Undermining Democracy: The EU Commission's Controversial Push for Surveillance • Hacker News Board

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

#311

Post by ryandrake » Sat, Oct 14, 2023, 10:45 PM UTC

AlbertCory wrote: post #304

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…

Exactly, and this is why the people in the thread saying, "don't worry, it won't pass" are not serious. In a year or two, they'll raise it again, except then they'll know what the opposition thinks and what arguments resonated with the public, so they'll be smarter. "They can't bring it up again for five years!" -- also not serious. They can resurrect the least controversial parts and call it something else. The only…

It’s hopeless. The “anti” team has to fight and win an infinite number of times. The “pro” team only has to win once, and that’s that. The deck is stacked.

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

#312

Post by godelski » Sat, Oct 14, 2023, 10:58 PM UTC

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…

> To combat this lots of people need to do activism. Those people need to devote your time and energy to prevent such thing.

I think the issue is of complexity and energy. The world and a lot of these problems are often extremely complex and there are no optimal solutions. There is always slap, noise, and limits. Many of these things are also hard to understand and take a lot of time and energy to actually understand what is even seemingly simple.

But the cost I believes to a lot of apathy. For example, how difficult is it to switch people to tools like Firefox or Signal? The noise is quite high and non-experts will not know how to navigate this. Even mentioning these two tools will cause controversy on sites like this with people pointing out the imperfections. But the truth is that these always exist (same thing politicians exploit) and the complaints just make non-experts confused. Yeah, there are things better than Signal but there's no tool that is better for the masses and communication systems rely on people being on the same platform. The network effect.

Which getting into the network effect is the quite disappointing part of many things in politics. We have a lot of people that operate under the notion "if you don't like it, then don't use/participate/whatever." But this is not a realistic notion. As an example, I've used Firefox for over a decade and a lot has been to simply push against the Chrome domination. But that happened anyways and the thing is that Chrome still took over and Google has a lot of control over the internet. The truth is the differences in browsers isn't really that large, but we become quite passionate about defending our decisions. The same is exactly true for political concepts. We can point out flaws in other systems/ideas but do not weigh these equally when they are the thing we chose vs the other option. But the entire landscape is exceptionally complex and there are no optimal solutions. Until we can at least remember that it's difficult to solve anything.

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

#313

Post by jltsiren » Sat, Oct 14, 2023, 11:11 PM UTC

roenxi wrote: post #307

jltsiren wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The two-party system in the US probably works in a different way than the multi-party system in the EU. In the EU, and especially in national parliaments, political parties are the primary actors. While individual politicians are often ignorant of the topics they vote on, the parties usually have the relevant expertise, though they are not always willing to take advantage of it. After all, one of the primary function…

These two positions are sitting in contradiction to each other. People chosen by lot are said to lead to administrators making the decisions and that would be bad ... but career politicians govern by giving decision making power to an administrator making the decision and that that is good. I don't think your original comment got to the heart of what you don't like about demarchy. Furthermore, I personally just flat…

It's all about checks and balances. When elected representatives have experts of their own, experts whom they trust, they are not as much at the mercy of the government and the lobbyists.

It's the same thing as with elections. You can trust the elections without trusting the government running them, because the party you vote has its own people overseeing the elections. And it's always a party you vote, even in systems where you nominally cast your vote for an individual candidate, because individuals acting on their own are too weak to challenge the system.

The experts you are aware of may be members of a political party, participating in the internal processes of the party to varying degrees. It's one way to be an active citizen. You usually don't know that, because it's not your business to know. Political affiliation is a private matter, after all.

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

#314

Post by rayiner » Sat, Oct 14, 2023, 11:24 PM UTC

skissane wrote: post #306

rayiner wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it does mean that, if you have even the most passing familiarity with the geography of the region.

Taken literally, the phrase could be understood as simply a call for a free State of Palestine composed of the West Bank and Gaza, with internationally recognised Israel remaining intact – "from the river" meaning the West Bank's boundary with the Jordan River, "to the sea" meaning the coast of the Gaza Strip. Maybe even with some sort of corridor with right of free passage connecting the two (see this NGO proposal –…

The phrase “from the river to the sea” was used by the PLO since 1964, a time when Jordan controlled the West Bank and Egypt controlled Gaza. It’s unambiguously a reference to eliminating the state of Israel.

I agree that we shouldn’t criminalize political slogans.

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

#315

Post by alexpotato » Sat, Oct 14, 2023, 11:24 PM UTC

m3at wrote: post #283

alexpotato wrote: post #265

I recently discovered that US Congressional votes used to be "anonymous" in the sense that the vote COUNTS would be public but who voted for what was kept secret. The voting was then changed so that actual votes where made public in favor of more transparency. While it did indeed make the vote more open and visible to the public, it had the effect of showing lobbyists exactly which members of Congress were voting for…

I learned about this effect too recently in an ACX post, let me add a link for the curious: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-secret-gov...

This article was both exactly in line with the point I was making and excellent.

Thanks for sharing!

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

#316

Post by AnthonyMouse » Sat, Oct 14, 2023, 11:31 PM UTC

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…

> 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 correct for bad legislation much faster.

There is a better way: Checks and balances.

Suppose that in order to pass anything of this nature it had to go through more steps: The union legislature had to agree, then a majority of the member state legislatures had to agree, then the general public had to vote in favor of it too. But to repeal it, it only takes one of those.

That doesn't make it impossible for something terrible to happen -- in waves of populism everyone will vote for something terrible because to do otherwise is seen as siding with the "enemy" -- but it helps. Raises the threshold before something dangerous makes it into law.

And it's the easier path to repeal which is the thing we most lack. It should be much easier for bad laws to be removed.

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

#317

Post by tpmoney » Sat, Oct 14, 2023, 11:49 PM UTC

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…

>They can pretty much push the same bullshit forever until it stays while you are devoting your life to prevent it.

This is the nature of democracy, and any way of stopping this from happening would be a case of the cure being worse than the disease. This same process is how women's suffrage, civil rights, gay rights, medical marijuana and many many many other smaller victories for rights have been enabled over the years. Each one of those was brought up by politicians and lobbyists time and time again, defeated time and time again, until one day it wasn't and it stuck.

Personally I think that smaller, decentralized, local government is the best way to minimize the harm of this nature, but I fully recognize that it also means every group must fight the same fight multiple times in multiple places in order to secure their rights all over, and that's its own harm.

But I can't think of any way that you could "permanently" defeat "bad" bills that wouldn't equally have harmed those other movements.

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

#318

Post by logicchains » Sat, Oct 14, 2023, 11:53 PM UTC

jltsiren wrote: post #282

logicchains wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 There's another way to achieve something similar less chaotically: demarchy, which was used for some things in ancient Greece. This involves electing people at random for a limited time period; if the selection is truly random, the…

It would be chaos, and the real power would shift to the administrators. If you select people at random, they will have even less understanding of the issues they vote on than career politicians. They don't have established networks of experts they believe they can trust. They lack the skills to have effective meetings between more than a handful of people, to negotiate, and to make collective decisions. Administrato…

>If you select people at random, they will have even less understanding of the issues they vote on than career politicians

This isn't necessarily true. Politicians aren't selected for understanding; their ability to obtain and retain power is entirely due to their ability to attract voters and make deals with other politicians. If you assume a normal distribution of traits, then when people are selected based on scoring a high percentile in just one trait (in this case, political charisma), on average they'll be worse at other traits than if you'd selected a similar number of people completely randomly.

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

#319

Post by skissane » Sun, Oct 15, 2023, 12:06 AM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #314

skissane wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taken literally, the phrase could be understood as simply a call for a free State of Palestine composed of the West Bank and Gaza, with internationally recognised Israel remaining intact – "from the river" meaning the West Bank's boundary with the Jordan River, "to the sea" meaning the coast of the Gaza Strip. Maybe even with some sort of corridor with right of free passage connecting the two (see this NGO proposal –…

The phrase “from the river to the sea” was used by the PLO since 1964, a time when Jordan controlled the West Bank and Egypt controlled Gaza. It’s unambiguously a reference to eliminating the state of Israel. I agree that we shouldn’t criminalize political slogans.

> The phrase “from the river to the sea” was used by the PLO since 1964, a time when Jordan controlled the West Bank and Egypt controlled Gaza. It’s unambiguously a reference to eliminating the state of Israel.

The meaning of a phrase is not fixed by its origin. A lot of people using the phrase today weren’t even born then. I’m sure many of them mean it in the exact same sense that the PLO meant it in 1964-but can we be sure that everyone who currently uses it means it that way? I don’t think we can, it seems entirely plausible that some of its users have reinterpreted it to refer to a more moderate position

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

#320

Post by Rzor » Sun, Oct 15, 2023, 12:32 AM UTC

jltsiren wrote: post #282

logicchains wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 There's another way to achieve something similar less chaotically: demarchy, which was used for some things in ancient Greece. This involves electing people at random for a limited time period; if the selection is truly random, the…

It would be chaos, and the real power would shift to the administrators. If you select people at random, they will have even less understanding of the issues they vote on than career politicians. They don't have established networks of experts they believe they can trust. They lack the skills to have effective meetings between more than a handful of people, to negotiate, and to make collective decisions. Administrato…

>If you select people at random, they will have even less understanding of the issues they vote on than career politicians.

This reminds me of Varoufakis wanting to take the issue to the Greeks, during the Greek bailout negotiations, being told that he was "putting [his] people in a difficult situation of having to make a pivotal decision on complicated matters". He replied "Yes, it's called democracy".