VirtualRageMaster

There is no class of person more smug than a Eurocrat, and no one with less to be smug about. The EU does not have freedom of speech. The EU has permitted and unpermitted speech. The relevant definition is in Article 11 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights, which states the right to free speech may be curtailed for: - national security - territorial integrity - public health - prevention of disorder or crime - protection of health or morals(!) - protection of rights and reputations - protection of confidential information - protection of judges' authority & independence. - anything else "necessary in a democratic society." The EU is extremely keen on exercising its right to restrict speech. This is in large part because its leaders have often tried - and failed badly at - national democratic politics. Consequently they loathe the people they govern. Ms von der Leyen, for example, used to be the German Defense Minister. Under her watch, German soldiers joined NATO exercises using broomsticks instead of guns, because no guns were available at the time. She was then caught up in a major defense contract corruption scandal. When the Bundestag launched an investigation, she deleted her phone records and cited "national security." The Eurocrat loves a corrupt failure, so naturally she became President of the Commission. Sending your most hated ministers to the EU is the German equivalent of the Vatican relocating child-diddlers to a small village in Botswana. The Eurocrat nonetheless believes it is born to rule - or at least regulate - the world. It is extremely maternalistic and it both hates and fears innovation, because innovation requires freedom, and the Eurocrat does not understand it. It is implacably hostile to the Anglosphere tradition, which holds that freedom is the default position. The Eurocrat believes that everything is presumptively illegal unless it says otherwise. In the last 50 years, the US has built 6 tech companies with a trillion dollar market cap. In that time, the EU Commission admits it has not built a single €100bn tech company from scratch. It's so bad that in 2024, the EU made more from slapping specious fines on American tech companies than it made in taxes from its entire domestic digital/internet economy. In 2008, the EU's GDP was 110% the size of the US. It is now around 67%. In that time, the poorest US state has drawn near-level with the richest EU nation. (The Eurocrat response to this is to smugly point at the Colosseum. Which is fitting, as the EU is a ruin, and it cannot recreate the achievements of its ancestors. Americans, meanwhile, build colosseums for college sports.) The Eurocrat then demands the right to "regulate our own space," and by this it means "control what is said online." But it does not have a space to regulate. Everyone uses American tech platforms, because the Eurocrat has made the EU a technological irrelevance. And so the right to self-regulate seamlessly becomes the demand to regulate the American space. By "regulate" it means "fines and censorship." It thinks it has the right to govern the internet. These self-satisfied failures, who create nothing, believe they are entitled to tell Americans what they are allowed to say, to read, and to think. When they're rejected, they puff themselves up, huff a champagne glass full of their own farts, and scold America for refusing to kneel before their betters. The correct response is: Merry Christmas, go fuck yourselves.