[coffinbirth]

> Open models are served via various means, some by the companies that released them and some by third parties like OpenRouter. Unfortunately, both of these routes are dodgier in terms of privacy and data sharing, and I would not feel the same comfort sending API calls containing client or confidential data to them.

That's why I'm using eurouter.ai with the following routing rule for all my requests:

  {
    "model": "glm-5.2",
    "models": [
      "deepseek-v4-pro",
      "deepseek-v4-flash"
    ],
    "provider": {
      "allow_fallbacks": true,
      "data_collection": "deny",
      "data_residency": "EU",
      "max_retention_days": 0,
      "eu_owned": true
    }
  }

Sure, it's quite expensive, but at least on a legal side data privacy is ensured. I trust them more than e.g. Anthropic, OpenAI or OpenRouter.

Personally, I find it morally unacceptable to use U.S. AI tools, because I do not want to support them financially and thus support the crimes they are involved in[1].

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48512339

[himata4113]

The part that gets me about anthropic red lines is "of Americans", okay so the rest of the civilized world is up for grabs then? It's okay to destabalize allies with sabotaged tests (in machine learning) and data exfiltration outside America?

What gets me the most is that they claim that the model should follow the https://www.anthropic.com/constitution and they claim that it's embedded into the model. However, system prompts in claude code and cowork re-iterate all of these points and if they're embedded you shouldn't need to do that. Now, if you ask the API version of claude to be a hitler supporter with enough prompt engineering it will become one which directly contradicts what they claim to do, opus 4.7 specifically will be happy to create anti-(insert minority group) propaganda although I haven't had the same success with 4.8 thus far, but I also haven't been motivated enough to push it in that direction yet since I've been more interested in exploting the cyber capabilities of the model.

My conclusion from the very start is that Anthropic's strategy are pure optics and considering the fact that there was an outpoor of support for the company I think it has been very successful.

[dminik]

Yeah, it was funny seeing a bunch of people going like "Anthropic is fighting for privacy" meanwhile I'm like "Uhh, what about the other 8 billion people?"

On second thought, it's not funny.

[beng-nl]

As a thought experiment - such shocks (govt pressure to use models for bad purposes and govt excluding access to non-Americans) coming early in the ‘ai revolution’ will wake up the rest of the world sooner that they have to get their act together to stay competitive without relying on USA. Just like with nato.

[nerdsniper]

> The part that gets me about anthropic red lines is "of Americans", okay so the rest of the civilized world is up for grabs then? It's okay to destabalize allies with sabotaged tests (in machine learning) and data exfiltration outside America?

Regardless of Anthropic's "moral" position (inasmuch as a corporation can even have morals) against spying on non-Americans, they would have no way to enforce that limitation against the government because non-citizens outside of the USA have no protections from the intrusions of the US government.

[cbolton]

They can include these limitations in a contract which can be enforced like any contract.

[nerdsniper]

FISA Section 702 (50 U.S.C. § 1881a) or CLOUD Act could be used to override any contractual terms that US government agencies may have agreed to. Those clauses would be unenforceable / unexecutable.

More generally it would be overpowered by the Sovereign Acts Doctrine.

The facts aren’t identical to the 2008 Yahoo FISCR case but that case sets the tone for how any clauses like this would just be brushed under the rug.

[NewsaHackO]

I don't think they can, at least if they are making an argument for why the Defense Production Act should not apply to them. Their original argument is that they will not help with anything that is unconstitutional, such as the unlawful spying on American citizens, without a warrant.

[jazzyjackson]

I don’t think Defense Production Act lets the government takeover what you produce, just that if you sell something you have to prioritize selling to the Feds. There is also precedent that code is speech and the government cannot compel speech (this came up during the debacle where FBI wanted a backdoor to unlock iPhones and Apple said no, we’re not building that)

[nerdsniper]

It’s slightly nuanced, but during COVID-19 the DPA was applied to GM for production of ventilator machines. GM had not yet ever made any ventilator machines, and had only just one week earlier begun laying the groundwork to partner with Ventec Life Systems to look into retooling their automotive electronics factory in Kokomo, IN to produce ventilators.

I agree that the Apple case indicates that there’s a lot of uncertainty around this type of issue, at least post 1953 when title II of the DPA expired after Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer (1952)

[oefrha]

> anthropic red lines

Alleged red lines. Could be just talking points for garnering sympathy. Big tech aren’t exactly known for being truthful, especially big tech partnering with esteemed Palantir.

[throwaw12]

> The part that gets me about anthropic red lines is "of Americans", okay so the rest of the civilized world is up for grabs then?

And this is coming from a CEO who constantly claims moral superiority and advances the idea that China is bad

[avadodin]

These companies are so good at selling their product's likely incompetence as possibly intentional subversion.

[johndough]

I had a look at eurouter.ai and it seems like an extremely bad offer.

- The prices are ridiculous (15 % markup for free account).

- They have a rate limit of 1000 requests per month, unless you pay 40€ per month for ... what exactly is their value proposition?

- They have a single provider (TensorX) for DeepSeek-V4-Pro, with a cache read cost that is over 100 times higher than DeepSeek ($0.44 vs $0.003625). Notably, I had to look at the TensorX website for that information, since I could not find any information about cached token cost on eurorouter.ai.

[qznc]

I guess the prices are for "EU owned" instead of "EU hosted". The data centers in the EU where you can rent GPUs is mostly US companies.

[trollbridge]

It looks like a business opportunity, then, to provide inference that is EU-local and/or EU-owned.

If there aren't enough businesses who want to do this, the EU should figure out how it can properly incentivise that to change.

[imhoguy]

Hosting anything in EU must cover redtape and carbon taxes in electricity bill.

[Grombobulous]

That seems pretty unsubstantiated. Hetzner proves that EU data center != expensive.

Low carbon does not equal expensive, either. Solar is the cheapest power generation method. Solar plus grid scale batteries is in the same cost ballpark as natural gas.

There’s nothing about data centers that is inherently a high carbon business. It’s only a high carbon business in places like the US where political leadership purposefully fights against renewable energy projects that private businesses want to undertake on their own dime.

[jampekka]

The markup is not going to the providers, only the router. It seems more like eurouter found a niche it can milk for a while.

[KronisLV]

Actually got curious about other alternatives to OpenRouter and looked into it a bit.

EURouter (Amsterdam): https://www.eurouter.ai/pricing

Eden AI (France): https://www.edenai.co/pricing

nexos.ai (Lithuania): https://nexos.ai/pricing/

Requesty (Germany): https://www.requesty.ai/pricing

Cortecs (Austria): https://cortecs.ai/pricing

Nordference (Estonia): https://nordference.ai/pricing

Guess those are really popping up as mushrooms, eh? Not an endorsement of any of those on my part cause I haven't personally used them, but seems like there are at least options for those who need them.

[root-parent]

Crimes does not even starts to describe it:

"AI-assisted targeting in the Gaza Strip" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-assisted_targeting_in_the_G...

"Palantir allegedly enables Israel's AI targeting in Gaza, raising concerns over war crimes" - https://www.business-humanrights.org/de/neuste-meldungen/pal...

"What The Wounds Are Telling Us" - https://www.volkskrant.nl/kijkverder/v/2025/gunshot-palestin...

[bandrami]

If data security is an actual concern I don't think there's a solution other than biting the bullet and self-hosting.

[fg137]

If your only concern is data residency, data privacy and sharing, why not just use bedrock with the processing region locked to eu-west-2? For sure, it's not an European company serving the LLM, but it satisfies your requirements otherwise and is trusted by tons of companies worldwide.

[helloplanets]

Anthropic already explicitly communicated that they'll store and check all the data from Bedrock or any platform, even if you've selected zero data retention, if using Mythos class models. To use these models on any platform, you'll have to accept these terms regardless of the region.

> Limited data retention and review as part of our safety work. Prompts submitted to, and outputs generated by, Mythos-class models are retained for 30 days for trust and safety purposes, on every platform where these models are offered.

> Change applies to organizations that have set up workspaces with zero data retention (ZDR) in Claude Console, use Claude Code with ZDR in Claude Enterprise, or access Claude through AWS Bedrock, Google Cloud Agent Platform, or Microsoft Foundry with ZDR.

https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15425996-data-retenti...

[fg137]

The original comment is about GLM/deepseek models. As you already pointed out, this applies if you use those specific Claude models on any platform, so I don't know what the point is.

[quikoa]

> it's not an European company serving the LLM

That's a pretty big downside if data privacy and sharing is one of the main concerns.

[fg137]

I'd like to see some real reasoning here that is based on facts.

[layer8]

One of the facts is the existence of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act, in conjunction with https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2705 and https://www.nsa.gov/Signals-Intelligence/FISA/.

[trollbridge]

The great part about open models is that you can do this.

Do you have a sound reason to need EU data locality? You can.

Do you want the confidence (and are willing to accept the expense) of only running models on local hardware you control? You can.

Do you want the cheapest possible option - choosing a Chinese, for example, provider, or perhaps a provider offering it for free where you agree they can use your prompts? You can.

Do you need to comply with some kind of regulation like GDPR or rules for contracting with the U.S. federal government? No problem. (Although I'm still waiting for DeepSeek V4 to show up on Amazon BedRock so it can be used from GovCloud...)

Do you have moral objections and want to actually live by them? You can.

[ttoinou]

You dont care about which exact provider it is using behind the hood ?

[Phlogi]

No, as long as they follow the requirements, especially the data privacy agreements. What would you? Price?

[fredoliveira]

Output quality immediately comes to mind, of course.

Models are converging, but they converge in bands, and frontier is frontier. I would not like to have any workflows in any area of my business where output is generated by an assortment of models from different providers. For trivial, mundane tasks that might be fine, but it certainly doesn't apply across the board.

[MarceColl]

Not caring about providers doesn't mean not caring about models.

[ttoinou]

How do you know they're following requirements ? At least a quick search about the company providing the service would be useful

[Phlogi]

Well there is an established legal system that i rely on. I don't have to check every provider, that is the value i get from this router service.

[NewsaHackO]

The issue is that the legal system is retroactive, and information that is made public cannot be retracted. If a random company gets your sensitive data and disseminates it to the world, then sure, they will face legal repercussions, but the damage would have already been done to you.

[codedokode]

Not only it requires a minimum payment of 39 euro, it doesn't accept cryptocurrency althogh that can be worked around by buying a prepaid virtual card for crypto.

[yogorenapan]

What services give you a prepaid virtual card for crypto without KYC?

[WhyNotHugo]

You only need to worry about GDPR and the hoster being in the EU if you're giving the model actual access to production data — which you shouldn't anyway. Use the model to write code that processes or analyses the data, so that process can easily be reproduced with deterministic results.

[simianwords]

GDPR compliant llm was a joke a few months back but here we are

[speedgoose]

I work in Europe, sometimes with sensitive data, and LLMs weren’t an exception a few months ago.

Maybe it was funny to you, but designing data platforms that respect GDPR and involve LLMs is a thing.

[throw1234567891]

But is no joke anymore.

[vonneumannstan]

Lol what performative shite. Chinese astroturfing 101. You're either mentally ill or a shill.

[throwaway27448]

Why use EU specifically? I get not trusting the US, of course, but surely the EU isn't far behind in its desire to spy on its own citizens. Do you not live there?

[earthnail]

From all the large governmental institutions, the EU is the one currently holding up traditional western values. That gives it street cred in this subject.

[kortilla]

>traditional western values

This seems tautological because Europe is pretty weak on the values that people in the US might care about (freedom of speech, limited govt, etc).

What values specifically are you optimizing for here?

[solumunus]

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.

[calgoo]

The UK is not the EU, the UK is US "lite", they have always been that way, thats not something new.

[solumunus]

Not getting the relevance of this comment.

[tonyedgecombe]

> The UK can arrest you for hate speech.

https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=13879460433775...

[nxm]

I as a individual won’t get arrested for speaking my mind, and that’s much more important than some legal battle around corporate media.

„ deployed the military in cities they don’t like for no other reason than intimidation of political rivals” That’s one perspective on simply trying to enforce laws.

Moreover, let’s not forget about how Biden government tried to silence Rogan.

[vrganj]

You know who else was simply enforcing laws? The Gestapo.

[solumunus]

> I as a individual won’t get arrested for speaking my mind

Assuming you’re not a violent bigot you would also be fine in the UK.

> Moreover, let’s not forget about how Biden government tried to silence Rogan.

So your response to my claim that the US is worse is to point to other anti free speech practices by previous US governments? Well done!

[goodpoint]

> The UK can arrest you for hate speech.

And that's a good thing.

[p_j_w]

> 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.

[Gigachad]

They currently have the military circling a pool to intimidate people trying to take photos of the botched paint job.

[Applejinx]

In fairness, it's our Berlin Wall, and I absolutely would want a piece of the delaminating paint as a souvenir. The difference is we are so early into the collapse that the armed guards are still there. But yeah, it's definitely not just pictures, I'd want a piece of the blue stuff. It'd be a souvenir and also me taking it away from there, so win/win. Of course there's armed guards guarding the swamp now, what else would there be?

[fuck_google]

Intimidation is the sincerest form of flattery.

[throwaway27448]

> The US federal government forced Paramount to take Colbert off the air.

Not really; the Ellisons are quite close to Trump. Nobody was forced to do anything. Had the FCC actually revoked their license, and had Paramount actually been willing to fight, they could have sued. It's not easy to force anyone that rich to do anything; the state works on behalf of capital. It seems like europe is more aware of the meaningless bluster than the actual crimes being committed

There are much better things to point to to illustrate the deterioration of the rule of law, like blatantly illegal deportation of citizens without due process. Or raping children in concentration camps under the guise of cracking down on crime. We may never even know who was seized and what happened to them and there's little incentive for our very pro-corporate media to report on it.

But sure, paramount is the real victim here.

[hvb2]

You might want to read the 3rd paragraph of this article

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merger_of_Skydance_Media_and_P...

Read that timeline and then see if you're still convinced that they didn't at least seem to have done a thing or 2 to appease the federal government

[cpursley]

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. They all seem to be running full speed towards a surveillance state.

[lmm]

> 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.

[leptons]

>and US citizens don't seem to care

I think maybe you haven't been paying attention.

Most of us do care. Trump's approval rating is pretty low at 36%, and his disapproval rating is high. Just because he's still causing chaos doesn't mean the majority of us don't care about it. There's just no legal way to remove him, and his cronies simply won't do it - there's not enough votes in congress or he would have been gone after his first or second impeachment.

https://www.npr.org/2026/06/20/nx-s1-5861764/trumps-job-appr...

[lysium]

I understand your point, however I don’t buy „there's just no legal way to remove him“. With so low ratings where are the daily protests against such type of government? Surely, nationwide daily protests would make elected officials reconsider their positions, given an upcoming midterm election, while there still is one.

Don’t get me wrong, I know the thousands reasons why you won’t join a protest, I’m „guilty“ myself. I just want to argue against your argument that I quoted because this puts all of us in an unhelpful victim mentality.

[lmm]

This isn't about Trump. No 4th amendment rights at the border has been an issue for at least 20 years, but US citizens don't care because it doesn't affect citizens.

[PoignardAzur]

A 36% approval rating is sky-high for a president that started a pointless immensely costly war after getting elected on a platform of "no more costly wars" and is in the process of negotiating an immensely unfavorable deal with Iran after getting elected on a platform of "Obama's deal with Iran was terrible, I could do much better".

By contrast, Biden at the same point in his term was hovering around 39%, for the heinous crime of... rebuilding the US economy? Including some woke riders in his infrastructure bill?

At this point, a fair assessment of US citizens is that on average, they seem to consider that being a right-wing autocrat wannabe, threatening to invade allied countries "as a negotiating tactic", being a climate change denier, starting a humiliating failed war, trying to blackmail the press into compliance, etc, are about 3% worse than being a cringe center-left bureaucrat.

"US citizens don't seem to care" is an apt hyperbole.

[NamlchakKhandro]

NPR as your source isn't exactly a compelling argument tbh

[nxm]

A few people being stopped to check if their residency is valid is more than fine considering the last admin flooded the country with 20mil migrants with its open border policy

[delis-thumbs-7e]

[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.

[Accacin]

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.

[rob74]

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?

[Latty]

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

[seba_dos1]

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

[gpvos]

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.

[solumunus]

That’s not the EU.

[hdgvhicv]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/feb/...

The age old joke;

A Russian and an American are drinking at a bar

The Russian says "I'm impressed by american propaganda. It's so subtle but effective."

The american responds "What are you talking about, we don't do propaganda."

[t-3]

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.

[0xDEAFBEAD]

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.

[gpvos]

> Many Europeans believe that the US promised to protect Ukraine in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum.

European here, following the Ukraine situation closely. I absolutely never heard that one. The main issue in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum that has been mentioned in the media in recent years is that Russia would respect the independence, sovereignty, and existing borders of Ukraine, which is clearly there in article 1. Thanks for the link though, it is quite enlightening.

[throwaway27448]

Have you ever read Manufacturing Consent? A conspiracy is not necessary for wide-spread propaganda campaigns—just a confluence of incentives that act against the common interest (even in the US) but work in the interest of the ruling class.

[zzzeek]

and then Chomsky goes on to form a deep online friendship with Jeffrey Epstein

[mopsi]

"UN Security Council action" is a broad term that can include deployment of international UN-led military forces, as in the Korean War: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Command

A few years prior to the Budapest Memorandum, the UN Security Council had authorized military action to liberate Kuwait. 42 countries participated in the coalition that drove Iraqi forces out of Kuwait: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_of_the_Gulf_War

The expectation at the time was clearly more than just "we'll bring it up at the UN for dicussion". The current weaseling over the exact wording looks weak and pathetic, and has a certain flavor of propaganda that tries to convince everyone of something that's not quite true. The fact remains that the US strong-armed Ukraine out of nuclear weapons, and when Ukraine was eventually invaded, tried to strong-arm Ukraine into surrender. This reflects very poorly on the US.

[wat10000]

The Budapest Memorandum only requires going to the Security Council if nuclear weapons are involved. There's no required action at all for non-nuclear attacks. This isn't "weaseling over the exact wording," it's just the plain language of the memorandum.

It really amazes me how much misinformation is out there about this thing. It only has six points, each one a single paragraph long. It's very quick and easy to read, yet people apparently can't be bothered to look up the actual text of the thing they're discussing.

[0xDEAFBEAD]

"Russia blocks Security Council action on Ukraine"

...

"A ‘no’ vote from any one of the five permanent members of the Council stops action on any measure put before it. The body’s permanent members are: China, France, Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, and the United States."

https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/02/1112802

(emphasis mine)

This is 101-level UN stuff. If Ukrainian diplomats were unaware that Russia can veto Security Council resolutions, that means they were totally incompetent.

It's also misleading to say the US "strong-armed" Ukraine out of its nukes... it was originally Ukraine's idea to abandon nukes, and they didn't have the control codes for the nukes on their territory anyways. The US attempted influence via carrots (financial assistance), not sticks ("strong-arming").

In any case, we did far more than just bring it up at the UN for discussion. See this map from a year or two ago: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HKNCFWPbEAA7p5g?format=jpg&name=...

Mostly, in response to US generosity, Europeans just complained that the US should give even more. Your comment illustrates this perfectly--you speak as though the US only responded via UN diplomacy, completely neglecting over one hundred billion dollars the US sent in Ukraine aid, to a country which is not even a treaty ally of ours. When Biden was president, right after he saved Ukraine's butt in the initial invasion, public opinion of the US in Europe was barely even net-positive.

The real question is why Europeans spend so much time harassing the US for Ukraine funds, and so little time harassing tight-fisted countries which are actually in Europe like Ireland, Switzerland, Austria, Spain, etc. The answer: Europe has a transatlantic philosophy that the US brings the guns and the Europeans bring the scolding. As long as Ireland/Switzerland/Austria/Spain nod along with the scolding, they are doing their part, as far as Europe is concerned.

[tumdum_]

> Many Europeans believe ...

> ... misinformation (likely Ukrainian-origin) ...

Your post is also "a half-baked, un-falsifiable conspiracy theory with little supporting evidence" ;)

[0xDEAFBEAD]

Can you point me to any sort of Ukrainian law which would prohibit this type of info op? See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_of_Kyiv

If the US was attacked the way Ukraine was attacked, and foreign intervention was key to our survival as a nation, I expect the Pentagon would deploy foreign info ops in that situation. That doesn't seem like a heavy lift to me.

Occam's Razor: If something is a core/essential national interest, it's reasonable to expect a government to pull out all the stops. But governments are fairly ineffectual for the most part. Everyone saw how the USG mishandled e.g. COVID, mishandled the war with Iran, yet we expect the USG to be wizards at covert propaganda? It doesn't really track. I'm sure we are doing covert propaganda here and there, and we would ramp it up in an emergency.

Anyways, if you want to point to specific content you suspect as USG propaganda, be my guest. My point is, the fact that people rarely do this seems evidence against widespread USG propaganda. "They don't point it out because the propaganda is too good" has a suspicious un-falsifiable quality to it.

[6510]

>I'm of the opinion that there is considerably more wailing about US government propaganda than actual US government propaganda.

okay....

>People who reference supposed US government propaganda rarely provide much in the way of concrete examples.

YOU'VE ALREADY SAID THAT

[throwaway27448]

I'm honestly not really sure what "traditional western values" have to do with where to store data. What does that even refer to—individualism? Christianity? Representation in court by lawyers? How does this intersect with the topic at hand?

Edit: c'mon people, if you're going to use such ambiguous phrases at least have the spine to clue the reader in to what you want them to refer to in this context.

[NonHyloMorph]

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

[throwaway27448]

Philosophy and democracy are hardly unique to western culture. But I see how one would be proud of and want to preserve most of these things.

But putting that aside, most of this is modern, i.e. formed after the 17th century. I hardly see how any of this is traditional. Most of the good stuff here was formed in the 20th century—emphatically modern, borderline postmodern.

Yes, I'm being facetious. But I really fucking hate conservatives that don't understand what the words they're saying mean.

[0xDEAFBEAD]

"The situation for free speech in Europe is even worse than I thought"

https://eternallyradicalidea.com/p/the-situation-for-free-sp...

[NicuCalcea]

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

[0xDEAFBEAD]

Who controls the definition of "fascist"?

In any case, practically speaking, censorship helped the rise of the Nazis: https://www.fire.org/news/blogs/eternally-radical-idea/would...

You can see far-right parties surging across Europe. Speech restriction isn't just authoritarian, it's also counterproductive.

As an American I am actually quite worried about Europe's far right. Those guys are very scary, and it's creepy the way they have been able to influence the right here in the US. The MAGA movement was far more multicultural back in the 2010s, before Europe's far right was able to influence it with their ethnic cleansing and pogrom fantasies.

If you're in a hole, maybe stop digging?

[NicuCalcea]

In spaces and interactions I control, the definition is up to me.

[Phlogi]

US Data Privacy is not sufficient.

[throwaway27448]

For what? Does the EU not want to spy on its citizens? That strikes me as... unlikely.

Why not host in east asia? Or southeast asia? Or south america? Or africa? Then you avoid both the government with incentive to spy on you (assuming you live in the EU) and american companies.

[nickserv]

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.

[kergonath]

> 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.

[Phlogi]

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.