Good thing happens.

wAkE Up ShEePlE

What kind of shit take is this?

The lemmy.ml kind, check OP’s profile

I don't know. I live in Russia. One can say things like "aggressor state" and such, but if democracy worked here, we'd probably have no nukes by now, and I don't think this would have worked well, aggression or not.

While the last few years show more and more persuasively that it's unwise to let go of your weapons, any democracy in Russia in a long period between now and 1999 would have resulted in a radical contraction of the military and everything associated with it. Because it was very easy to believe that the world is different now and daddy USA is the global power for good that will keep peace. And that "rules-based order" really exists. And what not.

Propaganda is a thing. The EU is maybe not democratic, but making it such one should first make brakes.

At least the EU includes France which has nukes. In case world suddenly becomes even crazier.

Your sarcasm is out of place here really, and yes, Ukraine gave up its nukes and got this outcome. Ukraine had nukes after the union's breakup.

We naturally can't compare Russia without nukes to Russia with nukes, having only one version of history, but it's pretty clear that having nukes is beneficial, from comparing countries treated by western media similarly between which have nukes and which don't have nukes.

Say, there is North Korea with nukes, which, despite all its despotism, still survives, even somewhat modernizes and doesn't even have hunger as it did in some other periods of its history. It's a functional nation.

And there's Syria, where rebranded ISIS took power, is openly massacring Alawites and Druze and basically everyone not Sunni Arab whom they can get (Kurds they can't, Kurds have their own military organization still existing), and the western media is praising them and behaving as if it's regrettable, but necessary that genocide took place. Say, Bashar al-Assad didn't do genocide. He really had an unpleasant regime, basically abusing all dissenters and selling drugs as the basis of his rule, and he even all by himself put off payroll the units most useful in preserving his power in the civil war. And he is to blame that this happened and the Syrian state fell apart like some rotten fruit, for pieces to be picked up by jihadis. Except all those civilian Alawites are not to blame, and if you read something in western media about it, it's almost as if they were. Because what's a little genocide between friends, right. It's not a functional nation.

And then there's Iran, which got invaded by Saddam Hussein with western cheering almost immediately after its revolution (against western-approved "Shah", whose father, by the way, was a half-literate cavalry officer who took power in a coup, it wasn't any kind of respectable legitimate government), and then they decided that they need nukes. And if they really had nukes, they might have had more peace. It's a very corrupt nation ruled by religious nutheads, but compared to fucking Saudi Arabia it's almost progressive.

I mean, these are all not even important. It's a pretty commonly accepted thing that the Cold War was "cold" because of nukes. We got half a century of peace in most of the world thanks to nukes.

Most people are kinda sane, only a few are insane. Sane aggressors fear nukes on their victim's side, and don't use nukes first because they want to win something, not burn themselves and the victim. A revolution in strategic armaments discouraging most aggressors and encouraging only a few helps peace.

All hail nukes.

Mass surveillance is a very bad solution to a real problem. The more years pass, the bigger are the chances of a war with equal adversary or worse, a conventional normal war or not. And the real problem would be cutting the flow of intelligence and control messages the potential adversary possesses.

If that potential adversary is US or close to US, this would require either going offline with jamming all communication over EU borders and other such things, while not doing mass surveillance, so that nothing got through, or mass surveillance to proactively filter out and find the specific actors leaking intelligence and neutralize them, while not having the expenses associated with the previous variant. Those expenses would be such that they could kill the EU economies very quickly, not even talking about protests and such turmoil that what you have now won't feel anything deep.

Just playing devil's advocate.

It's either that or limiting flow of information over EU borders, which, honestly, is not so bad, except without wide popular understanding and support it would lead to what I said.

The fact that wars are rarely declared in our time really hurts.

And if you think this is nuts, then you haven't been paying attention in history classes.

That people who can, do. Sometimes that means forcing others. Sometimes that means breaking good things for others. And sometimes locally that's the lesser evil.

Anyway, I've described, why a truly competent well-meaning imagined government would possibly be doing this, and what would be one alternative for it without backdoors. An EU-wide intranet. Probably with outside communications whitelisted and analyzed similarly to the GFW of China.

It's hypothetical, in reality, of course, we all should be judging to the best of our knowledge, not on imagination. Which means resisting such legislation.

It was demonstrably not a lie. There were so many regions in support of it that it was dangerously close to passing.

It really wasn't. It couldn't have been close to passing without a vote even taking place. The vote was scheduled for October 14th. However, since countries representing more than 35% of the EU population have declared their opposition to this proposal, it has been canceled.

A lot of countries have indeed declared support, though this is completely separate from the vote. There, it'd require a qualified majority (55% of member states in favor, or countries representing 65% of the EU population in favor). Looking at MEPs' public statements, it's unlikely that the vote would have passed.

Nonetheless, it remains troubling that they keep trying to force this proposal through. We have to push back every single time, but they only need it to pass once. Who knows what the future may hold.

There were so many regions in support of it that it was dangerously close to passing.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but - it wasn't "close to passing", it was "close to being passed on as a proposal for a law", requiring then a formal vote, no?

So, even if Germany retained its support and the motion went forward, it could still get smashed during the vote.

I’m thinking this post is the propaganda. Really really lazy propaganda.

I think you're misreading it and badly.

I read it as: "don't believe those who panicked that the EU is a fascist dictatorship that wants to subjugate the population, because it's still a democracy where the people have the power, as proven by Chat Control being thrown in the bin yet again".

Have we really reached the point where ALL media is propaganda?

Always has been.

Second, a lot of countries where on board, including Germany

That means nothing. The governments (which the stances of were being counted) have not that much to say on how the MEPs will vote.

For example, if the Polish government was in favour of this, half of their MEPs would've still been against.

You can be cynical all you want arguing that “people’s voice don’t matter” and saying there’s no causality there, but people made themselves heard, and thing moved

I think he's arguing the exact opposite, mate. He literally said that:

EU is a democracy with different opinions, and when a small group of facists tries to read your chats, it does not represent the EU opinion

There was a lot of panic about the EU being an oppressive "over-government", trying to subjugate the population like the UK government is doing. That propaganda never made sense to me, but it felt very much like something the pro-russian mob would be spewing because it sows division and chaos, decreasing people's appreciation of the EU, stoking exit views.

The message here is: "don't believe when people start screaming that the EU is a fascist organisation that wants to subjugate the population".

Because there was A LOT of that online when Chat Control reared its head.