• 6 Posts
  • 25 Comments
Joined 5 months ago
cake
Cake day: July 21st, 2024

help-circle



  • It’s a term that goes back to the cold war. There was a strike and the Soviet Union ended it violently by rolling tanks into the city. This put communists all over the world into a bit of a dilemma: on one side of the conflict was the working class making their opinion known (a communist value) and on the other the Soviet Union (the good guys). So whose side should they take?

    It was British communists who coined the term “tankie” for those who defended the SUs actions to brand them as “fake communists” who are more interested in identity politics (the good guys did it, therefore it’s OK) than the plight of the working class.



















  • I’m not sure which of the videos of Ross (the initiator of the initiative) you have seen, but in the FAQ video linked above he addresses the half baked complaint. An EU citizens initiative is not the equivalent of a ballot initiative in the USA. It’s not actual proposed law, not even a first draft of a law. A citizens initiative only describes a problem and why the EU is the right institution to solve the problem (rather than the individual member states). And it does all of that while meeting a strict word count limit. So it kind of has to be vague to give the European politicians some space to do their job. They are going to consult relevant parties (including representatives of the industry) and then draft the actual legal text.

    I therefore find Thors argument of “it starts the wrong discussion” pretty disingenuous because he argues for weakening the initiatives initial position before negotiations with the opposing side have even begun.

    His videos are also full of frankly baffling arguments. At one point he argues for example that the initiatives goals would make DDOSing legal.

    Since Thors original video a couple of people in the games industry have come forward in support of the initiative. Indie dev and unity tutorial YouTuber codemonkey for example made a video to that effect. But the highest profile supporter from within the industry so far is probably Running With Scissors, the studio behind the Postal games. Also high profile, but not actually a game dev, is Louis Rossman, who also endorsed the effort.

    There have been some people, who support Thors line of arguments, but those tend as far as I can tell to be mostly friends and acquaintances of Thor. Generally speaking i have yet to see a European content creator critical of the initiative (not saying there aren’t any, just that they don’t seem high profile enough to come to my attention).