141–147 of 147 posts
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The Internet was never democratic. When did you get to vote on anything?
> When did you get to vote on anything? October 2000, there were a worldwide online vote to select some members of the ICANN Board of Directors. https://www.icann.org/news/icann-pr-2000-09-21-en
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Because China is all about growth at the moment and having citizens open to new ideas would only encourage growth if it was not for western elites using establishment media to tell everyone how bad China is.
Yes, China censoring the internet is entirely based on us saying China is bad for censoring the internet. How laughably circular. Governments do not get to be immune to criticism.
Western elites have been trying to brainwash people against China since long before the idea of the internet was conceived.
>Governments do not get to be immune to criticism.
Edward Joseph Snowden.
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Please don't use the mere existence of the "Mickey Mouse" parliament as an evidence of direct representation to the EU as the parliament have literally none of the roles or authority of a real parliament but is mostly ceremonial, like the president of the EU. The real power is and have always been with the council of ministers who is appointed by the member governments, and in practice only responsible to the member…
Not a single piece of EU legislation (both directive and regulation) can be enacted without a majority in the EU parliament. The only difference to national governments is the lack of a right to initiate legislation. But in practice, they just stick anything they want into any vaguely related piece of regulation. They do have the power to amend.
- no power to propose laws
- process heavily skewed in such way that it's extremely rare to throw Comission proposals entirely
- current procedure for reaching comprosive between EP and Comission is: small working group hashes out compromise text with no public oversight, is then rubber-stamped by plenary
- crucially, low citizen visibility into EP's working, no oversight
The last point is, I believe, crucial. EP is a dumping ground for politicians who failed nationally and gets virtually no press attention. What happens in national parliaments is news, covered in detail, even though the importance of EP, as the place where things can be influenced, is much bigger.
It is very much disfunctional as a democracy.
> follow in the footsteps of China regarding online censorship This phrase makes the article seem overly dramatic. The proposed directive is all about copyright and not about censorship in the common sense. So, if I own the copyright (e.g. I wrote a blog post critizing the European Commission), this directive doesn't apply to me.
Copyright enforcement is censorship.
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Or Erdogan ?
Turkey is not part of the EU yet. I don't see how exactly the power "sits with Erdoğan".
Of course I'm no politician, I've no access to confidential information, but I'm sure he might use that to influence Europe (and there's nothing wrong with that, that's international politics as usual).
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It's not like the USA has ever had unlimited free speech; it's still illegal to shout 'fire' in a crowded building or make certain kinds of threats (generally the specific kind.) China thinks it should be illegal to say something that threatens the stability of the governing party as an institution, so they control information more heavily. But it's not yet clear what they've proven in the past 60-odd years. Remember…
There’s a difference between recognising a fundamental right and not recognising it at all in my opinion. China breaks from the “norm” drastically in a lot of ways. It doesn’t recognise the right of the public to elect officials, for example. There are lost of countries with flawed/fake democracies but most have democratic constitutions, officially. China is different. 20-30 years ago, liberal democracy was the only…
What about Arab spring of 2011? They still tried to setup a democracy afterwards. One of the motive for those revolution where abuse of power by the governments and by the police. This things are hard to deal with if you don't recognize a number of rights to your citizens.
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Brexit occured because people were lied to for years and years and conditioned to believe the EU was bad.
So there is no room for people to believe that EU is really bad? So that must be a lie? Come on...