The EU is both pro-privacy and anti-privacy. In many ways, they're ahead of the US - you can opt out of more telemetry, more advertising, more tracking. Good. But then the encryption stuff - bad.
Informed consent laws - good. Laws about third-party tracking - good. So it's some good, some bad.
But, on the topic of encryption, it's not like the US is pure here either.
It is very much not clear to me that you should have privacy from governments or cops. Aren't the whole point of the government and cops that they are the institutions we have created to entrust with this access?
Please feel free to set up a spyware on your phone that records every image you send, every text and email you write and saves all this data somewhere that you will never have access to and for an indefinite amount of time.
That is exactly what the EU is trying to do with the Chat Control law. Targeted law enforcement access to some data is not what is being discussed here.
We are talking about 24/7/365 mass surveillance without warrants and without the suspicion of any crime committed.
Bertrand Russell published a collection of essays in 1935 titled _In Praise Of Idleness_ which are well worth reading.
One of the essays is called _Between Scylla and Charybdis_ (the original rock and a hard place!) which explains why he rejects the commonly accepted idea that an intellectual should naturally be politically either a Communist or a Fascist. Remember Fascism was not a dirty word at this point; the Nazis destroyed it's legitimacy through their actions.
Anyway, if you want a better understanding read that. And the rest because they're very interesting.
You can't make China pay tariffs because it's not the exporter that pays them, it's the importer.
Tariffs in the USA are basically a tax on Americans. The aim being to make imported goods more expensive for Americans so they're more likely to buy local goods which would otherwise be more expensive than the imported version.
Assuming you are referring to The Council of Elrond, I think perhaps you're misremembering.
The only characters who speak at length at the Council are Glóin, Elrond (whose account is mostly skipped over), Boromir, Gandalf (the longest account), Aragorn, Frodo and Bilbo.
All of these are previously known characters except Boromir and he is certainly a major character. Plus they all add either new backstory about the ring or foreshadow something later, like Moria has been reoccupied and there is something evil there.
So there really isn't any information given that doesn't bear on the story at all.
Glóin is Gimli's father, but it's true that he does really only appear in that chapter (if you've not read the Hobbit, you won't know much about him). Afterwards, though, Gimli travels with the Fellowship.
Tolkien could have (and I believe in his notes he has versions) written the entire council, but he elides the parts that are "told elsewhere" - Bilbo, much of Gandalf and Elrond, and anything directly already told of the Hobbits.
> He was considered crazy in his time, disliked by most.
Where did you get that from? As far as I know he was widely respected as a genius in his time and had great professional and social success (including receiving a knighthood of course).
Where is it written that he was considered crazy and disliked?
Anti government folk from the USA hated them and decided they were government overreach.
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