EU Parliament greenlights Chat Control 1.0
patrick-breyer.de
patrick-breyer.de
- The Parliament voted against the first reading of this proposal twice in 2026, the first time they only supported limited cases for it, while the second time they actually defeated it fully.
- The Commission didn't care, and kept the proposal on the table by refusing to withdraw it.
- Once the Commission does that, the proposal goes on second-reading (despite the first-reading having defeated it) and it is established in a very PERVERSE way in EU law that to AVOID passing the proposal in second-reading you need ABSOLUTE majority which is incredibly hard to pursue (you would think that we would need an absolute majority to PASS a proposal that was previously defeated on first-reading, not instead needing absolute majority to DENY a previously defeated proposal that was again forced to the table).
- Furthermore, absences in practicality count as "No" on the rejection. So of course they scheduled the vote in the summer when notoriously there will be many absences.
By never withdrawing a defeated proposal they can effectively and in practicality pursue any agenda they want (it requires a massive mobilization effort to find absolute majority to defeat any proposal, especially when absences for any reason effectively count against rejection).
In PRACTICALITY, the Commission can pursue any agenda whenever and however they want, and throw the votes down the drain.
EU's democracy is lipstick on a pig.
I think what you've typed is not representative of what happened here. My understanding is that the EU Council forced this second-reading, not the Commission.
To provide evidence for my argument: https://fightchatcontrol.eu/
Look at "Timeline". This is the Council, not the Commission. This is your elected heads of state. This is "democracy" in action.
"Council and EPP attempting to bypass Parliament With negotiators still deadlocked on core issues, the Council and the European People's Party (EPP) are trying to sidestep Parliament by reviving the expired Chat Control 1.0. The Council plans to fast-track a rewritten proposal with identical content, effectively circumventing the Commission's right of initiative, democratic oversight, and a fresh opinion from the European Data Protection Supervisor (source)."
Both the European Commission and the Council itself are not DIRECTLY elected EU bodies. Potato, potahto, tomato, tomahto.
Council pushes it forward: https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2026...
From the last article: "The Council position will now be examined by the European Parliament, under second reading.". Note that this is technically accurate under absolute majority rules for rejection (not for approving), but practically is where the "cheating" happens - as described in my original parent comment - because of the perverse procedures of the EU that are designed to basically make it almost impossible to go against the agenda.
The Commission did not withdraw it: no source because it stayed "pending".
The EU procedures are maliciously designed against the Parliament while preserving the technicality of plausible deniability. How do we call this architecture in software? We call it a "backdoor", except this one is embedded in the EU legislative process.
Unlike the European Parliament which is directly elected by EU citizens. Conveniently, the EU citizens have been silenced on this matter despite the Parliament denying this full proposal not once, but twice.
I dont understand this line of reasoning about EU:
Ministers are appointed by people we vote. In most democracies the entire government is appointed and maybe indirect voted as a whole (by parliament and maybe directly by citizens).
What I am trying to say is people who proposed this are representatives of those countries (even if indirect their citizens votes vor the party that appointed them).
So representation is not the problem. The problem is citizens (at large) voting only on personal interest and not thinking or not understanding the second order effects. If you don't like what Council did here make sure next round of elections the party that proposed those ministers will not get elected in your country an should not have the power to form a government.
We seem to expect country officials to be even better when playing at EU level and think about yet a greater good than they are doing in their own countries.
No head of state was involved in the discussion we are having today.
By the way my personal opinion is that the confusing names are by design, to give the appearance that head of states are involved in decisions that have nothing to do with them, democracy in the EU is just an illusion.
For effective representation, you need a feedback loop between the voting and the policymaking at the other end. If you add all these layers in-between, voters are going to have a hard time figuring out how their voting is actually changing outcomes. Imagine trying to play a video game that has huge lag between the control input and what the character on screen is actually doing.
Why I find it hard: EU is another abstraction on top of what we already have: local, regional, national. EU is not just an alliance but a real governing body with legislative and executive branches.
Having an average (as in normal) citizen of a country have to think about their local interests, regional (as in around their local cities), national and global interests is too prone to manipulation. As we saw with Brexit and other campaigns. Too many of us are too focused on self interest and locality to be able to dedicate enough time to global matters.
IMHO of course
As I understand it, the EU can legislate in any area it wants. And member states are required to enforce EU law as if it were their own domestic law. The EU can even sue member states for failing to implement and enforce EU law.
So it seems like the EU government is both extremely powerful (the nationalism issue), but also very insulated from European voters (the representation issue).
[1] And I think most people would say that the federal government isn't even allowed to regulate individual use of marijuana. There's a 2005 Supreme Court case to the contrary, but I don't think it would turn out the same way under the current Supreme Court.
Here is a clear list of areas: https://commission.europa.eu/about/role/law/areas-eu-action_...
Also EU does not have a government. There are 3 powers lets say:
- EU Council which represents the countries governments
- The EU Commission representing EU interests
- The EU Parliament representing citizens
We go back to what I said: when introducing a new level of abstraction we got a new governing power. But lets never forget that except the EU Parliament all the others are formed by people proposed by countries governments.
Thus as EU citizen one:
- influences EU direct by voting the EU parliament
- influences EU indirect by voting who rules their countries which will then send people to EU Council and Commission
As you notice the countries governments have more power (2 out of 3) than the EU parliament even if they are different kind of powers.
Still in the end each citizen that goes to vote is deciding the direction of EU in three ways (one direct citizen to EU and two indirect citizen to country to EU). Want more federalization then vote parties that go that way. Want more nationalism then vote that way. But nobody (or few people) really think then consequences of what they vote in their own countries and how that affects everybody in EU.
The entire point of the EU design is that ultimately the member states national governments (the heads of) are the most powerful and set the direction. It was done this way because people didn't like the idea of EU ministers. There was even a huge objection to the change that introduced the Parliament, the MEPs that you are now saying should hold ultimate power.
And this is the problem. People decide up-front that the EU is "not democratic" and then they adjust their arguments and data to fit this narrative.
Macron sits in the EU Council and it has nothing to do with this.
These are not European bureaucrats, they are the ministers of justice of each member state.
Sorry, what are you talking about here?
The Commission is subservient to the EU Council. The EU Council consists, by design, of all the heads of the nation states.
Furthermore, at least in the case of Italy & other parliamentary systems, there's something like 3 levels of indirection between the people and their "representative" in the Council:
People elect members of the Parliament -> MPs decide who is the Prime Minister -> PM decides who sits in the Council
We should likely just replace it with either a "EU Senate", where each country elects the same number of senators, _or_ a chamber with truly European elections (as in, every EU citizen may vote for any candidate, regardless of their nation). But the latter option seems still out of reach as of today.
The EU voters have practically gifted their future to a bunch of technocrats. Over time (decades), it will get worse too, as inevitably power corrupts them more and more.
The EU is simply never going to represent the EU voters when it goes against their agenda. Want proof? They just did it.
The Council [1], also known as the Council of the European Union and the Council of Ministers, does not consist of heads of state. The body that consists of heads of state is the European Council [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_the_European_Union
The only way to fix this is EU member states become more critical: but for politicians in those states an EU position is the best promotion they can make. So almost nobody dares to speak out.
well actually, it's Ronald McDonald, not Donald McDonald
(but Donald Duck's first name is indeed Donald)
</HN is the 'well actually' capital of the internet>
Who is the engineer of all this evil? Her? Someone else?
I'm pretty sure that, for a start, backroom deals with Pfizer during the Covid pandemic. She's been accused of deleting evidence (like SMS) and pressuring companies to delete evidence if I'm not mistaken.
I don't know what GP means exactly but the EU institutions are a special jurisdiction: for example a belgian policeman cannot go inside the EU Commission and arrest someone without special powers. Source: I know an inspector who went in there and arrested an EU bureaucrat that happened to be a pedophile.
And it's well known that to be sure that the police cannot come and knock at her door with a warrant while she'd be anywhere else in Belgium, she's made herself an apartment build inside the EU Commission. So she's safe there.
> Who is the engineer of all this evil? Her? Someone else?
Note that that is another topic. And your tactic is a common, sneaky but obvious, tactic. One doesn't have to know the answers to those questions to point out wrongdoings when there are wrongdoings.
didn't know about it but apparently there was the Pfizergate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizergate
Ursula von der Leyen is hated in Germany as an evil war-mongering gnome. She was previously appointed to replace a highly decorated military general of the Germany Army (Bundeswehr) without having any skills in that area, except being corrupt to the core. She miserably failed the military, cost the state large losses in tax-payer money and was promoted instead being removed. Then she "somehow" became the fierce and corrupt "Queen of the EU".
EDIT (I owe you sources at least):
I think it goes much deeper, I think it's not just corruption, she's a perfect traitor of the EU and Germany. Selling all 500 million europeans out to a foreign state.
- https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/eu-abgeordnete-dr...
- https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article191310021/Urs...
- https://journalistenwatch.com/2026/07/11/ursula-die-skandal-...
- https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/ursula-von-der-le...
- https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/bundeswehr-berater-von-d...
- https://www.zeit.de/thema/ursula-von-der-leyen
- https://trump.news-pravda.com/ukraine/2026/06/24/360828.html
You need to specify which EU laws does this violate. "undemocratic" by your definition. There is no universally precise definition of "democratic". Because I'm sure EU council knows how to be democratic by their own definition of the term. They have an army of legal pundits who ensure that everything is done correctly within their legal framework.
By any definition of the term, this is not a democracy and it's a technocracy at best.
Edit: I am Italian.
The American system was mostly cribbed from Europeans to begin with. Montesquieu, etc. The structure of the EU is bizarre according to the principles of democratic governance articulated by Europeans themselves.
1. The Council triggered the second reading by adopting its own position and sending it back. You made it sound like the Commission just steamrolled it unilaterally.
2. The scheduling conspiracy is false. Parliament itself voted (331-304) on July 7 to fast-track this. Also, the votes in March and July were pretty stable: 311 against in March, 314 against in July.
This is farcical.
Yes, from a PURELY MONETARY viewpoint, Brexit was a disaster. But there are more important things than money.
I'm from Spain btw.
This will never become law in my country(Poland). Last time they tried to push it people protested in the millions.
I'm sorry to tell you, but if the choice becomes lose EU funding or pass it into law, it will happen.
Yeah, EU setup is absurdly convoluted but it's simply a result of the consensus that tires to balance difference sources of power (the people and the countries).
Ideally the whole EU population should just vote for MEPs in EU parliment, which the would form the government. But that would completely sidestep member states government which they won't ever agree to. And any even mention of reforminng the EU towards that is immediatelly shoot down because nationalists are screetching about soverignty (which at the same time complain that the EU is undemocratic)
So we have the setup with European Council (heads of governments) setting the agenda, Comission (presiden of which is selected by council and approved by parliment) that makes that into law and then Parliment and EU Council (not European council!) votes for it.
A coupld of infographics how that works:
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/en/article/20240524STO...
https://static.cfr.org/sites/default/files/image/2022/03/-la...
https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022...
I don't like the way US presidents are elected either, ignoring popular vote, and including gerrymandering. I also don't like how the US president is allowed to bypass Congress.
Are you saying I am mixing it up now? My post acknowledged I had mixed it up before: given that the Commission is so powerful, I had thought it was comprised of the heads of state. I’m aware that’s not how it’s structured. I was explaining it to my wife because the reality is very complicated!
> I don't like the way US presidents are elected either, ignoring popular vote and including gerrymandering.
Gerrymandering cannot affect a Presidential election, because the Electoral College is elected based on statewide popular votes. And the logic behind the Electoral College is the exact same as the reason why so many EU bodies have one member per member state. The U.S. President doesn’t only represent the people, he also represents the states as sovereign entities. The states have chosen to move in the populist direction by providing to allocate their electoral votes based on statewide elections, but they have never consented to abandoning the prerogative to do things differently.
Moreover, the electoral college also is deliberately designed to produce more decisive results. In every case where the U.S. electoral college vote produced a different result than the national popular vote, the President’s party still won the Congressional popular vote. In those cases, a pure popular vote for the President would have produced a divided government. Most European countries avoid that by not directly electing their chief executive at all, and instead providing various ways for the party that controls the legislature to also control the executive.
Finally, in terms of “bypassing Congress,” what you’re describing is a general feature of Presidential systems where the executive is led by the same party as the legislature. For example, the French President has limited powers in theory. But in practice he’s very powerful if his party also controls the National Assembly: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2022/05/02/w...
“In most cases, these constitutional provisions end up being diluted in practice. When the president obtains a supporting majority in the Assemblée Nationale, they are less tied to following the Constitution to the letter and are able to propose legislation. In doing so, they then encroach on the role of government and in fact have significant power, often described as more substantial than that of heads of state in other countries.”
That much was clear. I was saying this:
> Makes you wonder if he explained it correctly to his wife (American lawyer), or if she verified.
Still wondering.
> Most European countries avoid that by not directly electing their chief executive at all, and instead providing various ways for the party that controls the legislature to also control the executive.
Moot comparison. Most European countries don't have a two party system. As such, there is more cooperation and consensus between involved parties. They can also easily get rid of the leader of the country, should they opt for it. Now, compare that to GOP and Trump.
> But in practice he’s very powerful if his party also controls the National Assembly
Yes, I am aware. Don't like it. Don't like IRV either. France doesn't do very well in Democracy Index (not terrible either, slightly better than USA pre-Trump IIRC).
I prefer the way the Scandinavian countries, and in lesser extend The Netherlands and Switzerland deal with politics. You can also notice these countries do very well in indices such as Democracy Indez or freedom of press ones.
This is the key difference between presidential system and parliamentary system. In a parliamentary system, the head of state answers to the parliament. In a presidential system, the presidents answers to no-one (technically they answer to the people, but in practice that's inconsequential).
The (im)balance of power we have now is very much not what was originally intended, but it can only persist because Congress and the Supreme Court are complicit in granting the Executive near absolute authority, which is only being kept in check at the moment by lower courts.
(2) Replace US senate with a meeting of secretaries, or heads of departments from each state. Only one relevant representative from each state. But the senate composition is not fixed. When the senate discusses e.g. agricultural policy, each state sends their secretary of agriculture, of head of their department of agriculture. No more senate elections. This is the EU Council of Ministers (a.k.a. Council of the European Union or just "The Council").
(3) The house is the EU Parliament.
Take the right of legislative initiative away from the congress, and give it to the Commission of Presidents. The Commission writes the bills, and the senate and the house can only approve or disapprove (with comments).
(4) Change the states to follow the European model: The governor is not elected, but appointed by the state legislature, and is called "prime minister". (Except France has a presidential model.)
(5) The president / Commission is like a CEO. To supervise the CEO, we need a board. The heads of states (governors) meet 4 times per year to discuss and set broad and long term goals. This is the European Council.
To analogize to the U.S., it would be like if the National Governor's Association selected a Head President. Then you had a Senate of Secretaries made up of the secretaries of various executive departments in the 50 states. Then the Head President and Senate of Secretaries put together a slate for the Commission of Presidents. And Congress would then approve the slate up or down.
In (4), though, I do not get the French exception. There are many countries in Europe with a president and a prime minister
In most of those countries, the role of the president is mostly ceremonial and/or has to do with foreign policy outside of EU.
Germany and Italy are exceptions, not the rule
22 countries: Prime minister
5 countries: President
Yes, but what does it have to do with the original point about countries with real power presidents?
Unintelligent authoritarians run amok.
Wait, that's the rule? On the second go around, the default outcome is for a previously defeated proposal to pass unless you can muster an absolute majority?
This seems like if the U.S. President had a reverse veto: it could pass any law Congress rejected by forcing a second vote and the law would pass unless there was an absolute majority against. Didn't the EU people read Montesquieu about separation of powers? He was French!
The EU, in particular, is a community of relatively different states, where you can’t have just direct elections with proportional representation, otherwise the most populous countries will decide for everybody. This is why there is a zoo of directly elected bodies, bodies nominated by the Parliament, others expressing the will of countries’ governments, and complex voting procedures with qualified majorities and veto powers.
In practice the EU has struggled to make national governments ratify trade treaties because their devolved regions were worried about beef prices. It’s not an unstoppable dictatorial behemoth that decides against the will of the people, if 10 farmers in Wallonia can stop it. They still haven’t convinced Germany that an Italian baker can open a bakery in Bavaria without attending a local mandatory 5 year Meister training.
Same could be said for <some level of government>. Quite often people are just generally clueless how things are administered/goverened ;)
We know what they are in charge of (for the basic ministries), everyone knows who the president is, a lot who the PM is, and nobody knows the current ministers. But we know their jobs. They also refer to stuff which impacts us on a daiky basis.
The EU as a governing body is a mystery. Not only there are pieces that has almost the same name but are different things, they function in a remote world that does not interfere with ours. Like the UN.
Most of the Europeans know who the President of EC (so basically president in France or PM i other countries) is -- everyone hates beloved UvdL ;)
The same goes for comissioners - they mimic same roles as your government has but level up. Some positions may be more prominent (and names known), some less.
Then if you go level _DOWN_ to local authorities (regional, municipal) then people would most likely be clueless who-is-who-and-do-what.
Basically we live in dumbed-down world where people are aware of basically the only-single-strongest-figure (Presindent, PM) because… idiocracy…
I don't know the name of the person who runs utilities because they just work. I sure would know if there was a problem. This is the same with politics: when a country is stable and is moving ahead, people are not interested.
Look at the participation levels in elections: they are always high when there is substantial stuff on the scales. Otherwise it is moot.
Speak for yourself. A lot of people do.
What changes with the return of Chat Control 1.0—and what stays the same:
*What is coming back:* US tech companies are once again allowed to scan private messages without a warrant or prior suspicion. This affects direct messages on platforms like Instagram, Discord, Snapchat, Skype, and Xbox, as well as emails via Google’s Gmail and Apple’s iCloud.
*What remains unchanged:* Public social media posts and files hosted in cloud storage could already be scanned without this law. Furthermore, private messages can always be reported by users, or monitored by authorities using targeted, court-ordered wiretapping.
*What is still NOT being scanned:* End-to-end encrypted chats, such as those on WhatsApp, have always been exempt from these scans. Additionally, European providers of messaging and email services have never implemented chat control measures.
So, E2E is unaffected?
Chat Control 2.0 was the big one in those regards.
(Also, LOL @ Skype mention.)
By this logic, I should be happy if mail delivered to my address always arrives already open.
For IRC there is irssi-otr. There was weechat-otr but I think it may have gone unsupported as their script did not work in python3.
There is also ejabberd [0] that has OMEMO [1] preferred over OTR and PGP and supports many to many E2EE.
Someone tried to MitM Jabber, discussion here on HN [2].
[0] - https://ejabberd.im/
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/openai-faked-ina...
In a couple years time, Chat Control 2.0 will come about, and the same tyrants will use the EU admission [2] that there is no evidence that suspicionless scanning of private communications has led to an increase in criminal convictions or in rescued children to argue that we need to go further, and break E2EE.
[1]: https://www.iwf.org.uk/resources/end-to-end-encryption-and-k... [2]: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE...
Haven’t found anything that breaks their funding down by source and the majority on the UK govt site is from “charitable activities” (https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/en/ch...)
The top 25 members (£90k+; big tech are here) contributed between £2.25M and £4.37M. The other 110 members contributed between £2.26M and £4.46M.
I get that if you are an ngo that really wants to solve online child abuse you’d want a law like this. It may be mostly the ngo pushing for it, not necessarily big tech. I could be wrong.
If big tech _wanted_ to they could already backdoor their encryption and scan the message content, they don't need regulation to do that. The only thing that changes with regulation is that they now _have_ to, which cannot possibly be in their favor.
Regulatory capture. If the handling of user messages requires constant scanning and there are enough rules that you need a team of lawyers, then only Google, Meta and Apple will be able to afford it.
It's briliant really... instead of trying to dismantle privacy regulations you push for new regulation that overrides them and make data mining users even mandatory.
If the laws are designed to directly benefit it makes sense like with the FAA allowing Boeing to self regulate to the point of killing a few hundred people. This feels more like bureaucratic capture or some other name, where the entity must be so large to interact.
It has the same effect and you are not wrong, I just wish it was clearer.
In any case the OP claimed "Apple is wholly against Chat Control." i don't think it's so wholly if Apple financially supports biggest pro Chat Control proponents. Even if Apple is aware of it or not.
Why an earth would a big tech company say no to gather more info on its users? Show me the first one
The Internet Watch Foundation is one of these NGOs that makes lists of hashed child porn images and URLs. All the big tech companies subscribe so they can coordinate on blocking child porn, as they are legally required to do.
Unfortunately the IWF is also a "charity" and thus engages in political lobbying. Because like all such NGOs they have a single purpose, they lobby for making that purpose easier irregardless of other costs, which they view as out of scope. It's obviously easier to watch the internet if tech firms are forced to watch everything all the time, so that's what they're in favour of.
People actually working at tech firms on messaging systems don't want to do this, however. So they end up funding people who are undermining their own policies. This is very common whenever NGOs get involved e.g. governments funding NGOs that directly undermine the government's own efforts.
The fix would be for tech firms to leave the IWF and set up their own alternative organization that doesn't engage in lobbying activity. However, that would require a lot of cross-org agility that is difficult for big companies to achieve even internally, let alone across the industry, and the leadership is all thinking about AI anyway not EU stuff where they already just assume the EU is going to regulate them all the death anyway. So inertia carries the day.
[1]: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/26073615-c-2025-5430...
They are already allowed to do this, and already are doing this. When you provide data to the service provider in a non-e2ee fashion, it's their data as much as it is yours. They can scan it, data mine it, analyze it, whatever.
Because its an extension of an existing bill.
After the whole internet lost its mind about Apple CSAM scanning and being horribly off target, I'd recommend to ignore news reports and go to the sources when making an opinion.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex%3A...
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=COM...
The only issues I can see is the error rate for non-CSAM scanning and how the latest vote was conducted.
Although the scanning part, it is still law enforcement that has to review that information and determine if there is a case. Most of the those are teens sharing naked photos with other teens.
> Overview
> End-to-end encryption is a term used to describe blocking or preventing any third-party recipient from viewing, reading or becoming aware of information that one individual has sent to another. In response to growing concerns about online data security, many technology companies are adopting this strategy with potentially dire circumstances.
> The use of end-to-end encryption would prevent the companies or any third-party from detecting illegal activity occurring on their platforms, including the activity of people who use the internet to perpetuate online demand for graphic sexual abuse material of children.
> We believe personal security is extremely important and support efforts to improve online privacy. But, if this solution is implemented with no exceptions for detecting child sexual exploitation, millions of incidents of abuse will remain hidden, leaving these young victims without any help or protection from these horrific crimes.
If the "services" want to watch, don't worry they will, "they don't need your password". But I guess they "do" that only for the very baddies, aka child exploitation, human trafficking, terrorists, killers, drug dealers, etc.
We all know here that "information system security" does not exist, this is a fantasy: there is only some "best effort" with a wide spectrum of compromises. If somebody talks to you about "deliverable security", that guy wants to sell you something.
E2E will protect you only against John Doh, "hacker only on Sundays". And we better keep that in mind.
This is not specific to 'backdooring aes-gcm implementations' at all. Read again what I wrote, namely this is the general status quo on 'information system security': they don't need your password or aes-gcm key to watch if they really want to. You would be a fool to presume anything else.
Result: 314 against, 276 in favor, 17 abstentions, 113 absent
The EU is well on the way to becoming a totalitarian government.
ETA: It is shocking that 276 members of parliament would vote to support this. Are so many so naive? Or being paid off?
Aren't they fucking paid to be there 'on the last day'?
There are a lot of countries in the EU that aren't shining beacons of democracy.
The EU makes sense as an economic block but some of the countries in it are politically unaligned with what people think of when they think of the EU.
This one is more complete: https://howtheyvote.eu/votes/195338
You know Im right
At least in Spain this is exactly the case, and is really scary how much people falls for it.
there will be at least 1 entire generation of western kids that spectated short form content on screens since the moment of birth. based on aristotle, this entire generation is going to be retarded. the EU legislature in question enables legal spectation of content exchanged by a generation of the retarded. the optimal path forward seems to be ensuring that the next generation is not retarded, otherwise human extinction will be rapidly accelerated. I don't see how corporate destruction of individual privacy is going to help ensure that the next generation is not retarded.
But the western world has been trending down in culture sadly... I was a teen in 2005 and it was grim even then. Everyone wanted to be black for some reason.
For clothes, despite having preppy parents I never adopted it until now. Pinterest is suprisingly good and white european women in their 20s and 30s have not adopted the jeans & hoodie gamer fashion I was so trapped in as a man.
But it has to be discovered and there is a hurdle there. The codes are oxford shirts, pleated trousers/trousers, coats, jackets.
With the internet I have free MIT lessons, documentaries, debates on Youtube!
I have access to scientific journals.
I can access every book ever written in the world.
The internet is not the issue here. The homepages/fyp on youtube, tiktok, instagram is. Books and the correct asthetic needs to be prioritized.
AND that politicians and the sites WANT age verification because the sites wont have to fix their algo.
The block lists are crazy, even Youtube is blocked. Instead of fixing fyp and promoting non-brainrot content, they rather slap an age gate on it.
No pun intended, but how is this legal? I mean, if you don’t have a quorum, then shouldn’t you just wait for an Autumn session? It feels like having a democratic parliament with backdoors like this kinda undermines the whole idea
No, it's the clueless general public that is criminally naive and fails to recognize the revival of fascism in real time under their own noses.
It's something straight out of that 2015 German movie, "Er ist wieder da" ("Look Who's Back").
Same giggles, same reactions, same gaslighting of those who see where it's heading, same final effect.
Seriously, the only reason why it takes place IMO is just that nobody ever cares to think for a moment how decisions are made in the EU, so everyone is somewhat indifferent and there's no mass attention to the fact, that the general public ability to affect EU decision is near zero, far, far less than USA or Russia and probably even China.
Yet EU has overstepped that ages ago, and you can see that with SKG recently. The only tool we, as citizens, have to actually try to affect EC is effectively useless. EC can be wined and dined by lobbyists, including outside of official recorded proceedings(!) and can just ignore you.
Not to mention a lot of other systems in EU were made with idea that countries would operate for their own best interest, and that interest was aligned for every member state:
- Shared energy market, which was crashed by Germany ideologically decommissioning nuclear power plants in middle of energy crisis.
- Free movement of people within Schengen area - which is crashed by countries taking mass of immigrants which they think they need(i don't live there so i won't judge), but then they can move around whole of the area - including the countries with vastly stricter regulations for migration.
- Digital euro as a backdoor to enforce transition to euro across the whole area, limiting the ways in which member states can dictate their own monetary policy. Digital euro must be accepted by all vendors across EU - even in the countries not using euro at all.
And that's ignoring slippery slope towards CDBC with expiration date.
- erosion of free speech and constant doublethink language, and noticing flaws in EU is undemocratic/euroskeptical(biggest sin possible) - even if it comes from "how to improve EU" point of view. or even if one points out that EU itself isn't democratic.
- double loyalty in case of politicians where there's a conflict between national and European interest. Do you pursue national benefit, or do you go against it in such cases and hop onto EU track - where there are plenty of unelected positions?
and also double loyalty in case of EC members - they should pursue good of all EU by their own charter, but there's no punishment nor anything systemic to discourage them from abusing their power and pursuing national interests.
All of those are minor or major flaws that slowly fracture EU. And by this point I don't think the system can be reformed.
Maybe people should demand better of their representatives. Would YOUR job be OK with you not being able to perform your duties the day BEFORE your vacation starts? The time to go home is when your vacations STARTS, not one or more days before.
"a measure it had rejected twice in March. Although a majority of voting Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) actually opposed the regulation (314 against, 276 in favor, 17 abstentions), the motion to reject it failed to secure the required absolute majority of 361 votes. As a result, mass scanning is now permitted again until 2028."
"Oh no we can't get a majority to pass the law!"
"Have you tried getting a majority to not pass the law?"
"Worth a shot!"
"It worked, should we also do this multiple times?"
"Of course not! Pass the law, quickly!"
On 7 July, MEPs voted 331–303 to fast-track the return of Chat Control 1.0 mass scanning. A binding vote follows Thursday, 9 July, where an absolute majority of 361 MEPs is needed to stop it. Take action now to demand they defend your private messages.
"Yes" means stop control, because it's a "proposition de rejet" we're looking at. rejet = reject. Parties in favor of chat control were:
- European People’s Party and
- Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats.
Countries in favor of chat control were:
Spain, Poland, Romania, Sweden, Hungary, Portugal, Greece, Ireland, Lithuania, Latvia, Cyprus
If you look at the initial vote from July 7, there are a few countries who actually wanted to make it an "urgent decision" (other than the countries above):
France, Czechia, Finland, Croatia, Luxembourg
They voted for "Proposition de rejet". It's written there, but it's in French.
Also, see the case of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%BCseyin_Do%C4%9Fru - if you aren't liked by the EU courts, they just accuse you of "collusion with Russia" and ban your bank account via "sanction policies". The ECJ doesn't have to provide any evidence of crime, you have to provide counter-evidence of the absence of crime (and good luck defending yourself without money). The ECJ judges, who interpret and impose these laws, are also not democratically really elected or anything, yet they hold power over your bank account. Makes ya think.
This journalist was not sanctioned by the court.
You're right, it's about the injunction.
Can you explain how he is supposed to house and feed a family of 5 on 500€ a month?
Or is this a "he should starve to death" situation?
What right does the EU even have to "sanction" a German citizen? None.
https://infocuria.curia.europa.eu/tabs/affair?publishedId=T-...
This was done by the Council of Europe (an organisation made up of a mix of member state foreign ministers and member state parliament members)
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=OJ:...
No court was involved as far as I can tell...
>Immediately after Red Media gets founded by the guy, but now in Turkey
>Redfish social media presence gets renamed to Red Media
>Red Media kept staff, equipment and reused content from Redfish
Tbh I'd be pissed if sanctions could be bypassed by simply changing your logo and handle.
I'd go further and suspect the Russian disinformation apparatus just threw them under the bus for "EU bad" points.
It's such a textbook and standard Russian propaganda practice to finance and push divisive and partial views I'm even surprised people keep falling for it.
Another "journalist" the far left (in Spain at least) considers a martyr. The whole coverage of his arrest was a shitshow (Freedom of expression! Poland is fascist! Freedom for Pablo!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Gonz%C3%A1lez_Yag%C3%BCe
Then it was shown he spied on Nemtsov, Polish journalists... and he even hugged uniformed GRU officers upon arrival in Russia as part of a prisoner exchange, while wearing a "my empire needs me" t-shirt.
But this doesn't affect only the far left:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_Europe
Anti-immigration, anti EU narratives, solid antisemitic (not just anti-Israel) stances, interviews with all sorts of sketchy characters, the whole set. Luckily for de Vlieger, he had sold the operation to literal Viktor Medvedchuk (and then the platform took a further Russia victim, Ukraine bad turn), so he remains unsanctioned.
this is just eu in a nutshell, the irish were made to vote on both nice and lisbon treaties twice (both were voted no in the first vote)
They'll only realize this when the jackboot is on their neck. But probably not even then because in some EU countries government obedience is like a religion.
I'm neurodivergent, and on various nerdom bell curve tails, including know more than averga bear about technology societal implications and misuses, but I still wouldn't use that term; here in particular, it seems a strong pejorative for anybody who disagrees with your world view :-/
normie = normal "average" people; People who aren't terminally online and up to date on tech and politics drama. Exactly the ones oblivious to negative things the EU is doing in the background, because stuff like Eurovision or the World Cup takes up more of their attentions span than complex tech or politics.
>here in particular, it seems a strong pejorative
Only because that's how you choose to see it.
> for anybody who disagrees with your world view
So having a world view where government surveillance state should NOT be OK makes me the bad guy?
As we’re seeing in the UK right now, if you stump up £500 and find ten people to counter-sign your candidacy, you can even run against your MP as a novelty candidate. If you choose your novelty name right you also get to stand next to them at the alphabetically-ordered result announcement.
Compare with comatose Kentucky senators on their deathbed or EU commissioners based in a country with French train signs. Neither are insurmountable obstacles to democracy — hold up a sign? Google Translate? — but, by my metric, they are lesser options to something more local and accountable.
I’m sure, back in the day, rural folk took umbrage at having to ride their donkey to the local town just to be able to throw cowpats at their despised burghers. We of course can do it on TikTok nowadays but nothing beats yelling in person.
But if I’m unhappy with EU policies I can talk to a member of the EU parliament (and yes I know two of the members from my city) or I can talk to a member of the Bundestag since national governments have a large role in the EU.
In the end, my voice is tiny. Which is expected, after all I’m just one of over 450 million people living here.
I think the main purpose of the EU is to prevent wars between European states by providing a forum for compromise and cooperation.
I’d say it’s succeeded in that nicely since its founding. Not one war between member states despite ongoing disputes.
Seems like a very good idea.
I hate this law though, it’s undemocratic.
For example, why have an elected parliament that can’t even originate law, but an unelected commission that can make regulations that are effectively laws?
It's like thinking "I like Canada and am a proud Canadian, though I think there's still a lot of inequality and many policies can be improved upon and we can certainly be more efficient".
As an outsider, it feels all levels of USA government are constantly fighting and going back and forth and back and forth over big topics like minority rights, marriages, religion in schools and public matters, funding, environmental concerns, police approach, rights and freedoms, spying, choices of utilities, etc.
Same for EU externally I imagine.
because the European Union contains more than 600 million people and almost 30 very diverse countries (and is a supranational, not federal body). It's institutions also do mirror the structures of most other large unions.
The Commission is an executive body, the parliament is a legislative body, and the council is comparable to the state bodies in bicameral governments. You may as well ask why you have a Senate or Bundesrat when you have a HoR and Bundestag. Because minoritarian and majoritarian interests need to be balanced, even more so in the EU. If even actual nation states a fraction the size of the EU and bona fide countries aren't governed in unitary fashion, why do you expect anybody would centralize so much power in the EU.
If the FAA decides to make some aviation regulation that's binding through the entire country, and likewise if EU parliament and council have adopted legislation for say, the emission rates of cars the Commission then goes and decides the actual rules. In this particular case of Chat Control 1.0 it was put to a vote, but they didn't reach the majority they needed because apparently a significant number of representatives weren't even there. Of course politically a bit of a dirty trick to push something through like this before a summer break, although I'd say the blame is on the representatives, not the Commission.
These kinds of institutions, and really in most countries they do most of the implementation work are necessary because you can't have your legislative vote on thousands of technical details of how cars or planes work, that's just a technocratic reality regardless of where you are.
It should have stayed this way.
Yes - it fixed the attribution of our problems. Politicians, leaders, judges, etc will find it harder to "blame the EU" - when then blame is squarely on them.
This will then have an effect during voting.
I wouldn't call it the most censored platform, but it still has vestiges of its old self, particularly with respect to philosophy and politics.
Reddit has made it harder for mods to find out which subs you are active in, so that you can’t be banned for activity in subs that are in cold wars with each other.
- This vote took place on last day of the session when many MEPs had already left for Summer vacation - 112 MEPs of 719 didn't vote.
- The vote was called only two days before as an "Rule 170 - Urgent procedure" - 73 MEPs missed the vote making it "urgent". Normally it takes months of procedure to come up for a final vote.
What's stopping MEPs from having to do that? Do they have literally zero responsibilities and accountabilities? Because their job is pretty critical for our society an security, even if a trained monkey could do it in theory.
Basically, I don't think politicians should be held to the same standard as some SWE making note-taking apps.
PTO is not a “privilege.” In fact, it is a documented right as part of the employment agreement your company makes you, when you sign that document about the handbook. It should be a legal agreement, but somehow we’ve convinced people their purpose in life is to work for 50-60 years for 40+ hours a week and then have maybe 20 years to enjoy life before they die, happy to be of service to the people.
Public servants deserve MORE time off and MORE money because they literally are ON CALL most of the time. Taking a vacation should be MORE Normal and votes shouldn’t require people to be in person.
You build your government the way you build your country - you should show the utmost respect for those in public service by treating them right and respecting their time.
I wasn't talking about work agreements with civil companies. You brought that in. My comment was in regards to public service only.
I don't disagree about public servants having more time off or more money. But I believe they should be on call. If that means cancelling vacation to vote, so be it. You don't want to have that life style? Don't run for public office.
FWIW, I've had skin in that game. I was stop lossed when I had 4 months left on my enlistment for a 15 month combat deployment. That's public service. Elected officials should be present and ready to serve.
this doesn't seem like oncall?
I’m not American but happy to agree with the OP - being an elected MP is not just a job and if they want to take leave whenever they want to and miss critical votes then I’m sure they would have no trouble getting a normal job instead!
Surely the parliamentary sitting schedule gives them plenty of time off already where they would not miss votes (I know it does in my country)
Sure you can. What unstoppable force is going to prevent you?
You might find out there are undesirable consequences if you make that choice, but that is only if the employer decides to bring undesirable consequences. MEP employers in particular are generally apathetic about having an employee on staff. Extremely so — to the point that they won't even take a minute out of multiple years to say "hi" to the person they hired, never mind give any direction to the employee.
It doesn't have to be that way, but when the employer doesn't care, that is the way it will be.
If you knowingly miss a vote, that’s part of the job. If your OOO gets played, that’s fucking up.
imo that a representative of the people misses a vote should just not be acceptable under any circumstances.
that's of course if we had to take "democracy" as an actually meaningful representation of the people. this was a cheap political maneuver to get a bill passed. happens everywhere. they would have gotten the bill through by any other means anyway.
that would be in an ideal democracy, though, in reality european parlamentarians don't even draft laws, they are only able to sign off on laws drafted by shady appointees of an equally shady and largely unelected (by the people) comission, take it or leave it. that, photo ops and declarations is their whole job, it shouldn't be too complicated to have a fucking substitute when on vacation.
Do you think CEOs take vacation where they cannot be reached? If it does happen, it is a very rare exception.
What's also just as weird is how the EU can just straight up sanction, debank and make European citizens virtually homeless overnight, without even a trial day in court. Absolutely insane.
This is some NAZI/USSR shit, except you don't get executed, you just get deranked and made homeless and maybe die from that on the whims of some bureaucrat in another country.
We gave the EU superpowers to "protect us" but never asked ourselves what happens when they use those powers against us when people vocally don't agree with their agenda.
Sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.
It completely perverts the entire system. With this approach, any law can be passed by a minority; just phrase as a negative.
I propose a new law: "The EU is hereby not not not abolished" ohh look, it failed to gain majority vote! EU is over! Everyone go home! Look at how clever I am finding loopholes!
This was just everyone leaving on a Friday, sort of a work day, sort of not.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/faq/9/plenary-session...
> Plenary sessions of Parliament take place 12 times per year in Strasbourg and last four days
There are 48 days in sessions over a year. You're saying that it's too much to ask MEPs not to take holidays during those 48 days? Am I missing something here?
If we're talking about _direct_ democracy then we have to do the work ourselves but because we don't want to do that (because we want to go on holydays), we give up our rights to those who _want_ to represent us.
That, of course, falls apart once those representing us start to only represent themselves.
Even relying on people to vote no is not enough.
The problem is that constitutional courts should then say the law was against the constitution and cancel it, but will that happen?
Germany has implemented EU sanctions against a German journalist, which deprive him and his family of the ability to conduct basically any economic activity in Germany or even to leave the country. He is not allowed to work. No one is allowed to pay him money. He has to petition the government every time he wants to access even a small amount of the money in his own bank account. The same restrictions apply to his close family members, because they are suspected of helping him survive financially. He is barred from crossing any border in Europe, including to leave.
He has not been accused or convicted of anything in court. The only procedure that was required to hand down an economic death sentence was for the EU Commission to put his name on a list.
The German government claims this is all okay, because the journalist can proactively challenge his sanction listing in Brussels. It's a years-long process that will require paying lawyers - using money he is not allowed to access.
Needless to say, this is all highly unconstitutional. But the German government simply doesn't care. They just say they're implementing EU sanctions.
https://www.rts.ch/info/suisse/2025/article/ancien-espion-su...
The sanctions imposed on December 15 by the European Union against Jacques Baud and eleven other people include the freezing of their assets, a ban on doing business and bans on entering the EU.
“I don’t have the right to return to Switzerland, or even to travel within the EU. I’m essentially being held against my will,” says Jacques Baud.
Regardless, the UK is still run by the same pro-EU loyalists it was run by for decades, and they largely continue EU policy. You will notice that a lot of people are very unhappy about that, but it takes time to completely replace the entire political class of a country - especially when that class bought time by pretending they were going to make a break with EU ideas and demands, whilst secretly planning to do the opposite.
I live in Germany and am -principally- a massive advocate for and proponent of the free (or liberal) democratic basic order ("FDGO" [0]) we have had here for the last decades, and apart from Chat Control, I’m usually very highly pro-EU, too.
But reading this has genuinely left me in a bit of a shock now, and created some (for lack of a better word) FUD I haven’t felt before with regard to these two, eh, institutions governing us.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_democratic_basic_order
Currently we have numberplate recognition everywhere and logging of SMS and position info of phones.
So this is just another step into the direction where we will be watched everywhere by our government in case we step out of line.
It would be more surprising if the organisation ultimately responsible for security did not want to.
This isn’t true. Regulations are directly applicable and don’t require national legislation; directives generally do. Individuals affected by a failure to implement a directive can complain to the European Commission, which can bring infringement proceedings against the member state and potentially seek financial penalties.
EU law also has primacy over conflicting national law, and the CJEU’s position is that this includes constitutional provisions. Courts in Germany and Poland have challenged that position, but refusing to comply can put the countries in breach of their EU treaty obligations and lead to infringement proceedings and penalties.
Also, the European Court of Justice has, to the best of my knowledge, not ruled on this yet, either. The fact fight isn't over.
[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights
Editing to clarify that this isn't just semantics: under the 'grant rights to the people' model, a government that grants one set of rights is just as legitimate as one that grants another. It was the position of the founders that governments which deny certain rights are infringing on the pre-existing rights of the people. This is the basis for their position on revolution.
But that means I'm familiar with the counterpoints. A government has the power to use violence: to operate a military that can kill non-citizens and a police force that can put citizens in prison. It's a lot more important to put a check on this than on a corp, even though quantity has a quality of its own. One thing to suppress dissidents by saying they can't use your website; another to put them in the gulags.
And then the other big issue is that corporations are just a bunch of people shaking hands. You have the right to free press, so you can write a newspaper that says what you like. You can sell that paper and you can publish people's op-eds if they give you the copyright permissions. You can refuse to publish the ones you disagree with. You can make agreements with the printing company to scale up and with other authors to contribute as you become popular, and, while this shifts the practical considerations, no amount of these agreements changes your principle right to free press.
For these reasons, it's best not to include this in your constitution. I have no idea what to do instead apart from shaming and boycotting unethical companies, which of course doesn't work when most people don't care an iota about the principle of free speech. Look at Athenian democracy and sigh?
Think about what it might mean for
(a) the government to give me the right to live in your house; or
(b) the government to restrict you from expelling me from your house.
The US is founded on certain ideas about natural rights -- hence not granted, per se -- but that's somewhat orthogonal to this whole issue. Even if there were an unwritten constitution, a country could base its institutions, philosophy of lawmaking, jurisprudence, &c, on natural rights doctrine (and for a time, the British did exactly that).
The earlier post mentions "That's why you have a constitution with rights that are not up for vote." but if what they mean is natural rights, that goes well beyond any procedural issue around the basic law.
But https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrenched_clause are not all that uncommon in general.
With regards to Germany, the page says:
...if a constitution provides for a mechanism of its own abolition or replacement, like the German Basic Law does in Article 146, this by necessity provides a "back door" for getting rid of the "eternity clause", too.
It's really hard to have a legal system that literally can not be changed by any legitimate vote -- only by revolution -- because what sits at the bottom of most of them (all of them?) is that the consent of some body politic is necessary and sufficient to legitimate a law.
Attendance isn't just low before the summer break, it's low all the time. MEPs miss votes for reasons as trivial as there being a football game on, because why not? It's not like their votes matter much anyway. Everything important is decided upon long before they get involved, they aren't allowed to actually write laws or pass them or repeal them, and so nobody with any political ambition goes there unless they're using it as a springboard to national politics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=166SAhPB5-Q
> "Mr President, our parliament in the United Kingdom sat for 142 days last year and it was criticized widely for only sitting for that amount of time yet we in Brussels and Strasburg in the plenary and mini plenary, we sit for just five days a month and on three of those days it's only part of a day that we actually sit for. So we end up with debate in this chamber where microphones of speakers are cut off after 60 seconds, 90 seconds or 2 minutes, and we have no way of expanding on a point, we have no way of properly challenging a speaker, we have no means of proper scrutiny of proposed legislation that comes through. Surely it would make more sense to have sufficient time allocated to proper debate to reason debate and those who actually believe in the structures and institutions of this place should surely welcome that. I think my 60 seconds is up."
You can tell it's a joke institution because they regularly penalize MEPs for the content of their two minute speeches. Britain has the concept of parliamentary immunity but the EU does not, so you get "politicians" who are told what they can and cannot say by the leaders of other parties.
The Council, made up of heads of state, set the direction.
The Commission, made up of whoever is nominated by those heads of state, usually some mate of theirs with no democratic accountability or mandate of their own (see: Peter Mandelson), is the body that decides on and creates legislation.
The Parliament, made up of the actually elected members, seems to exist just to rubber-stamp the output of the other bodies. Or occasionally not, but look what happened here, they were asked again until they did * .
Don't get me wrong, I think there's a lot that's good about the EU too, but it's in need of serious reform before it can claim to be a truly democratic set of bodies.
(* Which is incidentally another criticism of the EU, mostly centred around the time of the Lisbon treaty, which was first put forward as the new EU constitution but, after rejection in some popular referenda in some countries, was renamed the Lisbon Treaty and pushed through again. In the UK this caused waves because the populace was not asked at all about the treaty and Gordon Brown was reported to have snuck-off and signed it into law on the quiet)
Well, the UK has only been asked about Europe twice - once to join and once to leave. Unlike many other European countries that frequently ask their populace as a way of standard governance.
The only other UK referendum in my lifetime was the 'alternative vote'
The UK government (no matter the party) just doesn't seem to like asking the public's opinion, on things. And after 2016, I'd be very surprised to see another referendum on anything, any time soon as the outcome of that was opposite to what the 'establishment' wanted (cue the last decade of squabbling). They will instead use the excuse: 'you gave us the mandate choosing us at the General Election'.
In a functioning democracy, the masses would demand higher taxes on the wealthy to fund social support. The oligarchy has already bought out democracy in the US and other places to ensure that doesn't happen. So to keep the masses in line, a system of totalitarian oppression is required.
I've seen several posts with the photo of Ursula (one of the most hated politicians of all times) associated with the batteries thing.
Surely this was not by someone’s design. Maybe though… you don’t leave a day early for your vacation?
This antecedent is far too broad; what regulations, benefiting whom? It's pretty obvious in this case that the majority of their representatives do not favor at least this type of regulation. In other cases, the majority of representatives favor regulation which prevents private corporations from selling their PII to the highest bidder. So you're going to have to reckon with the nuance of the real world if you don't want to make obviously leading statements like this.
314 against, 276 in favor, 17 abstentions
I think most of them will not even look at the biggest part of the laws they are supposed to vote. They will vote for whatever they are told to vote for by the party or carefully crafted lobbying.
For something like chat control, you don't see it but there are probably a dozen lobbyist that went to see them in turn, feeding lies and propaganda that they will not challenge because they have other "important" political subjects they are busy looking at.
The commission is leading the game with lots of tricks like what was done here to get what they want in the end.
Just look at the fact that very very few of member even realized or complained to have been played fool by the last vote.
And I mean that it is wonderful already that some many members did the right choice (and I hope because they understood the issue and not because they were told to vote this), but it is crazy that so many still voted in favor.
And who knows, maybe a lot of them didn't even understand the question and were thinking that the "no" was "no to chat control", but here it goes back to my initial point that they are dumb enough to be easily manipulated by the commission members.
Trust in the EU is at its highest in 18 years
'52% of Europeans trust the EU, the highest result since 2007. The level of trust is highest among young people aged 15-24 (59%). Setting another 18-year record, 52% of Europeans say they trust the European Commission, with scoring again particularly high among young citizens (57%). At the same time, 36% of Europeans say they trust their national government and 37% say they trust their national parliament.Three quarters of respondents (75%) - the highest level in more than two decades - say they feelthey are citizens of the EU.'
On the other hand look at who issued this report. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/api/files/docume...
Who was asked, i.e. tourists visiting Brussels? How many were asked? How were they asked, i.e. leading questions such as "you do like the EU don't you"? Who didn't respond?
And more importantly, who is doing the asking? Oh, the EU itself is doing the asking. They are, of course, not biased in any way at all.
These numbers are then provided by the same folks that just timed a vote on our privacy when a) MEPs were known to be on holidays b) reversing the vote procedures, i.e. the 'no's have reach a set minimum c) are happy to sign away our collective privacy.
All that for 52% - all time high. When I was going to school, 52% wasn't a score that I went home to my parents with and told them how good things were going - even if it was an "all time high".
Crazy, how the EU have mixed up mediocrity with democracy.
Soviet Union 2.0
Nothing really.
Some will disagree with this, but this is neither new or surprising behaviour from the EU. In the EU if the political class want something, it doesn't really matter what the public want or vote for.
In the US a lot of your dysfunction is from the fact that your political system actually "works". You maniacs actually can vote for someone like Trump (twice), and he can do stuff regardless of how unpopular he is among the political class.
Here in Europe things like democracy and freedom of speech are only permitted if our political class approves. We can decide things like tax rates, but some things we're not allowed to express opinions on, and some things we have no power to vote for or against.
With some exceptions most European democracies work like this and EU is really the gold standard of this system. They have lots of ways to do what they want regardless of how popular it is, and regardless of what the opinions of our elected representatives are.
In the US, it seems more obvious how corporate money pulls the political strings, but my impression is that corporate influence is a lot weaker in Europe..
Highly educated people, often from wealthy backgrounds, who are very globally orientated.
They are generally not representative of the average person in Europe.
They are the people who European government appoints.
> In the US, it seems more obvious how corporate money pulls the political strings, but my impression is that corporate influence is a lot weaker in Europe..
I agree, but not sure that directly contradicts what I said?
I wasn't disagreeing with you; I just added that to explain why it wasn't obvious who the political class is there because their incentives are more opaque to me.
What do you think is the main reason these highly educated people act against the interests of the common people?
For example with Chat Control, are they worried about preventing populism from taking hold? Or do they personally gain something financially?
Meet the senate, where most stuff doesn’t pass unless you get 60 votes, not 51
For all the bad in trump era like roe vs wade among many others. The same mechanism are what allowed roe vs wade to exist. A double edge sword but better than alternative variants of totalitarian multi decade long regimes.
It's clear that member countries use the EU as a blame-laundering mechanism to pass domestically unpopular laws, but the forcing of this vote under the urgency procedure that requires absolute majority to reject, on the last EP session before summer break is so blatant that it might awaken people that might've overlooked the structural failures of the EU and finally radicalise them
EDIT: bad wording, it's not that the urgency procedure causes the voting to require absolute majority, it's that an absolute majority second-reading is forced through an emergency procedure which is designed for first readings of legislation that's the implied meaning above
If it's not a dictatorship, a regime, a shithole, a kleptocracy, or whatever name they use for a government they don't like, I don't know what it is.
I'm not sure the EU needs to worry about political capital in the way that many national and regional governments do. Power moves through negotiations between institutions, party groups, lobbyists, activists, and heads of government rather than through anything voters can trace. If one is being unkind, it's basically backroom deals all the way down. Naturally, the EU has more respectable terms for this sort of thing, like "trilogue".
Look at how the President of the European Commission got her job in 2019 - there was an election campaign in which major parties presented lead candidates for the post and she wasn't one of them, then post-election - ta da - she's nominiated for the post and there's a confirmatory vote in the Parliament on which the ballot paper had precisely one name listed - hers.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48853746
https://www.alamy.com/16-july-2019-france-france-straburg-a-...
I was aware that VDL obtained her role by routing around the Spitzenkandidaten process, but I was never aware that her confirmatory vote was done in this way.
Her unpopularity at home also reinforces the idea that unpopular politicians can be sent to Brussels, because "in Brussels, you can't hear them scream".
Because no party has an outright majority, there are weeks of negotiations after the elections, as the parties try to find a compromise acceptable to a majority. Once a deal has been reached, the parliament votes to confirm it. If the vote fails, the parties return to negotiations.
Von der Leyen was chosen to head the Commission, because she was an acceptable compromise. All lead candidates had been tried before her, but all of them failed to obtain majority support in the negotiations.
No public hearings, no public votes, not even any public parliamentary debates(!) about different candidates for the Commission. This is indeed "the EU way", trying to find compromise via party-family bargaining ... in private.
> All lead candidates had been tried before her, but all of them failed to obtain majority support in the negotiations.
The Parliament didn't actually get to vote on any of the other candidates, did they?
Voting rituals would be a waste of time. The confirmation vote is not just about the President of the Commission but the entire package, including other major positions in the Commission and major policy directions. If no party has a majority, no candidate can hope to get majority support before the whole package has been agreed on.
It's two votes, not one; the President and the rest of the Commission are confirmed separately. In this case there was a four month gap between the two votes!
VDL was confirmed by the Parliament on 16 July 2019, by 383 votes to 327 against, with 22 abstentions[0].
Her Commission was approved by the Parliament on 27 November 2019 by 461 votes to 157 against, with 89 abstentions[1].
[0] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20190711IP...
[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20191121IP...
They passed a regulation with 276 votes in favor, 314 votes against, and 17 abstained. The minority decided instead of the majority.
If this is not a dictatorship, what is it then? In any case, it has nothing to do with the democracy.
Haha, no. As long as there is bread and circus, nothing wil happen.
PS: Sorry, but "haha nothing matters" cynicism does NOT add anything to the discussion. In fact it straightforwardly breaks a whole bunch of HN guidelines: "Be curious", "Don't be generically negative", "Don't be snarky", "Don't post shallow dismissals", etc. This forum is supposed to be better than the R-site.
It's useful to add some cynicism in the mix (or in this case, pragmatism)
that's the reason they are busy igniting a war by the time the defaulting begins, so that there's some external boogieman to blame instead of them...
The absolute majority seems to be an anti-paralysis instrument, where the onus is on the Parliament to reject something put in motion by the Council. I think the the asymmetry is that a vote to trigger the urgency procedure only requires a simple majority, whereas a rejection of that same legislation requires absolute majority.
To my reading, this reinforces the idea that Parliament is designed to be more of a rubber stamp for the Council.
> Second reading
> 7. If, within three months of such communication, the European Parliament:
> (a) approves the Council's position at first reading or has not taken a decision, the act concerned shall be deemed to have been adopted in the wording which corresponds to the position of the Council;
> (b) rejects, by a majority of its component members, the Council's position at first reading, the proposed act shall be deemed not to have been adopted;
> (c) proposes, by a majority of its component members, amendments to the Council's position at first reading, the text thus amended shall be forwarded to the Council and to the Commission, which shall deliver an opinion on those amendments.
It feels like the last turn in a board game where everyone is busy taking points with no regard for the impact of the decisions on the theoretical next turn - because there is no next turn. Its really weird.
> blame-laundering mechanism
Also, I'm stealing this.
This isn't surprising to me at all.
The World Cup is on, and it draws attention away from politics. This has been a pretty common observable pattern for as long as I can remember.
for some godforsaken reason left-lib parties in europe think accepting infinity migrants forever is the most important thing to do
this is becoming more and more unpopular with the voters, leading to right wing parties surging across europe (Denmark, which has an immigration restrictionist left wing government doesnt seem to have an issue here, true mystery)
obviously the solution here is total control of the internet, so that you can suppress dissent
This is completely BS. Nobody wants to let in unlimited migrants. This is not a goal of anyone, including the left-most left. In fact on the left we are very aware that our welfare systems can't support unlimited people.
The left wing parties just wish to honour existing international treaties which we have signed to allow genuine asylum seekers. There's processes in places to determine whether they deserve this. The right just want to turn their boats back as they approach (pushback) which is literally illegal.
It's important to realise though that asylum seekers are not the root cause of most of our issues even though they are portrayed as such by the right in deflection from the real issues. For example here in Holland the biggest societal issue is the farmers who pollute too many nitrogen compounds and that causes housing projects to be put on hold. The number of asylum seekers has been steadily decreasing over the years.
But farmers make up a huge piece of the right wing so they'll never take ownership of the problem. Better to deflect on someone else.
Unfortunately the hard-right has also defunded that process for many years, and have thus created this problem themselves. The agencies tasked with figuring out if asylum seekers have a legitimate claim are overwhelmed with all the work. This is purely a self-created problem (intended to gaslight the population in there being a huge 'immigrant problem').
This is exactly how we got here. We allowed them to work to make temporary asylum permanent migration.
PS: Part of the issue with sending them back is that the countries they're from won't take them. They can't live at the airport like Tom Hanks either.
They could be green for all everyone cares about. The actual relevant distinction with real word implication is criminal statistics and per capita rates. Not to mention everyday real life bad experiences for people living outside of the sheltered silicon valley world.
>countries they're from won't take them
That is just wrong. In many places it literally results in a brain drain. Your position literally hurts already poor countries just because you want to see less white faces in the streets.
Countries are not entitled to keep their citizens by force to prop up their economy. If the person doesn't want to stay, why should they be forced to?
You might want to contemplate the fact that you're literally rehashing the same arguments that Soviets and East Germany used to justify their exit visas. Except you're doing it from the other end of the pipe.
But these are treaties are no longer fit for purpose, as can be seen by the boatloads of mostly young male economic migrants turning up in the UK to 'claim asylum'. People who've got thousands of euros to pay the small boats traffickers.
If they were refugees fleeing war or other dangers, you'd expect a lot more families - women, kids, the elderly - to be making the journey.
(Of course, legal migration to the UK is vastly higher than illegal arrivals. And this is the larger issue putting pressure on housing, healthcare, transport, and more. But the small boats are a glaring example of a broken system being exploited)
In this way we do have responsibility towards them. The migration from Africa is a different issue but it is already possible to quickly reject asylum-seekers from known-safe countries.
> Of course, legal migration to the UK is vastly higher than illegal arrivals. And this is the larger issue putting pressure on housing, healthcare, transport, and more.
Well exactly but nobody is talking about that. Everyone is talking about the asylum seekers. Which are only a small part of the issue.
And the pressure on housing is very multifaceted. A lot of NIMBYism when it comes to new construction, and boomers who have invested in the housing market and don't want to see their investment evaporate by more supply on the housing market. So the parties backed by those with money are always obstructing new construction and other means to make housing cheaper. This is a much bigger problem when it comes to housing than those few apartments granted to asylum seekers.
True, but I would say the current refugees are not those who most need refuge. Religious minorities who are the most threatened by ISIS are under-represented.
> it is already possible to quickly reject asylum-seekers from known-safe countries.
It does not happen though. it happens in the end, but the system in ridiculously slow and inefficient.
> And the pressure on housing is very multifaceted. A lot of NIMBYism when it comes to new construction, and boomers who have invested in the housing market and don't want to see their investment evaporate by more supply on the housing market.
That is true.
As for the housing market, yes, it'd still be in a bad state with zero migration. But at the moment, it seems that we can't build enough to keep up with the migration alone. And when we do manage to build loads of homes, we completely neglect most of the infrastructure needed to support them.
We haven't built a reservoir since the 90s. Transport is a real problem, with the roads overloaded and in bad condition while rail projects seem impossibly slow and costly (HS2 is probably the last one the UK will ever attempt?). And then there's the NHS, policing+prisons, education system, and so on.
1. highly inefficient: its slow and badly run. 2. seriously considers applications that clearly false - people from Canada and the EU do not need to claim asylum! Those numbers are tiny but it illustrates a winder spread problem. people who feel safe enough to return to the country they "fled" on holiday also clearly do not have a genuine claim. 3. It fails to provide a route for a lot of people who do have a genuine claim - e.g. religious minorities in the Middle East.
It is no longer true that the numbers of legal migrants are vastly higher because the government have decided that they need to cut the numbers of immigrants and the easiest way to do this is to cut legal immigration.
The problem is, there never was a consensus around immigration. The Liberals own stats prove that. What there was was a consensus around multiculturalism and tolerance.
Immigration itself, was always split evenly among three camps in Canada: those who want more, those who want less, and those who think we have the right amount.
Trudeau & his fake leftist brigade many have ruined multiculturalism for a large portion of Canadians, permanently.
Well, it didn't.
The minimum anyone would have to accept is that the economy went to shit while mass immigration was happening ... (in both EU and Canada). So I guess you don't have to accept causation, but they were happening simultaneously, so this reaction by the population is justified in that sense.
No, leftist governments in the EU have failed to provide prosperity and failed in all their promises, now they're going for total control to try to stay in power.
Look at France, as soon as Le Pen was cleared to run for the presidency they start talking about anti "misinformation" laws...
You can always make your enemy. Current rearming efforts really remind historians of WW1 arm races.
At some point once so much interests and offers are at stake, that creating the demand is inevitable and just a matter of time.
And once the chip fabs have been bombed, civilisation is set by by decades, and may end up fighting a lower-tech war.
Beyond this, if you start attacking neutral fabs you lose out on anything from them. Your expectations are quite a bit off if you think striking fabs stops a conflict.
By WHO?! Russia is still stuck in 1/4 of the Ukraine and fear mongers make it sound like they're about to reach Paris any day now.
This does not even make sense as a conspiracy theory.
Had "EU" wanted to hurt Russia there were was a thousand ways to do that. But they didn't. Instead they traded and built infrastructure. Most EU countries saw Russia as a partner before they invaded their neighbour in the most gruesome way possible.
If anything, the EU should have reacted sooner. It was shameful they didn't. You can't really pretend like nothing while an all out war is taking place on the same continent.
This law didn't open a phone case factory in europe, it just made the 1eur case cost ~5euros (vat is paid on customs too). The only alternative is to go to a local mall and buy a case there for 10-15euros, and it's the same chinese case, just more expensive, but the reseller pays a lot less tax, since they can buy 100 cases for 1eur and still pay just 3eur of customs on them.
So I, the consumer get 300% customs on that 1eur case (+vat on huge customs fee), while the mall kiosk gets 3% customs fee, how is that fair? And how will that build a phone case factory in europe?
Why not build the factory first instead? Have it make 2eur phone cases, and then the price raise would make me buy the european one, but for now, it's just makes me pay more for the same chinese stuff, and I can't spend the leftover money for a local beer at a local bar anymore, so stuff actually made in europe.
They're trying to avoid any conflict since they have no energy and hard power to counter any confrontations, so they smile and nod to anything happening worldwide or push some stern words about "monitoring the situation" to social media, depending on the situation.
EU spends 33% of World’s military spending, once you exclude US. EU spends more on military than China.
How much do you need to spend to defend yourself, 60% of the world?
Mind you, many western weapons, like stinger and javelin, cost more than their weight in silver. Sounds like a scam
From force projection capability, the EU is toothless and lacks the spine to twist some arms in order to see its interests represented on the world stage. It's a pushover despite all that military.
The reality is that you need to be willing to drop some bombs every now and then or at least threaten or blackmail those who threaten your interests and way of life, to be taken seriously and for other countries to never fuck with you. For example the Ukraine virtually admitted to blowing up Nordstream pipeline and sending Germany's manufacturing into the storage, just to disrupt Russia. Now do you think Ukraine or any other country, would ever dare to blow up a US pipeline or piece of their infrastructure? Probably not, because they'd get carpet bombed in retaliation and their leaders shot or kidnapped by delta force.
And since the EU never plays hardball like that it always gets taken advantage of by more ruthless and unscrupulous nations with smaller and weaker militaries because both its citizens and its leaders are too afraid to ever use force.
The rhetoric right now is just bizarre. Why should the EU force countries against their will using military? Do you have zero idealism or regard for internationally agreed upon rules? Do you want a world where might is right?
Internationally agreed upon rules don't come from first principles, they're downstream from power. The world was, and will always be, might makes right.
Your rules in your country are real because you have judges and police to enforce those rules.
But internationally, there's no planetary police force(other than the US when it wishes to act like one), so solving disputes is dependent to how strong your military is, or on you capability to inflict pain on the offending country through other means like economy or trade.
That why the US walks away unscalved from international conflicts and the EU keeps getting buried further.
Did we though? At least in Germany a bunch of anti-climate-change projects and changes have been and are being canceled and we're going back to coal and diesel. It seems we're optimizing to have no results and negative progress at the moment.
Yes, interesting that the People dropping bombs did not anticipate blowing up.
Our elites have revealed many flaws recently, but one I did not expect is that they have surprisingly limited intelligence.
So long freedom, it’s been nice living in STASI free society for a while. Too bad power attracts the people who will make sure they keep it in their hands.
Mars is nice this time of year.
Well, once you realise that the so-called "EU parliament" is nothing but a lobbyist group (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar_corruption_scandal_at_th...) it is no longer surprising. To me nothing here is surprising, neither the hurry nor any slowness.
Lobbyists are winning the war.
I really don’t but any other reason, as other tools (legal and technological) are already in place.
Nt being able to scan personal communications would break big tech platforms main monetisation strategy (selling peoples data).
They know the impact of the decisions: more power for them as bodies.
I’m not saying this legislation impacts any of this positively or negatively, but we can’t pretend the prior world order isn’t making some drastic changes lately. Governments are slow to change laws but I would expect much of the current push has actual ties to the larger global shifts.
This smells like him, honestly.
So many reasons: unpopular wars in the Middle East, repeated embarrassments in international arena, domestic unrest, decadent elites…
It's only a matter of time before EU-skeptical opposition parties achieve absolute majorities in critical EU constituency states. They're aware of this fact and are trying to adopt as much of their agenda as possible in the time they have remaining.
- Europe is now at war with Russia (neighbor)
- Its relationship with the US is rapidly deteriorating (main partner, de facto protector)
- Its relationship with China is also rapidly deteriorating
- It is getting very antagonistic with it own citizen and some individual member countries (such as Hungaria or Romania recently)
So there are a lot of justifications in each case but the overall picture is worrisome. You can't be antagonistic with everyone.
There is a reason why the North Korean regime is still around, they never forgot they need to keep a good relationship with at least one powerful ally.
Second, the relationship with US is deteriorating due to Trump. As a matter of fact all US relationships are deteriorating for the same reason. Where have you been the past years? Im not going to bother to respond to the following points because you mix some reality with propaganda and seem to live in a paralel reality.
And the internal struggles are indeed a problem, this is due to the extreme right which has completely taken over America (and is sponsored by Russia). It was good to see the Hungarians came to their senses but it's worrying that the EU doesn't have a mechanism to expel countries.
The problem is who do we ally with that we can trust now. Russia and America obviously not. Canada yes but they're not big. China just serves its own interests, they will never care about a partnership. They just want our money to buy their products, nothing else.
I think South America is another potential one and the EU is trying to connect there with eg Mercosur. But America is sponsoring the extreme right there too as you can see in Honduras and Colombia recently. And in Venezuela of course.
They don't care about solving problems around migrants. It really boils down to people just not wanting brown faces in 'their' streets.
Its similar to Trumpism in that sense, if you ask afd voters for example they will talk about migration and crime. Must all be racists. The mainstream discourse ends there.
From a leftist pov I think its the dissatisfaction in the cartel party that makes this scapegoating popular in the first place. There are many meaningful ways that peoples material conditions are worsening, which is ignored by the establishment, then a new party comes along and blames it all on migrants. The fact the afd calls itself "alternative" is telling perhaps, it directly challenges the neoliberal "there is no alternative" (Thatcher) / "alternativlos" (Merkel) doctrine.
Germany almost 4x its defense spending, they spend hundreds of billions on defense while cutting social and infrastructure spending. Germany has neolib austerity literally written into their constitution since 2009 (debt break), interestingly the afd voters believe the inverse, that the german government has been over-spending for decades and there is no austerity which they actually want. But they also believe the cdu are leftists so there is that, just shit in their brains at the end of the day so how do you really make sense of it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_United_States_acquisi...
> The problem is who do we ally with that we can trust now.
"We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow." ― Lord Palmerston
There are lots of possible allies, but no one single ally to depend on. India to counter balance China, Canada to have an ally in North America, etc.
> it's worrying that the EU doesn't have a mechanism to expel countries.
Or it can become a federal state.
And no I don't think it's a good idea for Europe to become a federated state. The US' current situation shows how bad that could turn if the wrong person is elected.
At least we have the national governments here as a safeguard and we can also leave the EU if needed.
And yeah I didn't name India as a possible partner because they're too close with Russia. The EU is trying to make some deals with them but it's a bad idea while Modi and the BJP in general is in power in my opinion. They're similarly bad to minorites as the Chinese.
The US actually occupied parts of Greenland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_United_States_acquisi...
> And yeah I didn't name India as a possible partner because they're too close with Russia.
Offer them a better alternative
Nukes
For which there is no good reason and which is extremely stupid
There has been zero aggression from China towards Europe and zero chance of military confrontation.
Most of the sanctions that were implemented under pressure from Us have backfired on Europe (but not so much on US)
European politicians are going around the world and telling India not to trade with Russia while Israel trades with Russia, etc.
The media is barely covering it at all, the sheep are well asleep, online some just lucid dream about the democracy they never had.
The problem is though, that countries in the EU by themselves are economically not powerful enough, to hold up any ethical values against the giants US and China. So we need some alternative to the EU, some other union, that at least contains the economically most powerful EU countries, so that we have enough economical weight, that the other big players cannot simply push us around. Currently, the EU seems to be hellbent on losing its support. But how to prevent that other union to go down the same road?
Anyway, it seems clear, that we can no longer allow EU decision makers to make rules for us. They are not to be trusted.
You mean the far right that talks about EU all the time and loves when EU does things like this?
You shouldn't go that far. Simply don't vote for the EPP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_People%27s_Party_Grou...) in your country. They are the driving force behind this. Other parties have mostly voted against this (depending on the country)
It is the equivalent of having a gas pedal in a car that is fully activated unless you put your foot down.
There can exist strong consumer protections against misuse of their personal data by various entities.
And there can simultaneously also exist governmental overreach against citizens private data.
The world is complex, few things are truly binary.
Also how the Law was forced is extremely bad.
But hey it's once more proof that the EU is not a democratically spirited institution.
First of all, private companies shouldn't be given that responsibility to begin with. Meta in particular, has a long history of unethical and immoral usage of personal data. I won't use the term "illegal", as the question of legality becomes moot when punishment can be factored in as a cost of doing business [1]. Given the long list of things Meta has been caught doing, together with the in grand total zero seconds of jail time. I'm genuinely curious as to why you think this would be any different. I'd be surprised if it hasn't already happened, where in some room without windows and a lot of lawyers and business analysts, they have ran models and concluded that the cost of getting caught here is "a good financial decision". Wouldn't be surprised either if it also came with a guarantee of personal protection from prosecution, from NSA and other government entities, in exchange for a hand in that data pipe.
Secondly, for this to carry any plausibility for being motivated by "protect the children" arguments, it requires a minimal effort be enacted on more effective measures, and a measured balance with the cost this comes at. There are very good arguments for why this law would actively harm children. Throw in some Bayesian understanding, and you better have a state of the art system that somehow pretty much never has false positives, nor false negatives, where this was also the only way to detect and avoid said abuse. I don't know the numbers here, but I highly doubt this is a good idea, even with infinite generosity as to good intentions. We've all been children, we've all done stupid things. Now throw in the brilliant and surely-not-to-scar-a-child-for-life situations where parents and strangers looking at something they thought was private, and have a "grown up discussion" about. I shiver at the thought.
Thirdly, and aside from directly harming children in situations where they selves use technology and naively, and unwisely share pictures, consider how many take pictures of their own kids without clothes, because they are normal human beings, who do not consider there to be anything sexual about said depiction. You want to throw law enforcement in the mix here? Child protective services?
Fourthly, consider the possible negative for this abuse. If normal behavior (e.g. children being children, and e.g. normal parents otherwise sharing normal pictures if you are a normal person) can be selectively chosen as being a heinous crime, this should scare anyone, especially consider the political shifting trends towards fascism.
[1]: https://www.creativefuture.org/facebook-scandal-timeline/
Woah, that's such a good, on point statement. From Boing, FightClub (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0137523/quotes/?item=qt0479130) to Cambridge Analytica (Meta) and Pegasus as a small sample ;)
And it's not overreach it's kinda more of a loose exception to the GDPR which actually allows companies to read messages. Which they would already do without GDPR
The americans did, but US isn't EU.
But I suppose the OP said all that needs to be said, and so this spot was left empty for whatever nonsense comment dared to fill the void, and you won.
Laws and democracy is a constant fight, no democracy was complete and perfect the day it was announced.
We lost a battle now. And unlike people like you who only resort to insults I am not willing to give up just because of this setback. I will continue to fight for these rights.
word. thats the entire point of the existence of the EU
Bringing a rifle to a protest you expect to get hot, brandishing it about, and then shooting someone in self defense is perfectly fine, but having an every day carry firearm, getting held down by the president's personal paramilitary org, and being shot execution style is apparently fine.
I'm sick and tired of the stupid claims about how important the 2nd is while the very advocates of it only bring it up to talk about how much they want to shoot democrats.
I can hold the situation you cited as an example that should be shown in training in how not to handle a situation like that while at the same time vehemently pushing back against the bureaucrats trying to disarm me. It's why I've always identified as an independent my whole life.
That's called "luck".
A friend of mine did likewise, and got a knock, then handcuffs, then a trial. He was acquitted because everything he said was allowed under the first amendment. In fact, several academics had published the same/similar stuff he did and not had any problems (or ever worried about them). But he was of the wrong race/religion...
There was never a time in the 20th-21st century where you can practice your 1st amendment rights and be absolutely sure you wouldn't get a knock on your door.
I think it's actually called statistics. In 2026, it would seem I'm statistically less likely to get arrested for a social media post in the US than the UK. I mean it's not like the reason is hidden. Arrests typically require crossing into narrow unprotected categories under the First Amendment: true threats (Virginia v. Black standard), incitement to imminent lawless action (Brandenburg v. Ohio), or specific crimes like credible harassment, cyberstalking, or extortion.
It's quite a bit different than the UK's hate speech laws and the comparative result makes complete sense.
But not for some other folks in the US.
If you want to invoke statistics, I'm sure 99% of UK citizens are confident they won't get arrested over a social media post either. They probably worry about it a lot less than you would if you moved there.
https://web.archive.org/web/20251231145954/https://www.theti...
https://freespeechunion.org/archive/daily-mail-investigation...
Also, see E-petition 728715, which had 190,000 signatures from concerned citizens. Your 99% statistic is clearly going against the data.
You seem to be trying to knock down a straw man, as I never claimed it was worse in the US.
But sure, obviously we're never going to agree here. I've provided my logic/evidence and you're not convinced. Fair enough. I'm content to let others review the same evidence and form their own opinions on the matter.
Your links in another comment do not contain nearly enough detail to support the argument you're attempting to make. The 2 laws mentioned therein are broad and could cover many acts.
It's like a newspaper looking at the statistics for murder and creating a story that murder by asphyxiation with a pillow is on the rise.
n.b. I am not disagreeing that the police are policing social media. It's obviously an easy target. But we should be careful of newspapers pushing narratives, by asking for precise data
The fact that there were signed petitions, two reports from supposably untrustworthy news organizations (that I could fine, there's probably more), and that it's been discussed at the national level multiple times, will either convince someone that it's 100% fabricated if they lean one way politically or that it's true if they lean the other way.
More and more I've found that it has nothing to do with data anymore. People will just ignore whatever isn't suitable to their beliefs.
I am not leaning one way or the other 100%, as indicated in my earlier reply. You are just reading what you want to read
I agree when there is not precise data available, inferences can be made from other data, but you must not state things like "statistically less likely to get arrested for a social media post in the US than the UK" when you don't have the actual, relevant statistics.
If you wish to argue with statistics, you must present them. And they will be cross examined, as is right and proper.
But I digress. I'm the only one who has even attempted to provide any sort of data in this thread - which is typical of HN. Cast doubt and force the other party to continue to provide information until some unstated goal is satiated (and I often find the goal tends to move as well). It's a brilliant tactic, basically no effort and you can continue to feel confident in your assumptions. I miss when conversations were reciprocal.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/may/18/facebook-com...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cg7pyjxjxrvo
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/federal-agents-mon...
(The figures that the American right give for "arrests for social media posts" in the UK are actually figures from certain police forces for arrests under various pieces of online communication legislation, many of which have nothing to do with social media.)
I've never lived in US, were there any cases of ISPs blocking websites in USA? Even DNS-level blocking counts
The US has the 5th amendment protecting you from self-incrimination, while in the UK you can go to prison for not divulging your encryption password (even if you forgot it!).
The US doesn't have ISP/DNS level blocking for all I'm aware of, but there's the ultimate blocking that sometimes does happen (FBI raiding your servers, even if outside of the US).
The US has the 1st amendment protecting speech, while in the UK people routinely get arrested for social media posts.
Maybe there are areas where the UK is better about privacy/freedom than the US, but no examples immediately come to mind.
Here's a quote from the article itself, which works for both pro and con arguments:
"What is still NOT being scanned: End-to-end encrypted chats, such as those on WhatsApp, have always been exempt from these scans. Additionally, European providers of messaging and email services have never implemented chat control measures."
My steelman in favour of the legislation:
The regulation closes a legal gap that would otherwise force platforms to stop using existing CSAM detection systems; it's a temporary framework that doesn't require universal mandatory scanning or ban E2EE, just keeps the legal basis for companies which choose to use detection/scanners while lawmakers continue negotiating a more comprehensive longterm solution.
My steelman against the legislation:
Scanning private communications, even allowing companies to "voluntary" do this, sets the precedent that the confidentiality of private correspondence is conditional rather than fundamental. Also, automated scanning inevitably has false positives. Also, has chilling effect on free speech, undermines trust in encrypted messaging.
Also, situationally, that it's "voluntary" means offenders can migrate to platforms which don't "voluntarily" do this.
Blackboxes which scan your messages and photos for anything 3rd party want with undisclosed criteria.
In principle "for anything 3rd party want" would be illegal in the EU. However, Big Tech clearly doesn't care what's illegal in the EU.
Pertinent to this case: https://stateofsurveillance.org/news/big-tech-defies-eu-law-...
Previously: https://www.edpb.europa.eu/news/french-sa-cookies-and-advert...
Even earlier, when they cared about the law: https://www.trtworld.com/article/13092354
Well the criteria is CSAM?
Do you have any evidence that these systems have been used to imprison someone that wasn't CSAM related?
Could you confirm that in any way?
Given that big tech firms keep getting fined for doing stuff like this ("anything 3rd party want with undisclosed criteria"), clearly the answer is "yes, eventually".
Imagine Alice, an 18, 19yo girl, having a boyfriend, Bob, and since Bob is on a student exchange, she decides to send him a boob photo. Since alice is skinny, her boobs are on the smaller side.
Now imagine Alice hitting 'Send', and getting an automated message from whatever CSAM AI bot:
"Your message has not been sent, the system detected the breasts in the photo to be probably underage, the photo was forwarded to <your local police station> for manual review"
And half an hour later
"Detectives Rob Johnson, John Robson and Bob Bobson from police department XY, have done an extensive manual review of the photo of the breasts and have 2:1 decided that they're probably not underage, so the photo was sent to the intended destination. Than you, your friendly CSAM AI bot!"
No government really wants to be fully enforcing all their own laws, just because it's way too expensive to hire that many cops. I think the closest anyone got was the Stasi, and they had a lot of "volunteers": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unofficial_collaborator#Other_...
I think Apple was going to implement something like this a few years ago before scrapping it.
A couple of years ago you could add some pixels to an image to change it's automatic classification from cat to ostrich. But the tech has improved and I think the race has now firmly been won by the side trying to de-obfuscate images, and only in rare scenarios can images actually be obfuscated efficiently and consistently.
The LLMs think one specific mystery plant in my garden hiding behind the hedge is velvetleaf; no, wild cotton; no, linden; no, hibiscus; no, mulberry; no, knotweed; no, paulownia; no, catalpa; no, hydrangea; no, grape vine; no, pokeweed.
Many of these claims were trivial for me to falsify with a quick image search, they don't look much like each other or my mystery plant. The things the AI "identified" were often simply not true of the photo.
Basically, even with current tech, you go straight back to false positives and false negatives: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.06628
Why would you NOT want this to exist? This seems the only method to not raise false positives.
Why? Because I don't want such pictures to be kept or archived by anyone. This isn't hard.
"But the call was coming from inside the house": https://www.robertkinglawfirm.com/mass-torts/grok-lawsuit/
That said - i was obviously wrong.
I don't really know what else to say than : this breaks a fundamental foundation of privacy. Sure i was never 100% aligned with EU level decisions (neither with my residing country one's) but that's just... wrong on so many levels... how can i even still argue to people that EU and democracy are good if this is what its heading for?
Usually i try to explain stuff with common grounds, the bigger picture or whatever is fitting. You can't have everyone happy on every decision.
But at this point im lost of arguments. They just betrayed every citizen from my pov.
So whats my point of this comment? Maybe i need to vent in an environment where i think people might get how bad this actually is, since people IRL around me don't seem to remotly understand the impact....
Really you should have felt betrayed back in 2011.
This isn't Chat Control 2.0 - which is the thing that has been getting attention for the last few years.
E2E encryption should not be broken, we should find other ways to catch and find predators.
Scanning messages in platforms (Chat Control 1.0)? I honestly thought this has always been done, I don't consider any platform private.
A lot of Internet regulations are just catching up to ones that exist in meat space.
I think what scares people when the regulations come to the Internet is that they are highly automated, and I think there's potential for mass injustices when automated systems.
At the same time, the abuse of children has also been automated and amplified by the Internet. https://youtu.be/QYcAFanHwf8?t=1666
Surveillance is a branding issue. If you wrap a shit in crepe paper and Corinthian leather, most people will admire what an artist you are.
Basically, the hope is that the Council rejects that amendment in its second reading (but right, the probability of this is not really high, since it codifies what was already true). I should have explained it better in my comment
Let's not forget that these laws are supported and pushed for by national governments in the EU Council, there's no shadowy cabal that materializes these laws out of thin air, the EU is a blame-laundromat for domestically unpopular laws passed through backroom deals
that's really cute
This vote was urgently scheduled for today, the last day of parliament before the summer break. 113 MEPs were not present for this vote, likely having taken vacation days to extend their break. It's hard to believe choosing to do the vote today was done accidentally.
No, this is a much more benign form of government overreach, one born out of a normal desire to suppress citizens, and perhaps a healthy amount of regulatory capture by large corporations.
What did you see in The Zone of Interest? Just a documentary about a benign family?
Or are some humans worthy of more analysis than others?
Shame.
Israel is the horcrux of Emnity towards Freedom. This is why they destroy freedom everywhere they infect the halls of power.
Yet people remain in denial because genociding third worlders is regular programming for Epsteinists.
Who is working on that? I suspect the main challenge is not technical, but human - persuading users to switch messenger apps is almost impossible.
Such a weak reasoning and method which they used to push this is ridiculous agenda lead me to strongly suspect there must be something else behind it.
True P2P implies knowing the IP addresses of the people you're talking to.
Only the server operators then know your IP, and they don't know who you are or what you're saying.
Spain would label you criminal for merely using alternative Android builds: https://www.androidauthority.com/google-pixel-organized-crim...
-- EU policy makers are really honest people, hats off to them. There's no way politicians in my country allow their chats to be scanned, because they're very corrupt.
(Edit: seems that the statement above applies to ChatControl 2.0, not the approved text. Apologies.)
>*EU politicians exempt themselves from this surveillance under "professional secrecy" rules. They get privacy. You and your family do not.
https://8bitsecurity.com/posts/chat-control-2-0-%E2%80%93-ho...
It's a joke. The system is hacked.
First, there are USB tokens that can hold a private key and sign messages. Such tokens could be sold at places accessible only to adults and verify that they are indeed adult. Obviously every token should hold the same private key.
Second, OS could implement "parent mode" which allows installing only white-listed, government approved apps (no Telegram or Whatsapp or other dangerous apps, but school apps are ok) and opening only white-listed government-approved websites. Put in jail the parents who did not set up a parent mode. Problem solved without passports and verifications.
If, however, the government insists on selfies, it means they just want to identify users and compile lists of "untrustworthy", "rebelious" and other persons of interest.
Also, employees who do verification, sometimes create internal chats where they post pictures of clients and mock their appearance. We had such case with Alfa-Bank in Russia, where the photo of a funny client with a passport and third-grader level comments leaked to Instagram account of employee's friend. The bank paid approximately $20 as a compensation.
Having said that, I don’t think the tech industry is what it once was, dominated by cypherpunks working to create a better world. It has been captured by greed and “moving fast and breaking things”, as well as infighting. Greed (both in the form of web3 numbers go up, and benefiting from the greater fool while delivering no utility) and moving fast (web2 facebook / VC / dump shares on the public / lock in / extract rents). So no wonder the government eventually steps in, when the industry spends a decade without adults steering the ship. We have giant platforms controlling everything, and the rest has devolved into zero sum games and memecoins. The tech industry hasn’t led or even organized enough to get behind technology that can liberate users. Instead it’s been captured by for-profit interests. Mozilla and Apache are rounding errors.
Here is what open source can do when it comes to mass surveillance, and this would also solve the Flock problem here in the States, too:
https://community.qbix.com/t/balancing-privacy-and-accountab...
More broadly, here is what needs to be done across the board:
They will just call your code illegal in law. And if you will run it anyway, use deep packet inspection to drop your protocol packets, like they do in Russia
https://www.reddit.com/r/privacytoolsIO/comments/cukcaf/goog...
I want to stress that I'm speaking from experience. I personally installed a telegram proxy project which aimed to mirror the pattern of traffic and fool the censors
You don't need a special app to do this, or maybe you just need a companion app that you type your message into and it gives you the thing you just paste into whatever messaging app / social media you use. The steganography makes it hard for the operator to determine that you're "abusing" the service by not transmitting your message in the clear so they can read it.
1) Alice uses steganography to embed her public key in an otherwise innocent or mundane looking image e.g their profile picture.
2) Bob uses the public key to encrypt a short message to send her.
3) Bob embeds the encrypted message in his own mundane looking image (could generate these from a pool of images or on the fly using stable diffusion)
4) Bob sends the image to Alice.
5) Alice recovers the encrypted message and decrypts using her private key.
(Could also use the process to do key encapsulation too, instead of using the raw key pair)
Combine the 'age verification' (show your ID when you register) with this (we can read what you type), add some AI (to profile the people), and you have all the info you'd ever want on anyone anywhere.
I do not want E2E comms broken, but these posts on hackernews always bring out such outlandish claims.
You can't be applying the "mass control" claim for the attempts at stopping the spread of CSAM? So can you point to any evidence of wide spread "mass control" with Chat Control 1.0?
I was born in a communist country (with red stars, a communist party and a dictator), and even back then, the government requiring post office workers to read (and photocopy) our mail would seem absurd, but now, somehow it's ok, because "it's on the internet". And yes, CSAM could be sent via normal mail too.
Same for every repressive thing... if you went to a bar, and had to show your id, have it logged, and someone would write down when you came, who you sat with and how long you've talked, that would seem absurd even then... but now, since "it's on the internet", storing metadata is somehow ok.
Stop protecting the governments, if they wanted to stop pedos, they have the whole epstein list, and they don't care about it.
Steganography fundamentally requires you to be able to know where the data is, which requires you to have the original image to compare against. The only other strategy I'm aware of is setting known pixel positions to exact data, which is very easy for basic tools to spot and decode. Or to add the data to non-visual data blocks if the image format supports those, which is also quite easy to spot.
My another utopian wish would be to held them accountable for what they promised in the campaign and how they align with their constituents' needs.
Instead we get corrupted idiots who don't even know what they're voting for, why they're voting that way, and if it's important at all. Chat control is one blatant example, mandatory cameras inside cars constantly spying on drivers is another one. Whoever advises them idiots, they're in real control of what's happening in EU.
Are there any civilians left in the EU, or is it all bureaucrats and bankers?
How do we design such apps? Let's rule out age attestation (to allow only some age ranges) or scan of content because they are orthogonal to apps. What are the design patterns that prevent adults to meet kids? No messaging?
The EPP also gave us migrant quotas, chat control and punished Greece for its debt.
I'm feeling these politicians was not doing it for the victims. Instead, it's almost like the victims are providing reasons to allow the politicians to expand their own power.
The Accelerationism (see note below) part of me think it's a good thing, because a heavily regulated country is often also a backward country. Doing things like this long enough, then you get out competed by everyone else, your population shrinks to zero and your land gets reused.
(Note: The word "Accelerationism" in the Chinese dissidents circle means that, if a bad future is certain and it trends to destroy itself eventually, we might as well just let it happen faster, so the pain maybe shorter. More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerator-in-Chief)
Look, EU obviously have a few good regulations. But a regulation must be correctly designed and implemented, and it must not punish good people. Scanning private messages is a punishment to all.
If EU must scan something, I'd say scanning all messages/phone calls sent out by the politicians might do more good, consider how much trust people put on them (maybe they shouldn't).
And if they all have censorship, they are not failing (when comparing them to each other)
> To hell with children.
Chat Control 1.0 and 2.0 Explained
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48818311
Chat Control passed first round in EU Parliament
All for a safe and secure society.
This is what we have... Unelected bureaucrats using every opportunistic tool they can to, in my opinion get rid of democracy. What are we fighting for at this point? Personally I have lost all faith in the EU and I'm embarrassed to be living here. I'm so disgusted by politicians and the obvious de-route of democracy.
What the ** are we doing...
It is a disgusting dysfunctional institution that should have never been created in my opinion.
MEPs are elected.
Is there any sort of warrant needed for accessing this sort of information on devices?
What a bad example to bring for e2ee.
I thought WhatsApp is removing e2e encryption. The article should replace the wrong example with something like Signal
Welcome to the Brave New 1984 We World. Big Brother loves us.
We are living through the time best described by Zamyatin, Orwell, and Huxley.
Yes you can get involved in extended arguments with people arguing in bad faith or whose world view is fundamentally incompatible with your but that's usually just a waste of time (I mean you wouldn't argue with Nazis either just the same as with people trying to institute a Stasi style surveillance apparatus through slow boiling)
Europe would be a much better place if the EU stayed what it was, a trade union of sovereign nations without any political power over the people.
And once you get there, you're no longer a trade union. Or a trading block, which is probably the better word since a trade union already means something else.
>For example, Poland was hit with massive daily fines when it was embroiled in a dispute over rule of law measures, as well as a separate case linked to environmental permits at a coal mine on the Czech border.
>The Commission is allowed to take these fines out of that country’s EU budget allocation, preventing governments from simply refusing to pay up.
https://www.brusselstimes.com/1568198/how-the-eu-punishes-it...
If this is not some shady maneuver to scan user messages for security reason, because of, for example, possible incoming war then it's beyond absurd.
I would doubt that politicians pushing this are not understanding that pedophiles simply do not need to use these apps they are scanning. But I saw questioning of tech CEOs by older US officials and the lack of even basic knowledgeable about current technologies was ridiculously astounding.
It started out as a purely trade arrangement, then evolved to become a broader union.
314 against, 276 in favor, 17 abstentions
In case anyone wants to know: stopping it would have required 361 against.
The fact that governments worldwide do not force either a vote for or against is a much greater issue as it allows representatives to launder their beliefs through inaction.
So once again, it's the "democratic" EU council fixing things when all those pesky "deimos" don't behave and vote incorrectly.
I mean, yeah, I'd love for the EU parliament to put up more of a fight, but they were never going to win this fight, or the Chat Control 2.0 fight for that matter. Or the social media fight. Or ...
I mean, I don't know if you've ever seen this, but EU commission politicians often can't even hold their laughter in situations like this. Recently, after laughing, Ursula Von der Leyen declared that social services legislation isn't about denying children access to social media, but about denying social media access to young people.
(in other words, it's about EU politicians controlling the news young people see, not about protecting them. Oh and it's legislation because EU politicians want that control without giving anything in return)
innocent men cannot be ruled over. authoritarians want a population of such "criminals", because then their power becomes the choice of which law is executed on whom.
To avoid being affected by this law, you can just download Signal, or use any other encrypted messaging service.
I really don't feel like I can affect anything at all. First of all, even if we assume for the sake of argument that voting for MEPs is important, it's really hard to judge what you are voting for. It's not like they come with clear agendas that people carefully evaluate before they decide how to vote. It's a long running joke how USA elections are choosing between "a giant douche and a turd sandwich", and whatever you choose doesn't even matter because they won't keep their promises, but, hey, at least everyone knows their promises. This one is blue, that one is red, both will let you down in the end, but you kinda know what their general vibe is. Voting for MEPs on the other hand — they are all kinda grey and I couldn't tell you how'd they vote on this particular issue. Depends on your country, but in my case many of them simply weren't MEPs on 2023 vote. And I'm kinda surprised by some of the choices.
Second, I don't really feel that MEPs are that important. They impact almost nothing. All real work is done behind the closed doors by some unknown people, and half of them all happen to be Maltese for some reason (0.1% of EU population, by the way). Parliament in the majority of cases just votes "for all good things and against all bad things" and the actual things that will come to haunt us are usually some small details in the Appendix that were never even explicitly put on the vote.
And when MEP's vote does matter, well, we get something like in this case. The majority objected, but that doesn't matter.
By the way, a couple of years ago I was asking myself, how could it be that we choose von der Leyen to be the President of EC? Well, I don't think we ever did. I surely didn't. MEPs barely did. Never once in all of the history EP rejected a candidate proposed by Council. Whatever each member of the Council did we'll never know, this is not disclosed. And to add the cherry on top, in this particular case it was a record number of MEPs who actually voted against her. It doesn't matter. Here we all are.
The sad thing is how we keep saying how bad China is, while doing exactly the same things.
> What changes with the return of Chat Control 1.0—and what stays the same:
> What is coming back: US tech companies are once again allowed to scan private messages without a warrant or prior suspicion. This affects direct messages on platforms like Instagram, Discord, Snapchat, Skype, and Xbox, as well as emails via Google’s Gmail and Apple’s iCloud.
> What remains unchanged: Public social media posts and files hosted in cloud storage could already be scanned without this law. Furthermore, private messages can always be reported by users, or monitored by authorities using targeted, court-ordered wiretapping.
> What is still NOT being scanned: End-to-end encrypted chats, such as those on WhatsApp, have always been exempt from these scans. Additionally, European providers of messaging and email services have never implemented chat control measures.
Just--OF COURSE, think of the children.
Just now I scrolled through our most popular news sites. 0 mentions. Wasn't on TV either.
The vast majority of the population didn't even have a clue that the vote was happening.
I checked the top 5 most popular local news sites. There was one article about chat control in April and then 2 more from 2025. That's it.
Imagine an issue as big as this and it's not even reported. Yeah I don't feel confident about the future at all.
Example: Look at Germany and how many Rundfunk Intendanten there are and how much they make a year, plus how little coverage such topics get.
Is there any EU law that prohibits minors from encrypting their messages or using, for example, PGP keys?
How can they protect children if the children deliberately encrypt their messages?
Social Networks to push ideas and memes, that work against social-decomplexification parties and individuals.
There are also the other leviathan cybernetic levers- like implants- if you need insulin, or hearing aids- you are basically a deputy for social stability. Thus every prosthesis-citizen you can produce is a good citizen.
But it may still not be enough to prevent decomplexification events like Khemer Roughe or the Taliban.
Thus, push technology that allows for quick recovery, because somewhere some serverfarm with the most patient tutor survives.
Scenario-tree-root-hardening looks like this from the inside.
PS: Fuck you Peter - but its work that needs doing. The retarded don't herd themselves. Or they do, but if they knew- all the simulations would be worthless.
The war on privacy at the EU level always comes from conservatives.
>"Yes" means stop control, because it's a "proposition de rejet" we're looking at. rejet = reject
A "yes" vote was a vote against Chat Control. It failed because it needed an absolute majority of 361/) votes to defeat the "urgent procedure" lawfare by Metsina, a conservative.
As a central part of its campaign for the European elections in 2009, the EPP approved its election manifesto at its Congress in Warsaw in April that year. The manifesto called for:[16]
- Creation of new jobs, continuing reforms and investment in education, lifelong learning, and employment to create opportunities for everyone (govt universal social investment, left)
- Avoidance of protectionism, and coordination of fiscal and monetary policies (pro-federal pro-centralisation)
- Increased transparency and surveillance in financial markets(more regulation on market)
- Making Europe the market leader in green technology. (increase govt involvement in economy)
- Increasing the share of renewable energy to at least 20 percent of the energy mix by 2020. (increase govt involvement in economy)
- Family-friendly flexibility for working parents, better child care and housing, family-friendly fiscal policies, encouragement of parental leave. (Pro-Worker's rights, social security)
-A new strategy to attract skilled workers from the rest of the world to make Europe's economy more competitive, more dynamic and more knowledge-driven (Pro-migration)
Could you explain how that's considered right-wing?
- Avoidance of protectionism, and coordination of fiscal and monetary policies
- - Making Europe the market leader in green technology.
Market ideology -> Right wing
- Increasing the share of renewable energy to at least 20 percent of the energy mix by 2020.
Done through incentives, not nationalized industry -> market ideology, right wing.
- Family-friendly flexibility for working parents, better child care and housing, family-friendly fiscal policies, encouragement of parental leave
Classic birtherism -> right wing
- A new strategy to attract skilled workers from the rest of the world to make Europe's economy more competitive, more dynamic and more knowledge-driven
Importing cheap labor for European capitalists -> right wing
Yeah, compared to communists they are right, but even socialists does not push against market economy and if you consider socialists right-wing - we have a huge de-sync on definitions level I guess.
Left fascism was not so long ago. Think of the woke hysteria, black lives matter, cancelling on twitter, people losing their jobs because of them saying something the left ideology did not like etc.
Left have been and still are viciously hateful and racist towards white people. So if you are left and while, you are basically destroying your own livelihood.
Conservative Poland, Italy and Ireland are strictly against Chat Control. Well, at least against the worse version of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Party_of_England_and_Wal...
This is an example of party which can be called leftist. It's actually even listed as that on wiki. Minimal condition in general is to be anti-capitalistic.
Just fueling material for right wingers who will take advantage of this and push for secessionist stuff.
EU is in dire need to have VERY POPULAR measures among people, not idiotic stuff like this which is a step in a wrong direction.
Why should one care about GDPR or some privacy shield thingy when this is going through ?
It's dispiriting to see a supposedly pro-privacy politician launder backdoors as "strict security standards".
Would you also be ok with not being allowed to send any mail unless you first scan the contents of everything in that envelope and include a generated signature that might tell the post office that you're sending CSAM? And then having the envelope delivered directly to police if the scan did indicate that?
And let's not pretend there are not already many other ways in which child abuse is detected and fought. When schoolteachers or doctors or neighbors or other family members notice something is amiss, when a CSAM group is infiltrated by police, or when a predator falls for a honeypot. This triggers an investigation, and at that point no digital lock can withstand modern targeted covert surveillance. But we are supposed to pretend none of this exists, and that encryption is an unassailable castle, and play along with the "going dark" lie, despite being more surveilled than at literally any point in history, including under the Stasi.
They only don't address child abuse, if by "child abuse" is meant a photo existing in some private shared-with-nobody hard drive, and not an actual human child being abused.
The EU is literally a mafia at this point following a totalitarian agenda rather than actually caring for their citizens. I lived in Europe for almost 10 years, and I loved Europe back in 2010, the possibility of travel between countries thanks to the Schengen area, the commerce and growth and strength of uniting European nations.
Sadly seeing the current situation, I'm very glad I left, and I'm most likely not coming back until I see the EU reformed, or disolved. What a shame...
Incidentally, the comment immediately below this one begins with the words "I'm curious". So I think we're good.