Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Undermining Democracy: The EU Commission's Controversial Push for Surveillance

dannymekic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 386 posts

Re: Undermining Democracy: The EU Commission's Controversial Push for Surveillance

#201

Post by bboygravity »

irusensei wrote: post #23

Its just me that thinks there is something really wrong with the way politicians try to pass such controversial laws? Politicians bring up something controversial. Most of the time influenced by some lobby with very little interest in public benefit. To combat this lots of people need to do activism. Those people need to devote your time and energy to prevent such thing. So far it sounds good but after the dust settl…

This is the main reason that direct democracy is a better system: you can lobby all you want, but it ain't going to happen unless the people want it too.

Re: Undermining Democracy: The EU Commission's Controversial Push for Surveillance

#202

Post by wkat4242 »

irusensei wrote: post #23

Its just me that thinks there is something really wrong with the way politicians try to pass such controversial laws? Politicians bring up something controversial. Most of the time influenced by some lobby with very little interest in public benefit. To combat this lots of people need to do activism. Those people need to devote your time and energy to prevent such thing. So far it sounds good but after the dust settl…

It's nothing new for the EU. They tried to pass software patents through a meeting of agricultural ministers. The polish delegation saved us that time but later the industrials got their wish anyway.

Re: Undermining Democracy: The EU Commission's Controversial Push for Surveillance

#203

Post by LaGrange »

tekla wrote: post #2

How are there not riots in the EU right now?

We're all quite busy rioting about other things, because the US funded and supplied an actual genocide nearby. As bad as this is, it's a side show, and probably won't do much.

Re: Undermining Democracy: The EU Commission's Controversial Push for Surveillance

#204

Post by aleph_minus_one »

usea wrote: post #181
irusensei wrote: post #23

Its just me that thinks there is something really wrong with the way politicians try to pass such controversial laws? Politicians bring up something controversial. Most of the time influenced by some lobby with very little interest in public benefit. To combat this lots of people need to do activism. Those people need to devote your time and energy to prevent such thing. So far it sounds good but after the dust settl…

It's a lot easier to do something than it is to stop people from doing something. Usually to prevent actions you need total control or strong incentives. This is the same dynamic as browser feature development. Adding things is easy. Preventing additions is hard. We end up saying yes to things that disadvantage most people.

> It's a lot easier to do something than it is to stop people from doing something. Usually to prevent actions you need total control or strong incentives.

True. And because of this, you need to increase the incentives for your side: create a website that lists all politicians that are in favour of the dubious law by their individual names. Use a wording for these politicians that is not punishable by libel, but near to it. Even after such a law becomes passed, make sure that the politicians who voted in favour of it will spend the rest of their lives deeply regretting their decision in sorrow so that hardly any future politician will dare to vote for similar laws.

Summarizingly: do everything in your power that the reputation of *every* politician who voted in favour of the law becomes *destroyed* in important segments of the society.

Re: Undermining Democracy: The EU Commission's Controversial Push for Surveillance

#205

Post by peoplefromibiza »

greatgib wrote: post #164
peoplefromibiza wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And no one elected this persons with so much power by the way. this is a very tired meme, they have been nominated and scrutinized by the people elected in what you called probably the best thing that we have in Europe i.e. the EU Parliament edit: elections solve none of the problems people think they solve. proof is governments are corrupt even though they are elected by the people. if the objections is "we can't…

They are directly nominated by the government of the European states. So no, they are not nominated by the parliament. The idea that they would be legitimate because of being nominated by someone elected by proxy looks like to be a broken model in my opinion. Especially, because, never an European had to vote for someone that had in their program or proposal anything said about the person's that will be nominated at…

governments are elected in EU and the EU Parliament vets the candidates.

If that's the main objection, the POTUS is not elected by the people, is it undemocratic?

Re: Undermining Democracy: The EU Commission's Controversial Push for Surveillance

#206

Post by hackandthink »

t0bia_s wrote: post #165
layer8 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What alternative do you propose? The politicians are elected representatives of and by the people.

Eurpean Commison is not elected by citizens of EU. They are nominated by the European Council and confirmed by the European Parliament. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Commission Similar system is for WHO. They are not elected organisations, yet shape our laws. This bother quite a lot of people and don't bring a trust in system.

I like to call this:

victory of the executive branch

EU should be more lightweight a kind of European (United) Nations.

Re: Undermining Democracy: The EU Commission's Controversial Push for Surveillance

#207

Post by jowea »

quonn wrote: post #80
waihtis wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be beneficial to understand the underlying mechanics (very untransparent centralization of power to an unelected commission) and the risks involved before smugly dismissing concerns about it.

The commission has a member of each EU country and those members come from the elected governments. It‘s just like the government is not elected in many countries but instead the parliament is elected and that votes for a prime minister who chooses his ministers.

If the EU worked like a normal parliamentary government then parliament would have the right to initiate legislation. And it would be able to nominate whoever it wished for president of the commission as long as there was a parliamentary majority. The EU has confederal aspects that don't really work in the ways normal modern democracies work.

Re: Undermining Democracy: The EU Commission's Controversial Push for Surveillance

#208

Post by permo-w »

dsign wrote: post #78
irusensei wrote: post #23

Its just me that thinks there is something really wrong with the way politicians try to pass such controversial laws? Politicians bring up something controversial. Most of the time influenced by some lobby with very little interest in public benefit. To combat this lots of people need to do activism. Those people need to devote your time and energy to prevent such thing. So far it sounds good but after the dust settl…

I wonder what would happen if there were not politicians, if the parliament of Europe were the sum of all its citizens voting for laws in some sort of mega-stack-overflow consensus system. A part of me wants to believe this madness would end. Another part fears that we would try, at least for a few months, total surveillance and bisections as a form of capital punishment. But on the bright side, we would be able to c…

have you been on stack overflow recently? no thanks

Re: Undermining Democracy: The EU Commission's Controversial Push for Surveillance

#209

Post by jowea »

rjzzleep wrote: post #64
TacticalCoder wrote: post #7

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…

The fascinating thing to me is that the EPP(European peoples party) which ironically is the strongest party in the EU and seems to be the one least representative of the people spans across almost all EU nations. I find it very disturbing how the EU party system works above country party systems, where the EPP often overrides what the people in their own respective countries voted for.

> The fascinating thing to me is that the EPP(European peoples party) which ironically is the strongest party in the EU and seems to be the one least representative of the people spans across almost all EU nations.

Why you think that? It's the moderate conservative party. How many liberal democracies doesn't have one of those as a major party?

> I find it very disturbing how the EU party system works above country party systems, where the EPP often overrides what the people in their own respective countries voted for.

I'm not sure this exactly you're complaining about, but isn't that the inevitable result of any quasi-federal system? The federal government will inevitably end overriding what an individual state wants sometimes.

Re: Undermining Democracy: The EU Commission's Controversial Push for Surveillance

#210

Post by hef19898 »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #149
hef19898 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the commission members are elected in the respective member states elections... Ehy isn't that democratic? Rotating presendency, nice thing for an organisation made up of 26 member nations . And all those ministers are nominated following democratic elections in each member state. And as such, they are very much accountable to their electorate every 4-5 years. >> I don't know. I can confirm, you don't.

> I can confirm, you don't. I'm sorry if I insulted or embarrassed you. That wasn't my intent. My view is that the design of governing bodies is another area of engineering, and you can learn a lot about design goals by looking at the resulting systems. But I realize this can also become very personal.

Defining structures of government is not engineering, trying to apply the principles to both doesn't work.
Post reply on HN