I’m an European (specifically from an EU country). I was born still in a Dictatorship, before the Revolution which brought Democracy, and I grew up hearing the stories of Censorship and the Political Police arresting people for criticizing the local Dictator.

I don’t know who your “we” is, but it sure as hell ain’t me or most of my countrymen.

A mandatory Government app on your phone is the kind of thing that rings alarm bells in people’s minds around here because it stinks of Dictatorship and is a wet dream come true for a Political Police.

I lived elsewhere in Europe, so I can understand that people in countries which have long been stable and Democratic (say, The Netherlands and all of Scandinavia), have no memory of Authoritarianism and think that the Authorities only ever act for the greater good (which is why, for example, Swedes have zero concerns about every single payment they do ending up in a database), but pretty much everbody from Southern and Eastern Europe have either direct memories or heard the stories of just how bad the Authorities can be and just how bad it is to let them know what you’re doing.

Clearly, if you’re really from Europe (and not just a paid propagandist or troll), you’re not from one of those countries which freed themselves from some dictatorship or other recently enough for most people in that country having themselves or their parents been alive during the dictatorship days.

One thing is some kind of passive ID, be it in a card or in digital format, another very different thing is software running on your devices which is capable of automatically reporting to the authorities everything you do.

As the US is showing right now, it doesn’t take much to go from absolutelly legit activity - say having an abortion - and innocent apps with some kind of “phone home” ability - say something to help women track their periods - doing no harm to anybody, to extreme prison sentences (for murder, even) and said apps being used to catch and prosecute women for it.

Anybody who has even just heard the stories from their parents and grandparents about whatever the version of the Stasi in their country used to do in the Dictatorship days would be profoundly against any “report to the authorities” software even if it’s sold by politicians as “think of the children”.

If this is not the most crooked EU Comission ever, it’s a pretty close second.

PArTY A GoOd oNLy DOeS gOOd, pARty B evIL OnLY dOEs bAd.

(Switch A and B around for the other group of tribalist simpletons)

It’s not about America.

It never was.

The Democrat Party in the US is not anti-Fascism as their support for Zionism and plenty of other Fascist ideologie abroad as well as their unwillingness to stand fast against Trump shows.

The situation in the US is akin to a decades long one-two tactic being played by two of the same team (team Oligarch) on their way to score for them and against everybody else, which has NOTHING AT ALL to do with anything in Europe, except for what’s going on in Britain.

His is entirelly a “some of you might suffer and I’m willing to make that sacrifice” perspective, and he and his family have surelly made more than enough money frontrunning his proclamations to cover any costs he has from higher fuel price rises, so he is alright.

I’m wondering if the final collapse of an Empire being triggered by going into a war they cannot win which accelerates their Economic and social collapse, to serve the wishes of a much, much smaller country, is actually Historically unique.

Sure, getting some populist leader who then proceeds to mismanage everything and ends up doing some stupid shit with massive consequences that final torpedoes the once imperial nation down, is pretty common in History, but doing said “stupid shit” to serve the interests of a much smaller and weaker nation might actually make this unique.

That would require for me to know which carrier would be doing the final leg of the delivery when the package is in my country, which often I don’t and over time there’s even new carriers popping up.

A much simpler solution is to have a second mobile number which I give out for these things which is actually quite easy since I can just use a Pay As You Go SIM.

Might be worth changing the number AliExpress has on archive for me, though by now if the sold or leaked that info, it can’t be undone.

It’s used by the delivery people to contact me if they can’t find the delivery place or I’m not there. Also some of the local delivery companies will, for more expensive things, send the recipient an SMS with a code that you then give to the delivery person so that they know for sure they’re delivering to the right person (or somebody authorized by them).

It’s actually a pretty good way to solve a lot of problems with delivery, but it does mean I need to have a mobile phone number which ends up in the hands of at least two entities.

That’s just because the favored style for populists in the UK is “posh twat” rather than “loud blowhard”, making them a lot harder to spot unless you’re familiar with British (especially English) culture.

Britain + Some early 20s girl shouts “I want you daddy!” to some late 20s guy = Jail!

That would legally be “supporting terrorism” and socially be “anti-semitism”.

From my own experience living in the UK (as somebody from somewhere else in Europe who also lived in a couple more European countries), Britain is hugelly Moralistic, sorta like Southern Europe 50 years ago before Universal Education when those countries were very religious.

The thing is, Southern Europe has actually moved onwards from that decades ago, as religion’s power weakened thanks to high levels of Education amongst the young, whilst in Britain there were a few decades with a bit more moral liberalism which was just about enough to make homophobia socially frowned upon and to make homosexual marriage legal, but no further, and it all seemed to be anchored on who it is or not socially acceptable to shun for their sexuality, so nowadays you get self-proclaimed Feminists in The Guardian (so, supposedly the most liberal people in the most liberal newspaper) with opinion pieces outraged about for the (I! Kid! You! Not!) use of sex dolls by men, with not even the tinyest bit of self-awareness about how that’s exactly the same kind of article written about homosexuality a mere 40 years ago only about some other sexual practice that hurts nobody.

Unsurprisingly, that country has even slid down to transphobia in recent years.

So in present day Britain things having slid down so far that there’s a moral outrage for some kind of sexual roleplaying or other and a weak and desperate hard-right “center”-“left” government enacting legislation with actual prison time for it, isn’t too surprising.

In the XXI century, Britain is quickly passing the most backwards countries in Europe, accelerating towards its “golden age”: the Victorian Era.

Doubling down on stupid doesn’t make it more likely that others will follow, not even America’s poodle.

The less info about you is out there, the less handles they have to pass themselves for those who can legitimatelly ask money from you or which control access to your money, be they family, friends, your bank, the government and so on.

They can’t spoof a family member’s voice if they don’t know who is your family or have access to samples of their voice - both things often obtainable via Facebook and would also be obtainable via a Chinese equivalent one might be tempted to use instead.

Anyways, my point is that Chinese companies are inherently no more trustworthy than American ones, they’re just not as bad yet because they don’t yet have the same access to masses and masses of personal information for people all over the World - once they do, they’ll be just as bad because regulations in China are also shit and they don’t give a damn about foreigners.

Joining in and doing what their enemy is already doing and which they’re been unable to stop, is literally the only way the US and the Trump Administration can claim they’re winning anything in this war.

It’s also pretty much how the Far-Right in at least America and Britain does politics: if civil society momentum builds up in a direction which isn’t at all something they started or even wanted, rush to the front of the crowd and shout “Follow me!”.

The thing is, it doesn’t quite work at swindling people into thinking you’re a great leader when you don’t have a thoroughly captured Press conveniently “forgetting” that they didn’t actually started it and spinning that as “leadership” of and the result as a “victory” for the Far-Right leader.

So at least outside the US and in the context of their war against Iran the whole thing looks incredibly stupid, maybe even derranged, even will the “geniouses” at the White House think this will make America and Trump look like winning.

PS: There is one take which makes them actually seem intelligent (in the kind of “intelligence” a low-level thief would display) - that the actual individuals in the Trump Administration, including Trump himself, are doing it purely to personally profit from front-running Trump’s announcements. This would work but the returns would keep on getting smaller and smaller as the Market stops believing Trump’s words and/or expecting that sufficient people believe them for his words to cause market movements.

Let me put things this way: after my last AliExpress purchase I was targetted for the first time in my life by a PayPal fishing phone call from India (starting with a pre-recorded message in my native language but then switching to some guy speaking English with an Indian accent).

Somebody I know has been targetted twice by “you package is awaiting at customs” phishing messages after making purchases at AliExpress.

Maybe coincidence, maybe AliExpress is having their trade payment processing ops outsourced to somebody that sells it to people that will use it to fraudulently pass themselves as a natural entity involved in the purchase process (like PayPal or the destination country’s Customs) or maybe AliExpress themselves sell that data. Judging by the amount of outright fraudulent sales claims there (the capacity of any power storage devices is at times hilarious, as is the output wattage of solar panels and storage capacity of external SSDs), my bet is the latter, though if it’s not that totally not giving a shit about the risk of the second possibility is almost a certainty.

That kind of “why should I care” bullshit you’re peddling is exactly the same kind of bullshit that was peddled a decade and a half ago about having one’s e-mail with Google, and look at were we are now.

Unless you’re stupidly isolated from it (not even giving them your e-mail), you’re going to leak stuff that can be used against you, even if only by criminals (and the authorities in China couldn’t give a rat’s arse about their people swindling or stealing from laowai).

Like in the US, it’s going to be “Free Enterprise” abusing data about even if the local authorities don’t really care about you.

My point isn’t that there isn’t a Far Right in Europe or that it’s small, it’s that most of the Far Right dog-whistles from America don’t work in Europe.

Present day Europeans rarelly care about all the “God talk”, they don’t overly care about Homosexuality or Transsexuality and they certainly don’t think America is a Great Nation.

Absolutelly, the anti-immigration discourse goes down really well here (in fact, it’s the core of the Far-Right ideology in Europe), but beyond that what exactly is the part of the American Far-Right discourse which would make Europeans be more interested in that side of politics beyond what the Far-Right discourse of the local politicians already does.

IMHO, the biggest impact of America on the Far-Right in Europe is the money they give to the Far Right in Europe rather than an ideological foundation.

Recent polls showed support from more than 70% of Israelis for what Israel was doing in Gaza.

Also open Islamophobia and Racism against Palestinians and Arabs in general is widepread in Israel, including almost all of their Press.

They’re a White Jewish Supremacist state (as can be seen by their treatment of Black Jews who moved there from Ethiopia) with many decades of continuous indoctrination about how superior they are to everybody else (including White Christians, by the way) and how the people whose land they’re stealing are inferior, violent and even “vermin”.

Unlike NAZIs in Germany, Zionists in Israel weren’t stopped in the 1940s, so unlike the former this ethno-Fascist ideology has continued indoctrinating the population since the 40s and their “Western values”, unlike in Europe and even the US, are still mainly the white colonialism of the end of the 19th century.

By this point Israel needs the equivalent of the denazification done in NAZI Germany, only better done, or to disintegrate as a nation with the entire territory of Palestine becoming a multi-cultural multi-faith nation in its own right.