Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now

In Greece, we recently elected as representatives for the EU Parliament:

* a 71 year old lady, with no social media and no public speeches ever.

* a guy who used a nickname for his last name, that matched with a military general (who is well known), and many people thought he was the general

* a "journalist" that was caught twice talking on live TV, conversing with a pre-recorded video

* a convicted criminal

It's impressive to manage to fail as a politician.

Hello neighbor. You will never win the competition for choosing the worst possible politicians as long as Turkey has Erdoğan :)

Also ->

YouTube prankster voted in as Cyprus MEP - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4nnrwr72dqo

While your other examples are damning, I see nothing wrong with an elderly politician without social media profiles.

Goes to show how disengaged the voters are.

You'd be 100% correct if that was the case.

However, the problem is that she is not a politician and she has no public presense whatsoever.

She was chosen by her party, and eventually elected because her last name starts with A which put her near the top of the ballot paper.

Ouch, that's bad!

I don't know much about Greece and don't follow Greece at all. Every time I hear something about Greece, it sounds like a hot mess.

You forget they have Mazedonia and Bulgaria as neighbors ;)

Quite difficult to be engaged with the selection of candidates. It’s really quite the struggle to find someone halfway decent these days

This reminds of https://www.politico.eu/article/23-kookiest-meps-european-pa...

> struggle to find someone halfway decent these days

Would you want to deal with those voters as, effectively, your boss?

Hi, Malakas.

Yup that's the problem with PR: people actually get what they vote for. And people are idiots.

Truly frightening that these are the people who'll be contributing to the decisions made on the future of the internet for the entire rest of the world.

You are overestimating the real power of the EU parliament, everything is finally decided in the EU council. The parliament is more or less kind of a political theatre without the powers you would expect a parliament to have.

I think this sums it up pretty nicely. It's a failed state with corrupt people at the top of the government.

The parliament, i.e. the majority, i.e. these people, are also the ones who appoint the judges of the top courts of the country, which all but ensures their immunity.

Their immunity is also enshrined in the consistution[4, article 86] - only the parliament can take an MP to the courts, but guess who controls the majority

Also, they are in the pockets of the local oligarchic mafia [1]: A few families that control the vast majority of the media AND the big construction companies AND the energy companies. They are also the ones that own big part of the shipping industry in Greece. For their sake, back in 2022 when the EU was considering to ban oil shipments from Russia, Greece vetoed that [2]

Oh, and just to be safe, the oligarch's tax exemptions are written in the constitution[4, article 107]

So, the people in the government have an almost complete immunity from everything, which makes them extremely arrogant.

If you add to that mix the total disregard of public services, even hospitals during the pandemic, you get a very beautiful-to-look-but-terrible-to-live-in failed state.

A state that even the EU can no longer turn a blind eye on[5]

[1]: https://newrepublic.com/article/159252/noor-one-vampire-ship...

[2]: https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/11/23/how-greek-companies-and...

[3]: https://rsf.org/en/country/greece

[4]: https://www.hellenicparliament.gr/UserFiles/f3c70a23-7696-49...

[5]: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20240202IP...

I don’t think the voters are the problem. I think the established parties keep growing in all the worst ways, and I don’t think any decent candidate would be able to be successful in this setting.

Would happily work with voters to figure out a path forward.

And why are the established parties doing this? Why is it in their interest to keep advancing terrible candidates?

I dunno. I kinda do think voters are the problem. Or at least a link in a chain of problems, the next link up being corporate controlled media.

I'd say barriers to entry - being an established party gives you more revenue, supporters to do campaigning, influence, etc.

One place that tries to do it better in my opinion is Switzerland. It has a lot of controls to reduce the ability of politicians to act poorly and limits the power of higher levels (if something can be resolved well locally, there's no need to have a higher-level regulation). A lot of process is thought through and in place to enable direct voting on issues. Additionally, it has many levels to get engaged, which lowers the barriers to entry, by being able to have an impact on a local level.