As I understand it, many of the issues faced by petitioners in the past were due to local corruption; officials would physically prevent petitioners from traveling to the petition office to deliver a complaint. The new systems (12345, 12388, and the apps) are intended to bypass that and have done a decent job at reducing corruption.
The Citizen’s Initiative is more of a referendum system for proposing bills, but due to its non-binding nature those bills are often ignored. China’s system doesn’t necessarily bind the government to action either, but given the small scale of the problems they are motivated to fix them.
This does not excuse China’s human rights abuses, but if you’re going to be abused either way, I can see why some would prefer to do it in a place with a rising standard of living and with a government that seems interested in improving.
It’s mainly complaints that are considered sensitive or destabilizing that are suppressed. This should sound familiar to those of us in the West. Germany actually goes farther by directly funding left-wing protest groups, as these are not considered destabilizing.
So yeah, if I had to choose to live in a country where I had to toe the party line and bite my tongue when it came to political expression it would be China. At least they would be providing a high quality of life and a secure and peaceful society in exchange even if I had to deal with the negatives of being a minority in their country.
We have spent 20 years criticising China for the great firewall and control of social media, but now are adopting similar laws ourselves.
There is significant probability that China will have better quality of life than Europe in 2045 and that very little will be left of European liberties
It can only propose; the decision is made by the EU parliament.
Whenever one reads EC you need to read: "All of the heads of state in a trenchcoat". Macron, Merz, etc
And yet this is an EP maneuver
And let's not forget on the American lobbyists pushing for it (Including Big Tech)
In some ways, the concentration of power in a dictatorship might be better, if the dictator was well morally aligned with the people. Trouble is, the people are seldom even morally aligned with each other in a unified way, so a dictator cannot easily represent their conflicting interests. Representative democracy does at least take a step towards solving that issue.
Although I’d argue it is often just as much a failed technocracy.
This is pretty much the exact argument that Hayek makes - socialism leads to fascism through political gridlock.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/45129546
https://lpeproject.org/blog/neoliberal-encasement-infrastruc...
Calling everything fascist, nazis, communists, etc. is making actual fascism, nazism and dictatorship more likely.
Because you can't raise the attention of people to the absolute priority those needs when the time come if you just wasted it on stuff that were not it again and again.
We are crying wolf, and we'll pay the price.
There are dictatorships, where a very select few people have absolute power, but there’s no visible dictator.
Iran is a country like this. There’s no visible dictator. It’s a game of power between the clergy, the military, and the civil government.
Even "democracies" have death penalties and commit to genocide. See the USA as an example here. One can always reason that there are worse countries in this regard - nobody rejects that either.
We need to have a much more nuanced view on democracy. The EU presently is not one.
You can have some gray area I guess, with unfair elections or whatever, but when the bad decisions are made by leaders who keep on getting re-elected in reasonably fair elections, we do not have a dictatorship.
Now go enlighten us on how the EU is super democratic and way better than the worst dictatorship that ever existed, so we may be happy we are not the worst.
Well they're not rounding people because of their religion or sexuality and putting them in "retraining" camps yet. Or using "criminals" as enforced organ donors. I suppose there's that.
The EU is being a bit short-sighted and shit with regard to Chat Control but let's not loose perspective here.
Right. They pay Turkey to do that: https://www.rescue.org/eu/article/what-eu-turkey-deal
I don’t think the EU is a classic dictatorship, but it’s a colossal failure nonetheless, has a severe lack of democracy and acceptance. And their personnel is mediocre, not like the US administration but it’s closer than ppl in this forum realize.
You really have trouble imagining what this could lead to?
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c70yk5xjyl1t
https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/germany/ (the biggest party gets first shot at providing the chancellor and government)
And while Hungary's Magyar is a huge improvement over Orban, let's be honest here, he's extreme right too.
Anti-immigration rightist parties are the norm across Europe nowadays. The center is shifting right in a big way, and the current "sanity" coalitions are forced to make deeper and deeper cuts in government services. They will keep losing popularity for another decade or so.
The extreme right's message of "let's kick immigrants out so we can instead spend on normal, good people" is total bullshit of course, it doesn't work like that. But voters are going to be more and more desperate for anything that stops the government service cuts, for a very long time yet.
And the problem is that the base part of the argument is true. Immigration was supposed to save Europe's collective economic ass and has utterly, completely and totally failed to do that.
And, of course, like the UK has demonstrated, the sad truth is EU governments are going to cause a lot of social problems through ECB-enforced spending cuts. They'll be looking for someone to blame and ... well we all know where that leads.
We could easily see a repeat of Trumps wrecking ball, enforced by the EU, in Europe.
Oh, I 100% see the problem with it. I think pushing draconian laws, that have already been defeated, in secret backroom deals is dodgy as.
I think you have some very valid points.
I think the centre and left just see opportunities to act without compromise, never considering that it will piss of their electorates. The electorate will reply by voting just to piss off the politicians regardless of the consequences. Just like with Brexit.
That still doesn't mean that the EU is currently worse than actual dictatorships.
If you'll indulge my argument: I have a fair amount of confidence in the stability of the system and fairness of elections. It may be rigged in favour of some interested parties, but there are solid ways to get the people currently in power to be replaced by others and still retain stability in the system. Not so in any of: Iran, Russia, Albany, Eastern Germany, The phillipines, China, Belarus, Sudan, ... That is my whole point. The rest is a different topic, but cynicism usually does not help in doing something.
Chat control is no different.
In the past, pre public availability of internet chat rooms, people used to be a lot more reserved, and speech had a consequence of public accountability.
Now, anyone can be anonymous, post anything that comes to mind without any real repercussion. People love to criticize laws like UK has against hate speech online, citing lack of freedom, but most people that got punished with that law will be seen in public saying the same shit.
There are 2 options to fix this. First, is no internet anonymity. Second is surveillance. The latter option is preferable, because it de-anonymizes you only to the government entities, not everyone.
The famous argument is "don't give the government power that you don't want the political opposition to have" is silly. As been proven so clearly, if the political opposition takes power, they will just do what they want ignoring the law anyways. Its much better to create systems in place that allow current sane governments to implement guardrails to prevent nefarious ideas from taking hold in the first place, and silencing the people that would have been ostasized in public in the pre internet days anyways.