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This makes me happy. What would make me even more happy is if we linked our foreign policy, especially our trade and aid policies, to align with our Constituti

by efitz 10mo ago

This makes me happy. What would make me even more happy is if we linked our foreign policy, especially our trade and aid policies, to align with our Constitution. Other governments can do what they want, but we should prefer to interact with governments that share our values, and we should not reward or prefer governments that don’t.

tjpnz 10mo ago
Are you familiar with the First Amendment?
seattle_spring 10mo ago
> "Trust and safety is a broad practice which includes critical and life-saving work to protect children and stop CSAM [child sexual abuse material], as well as preventing fraud, scams, and sextortion. T&S workers are focused on making the internet a safer and better place, not censoring just for the sake of it" Definitely weird to be "happy" that the government is cracking down on people who help prevent the propagation of fraud, scams, and CSAM.
- b112 10mo ago
  "If you uncover evidence an applicant was responsible for, or complicit in, censorship or attempted censorship of protected expression in the United States, you should pursue a finding that the applicant is ineligible" If that sentence from the article is accurate, the parent poster's response makes complete and perfect sense. You don't have to like the current administration, to like a specific thing they are doing. Now is this actually what is happening? I don't know. And of course, that's a different conversation, and not what the parent poster was talking about.
  - kylehotchkiss 10mo ago
    Is this the foreign service officers or USCIS? iirc foreign service officers have pretty wide latitude on visa approval (whose really making sure they’re checking deeply?) and have 100 other more important factors to evaluate so if that’s the case; will this really amount to many denials?
    - stephenhuey 10mo ago
      Except they're under pressure to not exercise such wide latitude. A few months ago, many who had already passed the exam and were just awaiting placement found out they would have to retake the exam, a different one more to the liking of the current administration: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46156979 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46156979 98% of current foreign service officers who responded to a survey said morale is lower, plus the administration is laying off 1300 of them: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/us/politics/state-department-morale-survey.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/us/politics/state-departm...
  - mullingitover 10mo ago
    The problem is that this administration and their ilk have incompetently misinterpreted 'censorship' to mean 'not letting random strangers use your private property to publish things you don't want them to.' The only way "an applicant was responsible for, or complicit in, censorship or attempted censorship in the United States" would be if they were an employee of the US government and they somehow violated US law to enact censorship. To review: censorship is when the government doesn't allow you to say things with your printing press. Censorship is not when private parties don't let you use their printing press.
    - mitthrowaway2 10mo ago
      If I was on a telephone call which selectively declined to transmit certain words or topics to the receiving party, I would consider that a form of censorship, even if it wasn't the government doing it.
      - richrichardsson 10mo ago
        Just use a different system that didn't do that, it's your choice.
        mitthrowaway2 10mo ago
        To that extent, government censorship isn't really censorship either then? You can just move to a different country that doesn't censor you.
        mullingitover 10mo ago
        > You can just move to a different country that doesn't censor you. The 'Network State' fascist bros (Balaji Srinivasan, Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, et al) are the powers behind the throne of the current regime. They want to dismantle the United States and create modern-day fiefdoms where your corporate overlords dictate your rights. They are serious about doing it. "You can vote with your feet and leave our fiefdom if you don't like the lack of rights" is literally their stance.
  - RRWagner 10mo ago
    Displaying Nazi symbols is allowed (protected) in the United States, but prohibited in Germany. Does that mean that any German person involved in enforcing pr even tangentially acting on that restriction would be ineligible for a U.S visa?
    - herbst 10mo ago
      Obviously that is what the great leader wants for the greatest and most free country on all the earth
    - account42 10mo ago
      Hopefully, yes. The free speech situation in Germany is ... not good. Completely useless and reactionary laws restricting speech of specific symbols are only a small part of it of course but any global pushback would be good.
      - sofixa 10mo ago
        > Completely useless and reactionary laws restricting speech of specific symbols are only a small part of it of course but any global pushback would be good. You do know why these laws exist, right? And they are not useless. Many terrible things happened, and tens of millions died, because an extremely hateful ideology was allowed to take hold by assaulting civil society and democracy. Banning anything related to that ideology is not only needed, not only common sense, but I'd argue the moral duty of the German people. And everyone else who witnessed it (so everyone). And for what it's worth, most developed countries have banned Nazi-related things. The US is an outlier in thinking that Nazi opinions matter, and allowing murderous types to express their desire to murder others is somehow a virtue. And to be clear, yes, National Socialism is extremely agressive and murderous. One of its core tenets, probably its main one, is violent antisemitism and "master race"-ism, with their solution being exterminating "lower" "races". Nothing useful, nothing good, nothing redeeming. Just pure hatred and genocide. Nothing good can come out of "debating" a Nazi in the "marketplace of ideas". Goebbels himself said so back in the 1930s, that they do not intend to play by the rules of democracy, but if democracy wants to give them the tools to spread their ideology, they'll happily use it. The world saw this happen and saw the results. Nazis have no place in any civilised society, and anyone espousing Nazi ideology or sporting their insignia deserves to ostracised at least.
- throwaway290 10mo ago
  > Definitely weird to be "happy" that the government is cracking down on people who help prevent the propagation of CSAM. I mean... This is HN... You should see people's reaction when Apple decided to do something about it...
  - throwaway173738 10mo ago
    Apple wanted to scan pictures stored on our phones using a perceptual diff algorithm and compare them by similarity to known CSAM. So basically there’s a world out there where the baby bath pics your wife took will get flagged and she’ll have to prove she’s not a predator.
  - pjc50 10mo ago
    What the "something" is actually matters.
    - throwaway290 10mo ago
      I guess the how the government cracks down mattered to somebody too
- defen 10mo ago
  Those things are not protected expression in the US.
  - aprilthird2021 10mo ago
    Then why is the state department telling to deny visas to people who worked on Trust & Safety at social media cos? (Answer: they don't care about protected expression or pesky laws, they are lawless and reward other lawless types like themselves)
- inglor_cz 10mo ago
  "Definitely weird to be "happy" that the government is cracking down on people who help prevent the propagation of fraud, scams, and CSAM." Such self-descriptions are not necessarily accurate and honest. We have had quite a few debates around Chat Control here. It is sold as a tool to prevent propagation of CSAM as well.
antonvs 10mo ago
> our values What values are those exactly? Because the current administration doesn't seem to be representing the values expressed in the American founding documents, or the values held by a majority of Americans, very well at all. In many ways, they're diametrically opposed to those values.
- EGreg 10mo ago
  Our values are whatever Trump says they should be! An interviewer asked Trump in 2016 how people will know that America is great again. He replied: “cause I’m gonna tell em”. :) https://youtu.be/6TuqNMIxMeI?si=oCkU2Rypuf9SOU8H https://youtu.be/6TuqNMIxMeI?si=oCkU2Rypuf9SOU8H
- 4ndrewl 10mo ago
  You say that, but over the past decade he's got around 50 percent of the vote. Like it or not, this is what America is.
  - herbst 10mo ago
    That distancing is weird and worrisome. They voted for this bullshit, twice. Now they act surprised and distancing themselves from their politics while the whole country falls
    - 4ndrewl 10mo ago
      And the previous election he lost by a whisker. America has been lapping this up for a decade now.
    - antonvs 10mo ago
      I’m not an American, but I live in the US (for now!), and I’m the poster of the comment above. Perhaps if you’re unfamiliar, you may not realize just how undemocratic the US is. The Economist magazine downgraded it from a full democracy to a flawed democracy about 9 years ago. The list of reasons and flaws is long and quite intractable. This has compounding effects, a vicious circle. For example, there was a non-trivial number of people who sat out the last election, or voted for spoiler candidates, because they didn’t feel that either of the major parties represented their interests. As a result of those kinds of factors, the number of eligible voters that actively and directly “voted for this bullshit” is about 32%. Two-thirds of eligible voters didn’t vote for Trump. And a substantial proportion of that 32% is explained by the flawed democracy, such as how political influence correlates directly to money due to legal rulings about how money is speech, corporations are people, and so on. As such, I stand by my comment, and I don’t agree that the attitude I expressed is a distancing one, or would be even if it had been said by an American citizen. I think you’re just rather unfamiliar with the situation, or the realistic impacts of it. This is a situation that has been brewing since at least the Civil War, if not the Revolutionary War or even the original settlement. It’s not something with easy fixes.
SilverElfin 10mo ago
When people say “our values” or “Western values”, it’s just a made up term that means European Christian values. When it should mean classically liberal values.
- bytesandbits 10mo ago
  Spot on.
- adi_kurian 10mo ago
  Always took it to be synonymous with "enlightenment values", created in Europe and by Christians. (Who I believe were at least somewhat secular). I am unsure if we are, at present, a bastion of said values.
- watwut 10mo ago
  Christianity does not necessary implies fascism. And "our values" or "western values" here in this context do. Pope is not like Vance, despite Vance pointificating about by values and pope beong christan.
cinntaile 10mo ago
It would be quite unfortunate if the next government thinks your opinion is wrongthink.
- eastbound 10mo ago
  [flagged]
GaryBluto 10mo ago
I don't like the idea of "fact checking" as a job or position but denying Visas to people like this is a horrible idea that sets a bad precedent.
- nephihaha 10mo ago
  Fair comment.
KuSpa 10mo ago
The hypocrisy https://www.heise.de/en/news/How-a-French-judge-was-digitally-cut-off-by-the-USA-11087561.html https://www.heise.de/en/news/How-a-French-judge-was-digitall... (A french judge was cut off by most US servies, because trump didn't like his ruling. One could say trump.... censored him)
- input_sh 10mo ago
  ICC judge, the fact that he's French didn't have an impact. He's also far from being the only one. In fact, the Executive Order that imposed these sanctions is very broad and gives "immunity" to pretty much everyone affiliated with the US. If the ICC tries to prosecute anyone from NATO or anyone from a "major non-NATO ally" (Australia, Egypt, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Argentina, the Republic of Korea, and New Zealand), the current administration will put sanctions on those judges. So there's 40 or so countries whose governments are effectively "immune" from being prosecuted from the ICC, but the president has authority to add literally any country to that list.
  - bigiain 10mo ago
    I'm looking forward to the reaction from the public when he adds Russia to that list. It will, no doubt, be every bit as effective as the "thoughts and prayers" that follow the weekly school shootings that no other nation on earth have.
    - account42 10mo ago
      So about as effective as the ICC in the first place.
- JuniperMesos 10mo ago
  > In Guillou's daily life, this means that he is excluded from digital life and much of what is considered standard today, he told the French newspaper Le Monde. All his accounts with US companies such as Amazon, Airbnb, or PayPal were immediately closed by the providers. Online bookings, such as through Expedia, are immediately canceled, even if they concern hotels in France. Participation in e-commerce is also practically no longer possible for him, as US companies always play a role in one way or another, and they are strictly forbidden to enter into any trade relationship with sanctioned individuals. > He also describes the impact on participating in banking as drastic. Payment systems are blocked for him, as US companies like American Express, Visa, and Mastercard have a virtual monopoly in Europe. He also describes the rest of banking as severely restricted. For example, accounts with non-US banks have also been partially closed. Transactions in US dollars or via dollar conversions are forbidden to him. I view this as a failure of the cryptocurrency industry to build products that allow people to effectively transact with ordinary businesses in violation of US law, and without using payment processors ultimately subject to US law. Because of course US law includes this detail about being able to sanction people, and people who are sanctioned by US law because they have become an enemy of someone in the US government ought to be able to make monetary transactions in ordinary life too. I don't have a great solution for Amazon unfortunately, they really do just sell a lot of stuff and they're one gigantic corporation and they're based in the US and subject to US law. Buy from AliBaba I guess? Or for that matter French hotels using Expedia even when doing business in French with other French citizens. To be clear, I don't think it is good that the US Treasury Department sanctioned this judge. But the US has sanctioned lots of foreigners for their local political decisions as well as many other things, and I don't necessarily trust that all of those people necessarily did anything wrong, or deserve to be cut off from payment rails across the US aligned world.

by efitz 10mo ago

tjpnz 10mo ago

Are you familiar with the First Amendment?

seattle_spring 10mo ago

> "Trust and safety is a broad practice which includes critical and life-saving work to protect children and stop CSAM [child sexual abuse material], as well as preventing fraud, scams, and sextortion. T&S workers are focused on making the internet a safer and better place, not censoring just for the sake of it" Definitely weird to be "happy" that the government is cracking down on people who help prevent the propagation of fraud, scams, and CSAM.

b112 10mo ago
"If you uncover evidence an applicant was responsible for, or complicit in, censorship or attempted censorship of protected expression in the United States, you should pursue a finding that the applicant is ineligible" If that sentence from the article is accurate, the parent poster's response makes complete and perfect sense. You don't have to like the current administration, to like a specific thing they are doing. Now is this actually what is happening? I don't know. And of course, that's a different conversation, and not what the parent poster was talking about.
- kylehotchkiss 10mo ago
  Is this the foreign service officers or USCIS? iirc foreign service officers have pretty wide latitude on visa approval (whose really making sure they’re checking deeply?) and have 100 other more important factors to evaluate so if that’s the case; will this really amount to many denials?
  - stephenhuey 10mo ago
    Except they're under pressure to not exercise such wide latitude. A few months ago, many who had already passed the exam and were just awaiting placement found out they would have to retake the exam, a different one more to the liking of the current administration: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46156979 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46156979 98% of current foreign service officers who responded to a survey said morale is lower, plus the administration is laying off 1300 of them: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/us/politics/state-department-morale-survey.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/us/politics/state-departm...
- mullingitover 10mo ago
  The problem is that this administration and their ilk have incompetently misinterpreted 'censorship' to mean 'not letting random strangers use your private property to publish things you don't want them to.' The only way "an applicant was responsible for, or complicit in, censorship or attempted censorship in the United States" would be if they were an employee of the US government and they somehow violated US law to enact censorship. To review: censorship is when the government doesn't allow you to say things with your printing press. Censorship is not when private parties don't let you use their printing press.
  - mitthrowaway2 10mo ago
    If I was on a telephone call which selectively declined to transmit certain words or topics to the receiving party, I would consider that a form of censorship, even if it wasn't the government doing it.
    - richrichardsson 10mo ago
      Just use a different system that didn't do that, it's your choice.
      - mitthrowaway2 10mo ago
        To that extent, government censorship isn't really censorship either then? You can just move to a different country that doesn't censor you.
        mullingitover 10mo ago
        > You can just move to a different country that doesn't censor you. The 'Network State' fascist bros (Balaji Srinivasan, Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, et al) are the powers behind the throne of the current regime. They want to dismantle the United States and create modern-day fiefdoms where your corporate overlords dictate your rights. They are serious about doing it. "You can vote with your feet and leave our fiefdom if you don't like the lack of rights" is literally their stance.
- RRWagner 10mo ago
  Displaying Nazi symbols is allowed (protected) in the United States, but prohibited in Germany. Does that mean that any German person involved in enforcing pr even tangentially acting on that restriction would be ineligible for a U.S visa?
  - herbst 10mo ago
    Obviously that is what the great leader wants for the greatest and most free country on all the earth
  - account42 10mo ago
    Hopefully, yes. The free speech situation in Germany is ... not good. Completely useless and reactionary laws restricting speech of specific symbols are only a small part of it of course but any global pushback would be good.
    - sofixa 10mo ago
      > Completely useless and reactionary laws restricting speech of specific symbols are only a small part of it of course but any global pushback would be good. You do know why these laws exist, right? And they are not useless. Many terrible things happened, and tens of millions died, because an extremely hateful ideology was allowed to take hold by assaulting civil society and democracy. Banning anything related to that ideology is not only needed, not only common sense, but I'd argue the moral duty of the German people. And everyone else who witnessed it (so everyone). And for what it's worth, most developed countries have banned Nazi-related things. The US is an outlier in thinking that Nazi opinions matter, and allowing murderous types to express their desire to murder others is somehow a virtue. And to be clear, yes, National Socialism is extremely agressive and murderous. One of its core tenets, probably its main one, is violent antisemitism and "master race"-ism, with their solution being exterminating "lower" "races". Nothing useful, nothing good, nothing redeeming. Just pure hatred and genocide. Nothing good can come out of "debating" a Nazi in the "marketplace of ideas". Goebbels himself said so back in the 1930s, that they do not intend to play by the rules of democracy, but if democracy wants to give them the tools to spread their ideology, they'll happily use it. The world saw this happen and saw the results. Nazis have no place in any civilised society, and anyone espousing Nazi ideology or sporting their insignia deserves to ostracised at least.
throwaway290 10mo ago
> Definitely weird to be "happy" that the government is cracking down on people who help prevent the propagation of CSAM. I mean... This is HN... You should see people's reaction when Apple decided to do something about it...
- throwaway173738 10mo ago
  Apple wanted to scan pictures stored on our phones using a perceptual diff algorithm and compare them by similarity to known CSAM. So basically there’s a world out there where the baby bath pics your wife took will get flagged and she’ll have to prove she’s not a predator.
- pjc50 10mo ago
  What the "something" is actually matters.
  - throwaway290 10mo ago
    I guess the how the government cracks down mattered to somebody too
defen 10mo ago
Those things are not protected expression in the US.
- aprilthird2021 10mo ago
  Then why is the state department telling to deny visas to people who worked on Trust & Safety at social media cos? (Answer: they don't care about protected expression or pesky laws, they are lawless and reward other lawless types like themselves)
inglor_cz 10mo ago
"Definitely weird to be "happy" that the government is cracking down on people who help prevent the propagation of fraud, scams, and CSAM." Such self-descriptions are not necessarily accurate and honest. We have had quite a few debates around Chat Control here. It is sold as a tool to prevent propagation of CSAM as well.

antonvs 10mo ago

> our values What values are those exactly? Because the current administration doesn't seem to be representing the values expressed in the American founding documents, or the values held by a majority of Americans, very well at all. In many ways, they're diametrically opposed to those values.

EGreg 10mo ago
Our values are whatever Trump says they should be! An interviewer asked Trump in 2016 how people will know that America is great again. He replied: “cause I’m gonna tell em”. :) https://youtu.be/6TuqNMIxMeI?si=oCkU2Rypuf9SOU8H https://youtu.be/6TuqNMIxMeI?si=oCkU2Rypuf9SOU8H
4ndrewl 10mo ago
You say that, but over the past decade he's got around 50 percent of the vote. Like it or not, this is what America is.
- herbst 10mo ago
  That distancing is weird and worrisome. They voted for this bullshit, twice. Now they act surprised and distancing themselves from their politics while the whole country falls
  - 4ndrewl 10mo ago
    And the previous election he lost by a whisker. America has been lapping this up for a decade now.
  - antonvs 10mo ago
    I’m not an American, but I live in the US (for now!), and I’m the poster of the comment above. Perhaps if you’re unfamiliar, you may not realize just how undemocratic the US is. The Economist magazine downgraded it from a full democracy to a flawed democracy about 9 years ago. The list of reasons and flaws is long and quite intractable. This has compounding effects, a vicious circle. For example, there was a non-trivial number of people who sat out the last election, or voted for spoiler candidates, because they didn’t feel that either of the major parties represented their interests. As a result of those kinds of factors, the number of eligible voters that actively and directly “voted for this bullshit” is about 32%. Two-thirds of eligible voters didn’t vote for Trump. And a substantial proportion of that 32% is explained by the flawed democracy, such as how political influence correlates directly to money due to legal rulings about how money is speech, corporations are people, and so on. As such, I stand by my comment, and I don’t agree that the attitude I expressed is a distancing one, or would be even if it had been said by an American citizen. I think you’re just rather unfamiliar with the situation, or the realistic impacts of it. This is a situation that has been brewing since at least the Civil War, if not the Revolutionary War or even the original settlement. It’s not something with easy fixes.

SilverElfin 10mo ago

When people say “our values” or “Western values”, it’s just a made up term that means European Christian values. When it should mean classically liberal values.

bytesandbits 10mo ago
Spot on.
adi_kurian 10mo ago
Always took it to be synonymous with "enlightenment values", created in Europe and by Christians. (Who I believe were at least somewhat secular). I am unsure if we are, at present, a bastion of said values.
watwut 10mo ago
Christianity does not necessary implies fascism. And "our values" or "western values" here in this context do. Pope is not like Vance, despite Vance pointificating about by values and pope beong christan.

cinntaile 10mo ago

It would be quite unfortunate if the next government thinks your opinion is wrongthink.

eastbound 10mo ago
[flagged]

GaryBluto 10mo ago

I don't like the idea of "fact checking" as a job or position but denying Visas to people like this is a horrible idea that sets a bad precedent.

nephihaha 10mo ago
Fair comment.

KuSpa 10mo ago

The hypocrisy https://www.heise.de/en/news/How-a-French-judge-was-digitally-cut-off-by-the-USA-11087561.html https://www.heise.de/en/news/How-a-French-judge-was-digitall... (A french judge was cut off by most US servies, because trump didn't like his ruling. One could say trump.... censored him)

input_sh 10mo ago
ICC judge, the fact that he's French didn't have an impact. He's also far from being the only one. In fact, the Executive Order that imposed these sanctions is very broad and gives "immunity" to pretty much everyone affiliated with the US. If the ICC tries to prosecute anyone from NATO or anyone from a "major non-NATO ally" (Australia, Egypt, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Argentina, the Republic of Korea, and New Zealand), the current administration will put sanctions on those judges. So there's 40 or so countries whose governments are effectively "immune" from being prosecuted from the ICC, but the president has authority to add literally any country to that list.
- bigiain 10mo ago
  I'm looking forward to the reaction from the public when he adds Russia to that list. It will, no doubt, be every bit as effective as the "thoughts and prayers" that follow the weekly school shootings that no other nation on earth have.
  - account42 10mo ago
    So about as effective as the ICC in the first place.
JuniperMesos 10mo ago
> In Guillou's daily life, this means that he is excluded from digital life and much of what is considered standard today, he told the French newspaper Le Monde. All his accounts with US companies such as Amazon, Airbnb, or PayPal were immediately closed by the providers. Online bookings, such as through Expedia, are immediately canceled, even if they concern hotels in France. Participation in e-commerce is also practically no longer possible for him, as US companies always play a role in one way or another, and they are strictly forbidden to enter into any trade relationship with sanctioned individuals. > He also describes the impact on participating in banking as drastic. Payment systems are blocked for him, as US companies like American Express, Visa, and Mastercard have a virtual monopoly in Europe. He also describes the rest of banking as severely restricted. For example, accounts with non-US banks have also been partially closed. Transactions in US dollars or via dollar conversions are forbidden to him. I view this as a failure of the cryptocurrency industry to build products that allow people to effectively transact with ordinary businesses in violation of US law, and without using payment processors ultimately subject to US law. Because of course US law includes this detail about being able to sanction people, and people who are sanctioned by US law because they have become an enemy of someone in the US government ought to be able to make monetary transactions in ordinary life too. I don't have a great solution for Amazon unfortunately, they really do just sell a lot of stuff and they're one gigantic corporation and they're based in the US and subject to US law. Buy from AliBaba I guess? Or for that matter French hotels using Expedia even when doing business in French with other French citizens. To be clear, I don't think it is good that the US Treasury Department sanctioned this judge. But the US has sanctioned lots of foreigners for their local political decisions as well as many other things, and I don't necessarily trust that all of those people necessarily did anything wrong, or deserve to be cut off from payment rails across the US aligned world.