Comment by throwaway27448

The version in my fortune file is better:

A Russian and an American get on a plane in Moscow and get to talking. The Russian says he works for the Kremlin and he's on his way to go learn American propaganda techniques.

"What American propaganda techniques?" asks the American.

"Exactly," the Russian replies.

I'm of the opinion that there is considerably more wailing about US government propaganda than actual US government propaganda. People who reference supposed US government propaganda rarely provide much in the way of concrete examples. Probably because there are legal restrictions on covert propaganda in the US:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/covert_propaganda

To be clear, I'm happy to grant that:

* The Pentagon won't provide jets for your war movie if your war movie portrays the US military in a bad light

* The US engages in information operations in foreign countries, e.g. discouraging people in the Philippines from getting the Chinese COVID vaccine

* Voice of America and similar US-government sponsored outlets are, in fact, sponsored by the US government

But the notion that covert, English-language US government propaganda is ubiquitous and effective seems like a half-baked, un-falsifiable conspiracy theory with little supporting evidence.

The internet is full of false or misleading claims about the US which go un-refuted. There's just way too much low-hanging fruit going un-picked here to believe that the USG is running massive English-language covert propaganda ops.

A specific example of a false anti-American claim which is extremely widespread: Many Europeans believe that the US promised to protect Ukraine in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. This is false. We only promised to go to the UN Security Council, which we did. You can verify for yourself with a quick trip to the UN website, the memorandum is not very long: https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%203007/P...

If the American government possessed the propaganda wizardry that people ascribe to it, I expect the entire internet would be well-acquainted with the actual contents of this memorandum. Instead, you have randos like me trying to fight a tsunami of misinformation (likely Ukrainian-origin) related to this memorandum, using only a shovel.

> values that people in the US might care about (freedom of speech, limited govt, etc).

The US federal government forced Paramount to take Colbert off the air. Seems that people in the US don’t actually value these things.

> What values specifically are you optimizing for here?

Probably not being fascist.

The UK can arrest you for hate speech. You can disagree with that policy on free speech terms if you want, and that’s really a maximal free speech position. It’s a very strange position to hold if you’re claiming that the U.S. is better when it comes to free speech. The U.S. administration is engaged in active smear campaigns against anyone who speaks loudly against them, threatened to revoke licenses of media companies, they’re suing people and corporations to silence them and pressure them into conformance, they’re threatening to deport people who are simply expressing anti-Israel views, threatened to remove funding from universities, deployed the military in cities they don’t like for no other reason than intimidation of political rivals. This is just off the top of my head.

There’s just no comparison really. You must really be inhaling some nonsense X propaganda if you think government overreach is worse in Western Europe.

Well there have been a lot.. philosopy, polis, democracy, hemlock cup, enlightenment (note the perversion of "the dark enlightenment"), modernity, the resistance (against Nazism), psychoanalysis, postmodernism and critical studies (postmodernism in the genuine sense of the philosophies/theories that you would assign that label to and not in the misguided sense of relativism as arbitrarity; basically continental philosophy, frankfurt school (e.g. adorno horkheimer, habermas) and the french (e.g. foucault, derrida, deleuze (& guattari))

Of course there were also absolutism, colonialism, the jacobines, nazism & facism, to name just a few. Part of western values, from my perspective at least, is an implicit promise, that what happened in the 20th century with facism was the darkest hour, so to speak-> never again

> With all the issues in the US and generally wrong direction, I can’t remember them ever arresting people for mean tweets in the way that Germany and the UK have.

Then you haven't been paying attention. The constitution prevents citizens from being convicted, but that doesn't stop arrests or being turned away at the border (even for permanent residents who've lived in the US for decades), and US citizens don't seem to care, so it's cold comfort for many of us.

[x] Doesn’t know UK not in EU [x] Thinks people inciting violence online a free speech -issue [x] Calls Germany a surveillance state when US uses Palantir - a US company - to openly spy on its citizens

X seems to work great. Inciting men in with gambling, porn, crypto, ai and other broistan staples, then feeding them far-right nonsense info points.

I can immediately tell you're not arguing in "good faith" when you resort to "mean tweets".

The numbers commonly being reporting include stalkers, criminals, etc.

You don't get arrested for being politically incorrect in the UK. You get arrested for posting something threatening, harassing, inciteful, or grossly indecent. Also, being arrested and being charged are two completely separate things.

By "mean tweets" I assume you mean death threats? How about not threatening to kill someone on social media, is that so hard to do?

They literally arrested people for quoting Charlie Kirk in tweets after his death.

Yes, the US doesn't arrest people for death threats on Twitter, it's too busy actually killing those that oppose ICE.

I know of many examples from the US and none from Germany and the UK. If they're truly so plentiful, please enlighten me with a link or two of the latter.

That’s not the EU.

Same old tired arguments from Americans about how if you don't let fascists have free speech, it's not really free speech.

EU member *countries" certainly do, but that's true of all countries that have the ability.

If anything the EU puts limits on what EU member countries and companies can do. By hosting in one of the EU countries you have stronger legal guarantees on data privacy than in any other area. A possible exception is Switzerland (not a EU member), which historically has had even stronger privacy laws, though these have been weakened recently IIRC.

> Does the EU not want to spy on its citizens?

You do not seem to understand what the EU is. It is not a country, it does not have a police or anything like the NSA.

No they don't want to spy. They want to protect their citizens data, that is why we have GDPR. The other areas you mention do not provide this legal certainty and have different approaches to data privacy.