Then you should sign it anyway. Worst case your new signature will get invalidated after the fact, but your old one should (AFAIK) still get counted

There is another downside. The local and global feeds are potent discovery tools. But they only work if you group people with similar interests onto the same instance. Your proposal assumes a certain amount of homogeneity. If everyone is interested in the same content anyway then yes you can distribute it randomly. But all the people interested in Linux memes are already here. If we are to expand our reach we need to have instances catering to other interests.

And it also doesn’t work with international communities. German speakers for example go to feddit.org, precisely because that’s where German content is going to be amplified via the local feed and therefore easier to discover (for people an that particular instance)

VPN and YouTube-dl (or better yet yt-dlp) but in that case you could just sail the high seas using more conventional means

1. This is about citizenship not about residence. So if you have European citizenship (even dual citizenship) you can sign from outside the EU without a VPN necessary
2. All signatures are checked by the EU after the fact. So if you aren’t eligible then signing won’t help. Your signature is going to get invalidated

Also the Dutch angle in cinema, named after the expressionist German film of the early 20th cinema (think Nosferatu)

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).

Sorry this one is EU citizen only

We don’t actually need to hit the minimum in all countries. We only need 7 (and a million signatures total) and we are already halfway there. 3 countries have reached the minimum and an additional 3 are past 70%

Update: Yesterday the German government introduced a constitutional amendment that would protect the Constitutional Court from some of this. It’s not perfect but it is still pretty good and it has the necessary 2/3 majority to pass

https://www.dw.com/en/germany-moves-to-protect-top-court-against-far-right/a-68403671

In the case of Germany: a lot less, but it’s not impossible.

The German equivalent to the supreme court is the Bundesverfassungsgerichtshof (BVerG, federal Constitutional Court) and in stark contrast to the highest American court, it is not an appeals court. A lower court might refer a case to the BVerG, or ask it to clarify a constitutional question, that has come up during a trial but most case don’t even have a theoretical path to Karlsruhe. Political parties and NGOs may also go to directly in front of the Constitutional Court to protest the constitutionality of laws.

New justices are confirmed with a 2/3 majority which means that you need to convince roughly 30% of the opposition to vote for your candidate. That in turn leads to more moderate candidates put forward. Justices are also limited to one term of twelve years. Outside of that a justice may be removed from office by the German federal president* if 2/3 of BVerG justices vote to impeach their colleague.

So far so good. Unfortunately there are some weaknesses in the entire setup. The law responsible for needing a 2/3 majority to elect a justice can be changed with a simple majority. A right wing government could also expand the court by introducing a third senate and pack it with their appointees. But that requires them to get into power first.

German late night show Die Anstalt did a segment about that problem a while back: https://youtu.be/ljjZ6AZsmGk (Video in German)

Tldr: the highest German court is not going to stop a fascist government from doing fascism but it is also not working to put the fascists into power, the way the US supreme court is.

• Yes Germany has a president. The role is largely ceremonial though as he isn’t head of government