EU Parliament greenlights Chat Control 1.0

> What am I missing?

Nothing really.

Some will disagree with this, but this is neither new or surprising behaviour from the EU. In the EU if the political class want something, it doesn't really matter what the public want or vote for.

In the US a lot of your dysfunction is from the fact that your political system actually "works". You maniacs actually can vote for someone like Trump (twice), and he can do stuff regardless of how unpopular he is among the political class.

Here in Europe things like democracy and freedom of speech are only permitted if our political class approves. We can decide things like tax rates, but some things we're not allowed to express opinions on, and some things we have no power to vote for or against.

With some exceptions most European democracies work like this and EU is really the gold standard of this system. They have lots of ways to do what they want regardless of how popular it is, and regardless of what the opinions of our elected representatives are.

Then we agree that it's not unreasonable for me to feel confident I am unlikely to get arrested in the US over a social media post than in the UK, which is the whole point I was making all along.

Nuclear and Coal. What an optimistic nation. Both are coming back I think.

> It really boils down to people just not wanting brown faces in 'their' streets.

Its similar to Trumpism in that sense, if you ask afd voters for example they will talk about migration and crime. Must all be racists. The mainstream discourse ends there.

From a leftist pov I think its the dissatisfaction in the cartel party that makes this scapegoating popular in the first place. There are many meaningful ways that peoples material conditions are worsening, which is ignored by the establishment, then a new party comes along and blames it all on migrants. The fact the afd calls itself "alternative" is telling perhaps, it directly challenges the neoliberal "there is no alternative" (Thatcher) / "alternativlos" (Merkel) doctrine.

Germany almost 4x its defense spending, they spend hundreds of billions on defense while cutting social and infrastructure spending. Germany has neolib austerity literally written into their constitution since 2009 (debt break), interestingly the afd voters believe the inverse, that the german government has been over-spending for decades and there is no austerity which they actually want. But they also believe the cdu are leftists so there is that, just shit in their brains at the end of the day so how do you really make sense of it?

Yeah, right, this is just complete bullshit. Let's just put it this way: so, given that you more aware than "most people", did you at least vote against those who support it, and did you try to persuade your friends to do that, but they just didn't listen?

I really don't feel like I can affect anything at all. First of all, even if we assume for the sake of argument that voting for MEPs is important, it's really hard to judge what you are voting for. It's not like they come with clear agendas that people carefully evaluate before they decide how to vote. It's a long running joke how USA elections are choosing between "a giant douche and a turd sandwich", and whatever you choose doesn't even matter because they won't keep their promises, but, hey, at least everyone knows their promises. This one is blue, that one is red, both will let you down in the end, but you kinda know what their general vibe is. Voting for MEPs on the other hand — they are all kinda grey and I couldn't tell you how'd they vote on this particular issue. Depends on your country, but in my case many of them simply weren't MEPs on 2023 vote. And I'm kinda surprised by some of the choices.

Second, I don't really feel that MEPs are that important. They impact almost nothing. All real work is done behind the closed doors by some unknown people, and half of them all happen to be Maltese for some reason (0.1% of EU population, by the way). Parliament in the majority of cases just votes "for all good things and against all bad things" and the actual things that will come to haunt us are usually some small details in the Appendix that were never even explicitly put on the vote.

And when MEP's vote does matter, well, we get something like in this case. The majority objected, but that doesn't matter.

By the way, a couple of years ago I was asking myself, how could it be that we choose von der Leyen to be the President of EC? Well, I don't think we ever did. I surely didn't. MEPs barely did. Never once in all of the history EP rejected a candidate proposed by Council. Whatever each member of the Council did we'll never know, this is not disclosed. And to add the cherry on top, in this particular case it was a record number of MEPs who actually voted against her. It doesn't matter. Here we all are.