Comment by McDyver
5 days ago
They make it really difficult to fight any of this.
You have to, individually - find a representative, their contact info, state your case, hope it's the correct person, hope your mail doesn't go unnoticed, hope that it will be properly read, hope it changes their mind.
This is "lobbying" by the people in a disorganised way, trying to fight organised lobbying.
This is a barrier that puts lots of people off, even if they have strong feelings about it.
I wish there was an easier way for people to say they are against this
Same for any legislation piece.
A law that costs 100M people $1 and benefits 100 people with $1M.
Would be, as you noted, costly to oppose, not worth the $1 nor the time.
And at the same time, very profitable for the 100 to spend hundreds of thousands and great effort lobbying for.
It's just the power structure of any representative legislature.
"In vain do we fly to the many"...
The European Commission (EC) is particularly sinister in so many ways and not like any previously known modern democratic entity. The EC has been constantly pushing for less democracy, less transparency, more censorship for decades. All the while the horrible president von der Leyen makes billion dollar deals with Big Pharma in complete secrecy without any repercussions or oversight. Europe is doomed if we don't destroy the EU in its current form, but how?
The EU it's good, little American/Russian spoiled kid. It's these kind of turds who want Chat Control whose give the EU a bad name.
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This is the case for so many things… it is why every attempt to make filling out your taxes in the United States fails completely.
What does it mean "to make filling out your taxes"??
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Plato's "republic" (one of the worst books in human history) and every justification in that book and every book citing it is trotted out to argue for how bad direct democracy is.
Now we act like it's not good because Athens got its shit pushed in by Sparta during the Peloponnesian war.
Direct democracy is good. One person one vote, on all legislation, actually could work. We haven't even tried at scale in thousands of years.
It's telling that my boy Smedly Butler (ask your US marine friends who he is and they will recite his story perfectly or else their bootcamp will have smoked them for it) advocated for a military draft where the draft eligible are only drawn up from the list of folks who voted yes on the war.
It's impossible for people to know about every topic. That was true in Plato's day and is dramatically more true now. People defer to what someone on TV or Tiktok told them and have no time to look into facts or primary sources.
Direct democracy would get you solutions that sound emotionally appealing but do not work. That or gridlock where you can't get 50% to agree on anything.
If you ask people "do you want A, B, C, or D" a majority may well say to do each. If you only have budget for one, getting them to come to consensus is impossible at the scale of direct democracy.
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The average person (and more if younger) is illiterate these days and unfit to hold any position of significant power. Source: I work with them.
If you think the republic is one of the worst books in human history I would ask what makes a good book? When there are plenty of implementation issues for direct democracy it feels strange to blame Plato... Particularly when the world has benefited from the republic in so many ways.
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I completely agree about the excellence of Direct Democracy (DD). One of the most common arguments against DD is that: "people aren't smart enough or knowledgeable enough to make important decisions". My reply to this is: and current politicians are? Politicians obviously aren't smarter or more knowledgeable than the average citizen, they are more inclined to act in their own best interest rather than the public's best interest though. We get rid of the middlemen and we get rid of: corruption and the abuse of power. The Swiss are doing excellent with DD!
I say only the patriarchal heads of households should get votes. Isn't that pretty much how Athens did it? No votes for slaves, women, anybody with mixed non-Athenian ancestry, no poors allowed to hold a political office...
Anyway, I'm all for putting the sons of politicians on the front line, but don't think that will stop wars. The British Empire was infamous for putting nobleborn men directly in harms way, they would proudly stand up right in the thick of combat making themselves tempting targets and were routinely cut down. In a society with a strong martial tradition this doesn't turn people into peaceniks, if anything it gets people even more excited for wars.
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Have you ever read the (full) text of any bill that has been passed during the last couple of decades? How about reading all of them?
So are you proposing people vote on them without reading them? Or that we write very short bills aimed at a non-lawyer audience, effectively leaving most decisions up to the interpretation by courts? Or something else?
>advocated for a military draft where the draft eligible are only drawn up from the list of folks who voted yes on the war.
I really like this position from an ethical point of view.
But in reality you will be conquered by a neighboring country with different principles in about 3 days.
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Why not have one organization that collects $1 from everyone to fight on behalf?
Check out the Chaos Computer Club. They're actively fighting this.
https://www.ccc.de
Roughly, this is the Electronic Frontier Foundation (and comparable lobbying orgs in other countries.) However, an org like this doesn't have much power to compel individuals to give them $1.
Because whether the government gets it or this collective organization gets it, you’re still out a $1. Besides, very few people will actually care enough about $1 to partake in literally any amount of effort to regain it.
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Should we call the organization “government” and the fee “tax”? </s>
It’s not a bad idea but it’s funny we need a funded people’s organisation to represent us to the democratic government!
I wonder if we need direct voting rights (for legislation etc) - now that we live in the internet age it may be feasible. Not sure how else to have the many overwhelming the few.
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A possible countermeasure could be to make the life of politicians (which we will of course all name individually) who voted for such laws a hell on earth ...
No, this cannot be a countermeasure.
Such laws are adopted precisely so that society cannot influence politicians and their decisions.
That is, if society does not have the ability to do something about it now, then they will be even less able to do something about it later.
Assuming "the people" are on your side on this is first and foremost your biggest folly.
I see this problem over and over again - people start from "the politicians" (the other) is not listening to us (and we obviously represent everyone).
It leads to extremely unconstructive messaging ideas, where you assume no one can ever change their minds and if they do they are to be forever considered "lesser" for not being "right" the first time.
Which is costly to do...
But you don't know who voted for them. In Europe, laws are also formulated by a group called "The high level group" I believe, and the members of this group are anonymous.
Other than shooting them? But they hire security… it's quite hard to hit them without hitting anyone else.
What does that mean, precisely?
How do you get to them to force them into submission? Did Americans get the child rapists off the Epstein list yet? And the unelected EU leader Ursula VDL has had private security since she was a child.
They're untouchable by the plebs, they have zero accountability.
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“Concentrated benefits and diffuse costs”.
On the other hand, a legislator is elected by a large number of people, so in theory he has incentives to act on their behalf. But I'm sure lobbying can tip the scales a lot.
Maybe outright outlawing lobbying would help. Also, I think campaign donations and monetary influence should be extremely limited (to not make someone have too much influence *cough cough Elon Musk cough*), maybe to $100 or so. If lobbying is to be allowed, probably something like that should hold as well: each individual could give at most something like $100/yr to a special interest group, and those should be closely watched.
From wiki:
> Lobbying takes place at every level of government: federal, state, county, municipal, and local governments. In Washington, D.C., lobbyists usually target members of Congress, although there have been efforts to influence executive agency officials as well as Supreme Court appointees. Lobbying can have a strong influence on the political system; for example, a study in 2014 suggested that special interest lobbying enhanced the power of elite groups and was a factor shifting the nation's political structure toward an oligarchy in which average citizens have "little or no independent influence"
Campaign donations, per this website:
https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/candidate...
It seems individuals can total $132k "per account per year" (I assume there can be multiple accounts for different roles?). Even the $3500 per person per candidate per election seem a bit oversized to me.
Of course, legislators also have an incentive to allow lobbying to make their lives easier and earn all sorts of benefits, further complicating things.
It's really not clear to me lobby should exist at all. Like probably legislators could simply fund their own apparatus to understand the issues of their country/region in an equitable way.
> Maybe outright outlawing lobbying would help.
Outlaw communicating with legislators to try to get them to adopt a position on legislation?
Or do you mean outlawing paid lobbying on behalf of third parties?
The first would obviously be deeply problematic even if it was possible to police, the latter would probably generally be ineffective however you managed to operationalize it.
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>Maybe outright outlawing lobbying would help
I doubt it. The cure is way worse than the disease and is a direct path to totalitarianism. The influence of capital will not go to the people, it will go to the government, and the government will use it to depend even less on the will of the people.
> It's just the power structure of any representative legislature...
... Under capitalism.
One of the failings of most modern democracies is that if a measure doesn't pass, nothing prohibits it from being introduced again immediately. I've seen ballot initiatives simply get copy pasted onto each election by city council until they happen to pass.
The deck is stacked. They only have to win once, and it's law. You have to win over and over every time it's introduced.
Heinlein in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress proposed a bicameral legislature, where one half needs a 66% majority to pass a law. The other half’s only job is to repeal laws, which they can do with a 50% majority.
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It's analogous to information security.-
PS. Maybe there's something there ...
Is this really true, though? Couldn't you pass a law specifically banning the thing you don't want to happen, so any future law that contradicts it needs a supermajority to pass or something?
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A well-funded institution will always outlast an individual or smaller organization in a war of attrition. I think a modern Constitution needs to consider 19-20th-century concepts such as game theory if it has any hope of preventing eventual corruption.
Look at SOPA/PIPA. They simultaneously pushed the same bill through both chambers to try and guarantee it would pass. Grassroots efforts led to it being overwhelmingly blocked in both cases. And then they just slowly slipped most of it's provisions through other legislation over the years.
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The same game theory that could make a modern constitution so robust could also be used by the bad guys to thoroughly corrupt the drafting of any modern constitution you could get enacted.
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Meanwhile, they make the dismantling of legislation near impossible. You have to go through the same process, but in inverse; and hope that miraculously the representatives in gov't become altruistic with a desire for less power.
It'd be nice if bills were one item only and on failure or passage, there would be a timeout before it could be brought to vote again either to try to pass it again or to repeal it. Like at least a year. For some things maybe five years.
That's what constitutional amendments are for, right? (or in this case ECHR updates)
Not really. There have been multiple times that California passed ballot initiatives that violated their own constitution.
At the federal level in the US we have the annoying problem that effectively everything is interstate commerce.
This system would make a lot more sense if the number of people you had to get to agree to a bill with a bunch of riders was more than 50%.
There is a German Verein called digitalcourage who lobbies for this: https://digitalcourage.de/en
You can toss some money to the European Digital Rights initiative (EDRi) as well: https://edri.org/
All of those are doing good work in the digital rights space
(Edit: there is probably more but those are the ones that came to mind)
The only way to stop it is to have positive rights written in law, like right to online privacy and privacy of communications.
Yes, like the Soviet Union.
Whereas the West has predominantly negative rights, the USSR had positive rights. And due to their campaign, even got the UN declaration of human rights to mostly include USSR's positive rights.
https://spice.fsi.stanford.edu/docs/regional_perspectives_on...
Part of USSR constition indicating positive rights: https://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/77cons02....
Women and men have equal rights in the USSR.
Citizens of the USSR of different races and nationalities have equal rights.
Citizens of the USSR have the right to work (that is, to guaranteed employment and pay in accordance wit the quantity and quality of their work, and not below the state-established minimum), including the right to choose their trade or profession, type of job and work in accordance with their inclinations, abilities, training and education, with due account of the needs of society.
Citizens of the USSR have the right to rest and leisure.
Now, that isn't to say the USSR was blameless. We know it wasn't. However, we can take their successes and failures in what we propose and build next. Negative and positive rights both are needed. But the West is allergic to those.
While the idea is great I'm not convinced that the Soviet Union is the best example to demonstrate the concept. Yes they had a "right for leisure", unless the State decided that you were a slave and sent you in Siberia to knock hard rocks for the rest of your life. Or your "rest days" were in fact forced, unpaid labor (subbotnik), no different than their previous feudal serf system.
Same for a "right to a house", where the State provided you with a filthy, overcrowded slum and call it a day.
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I don't think the USSR is the best example of a constitution protecting the rights and freedoms of the people.
> Citizens of the USSR of different races and nationalities have equal rights
This rings pretty hollow when you look at the history of Russification. And no doubt this clause is in the constitution because of the Russification policies of the Russian Empire, yet that didn't stop the Soviet Union from doing very much the same thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russification
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Article 35: Citizens of the People’s Republic of China shall enjoy freedom of speech, the press, assembly, association, procession and demonstration.
https://english.www.gov.cn/archive/lawsregulations/201911/20...
Constitutions are just paper. It doesn't matter how they're written if the guys with the guns don't care to respect it.
Yeah, when reading about the collapse of the Roman republic recently I was struck by how unimportant the law (about not crossing the Rubicon with an army) was. For a long time, the law wasn't meaningful because nobody would think of bringing an army into Rome, it just wasn't done! Then eventually Sulla said "fuck this, I'm bringing in an army to enforce my will", and the law didn't do a thing to constrain him (or anyone who came after him). It seems to me that it was the social norms of Roman society which kept people from using military force to get their way, and that the law served no purpose except perhaps a very visible way to reinforce the social norm.
Historically, the window to enshrine broad positive rights like those is only briefly open in the wake of a revolution, civil war, or at best significant civil unrest. It’s not a pleasant future to look forward to, we all have a lot of work to do!
Ultimately if you want politicians not to do this then you need to start pooling your resources and just paying them not to, because it's pretty obvious with how all this stuff is getting rolled out in a month that someone someone has bankrolled it.
The UK has a petition website. It logs the signatory by constituency. Once a threshold os signatory has cross, the government has to respond and parliament will have to consider a debate on the topic.
And just because they respond, it doesn't actually mean anything will result from it.
"No more something!" "We have seen your petition. Fuck off, peasants".
And You can use the response as campaign material. Ultimately democratic governments are accountable to the people at the ballot box.
This exists only to pacify people and make them think someone has listened to them.
This is the relevant petition: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/722903. The government's response so far is "lol no"
The proposing side can be centralised and organised; the opposition diffuse and disorganised. Hence the continual growth of all forms of legislation.
Why would the politician in question give a shit what you think? They get into office mostly by funding which comes from… guess who?
> This is "lobbying" by the people in a disorganised way, trying to fight organised lobbying.
That's gighting against an organized crime syndicate. It requires coordination, resources and aim.
1984 is coming in its worst scenarious.
There will be no win for the people, no hope. Freedom is gone.
On the other hand, elected politicians (senators, MPs, etc) are supposed to represent what the populus wants, else be ejected.
So in theory, they should be paying as much heed to lobbyists as to their constituents.
The question arises, then, as to why they do not. There's no ground swell of public opinion in favour of being continually monitored.
> The question arises, then, as to why they do not.
There are huge bodies of research out there on voting behaviour. If you look at it, it's a lot less surprising.
The means by which we're supposed to hold the elected officials accountable for not representing our best interests is voting. It doesn't work.
Most people don't, as individuals, hold any sort of stable policy positions to begin with. People have a poor understanding of the candidates' position on various topics (strongly correlated with not having a stable policy position themselves). Candidates themselves have influence on people's view of subjects. People tend to take some of their views from the candidate they've decided to support, and project their own views onto the candidate in other cases making them seem more aligned/preferable.
The entire model is basically set up assuming that:
1. People have a view on policy which they decided on.
2. People will understand the candidates' positions and vote for the ones most closely aligned with them.
3. If an elected representative does not follow through on their positions and views, the people will hold them accountable by voting them out of office.
4. Therefore, in aggregate and over the long term, the elected representatives represent and enact the will of the people.
For the vast majority of issues in the vast majority of cases... one and two do not hold true to a level that's meaningful or significant.
That means the third step falls apart. In practice, there's little accountability to the electorate for the elected representatives.
Which means the fourth falls apart.
Given the elected officials aren't really beholden to the electorate, what else would guide their position? On an individual basis, there are a lot of opportunities for wealth and power. Unless it's anything particularly egregious, the only real impediment to them taking advantage is their own personal ethics and morals. The kinds of people that want to put their life on hold to run a campaign so they can maybe take a shit job with mediocre pay where a bunch of people will be pissed at them no matter what they do... are unfortunately often not in for the mediocre pay and anger.
And here we are. It's not whether there are enough people that support being continually monitored, it's about whether there's enough people and enough money _against_ it to stir up enough people to care to stop them. There's almost definitely not.
And just to make it entirely hopeless--even if you are a well-informed voter with considered and consistent views on policy... Many countries have very little in the way of options for who else to vote for. Is this important enough to enough people to make them a single issue voter? Would they vote for the hypothetical "We Support Murdering Kittens" party if they were against the spying? Probably not--they'll probably hold their nose and vote for the "We Love Kittens" party as the lesser evil.
This paints a depressing picture, which also has some support in empirical evidence.
However, democracy is not as feeble as this analysis would suggest. After all, we can see that major shifts in political support for policy positions are possible, and these do require public support (democracy) to occur.
For example, in the US the civil rights movements of the 1960's and 1970's. Or more recently the Brexit referendum in the UK or populist anti-immigrant positions that have arisen in recent years and acquired major political support. Whether you agree with these or not, they are politically impactful, and democratically supported.
Issues surrounding civil liberties have often attracted strong political and popular support. So the question here is how such support can be generated for privacy, which itself a right under numerous legal regimens including the US constitution and the UN Declaration on Human Rights.
No the problem is much more basic: you only get one vote and you can only pick from a very small number of parties. That means unless something is the most important issue for you, you have zero voting power for it.
I donate to an org that supports free speech. They do a good job for me. If there’s something they need a signature on I’ll generally follow their instructions and sign it.
I don’t think people are particularly against this. The kids are imploding and people dont care about a completely open internet as much.
I was told by a Brussels lobbyist a long time ago that the EU was by design made for them. I then was shocked how in your face it is within the EU walls.
In a sense citizens also have legitimate lobby groups, they are the political parties we know.
Foreign countries also lobby. Now recently what should worry Europeans is they don't bother anymore and just wipe the floor with the EU representative in front of everybody like Xi and Trump did last week.
So you can vote and lobby but I don't think it is enough today. We should first opt out of a lot of things and defend ourselves digitally:
- Buy some cheap LoRa devices and give some to your friends. Get into meshtastic and reticulum
- Buy some cheap HaLow WiFi devices and get into things like OpenWrt and B.A.T.M.A.N
- Self host as much as you can (It is worth doing just to avoid the Cloudflare " verify you are human" thing)
- Look back into things like Ethereum and good projects, they slowly made some real progress. Crypto is not only about price, annoying bitcoin bros and memecoins. It is still bad but banks and credit card companies are worst.
- Get some useful skills.
We have entered some kind of world war already and it will most likely include some ugly cyberattacks. In that context ChatControl matters much less and you can kill two birds with one stone.
I am still looking for a realistic solution to the email problem. If you have a suggestion I am really listening.
There is no way to resolve these problems. Every answer involves capitulation to governments with loss of personal freedoms.
One has to admit the system is fundamentally broken. Once this is accepted, and people stop investing themselves further in the political system, then we will see change.
Sadly, the change is already planned for and will likely be a jump to some sort of communistic, ai-managed technocracy. However, it is also an opportunity to make the point that force should be no part of a future system. People should be able to opt-in or opt-out. That's freedom.
It's equally difficult to support it, no?
This, I believe, is the only issue with our form of gov. Lack of referendums. In the US, much of the current unpopular issues (Abortion ban, support for Israel's genocide using American taxpayer's taxes, lack of regulations on data harvesting) could be circumvented. I believe the optimal way to avoid these is 1) an educated populace and 2) referendums. The people who were given objective facts, free of propaganda and private interests, decide accordingly. If the majority believes in something, then we the people decide. Congress and the senate have been too bought up by private interests, that starts with campaigning (you receive x millions, from a lobby group (AIPAC for instance), and every legislation that affects their interests has to go through them). I dated a girl who was a lobbyist in DC, and relocated back home. It is unbelievable what goes on behind the scenes. Much of us do not recognize for instance the extent to which fossil fuels or car dealerships dictate how we live our lives. We may be aware of it, but there is a bureaucratic apparatus built in DC, at least 50x the size of congress, that strips We the people of power.
> an educated populace
Wherever someone attacks public education or free libraries, you know where they stand on government by the people.