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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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That pretty clearly isn't supposed to matter. If it does matter, the fact that it matters should be made as legible as possible, to remove as much misunderstanding as possible from what follows.

To be explicit, you believe that the US government can extend or withdraw protection from foreign laws as it sees fit, more or less arbitrarily, that this power is likely to be used to reward domestic allies and punish domestic opponents, and that this is the normal state of affairs we're currently living in, such that Musk's arrest shouldn't cause an update.

Specifically, you believe that Musk being arrested for first-amendment-protected behavior would be fine, provided it's not the US government arresting him, and despite the fact that it is entirely within the US government's power to prevent his arrest.

Further, you believe this reality to be common knowledge.

Would that be accurate?

Yes? If an American is arrested for hate speech ‘committed’ while in an allied Western country in Europe, what does the US government do? Presently the answer is almost certainly nothing.

I don't have much evidence to support this, but my gut feeling -- which is probably representative of the voters that the politicians are at least a bit responsible to -- is that this will depend on context quite a bit. An American citizen arrested for "hate speech" that happens in Europe and is relevant to European politics (say, participating in a riot in the UK) would be treated very differently than an American tourist arrested for something they posted in America on Twitter last year.

Extraterritorial jurisdiction is complicated and probably doesn't have broad support on either side of the Pond. Europe complains when the US does it, too: the entire Assange extradition thing wasn't, from what I can tell, particularly popular in Sweden or the UK.