321–330 of 341 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well they do keep electing communists in Europe so it makes sense the Soviet dream state is near completion.
By communists you surely means far-right.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you tell me what democratic deficiencies you see in this? Why is the process of having a prime minister/chancellor/etc as head of state fine in a national democratic process, but not on a european level? If I see any issue with the way EU passes laws is with the terrible overhead of having three to four bodies that govern the whole process, from proposal to legislature, not necessarily with the way some participa…
> Can you tell me what democratic deficiencies you see in this? Why is the process of having a prime minister/chancellor/etc as head of state fine in a national democratic process, but not on a european level? Well for one because people already vode with the head of state in mind when choosing the party. Even if they were aware of the EU politicians of said party (which is never part of the campaign materials) then…
Maybe I'm thinking too hard about the problem, but my impression is that the role of the head of states in the Council is to represent to the best of their abilities their own countries. In that, there's nothing to compromise on when a citizen votes. If you think that person is the best to head your state, it tracks that they can do that once in the Council's chambers. I understand this can sound naive, but meh, European politics is already pretty complicated, having yet another corps of people that needs to be voted democratically feels like it adds another snag in the existing democratic process. And personally I strongly believe that anything that can be done to make it easier for citizens to materialize their democratic options the better for their nation and the EU.
I think Europe as a whole (alongside many other nations, really) suffers from having a disenfranchised and apathetic majority that prefers not to participate in elections, because they don't find representation, because it's an inconvenience, because "what's the point?", etc. All of these paper cuts lead to the results we see today after the EU parliamentary elections ended: more and more support for divisive politics. A better democratic process would drown these voices in the vast majority of moderate people in my opinion, and that's what we should strive for.
Having semi-elected officials as Councilmembers is such a small inconvenience in front of that.
Anyway, sorry for the long(ish) rant. To sum it up, I think the solution to assholes representing their countries in the EU Council is not yet another democratic process, but making it easier for everyone to cast their vote, so extreme options are less likely to crop up.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The public, as a group, can only keep a small number of subjects in focus at a time. This feels like a phenomenon that I take for granted to be true but I haven't heard any name for it or read any studies. It really feels like a symptomatic phenomenon of our time.
>> The public, as a group I don't know, my local journalists paid with public money seem to be able to follow a lot of domestic trivia. They are much less capable of following matters of national interest, like how the country's economy is doing, what laws are coming up, and how's that Orwellian State business coming along.
I don't support this legislation but I also do not live in the EU. Honest question, why do we (US, EU, wherever) not have more harsh punishment for child SA? Why not castrate the offender after two strikes or even one? I am sure there are other biological reasons for this to happen but I got the impression a lot of abusers were abused as children.
Because the age of consent is 14 in Germany.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Which is a very interesting asymmetry, if we're stipulating that these are merely excuses. It implies that "think of the gays" will lose you more votes than it gains, compared to "think of the children". Terrorists and children are apparently the optimally intersectional bogeymen and helpless wards respectively.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong : > Mao's policies were responsible for a vast number of deaths, with estimates ranging from 40 to 80 million victims due to starvation, persecution, prison labour, and mass executions, and his government has been described as totalitarian. I guess according to you killing your own people shouldn't be counted.
Surveillance on internet use in China probably results in many visits to forced labour camps. Or worse. Imagine the Chinese people agreed and voted for their great firewall, wouldn’t we all think they were fooled into sabotaging their own freedom? But they never had the chance to oppose it. We do. And so who are the real dummies. With how popular Trump is in the states, that makes me think dictatorship is just around…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and I believe we the west are probably more awful to humanity than even the Chinese, Israel or the Russians, and that is saying something This is a wild POV to hold and one I'm pretty disappointed to hear on HN. You'd really prefer a world of Russian hegemony over NATO? My cousins in Ukraine would be shocked to hear otherwise smart people cheering on a regime which the rest of the civilized world has broadly condem…
You serious? I nearly cried watching what was happening in Ukraine early in 2022. You are making bad assumptions here. But if you want to put it into perspective… think about what is happening in Gaza. Now compare to Ukraine. Russia has plenty of missiles and by comparison (even while absolutely awful) have shown much more restraint. I don’t support them at all though!
Not the same.
The wording in the current draft seems to indicate that it applies to "providers of hosting services and providers of publicly available interpersonal communications services". So unless this includes ISPs, I wonder if that means a decentralized P2P service is not covered.
I also wonder how it applies to Matrix, which is encrypted and technically decentralized. However most users will be using the matrix.org homeserver, which makes it effectively centralized. Though I can still create my own homeserver that talks to matrix.org. Would matrix.org be forced to offer scanning / a backdoor on the homeserver? Or would they be forced to add something to the official apps, which is pretty inef…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> At that point I'm wondering why we don't also open and scan regular mail at the post office before delivery. We do open and scan some percentage of regular mail at the post office. It's difficult to find exact sources because the USPS only seems to easily admit to doing it for postage reasons, but it's fairly well known that they search for drugs, bombs, etc. Mail is subject to X-ray scanning and being opened under…
X-Raying import of goods is one thing. What I'm thinking about is more opening letters to read writings and check pictures, without explicit permission nor judge involved.