Comment by iamnothere
1 day ago
From a post on Mastodon:
> democracy is when you repeatedly push for unpopular laws until they pass, and the more times you do it the more democratic it is
It is unlikely that 60 additional “no” votes can be found by Thursday to stop this.
They only have to win once. You have to win every time.
Just as there a counter-suits perhaps we need more counter-laws. When something like this is defeated, a law is instead introduced to make chat control explicitly illegal.
If someone's asking too many times it's abuse.
To repeal it you only need to win once too.
Not quite, the EU parliament can't propose new laws nor repeal existing ones, only amend them and vote on proposals from the commission.
The Stop Killing Games campaign, for example, has noticed that the EU commission keeps repeating lobbyist lies and has no expectations of new laws actually passing, so they're focusing on amending existing law through parliament.
The repeal would have to be proposed by the same people who proposed the law in the first place. The European Parliament can't initiate the process on its own.
I want them to win. The internet is stupid right now. A culture eating its own tail.
Pray tell, how would stepping closer to a dystopian hellscape help the internet from eating itself? Somehow, having omnipotent watchers is going to make the internet... more fun and welcoming?
3 replies →
Accelerationism doesn't work.
So basically the people we elected will vote yes. How's that undemocratic? Because the majority doesn't vote the way I like it? I'm not even ironic, I truly don't understand those comments. You get what you voted for, garbage in garbage out.
All votes have a certain margin or fluctuation, as individual representatives can be pressured, swayed, or coerced by any number of means. If a vote fails over and over again then eventually passes under dubious circumstances (start of vacation when attention is elsewhere), that seems to be against the spirit of democratic rule. At least to me, but what do I know? Maybe everyone loves this outcome and all the prior rejections were just a fluke.
> How's that undemocratic?
Because they're not representing the needs of their constituents? Democracy is more than just voting—and if it wasn't, most states we think of as authoritarian would also be democratic.
Well, you can imagine a bunch of scenarios that match the "try repeatedly until it succeeds".
One good case: The original rule was good but had specifics that made it unpopular. Retrying repeatedly is a pathway to refining it into the minimal valuable version that is acceptable to all.
One bad case: The original rule is terrible and progress was stopped only because of public outrage. The assumption of the public is that a groundswell of opposition will cause a fundamental rethinking. However, because such outrage cannot last, repeated attempts will cause fatigue in the public opinion and resignation to pass anything.
If the situation is closer to the front it's "democratic". If it's closer to the back it's "not democratic". One represents a refinement to match the will of the people; the other relies on our human inability to focus tremendous energies continuously on a broad front. Both match a representative democracy repeatedly tabling (haha) a bill.
I didn't vote for the person that was elected. Where's my representation?
The vast majority (72%) of European citizens are opposed to Chat control. Regardless, the proposal has been brought up and rejected relentlessly, mostly by action of politicians (commissioners) who are not directly elected to begin with. We have more than enough reasons to be furious.
https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/poll-72-of-citizens-oppose-...
That's talking about a different Chat Control that has mandatory scanning. This is talking about an older Chat Control that allowed sites to scan on their own without getting in trouble due to privacy laws, which has been in effect but recently expired. The thing passing now is reauthorizing that older law.
1 reply →
Did you read the question of that survey? Talk about poisoning the well.
1 reply →
What you have to understand about issue polling is that it's very easy to get whatever results you want if you simply instruct the pollster to ask in absurd ways. This was the question posed to respondents:
> EUR02a. Some politicians are calling for the automatic searching of all personal electronic mail and messages of each citizen for presumed suspect content in the search for child pornography. Suspected cases will be notified to the police. An advantage of this could be that more offenders are caught. However, according to police reports, in the vast majority of cases innocent citizens come under suspicion of having committed an offence due to unreliable processes. Please place yourself in the position that your personal electronic mail and messages are searched for suspect content. What is your opinion?
Obviously this is not a good faith attempt to understand if people support message scanning.
6 replies →
They keep voting on surveillance state measures that the oligarchy wants that will limit the freedom of the people.
They keep voting and voting and voting until the energy of the people to protest diminishes or they find a way to get it in.
There needs to be a counter-balance where politicians can be removed or even punished by the people for proposing unpopular bills.