I wasn't aware of these things back then, but I've been sad to find out it's not like we weren't warned about exactly this way back in the 90s when the crucial first steps were taken. Including by Paul Krugman, of all people!

Of course, it was the 1990s, from "Winds of Change" to Western neoliberalism as the End of History. And the elite belief in integration advancing "one crisis at a time" was well-established by then. Easy to say now, but did they really think public debt crises and bailing out national governments would create better conditions for having a mature discussion about EU-level fiscal transfers and taxation without drawing in the worst of our national stereotypes and trust issues, zero-sum thinking, and widespread beliefs about the Brussels bureaucrats completely detached from the realities of the common man, issuing directives about the correct curvature range of cucumbers while shoveling regional aid funds to smooth-talking Neapolitan gangsters to promote more sustainable EU waste management strategies, or whatever?

In some of those states, the provisions of the Covenant may be considered directly applicable/self-executing, having the legal force of a provision of constitutional rank, while others require some kind of national step or implementation. Whatever the case, it's arguably at the level of incorporation into national law, though, that the ICCPR has exerted its greatest impact. Basically, post-WW2, when anywhere in the world a national constitution has been framed, the ICCPR has served as the natural yardstick for drafting the fundamental rights provisions.

And beyond nation states, I'm glad we're not dependent on UN bodies and agencies for the development and enforcement of human and fundamental rights more globally either. Sure, the European Court of Human Rights doesn't have an army of its own, and part of the influence and relevance of the law it creates is a bit squishy, frankly, hinging on the authority, gravitas and respect bestowed on it by a somewhat opaque and shifting web of institutions and so on. It's certainly not nothing, though, especially since nowadays the ECHR's jurisprudence is mainlined by the ECJ basically uncut, and also applied as constitutional-level law by the rest of the eurocracy basking in the supremacy of Union law.

But I don't know, man, this human rights talk is always a bit of a gamble in terms of using your time well, at least if addressing a crowd where potentially more people support the death penalty than the ICC.

Personally, I find "loyalty" perhaps the most fascinating one of those, being "irrational" for the individual almost by definition but sometimes, for example, proving out to be the only "glue" holding an organization together through a period of incurable-looking decline followed by an eventual recovery (in the lucky cases).

I don't know what you mean by a rugpull exactly, but of course in theory you can grant/obtain very extensive rights under a CLA as well, including eg the permission to relicense your contributions under whatever terms the licensee prefers. CLAs are a great way to centralize the IPR in an open source project for practical purposes like license enforcement, but in case the CLA terms allow it, the central governing entity could also obtain the right to switch the license even to a, say, commercial one. (Such terms would usually be a red flag for contributors though.) And in any case, that kind of CLA wouldn't still close off the code already released under the previous open-source license, and neither would it prevent you from licensing your own contributions under terms of your choice.

The Old English wīc, on the other hand, has an old Germanic etymology referring to 'camps', 'villages' and the like.

God knows there are a lot of inlets and fjords in Scandinavia, which incidentally were also places from where the surplus "víkingr" males surged west, possibly having adapted the term as an ethnonym by then; at least in modern Scandinavian languages cognates like 'viking' (pl. 'vikingar') are definitely associated with the geographic root 'vik' — as are innumerable surnames like Sandvik, Vikman, etc. Then again, those roving Vikings did of course build up "camps" and "settlements" wherever they went, although this perhaps sounds more likely a name someone else would give to them...

As for the difference between the Norse (ie North Germanic/Scandinavian) tribes/people and their more southern cousins (Angles, Saxons, Franks etc.) prior to and at the beginning of the Viking era, you might say the former were in fact quite clearly relatively more isolated in terms of geography, language and still-very-much-pagan culture. (And while eg Angles and Saxons did invade and settle much of Britain from current Northern German and parts of Denmark, this was already a couple of hundred years before, and a lot happened since.)

Anyway, as far as human/fundamental rights go, the encryption and related issues in Chat Control tend to fall more on the Article 7 side of the Charter[2] like many similar questions related to different forms of (mass) surveillance, secrecy / confidentiality of (electronic) communications, including related national regimes with often diverse jurisdiction-specific histories, etc.

[1] The main difference between a Directive and a Regulation under EU law is that a Directive requires implementation on the national level to work properly (ie national legislation, usually with some room for discretion and details here and there), while a Regulation is directly binding and effective law in member states wholly in itself.

[2] And similar/corresponding language in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), including the related case law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). While these are not EU institutions, European human rights law is recognized and applied as constitutional / fundamental rights-level law both by the EU and member state courts.

Also, in the latest Hard Fork episode, Casey or Kevin mentions how the DoD undersecretary in charge of this contract doesn't apparently get along with or even pretty much hates Amodei for some reason. I think this might be the same undersecretary dude who actively commented the whole contract term controversy on X yesterday. Too bad I can't recall his name either.

EDIT: Trying to stay on topic and score some po--, cargo I mean...

In short, there are three core institutions, the "technocratic" European Commission, the European Parliament elected by direct popular vote, and the Council ("of the EU"/"of ministers") made up of the relevant (in terms of subject matter) ministers of the standing national govs. The law-making procedures depend on policy areas etc. but usually in the policy areas where EU is fully competent, the Commission — the democratically least accountable of the three bodies — by default makes the initiatives and negotiates/mediates them further along with the Parliament and Council, but only the last two together really have the power to finally approve actual legislation, usually either Regulations (directly applicable in member states as such — so an increasingly preferred instrument of near-full harmonisation), or Directives (requiring separate national transposition / implementation and usually leaving more room for national-level discretion otherwise as well).

While not fully comparable to nation-state parliaments, the powers of the EU Parliament have been strengthened vis-à-vis both the Commission and the Council, and it's certainly long been a misrepresentation to say that they, e.g., only have the power to "approve or turn down" proposals of the Commission and/or the Council.

I guess it's OK — I'm European too, for example — but it does seem like you're doing it to imply that your views are somehow (at least relatively more) popular among, or representative of, well, Europeans. But now that we're making such massive generalisations, I'd claim that well-educated English-speaking Europeans are often likelier to be more familiar with the views and internal debates among Americans than those of many of their fellow Europeans, and that you're probably no exception.

As for your comment, had you not addressed it to 'you Americans', I'd be hard-pressed to tell it apart from a pretty standard-issue American Left (or 'Progressive') rant, perhaps somewhere from the younger and more identitarian part of that crowd, for example (despite some of the quasi-tankie undertones). While I'll admit that scoffing at things like pro-life policies and/or American poverty is certainly easier and more common throughout the political spectra in (Western) Europe, I'd say your cringe-inducing bothsidesism with USA and China falls closer to the crackpot left camp in Europe as well.

Europe contains multitudes, and undoubtedly for some but not all, up until now at least, it has been a bit too easy to comfortably observe and judge things for so long as a world-political bystander from under the US nuclear umbrella, typically further from the Russian border too — whether you were an insular French with casual contempt for all things 'Yankee', a German atomic-phobic pacifist (or worse, a far-right, Pro-Putin knuckle dragger) from that 'European powerhouse' heated with Russian non-renewables, or even a Swede from the world's leading moral superpower, or something like that, anyway... ;)