581–590 of 947 posts
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The sheer optimism of posting this as an American right now...
our rights have largely held up even in the absurd world we live in, and the constitution continues to be a thorn on the side of those trying to abridge them. what we are seeing now is the conclusion of decades of eroding our rights and the tower still refuses to topple. though of course we're going to have a lot of work to do fixing it up after all is said and done.
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The revised law not passing until it gets a majority would seem more democratic.
So is it undemocratic if a law is voted on by a majority and doesn’t pass because the law says it takes 3/4 to make that type of change?
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I think I'm one of those to whom you refer (except that I'm already "awake", or at least I like to think so). I'm normally pro-EU but this chat control is anathema to me. I'll be voting anti-EU in future I think.
Yeah, this is also a step too far for me. The EU has also done good things, like GDPR, right to repair, fining big tech again and again ... but it rarely follows up as much as it needs to. The problem is though, that countries in the EU by themselves are economically not powerful enough, to hold up any ethical values against the giants US and China. So we need some alternative to the EU, some other union, that at lea…
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>This is a nice piece of democracy right here: this is just eu in a nutshell, the irish were made to vote on both nice and lisbon treaties twice (both were voted no in the first vote)
Any time now even the most pro-european EU defender will realise that what was once a trade union has slowly transformed itself into an undemocratic, bureaucratic monster.
That said - i was obviously wrong.
I don't really know what else to say than : this breaks a fundamental foundation of privacy. Sure i was never 100% aligned with EU level decisions (neither with my residing country one's) but that's just... wrong on so many levels... how can i even still argue to people that EU and democracy are good if this is what its heading for?
Usually i try to explain stuff with common grounds, the bigger picture or whatever is fitting. You can't have everyone happy on every decision.
But at this point im lost of arguments. They just betrayed every citizen from my pov.
So whats my point of this comment? Maybe i need to vent in an environment where i think people might get how bad this actually is, since people IRL around me don't seem to remotly understand the impact....
This is a nice piece of democracy right here: "a measure it had rejected twice in March. Although a majority of voting Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) actually opposed the regulation (314 against, 276 in favor, 17 abstentions), the motion to reject it failed to secure the required absolute majority of 361 votes. As a result, mass scanning is now permitted again until 2028." "Oh no we can't get a majority to…
Honest question: when Europeans give so much power to EU and usually favor regulations by the government, isn't it natural that the government will try to implement more control? And it looks EU officials do not have to accountable for anything. They will not suffer personally even when their policies wreck havoc. I don't quite understand why Europeans can trust EU at all. Case in point, EU HQs shut down its air cond…
Trust in the EU is at its highest in 18 years
'52% of Europeans trust the EU, the highest result since 2007. The level of trust is highest among young people aged 15-24 (59%). Setting another 18-year record, 52% of Europeans say they trust the European Commission, with scoring again particularly high among young citizens (57%). At the same time, 36% of Europeans say they trust their national government and 37% say they trust their national parliament.Three quarters of respondents (75%) - the highest level in more than two decades - say they feelthey are citizens of the EU.'
On the other hand look at who issued this report. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/api/files/docume...
The defence against this is widespread truly peer to peer messaging services, where there is no company at the middle to tell you add backdoors. Who is working on that? I suspect the main challenge is not technical, but human - persuading users to switch messenger apps is almost impossible.
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That's why you have a constitution with rights that are not up for vote. Even relying on people to vote no is not enough.
I'm not sure any country actually has a Constitution with rights that are not up for a vote. There is generally a separate, harder procedure for changing the "basic law" or Constitution of a country -- for example, 2/3 of delegates or a 2/3 of states or something of that nature -- but I'd be surprised if there's a country where they have literally no way to change it at all.