenance of those machines. Somewhat objectively, the breakdown rates and repair costs might possibly be studied, but almost certainly the stats collection would not have exactly the same methodologies.
Objectively, the transportation infrastructures within cities are not apples and apples, and likewise national scale infrastructures. The specializations of the rails are different, and also the city constructions are fairly distinct.
The economic problems being solved are not comparable.
Private machines, privately maintained, the preferred breakdown rate can be adjusted to personal priorities. Someone with a strong interest in living in a deeply isolated rural location, who does not want to live in Warsaw ghetto, may be able to afford the transportation costs of achieving the first goal.
Americans may be unusually paranoid, and prefer not to live in the Jewish ghetto of a major European city, wholly at the mercy of a European government.
Now, only a small minority of Americans are Jewish, but it is not clear to me that the Christian Americans are that much less traumatized over the Holocaust, and that much less paranoid about Jews or anyone else being mass murdered.
The transport evaluation involves a bunch of trade spaces, and on closer examination they are clearly not straightforward, and completely identical in all relevant cultures.
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“Mad” Mike Williamson has experience with socialized medicine three times over: British, Canadian, and US VA. To put it lightly, he ain’t impressed by any of ’em.
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Also, much of Europe is *tiny* compared to even just US states. One episode of the first season of “Clarkson’s Farm” has Kaleb driving to London, which is iirc less than half an hour away. The show notes that it’s the furthest he has *ever* driven in his life up to that point (not the case for his boss of course, but Mr. Clarkson’s driving experiences are unusual by nearly everyone’s standards). You and I may not drive that far every day (though a lot of people here in LA County do just to get to work). But we almost certainly do it at least once a year for one reason or another.
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half an hour was a short drive in Colorado.
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When we were living in Aurora, we would drive up to the northwest corner of Denver weekly in order to meet up with our friends. Usually 45 minutes or more in Friday traffic, even with taking the interstate ring roads.
Heck, we even did that the Friday with the unexpected ice storm, and we weren’t the only ones. (And yes, all of us agreed that was more than a little foolish.)
Half an hour? That’s just getting across town for a meeting, no big deal.
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The proper response to Yoorupeen expressions of the clutching of pearls and stern disapproval is “Bite Me.” When then proceed to sending imaginary invoices for imaginary fines to US entities, escalating to “Do Not Come Here You Idiots” is entirely appropriate. I’d next move to foreign aid reconsideration myself – the USAID cuts already impacted their commie piggy banks, but there’s “real” foreign aid moneys that we could definitely use with effect in other places.
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There’s an argument that Putin’s norms are the ones that the Europeans respond to, and therefore that the naive rational/autistic tactic for Americans to pursue is to treat the Europeans the way that Putin does, if they really want for us to follow international norms.
SMO, plus targeted murders of officials in European regimes.
SMO are stupid as f&ck given US cultural norms, because we try to predict the long term costs of trying to hold the territory before we invade across our own borders.
I just don’t think it is a good idea for us to allow our national security organizations to build the capability of randomly murdering Europelanders to terrorize their government officials. I mean, if we were killing ten, or twenty, or a hundred officials like Breton, etc., per year, then I don’t see why those organizations would necessarily have scruples also to avoid doing that stuff here.
So it makes sense not to develop those capabilities for sheer internal paranoia.
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Saw this.
https://instapundit.com/764847/
There’s an obvious explanation for the former.
Majority female tertiary students is pretty clearly downstream of political decisions to try to increase proportion of female students.
This could have the result of intimidating men from participating, but it also could also result in stringing along marginal female students for longer, or coercing poorly prepared female students to pursue university training.
Anyhow, possible disparate impact thing in making university more of a destructive scam for women.
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Livestock, and Slaves, get a whole bunch of “free” stuff from their owners.
We have Liberty.
Why would anyone trouble themselves over the opinions of willing slaves and livestock? May their Masters, current and future, be sparing with the lash.
May they also be respectfully silent in the presence of their betters.
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That’s not quite what they were attempting to do. Like any narcissist or sociopath, they were trying to renegotiate reality to their advantage, in this case by trying to create an international “consensus” (controlled by them, of course) that national laws did not apply to the international internet. All the elite prestige, all the WEF money, all the everything they could lay hand to, was put to use in an attempt to create in American minds the idea that The Internet Is Different, and should be run their way. It was a bullying attempt at impression management, and worked as well as those things do on people who are oriented in reality, rather than oriented to What Will The Neighbors THINK?
And their sort does not stop. They never stop. They simply regroup and try a different tack to achieving what they are pushing to achieve. It is very tiring to deal with on a personal level. At the international level, we can point, laugh, make duck noises, and tell them to sanction us with their army, if they think they can.
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I’d say they can kiss me under my tail, except I have standards.
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It’s all so exhausting….
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Leftist rant of the day;
Dear Jimmy Kimmel if no one watches your show over here, why do you think they’ll watch you over there?
Don’t worry Jimmy, so long as Chuck Schummer has a butt, your lips will have something to keep them warm.
Happy New Year brown nose.
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Try #2 for c4c switch turn on.
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When I lived in Germany I was able to find screening that you could velcro to the window frame that you’d applied velcro sticky tape to. And similar velcro-on door screens with magnetic closures in the center. No idea where I found those in the pre-Amazon days. Weirdly it was probably at a Lidl.
We lived near a pig farm, so fly screens were not optional.
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If that seems like a non sequitur, that’s because it was supposed to be a comment on a conversation way up further in the thread. This is a sign that I need to go to bed and sleep.
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My Dad and sister have contracted a RAGING case of TDS, and are making noises of leaving California (not a bad idea…) and moving to Ireland.
Why? It’s pretty, it’s “free” of Trump, it’s safe, it’s…
…it’s all the things they saw on a car tour while they weren’t getting taxed 40+% of their income and don’t know all the dodges and have all the “friends” in the right places to save their money…
…and they didn’t have to deal with Irish health care…
…and my sister has mobility issues, so she would need a car…but that’s yet another set of taxes and fees…
…and you lose hope in the human race sometimes. Especially your family.
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My 2 doors down neighbor is planning to move to England for the same reason…. with his gay daughter, her partner, and the partner’s children from a prior marriage.
Yeah…..
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Until/if my friend’s startup gets off the ground and I could move to Tennessee, I’m going to try and insist that Dad keeps the house in a trust and I manage it while he’s gone.
Just in case they decide after the first Irish winter or serious case of IBD or divictuitus in my sister to come back home.
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It would be “interesting” if these people would run afoul of the EU “Speech Codes”. [Very Very Big Nasty Grin]
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There’s a joke about pretending that I think that there is a world class research university in Vanatu or Palau or somewhere tiny, tropical and with almost zero population, and that I am going to relocate to that country, and become a tenured professor and a department head.
(Okay, I skipped over the worst cases for security problems, but security would also be something I might consider.)
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As I’ve posted on Twix, other countries only exist because America allows them to.
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I’ve mentioned this before, but apparently the reason Princess Diana died from the car crash was because France doesn’t have trauma surgeons.
Of she’d had the crash in even downtown Detroit, they would have had the skill set to stop the bleeding and put her back together.
But see, France is a socialist medicine utopia, so trauma surgeons were an unnecessary specialty, so that didn’t have more than a few for the whole nation.
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