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Undermining Democracy: The EU Commission's Controversial Push for Surveillance

dannymekic.com

21–30 of 386 posts

Re: Undermining Democracy: The EU Commission's Controversial Push for Surveillance

#21
post #6
post #2

How are there not riots in the EU right now?

EU is a shit show of corruption and oppression. If people would riot for every atrocious thing EU does there would not be time for anything else.

Where or how are people oppressed in the EU?

Re: Undermining Democracy: The EU Commission's Controversial Push for Surveillance

#22

The title should be shortened from "Undermining Democracy: The European Commission's Controversial Push for Digital Surveillance" simply to: "Undermining Democracy: The European Commission" . The EC is sheer horror. The thousands of years old saying: "The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the state" has never been truer. I've done a short consulting gig at the European Parliament, which at least tries to be th…

It seems like over the past 10 years there has been a global retreat from freedom and democracy.

China is returning to at least a superficially softer version of Maoism. Russia has returned to Stalinism. The Middle East never had much of a liberal tradition but it’s certainly not gained any ground. The US is flirting with populist strong man rule with Trump and RFK. South America seems to keep oscillating between authoritarian socialism and their own forms of right wing strong man rule. Not sure about Africa but from afar it still seems dominated by strong men or illiberal theocratic states.

The UK and EU felt like an exception but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Both are trending toward undemocratic bureaucracies in service to either the bureaucracy itself or the powerful.

Surveillance is everywhere and is barely challenged. After all we get cute videos on social media and apparently cute videos are more important than freedom or human rights.

One problem might be that we teach everyone about the dangers of fanatical explosive totalitarian movements like Hitlerism and Stalinism but not enough about “softer” creeping authoritarianism that is less easy to identify or oppose. Both are a risk but the strong man cult type is easier to mobilize people against.

Re: Undermining Democracy: The EU Commission's Controversial Push for Surveillance

#23
Its just me that thinks there is something really wrong with the way politicians try to pass such controversial laws?

Politicians bring up something controversial. Most of the time influenced by some lobby with very little interest in public benefit.

To combat this lots of people need to do activism. Those people need to devote your time and energy to prevent such thing.

So far it sounds good but after the dust settles the same politicians and lobbysts bring the thing again this time with another name or sneakily group it into some other law. Perhaps something bad happened and that momentarily gained public support, of course with lots of emotions involved and very little context given to the common folk.

The politicians and lobbyists are literally being paid for this. You are not. They can pretty much push the same bullshit forever until it stays while you are devoting your life to prevent it.

Re: Undermining Democracy: The EU Commission's Controversial Push for Surveillance

#24
post #11

The EU and the West are over-playing their hands with this in my opinion. They'll get burned by this at some point, at which point it'll be too late; and maybe then they'll recognize that the reason they have had such control was just the fact they were first. Not some universal physics law that such companies can only exist in the Western sphere. The recent Middle-East events had some troubling intervention (in Twit…

They want to overplay their hand.

An oppressive internet that they can bully, works for them.

An internet that withdraws into itself and the EU returns to pen and paper + dumb phones works for them.

The US is all on this. As long as the US owns the internet and big tech, they are happy to let other countries do the dirty work of setting boundaries.

The long term solution is to 'manualize' tech. Make all tech we touch, open and ready to modify, run at full capacity and be easily controlled by a single man.

The only way to keep tech free, is to take it out of the System's hands and put it into the hands of the average joe, for his control.

And feed the machines silence.

Re: Undermining Democracy: The EU Commission's Controversial Push for Surveillance

#25
That is so awful, Britain is trying on this sort of thing too saying it is to protect children. However they don't try and support citizen organiztions that do a good job there, and have been involved in actions showing it is much lower priority than control. Has anyone ever done a study even of how much benefit it would have in countering paedophiles even ignoring any loss from the general control freakery and general loss of freedom? I think it would be quite ineffective compared to the citizen organizations countering paedophilia. It's just trying to emulate China in conttrolling the population.

Re: Undermining Democracy: The EU Commission's Controversial Push for Surveillance

#26
post #18

The title should be shortened from "Undermining Democracy: The European Commission's Controversial Push for Digital Surveillance" simply to: "Undermining Democracy: The European Commission" . The EC is sheer horror. The thousands of years old saying: "The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the state" has never been truer. I've done a short consulting gig at the European Parliament, which at least tries to be th…

> The thousands of years old saying: "The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the state" has never been truer Can you tell me what is the correct number of laws? What's your threshold? And what happens when a new thing appears / enters the mainstream, do you have to remove an old law first before creating a new one? As a concrete example, LLMs and how they relate to copyright and image rights. Should we have to…

> As a concrete example, LLMs and how they relate to copyright and image rights.

Why the heck is any new law needed at all for copyright? The only accusation is that LLMs did not respect current copyright laws, not that the current copyright law is insufficient. Specifically, there was a commonly used corpus of pirated copyright material (books3) that was used to train many LLMS. Its hosting was withdrawn when challenged by copyright holders. That's the system working as intended.

Re: Undermining Democracy: The EU Commission's Controversial Push for Surveillance

#27
post #8

The title should be shortened from "Undermining Democracy: The European Commission's Controversial Push for Digital Surveillance" simply to: "Undermining Democracy: The European Commission" . The EC is sheer horror. The thousands of years old saying: "The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the state" has never been truer. I've done a short consulting gig at the European Parliament, which at least tries to be th…

Haha, sure, it’s real invigilation terror over here in Europe. We all just want to escape this tyrannical dictatorship. But, the European Parliament is against this legislation, and for the moment it’s not passing.

> We all just want to escape this tyrannical dictatorship.

some of us have managed to, it is possible

> But, the European Parliament is against this legislation, and for the moment it’s not passing.

it will eventually, it always does

Re: Undermining Democracy: The EU Commission's Controversial Push for Surveillance

#29
post #2

How are there not riots in the EU right now?

Because they've been boiling the frog for 20 years.

This one might not pass today but in 5-10 years we'll likely just be fine with it if the narrative continues to evolve on its current trajectory.

Re: Undermining Democracy: The EU Commission's Controversial Push for Surveillance

#30
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EU is a shit show of corruption and oppression. If people would riot for every atrocious thing EU does there would not be time for anything else.

Where or how are people oppressed in the EU?

[link I was referring to has been deleted by the original author]
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