7 ms·

The EU elections are just around the corner. It's a good moment to make an informed decision and stop electing alt-rights who'd do anything under the slogan of

by isodev 2y ago

The EU elections are just around the corner. It's a good moment to make an informed decision and stop electing alt-rights who'd do anything under the slogan of "protecting the children".

t0bia_s 2y ago
We should seriously ask, if being part of EU is beneficial or not. Electing left or right is just a game to keep system working. But it serves to scrap responsibility from us and lead to slavery with every new regulation.
- weikju 2y ago
  Leaving the EU hasn’t really been helping the UK either
  - t0bia_s 2y ago
    Sure, voting system remains same.
  - personomas 2y ago
    It hasn't really been hurting them either. By the way, UK had GDP growth by .6% in first quarter of this year, which is a lot more than a lot of other EU countries.
  - mike_hearn 2y ago
    Presumably Signal will remain available in the UK. At least, it could.
- spockz 2y ago
  Yes, at this point I see no way forward except with the EU. Unless each individual country wants to go at it alone and eventually end up working as a Vasal state to either USA, Russia, or China. The cost of products and manufacturing is so low that a significant part of the final price is made up of overhead costs such as tax, tariffs, and transport. All of these will go up by stepping out of the EU due to increased friction. If anything, we should go a lot further into embracing the EU. In the current political landscape we are committed.
  - ekianjo 2y ago
    you can have an economic community without the political aspect of it
    - hgomersall 2y ago
      What does that look like? Let's say you have a large exporting country that decides its exporting needs are more important than the employment needs of other countries in the block, how do you handle that without political alignment? Economic community is political community. The only question is what flavour of economic community, which IMO is where the EU has gone well off track.
    - ako 2y ago
      Unfortunately, these days economic community is not enough. With the US slowly falling apart due to internal polarization, rusia and china trying to grap as much power as they can, Middle East far from stable, and the disrupting impact of climate change, focusing only on the economy ignores our biggest problems.
      - t0bia_s 2y ago
        If you put ideology on first place, competition will crush you easily. China don't care about environment and they make high fortune on it, like other countries did previously. What frustrate me most is how EU sponsor their business from our taxes in name of care about environment. Ie grants on photovoltaic panels that are made from 95% in China or donated EV's that ruin traditional car manufacturing in EU.
        76SlashDolphin 2y ago
        China will (and does to a certain extent) care about the environment because they know it will eventually be a massive problem for them. Their single-party state has only managed to stay in power because it's been very good at driving up the standards of living. And you can only pollute so much before those standards stop going up and people start to get displeased, which is why they've been trying so hard to move up the value chain and export their pollution to other countries (via cheap loans).
- ohmyiv 2y ago
  If you leave the EU who are people in your country going to vote for? Most likely, either the right or the left. Leaving the EU doesn't automatically make a country not right/left/whatever. Even before the EU most countries had the same thing. The UK left and still have left/right/whatever. You need to change a lot more than EU membership status to avoid the whole left/right issue.
  - mantas 2y ago
    It’s funny that those chat censorship laws seems to be mostly at EU level. Very few countries have something similar going on locally.
    - aembleton 2y ago
      Probably because they know it's not politically popular. As members of the EU, they can work with their commissioners to bring in unpopular legislation and then blame the eu if anyone complains. The UK used to do this a lot, and I expect other countries do it too.
    - ohmyiv 2y ago
      I don't know if youre trying to imply I said any thing about the censorship law, but all I was pointing out was that leaving the EU doesn't change anything about parent's idea about voting left/right/whatever.
      - mantas 2y ago
        What I'm saying, it looks like those are pushed at EU level seemingly by bureaucratic apparatus regardless of ruling parties. Yet such ideas seem to be nowhere to be found at home, again regardless of ruling parties. I'm probably wrong, but my gut feeling is that euro bureaucracy is playing it's own game. And it has little in common with democracy, citizen rights and citizen will at large. Infamous Juncker's phrase about how to push through unpopular regulations is the modus operandi of those people.
        2y ago
- rocqua 2y ago
  We shouldn't leave, we should reform! That means power taken from the committee and brought to parliament. So the decision-making becomes more politicized, and thus more public. Politicizing isn't great, but without it the committee van fly under the radar. Moreover, without it the committee is fully beholden to the national governments, who won't be held to account for their decisions.
  - zo1 2y ago
    I've stopped taking the whole "change it from withing / reform" arguments seriously when it comes to anything larger than a village or small community. The entire system has gotten to this point because the rules, processes and incentives all aligned and co-evolved to get it here. Every single one of those "memes" (borrowing from Dawkins here) will fight very hard for its own survival. And their survival depends on the status-quo staying as is without change. The only way forward is to not participate and/or burn it all down and start from scratch. And we all know what a polite and neutered society we are currently because things are relatively "okay" for us, so we're not at threat, so we're not willing to do the drastic measures necessary for correction here. That includes me, as I will not be sending my sons to the slaughter.
    - lambdaxyzw 2y ago
      >The only way forward is to not participate and/or burn it all down and start from scratch. You can't honestly suggest that. From where? "village or small community" level?
      - Jensson 2y ago
        You can still legally leave the EU. But this draconian law has not passed yet and has been up many times before, most likely it wont pass.
      - zo1 2y ago
        It's not a perfect answer, and one can "not participate" in more ways than one. Also, it depends on the individual and what makes sense for them and their family. It's also a case of "picking your poison". So if the recent war wasn't happening, I'd be moving straight to Russia as right now it seems to be the sanest when it comes to these specific things. But that comes with dealing with some of the "negatives" as I'm sure you all can imagine. If money wasn't a problem, personally I'd fund some sort of island or floating-island community to promote self-sustainable practices whilst staying as far as practically possible from the craziness going on in the west.
- cataphract 2y ago
  It's the governments of the EU countries that are agreeing to this in the Council (apparently it's going through because France is lifting its veto). If enough people cared about this, they would put pressure on their governments to scrap this. But this is not ever talked about except in these circles (unlike, say, the migration pact).
oxygen_crisis 2y ago
> do anything under the slogan of "protecting the children". This is far too forgiving a representation, they are surveillance wolves disingenuously wearing the sheeps' wool of protecting children to further their eventual thought-policing goals of "total information awareness." Doing anything to protect children is difficult to object to. Using the children as their pretense for monitoring dissidents is really the heart of the matter. It's important to differentiate between the two. I get that this difference could be subtly implicit in that comment, but let's please make it explicit.
123yawaworht456 2y ago
that's such a hilarious /r/politics-tier take, I literally can't even.
Proven 2y ago
That is ridiculous. Both the commission and the parliament are controlled by socialists (of various kinds).
- isodev 2y ago
  It doesn't work like the US - it's not binary "left or right".
  - mardifoufs 2y ago
    So why did gp talk about the alt right?also I disagree, there is a binary left right in Europe too. Unless it's for social stuff then most parties are on the right in Europe lol
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
tsimionescu 2y ago
This proposal is coming from the EU council, which has nothing to do with this election (it is made up of PMs or Presidents of the EU countries). The EU election is important though to ensure that the EU Parliament doesn't enact such a horrid proposal into law.
- hcfman 2y ago
  Who should we vote for then? That’s very hard to decide without a lot of research. I would say the pirate party is a safe bet. But if there are multiple candidates you need to be sure your vote goes to a strong candidate to increase your chances of success. But just figuring out who this might be is already hard. Then of course there’s the non-democratic structure of the union itself where the non voted commission decide the laws.
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    It varies from country to country who you can vote for to oppose such legislation. You need to investigate your local representatives. Also, the Commission only proposes legislation, it doesn't enact it. Only the EU Parliament can enact legislation. The comission is similar to the Government of most democratic countries, also in the fact that it's not directly democratically elected. However, you still have plenty of democratic control over it, just not in EU specific elections, but in your own country's elections. Edit: mistook the Council for the Commission. Corrected in line.
  - isodev 2y ago
    This is not reality TV, it's important that you cast a vote aligned with your views, not who is most likely to win or loose. If you're unsure which party represents your views, you can use tools like https://euandi.eu/ https://euandi.eu/ The EU structure is democratic, you can see a summary of each body and how its formed at https://european-union.europa.eu/institutions-law-budget/leadership/elections-and-appointments_en https://european-union.europa.eu/institutions-law-budget/lea...
- isodev 2y ago
  Parliament's involvement depends on the policy area and may imply (a) being consulted, (b) giving consent or (c) co-legislating on an equal footing with the Council (ordinary legislative procedure). In case of "chat control" (actually called CSAR or COM/2022/209), we are in case c) - it was Parliament rejecting big parts of the proposal [0]. The OP refers to a document discussed during ST 9093 2024 INIT, it's part of the same package of legislation priorities (2022/0155(COD)) and it's currently awaiting the opinion of Parliament [1]. I know these make for very click-baity titles, but this is the moment when one can follow the feed and publications of their MEPs and contact them when one doesn't agree with some of their positions. Logs of all meetings are available online. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_to_Prevent_and_Combat_Child_Sexual_Abuse#Legislative_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_to_Prevent_and_Comb... [1] https://oeil.secure.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/popups/ficheprocedure.do?reference=2022/0155(COD) https://oeil.secure.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/popups/ficheproc...
plasmasheep 2y ago
Alt rights? You realize this is being driven by the heads of state from mainstream parties, yes?
- isodev 2y ago
  Yes, I know how the EU works. These heads of states also got elected in their respective countries. You don't want to see "chat control" proposals coming from the council of Europe? Then don't elect the likes of Orban/Melonie/Geert Wilders! Next week we're voting for the EU Parliament where MEPs are responsible for discussing and accepting/rejecting proposals from the EU Council.
  - mike_hearn 2y ago
    Wilders only formed a coalition about two weeks ago, and he isn't the prime minister so wouldn't be in the Council anyway. As for the others, why do you think these laws come from the council? EU law never comes from the council, it's always proposed by the Commission. There's a list of people who are most responsible for this specific law here: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/s/Q4fRGd1a2e https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/s/Q4fRGd1a2e None of the people on the list are heads of state, as per usual. They are senior members of the Commission and the usual assortment of lobbyists who feed them ideas.
ornornor 2y ago
I wish they made it easier to vote in these EU elections. I live abroad. For me to cast my vote I’d have to physically travel to my country’s embassy which is several hours travel away return during the voting hours. Or give proxy to someone living there (don’t know anyone since I’ve never lived in that city). Meanwhile, Canada lets me vote by mail, no fuss, and they even send the ballot to my home address automatically every election. Would that really be so hard to do for EU or national elections?
- praseodym 2y ago
  The Netherlands does allow citizens living abroad to vote using mail-in ballots, so it’s something that your country has to arrange.
  - ornornor 2y ago
    I can only hope… but won’t hold my breath.
  - awelxtr 2y ago
    Spain too
- arianvanp 2y ago
  The EU elections allow you to either vote in your country of residence or in your country of birth. You just need to register beforehand and you'll just be able to vote at a local ballot. Here in Germany they even actively inform you of that choice. I got a letter both from the dutch government and the German government that I can make a decision to either vote in Germany or in Netherlands
  - ornornor 2y ago
    Yes, I’m not saying it’s impossible. I still need to travel to my residence country’s capital which is several hours away and not free to get to in order to cast my vote in person. That’s quite a hurdle and I’m not surprised that participation is so low as a result.
bun_terminator 2y ago
I hope there'll come a time where the idea that these events that distribute ultimate power might not be flawlessly executed and maybe even partially fraudulent is seen with merit. It's certainly not the time yet, as always seen when this comes around.
paganel 2y ago
You’re correct, these elections are pretty important, as we can vote for the parties/people that would bring this thing called the EU a little bit closer to disintegration, i.e. vote for the Nigel Farages of your countries. At this point the ghouls in Brussels are un-reformable.
- timeon 2y ago
  Are you even EU citizen? You seems to be posting mostly Russian POV.
  - paganel 2y ago
    What type of question is that? If you’re so curious, yes, on top of being pro/Russia I’m also a Mets fan. LGFM! How does knowing more about me help bring this conversation forward? Should I in turn ask about your favorite MLB team?
- omnimus 2y ago
  Yes the best solution to democratic process is to vote for famous populist alt right politician whose politics is build around saying whatever generates most clicks/hate at the time. Best part is once in power these people are as corruptable if not more because they just dont care and will sell their votes to the highest bid. Snakeoil sellers.
mike_hearn 2y ago
These laws, as required by the EU constitution, do not come from the people who are elected, so changing who gets voted in will have zero impact on whether such laws appear or not. Moreover the EU Parliament is controlled by social democrat (left) parties. There currently a bunch of stories in the press freaking out over the possibility that the EU Parliament might actually become majority right wing for the first time ever, example: https://www.google.com/amp/s/ecfr.eu/publication/a-sharp-right-turn-a-forecast-for-the-2024-european-parliament-elections/%3famp https://www.google.com/amp/s/ecfr.eu/publication/a-sharp-rig... So it's very unclear how you reached your conclusions about who people should stop electing and what effect that would have.
l33tman 2y ago
The ChatControl2.0 proposal was put forth by Ylva Johansson who is from the left in Sweden. She literally says "But think of the children" in every interview she made after this. There has been many accusations of corruption, for example the council was in contact with the AI companies that stand to gain from getting this in law. https://www.svt.se/nyheter/ylva-johansson-ifragasatts-om-lobbying https://www.svt.se/nyheter/ylva-johansson-ifragasatts-om-lob... I don't like mass-surveillance or "dragnets" which are actually considered unconstitutional in the US (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragnet_(policing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragnet_(policing) ), where you make an extraordinary amount of people suspects in order to catch a single suspect. In medicine there is a number called NNT (Number Needed to Treat) which is a really good comparision to this. It's how many you have to treat with a medicine or procedure in order to help one patient. If that number goes up too large it's a bad sign, like if you would have to feed 1 million people a pill every day to avoid 1 heart attack per year. Here you have mass surveillance and an incredible breach of privacy of 500M citizens, in order to catch how many pedos? If they would even be caught by this at all to start with.
- lambdaxyzw 2y ago
  >If they would even be caught by this at all to start with. I doubt it. Teenagers sending each other naked pics, maybe (but after the law passes they will know they have no privacy and will stop doing that. I fear what awareness of constant surveillance does to a young brain). The actual pedophiles were always on top of their opsec game. In this case it sounds like they just need to opt-out of scanning and send each other obfuscated links or base64 encoded encrypted zip files in text? This is child's play, there were highly sophiasticated pedophile groups using tor-only infrastructure with forced opsec and rotating identifies every month. They never trusted mainstream chat apps, and they won't be affected. This only makes it possible to track regular people.
  - neop1x 2y ago
    Can't upvote this enough. Such proposal is against the privacy and basic human rights or ordinary people (wveryone is guilty unless proved innocent). Big groups making and sharing such content won't be affected by this at all.

by isodev 2y ago

The EU elections are just around the corner. It's a good moment to make an informed decision and stop electing alt-rights who'd do anything under the slogan of "protecting the children".

t0bia_s 2y ago

We should seriously ask, if being part of EU is beneficial or not. Electing left or right is just a game to keep system working. But it serves to scrap responsibility from us and lead to slavery with every new regulation.

weikju 2y ago
Leaving the EU hasn’t really been helping the UK either
- t0bia_s 2y ago
  Sure, voting system remains same.
- personomas 2y ago
  It hasn't really been hurting them either. By the way, UK had GDP growth by .6% in first quarter of this year, which is a lot more than a lot of other EU countries.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  Presumably Signal will remain available in the UK. At least, it could.
spockz 2y ago
Yes, at this point I see no way forward except with the EU. Unless each individual country wants to go at it alone and eventually end up working as a Vasal state to either USA, Russia, or China. The cost of products and manufacturing is so low that a significant part of the final price is made up of overhead costs such as tax, tariffs, and transport. All of these will go up by stepping out of the EU due to increased friction. If anything, we should go a lot further into embracing the EU. In the current political landscape we are committed.
- ekianjo 2y ago
  you can have an economic community without the political aspect of it
  - hgomersall 2y ago
    What does that look like? Let's say you have a large exporting country that decides its exporting needs are more important than the employment needs of other countries in the block, how do you handle that without political alignment? Economic community is political community. The only question is what flavour of economic community, which IMO is where the EU has gone well off track.
  - ako 2y ago
    Unfortunately, these days economic community is not enough. With the US slowly falling apart due to internal polarization, rusia and china trying to grap as much power as they can, Middle East far from stable, and the disrupting impact of climate change, focusing only on the economy ignores our biggest problems.
    - t0bia_s 2y ago
      If you put ideology on first place, competition will crush you easily. China don't care about environment and they make high fortune on it, like other countries did previously. What frustrate me most is how EU sponsor their business from our taxes in name of care about environment. Ie grants on photovoltaic panels that are made from 95% in China or donated EV's that ruin traditional car manufacturing in EU.
      - 76SlashDolphin 2y ago
        China will (and does to a certain extent) care about the environment because they know it will eventually be a massive problem for them. Their single-party state has only managed to stay in power because it's been very good at driving up the standards of living. And you can only pollute so much before those standards stop going up and people start to get displeased, which is why they've been trying so hard to move up the value chain and export their pollution to other countries (via cheap loans).
ohmyiv 2y ago
If you leave the EU who are people in your country going to vote for? Most likely, either the right or the left. Leaving the EU doesn't automatically make a country not right/left/whatever. Even before the EU most countries had the same thing. The UK left and still have left/right/whatever. You need to change a lot more than EU membership status to avoid the whole left/right issue.
- mantas 2y ago
  It’s funny that those chat censorship laws seems to be mostly at EU level. Very few countries have something similar going on locally.
  - aembleton 2y ago
    Probably because they know it's not politically popular. As members of the EU, they can work with their commissioners to bring in unpopular legislation and then blame the eu if anyone complains. The UK used to do this a lot, and I expect other countries do it too.
  - ohmyiv 2y ago
    I don't know if youre trying to imply I said any thing about the censorship law, but all I was pointing out was that leaving the EU doesn't change anything about parent's idea about voting left/right/whatever.
    - mantas 2y ago
      What I'm saying, it looks like those are pushed at EU level seemingly by bureaucratic apparatus regardless of ruling parties. Yet such ideas seem to be nowhere to be found at home, again regardless of ruling parties. I'm probably wrong, but my gut feeling is that euro bureaucracy is playing it's own game. And it has little in common with democracy, citizen rights and citizen will at large. Infamous Juncker's phrase about how to push through unpopular regulations is the modus operandi of those people.
      - 2y ago
rocqua 2y ago
We shouldn't leave, we should reform! That means power taken from the committee and brought to parliament. So the decision-making becomes more politicized, and thus more public. Politicizing isn't great, but without it the committee van fly under the radar. Moreover, without it the committee is fully beholden to the national governments, who won't be held to account for their decisions.
- zo1 2y ago
  I've stopped taking the whole "change it from withing / reform" arguments seriously when it comes to anything larger than a village or small community. The entire system has gotten to this point because the rules, processes and incentives all aligned and co-evolved to get it here. Every single one of those "memes" (borrowing from Dawkins here) will fight very hard for its own survival. And their survival depends on the status-quo staying as is without change. The only way forward is to not participate and/or burn it all down and start from scratch. And we all know what a polite and neutered society we are currently because things are relatively "okay" for us, so we're not at threat, so we're not willing to do the drastic measures necessary for correction here. That includes me, as I will not be sending my sons to the slaughter.
  - lambdaxyzw 2y ago
    >The only way forward is to not participate and/or burn it all down and start from scratch. You can't honestly suggest that. From where? "village or small community" level?
    - Jensson 2y ago
      You can still legally leave the EU. But this draconian law has not passed yet and has been up many times before, most likely it wont pass.
    - zo1 2y ago
      It's not a perfect answer, and one can "not participate" in more ways than one. Also, it depends on the individual and what makes sense for them and their family. It's also a case of "picking your poison". So if the recent war wasn't happening, I'd be moving straight to Russia as right now it seems to be the sanest when it comes to these specific things. But that comes with dealing with some of the "negatives" as I'm sure you all can imagine. If money wasn't a problem, personally I'd fund some sort of island or floating-island community to promote self-sustainable practices whilst staying as far as practically possible from the craziness going on in the west.
cataphract 2y ago
It's the governments of the EU countries that are agreeing to this in the Council (apparently it's going through because France is lifting its veto). If enough people cared about this, they would put pressure on their governments to scrap this. But this is not ever talked about except in these circles (unlike, say, the migration pact).

oxygen_crisis 2y ago

> do anything under the slogan of "protecting the children". This is far too forgiving a representation, they are surveillance wolves disingenuously wearing the sheeps' wool of protecting children to further their eventual thought-policing goals of "total information awareness." Doing anything to protect children is difficult to object to. Using the children as their pretense for monitoring dissidents is really the heart of the matter. It's important to differentiate between the two. I get that this difference could be subtly implicit in that comment, but let's please make it explicit.

123yawaworht456 2y ago

that's such a hilarious /r/politics-tier take, I literally can't even.

Proven 2y ago

That is ridiculous. Both the commission and the parliament are controlled by socialists (of various kinds).

isodev 2y ago
It doesn't work like the US - it's not binary "left or right".
- mardifoufs 2y ago
  So why did gp talk about the alt right?also I disagree, there is a binary left right in Europe too. Unless it's for social stuff then most parties are on the right in Europe lol

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

tsimionescu 2y ago

This proposal is coming from the EU council, which has nothing to do with this election (it is made up of PMs or Presidents of the EU countries). The EU election is important though to ensure that the EU Parliament doesn't enact such a horrid proposal into law.

hcfman 2y ago
Who should we vote for then? That’s very hard to decide without a lot of research. I would say the pirate party is a safe bet. But if there are multiple candidates you need to be sure your vote goes to a strong candidate to increase your chances of success. But just figuring out who this might be is already hard. Then of course there’s the non-democratic structure of the union itself where the non voted commission decide the laws.
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  It varies from country to country who you can vote for to oppose such legislation. You need to investigate your local representatives. Also, the Commission only proposes legislation, it doesn't enact it. Only the EU Parliament can enact legislation. The comission is similar to the Government of most democratic countries, also in the fact that it's not directly democratically elected. However, you still have plenty of democratic control over it, just not in EU specific elections, but in your own country's elections. Edit: mistook the Council for the Commission. Corrected in line.
- isodev 2y ago
  This is not reality TV, it's important that you cast a vote aligned with your views, not who is most likely to win or loose. If you're unsure which party represents your views, you can use tools like https://euandi.eu/ https://euandi.eu/ The EU structure is democratic, you can see a summary of each body and how its formed at https://european-union.europa.eu/institutions-law-budget/leadership/elections-and-appointments_en https://european-union.europa.eu/institutions-law-budget/lea...
isodev 2y ago
Parliament's involvement depends on the policy area and may imply (a) being consulted, (b) giving consent or (c) co-legislating on an equal footing with the Council (ordinary legislative procedure). In case of "chat control" (actually called CSAR or COM/2022/209), we are in case c) - it was Parliament rejecting big parts of the proposal [0]. The OP refers to a document discussed during ST 9093 2024 INIT, it's part of the same package of legislation priorities (2022/0155(COD)) and it's currently awaiting the opinion of Parliament [1]. I know these make for very click-baity titles, but this is the moment when one can follow the feed and publications of their MEPs and contact them when one doesn't agree with some of their positions. Logs of all meetings are available online. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_to_Prevent_and_Combat_Child_Sexual_Abuse#Legislative_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_to_Prevent_and_Comb... [1] https://oeil.secure.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/popups/ficheprocedure.do?reference=2022/0155(COD) https://oeil.secure.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/popups/ficheproc...

plasmasheep 2y ago

Alt rights? You realize this is being driven by the heads of state from mainstream parties, yes?

isodev 2y ago
Yes, I know how the EU works. These heads of states also got elected in their respective countries. You don't want to see "chat control" proposals coming from the council of Europe? Then don't elect the likes of Orban/Melonie/Geert Wilders! Next week we're voting for the EU Parliament where MEPs are responsible for discussing and accepting/rejecting proposals from the EU Council.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  Wilders only formed a coalition about two weeks ago, and he isn't the prime minister so wouldn't be in the Council anyway. As for the others, why do you think these laws come from the council? EU law never comes from the council, it's always proposed by the Commission. There's a list of people who are most responsible for this specific law here: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/s/Q4fRGd1a2e https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/s/Q4fRGd1a2e None of the people on the list are heads of state, as per usual. They are senior members of the Commission and the usual assortment of lobbyists who feed them ideas.

ornornor 2y ago

I wish they made it easier to vote in these EU elections. I live abroad. For me to cast my vote I’d have to physically travel to my country’s embassy which is several hours travel away return during the voting hours. Or give proxy to someone living there (don’t know anyone since I’ve never lived in that city). Meanwhile, Canada lets me vote by mail, no fuss, and they even send the ballot to my home address automatically every election. Would that really be so hard to do for EU or national elections?

praseodym 2y ago
The Netherlands does allow citizens living abroad to vote using mail-in ballots, so it’s something that your country has to arrange.
- ornornor 2y ago
  I can only hope… but won’t hold my breath.
- awelxtr 2y ago
  Spain too
arianvanp 2y ago
The EU elections allow you to either vote in your country of residence or in your country of birth. You just need to register beforehand and you'll just be able to vote at a local ballot. Here in Germany they even actively inform you of that choice. I got a letter both from the dutch government and the German government that I can make a decision to either vote in Germany or in Netherlands
- ornornor 2y ago
  Yes, I’m not saying it’s impossible. I still need to travel to my residence country’s capital which is several hours away and not free to get to in order to cast my vote in person. That’s quite a hurdle and I’m not surprised that participation is so low as a result.

bun_terminator 2y ago

I hope there'll come a time where the idea that these events that distribute ultimate power might not be flawlessly executed and maybe even partially fraudulent is seen with merit. It's certainly not the time yet, as always seen when this comes around.

paganel 2y ago

You’re correct, these elections are pretty important, as we can vote for the parties/people that would bring this thing called the EU a little bit closer to disintegration, i.e. vote for the Nigel Farages of your countries. At this point the ghouls in Brussels are un-reformable.

timeon 2y ago
Are you even EU citizen? You seems to be posting mostly Russian POV.
- paganel 2y ago
  What type of question is that? If you’re so curious, yes, on top of being pro/Russia I’m also a Mets fan. LGFM! How does knowing more about me help bring this conversation forward? Should I in turn ask about your favorite MLB team?
omnimus 2y ago
Yes the best solution to democratic process is to vote for famous populist alt right politician whose politics is build around saying whatever generates most clicks/hate at the time. Best part is once in power these people are as corruptable if not more because they just dont care and will sell their votes to the highest bid. Snakeoil sellers.

mike_hearn 2y ago

These laws, as required by the EU constitution, do not come from the people who are elected, so changing who gets voted in will have zero impact on whether such laws appear or not. Moreover the EU Parliament is controlled by social democrat (left) parties. There currently a bunch of stories in the press freaking out over the possibility that the EU Parliament might actually become majority right wing for the first time ever, example: https://www.google.com/amp/s/ecfr.eu/publication/a-sharp-right-turn-a-forecast-for-the-2024-european-parliament-elections/%3famp https://www.google.com/amp/s/ecfr.eu/publication/a-sharp-rig... So it's very unclear how you reached your conclusions about who people should stop electing and what effect that would have.

l33tman 2y ago

The ChatControl2.0 proposal was put forth by Ylva Johansson who is from the left in Sweden. She literally says "But think of the children" in every interview she made after this. There has been many accusations of corruption, for example the council was in contact with the AI companies that stand to gain from getting this in law. https://www.svt.se/nyheter/ylva-johansson-ifragasatts-om-lobbying https://www.svt.se/nyheter/ylva-johansson-ifragasatts-om-lob... I don't like mass-surveillance or "dragnets" which are actually considered unconstitutional in the US (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragnet_(policing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragnet_(policing) ), where you make an extraordinary amount of people suspects in order to catch a single suspect. In medicine there is a number called NNT (Number Needed to Treat) which is a really good comparision to this. It's how many you have to treat with a medicine or procedure in order to help one patient. If that number goes up too large it's a bad sign, like if you would have to feed 1 million people a pill every day to avoid 1 heart attack per year. Here you have mass surveillance and an incredible breach of privacy of 500M citizens, in order to catch how many pedos? If they would even be caught by this at all to start with.

lambdaxyzw 2y ago
>If they would even be caught by this at all to start with. I doubt it. Teenagers sending each other naked pics, maybe (but after the law passes they will know they have no privacy and will stop doing that. I fear what awareness of constant surveillance does to a young brain). The actual pedophiles were always on top of their opsec game. In this case it sounds like they just need to opt-out of scanning and send each other obfuscated links or base64 encoded encrypted zip files in text? This is child's play, there were highly sophiasticated pedophile groups using tor-only infrastructure with forced opsec and rotating identifies every month. They never trusted mainstream chat apps, and they won't be affected. This only makes it possible to track regular people.
- neop1x 2y ago
  Can't upvote this enough. Such proposal is against the privacy and basic human rights or ordinary people (wveryone is guilty unless proved innocent). Big groups making and sharing such content won't be affected by this at all.