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Language confusion question: aren’t democracy (people voting?) and surveillance conflating different topics? What correlation is implied?
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What alternative do you propose? The politicians are elected representatives of and by the people.
If a law doesn't pass, the contents can't be brought up in a new law for a minimum of 5 years.
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What alternative do you propose? The politicians are elected representatives of and by the people.
Something like "There are only X laws allowed. Every time you want to add a new law and already have X laws, you must remove one existing law". Then we'd get laws covering the most important things without a bunch of bureaucracy on top of that.
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You mean the very thing that made the USA the single world superpower by allowing it to act as a unified block instead of a pile of constantly bickering and sometimes warring states? Yeah gee why would we think that.
Does the US system seem like an asset to you?
The title should be shortened from "Undermining Democracy: The European Commission's Controversial Push for Digital Surveillance" simply to: "Undermining Democracy: The European Commission" . The EC is sheer horror. The thousands of years old saying: "The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the state" has never been truer. I've done a short consulting gig at the European Parliament, which at least tries to be th…
It seems like over the past 10 years there has been a global retreat from freedom and democracy. China is returning to at least a superficially softer version of Maoism. Russia has returned to Stalinism. The Middle East never had much of a liberal tradition but it’s certainly not gained any ground. The US is flirting with populist strong man rule with Trump and RFK. South America seems to keep oscillating between aut…
This is entirely the problem in my opinion. When you talk to Europeans you'll notice they tend to be very concerned about the dangers of things like extremism and hate speech, but not at all about state authoritarianism. But why is that? I'd argue that today your life is much more likely to be ruined because you hold the wrong social opinions or political views rather than your neighbour denying the holocaust[1].
And there is an ugly righteousness developing here too. I'm finding it increasingly difficult to defend people's right to dislike Islam or be homophobic, for example. A lot of Europeans genuinely believe these views are so evil that people deserve to be punished for holding them.
But how can I really blame them? The media here constantly reminds us about the dangers of terrorist and and extremism. It constantly tells us how evil it is to hold certain opinions. And most people don't reason about this stuff from first principles. They just assume that the extremism is a threat so end up contributing to the problem by demanding the state does more to suppress our freedoms.
It's difficult to see this getting better and if it did it would be because we put equal effort into warning about creeping authoritarianism. Obviously this isn't going to happen, but that is the solution.
[1] I'll note that I'm referring explicitly to the illegality of holocaust denialism here. I'm not talking about people who deny the holocaust and are planning to commit mass murder. The difference here is someone who holds unfavourable views vs someone who's genuinely a danger to the public.
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Legal note: I do not support any hateful ideologies, but I do believe people should be free to express views which may be considered hateful. My comments are not intended to undermine how awful holocaust denialism is in any way.
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It is a very complex system, and I say that as a US person who is used to a very complex system. In fact, I'm not really aware of any democratic nation with anything quite as byzantine. The EU Commission President is nominated by the EU Council, which is itself comprised of the heads-of-state of the member states. The President is then confirmed by the EU Parliament, which is directly elected by voters. So far this s…
Both, the European parliament and the European Council are voted for, the first directly by EU citizens, the latter by citizens of the individual EU countries everytime a new national election, and subsequent goverment formation, happens.
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Also it's important to notice the "European Commission" is the fancy name for the representatives of all the EU countries Of course, it has a structure, executive, etc, but essentially they are composed of representatives of the EU27 countries
It is a very complex system, and I say that as a US person who is used to a very complex system. In fact, I'm not really aware of any democratic nation with anything quite as byzantine. The EU Commission President is nominated by the EU Council, which is itself comprised of the heads-of-state of the member states. The President is then confirmed by the EU Parliament, which is directly elected by voters. So far this s…
While there were giant Interop conferences in the 80's and early 90's for TCP, where every vendor had to demonstrate they could interoperate with everyone else, OSI never managed anything remotely close, because it was too complicated. Like the EC's structure.
Instead, the tech community just proceeded with TCP and the Internet suite of protocols. Even when forced to buy "OSI-compliant" equipment, they actually ran TCP on their networks. Eventually OSI just died. Some vestiges survived, like LDAP and the notion of the "seven-layer model" (mainly 1-4).
It's deeply, deeply ironic that, now that the Internet is global, the Eurocrats are back trying to take it over.
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Haha, sure, it’s real invigilation terror over here in Europe. We all just want to escape this tyrannical dictatorship. But, the European Parliament is against this legislation, and for the moment it’s not passing.
> We all just want to escape this tyrannical dictatorship. Well, I actually do.
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I’m not sure I understand : European Commissioners are nominated by elected National governments, and approved by parliament. How is this not democratic ? Whether you agree with these policies or not is a different matter altogether.
Perhaps the sentiment is more about how our expectations of democracy are completely out of line with the results of democracy.