>Society has started to see sexual freedom and expression as grotesque

When has it been not grotesque? It's just that “American” “norms” are actually starting to “progress” to the mean.

No state is representative of the whole US population. Don't think the US is a united whole.

What's stopping people from changing it?

Almost all the world doesn't care about any of that when it comes to external behaviour.

There's incredible amount of misplaced belief on HN that every HN reader considers the US government friendly.

I didn't say the US government was friendly, and I certainly don't think that either. But if we're talking about social networks surveilling people in the US, the US government doing it is bad and an adversarial foreign government doing it is worse.

Balkanizing the internet sounds great, honestly.

I think the CLOUD Acts essentially make them proxies of the state.

“American” is a granfalloon.

that's a big and messy bag of worms and given the contextual ambiguity I'm having a hard time agreeing or disagreeing with any conviction, although I do agree American identity is in many of its deployments a pretty empty concept

is there anything in particular about my comment that makes you say so?

I really hope this doesn't become the standard for new Linux desktop users.