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Comment by cbeach | Hacker News Reader

I get the feeling most of those conservatives entering the parliament are of the libertarian and anti-establishment variety.

Within the European Parliament, The ID Party represents many of the rising rightwing national parties, such as AfD, RN, Lega, PVV. Among other things, the ID Party stands for "Defense of individual freedoms and protection of freedom of expression, in particular digital freedoms"

https://id-party.eu/program

The concept of a centrally-managed surveillance apparatus in the EU runs contrary to the stated beliefs of the Euro-skeptic ID Party, which wants to reverse the centralisation of power within the EU.

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There are definitely factions of both the extreme right and extreme left (outdated terms) that understand privacy and dislike mass surveillance.

Authoritarianism is on the rise in the 'Third-Way' corporatist, technocratic 'center' which is increasingly worried about losing control to perceived or real extremist parties that threaten their funding model and rock the boat.

I wonder if conservative/progressive and right/left were false dichotomies. At the extremes there are remarkably similar outcomes. Corruption is present at the extremes and the more moderate center. Some of the corruption is more explicit and illegal (pay me and I'll do this), other less so and legal (you did this while in office so now we hire you for big $ to do little.)

They are not false dichotomies, they're just not the only ones that matter. There's a separate scale of liberal/authoritarian that, while not entirely orthogonal to progressive/conservative, allows for a lot of leeway in practice.

Authoritarian center is called 'extreme center' for a reason.

It's easy to talk about freedom of speech and expression in the abstract. Practice shows that many political forces that do so adopt much less liberal positions on specific issues when it comes to the kind of speech that they don't like, or that they see as beneficial to target from an appeal-to-the-voter perspective.

So, given that this proposal is entirely framed as a way to combat child porn, and that "liberal pedophile elites" are part of the current far right zeitgeist, I wouldn't be so sure that they would be all that strongly opposed to it. Especially if they get to rewrite it in name (but not substance) to claim credit for it.

I'm not so much concerned about the rise of the ID party in this regard, but instead the growth of EPP and decline of the Greens. And possibly also Renew, though I'm not sure where they stood - if they were in favour then I guess their decline helps here.

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