Remember when they arrested Pavel Durov? I don't buy their official reasoning.
Dear European friends, our leaders are tightening the screws. If we don't make our voices heard this is only going to get worse.
Remember when they arrested Pavel Durov? I don't buy their official reasoning.
Dear European friends, our leaders are tightening the screws. If we don't make our voices heard this is only going to get worse.
I mean, Durov has been trying to push for Russian puppets to get elected in Romanian and Moldovan elections, by pushing to everyone (at least in Romania, he might've just posted on twitter for Moldova) that the French government is trying to interfere in the Romanian elections. I mean, it turns out, Russia was, on behalf of the candidate he was talking about... so take from that what you will.
Oh, yeah, and he calls himself DuRove now. Hats off for that one, but I hope he rots in prison for advancing the Russian agenda.
I mean, sorry, but the EU essentially installed puppets in both Romania and Moldova, what are we even talking about here?
I'm sure you're very familiar with the politics of both countries, but tell me...
How is Nicusor Dan a puppet of the EU? More than Calin Georgescu? The guy who actively tried to stage a coup? More than George Simion? Granted, there's no PROOF he's a Russian puppet, but he's a far right twat that has views friendly to Russia.
How is Maia Sandu and PES a puppet of the EU? And... let's look at BEP. Voronin, Russia friendly ex President, he was very against Moldova trying to get closer to the West. And Dodon? The guy who is being indicted for treason, who's a friend of Plahotniuc (he stole 1 billion dollars from banks and fled the country)? Yeah, sure, puppets of the EU, vs corrupt fucking puppets of Russia.
I know it's easy to look at this stuff from the outside and say, oh, yeah, the EU is interfering in elections, but there's a lot of history here that you obviously don't have. I like Maia Sandu more than Nicusor Dan (his positions on gay rights were disgusting a while back, he now just stopped talking about them), but compared to the obviousness of the Russian support for their opposition, I think the fact that the EU supports them is just insignificant.
Remember when they just annulled an election when they did not like the result?
I remember. It helped expose his lies about not traveling to russia and not collaborating with russian security services.
care to expand/provide some more info?
Durov had long claimed he was in exile from Russia and couldn’t return and that he was a UAE/French citizen. then records leaked that showed 120 border crossings from 2016-2021 and that he still held a Russian passport. One such border crossing was a flight from St Petersburg on June 18, 2020 which happens to be the same day that Telegram was unblocked in Russia… Lots and lots of smoke..
The Kyiv Independent article is a good summary.
https://kyivindependent.com/opinion-examining-telegram-found...
I was hit pretty hard when Russia was trying to block telegram; I don’t buy that it was a coverup. And there is only a single (anonymous) source for that whole article.
That said, would be good to rely on no central authority and use Matrix instead; or at least put OTR/Ratchet on top of Telegram with custom clients.
TG does not seem hostile to third party clients the same way Whatsapp/Signal are.
It would otherwise serve the USA for people to prefer Signal over TG (due to jurisdiction).
You know I didn't use to understand libertarians, but after years of watching boundaries being overstepped again and again I think I see the appeal of burning it all down and living in a cabin in the woods.
Like, in Europe we already live in a completely safe society in historical and geographic terms, what more do you fucking want? Security is beyond a laughable excuse for things like chat control. Power tripping elitists will never be happy until they have the entire population under 24/7 camera surveillance and can read every thought in our heads as it occurs. If you make crime impossible, you make free will impossible.
> I think I see the appeal of burning it all down and living in a cabin in the woods.
AFAIK, you're not allowed to live in a cabin in the woods in Europe.
Except in Finland :)
"... the appeal of burning it all down and living in a cabin in the woods."
I hope that's not what you think libertarianism is about. I'm sure there are libertarians who DO feel that way, but it's not a core tenet to personally isolate and live off the land.
Libertarianism sees not left vs right, but instead the people against the government. Libertarians focus on personal liberty and solving problems together, voluntarily, as individuals cooperating. A libertarian would say, for example, that if I think a bridge should be built, then I should either build it myself or convince other people to help me out voluntarily - but not use government to force people to help (via taxes, etc).
Libertarians are against force/coercion, and see government as the ultimate expression of force.
There are some loony libertarians, as there are of any political party, but most of us have pretty ordinary and mainstream beliefs and priorities.
The same reason there's only more regulations being piled on top of previous ones. Sadly only wars and similar catastrophes work as reset buttons for these things historically. A peace as long as the current one is somewhat of an untested ground
try it, like these people https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7iJDMU43iUk
The libertarians that want to live in the woods have a point.
The problem is the libertarians that want to burn it all down and build a corpo-state.
I agree with your overall sentiment, except:
"Like, in Europe we already live in a completely safe society in historical and geographic terms"
Russia. Putin.
I'm talking about our society internally, not potential external attacks on it. It's reasonably high trust and crime is rare outside a few outlier cities. We could not be further from warranting these sort of fascist style crackdowns. Ironically yes we could be spending funding used for domestic surveillance and bureaucracy on buying more Himars.
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This "joke" is neither funny nor original as it comes up on social media everytime someone mentions Russia as a threat to Europe.
Oh, look at that. A fresh account just to make this comment. What a coincidence.
What a surprise a 2 hour old throwaway post parroting barely coherent Russian propaganda.
It’s important to defend libertarian values even when things are good. Small violations of civil rights have a tendency to stick around and snowball into something worse.
The katamari will grow until morale improves.
> in Europe we already live in a completely safe society in historical and geographic terms, what more do you fucking want?
For people not to get killed, abused, and exploited? You don't sound like a "libertarian" you sound like an anarchist.
You know who has a large part of the population under global 24/7 surveillance right now? Google, Facebook, Microsoft.
> I don't buy their official reasoning.
Why not? Have you used Telegram? Before Durov’s arrest there was open drug trade everywhere, afterwards they started to actively ban groups.
In the Pavel case, it involved child pornography groups on Telegram and the fact that they ignore a court order.
But I agree with you for the authoritarian logics in Europe (even America) with Chat Control and other actions like the French gov. just did....