First off, the Article 13 in question was already rejected once by Parliament and is expected to be repealed against (but it doesn’t hurt to be cautious, good on Mozilla).
> GDPR
While not uncontroversial, GDPR is generally seen as a good thing by experts.
> arresting people who train their dog to do a bellamy salute
This didn’t happen. The man was arrested for hate speech, not for gestures his dog made. It’s also unrelated to EU law.
> arresting people for having potato peelers in public
This didn’t happen. The man was arrested for wielding a weapon in public. This weapon happened to be a knife (but not a potato peeler, though it was called that by the press: it had a fixed > 3″ long blade) but the nature of the weapon is secondary; what’s relevant for the arrest was the fact that the man wielded it as a weapon. And, again, this has nothing to do with EU legislation. And some additional context: the knife wielding laws in the UK are indeed pretty draconian but the UK, which is generally pretty low on violent crimes, has a specific problem with knife crimes and is therefore tackling the problem heads-on. Seems reasonable.
> I can't think of a single reason other than vacation days that I'd ever want to live there.
Really? https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/rankings_by_country.j...
(In fact, even with occasional questionable laws being passed on EU levels the legal situation in the EU, both on EU and on country level, is still a lot saner than e.g. in the US.)
Sadly neither the problem nor the solution is new - the ban on knives in public dates to at least 1953.
It's interesting (and very Brexity) that people blame these things on the EU when they're both very much British criminal law independent of the EU.
There's nothing in UK law that prevents you from doing this. Bring along a cook book and store the knife securely (and keep it in your bag) and you're going to be fine. If you get stopped by the police mention it straightaway and move from there.
The legislation is written broad enough that discretion is possible in cases like this. Where it's going to look funny is when you're stopped with it in a pub at 9pm on a Saturday night.
So yeah I see both sides (I might go for a beer down the local after cooking on the way home with the knife for example), but really there's not much wrong with your knife laws IMO.
This is also true, I certainly think if you're a white middle class person taking a knife to a friends you're going to get off easier than an someone from a ethnic minority in Tower Hamlets.
It also results in insane things like this [1]. I'm not sure if there's a better way though, it seems much like democracy it's the best of a bad bunch.
1. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/3165489/Gardener-arr...
-> Article 13 has not been rejected by the EP.
What has been rejected is a proposal to fast-track the proposal with no debate.
See https://juliareda.eu/eu-copyright-reform/
"The Legal Affairs Committee narrowly approved the plans (with slight changes) – but in a surprise move, the Parliament then refused to rubber-stamp the Committee’s position, opening it up for further debate."
As they say, don't count your chickens before they're hatched
It was rejected rather narrowly (278-318) a few months ago, and only because some of the coalition that voted against it wants to pass a slightly weaker version of the other clauses instead.
And the hate speech he was convicted for was training his dog to do a "Bellamy salute".
What am I supposed to take away from that quality of life ranking? Yes, the US is below a few EU countries and above others. And it's an average, which means it doesn't mean you can't have a better quality of life in the US than you would in Denmark depending on your individual situation. I for one would be much less happy having to deal with more than doubled gas prices and restricted individual freedoms.
I didn’t, but your comment insinuates that it’s all the same. As for restricted individual freedoms, this betrays a lot about your background. EU contries value equal opportunity over individual freedom for a select few. For minorities and poor people, the EU fares a lot better on individual freedoms than the US does.
That's not true at all. All you have to do is go to France to see how far Europeans are willing to go to restrict the individual freedoms of minorities.
Of course, you won't get data on just how much those groups are in the minority, because France has also conveniently made it illegal to collect this data, but you don't have to have exact numbers to see that the French government has no problem passing laws that directly curtail minorities' freedoms.
I’ve lived in France for several years. And yes, I agree that France unduly restricts individual freedoms (and protested against it). I’m not claiming that any single country is perfect. I’m claiming that they are, on balance, better than the US (when you’re poor and/or a minority). Basic personal safety is a prerequisite for freedom: If you can’t even be sure that you can afford medical care keeping you alive, or if you need to worry that institutionalised racism means you get shot by police or thrown in jail for a trivial misdemeanour that earns a white person a slap on the wrist … then “freedom” is simply a theoretical concept.
And yes, institutional racism also exists in France (and in every other European country) but it’s much less normalised than in the US.
This is the line that white people in France often say, but it's completely wrong. Racism is much more institutionalized in France than it is in the US. Racism is so institutionalized in France that it's almost impossible to talk about it, because it's woven into the legal and societal fabric and so deeply embedded.
> Basic personal safety is a prerequisite for freedom
You are dramatically overestimating the extent to which it is safe to exist in France as someone who is Black, Arab, or Muslim. Which is a common mistake, given that France has literally made it illegal to collect data on police brutality and incarceration rates of minorities in France, the way we can in the US. But that doesn't mean it doesn't happen, or that France isn't also an incredibly dangerous place for minorities - and arguably much more so - as anyone (like myself) who looks Black, Arab, or Muslim and has so much as traveled to France or lived there can attest.
You’ll need to provide a good reference for that because this is completely wrong as far as I know (AI doesn’t mention it, for instance [1]).
Again, don’t get me wrong: I deeply disagree with the way police acts and is organised in France.
[1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/press-releases/2009/04/france-pol...
Since 1978, it's been illegal in France to collect census information on race. This is done under the guise of providing "equality under the law". In practice, as pretty much any minority could predict, all it does is make it impossible to actually talk about the systemic discrimination which happens[0].
You say you lived in France for several years, and yet you're not aware that it's impossible to legally collect data on anything related to racial, ethnic, or religious minorities (including police brutality and incarceration rates). Which, in a way, is my exact point: making it impossible to talk about these issues in France doesn't mean that they don't happen; it just means that people who aren't affected by them aren't aware of them, and so they can continue believing the illusion that this racism somehow doesn't exist, or isn't as bad as it really is.
[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/how-french...
Yet if tomorrow these statistics were allowed and were to show (for example) that 50% of people in jail are Muslim, what would be the use of that number? The far left would use it as proof of discrimination and the far right that muslims are a danger to society.
Societies like the US where there's a "race" checkbox on forms and where ethnic statistics are legal, are far from being less racist or discriminatory...
I will concede that it makes it harder to do so by referring to official records (and this is indeed a problem). But your comment sounded like it would be illegal to, for instance, independently collect complaints. And it's emphatically not. Amnesty and others do exactly that, including looking at racial factors.
The rest of your points are worthless anecdotes. Yes it may have happened once, and yes it was stupid, but it's not like you will be chased down by the police if you walk around with a potato peeler. You cannot seriously believe that.
Or how about both rooted in a power-grab by an aspiring superstate that has long been resentful of the influence the US and it's corporates has over it's Internet-dependent citizens?
Or perhaps I'm being too cynical. The remote, barely accountable, hard-lobbied politicians are only looking out for individuals. These new content filter and link tax proposals as just anomalies.
I love the GDPR. It came out of nowhere (I hadn't heard much about it before the big hubbub), I couldn't believe they were doing something so bold, and it reinvigorated my belief in the European Union.
You're doing the intent thing where you are saying what you think is the case or the intent instead of the reality. People are hurt by the money they spend applying reasonable compliance risk avoidance measures when new laws come out. People running companies, employees of those companies, customers of those companies, and society as a whole. Maybe you feel the harm is worth it, but please stop pretending it doesn't exist.
And it didn't come out of nowhere, data protection laws had existed before, didn't work before, so they doubled down on the already-failed legislative approach with the same not-working institutions instead of taking more practical or incremental approaches.
So if society decides to solve a problem, "it costs some money" is simply no argument against it.
Companies are free to operate in some failed state if they wish not to contribute to society.
It's like saying that laws against torture limit the freedom of anybody who owns thumb screws. Well, yes, because _not being tortured_ is a right that everybody has.
I'm sure the poor folk in Europe will manage to struggle on without you and they thank you for your concern.
But you need look no further than this very forum to see one country's feeble attempts to leave the sorry cirkus habitually likened to the end of civilisation as we know it.
We're on a road to nowhere good whatsoever.
The illegal act was sending the threatening message "gas the jews" through a telecommunications system.
The potato peeler incident: https://dailycaller.com/2018/05/03/british-man-arrested-for-...
Homeless man with learning difficulties wielding a knife-like object in public?
In both cases the relevant law is UK domestic criminal law, not EU law.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellamy_salute
The Bellamy salute is a palm-out salute described by Francis Bellamy, the author of the American Pledge of Allegiance, as the gesture which was to accompany the pledge. During the period when it was used with the Pledge of Allegiance, it was sometimes known as the "flag salute". Both the Pledge and its salute originated in 1892. Later, during the 1920s and 1930s, Italian fascists and Nazis adopted a salute which was very similar, and which was derived from the Roman salute, a gesture that was popularly (albeit erroneously) believed to have been used in ancient Rome.[1] This resulted in controversy over the use of the Bellamy salute in the United States. It was officially replaced by the hand-over-heart salute when Congress amended the Flag Code on December 22, 1942.
Along with the swastika, just another thing the fascists stole and corrupted.
“My oh my, we won't be able to sell people online life without them knowing it”
> local movie quotas on services like Netflix
Promoting local culture, what a shame.
> arresting people who train their dog to do a bellamy salute
Of course, if someone is training their dog to do a “Bellamy” salute when prompted by statements including “Heil Hitler” and “gas the Jews”, the chances that this guy is a closet neo-nazi are so low[0] – BTW, you're the only one presenting it as a Bellamy salute, that sounds like if you were trying to cover a neo-nazi.
> I can't think of a single reason other than vacation days that I'd ever want to live there.
Nah, even for vacations, please don't come here, it's awful, you wouldn't like it.
[0] https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/scottish-man-who-t...
And I don't care if the guy was a neo-nazi; it shouldn't be the government's job to decide what jokes are too offensive.
Americans even shut down newspapers after WW2 and only gave out licenses to start a newspaper after background checks and ideological checks.
Strange how things you made us do somehow morphed into something that you cannot accept at all.