Posted by amarcheschi 12 hours ago
I highly doubt they have given up here too
https://howtheyvote.eu/votes/189270
Just pointing this out because yesterday there was the myth around that "chat control is pushed by the conservatives", obscuring the actual political dynamics in the EU about it.
EPP wanted indiscriminate scanning instead, not targeted one.
Mass surveillance isn't really a question that projects well onto the left-right scale, and attempting to make it fit a left-right question is more likely to distract than provide a useful understanding.
While your examples were on the economic left, they were clearly authoritarian.
And they will try again tomorrow. Until it passes.
> Also compared to whom?
Why compare? The fact that there are worse regimes than the EU doesn't make the EU even a single bit better. Lesser evil is still evil. Let us strive for good.
You're inverting roles here.
Just look at the UK and how crazy they've gone now that the EU can't shoot their ideas down anymore.
... I mean this is how all parliamentary systems work. It's more _visible_ in the EU than in others, I think, because the council/commission are more willing to put forward things that they don't really think the parliament will go for (in many parliamentary systems, realistically the executive will be reluctant to put forward stuff where they think they'll lose the vote in parliament).
But there's not really a huge difference; it would just be _quieter_ in most parliamentary systems, and you wouldn't really hear anything about it until the executive had their votes in place, brought it forward, and passed it. I actually kind of prefer the EU system, in that it tends to happen more out in the open, which allows for public comment. And public comment and pressure is a huge deal for this sort of thing; most parliamentarians, on things they don't understand, will vote whatever way their party is voting. But if it becomes clear that their constituents care about it, they may actually have to think about it, and that's half the battle.
Once laws are passed they aren't revoked. So it's just a matter of political climate. Just wait for people to get a little more negative, a little more paranoid (which has historically been "helped along" in various ways)-- a law only needs to pass once, and then we're stuck with some stupid bullshit forever.
It doesn't really seem like how you'd want to design it.
And not being able to deny the Holocaust doesn't mean you don't have free speech
You can see it the other way around, without the EU, Denmark and others would have already implemented ChatControl in their country. This is driven by member states (Denmark), not the parliament, after all.
With the former approach, every country is allowed to try different things, some amazing, some dumb, and learn from the amazing and dumb things that others have done.
In the latter, there's only one governing body, and whatever that body said, goes. There's no science or statistics, just sides shouting their arguments at each other, calling people names.
Both the EU and the US used to heavily lean towards the former approach, but they're slowly but inexorably moving towards the latter.
There are many reasons to abolish the EU, but the topic here is chat control.
> You can see it the other way around, without the EU, Denmark and others would have already implemented ChatControl in their country. This is driven by member states (Denmark), not the parliament, after all.
Would they? We don't know. Would the government of Denmark be ready to commit political suicide by insisting again and again on something so unpopular?
The whole premise of the EU is to allow various unelected interest groups to push unpopular regulation to the EU member states without any consequences.
> insisting again and again on something so unpopular?
Didn't the UK do exactly this?
> directly elect some kind of president
We do not need a president with over-powers, and electing directly one does not solve anything for democracy, as the recent history in countries like the US and France shows. The point of directly electing a president is giving that role more power. The current structure in the EU is not so much president-centric either executive or legislative wise, but more like comission-centric, which is what imo has the biggest problem in terms of democracy in the EU.
They do.
> directly elect some kind of president
I get the impression you're coming at it from a US perspective, and it's not that, and doesn't intend to be for now. The president is elected by majority of the MP's who have been elected by the people of their respective countries. Almost like the US electorial system, except it's done internally because people generally only vote for their own best interests and not that of the entirety.
Perfect, no, it can be slow and a lot of red tape, but what system isn't flawed.
Many EU nations are not presidential, and personally I prefer parliamentary republics than presidential ones.
give everyone half a dozen votes or more, and and you'll get a more representative sample.
for example instead of electing a president, elect a while leadership team. independent of party affiliation. (i'd get rid of parties completely while we are at it, every candidate should be independent (the expanded version of that gets even rid of candidates, every adult can potentially be elected, but that is a more complex system that needs more elaboration))
It's like on the Apollo missions where some parts were made by two completely different manufacturers and worked completely differently.
Hybrid political systems are best. Of course if we like democracy (and most people do), then that should be the most common kind of component. But I'd still like to have some different paradigms mixed into the system. And that's exactly what most modern constitutions do, for better or for worse.
Maybe also a 3rd chamber, where the weight of your vote was proportional to IQ (much more palatable in EU than US).
Why exclude teachers from picking the education minister? If we're restricting votes, shouldn't they be the only ones doing so instead?
...
We do? What did you think the European Parliament elections every four years were for?
> directly elect some kind of president.
Why? Nowhere in Western Europe except very arguably France (France, as always, has to be a bit weird about everything, and has a hybrid system) has a directly elected executive. True executive presidential systems are only really a thing in the Americas and Africa (plus Russia, these days).
Like, in terms of big countries with a true executive presidency, you’re basically looking at the US, Russia and Brazil. I’m, er, not sure we should be modeling ourselves on those paragons of democracy.
> They have no accountability, no checks and balances.
The parliament has the same accountability and checks and balances as any national parliament, more or less (more than some, as the ECJ is more effective and independent than many national supreme courts).
Probably it is not taught as part of the curriculum in Russia.
imagine system where we directly elect the whole cabinet. only people with electoral approval should get to be ministers. and the prime ministers or presidents job is to only manage that group.
Generally, a prime minister is less powerful than an executive president, often much less powerful.
> and the prime ministers or presidents job is to only manage that group.
On the face of it, that is the PM's primary role in a parliamentary democracy. Now, the complication is that, in many parliamentary systems, the PM has significant power over the ministers (either via the ability to directly appoint them, or via being the head of the ruling party/coalition/or various other means). But generally, the PM is less powerful in nearly all systems than, say, the US president; in particular the finance minister is often a separate semi-independent power within the cabinet.
You're missing a [citation needed] on that.
How is that an EU problem? Without the EU, like here in the UK, we had non-elected lobbyists pressuring our elected government to implement age checks, message scanning, etc. And it is still continuing.
You're fighting the wrong fight by blaming the EU for this.
EU has checks and balances that were intended for a trade union, not a nascent superstate. If we don't implement proper checks and balances in a real fucking hurry, we'll wake up one morning and realize the EU has turned into another Soviet union, and by then it'll be far too late to do anything about it.
If accountability is to work, it has to be more than an abstract theoretical possibility.
Even if there was an option in the national elections that didn't want this stuff, convincing a majority of voters to disregard national politics for an election cycle to have an imperceptibly small impact on the council members is such an unlikely outcome the council or comission would de facto be committing genocides before voters would be mobilized, and even then it's unlikely they'd face any repercussions.
And no, this isn't dog whistling violence. It is simply applying signal. The only other message I can think of is engaging an investigative journalist/PI and starting to figure out who is lobbying the person, and start pressuring them.
Why do you keep lying?
They keep getting away with these attrition tactics with regards to implementing near Stasi levels communication surveillance. What about the day they're pushing to give the council unlimited powers, or to abolish voting rights, or to purge jews?
If the EU were to not exist, your representatives in the Council/Commission (e.g. your national government) would be more powerful because they wouldn't be checked by the Parliament, not less.
Your problem is with your government, they just successfully deflected it to the EU in your mind.
Again, why are you aggressively lying here? Why are you misrepresenting workings of EU despite them following every single democracy out there?
Also - wasn’t this program voluntary? This seems like the height of backslapping. Would have been better if they just sat on their hands and did nothing in the first place.
You described 95% of EU's work.
This gave companies permission to do things which would ordinarily be illegal under the ePrivacy directive, but did not make it mandatory for them to do so. That permission is now revoked (or will be when the derogation they were trying to extend expires in two weeks).