Let’s be very clear: the European middle-class is not traveling to the US. They can’t afford it.
These are rich European traveling and being amazed at the wealth of the American middle class.
European middle class earns € 2200/mo. After expenses they have €500/mo left at best. This is nowhere near enough disposable income to go on a multi week trip to the US.
The middle class European stopped being able to travel internationally years ago.
Pro-Problematic Vol. 1 is out now on our site! It’s an independent, anti-censorship, anti-puritan, original illustration and comic anthology featuring 100 pages by 13 artists. Page previews (a thread):
Three key take aways for us from Orban's defeat.
(1) Despite years of muzzling counter-majoritarian institutions, Orbán did not command the full authoritarian apparatus needed to overturn a comprehensive electoral defeat. He could not jail his political opponents at will, deploy the police or the military as a personal militia, etc. He's not Putin or Lukashenko.
(2) Defeating an authoritarian government in a system rigged in its favour requires a multi-pronged effort. You need citizens to engage, organise, mobilise - but you also need parts of the security state and sections of the business elite to come over to your side.
(3) The psychological impact of this for citizens in Western democracies is to pull their sense of keeping or losing their democracy out of the realm of magical thinking and into the realm of concrete action. It blasts away both magical optimism and magical doomism, and returns citizens to the realities of engaging in political conflict constructively.
It's so infuriating seeing americans sit on their hands and do nothing. Do none of you have friends? just grab a couple of your buddies and demand justice
State Terror in America: ICE in Minneapolis - Function, Normalisation, and Empathy.
In January 2026, ICE performed its duties with such enthusiasm that it became indistinguishable from a personal militia servicing executive power. In Minneapolis, ICE-led federal officers detained a 5 year old child, smashed car windows, set off crowd-control grenades, seized a US citizen from his home in his underwear, and killed two US citizens - a white middle-class mother and an ICU nurse with no criminal record.
FUNCTION
Whatever the intent of the Trump administration, ICE has come to function as a pointillistic dispenser of state terror: for every actual victim of militarised violence in urban centres, thousands fear they might be next.
NORMALISATION
When power lies about killing, the corrosive effect on society is incalculable. Retrospective demonisation of victims, against available evidence, disorients citizens. Hannah Arendt warned about this, when she spoke of how totalitarianism mobilises drama and terror to de-centre a citizen’s sense of reality.
EMPATHY
And yet tens of millions of American citizens support ICE enthusiastically. The task of citizens who disagree is to ask: what do they fear, and what are they defending?
They fear chaos, loss of control, and deprioritisation. They see themselves as defending order in a moment of national emergency. In their frame, ICE becomes the answer, and opposing ICE is not merely misguided but evil. Where you see arbitrary abduction, they see public safety. Where you see militarised terror, they see immigration targets being met. Where you see the criminalisation of peaceful protest, they see law enforcement doing their job.
Freud, Marx and Nietzsche would approach this with suspicion. They would see destructive impulses hiding beneath positive aspiration: a division of the world into protectors and enemies, intolerance of ambiguity, and more rarely, sheer glee in causing pain.
But here is the problem. Fellow citizens do not disappear because they have been explained away by a psychological argument. Thinking that this makes them go away is itself an evasion: a refusal to accept your dependence on others who you cannot control.
This is a difficult time for US citizens. You are in my thoughts.
The only people who benefit from replacing human creativity in our communities with algorithms are the super-rich owners of AI companies that rip off artists’ work.
We're calling for urgent regulation and safeguards to ensure people and planet are put before profit.
in every single fandom there will be a point where i notice im too european for this.
everything, every discussion, every critique, every analysis is so saturated by american culture and morals and norms that i just reach a breaking point