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.
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.
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.
> "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.
"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.
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.
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?
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:
That's insane.
I started Ask Me Anything on reddit, does being a moderator in that capacity mean I limited free speech of Americans?
They’re also forcing visa applicants to share their social media publicly, like the authoritarian America is supposed to be better than:
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/News/visas-news/a...
Extremely on brand activity for a group of fraudsters who managed to lie their way into power via a firehose of misinformation.
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.
> 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.
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.
Spot on.
> "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.
"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.
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.
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?
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
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-departm...