| ▲ | belowavgiq 3 hours ago |
| "The procedure now chosen gives the proponents of Chat Control a significant tactical advantage. Since the law is in its second reading, an absolute majority of 361 votes of all parliament members is required for amendments or a renewed rejection on Thursday. In contrast, a simple majority of the MEPs present is sufficient for the other side. As many parliamentarians have historically already departed by the last day before the summer break, the re-enactment of the regulation is considered almost unavoidable." So, if I'm reading this correctly, Chat Control is bound to become law? and this is after I think 2/3 rejections, how democratic of the EU. Oh, and parliamentarians starting their summer break whenever they want will never not be funny. |
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| ▲ | ur-whale 14 minutes ago | parent | next [-] |
| > how democratic of the EU. Really, it's not the first time the EU pulls that kind of shite off. And summertime is the perfect time, in Europe everyone's at the beach. They even managed to find a work around an actual referendum. |
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| ▲ | dgellow 12 minutes ago | parent [-] | | It’s the council. We have to be clear which institution we are talking about within the EU, otherwise that doesn’t make any sense. The European Parliament already pushed back that proposal. The EU is made of a lot of different actors with their own agenda. Here the council, with the help of the EPP party is doing that undemocratic maneuvering: They made it on purpose so that the parliament is unlikely to be able to push back a third time (all of that leaked a few days ago) |
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| ▲ | Balinares 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > So, if I'm reading this correctly, Chat Control [2.0, implied] is bound to become law? Nope. This is bad, but not THAT bad. This is an extension of the existing Chat Control 1.0, which was set to expire (or maybe already has, I didn't keep track). AIUI it gives chat companies permission to scan user chats for illicit content, but does not mandate it. This is bad, but it's not the much worse still Chat Control 2.0 that was defeated several times already. |
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| ▲ | an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | belowavgiq 43 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Thanks for the correction! I guess I can live with that. | | |
| ▲ | MaxikCZ 24 minutes ago | parent [-] | | yes. Frog will be boiled tomorrow, no need to panic today. | | |
| ▲ | order-matters 13 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I think their point is that you lose some battles in a war, chat Control 1.0 is a battle that was already lost. While it is still worthwhile to make an effort to retake lost ground there, that can be done strategically and through habitual effort and does not demand immediate attention the same way an imminent threat of losing new ground would be | | |
| ▲ | dgellow 8 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > chat Control 1.0 is a battle that was already lost That’s not true, the previous instance of it expired, and the parliament rejected it. It wasn’t already lost, it was actually a win for people against the proposal |
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| ▲ | delusional 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > or maybe already has, I didn't keep track Literally second paragraph. > to reinstate the transitional regulation for Chat Control, which expired in April |
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| ▲ | raverbashing 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 1 - this is about Chat Control 1.0 2 - The vote was on the "Urgency requirement" > parliamentarians starting their summer break whenever they want will never not be funny Eh. This is the least problematic thing here. Some MEPs might just be on official PTO. |
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| ▲ | procaryote an hour ago | parent [-] | | The voting dynamics changing beacause elected representatives can't plan their vacations like any regular work place is pretty silly |
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| ▲ | an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | skeptic_ai 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | khurs 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | One of reasons the the EU exists is so domestic prime ministers can deflect blame and say "not me, it was them over there in the EU parliament and my hands are tied" | | |
| ▲ | wongarsu 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | That's the British approach In Germany it's usually the other way around: the EU tries to force us to do objectively good things, while national and regional governments drag their feet implementing EU law or complying with regulations. We regularly have headlines about how we might have to pay fines to the EU, and every time it's for something where the EU seems clearly on the morally right side And all that despite our government's best efforts to send their worst politicians to represent us in the EU. Describing von der Leyen as a disgraced politician who just failed upwards would not be entirely inaccurate | | |
| ▲ | khurs 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | "In Germany it's usually the other way around:" Germany is one of most wealthy, powerful and biggest contributors to the EU budget. They can't be bullied round easily. "We regularly have headlines about how we might have to pay fines to the EU" The state controls the media... a lot of headlines are orchestrated. But it is done so well, unless you know, you don't know... Where Germany doesn't agree, it has sway. Where Germany and France don't agree, it is unlikely, and where Germany, France and Italy don't agree it's not going to happen as some countries matter more than others. | | |
| ▲ | wongarsu 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Sure, but all of those used to be true of the UK too back when they were in the EU, and yet they had the good cop/bad cop roles swapped compared to Germany |
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| ▲ | miroljub 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The EU is a dictatorship for some time already. The fact they push and push and push unpopular laws until they push them through is all you need to know about them. They sneaked this atrocity in while all the EU-controlled media hype the football championship and blame Trump and FIFA boss Infantino for overriding a decision on whether a single player will play a single game or not. |
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| ▲ | chrystalkey 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You have apparently no idea what an actual dictatorship is | | |
| ▲ | mikestorrent 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It's mostly a lack of properly descriptive words in the language. I think "totalitarian liberalism" or the "managerial state" is probably closer to what we're talking about here. Power is not concentrated in one individual; responsibility and accountability are diffused so far that it is impossible to find someone who actually can do or change anything. "Rational systems" of business process and rigour serve to remove individual wisdom and intuition from the equation entirely. Adding AI on top of this will probably only further entrench it - walls of words protecting people from really improving anything meaningfully. In some ways, the concentration of power in a dictatorship might be better, if the dictator was well morally aligned with the people. Trouble is, the people are seldom even morally aligned with each other in a unified way, so a dictator cannot easily represent their conflicting interests. Representative democracy does at least take a step towards solving that issue. | | |
| ▲ | jerkstate 15 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | > In some ways, the concentration of power in a dictatorship might be better, if the dictator was well morally aligned with the people. This is pretty much the exact argument that Hayek makes - socialism leads to fascism through political gridlock. | |
| ▲ | BiteCode_dev 5 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's not, not everything need to be a single word, because the world is full of nuances. Calling everything fascist, nazis, communists, etc. is making actual fascism, nazism and dictatorship more likely. Because you can't raise the attention of people to the absolute priority those needs when the time come if you just wasted it on stuff that were not it again and again. We are crying wolf, and we'll pay the price. |
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| ▲ | 73738384 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The European Comission is the top decision maker of the EU. The European citizen has zero (0) influence on the members or actions of the EC. No different than the politburo in China. | | |
| ▲ | iamnothere 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It is slightly different than China, China has implemented hotlines/apps for citizen complaints in response to social pressure, and it actually attempts to address those complaints. | | |
| ▲ | iknowstuff an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/index_en | | |
| ▲ | iamnothere 44 minutes ago | parent [-] | | This is for proposing legislation, not fixing local quality of life issues, and the success rate has been rather poor. China’s system has a broad scale, but is directed at local problems and has a very high success rate. As I understand it, many of the issues faced by petitioners in the past were due to local corruption; officials would physically prevent petitioners from traveling to the petition office to deliver a complaint. The new systems (12345, 12388, and the apps) are intended to bypass that and have done a decent job at reducing corruption. The Citizen’s Initiative is more of a referendum system for proposing bills, but due to its non-binding nature those bills are often ignored. China’s system doesn’t necessarily bind the government to action either, but given the small scale of the problems they are motivated to fix them. This does not excuse China’s human rights abuses, but if you’re going to be abused either way, I can see why some would prefer to do it in a place with a rising standard of living and with a government that seems interested in improving. |
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| ▲ | jason1cho an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | While you can use the hotline in private, you can't object to any matter in public. | | |
| ▲ | iamnothere 32 minutes ago | parent [-] | | From what I can tell, there are many issues that aren’t off limits to criticize on Chinese social media. In fact, recurring social media complaints are what spurred development of the hotline system. It’s mainly complaints that are considered sensitive or destabilizing that are suppressed. This should sound familiar to those of us in the West. Germany actually goes farther by directly funding left-wing protest groups, as these are not considered destabilizing. |
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| ▲ | pigpop 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Given a choice between China and the EU at this point I would choose to live in China. | | |
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| ▲ | onraglanroad 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Apart from the fact it can't make decisions. It can only propose; the decision is made by the EU parliament. | |
| ▲ | raverbashing 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > The European citizen has zero (0) influence on the members or actions of the EC Whenever one reads EC you need to read: "All of the heads of state in a trenchcoat". Macron, Merz, etc And yet this is an EP maneuver And let's not forget on the American lobbyists pushing for it (Including Big Tech) | | |
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| ▲ | shevy-java 28 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | No, I think the term applies very well. That there are worse dictatorships does not really nullify the statement. Even "democracies" have death penalties and commit to genocide. See the USA as an example here. One can always reason that there are worse countries in this regard - nobody rejects that either. We need to have a much more nuanced view on democracy. The EU presently is not one. | | |
| ▲ | Calazon 16 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | If the decision-makers are elected by the people, it's not a dictatorship, no matter how many atrocities the nation commits. You can have some gray area I guess, with unfair elections or whatever, but when the bad decisions are made by leaders who keep on getting re-elected in reasonably fair elections, we do not have a dictatorship. | |
| ▲ | phainopepla2 21 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | What relationship does the death penalty and genocide have to democracy (or lack thereof)? That seems orthogonal to the definition. |
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| ▲ | skeptic_ai 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Tell me the difference please. Which country we compare to? | | |
| ▲ | nuka_coffee 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | A dictatorship has a dictator. Who doesn't know that? | | |
| ▲ | aaomidi 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | TBH modern dictatorships are a lot less obvious in the way you describing. There are dictatorships, where a very select few people have absolute power, but there’s no visible dictator. Iran is a country like this. There’s no visible dictator. It’s a game of power between the clergy, the military, and the civil government. | | |
| ▲ | wongarsu 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Those are more like aristocracies or oligarchies than dictatorships though. Though maybe those are not the best descriptions of Iran either |
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| ▲ | miroljub 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I suppose you know? Now go enlighten us on how the EU is super democratic and way better than the worst dictatorship that ever existed, so we may be happy we are not the worst. | | |
| ▲ | Lio an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | > Now go enlighten us on how the EU is super democratic and way better than the worst dictatorship that ever existed, so we may be happy we are not the worst. Well they're not rounding people because of their religion or sexuality and putting them in "retraining" camps yet. Or using "criminals" as enforced organ donors. I suppose there's that. The EU is being a bit short-sighted and shit with regard to Chat Control but let's not loose perspective here. | | |
| ▲ | atmosx 34 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | > Well they're not rounding people because of their religion or sexuality and putting them in "retraining" camps yet. Right. They pay Turkey to do that: https://www.rescue.org/eu/article/what-eu-turkey-deal I don’t think the EU is a classic dictatorship, but it’s a colossal failure nonetheless, has a severe lack of democracy and acceptance. And their personnel is mediocre, not like the US administration but it’s closer than ppl in this forum realize. | |
| ▲ | spwa4 26 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | And you don't see the problem with allowing processes like this just before the extreme right might gain control of the French presidency AND gets a shot at the German chancillary (even if, yes, it's likely to fail)? The ability to make laws for the entire EU, overriding popular opinion ... You really have trouble imagining what this could lead to? https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c70yk5xjyl1t https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/germany/ (the biggest party gets first shot at providing the chancellor and government) And while Hungary's Magyar is a huge improvement over Orban, let's be honest here, he's extreme right too. Anti-immigration rightist parties are the norm across Europe nowadays. The center is shifting right in a big way, and the current "sanity" coalitions are forced to make deeper and deeper cuts in government services. They will keep losing popularity for another decade or so. The extreme right's message of "let's kick immigrants out so we can instead spend on normal, good people" is total bullshit of course, it doesn't work like that. But voters are going to be more and more desperate for anything that stops the government service cuts, for a very long time yet. And the problem is that the base part of the argument is true. Immigration was supposed to save Europe's collective economic ass and has utterly, completely and totally failed to do that. And, of course, like the UK has demonstrated, the sad truth is EU governments are going to cause a lot of social problems through ECB-enforced spending cuts. They'll be looking for someone to blame and ... well we all know where that leads. We could easily see a repeat of Trumps wrecking ball, enforced by the EU, in Europe. |
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| ▲ | an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | pigpop 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's much more of an oligarchy where even though the members of the elite are elected the body of them as a whole appears to have enough influence over new members to force them to act in accordance with an ongoing plan. It seems like any real change would require a very large super majority of new members to be elected at the same time in order to change course. Even a country like the UK seems to still be under their influence after leaving the union which speaks volumes about the amount of backroom dealing that must be going on. | | |
| ▲ | iknowstuff an hour ago | parent [-] | | You think the UK is influenced by backroom dealing and not just the fact that they want to trade with the single market, which is the whole point of banding together as the EU? |
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| ▲ | lokar an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Is there reliable polling that shows this is broadly unpopular? | | |
| ▲ | dgellow 14 minutes ago | parent [-] | | The fact that the parliament pushed back already twice in the very recent past is a clear signal the population doesn’t want it |
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| ▲ | ChocolateGod 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Nearly every law pushed by the EU Commission has support from the EU Council. Chat control is no different. |
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| ▲ | isodev 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > how democratic of the EU Well, these are the MEPs elected by member states. We don’t like the outcome but this means chat control is well supported within the government of each country. |
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| ▲ | CrisMystik 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | MEPs are directly elected by citizens, not governments. It's the Council instead where representatives (ministers) of all national governments sit | | |
| ▲ | isodev 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yup, edited to clarify I mean the MEPs bring “the will of the people”. Clearly not enough has happened on local level to raise awareness / lobby against chat control. I don’t think many outside tech are even aware if the slippery slope of the surveillance machinery. |
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| ▲ | belowavgiq 35 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | uhm, the will of the people is often already half-lost with the politicians/parties they directly elect, so I would hardly consider another layer of representative "demo"cracy on top of another layer of representative democracy following the will of the people at all. But true, I blamed this on the Commission when I should have just started with this criticism of the overall system. | |
| ▲ | afh1 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Is it really supported by the people, or just the politicians? If the former, the EU is an autocratic democracy. If the later, an autocratic oligarchy. Either way bad. Only true democracy in Europe is Switzerland where the people actually get to vote on laws. | | |
| ▲ | kennywinker an hour ago | parent [-] | | Representative democracy vs direct democracy is the actual dichotomy you’re looking for. |
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