"Fun" Fact: it's currently the European championships in football (soccer) in Europe (probably the biggest event of the year), so it's the perfect opportunity to sneak this through without too many people noticing.
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It really feels like a symptomatic phenomenon of our time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzYOdO4pEyI
It works in real life too. Distract the public for long enough that few people make a stink and the law gets through. When people complain later it’s “Oops, we didn’t know, no one seemed to care. Well, nothing we can do now”. Much harder to do that if everyone is shouting at you to not do the thing.
Man, how did this "conspiracy theory" mental illness become so commonplace?
How many? Can you list some of them? I think that your assumptions are kind of the general opinion, but I am interested in facts. I couldn't find "many unpopular laws being passed during such events", can you?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bread_and_circu...
Honestly, I would say that's just the media jumping on the next thing. Everybody was sick of hearing about covid for 2 years. The war was also a lot more threatening by then (at least in Europe).
As for Covid's evolution, like all pandemics before it (plague, spanish flu, swine flu, ...) disease evolution and human immunity reduces its danger and importance.
I don't know, my local journalists paid with public money seem to be able to follow a lot of domestic trivia. They are much less capable of following matters of national interest, like how the country's economy is doing, what laws are coming up, and how's that Orwellian State business coming along.
At least in France, the upcoming Olympics are a strong contender. That and the surprise parliament election our president dropped on us; because he apparently didn't like the result his party got at the latest EU election, but honestly I don't see how he imagine he's going to get a better result this time around.
- summer 2017, a law to limit demonstrations and strikes.
-summer 2020: LPR, that incite scientist to shut up, and limit their autonomy while strengthening administrative power over them (students tends to protest laws like this).
But usually, how you do it: you make a 'protect the children' law, or a 'counter terrorist' law, and you expend it's reach with executive power, that how Macron does it. Is it authoritarian? Yes.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/plenary/en/votes.html?tab=ord...
Quite often a government body has missed some performance targets, suffered cost overruns or has other bad news which they need to announce publicly at some point. But they can choose when the announcement comes out.
Then along comes September 11th 2001, planes crash into the twin towers, and while the towers are still burning government PR teams are rushing out the announcement that they've badly missed their train punctuality targets.
They know the news and social media are going to be full of the big event for days or weeks. By the time things are quiet enough that the newspapers have space to report on train punctuality, the bad figures are old news.
This works equally well with big good-news stories like royal weddings and big sporting events.
The "good day to bury bad news" quote is interesting because someone leaked an e-mail where a government PR boss literally encouraged it. Usually such encouragement would be by telephone or whatsapp to avoid creating a paper trail.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/plenary/en/votes.html?tab=ord...
... the submitted article is complete nonsense "EU citizens would no longer be able to communicate in a safe and private manner on the Internet." ..
no, here's the draft law
https://cdn.netzpolitik.org/wp-upload/2024/05/2024-05-28_Cou...
see page 39,
"Without prejudice to Article 10a, this Regulation shall not prohibit or make impossible end-to-end encryption, implemented by the relevant information society services or by the users."
It's a broad framework and - based on my cursory reading:
- providers have to set up a counter-abuse team and fund it
- authorities and industry-wide cooperation on trying to come up with guidelines and tech
- counter-abuse team needs to interpret the guidelines, do "due diligence"
- provider needs to have monitoring to at least have an idea of abuse risks
- if there are, work on addressing them if possible without breaking privacy
There's a section about penalties and fines, up to 6% of global revenue, if the provider doesn't take abuse seriously. And - again, based on my understanding - this is exactly to prod big services to make these "safer, but less profitable" options.
see page 45 for actual things providers might need to implement
That is because the people who need to leave office will usually join with the opposition to get laws passed that they wanted but were afraid to vote for before the election.