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Tucker Carlson interview with Putin to test EU law regulating tech companies
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
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Agreed. I promise that I'm trying my best to understand your perspective, too.
No disagreement here.
No, not at all.
First of all, the alternative is that you give the power to determine what's acceptable entirely to corporations. Almost all corporations already prohibited the sort of speech that would be impacted by these laws.
Second of all, thoughtcrime is fundamentally a different animal than what the EU is doing. Thoughtcrime is the policing of thoughts that are contrary to what the government wants you to think, regardless of whether those thoughts are actually harmful, and it's implemented via pervasive surveillance and a lack of privacy. Criticizing the government is, of course, prohibited.
By contrast, the EU is mandating the censorship of hate speech and calls for violence. The sentiments and logic associated with that hate speech are used as justification for violence and to restrict liberties. And this type of speech is not legally protected in the US under the 1st Amendment.
In 1984, the government rewrites history and uses a multitude of techniques that trick you into accepting things that are not true as being true. This is why it's important to be able to recognize logical fallacies - they're used by all sorts of propaganda techniques with the goal of getting people to act against their own best interests, e.g., by getting poor people to vote for Republicans or to support laws that infringe on our liberties by justifying them by saying "It's for the children!" The world would be a better place if misinformation and misleading propaganda at scale (meaning, in advertisement, on news shows, etc.) were illegal.
I don't have to engage in doublethink to accept the justification for the EU's law, but the arguments that you've shared for why I should oppose it would require that of me. Ultimately, what I'm asking you is: why would I be opposed to a law that itself is 100% fine, just because the same legislators might later pass a different law that I don't like? This law doesn't make it any easier for them to pass one like what you described.
Ultimately because the basic premise of the law could (in general) be the basis for the government to remove our entire conversation here...
It is potentially a tool to do this
I don't object for the sake of my my benefit, I object for the sake of yours (everyone).
I see it a one degree increment on the proverbial frog in the proverbial pot, being slowly but surely brought to boil and it's death, and I don't really care who it affects in the moment.
The laws are completely unlike another, so the progression you’ve described isn’t a concern. One law regulates mega corporations who already have relationships with EU countries; the one you’ve described would regulate ordinary people.
Corporations aren’t people, no matter what they would have you believe. They don’t need to be defended in the same way.
And of course any of those people outside the EU could just ignore them. So even if I thought it were likely that the EU would do this, I wouldn’t care. If the EU sanctioned a Lemmy instance, it wouldn’t ultimately matter; Lemmy instance owners would need to ensure that their hosting setup was outside the EU but that’s it.
I’m concerned about people’s freedom being effectively taken away by corporations - e.g., pushing up the price of housing by “investing” in the housing market and making it unaffordable for lower income people; lobbying for regulations that make it unaffordable for small businesses to enter spaces that large businesses already exist in; lobbying for regulations that make it difficult to exert our power against them; heck, just being treated as people and being able to donate to political campaigns in the first place; exploiting workers; exploiting resources; and so on.
I’m concerned about the ways that the US government takes away our individual and collective freedoms - e.g., gerrymandering; refusal to implement a proper system for elections that doesn’t result in people thinking their votes are being wasted if they vote for third parties; the rights of women that have been revoked with Roe v. Wade being overturned and the laws passed since; our public school budgets being siphoned to subsidize private schools for the rich; slashing public aid programs such that we become even more beholden to corporations; and so on.
There is a frog being boiled, but it’s us, and the stove is much closer to home.