JD Vance says US could veto NATO if Europe tries to regulate Elon Musk’s platforms
JD Vance says US could veto NATO if Europe tries to regulate Elon Musk’s platforms
Republican vice presidential nominee says ‘Germans and other nations’ – not Russia – would ‘have to fund Ukraine’s reconstruction’
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Did…did Vance just call European countries “backwoods”? He couldn’t possibly have, right? He’s not that stupid…right?
Bro, you know he’s fucking dumb af.
He graduated from Yale...
fucking LOL.
Hey bud, I have a PhD from MIT (seriously, I do). I can't tell you how many fucking morons permeate the halls of academia. A guy in my lab once asked me how to convert a flow rate to a pressure. In a fucking lab at MIT. I had to explain to my own fucking advisor that the bullshit rules of thumb one learns in chemistry class are NOT reliable.
Anyone who goes to one of these universities has a certain degree of intelligence and access to wealth. You can certainly trade a little bit of one for the other but only within limits. And I would be extremely careful just labelling him dumb because he's a populist.
Intelligence is not a binary thing. There's loads of people in academia that are very good at the specific thing they study but are absolute morons about near everything else. Just because someone has a degree in business or whatever that does not mean they know jack shit about geography.
The guy has a law degree. That means he knows how to form complicated sentences that seem absolutely coherent. And sounding coherent is a large part of his basic business as the VP.
I find it unhelpful to claim he's "dumb" when in fact he's an opportunistic, malevolent, populist weasel.
Not only do I think Vance never meant to call the EU "backwoods" (I still think he used it as a comparison), it also doesn't matter whether he did. He pretty much has the upper hand:
- The most widely-used social networks in the EU are all based outside the EU, and they're all adversary.
- EU conservatives and right-wingers are already wondering how to kill EU regulation like GDPR, AI act and DSA. They cut into their ability to propagandize. They could also make money kn rhe side getting them abolished.
Finally, no one in the EU would care about slights like this. We have all seen the first Trump presidency unfold. We expect Trumpists to be pompous nationalist douchebags.
Why is that stupid? Europeans are dependent on him now. European leaders will demurely congratulate Trump and him on their victory and hope they won't be hit too hard by what comes next.
To call a bunch of countries that rank much higher than the States on quality of life “backwoods” is a pretty wild statement. The U.S. is the proudly unwiped asshole of the developed world.
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Facts don't matter to Trump or Vance. Don't expect anything in that department. They care about getting ahead or looking like they are.
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In my reading, Vance didn't call European countries "backwoods":
“I’m not going to go to some backwoods country and tell them how to live their lives, [...] But European countries should theoretically share American values, especially about some very basic things like free speech.”
My paraphrasing of that would be: "There are 'backwoods' countries and I expect nothing of them. But European countries must share our values and need to leave our propaganda platform untouched."
My reading is:
There are 'backwoods' countries and I am not going to be telling them explicitly how to live their lives, they should by default share our values and be doing what we do.
With this reading he is using backwood countries as european countries. With the American Republican party, you can safely assume the most offensive interpretation of their sentences because history shows us that they usually mean it.
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I think he means "backwood countries can do whatever they want, but EU countries can't"