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Samizdata quote of the day – Macron has declared war on free speech Macron insists he’s defending democracy from manipulation and hate. But that’s the excuse. His vision is of a Europe where free speech is tolerated only when it is traceable, and where platforms pre-emptively silence anything that might draw a regulator’s glare. He calls it a ‘resurgence of democracy’. It’s nothing of the kind. It’s the bureaucratisation of thought, and the beginning of a continent where debate survives only on licence. If Macron has his way, Europe’s public square will not just be regulated, it will be licensed.
– James Tidmarsh
Of course UK is no better.
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One of my beefs with the EU is that they follow Roman or Napoleonic Law – you are only allowed to do what is permitted. So ‘free speech’ only exists within what is permitted, and what is permitted is getting more and more restrictive.
After (a fumbled) Brexit we are in a Common Law community where you can do anything that is not forbidden – although there are still plenty of the elite who choose not to get the message. Hankering after the bullshit of Brussels, perhaps.
It is ‘democracy’ (and thus ‘good!’) when the mass of ordinary people agree with the elites and the authorities, and ‘populism’ (and so ‘evil!’) when they disagree.
That makes this grand censorship regime a strategy to suppress ‘evil populism’ by thwarting the masses from disagreeing with the elites and the authorities, and to promote ‘good democracy’ by allowing only agreement with the elites and the authorities from the masses.