Someone pointed out something to me and it's really struck a chord with me.

In the USA, we hate the government collecting information on us, but shrug our shoulders when corporations do it.

In Europe, it's the exact opposite. They created GDPR to restrict how corporations collect and share data about you, but they shrug their shoulders at government doing it.

Obviously, this is incredibly reductive and over-simplified, but the general idea of it feels pretty true.

Sorry, this is just not true. Stasi was a government agency, and it was from this kind of thing that European privacy advocacy sprung up.

Who's we?

Sure, but I think the point of this thread was (or should be) what can be done in the US to resist this. There's a lot of things the US resists doing because voters who never traveled outside of it can be convinced that what it is as implemented elsewhere is somehow flawed or worse than the status quo.

You see this exact pattern with real health care, common sense gun laws, investment in mass transportation, probably more that I'm not thinking of.

> Sure, but I think the point of this thread was (or should be) what can be done in the US to resist this.

I read that as "we're not going to sit with the uncomfortable implication that the places being held up as policy exemplars are also the places criminalizing speech."

What differentiates correct politics from incorrect politics?