> The campaign has irked some recipients. “In terms of dialog within a democracy, this is not a dialog,” said Lena Düpont, a German member of the European People’s Party group and its home affairs spokesperson, of the mass emails.
It is a dialog. Millions are against it, a few (powerful people) in favor. The powerful are too detached from reality and consider this "not a dialog".
On a meta level, it even gives them a taste of the millions of messages that‘d get flagged false positively monthly, overwhelming police and other systems.
It's as much of a dialog as they allow for people to express their views. If I write a politician a well reasoned, thorough explanation of why I support or oppose something, the best outcome I get, as a non-lobbyist, is having a "for" or "against" viewpoint tallied into a giant bucket.
So if elected reps are going to distill our "dialog" down to an aggregated tally of support or opposition, then a canned email covers the entire dialog that's allowed.
We are very talented at distilling the noisy information going through the web each day into lists.
Let’s distill diplomatic topics and their sub topics into lists as well.
Let’s keep the lists around. They should be as indefinite as the topics they trace.
Do some tech-AI-open-source-local-… stuff to compile our many mouths into the lists they belong. Unstructured data-> structured data.
Compile collective thought by semantic meaning. Each person should be able to influence the whole proportional to total participants of the list.
It could be a dialog! A dialog takes two sides. Now that the other side has finally heard the voice of literally millions of people who oppose Chat Control, it can respond intelligently, and a dialog would start.
Saying "it's not a dialog" is just evading the (uncomfortable) dialog. Maybe some MEPs are going to actually engage in the dialog.
Yes, and in fact, Lena's response is part of the dialog. And its dismissiveness is telling. Not only does it reflect her attitude toward her constituents, it also exposes her tacit premise that digital communications are somehow unreal.
It's as if, for her, only phone calls, speeches, or handwritten letters would be enough to start a dialog. She seems to be under the misapprehension that digital communication is something to which norms and laws and, fundamentally, rights don't apply. Which is a misguided and dangerous belief.
Representatives work for us. If they don't like the terms they can quit. The terms are that they enact the public demands. This does not require any form of "dialog." Their point of view in the role is irrelevant.
They have the additional duty of convening meetings to discover facts and information useful to the public and to the creation of new laws. In this they consult experts with specific questions relevant to current national interests. The experts are also not there to engage in "dialog" but to provide data.
In my entire life I've not seen "dialog" between a politician and a citizen produce anything useful other than tragic comedy.
Exactly. That's the right dialogue to have about this: repeated "no" combined with as much power and leverage can be brought to bear to get people out of office for trying.
> The powerful are too detached from reality and consider this "not a dialog".
It's 2025. That the citizens don't have a government run website which allows them to register their sentiment, if not outright direct democratic vote, on every issue put before them is baffling to me.
Representatives made sense when horses were the fastest way to send news. They're a vestige on an otherwise powerful ideal.
Feel free to accuse the Germans. Russian bribes is basically why they have some of the most expensive energy in the world now. They're surprisingly corrupt for a "developed" "high tech" nation.
Merkel was the worst european politician by a lightyear (or two). Maybe growing up in East Germany affected her negatively, don't know but these days she is a huge (and publicly outspoken) putin and russia apologist. Looking at history of her political moves, she was actually the same before, there just wasn't such an obvious war against whole Europe so it all could be labeled as 'low cost gas and oil is good', probably mixed with typical german 'we must atone for the sins of our grandparents' backwhipping.
Current russian war in Ukraine is also her doing. Making german military a joke, sending tens if not hundreds of billions euros to russia. She still admits no mistakes at all, despite being very actively hated across whole eastern part of EU. When asked directly about any of this she just goes into her fairy tale mental space not anchored in reality.
Overall she did a lot of long term harm. I don't believe she is evil at the core, just severely delusional, easy to manipulate and overall a bad, very bad leader. Wake me up when regular germans realize what rest of EU grokked a decade ago.
The fact that she gets a pass from lots of people is somewhat confusing to me. Clearly she is a major cause, whether through incompetence or malice isn't really all that important, though her most recent utterances make me now lean towards 'malice' more than 'incompetence' when before it was the latter (and a dose of hope that this time around it will be different).
This can't be, bribes can only happen in corrupt Eastern Europe. No way it's happening in founding EU member, they will be kicked out of the club at once
> The campaign has irked some recipients. “In terms of dialog within a democracy, this is not a dialog,” said Lena Düpont, a German member of the European People’s Party group and its home affairs spokesperson, of the mass emails.
It is a dialog. Millions are against it, a few (powerful people) in favor. The powerful are too detached from reality and consider this "not a dialog".
On a meta level, it even gives them a taste of the millions of messages that‘d get flagged false positively monthly, overwhelming police and other systems.