EU: Definition of "potential terrorists" opens door to broad information-sharing
statewatch.org
statewatch.org
I remember not so long ago a couple people were arrested for conspiring to kidnap a governor in the US. They never actually committed the crime though.
I grew up in a society where I was completely unaware of it, just because I was a white, middle-class, very caucasian, cishet male. I never feared a police stop. I have never feared the police would storm a party, show, or rave I was in and kill a dozen people. I moved to Ireland and was rapidly integrated into their society. I never faced any form of discrimination.
A lot of Brazilians there and here are not so lucky. My Indian colleagues tell horror stories of their encounters with less enlightened members of my adopted country's population. You wouldn't want t be one of them.
The US has far more pressing issues than the EU.
What are you referring to here?
At least we're back in the US, where, according to Gallup, 71% of black Americans think "that police would treat them with courtesy and respect in an interaction".
https://news.gallup.com/poll/511064/black-americans-less-con...
Also, black Americans fear crime more than they fear the police, and "most also prefer to maintain (or increase) local police presence and spending"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...
The whole protest movement against the police was more popular among privileged liberals who haven't experienced crime than it was among the people it claimed to be helping.
A “minimum materiality threshold”. This requires “objective and verifiable… information suggesting that a criminal offence, or future criminal offence, has a certain degree of seriousness.”
A “basic indicative criterion”. This requires “objective, verifiable information” leading to a belief that the individual in question “will in the future commit, facilitate, support or engage in terrorist or violent extremist offences.”
A series of “indicative auxiliary criteria”. This could be involvement in terrorist offences, sharing terrorist content online, or being the subject of an EU entry ban.What constitutes "support"? Hopefully your next government is OK with you back then liking the post of that one organization previously not classified as terroristic.
In my humble opinion, they have pushed Europe to a disaster if things do not get fixed in the next few years.
Are there cultures without corruption ? (no i'm not asking about headhunters in Papua New Guinea)
Some of the most well behaved and civilized cultures in the world, again in my opinion and only my opinion, had a double standard when they went out of their domains.
I am guessing that is alao human nature, though, but I find that somewhat corrupted behavior. It is fair to say that before mindsets were also different and should be adapted to the times before giving an extensive opinion on this.
But human and double standards, no matter the place or culture in the world, is quite common. I think things have improved in that sense but we are still very far from perfection, which does not exist anyway.
Also, and from my experience, you see more real humans in the face of scarcity. It is like the instincts pop up more quickly when there is less abundance in the environment.
It is not a matter of materialistic things available only though, but it is something that it affects definitely human behavior. Put in other words and in harsh vocabulary: just because someone looks good, it does not mean they are. Sometimes, conveesely, a desperate person could do things we would label as bad and probably the only thing that happened is that we saw those two people in very different contexts...
It is a complicated topic, but from Eruope to Asia (where I lived over a decade) and since the country where I have been most of the time is somewhat poorer (also cultirally different) you can see very different behaviors for similar situations or things that are very bad in Europe are somewhat ok here.
The topic of lying is one of those. For people here, it is not really important to stick to their word that much (except for family-related stuff). It is ok also to use lies as a tool to give excuses. I do not mean noone does that. Everyone has done some of that. What I mean is that for them there is no bad in doing it in that way, for me it would be a bad-looking thing I'd rather avoid most of the time.
This happens with so many things...
However, interestingly, if you look at US Department of State travel advisories, note those for the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and Sweden and compare those with Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary, for example. One element is that the very policies that the EU is pursuing contribute to the anxieties motivating such fears of terrorism.
Unfortunately promoting strictly enforcing immigration laws and borders makes you a right wing supremacist in the other progressive EU counties so they need to make themselves unsafe in order to virtue signal to the world how welcoming and tolerant they are.
In the media only. I do not know people who really think that if you ask, no matter left or right. Right wing people because they always thought in these terms somewhat (but not as much as you might think for a country like Spain). Left wing because they are starting to see this is already a matter of security, no matter their core ideas, they live in the real world, like everyone else.
In Spain for example immigration became already the first and most worrying topic according to the INE (National Institute of Statistics, biggest surveys in country). We have waves of like up to 5,000 in canary islands some weeks, like almost 300 per day in average. They also use the NGOs and take them illegally even according to our laws to Madrid in flights that are not tracked. All this has been researched and is known already nowadays.
That is why people get this worried. There are other problems related, but they ask citizens to follow laws and they workaround them however and whenever they deem appropriate. That is quite infuriating, more even so than the problem itself when you know security is related to this phenomena when it is too massive, and there is hard data that backs it up...
That is the reason why in many countries right wing parties (not the "soft right wing", which are kind of social democrats) are getting traction: security. In fact, my personal opinion is what they call far right is (almost all the time except very very few exceptions) more or less normal right wing and what they call "right wing", are just social-democratic parties.
But who am I to say... the media will jump to my throat, right? Anyway, many of us never cared or do not care anymore, because this has become already a matter of security.
My personal pre-crime assessment is that a failed Ukraine would be devastating for the security of EU member states.
The NS2 bombing was stupid, but it wasn't terrorism.
Which other potential terrorists are they looking for?
Check your definitions, please.
It's really quite antimodern, in fact.
Of course it is possible to abuse such things, which is why its important to have reasonable definitions for these things.
2. You went to buy some acetone as a solvent for a project.
There is now material evidence and intent for a terrorist attack using TATP bombs.
You and your family are on a no-fly list and are being watched.
All digital platforms have to automatically turn over all your personal data to intelligence services. They will share it with every other intelligence service in the union.
During automated analysis, a CASM detector finds bath-time pictures of your child. A criminal trial for the production of child pornography is initiated.
Those in the legal field grok this. Those with less experience in the legal field typically fear the law for its seeming black-and-white attribute when it's really a lot of grey.
Any claimed benefit or justification is entirely nullified for regular people if their oversight and transparency processes are being negated.
No, one legitimate concern is over the amount of information gathering and sharing that's needed to establish sufficient “objective, verifiable information” and how that competes with other goods.
Is very different from 'a belief'.
What you're doing is wordsmithing this into something that sounds much worse than the actual text, which is textbook misinformation spreading.
And pretty much anything, with a semblance of plausibility or causal inference can be used as "objective, verifiable information". They just need to define that property as a) verifiable, b)objective and c) somehow implies some bad other property or future event.
There's a reason that programming is hard, and even harder when you have to use normal non-programming-language constructs.
What a belief is based on means squat, it is how that belief came to be that is important.
I think people give too much credit to governments. "Of course they'll only use for-sure for-sure objectively terrorist intent verifiable information." No, historically what they'll do is throw you on the list because you followed a hot commie girl to a meetup in college, or attended a protest, or hell bought a watch terrorists happen to use to set timers in bombs.
In many cases it also leads to a case being dismissed because no evidence is found.
I'm honestly pretty surprised that people think this is a new concept.
Good luck piecing back together your life at that point, after years of being unemployable and unable to find rental accomodation (and the house that you bought with your life savings is gone, the bank sold it while you were fighting for your freedom).
No absolute either in freedom or security is sustainable.
That's a much higher bar than the one mentioned in the EU legislation.
>No absolute either in freedom or security is sustainable.
But nobody was arguing for this?
Governments are very good at catching the talkers but hopeless at catching the doers. Going after talkers generally is very useful for creating an atmosphere of fear as well.
As far as I can tell, climate activists have been making a nuisance of themselves much more than a 'willingness to use violence.' I find this justification concerning, to say the least.
I don't have the source at hand but I remember reading that in Germany, plain clothes police inserted themselves into the group of climate protestors and start throwing rocks at the riot police, in order to give them legal justification to engage the protestors.
Don't know if this is the truth, but since this has also happened in my country in the past, I wouldn't be surprised that it is. Governments and the ruling elite can and will always find ways to legally justify their actions against citizens they consider a threat. The US had the Pinkertons (who stil exist today) who did similar actions but for the private sector.
And even if by a miracle you do manage to get the face of that person and submit it to law enforcement, if they happened to be part of one of the intelligence agencies like it was in my country, the government would turn a blind eye and pretend they cant identify that person in order to protect them.
Throwing LEOs under the bus, even if they're guilty of something, is not something most government leaders are rushing to do since they need LEOs on their side in order to enforce the laws and maintain their positions in society, and it's not a good idea to piss off those in charge of the guns and surveillance capabilities and turn them against you.
Today there are enough meth heads that the only thing police need to do for violence at a rally to explode is nothing.
Typically when shit kicks off, it's an agent provocateur. Not always, but typically: https://abcnews.go.com/US/man-helped-ignite-george-floyd-rio...
There was similar in Oakland, some white kids from who tf knows where were trying to break windows, and everyone around was shouting for them to fuck off and knock it off.
Recently nazis and right wingers were allowed to do whatever they want as cops stood by and watched them beat up college protesters. https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/16/us/ucla-student-protests-... At one point one shouted "we're here to finish what Hitler started" https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/uclas-unholy-alliance/
Agent provocateurs are going to become more and more necessary to "justify" the violence against protesters as protesters become more educated on pacifist strategies.
The Anarchist Cookbook (new version) https://www.foodnotbombs.net/anarchist_cookbook.html is free to read and gets into the effectiveness of peaceful protest and direct action, and the counter-effectiveness of violence.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Blow_Up_a_Pipeline takes a slightly different perspective, analyzing the possible necessity of extremely limited, targeted destruction of property, that strives to be completely disassociated from the greater movement so that the benefits of the destruction (such as disrupted oil supply, plus attention) can be combined with the opportunity for the greater movement to condemn the action.
If you randomly shoot at a anti-fa rally and hit 100% meth heads and felons there's an issue with anti-fa rallies.
So, Kyle Rittenhouse was shooting randomly into the crowd? Interesting, I wonder what his goal was in doing so.
Seems only one of the three people shot was a pedophile. That's ok, though, 1/3 is certainly a majority, I agree with you, it indicates that basically everyone at the protest was a pedophile. Except Kyle and his friend. And anyway, the other person killed had a criminal record of violence - I wonder how Kyle was able to identify that when he shot him in the middle of the crowd? We could potentially leverage this technique in a new machine vision model. Luckily Kyle killed him before he could commit more crimes. Once someone commits a crime, they might commit more, and should be shot by unelected strangers without a trial.
As for the third, a notorious anti-cop creep that would frequently get arrested for doing weird things like photographing police stations and the cars parked there. Degenerate behavior, he's lucky police never harass and frequently arrest those weirdo first amendment audit types. If they did, there would be obvious signs, such as a huge list of overturned convictions and dismissed court cases. Anyway the guy was probably a pedophile, because the first guy was.
Thank god a child brought a rifle to a protest.
Wherever there are truly peaceful protests against governments there is a very high probability that governmental agents infiltrated among the protestants will attempt to cause violent incidents in order to provide justification for the police to attack the participants with excessive force.
Maybe I misunderstand what you mean, but generally people who participate in peaceful protests isn't willing to use violence, then they'd be a part of a different type of protest. That's not to say there are groups within peaceful protests that are willing to use violence, but it isn't the norm.
Post-enlightenment, we put down the torches and pitchforks, we outsourced the accountability function to the media/press. Shame and transparency were the new "torch and pitchforks".
As soon as the likes of Rupert Murdoch/Roger Ailes etc. got involved in media, the press no longer wields the people's power, which was delegated to them, for the people. Instead the press selectively uses that power for ulterior aims - whether that's the Oil & Gas industry, the war machine, or for foreign interests.
After Clinton, and in order to push the illegal Iraq war, politicians (no longer called "leaders") had to shed all their shame so that they would be immune to any press that came out about their illegal acts for the war machine. Wikileaks happened. Only the messenger was pursued.
Shame doesn't work anymore. The press use the power we gave them against us. Therefore no wonder protests don't work. They don't get covered and politicians are rewarded for shamelessly ignoring the people's interests.
The system is broken.
I don't blame climate protesters escalating. Especially while climate destruction is being escalated.
How does this square with the rise of insurgents like donald trump? He was basically snubbed by the GOP political establishment in 2016, but now the republican party is now enthralled to him. There was even a period where he tried to fight fox news and urged his supporters to watch OAN instead. Some of Trump's populist policies were so successful that even the democratic party copied it, eg. his anti-china policy. That's despite such policies being arguably anti-business, which under your framework shouldn't have happened.
Just as the press usurped our power to block us out of it. Trump usurped the media's power (through his own showmanship) to block them out of it (this was the only reason CNN libs were mad really). At the end of the day Trump did the bidding of the common backgrounds interests so he was allowed to play the part:
- Sold $100s of billions of weapons to dictators (MIC) - His anti-china policy was solely to stop their EVs from taking over the gas car market in the US (Oil & Gas) - Escalated tensions in the middle east to keep netanyahu in power through the Abraham Weapons Deal and moving the US embassy illegally to Jerusalem (Foreign Interests)
The politicians, the media, they fall over, and fight amongst, each other to be top slave to these same various lobbies. The public are only there insofar to keep the facade in-tact, every 4 years people stand in line to larp as casting directors in the great pantomime. Most western states do not live in free, representative democracies - all the ones with significant sway have been totally usurped (in other countries we'd call it coups).
And unfortunately, the tech industry is now going in that direction (with YC now accepting MIC projects, lazy zero-alpha investors and VCs are crawling to the DoD infinite-money-glitch teat).
Read "Silent Coup" by Matt Kennard & Claire Provost[https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Silent_Coup/gjmvEAAAQ...]
Feels like for each of these, you can weave an alternate story with another set of benefactors if the opposite action was taken. For instance, his being pro china would benefit corporate interests through globalization, allowing multinationals to bleed the rust belt even more. Or that signing the Iran deal actually means Russia benefits somehow (dunno, maybe so their client state/ally isn't sanctioned anymore?) and trump is in the pockets of Russian oligarchs. Point is, no matter what policies get enacted, there's going to be someone benefiting, which means you can accuse the people in charge for doing "the bidding of the common backgrounds interests". Even something that should be an unalloyed good (eg. FTC outlawing noncompetes) can be cynically written off as "that's just them throwing us a bone to keep us placated".
To put another way, what would convince you that your theory is false? A full socialist revolution?
If you were to ask me what I want. I want consistency and honesty. If politicians want to do the bidding of lobbies then don't waste our time with the quadrennial dog and pony show. If the press/media refuses to keep the powerful to account then just give us our torches and pitchforks back. If the justice system can be abused by people with power and money to squash the little guy then just rename it to something else. If international law only applies to what the status quo considers subhumans then just get rid of the ICC/ICJ and the entire concept of International Law. If profit motive is more important than the continuation of life on earth then just say so and stop paying useless consultants millions of dollars while the world burns and allow people who care about the climate to escalate as they see fit. If corporations are allowed to massacre people with their negligence and the "justice system" does nothing to hold them to account then just allow the people to do the same to negligent corporations. This whole setup of one side can always do the bad thing yet the other side always needs to politely go through "the right channels" to get an ounce of recourse is tiring. It's either "law & order" or the "law of the jungle" for all of us or none of us.
You have to know how to suffer for what is important.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mahatma-Gandhi/Resistan...
"Thus was born satyagraha (“devotion to truth”), a new technique for redressing wrongs through inviting, rather than inflicting, suffering, for resisting adversaries without rancor and fighting them without violence."
With that out of the way, maybe ideals is too charged of a word. Maybe the right word here is: priorities.
But I will also argue, imagine if he did nothing?
> But I will also argue, imagine if he did nothing?
I think that India would still have gotten independence a few years later, since either way, I don't think post-WW2 Britain had the capacity to hold on to India. However, I do believe that Gandhi's efforts ended up playing a significant role in creating a more unified national identity and helped to foster values that have allowed India to be a mostly stable democracy, in stark contrast to many of its neighbors. So, if he had done nothing, I figure that India might've fragmented into smaller countries with too much conflict to amount to much on the global stage.
But I am sad to see that bringing up Ghandi here even leads to downvotes of my original comment.
Why must it be the people suffering the consequence of greedy politicians, who must be the ones behaving with the high moral compass?
This seems to me like blaming the victims
Edit to add:
> You have to know how to suffer for what is important.
With that principle, people who have the decisional power should "suffer" by refraining from causing harm to others/the planet
I agree. But can we really only blame the politicians? I do not vote because every politician wants war. That is my small protest that aligns with my morals. They have to earn my vote. What if there were a group of people who got together and said we will only vote for the candidate that is against all war or where serious about climate change?
>Why must it be the people suffering the consequence of greedy politicians, who must be the ones behaving with the high moral compass?
Yes, unfortunate, but the only way out is for those of us with a moral compass to act as an example for others. To be the heroes who sacrifice and are remembered through history and change things for the better.
Start in your town. Keep it local.
I agree that most climate activism is more nuisance than violent, but that doesn't mean violence doesn't happen.
But in the grand scheme of things this is indeed a weak justification.
Someone smarter than me wrote:
> Anarchists dedicated to nonviolent direct action are not opposed to all forms of property damage. It can be an effective strategy if the decision to do it involves all participants, the target chosen is one that will guarantee no one who is not part of the action could be injured, and the method used does not frighten the public.
> A simple example is the Food Not Bombs actions taken the night of August 19th... we spray-painted the outline of "dead” bodies on the ground, stenciled mushroom clouds with the word “Today?” and wheat-pasted "War is Murder for Profit" posters along the route that the weapons buyers and sellers would take from their hotel to the conference hall. taking credit for hundreds of dollars in graffiti damage to Boston University's property. Who did this frighten into the arms of the state? No one.
Rebecca Solnit wrote:
> I want to be clear that property damage is not necessarily violence. The firefighter breaks the door to get the people out of the building. But the husband breaks the dishes to demonstrate to his wife that he can and may also break her. It’s violence displaced onto the inanimate as a threat to the animate.
> Quietly eradicating experimental GMO crops or pulling up mining claim stakes is generally like the firefighter. Breaking windows during a big demonstration is more like the husband. I saw the windows of a Starbucks and a Niketown broken in downtown Seattle after nonviolent direct action had shut the central city and the World Trade Organization ministerial down. I saw scared-looking workers and knew that the CEOs and shareholders were not going to face that turbulence and they sure were not going to be the ones to clean it up. Economically it meant nothing to them.
https://www.foodnotbombs.net/a.%20Anarchist%20Cookbook%20int...
In any case, the (Cambridge English) dictionary's definition of "violence" remains "actions that are intended or likely to hurt people or cause damage" (you'll note that what firefighters might do is not intended to cause damage while vandalism obviously is), and the law indeed makes this a criminal offence for a reason.
I'm half expecting someone to seriously claim at some point that an instant death is not violence because there is no suffering...
I disagree that highly cited Solnit is engaging in "obviously dishonest mental gymnastics" and can be safely ignored. Now what?
Great, you found another definition of violence, let's apply your definition to your own example.
Note that your definition includes "intended or likely." For some reason you ignore the "intended to" when discussing firefighters. Firefighters are obviously intending to cause damage to a door they axe down. Why is this not violence and why is this not a criminal offense? It's violence per your definition.
Do you want to use the same word to describe, and justify the criminalization of, all things that can be described by this word? It sounds like you don't because you seem to want to indicate that a firefighter axing a door and a protester bricking a window are different things, and that one is bad and one is good.
If you're ok with using the same word to describe both, then there's not really a point in discussing whether something is violence or not - many things good and bad are violence, and so we don't need to determine if something is violence or not to determine if the action should be criminalized, we need to consider other factors.
If you're not ok with using the same word to describe both, then we need to engage in what you're erroneously describing as "goal post moving." It's actually just seeking to define what "violence" encapsulates. In this case your chosen definition from Cambridge probably isn't great. Though it's in a dictionary, we can always change the definitions of words if we like, it happens all the time. Cambridge describes our language, not defines it.
As to your final sentence I'm not sure the relevancy, nobody ever brought up suffering and its relation to violence, so far as I can tell.
Hmm, this is an excerpt from my previous comment: "you'll note that what firefighters might do is not intended to cause damage while vandalism obviously is". You do also seem not to understand the meaning of "intent"...
Anyway, this is obviously useless, and in a way illustrates the issue when trying to tackle extremism, which is that it is outside the bounds of logic and reason, so bye.
Because if that's the case, then vandals also dream of a platonic city that doesn't require statements to be made through thrown rocks in order to achieve systemic justice.
> Anyway, this is obviously useless, and in a way illustrates the issue when trying to tackle extremism, which is that it is outside the bounds of logic and reason, so bye
It saddens me that when you find someone you disagree with, you assume they're simply irrational lunatics and thus not worth paying attention to.
And it's interesting to me that when 'violence' is used on this specific topic, it seems to only be used to label the reaction of the protesters and not the underlying issue they're protesting about, which itself is also a form of violence.
> the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: "theres actually zero difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you fucking moron"
Unless the latter is the point, consider an edit that addresses my point directly. I am only human. It is possible that there is a flaw in my reasoning. It is possible coffee did not hit me yet.
As written, this is not an argument at all.
What the comment does in its original form is draw attention to the nonsensical cowardice of refusing to take a stand on any issue. "There's no such thing as good violence" has you condemning slave revolutions for example. "There's no such thing as hate speech" refuses to acknowledge the forces and choices that led to historical atrocities and abdicates power to notice and prevent them. There's no future in this enlightened centrism, nothing to refute because it refuses to take a stand.
Time for protests...
Orban and his fellows are the ones who engage in authoritarianism.
The SPD should instead examine why they themselves are losing votes.
With a leader like Willy Brandt and the historical SPD they'd easily get 40%. The current mediocrities in the SPD are old enough to know that. Yet they still prefer their positions over actually serving the country.
The result is they're even less connected to the societies they are nominally a part of. It also makes them much more invested in perpetuating the system and less receptive to society.
edit: This was intentional as it was thought that such a system would reduce international conflict.
How might we start to fix that, do you think? I don't imagine globalization is going anywhere.
When dealing with complexity tooling usually helps. I tend to think instead of redacting documents when FOIAd everything should be public by default. We could have graph tools that markup the connections and make the world more comprehensible.
> The result is they're even less connected to the societies they are nominally a part of. It also makes them much more invested in perpetuating the system and less receptive to society.
> The SPD should instead examine why they themselves are losing votes.
Extremist discourse is appealing. Much like using lead in gasoline. It's very hard to compete with hate-based politics when you don't have to outline actual actionable and long-term viable policies and can rely on soundbites for effect.
edit: burn, karma, burn
Anyone looking at the rise of AfD should also look at the example of Denmark, which some years earlier had also seen a strong rise of radical alt-right parties, but once the centrists switched their stance against immigration, at the next elections the radicals went back down to their rightful 1% or so of votes. That is also an example which shows that indeed it is possible to compete with hate-based politics with actual actionable and long-term viable policies.
Indeed, SPD should instead examine why they themselves are losing votes and consider it their duty to provide some alternative for German voters so that a person can vote against immigration without getting the full neo-nazi package in addition to that.
Is it that so, or is it that hate-based shallow arguments appeal to a particular audience more than "more reasonable" policies or discourse?
> once the centrists switched their stance against immigration
Then the far-right would have won and turned the political mainstream into xenophobes. Not a great outcome for the society as a whole. Would arguments centered on supporting immigrants (and refugees fleeing humanitarian crisis) and integrating them into their host society have the same appeal for people who have been fed a diet of fear and hatred?
There has to be a line that should never be crossed in any democratic society. The far right has crossed it.
Also, speech you hate ≠ hate speech.
I agree, but...
Does it cross that line to say that too much immigration, too fast, causes some definite, specific negative effects on society?
Does it cross that line to say that therefore we should accept less immigration?
(It definitely crosses that line to say that immigrants are evil, or worse, subhuman.)
https://chomsky.info/20081010/
I'm disappointed but not surprised that you are trying to discredit a comment based on a single term that saves a paragraph of explanation. The same tactics that we talk about in this submission.
"Uniparty," as in that exact word, is very much a Trumpean era creation, brought back into popularity by right wing q-anon aligned USA presidential candidate (I believe candidate?) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Someone's usage of it generally indicates not that they're an anticapitalist but that they're aligned with this new form of reactionary thinking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniparty
"Supporters of the 2000 Green Party presidential bid of Ralph Nader used the term extensively, and Nader himself called the prevailing political structure a 'corporate uniparty' in his 2002 book Crashing the Party."
Pinning this term the right is the usual tactic to outlaw the term and remove it from the dictionary.
Besides, the complaint that the SPD under Schroeder destroyed the welfare state and was increasingly indistinguishable from the CDU predates the AfD.
Arguments like these of course require historical knowledge and nuance rather than crying "far right".
You created your account today, this was your first comment, and I perceive it to be exceedingly aggressive and antagonistic. You're also putting words in my mouth. I don't believe you're acting in good faith and engaging with you is not a productive use of my time.
Uniparty specifically is a term Americans mostly use from the right wing to describe what they call Globalist interests, which almost means the same thing as when anticapitalists describe Capitalist interests, except the points they differ on identify them as fundamentally opposed ideologies.
I've never heard any european politicians use the actual term "uniparty," if someone on this sub is using that exact term, they're likely adopting the American right wing definition of the term in the same way if you see someone referring to "libertarian values" on this sub they probably don't mean values like forming cooperative relationships of mutual aid, they probably mean american libertarian values like privatized unregulated industry. My sibling comment mentions that we're discussing Germany, and that's why I'm being a stickler, if you hear a German refer to the concept of "one party" meaning many parties being enthralled to capitalism, that's very different than the typical usage english word "Uniparty."
Chomsky is talking about capitalist interests, he's not talking about the modern American right wing "globalist interests" which is a sort of umbrella term vaguely blaming economic hardship on trade deficits, exporting factories, importing cheap labor, and sometimes simply antisemitism (global jewish conspiracy to pump nations dry for example). What chomsky is talking about is more like how both parties are required to serve capitalist interests e.g. by not socializing healthcare since that would hurt the bottom line of healthcare companies, or by not banning fracking since that hurts the profits of massive transnational oil companies.
I apologize if you're genuinely interested, but I really have 0 desire to respond to sealioning.
EDIT: For starters https://afd-verbot.de/beweise?category=demokratiefeindlichke... seems to have a comprehensive list of potential evidence. The site and material are German though.
I disagree with your "totalitarian measure" comment, it is the AfD who are not compatible with the German constitution and the majority of Germany's society who prefer a fair democracy should not bulge the shouting of demands by populists, Reichsbürger, Querdenker. The connections to the AfD do exist, AfD politician Malsack-Winkemann (then already not a member of the Bundestag anymore, a security issue in my eyes) toured through the Reichstag with people from the Reichtsbürger group around Heinrich XIII. Prinz Reuß. Local AfD politician Andreas Geitz was even part of the Reichstagsturm in 2020.
Do you know how much support the remaining power centers had? Does it mean he had majority? Does it change your argument? If so, how?
I am avoiding addressing the meat of your argument so far and I am letting small things like Bush 2020 slide, because you are not wrong about power. You do, however, appear to be blinded by the convenience of Left/Right political spectrum.
https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/inland/ex-afd-abgeordnet...
Connections to the AfD exist, because extreme right people will always choose the most right wing viable party (NPD or successor is too small) as their home. The question is the percentage of these people and if all of them are genuine or some of them are planted.
I agree with the CDU here that the purported issue is not clear enough. It is a shame that we do not have the relatively normal political era of Schmidt, Kohl and Genscher, but that's the fault of the CDU/SPD.
In April 2018, Germany's domestic intelligence service, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), estimated that Reichsbürger movement membership had grown by 80% over the previous two years, more than estimated earlier, with a total of 18,000 adherents, of whom 950 were categorized as right-wing extremists. [Wikipedia]
For context: the RAF probably had no more than 100 members at any point, but no one would think to call them "irrelevant".
Also, I'm fairly sure Strafgesetzbuch section 86a is not what bans parties and membership of them, but censors their symbols and imagery. The Basic Law (Grundgesetz) article 21(2) is what bans parties.
For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_of_Germany_v._...
The article literally has a list of political groups that were banned on the basis on the law.
But what bans the parties? Who decides parties are unconstitutional? That is Grundgesetz article 21(2):
Parties that, by reason of their aims or the behaviour of their adherents, seek to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order or to endanger the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany shall be unconstitutional. The Federal Constitutional Court shall rule on the question of unconstitutionality.
Parteien, die nach ihren Zielen oder nach dem Verhalten ihrer Anhänger darauf ausgehen, die freiheitliche demokratische Grundordnung zu beeinträchtigen oder zu beseitigen oder den Bestand der Bundesrepublik Deutschland zu gefährden, sind verfassungswidrig. Über die Frage der Verfassungswidrigkeit entscheidet das Bundesverfassungsgericht.We should prevent that from happening again. Now... how would we go about that?
By doing the same thing as last time; wait until the party takes over?
Otherwise, the loud idiots with simple-sounding solutions (that don't work) will gain power.
In the case of the Weimar Republic, it was fucked over by the victors of WW1 imposing a crippling financial burden on it. So, don't wreck your enemies so hard, you might create a monster.
This rethoric always sounds to me like "it's the big parties' fault the people are voting for extremists because the big parties didn't create a perfect world full of rainbows and sunshine".
I'm not convinced that the quality of the current government(s) is the reason for extremists gaining popularity.
What if the Weimar Republic said "screw it, we're not paying"? It might have prompted military invasion, or further sanctions from the victors, making it a pariah state, but it might also have relieved the misery felt by ordinary citizens, and they might not have been so receptive to the big lies of the future dictator.
Because I find people are very upset about this until it's used on people they don't like - socialists or fascists - and then they are very happy it's being used to 'stop the slide into fascism/communism' until it's used on them again.
A famous example many here will likely still be able to associate with is “The Patriot act”, which should have really been called “The Hunt Patriots act”; in reality a kind of mop-up operation after the USA has already long ago been functionally and psychologically conquered without the people even realizing it, kind of like how people can one day find themselves wondering how they slid into a very abusive relationship little by little without realizing it or being able to take action to prevent it. The only difference being that many, definitely not most people haven’t even started asking themselves whether they are in an abusive relationship, let alone how they got there.
People still haven’t even realized that the whole premise of the EU is a tyrannical and hostile illegitimate imitation government. It has no legitimacy under its own claimed democratic principles, it’s the timeshare fraud of governance; sell a fantasy and good presentation, while reality is a fraudulent and destructive nightmare.
Are you sure these are the same individuals? I can imagine them being different members of a nebulous group where different people talk louder at different times.
One need only quote what Churchill said to see that it's nothing of the sort. Unless of course you think the man who kept the world war against nazism and fascism going for a year by himself was himself a fascist nazi at which point words don't mean anything.
His reputation in India is not as stellar as you might think.
There is after all a difference between callous indifference and industrial genocide.
There are places one can calmly discuss even the most abhorrent of ideas like giving parents the right of infanticide or banning home ownership or requiring parents to swap their baby for a random one without anyone getting heated, but this isn't one of them.
Maybe it was 10 years ago? I dunno.
I'm an EU citizen. I have minimal saying in who our commissioner is and what members of the cabinet get chosen.
I have a vote which I give to whatever party. After that, the vote for commissioner is secret; I have no idea who voted for what. After that, the negociations for the cabinet are secret; I have no idea what the criteria are and what the plans are.
I'm not putting us in the bucket of non-democracy just yet but I don't feel it's that far.
We get to vote for our country representatives, who then vote for the MEPs. I don't think there is any EU-wide rule that prevents the MEP nomination process from being open - that'd be country-specific legislation.
There is no rule preventing it from being open, there is also no rule forcing it to being open.
In a democracy the government as well are supposed to be accountable by the rule of law. As they are not it is a failed democracy.
But, once one or two states decided to elect their senator, it was game over. The other states gave up, and now all the senators are elected.
It's true that both the commission and (perhaps even more powerful) the council of ministers are not democratic. But this is in the hands of each individual country to change. And it's national level politicians who are currently the obstacle. All find it easier to blame the EU than to take responsibility for change. But if one country takes action to increase , even a small one, the public in the others will realise they all can.
In the UK for example, the people elect members of parliament as their representatives, but MPs choose their party leaders, and the governing party leadership chooses its ministers without any public consultation or debate. What's the difference?
In the EU we find about it after we vote, after they discuss in secrecy.
Voters typically cannot directly stop somebody being named leader of their party or given a specific role within government for multiple terms. If you dislike them, you pressure your elected representative to change that.
Almost all representative democracy is accountability through a representative, not directly through control of government internals & positions.
But representative democracy still is democracy.
Arcane electoral rules make for weak representatives who gather power by making back room deals.
The real (but not constitutional) power lies in the commission that is appointed, not elected, and has been vacuuming power to itself in increasing amounts.
Unelected commissioners draft laws, while elected MEPs rubber-stamp with barely any changes. The Council's backroom deals make smoke-filled rooms look transparent. Try explaining the Ordinary Legislative Procedure to the average voter - you can't.
And let's not forget the ritual of ignoring referendums that don't align with the "ever closer union" mantra. When lobbyists have more sway than citizens, you've got a problem. The EU is a masterclass in obfuscating accountability behind layers of bureaucracy. It's democracy laundering, plain and simple.
The MEP usually do not "rubber-stamp with barely any changes". There often is considerable change applied to the original proposals, by the MEP negotiating. What really is missing is the right to propose laws for the EP. But for that you would need to agree about a way tighter EU integration of the member countries, which currently seems highly unlikely in the given political climate.
Again, it is way easier organizing a democratic system in a single nation state than in a confederation of sovereign countries with sometimes very different national systems and views. And I am not saying that to brush over the democratic deficit of the current EU implementation, but just to acknowledge the level of difficulty.
A real shame, if you ask me. The EU is the crowning achievement of human politics, and a step for a single government representing every human being democratically, with equal rights across national borders.
Just to think the member countries never managed more than a couple decades without engaging in wars between them is a statement of the value of this organisation. Imperfect as it is, it has prevented countless avoidable deaths and brought unprecedented peace to its members.
Take Canada.
The PM - Papineau
The defence minister - Scarborough South West
Finance Minister - University - Rosedale
Even the Speaker, who stands for the Majesty, is a member of the House - Hull Aylmer.
While Cabinet members are, typically, given safe seats to run, cabinet members can and do lose their seat effectively ending their ministry.
In a strong presidential system, like the US, the "ministers" (i.e.secretaries) are not in fact elected. But, not only are they approved by Congress, but they serve on behalf and on the whim of the President who is elected.
The fount of executive authority is solely in the hands of the President, who merely delegates his authority (who have no power of their own) to the cabinet members and (except for the VP) can fire them at any time.
The President holds all the executive power and the voters pick him.
The EU commissioners are not elected and the Commission president is not elected
In many (most?) of the democratic EU countries the voters cannot fire the PM/chancellor/etc. while keeping the ruling party in power. So, to have that expectation on EU level would be strange, as it is not typically realized in the constituents.
The EU commissioners and their president are nominated by the (often themselves indirectly) elected governments of the EU countries. That is a level of indirection too much for my taste, but it is still not undemocratic. But they have to be confirmed by the EP, which is elected directly.
One reason for that approach is that most possible candidates for the positions are completely unknown to the general populace in most EU countries. There is a lack of EU level political information and conscience in the EU. If the system has to be improved that is the point to start.
Each layer dilutes democratic input and accountability. By the time you reach EU law, the average voter's influence is homeopathic at best.
Localists would argue since a federation is highly non-local it shouldn't even be attempted because it leads inherently to non-representative centralisation of power.
This multi-layered separation explains why EU citizens feel disconnected from Brussels decision-making. It's a game of democratic telephone where the message gets garbled with each step and the centralist power machine inserts its own interests.
I agree with the first sentence, but I do not think that this cannot be improved upon. For example, more direct news reporting from EU level events/decisions could help. If only good journalism was not such a rare occurrence these days.
Regarding the "centralist power machine" - that is no different anywhere, no matter the processes. Money talks and lobbies get their way, even if not always. Still, (flawed) democracy and rule of law are better than doing without.
Perhaps the other commenter was refering to the French, Dutch, and Irish EU Constitution referendums that all failed. In the case of the two former members, they never went back to the people and found an alternate way to get what the EU wanted into practice. In the case of the Irish, they voted again until, it seems, they voted for the ‘right’ side of the issue.
And the playbook was almost followed in the UK following Brexit. For three years politicians and various interests called for a "confirmatory vote", or a "peoples' vote" (as if people didn't vote the first time round).
The rules are clear, changes in EU rules must be unanimous. Typically, governments agree to changes affecting their countries' constitutions and sovereignty w/out consulting voters (how democratic! /s).
Occasionally a government will allow a vote. And when they lose, they ignore the vote.
There are no rules as to what an intervention can be and zero accountability. They will and have obstructed justice all the way to the courts, loosing evidence etc from the illegal activities their proxies have done. Welcome to the new world.
Apparently Belgium and Germany now also use this approach.
> Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences.
If they'd not spend the last 10 years purging the old guard who they called free speech fanatics they'd have someone in their corner. Now I just have the world tiniest violin for them.
Or to use much better words than mine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUqytjlHNIM
I love this line. Its like a riff on the old radio Yerevan joke.
> Q: What is the difference between the Constitutions of the USA and USSR? Both guarantee freedom of speech.
> A: Yes, and the US Constitution also guarantees freedom after speech.
Or to use another Radio Yerevan joke:
Q: Is it true that Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov from Moscow won a car in a lottery?
A: In principle yes, but: it wasn't Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov but Aleksander Aleksandrovich Aleksandrov; he is not from Moscow but from Odessa; it was not a car but a bicycle; he didn't win it, but it was stolen from him.
>Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences.
The reason this line is bad is because it's wrong and misused from multiple directions due to overloading/being vague with "consequences". Freedom of speech is freedom from VIOLENT, or directly violent adjacent [0], consequences, public or private. But SOCIAL consequences aren't infringement on free speech rights, they are exercising free speech rights. The exact same freedom of speech and association that gives you the right to say something offensive also gives everyone else the right to say offensive things back and/or never have anything to do with you again. Free speech culture and principles typically encourage attempting to maintain a more open and curious mind then you are required to, and to use your rights with appropriate measure and discretion. And of course social/economic consequences go round and round, too harsh a reaction may result in others treating the one who is judged to have been too harsh with consequences in turn, and on and on. That's the vibrant market of ideas.
But it's false if someone brings this line up to support or excuse violent speech suppression, and it's also false if someone brings this up sarcastically and tries to equate bans from private soap boxes, people refusing to offer support, people offering criticism, etc with use of violence. If you get banned from some web forum, which is said web forum's freedom of speech, and then whine about your free speech rights, and someone says "that doesn't give you freedom from consequences" you should recognize they're completely correct as far as social consequences go, and would be completely wrong if they said you should get fined or imprisoned or beat up or the like.
I consider myself a "free speech absolutist", but that's within a wholistic understanding of the whole system of free speech applying to everyone with infinite regression. The phase has gotten a bad name from hypocrites who call themselves that while then complaining loudly about others exercising their free speech (which of course is itself free speech).
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0: For example if government imposes a fine someone might say that's not violence, but the reason it's a "fine" not a "suggestion" is that it's backed by the government's general monopoly on violence. What makes a law a law is what happens if you don't go along with it. It can be nested many levels deep, and involve discretion and resource limits, but ultimately it always ends up with violence.
I've worked with people who are outraged over what is happening with Hezbollah protestors that were 100% behind the above.
One of the big reasons why I rather enjoy working remotely is that I don't have to interact with those people more than looking at their mastodon feeds to see just how unhinged they are once a month for entertainment purposes.
Let's also not forget, Nelson Mandela was branded as a terrorist.
Mandela was the leader of MK[0], an organization which publicly undertook a campaign of bombing and sabotage. Whatever you think of Mandela or his reasons, labeling him a "terrorist" seems a lot more defensible than most.
>Necklacing is a method of extrajudicial summary execution and torture carried out by forcing a rubber tire drenched with petrol around a victim's chest and arms, and setting it on fire. The term "necklace" originated in the 1980s in black townships of apartheid South Africa where suspected apartheid collaborators were publicly executed in this fashion.[1]
Did we already forget the Polish blacksites?
Have we already forgotten the Italian secret services aiding the abduction of a man in Italy?
Whoever bemoans that the EU is becoming like the US is clutching pearls.
The criteria seems reasonable enough. If there is objective, verifiable information that an individual, who has been sharing terrorist content online, will commit a violent extremist offense in the future and that offense would be serious enough... I would hope that this data is shared between the Union members now and in the future.
If parliaments had decided that, my objections would be much lower. But the institutions just deciding for themselves seems to be potentially abusive. It is not like there would be no examples.