261–270 of 330 posts
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I wish there was a way for EU citizens to punish the council this behaviour. Sadly, there doesn't seem to be anything in place for that.
You can vote for a different president/prime minister.
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Most people are just concerned about economic and social issues, and the implications this proposal has on freedom of speech and what that means to democracy seems to be unknown to most. In Portugal, this proposal was not debated nor was it present on most parties' electoral agendas. Furthermore, I got no replies from the MEP candidates I emailed about their opinion on chatcontrol. Even if I wanted to vote accordingl…
this specific proposal had the benefit of already having had votes on it, so you could've probably found the parties' voting records there. But yeah, there's a broader issue with how european politics is approached since it is always so nationalized that these kind of votes end up as referendums on the national government, which in turn breeds ignorance of what the EU is responsible for and for what it isn't which fe…
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An issue is that what US people mean when they say "socialism" is not what EU people understand at all. US people typically don't see the difference between communism and socialism. From an EU point of view, US people see everything that is not right or far right as "the bad guys in Marvel comics".
What is the difference between socialism and communism, then? If you listen to Leninists, 'communism' is the ultimate form of 'socialism' but really that was created because Russia's industry was judged too undeveloped to achieve what Marx described. But there is no meaningful systemic difference. I think "EU people" know that very well, including from experience. What's happened is that most "socialist" parties have…
It's a bit like the difference between "liberal" and "libertarian". It is a gradient.
Socialism is a more global term that includes communism. Communism wants to remove social classes and the notion of state. But there are ways of being socialist in a democratic state.
It is a gradient, you can be more or less extreme. Communism is a pretty extreme notion of socialism.
Some EU countries are more "social", i.e. the socialist parties are strong and society is organized in a much, much social way than the US. But US people have this tendency to think that either you are libertarian, or you are communist.
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thing is, this chat control will not help. Criminals will use illegal tools while all the rest of the population will be subject to gov investigation (including monitoring political adversaries). And that's one thing - if the system is wrongly implemented, this backdoor could be accessed by 3'rd parties/hackers and at that point it would be a clown show. Unrestricted social media is another problem that should be sol…
It will help. Just as any system that has trade-offs. So much of human existence would be much simpler and happier if we didn't have to build systems to control crime and bad behavior. Is it a system I want? No. I think there are better options. Do I see people in this thread proposing any better options? No. So the default seems to be Orwellian as everyone is too dismissive, arrogant and lazy.
I am, indeed dismissive. I don't believe any crime justifies mass surveillance. Client-side scanning in all public chat apps cannot be described any other way. I am therefore opposed to it without any room for subtlety.
That does not mean I don't care about child abuse. If someone wants to propose more funding for law enforcement to investigate crimes against children and additional resources to support victims, I'm all for it.
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That's just because you don't understand what "socialism" means. Maybe you meant communism? It would still be debatable, but not completely wrong.
What is wrong about the means of production being under social ownership in socialism? Yes, socialism allows also some private property and there is spectrum of how much it is a planned economy but social ownership of the means of production is a central component of socialism.
For instance, saying that public transportation should be public (i.e. belong to the state) does not mean that the state is authoritarian. You can have more moderate forms of socialism.
I find it interesting that the Wikipedia articles are pretty different in different languages. In French it is much more moderate than in English, for instance: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialisme.
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If this issue got put to a straight referendum, and won >80% of the vote, would it then be democratic?
See my earlier comment. This is simple stuff. Are you guys being disingenuous?
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I don't think this discussion is happening against people's wishes. I think people outside of tech (99% of people) are far more likely to support such a law. You may argue that this is due to them not being sufficiently informed, but that's not to be blamed on representative democracy.
Are you saying that most people are likely to support this, or that people actually demanded it? No one asked for this law, but you can convince the populace a posteriori that this is good for them, certainly. It's all part of the game. The fact that the hoi polloi can be easily persuaded in any direction is not a reason for the people in power to do whatever the f they want with our rights, hiding beneath the banner…
I think there are only two groups of people who still care about this:
- Tech people who are willing to give up QoL to cling to privacy-respecting alternatives. (People like us.) These people are a tiny minority which would be irrelevant in any democratic system.
- Old people who haven't yet arrived in the digital age. These are also a minority, and keep becoming fewer.
I think the vast majority of people have fully accepted constant surveillance of their digital activity by companies (and therefore governments) as simply the way things are.
To these people, this law is a benefit to security with zero tradeoff.
Normal people have no online privacy whatsoever anyway.
And only evil people would use encryption and anonymization, right?
(Tangent 1: Goverments could educate people in a representative democracy, too. People could also use the educational material readily available. But I think most people don't want to be educated on the majority of topics.)
(Tangent 2: I don't think direct democracy is a good system. I think that the vast majority of people (including me) are incapable of making good laws. I believe only a trained professional, aka a politician, is capable of understanding and predicting all the possible long term effects a law, such as e.g. a trade deal, can have. I certainly cannot.)
(ETA: I would go so far as to say that this law being controversially debated is the result of representative democracy working well. I'd claim that in a direct democracy it could easily get passed without much scrutiny.)
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You can vote for a different president/prime minister.
Sure, I can vote people into office, and after their tenure they disappear. But I can't vote their incompetent arses out of offices or prevent them from ever getting elected again when they display blatant disregard for human rights.
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I dunno how you drink out of a bottle, but I most certainly don't deep throat it to have its neck in my mouth. Please enlighten me how it would make it impossible to "drink properly" when the bottle is flipped beyond the neck.
Tetrapack milk packages have some sort of a "roof" on top. The opening is on one of the sides of the roof. It is hard to drink from that anyway, now additionally the cap is pressing against the lips.
You don't have to "deep throat" a water bottle either to feel the effect. The cap always disturbs.
It is also ugly of you have water bottles on a dinner table with the cap hanging on the side.
It is also harder to screw the cap back on.
But like in the EU, criticism here can just be flagged and then it never happened.
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There is: stop electing the people that make these decisions in positions that can land them in the EU Council.
I wish that we had this possibility, but here in France the bad political parties have strong regulatory barriers to prevent independent and need comers to be candidate or have a chance to be president and sometimes parlement members...