Comment by lynx97

9 days ago

The EU definitely has no concept of "love". It was founded to make trade easier. All the fuzz about humane values and morals has been tacked on more or less recently, to keep up the support for it from the population. It is the literal wolf in sheep's clothing.

It was founded to make world war 3 impossible /through/ trade. By intertwining the economies of countries that considered each other hereditary enemies (Erbfeinde in German), it sought to make war too costly to consider. Humanitarian values are a core part of what became the EU.

That's one of the reasons the EU has had so many political problems with Hungary and Poland in the last decade: their drift to authoritarian forms of government (including weakening the judiciary in Poland) didn't impact trade at all. Nonetheless, it went against the humanitarian values.

I'm no EU fanboy (there's plenty to criticize), but regarding chat control and surveillance, it's important to see from which part of the EU institutions the push comes: the council. The council consists of the governments of the member states. It's not the big bad EU trying to force surveillance on the innocent countries; it's the governments trying to push domestically unpopular surveillance through the EU. The directly elected EU parliament has so far always prevented this push.

  • Given the current geopolitics, it doesn't look like the EU was very effective in eliminating the possibility of WWIII...

Yet because of it's existence, thousands of people have been able to love beyond their countries borders.

  • Wait, requiring a passport to cross a border did prevent people from forming relationships? I really don't follow. It is not like we were prisoners in our home countries before the EU was invented. And "love" has always been a huge driver of immigration, way before the EU. I even know people who sold marriage so that the buyer could immigrate. So why exactly was the EU a driver for international love?

What does "wolf in sheep's clothing" mean for you, concretely, outside of metaphors?

  • Well, the EU is pretty firmly in conservative hands. Ask a random EU citizen if they know that EPP is secretly leading the EU since its conception? They will likely not realize, because they fall for the piece&love propaganda. Just look at what VDL has done since she overtook the lead? Know where she comes from? Used to be defense minister in germany. Was called "Flintenuschi" back then. And now, magically, we are supposed to invest a shitload of money into military. Thats what I call a wolf in sheep's clothing.

  • Chat control and the never-ending drive to police our private communications.

    • What exactly makes you assume that the persons arguing for open source here are not the same people who has helped us defeat earlier attempts to make chat control happen?

The US was founded to not pay taxes... Come on, you know well that most things evolve and grow.