Republic and democracy are not mutually exclusive…

Citizen’s Initiatives are great, but I’m not sure they are the right mechanism in this case.

They are meant to make parliament address a concern, and not to inform legislators how you feel about a law proposal that is already on the table. All a Citizen’s Initiative does is force the European parliament to address a concern if a certain threshold of signatures is met. They will be doing that anyway when the law proposal is being voted on.

And on top of that, the time frame for a Citizen’s Initiative is too long (over a year) to be a meaningful shield against Chat Control.

Contacting your representatives to the European Parliament is probably the best way forward at this point.

I’m not sure how contacting my representatives in the European Parliament over something that I am concerned about, would be spam.

I don’t care what party they are from, or what part of the country they are from. They are still my representatives.
They sit there to represent the concerns of their constituents in parliament, and they cannot effectively do that if they do not know the concerns of their constituents.

If you have good ideas for collective action I’d love to hear them, but until then shooting an email can never hurt.

Edit: Just so there is no confusion, I don’t think signing a four year old change.org petition is any more effective than directly contacting your MEPs

Instead it might be more helpful to directly contact your representatives.

This website can help you figure out who they are, and help formulate an email send to them:
https://fightchatcontrol.eu/

(Obviously it is best to write your own response, or at least update the text to be your own, but it could be a good springboard)

The EU is a democracy.

While it’s not perfect (no system is), each of the bodies that make up the EU legislature are democratic:

• The European Parliament is directly elected in European elections every five years
• The European Commission is made up of commissioners from each country, which are in turn appointed by their democratically elected governments
• The European Council consists of the heads of state or governance, which are also democratically elected in the respective countries.
• The Council of the European Union is made up of government ministers, which are appointed by the democratically elected governments.

Not every body is directly voted on, but each body comes forth from a democratic election

Edit: The message I responded to originally made the claim that the “EU is no democracy.”

Oops! We accidentally added Putin himself to our top secret summit Signal group-chat

This looks like an AI generated article

And people should support this move by using Ecosia and Qwant until they do.
“Vote with your wallet”, or rather vote with your attention.

I switched to Ecosia from Startpage after I learned they were working on this.

I’m sure they’ve recently amped up the marketing on that front, but it is not strictly something new.

McDonald’s and other fast food chains have always loved advertising that their ingredients are all European in European markets, because apparently people respond well to that.

It makes the food sound more premium than it actually is, I guess.

You can substitute your McDonald’s purchases with purchases at the Quick. They are a Belgian chain.

I kind of wish they would expand up north into the NL. Instead I’ve had to learn self control and not go to a fast food restaurant when I get a craving for a mediocre burger.

It is not that funny when it is your home that gets blown up

I’m Dutch, but I don’t live in a place that is particularly affected by these explosions, nor am I an expert on the matter… but I’ll drop my two cents, based on my reading of the situation

These explosions are happening in cities like Rotterdam and the Hague. They are places that traditionally have gang/mafia activity.
From my understanding a lot of the explosions are related to underworld dealings. It’s possible that there is some petty conflicts as well, but the individuals are almost always connected to the underworld somehow.

It’s also worth noting that in the NL (as I imagine it happens in other places?) crime tends to come in waves.
Criminals figure out a new effective method to commit crime. The police and institutions scramble at first in order to deal with it. Then eventually they figure out an effective method in order the combat the issue. After which criminals lose interest and either the problem moves to a different location, or they change tactics.

Edit: The article also mentions that “the use and possession of fireworks generally are also laxer in the Netherlands.”
This is simply not true. The kinds of fireworks that are legal in the NL are much more restricted than they are in Belgium and Germany, and you can only legally purchase and use it leading up to New Year’s Eve.

The dangerous stuff is illegally imported from Belgium and Germany.

I dont usually name my cars, but my first car kind of naturally developed one over time:

Het Groene Gevaar

Meaning “The Green Danger”, so called because it was green and had no airbags.

I loved that car

I wish there was a good alternative to YouTube. I’ve been meaning to host a Peertube instance but that process is really not as straightforward as it should be if they want the platform to gain widespread adoption

Google Maps has pretty decent alternatives though:

• For simply browsing the map I use OpenStreetMaps on desktop, and Organic Maps on mobile.
• For navigation (by car) I used to use Waze (which is also owned by Google), but I’ve switched back to good ol’ TomTom

As for iPhone… personally I have a Google Pixel which I’m going to keep using till I can’t anymore. After that I’m probably switching to Fairphone. They’re a European company and their phones are right up my alley

Not op, but for me the main problem with Authy is that it is owned by an American company.

It’s not the worst offender, but any American company is subject to the whims of the current administration. As an example, we’re currently seeing how American sanctions lock people out of their Microsoft accounts at the International Court.

I’ve slowly been moving over my 2FA codes to Aegis.

Visa and Mastercard were under no obligation to give in to this group, yet they did. They are equally culpable in this whole fiasco.

In my honest opinion Wero is not the solution to this specific problem either.
They could potentially also unilaterally decide that they won’t allow payments for specific types of purchases (Though they are still preferable to relying in American payment providers).

The real solution is proper regulation of payment providers that blocks them from refusing service.

It has to start somewhere

Yeah they should just sit back and do nothing while their government finishes the job! /s

That is for the Eastern Roman Empire, which did obviously have the most legitimate claim to be the “successor” of the legacy of the Roman Empire (because they are a direct lineage of the Roman Empire).

But at that point there had been a thousand years of other empires also claiming to be the continuation of the Roman Empire. To the point where the Eastern Roman Empire is often more commonly referred to as the Byzantine Empire

The fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 is generally more accepted as the fall of the Roman Empire. As the other comments say, that is when the city of Rome was sacked.

I’m literally not even trying to argue with you. I’m merely calling you an asshole for behaving like an asshole.