People in the English-speaking countries generally don’t have government issued ID beyond a driver’s license. That’s also true for the UK. Historically, ID cards are connected to military conscription. The UK could rely on the Navy for defense and did not maintain vast land armies like the continental nations. Political initiatives to introduce ID cards are usually rejected by voters as totalitarian overreach.

The former slave states in the US have a history of using procedural rules to exclude blacks from voting. After the end of slavery, there was formally equality before the law. So, laws were created to maintain the status quo that were non-discriminatory on their face. EG literacy tests. This not only targeted blacks who were denied an education. Administering such tests was fully in the hands of local elites. They could be made arbitrarily hard to black people, while politically reliable white illiterates could be excused.

Legally, the people in the polling station may require you to show ID. It’s just never done.

Is this a joke about the EU’s desire to curb misinformation? Like, I’m 90% sure that you can’t be serious.

Everything you wrote is factually wrong.

Europe has a lot less social resistance to this stuff. You can see it here. Watching the watchmen turns out to be one of the best tools for defending democracy. And still the call is for more censorship. It’s insane.

Did you pick up, like 2 weeks ago, when Italy fined Cloudflare for not censoring hard enough? Italy is literally ruled by a fascist party. They literally present themselves as being in the tradition of Benito Mussolini. No one bats a fucking eye.

Of course, the censorship is about copyright; protecting the Italian media industry. Maybe people here are too young or unpolitical to remember Italian media billionaire Silvio Berlusconi. In the 1990s, he used his media empire to get himself elected prime minister and escape prosecution for corruption. At one point, he used his office and some lies to get an underage prostitute, he’d been fucking at one of his sex parties, released from police custody. That guy was Italy’s longest serving prime minister since WW2. He then was an MEP until 2022.

Italian intellectuals, identified Trump as a Berlusconi-type populist 10 years ago, when Berlusconi was fading out and Trump rising. Maybe something could be learned from that experienced.

So it’s not like Europeans believe that “It can’t happen here.” It is happening all the time. I think the pro-censorship people are simply so privileged that they can’t conceive of the state ever not being on their side. They seem to feel that being harassed or doxed on the net is the worst that could ever happen to them, personally, and they might be right.

Right. Merely making the recording may already be criminal; not only sharing it. I didn’t want to sound too alarmist. But when we’re ad it. Pixelating the faces means processing personal data which may already be illegal.

What it boils down to is this: If some lawless government goons arrest anyone recording their deeds and seized their phones, no honest, law-abiding judge or police officer would see a problem with that. Anyone live-streaming, just in case, would be guilty of violating fundamental rights in the eyes of all defenders of European values. The government could rely on the technical and organizational infrastructure to enforce GDPR to suppress inconvenient videos without bending the law.

But no problem. Freedom of information is in the constitution. So you just go to court and insist on your right. Of course, a far right government will have packed the highest courts with its people, and so you lose. Well, everyone has rights. Freedom of information isn’t everything. No problem there.

Just bear in mind that many Fediverse instances are in Europe and Europe has no free speech culture. EG In Germany, people who upload videos of police are commonly prosecuted for GDPR violations. It violates the fundamental rights of the police officers. When European activists oppose Big Tech in the name of democracy, they want more censorship; more government control.

Yeah. I looked it up. That’s why I made the post with the credible numbers. The point about the crime rate is one of the criticisms of that Yale study, which I thought was neat.

I can see what she’s doing, but I don’t know off the top of my head if there is anyone actually claiming that figure.

Most estimates of “illegal aliens”, including by the Department of Homeland Security, are around ~11 million; a figure that has been stable since noughties. https://www.statista.com/statistics/646261/unauthorized-immigrant-population-in-the-us/

Based on that figure, undocumented immigrants have a much lower crime rate than average. If the figure was as high as she claims, they would have to be absolute saints.

Yes. I’ve already edited the OP.

Oops. I first put in the article link, then decided to upload the image. I didn’t notice that that overrode the original link.

It shall be unlawful for [the President] to request, directly or indirectly, any officer or employee of the Internal Revenue Service to conduct or terminate an audit or other investigation of any particular taxpayer with respect to the tax liability of such taxpayer.

[…]

Any person who willfully violates subsection (a) or fails to report under subsection (b) shall be punished upon conviction by a fine in any amount not exceeding $5,000, or imprisonment of not more than 5 years, or both, together with the costs of prosecution.

26 U.S. Code § 7217

They made inquiries with law enforcement agencies and no one took responsibility. The rather optimistic guess in the article is that the cops were acting on their own, which makes the use of the jammer illegal.

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

Krugman is an economist, so he looks at the economics. When a physician looks at a patient, you probably would not be satisfied if they just said: “The patient is simply very old.” Even if that is objectively correct.

Most importantly, such a big picture answer doesn’t suggest any solution.

Do Americans know the history of Arlington? I was quite amazed to learn how it became a military cemetery. Not hanging Robert Lee and the other high-ranking traitors is perhaps the biggest single mistake in US history. He is still the highest ranking US soldier to ever betray his country, no?

It’s weird. They used to take such great pride in not being like the French.

Then again, they also used to think the Iraq War was a great idea (unlike those filthy French).

Do they even eat chocolate that taste like barf anymore? Man, if old Hershey was still around, he’d set them straight. Or the other thing. Either way, he’d do it decisively.

The President has no power over the interest rate. The interest rate is set by the Federal Reserve.