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 settles the same politicians and lobbysts bring the thing again this time with another name or sneakily group it into some other law. Perhaps something bad happened and that momentarily gained public support, of course with lots of emotions involved and very little context given to the common folk.
The politicians and lobbyists are literally being paid for this. You are not. They can pretty much push the same bullshit forever until it stays while you are devoting your life to prevent it.
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.
To be fair that was just a rubber-stamping process to get the law back to the european parliament to be debated and discussed, where it was (rightfully) rejected. It had already been agreed (correctly, at a competitiveness meeting of the council) that it would go back to the parliament.
They sent it through the fisheries Commission because the board that had the responsibility for it wasn't due to meet for another 6 months.
I guess some people care deeply about the details of which commission sends the proposed legislation to the parliament to be debated & amended / rejected, but in reality I think it doesn't really matter. In either case the correct thing for the commission to do was send the legislation to the parliament.
it wouldn't have become law. it sounds fishy (because it was at the meeting of agriculture and fisheries, eheh), but the EU Parliament would had to vote on it anyway.
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 correct for bad legislation much faster.
>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, then the outcome of a couple hundred randomly selected people voting on something should usually match the outcome of the whole population voting on something. And due to it only being for a short period of time, you avoid anyone accumulating too much power.
There was so much uncertainty around it and who wanted what that a lot of people voted against their best interests. I'm still meeting people who thought they were voting against Uber and Lyft with that proposition.
The ads were constant and incredibly misleading. And that was one issue. Every time these propositions come up, I can usually find 3 or 4 that are not what they seem (the Diveta props are similar but very different tactics afaict).
If all state business was done this way it would be overwhelming to filter through it all.
I've been thinking that maybe we need the opposite - a citizens veto. The threshold would have to be high enough to ensure it's not abused by individual groups (maybe 2/3rds?), but the ability for the population to decide against measures (maybe even individual parts of omnibus bills) would create new controls against overreach without completely throwing away the current system.
It would be much worse, witch-hunt style. Propaganda would run rampant. Also, many wouldn’t trust the voting system, because they won’t believe many actual outcomes to possibly be representative. Instead of blaming politicians, they would increasingly blame the voting system to be rigged by whoever is running it.
People also become tired of engaging in the constant need to decide on various issues and disconnect. Legislator have to vote on hundreds of issues over the course of a year. Do you want to have to do a public vote every week? How do the people stay informed enough to understand the issues and options? How many times will they vote before it becomes too onerous and they stop participating? Then you just get the special interests voting on their issues.
This happens a lot in the US in the primary elections. Everyone complains about the poor quality of Republican candidates and how they wish there were better options but the primary voter has already limited the field.
> 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.
Switzerland has a direct democratic system. It works great for them. Incidentally, they have very strong privacy laws.
Full disclosure, I’m originally from a EU country but I am now a resident in Switzerland.
Everyday I feel blessed to be living in a country where my fellow humans are in charge and not some ignorant fools who’s primary skill is to elbow themselves to power.
Take a look at the recent Australian referendum (disclaimer: like most young people I voted yes, but the outcome was no):
Although people were voting, there was a lot of political parties "advocating" fairly hard for different views, and the opinion of Australians flipped as a result of that. Seems like spreading FUD is effective.
>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.
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.
> To combat this lots of people need to do activism. Those people need to devote your time and energy to prevent such thing.
I did the activism. I did the walk so I'm going to talk the talk here.
The problem is only an utterly microscopic number of people will actually do anything. A larger proportion will, to some degree inform themselves of the issue but still do nothing. An even larger number will simply complain on a forum and call for other people to get stuff done but do nothing (looking at you@irusensei).
It takes a remarkably small number of people to make a difference, but IRL the number who will do something is even smaller so nothing happens. Those that do, like me, end up exhausted and despairing, feeling we've wasted a fair chunk of our lives, and had there been just a few other people willing to involve themselves things might be different, but that didn't happen.
If you want change it's there for the taking. But you won't.
> bring the thing again this time with another name
There should ideally be a rule that if an idea doesn't pass it can't be brought up again for 4 years. If defeated again, not in 8 years. And so on, each defeat doubles the number of years it's not allowed to be discussed again. Still not perfect but at least slow them down.
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.
People tend to approve of direct democracies up until the point that they vote for something they don't like (in European settings, this will nowadays most likely be some anti-immigration measure like the Swiss minaret ban). Then all the talking points about dangerous populism and how politics is better left to professionals who can dedicate time to understanding what is actually good policy and are not swayed by base emotions re-emerge.
> 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.
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 answer is to fire every single person associated with this, such that they can never work for the EU in any guise, ever again. I'm not optimistic about that happening.
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.
Exactly. The problem isn't the specific abuses of power, it's the power itself. The EU (and the US federal government) simply shouldn't be able to do most of what they do.
Meanwhile, other groups of people you might find insane are also devoting their lives to shouting down changes you actually support or find critical. The lesson for even the most faithful elected representative is that the signal/noise ratio of public opinion is too unreliableto take seriously.
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.
"Switzerland is governed under a federal system at three levels: the Confederation, the cantons and the communes. Thanks to direct democracy, citizens can have their say directly on decisions at all political levels. This wide range of opportunities for democratic participation plays a vital role in a country as geographically, culturally and linguistically varied as Switzerland."
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.
> This is as good as it gets when money has any influence on policy.
I agree with this but I think the problem is bigger than "capitalism" and "democracy" (quotes because it seems none of us can agree on these -- to be fair -- vague definitions). Capital is more than money, and capital is what is abused. Capital can be your house, where you live, the food you eat, the clothes you wear, and so on.
Regardless of ruling systems there are no (other than short lived) cases where this imbalance does not exist and creep larger. The reason I hate these "yep that's capitalism for yah" comments is not that there aren't things to criticize about capitalism (if you can't criticize a system you're in trouble) but because it hinders the ability to have this conversation. I'm sure the conditions will relax as we approach post scarcity but there is no possible means to have true equality on all levels. Capitalism, socialism, whatever, all need to have a real discussion about how to place people into power while minimizing the ability to influence those people while maximizing the ability to do good for people. Which some of these seem to be in direct opposition from one another.
A part I see clearly missing is the temporal factor in all of this. It does not matter if you elect someone who is a saint if the environment will corrupt them. Nor is there a way to have an environment that is not rapidly changing. So how do you create a system that can adapt (be iterative) but not be influenced by those with more power/capital? If we can't have this discussion it doesn't matter much which system we choose because the truth is that you can't maximize both because they're not orthogonal.
It's about time we have some standing voted directives originating with the people. Perhaps an AI could verify law proposals and shoot them down if the citizenry oposes it. Properly tallied and percentaged of course.
> To sway European public opinion, however, the European Commission went even further. X’s Transparency Report shows that the European Commission also used ‘microtargeting’ to ensure that the ads did not appear to people who care about privacy (…) and eurosceptics
Independently of the broader privacy and surveillance topic, this is highly concerning: if institutions, like the EC, start to run agendas through and by carefully created echo chambers and keep certain segments of the demographic out of the loop, all is lost, as there is no common and public realm of political discourse anymore.
Let's put it this ways: if policymakers are allowed to think that certain elements should not be represented in the political process and/or should be just overwhelmed by a broad wave welcoming the agenda, we're deep into the root causes of what haunted Europe in the 1930s.
If only for this reason, we must stop targeted advertising and messaging, before it is too late. Because, for a minimal social and political alignment, everybody must be allowed to be informed of what is on the market, that of goods and that of ideas. Modern democracy is built on mass media and communications and not on in-group messaging and arbitrage deals. (At least, in the more idealistic and not-entirely-cynical version of the narrative.)
And who provided those tools? Twitter? So nothing new to see here, only that is not just right wing populists doing it (which is for some reason completely fine on Twitter nowadays).
>Independently of the broader privacy and surveillance topic, this is highly concerning: if institutions, like the EC, start to run agendas through and by carefully created echo chambers and keep certain segments of the demographic out of the loop, all is lost, as there is no common and public realm of political discourse anymore.
It's especially annoying since many people who vote in the EU are a bit more... extreme? Like when you're marketing to "Beligum" or "NL" whatever... the people who've been there multiple generations are the right wing parties.
The folks obeying the spirit of the laws are like the students in America, oft not registered locally.
It's a feedback loop of the same sort who Brexited being sent other things in their feeds.
I agree with the author:
>If there is insufficient support for a proposed legislation, the only proper democratic response is to withdraw it
I'm tired of this fraternity brother model of public policy -- ask until you hear the "yes" you wanted from those who didn't block you from being heard at all.
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 and against the lobbyists' interests. This in turn led to funding going to the pro-lobby Congress members and the vicious cycle accelerates.
As a post script, I forget if it's in the video or somewhere else but experiments in real political bodies (I believe it was the Italian parliament) with both a public and secret vote for the same legal bill led to two completely different outcomes.
The European parlement is probably the best thing that we have in Europe, most good things and new rights come from there.
At the opposite, the European Commission is probably the worse that we can have. It is totally corrupted (see the vice president with bags of cash given by the Qatar and co) or at least morally corrupted by lobbies. And no one elected this persons with so much power by the way.
Good things to wonder is why America got shared access to all financial transactions of European citizens but the opposite is not true.
> the vice president with bags of cash given by the Qatar and
It was the vice president of the Parliament. Btw she was the vice president in charge of AI and Blockchain because ... reasons (she didnt have any qualifications)
The problem with both EC and EP is the lack of accountability , it's a very indirect system
>the European Commission is probably the worse that we can have. It is totally corrupted (see the vice president with bags of cash given by the Qatar and co) or at least morally corrupted by lobbies.
Euroskepticism is a virus, but OTOH the Five Stars had a good idea: politics should not be a profession.
I'd love to see more folks do good work then pivot to entertainment if they want bags of Qatari cash in a way that doesn't involve destabilization
> 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 let them chose because they will meet in a room and exchange money for the position" well, how is it different from "they will meet in the same room exchanging the same money to decide who you can vote or not"?
elections are a consensus strategy, they do not solve social and political issues.
> 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
yes, in 2019 the Parliament were allowed to pick from a list of exactly one person (selected by another part of the EU)
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 this position. So this is different, in my opinion, of a model like US.
In the U.K. we allow our elected representatives to “nominate and scrutinise” appointed positions in the House of Lords.
The result is a bunch of dodgy appointments in exchange for political favours. The whole process reeks of corruption, but it’s tolerable because the Lords don’t have the power to originate or block law (although they can frustrate the process).
The appointed EU Commission is much worse. The appointment process for commissioners always seems to select failed/tainted/alcoholic nobodies. The current EU Commission Chief is a failed German politician whose stewardship of the defence ministry was condemned from all sides.
And the EU Commissioners have a LOT more power than the UK’s Lords. For example, the EU Commission is responsible for coming up with all new EU Directives, setting budgets and representing the EU internationally.
The European Parliament is a charade of representative democracy, in that it waves through pretty much all legislation that the Commission comes up with, and if it votes “no” it tends to get asked to vote again until it says “yes” (see Copyright Directive, 2019)
Nothing new for the EU commission. They are the least democratic of the EU bodies. The name the have (the commission, from the soviet union commissars) is very appropriate and the do live up to it. Just look how they attack every country that has the audacity to elect forces opposed to their paymasters (that mostly include German interest groups, and Russia by proxy). Trying to redefine words like "rule of law" to hit for example Poland(ruled by a party opposed to EPP, the ruling party in the EU) while 100% ignoring horrible corruption in Bulgaria that is aligned with them. No reaction whatsoever to huge corruption in the Court of Justice of the EU (the Court of Justice is the opposite of the rule of law at the moment, but it's a long story). All while trying to force more power to itself against treaties, get rid of veto rights, and push through things like this law. Sad really, because the EU itself was a great idea, but everything can be corrupted.
I would be interested in learning the thoughts of those who have thought deeply about the role of anonymity in democracy.
I am intrigued how often people with the attitude that if you aren't don't anything wrong you shouldn't mind being observed apply that philosophy in only one direction. I see people who are upset that Snowden would leak and provide visibility into government actions, but don't blink that the revealed actions were actually the government spying on its own citizens. So governments are entitled to privacy, but their citizens are not?
My interest is not one sided. I have an intuition that personal privacy is important in maintaining democracy. But I also have an intuition that institutional privacy for a government is harmful to democracy. I think most would argue that a reasonable amount of governmental privacy is important to national security. I tend to favor the bare minimum. Most people I know disagree with me on that. I enjoy exploring both sides and trying to move beyond intuition for my position.
Any links or references to reasoned arguments on all sides are appreciated.
> I am intrigued how often people with the attitude that if you aren't don't anything wrong you shouldn't mind being observed apply that philosophy in only one direction. I see people who are upset that Snowden would leak and provide visibility into government actions, but don't blink that the revealed actions were actually the government spying on its own citizens. So governments are entitled to privacy, but their citizens are not?
I am strongly in the pro individual privacy camp FWIW, but I'm bored so I'll take a stab at steel-manning the premise that governments are entitled to privacy while individual people are not:
One of the obligations of governments is military defense. Governments are required to protect their people and the reality of war necessitates the keeping of some secrets. Failure to recognize this reality would constitute an abdication of their duty as a government. On the other hand, private persons are not permitted to wage war (this is why governments are obliged to defend their people, because they forbid people from doing it themselves.) Since people are not allowed to wage war on their own, the "realities of war" justification for governments keeping secrets doesn't justify people keeping personal secrets.
Rebuttal to the above: throughout history and particularly in the 20th century, tens of millions of people were killed by their own government. While governments may need to keep some secrets to effectively defend their population against external threats, people also need the right to keep secrets from their government to defend themselves against that domestic threat, which is every bit as real and concerning as the external threats.
Counter point: You characterize military actions as "defense", but personal actions as "war". If individuals are not permitted to defend themselves, neither should governments be allowed to wage war.
In fact, individuals are allowed to defend themselves. Even something as simple as a door lock is a means of defense. Are they not allowed to keep their lock combination secret? I think this is the type of secrecy most people are willing to afford the government. They don't want everyone to know the launch codes for the nuclear weapons.
But let's take some different examples. I think that the government should have to disclose how much they pay to develop a new park. I don't think I should have to disclose how much I paid for my new patio. But if I don't disclose that information, how can we be sure the lumber supply store is paying its fair share of taxes?
I think the government should have to disclose that they produced and distributed specific propaganda. I don't think I should have to disclose the same. Is that fair?
> I have an intuition that personal privacy is important in maintaining democracy.
I don't think this is true. People need social pressure of some kind to cooperate. It could be positive pressures like getting positive feedback from peers, or negative feedback in the form of shame from peers.
Authenticity is important here, to ensure that one's peers can provide accurate feedback (both positive and negative). Anonymity breaks this model, allowing people to pretend to have one viewpoint
in order to reap the positive rewards, while simultaneously allowing them to dodge the negative feedback for antisocial behaviors.
You needn't look further than the behavior of pseudonymous commenters on the Internet to see this play out. So many "normal" people are capable of being complete assholes online because they're able to hide those actions from those who can impose social consequences.
I mean, if I found out a close friend was the kind of person who demonstrates the kind of casual cruelty that online trolls exude, I might stop being their friend.
That's not too say that the benefits of privacy are all bad. Vulnerable people certainly benefit greatly from privacy, especially in adversarial environments... But perhaps the answer in less adversarial environments (i.e. direct/indirect democracies) more often isn't "more privacy", but "less judgement"?
The other framing for this question involves trust. Anonymity undermines trust, but trust is _required_ for coordinated action. From this perspective isn't pretty obvious that democracies and privacy pursue opposing goals.
Put differently, when it comes to voting, I don't think it's a good idea to incentivize lying--or worse still, actively promote it as a positive. If making votes public causes negative externalities, perhaps there are solutions other than "let people lie about how they vote"?
Not all anonymous behavior is antisocial. Take, for example, people who sheltered Jews during WWII. I suppose by some definition this is antisocial if you define "antisocial" as bucking local society. But by that definition democracy always leads to antisocial outcomes.
This quote from George Bernard Shaw highlights the value of some "antisocial" behavior and seems like a rather democratic ideal:
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
Some people can be publicly unreasonable. We have unpleasant names and consequences for such people, as you demonstrate. Other people can be privately unreasonable.
If all progress depends on the unreasonable man, isn't there value in facilitating cowards to be unreasonable? Obviously a great deal of damage is also done by unreasonable people. But I suspect that the balance of a few heros outweighs the many villains and it is better to err on the side of individual privacy.
I just wonder why I promote individual privacy while discouraging government privacy. What arguments can be made for or against that seeming contradiction?
That is so awful, Britain is trying on this sort of thing too saying it is to protect children. However they don't try and support citizen organiztions that do a good job there, and have been involved in actions showing it is much lower priority than control. Has anyone ever done a study even of how much benefit it would have in countering paedophiles even ignoring any loss from the general control freakery and general loss of freedom? I think it would be quite ineffective compared to the citizen organizations countering paedophilia. It's just trying to emulate China in conttrolling the population.
The proposal in question does regulate freedom of expression, as the gp said, because it proposes monitoring all communications of citizens. So their argument is not nonsense at all.
> The most important one should be: Every citizen is free to express his opinion.
And if their opinion is that, all Jews are subhuman and have to be exterminated? (real life example)
Most EU countries have "hate speech" laws explicitly banning hate speech such as Nazis and Anti-Semites. Nobody sheds any tears over their opinions being restricted, and nobody should. Debating with pidgeons doesn't work.
The same people making these laws get to determine what hate speech is defined as. You can be charged with a hate crime in Louisiana for resisting arrest at a peaceful protest, for instance. In Ireland you can run afoul of blasphemy laws, which is in the same spirit as hate speech laws (in my religion it's a blasphemy to discuss any other religion, and since Ireland won't enforce my ideas of blasphemy on anyone else, their enforcement is selective for their favorite religions).
Once you make it a crime to express certain opinions, all opinions are up for negotiation. It's not hard to imagine an ultra conservative getting elected and what that would do to discussion around LGBT, for instance.
In the UK, the Home Secretary is pressuring the Police to interpret the phrase "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" (a slogan often used in pro-Palestinian demonstrations) as an "expression of a violent desire to see Israel erased from the world", possibly making it a "racially aggravated" public order offence.
I'll add that a guy got sentenced to prison in Switzerland last week for calling someone a fat lesbian in a video that he posted two years ago. What is considered hate speech is very broad these days – Nazism would actually be on the more extreme side of what is considered an arrestable hate crime.
> Nobody sheds any tears over their opinions being restricted, and nobody should. Debating with pidgeons doesn't work.
Wrong, wrong and in my experience the people most similar to pigeons (e.g. shitting on the table rather than debating) are the young teens on reddit with vaguely leftist ideas with no foundation (proper communists are generally good debaters), the actual heriditarians and ethnic nationalists might be wrong, but they do try and actually debate rather than insult.
Readit News
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 settles the same politicians and lobbysts bring the thing again this time with another name or sneakily group it into some other law. Perhaps something bad happened and that momentarily gained public support, of course with lots of emotions involved and very little context given to the common folk.
The politicians and lobbyists are literally being paid for this. You are not. They can pretty much push the same bullshit forever until it stays while you are devoting your life to prevent it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_directive_on_the_pate...
https://www.theregister.com/2004/12/20/patents_vote/
I had to look it up because it sounded bizarre, but it's true.
They sent it through the fisheries Commission because the board that had the responsibility for it wasn't due to meet for another 6 months.
I guess some people care deeply about the details of which commission sends the proposed legislation to the parliament to be debated & amended / rejected, but in reality I think it doesn't really matter. In either case the correct thing for the commission to do was send the legislation to the parliament.
Dead Comment
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, then the outcome of a couple hundred randomly selected people voting on something should usually match the outcome of the whole population voting on something. And due to it only being for a short period of time, you avoid anyone accumulating too much power.
There was so much uncertainty around it and who wanted what that a lot of people voted against their best interests. I'm still meeting people who thought they were voting against Uber and Lyft with that proposition.
The ads were constant and incredibly misleading. And that was one issue. Every time these propositions come up, I can usually find 3 or 4 that are not what they seem (the Diveta props are similar but very different tactics afaict).
If all state business was done this way it would be overwhelming to filter through it all.
This happens a lot in the US in the primary elections. Everyone complains about the poor quality of Republican candidates and how they wish there were better options but the primary voter has already limited the field.
Second trouble is the dictatorship of the majority - you'll never get minority rights or issues of the disenfranchised addressed.
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.
We're really lucky that slavery was mostly abolished before we regressed to this stage.
Full disclosure, I’m originally from a EU country but I am now a resident in Switzerland.
Everyday I feel blessed to be living in a country where my fellow humans are in charge and not some ignorant fools who’s primary skill is to elbow themselves to power.
Although people were voting, there was a lot of political parties "advocating" fairly hard for different views, and the opinion of Australians flipped as a result of that. Seems like spreading FUD is effective.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2023...
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.
It won't fix it, but it'll help.
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.
I did the activism. I did the walk so I'm going to talk the talk here.
The problem is only an utterly microscopic number of people will actually do anything. A larger proportion will, to some degree inform themselves of the issue but still do nothing. An even larger number will simply complain on a forum and call for other people to get stuff done but do nothing (looking at you@irusensei).
It takes a remarkably small number of people to make a difference, but IRL the number who will do something is even smaller so nothing happens. Those that do, like me, end up exhausted and despairing, feeling we've wasted a fair chunk of our lives, and had there been just a few other people willing to involve themselves things might be different, but that didn't happen.
If you want change it's there for the taking. But you won't.
There should ideally be a rule that if an idea doesn't pass it can't be brought up again for 4 years. If defeated again, not in 8 years. And so on, each defeat doubles the number of years it's not allowed to be discussed again. Still not perfect but at least slow them down.
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.
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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 answer is to fire every single person associated with this, such that they can never work for the EU in any guise, ever again. I'm not optimistic about that happening.
Of course, they'll always have an interest in enriching themselves and their friends
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.
https://www.eda.admin.ch/aboutswitzerland/en/home/politik-ge...
"Switzerland is governed under a federal system at three levels: the Confederation, the cantons and the communes. Thanks to direct democracy, citizens can have their say directly on decisions at all political levels. This wide range of opportunities for democratic participation plays a vital role in a country as geographically, culturally and linguistically varied as Switzerland."
I'd kill to see The Machinery of Freedom by D. Friedman in real life
This is as good as it gets when money has any influence on policy.
https://www.eda.admin.ch/aboutswitzerland/en/home/politik-ge...
I agree with this but I think the problem is bigger than "capitalism" and "democracy" (quotes because it seems none of us can agree on these -- to be fair -- vague definitions). Capital is more than money, and capital is what is abused. Capital can be your house, where you live, the food you eat, the clothes you wear, and so on.
Regardless of ruling systems there are no (other than short lived) cases where this imbalance does not exist and creep larger. The reason I hate these "yep that's capitalism for yah" comments is not that there aren't things to criticize about capitalism (if you can't criticize a system you're in trouble) but because it hinders the ability to have this conversation. I'm sure the conditions will relax as we approach post scarcity but there is no possible means to have true equality on all levels. Capitalism, socialism, whatever, all need to have a real discussion about how to place people into power while minimizing the ability to influence those people while maximizing the ability to do good for people. Which some of these seem to be in direct opposition from one another.
A part I see clearly missing is the temporal factor in all of this. It does not matter if you elect someone who is a saint if the environment will corrupt them. Nor is there a way to have an environment that is not rapidly changing. So how do you create a system that can adapt (be iterative) but not be influenced by those with more power/capital? If we can't have this discussion it doesn't matter much which system we choose because the truth is that you can't maximize both because they're not orthogonal.
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Independently of the broader privacy and surveillance topic, this is highly concerning: if institutions, like the EC, start to run agendas through and by carefully created echo chambers and keep certain segments of the demographic out of the loop, all is lost, as there is no common and public realm of political discourse anymore.
If only for this reason, we must stop targeted advertising and messaging, before it is too late. Because, for a minimal social and political alignment, everybody must be allowed to be informed of what is on the market, that of goods and that of ideas. Modern democracy is built on mass media and communications and not on in-group messaging and arbitrage deals. (At least, in the more idealistic and not-entirely-cynical version of the narrative.)
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It's especially annoying since many people who vote in the EU are a bit more... extreme? Like when you're marketing to "Beligum" or "NL" whatever... the people who've been there multiple generations are the right wing parties.
The folks obeying the spirit of the laws are like the students in America, oft not registered locally.
It's a feedback loop of the same sort who Brexited being sent other things in their feeds.
I agree with the author:
>If there is insufficient support for a proposed legislation, the only proper democratic response is to withdraw it
I'm tired of this fraternity brother model of public policy -- ask until you hear the "yes" you wanted from those who didn't block you from being heard at all.
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 and against the lobbyists' interests. This in turn led to funding going to the pro-lobby Congress members and the vicious cycle accelerates.
This video lecture goes into much more detail about the process and the impact that this had: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qz27n1tNNMg
As a post script, I forget if it's in the video or somewhere else but experiments in real political bodies (I believe it was the Italian parliament) with both a public and secret vote for the same legal bill led to two completely different outcomes.
Thanks for sharing!
At the opposite, the European Commission is probably the worse that we can have. It is totally corrupted (see the vice president with bags of cash given by the Qatar and co) or at least morally corrupted by lobbies. And no one elected this persons with so much power by the way.
Good things to wonder is why America got shared access to all financial transactions of European citizens but the opposite is not true.
The corrupt politician in question, Eva Kaili, was not a vice-president of the EC, but of the European Parliament. She was elected.
That sort of undermines your argument.
European Parliament literally does not have right of initiative.
A lot of things are unequal between US and Europe. Eg., US bearing most of the cost of Europe's defense.
It was the vice president of the Parliament. Btw she was the vice president in charge of AI and Blockchain because ... reasons (she didnt have any qualifications)
The problem with both EC and EP is the lack of accountability , it's a very indirect system
Yeah, she was also behind the infanous cyber resilience act!
Euroskepticism is a virus, but OTOH the Five Stars had a good idea: politics should not be a profession.
I'd love to see more folks do good work then pivot to entertainment if they want bags of Qatari cash in a way that doesn't involve destabilization
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 let them chose because they will meet in a room and exchange money for the position" well, how is it different from "they will meet in the same room exchanging the same money to decide who you can vote or not"?
elections are a consensus strategy, they do not solve social and political issues.
yes, in 2019 the Parliament were allowed to pick from a list of exactly one person (selected by another part of the EU)
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 this position. So this is different, in my opinion, of a model like US.
The result is a bunch of dodgy appointments in exchange for political favours. The whole process reeks of corruption, but it’s tolerable because the Lords don’t have the power to originate or block law (although they can frustrate the process).
The appointed EU Commission is much worse. The appointment process for commissioners always seems to select failed/tainted/alcoholic nobodies. The current EU Commission Chief is a failed German politician whose stewardship of the defence ministry was condemned from all sides.
And the EU Commissioners have a LOT more power than the UK’s Lords. For example, the EU Commission is responsible for coming up with all new EU Directives, setting budgets and representing the EU internationally.
The European Parliament is a charade of representative democracy, in that it waves through pretty much all legislation that the Commission comes up with, and if it votes “no” it tends to get asked to vote again until it says “yes” (see Copyright Directive, 2019)
I am intrigued how often people with the attitude that if you aren't don't anything wrong you shouldn't mind being observed apply that philosophy in only one direction. I see people who are upset that Snowden would leak and provide visibility into government actions, but don't blink that the revealed actions were actually the government spying on its own citizens. So governments are entitled to privacy, but their citizens are not?
My interest is not one sided. I have an intuition that personal privacy is important in maintaining democracy. But I also have an intuition that institutional privacy for a government is harmful to democracy. I think most would argue that a reasonable amount of governmental privacy is important to national security. I tend to favor the bare minimum. Most people I know disagree with me on that. I enjoy exploring both sides and trying to move beyond intuition for my position.
Any links or references to reasoned arguments on all sides are appreciated.
I am strongly in the pro individual privacy camp FWIW, but I'm bored so I'll take a stab at steel-manning the premise that governments are entitled to privacy while individual people are not:
One of the obligations of governments is military defense. Governments are required to protect their people and the reality of war necessitates the keeping of some secrets. Failure to recognize this reality would constitute an abdication of their duty as a government. On the other hand, private persons are not permitted to wage war (this is why governments are obliged to defend their people, because they forbid people from doing it themselves.) Since people are not allowed to wage war on their own, the "realities of war" justification for governments keeping secrets doesn't justify people keeping personal secrets.
Rebuttal to the above: throughout history and particularly in the 20th century, tens of millions of people were killed by their own government. While governments may need to keep some secrets to effectively defend their population against external threats, people also need the right to keep secrets from their government to defend themselves against that domestic threat, which is every bit as real and concerning as the external threats.
Counter point: You characterize military actions as "defense", but personal actions as "war". If individuals are not permitted to defend themselves, neither should governments be allowed to wage war.
In fact, individuals are allowed to defend themselves. Even something as simple as a door lock is a means of defense. Are they not allowed to keep their lock combination secret? I think this is the type of secrecy most people are willing to afford the government. They don't want everyone to know the launch codes for the nuclear weapons.
But let's take some different examples. I think that the government should have to disclose how much they pay to develop a new park. I don't think I should have to disclose how much I paid for my new patio. But if I don't disclose that information, how can we be sure the lumber supply store is paying its fair share of taxes?
I think the government should have to disclose that they produced and distributed specific propaganda. I don't think I should have to disclose the same. Is that fair?
I don't think this is true. People need social pressure of some kind to cooperate. It could be positive pressures like getting positive feedback from peers, or negative feedback in the form of shame from peers.
Authenticity is important here, to ensure that one's peers can provide accurate feedback (both positive and negative). Anonymity breaks this model, allowing people to pretend to have one viewpoint in order to reap the positive rewards, while simultaneously allowing them to dodge the negative feedback for antisocial behaviors.
You needn't look further than the behavior of pseudonymous commenters on the Internet to see this play out. So many "normal" people are capable of being complete assholes online because they're able to hide those actions from those who can impose social consequences.
I mean, if I found out a close friend was the kind of person who demonstrates the kind of casual cruelty that online trolls exude, I might stop being their friend.
That's not too say that the benefits of privacy are all bad. Vulnerable people certainly benefit greatly from privacy, especially in adversarial environments... But perhaps the answer in less adversarial environments (i.e. direct/indirect democracies) more often isn't "more privacy", but "less judgement"?
The other framing for this question involves trust. Anonymity undermines trust, but trust is _required_ for coordinated action. From this perspective isn't pretty obvious that democracies and privacy pursue opposing goals.
Put differently, when it comes to voting, I don't think it's a good idea to incentivize lying--or worse still, actively promote it as a positive. If making votes public causes negative externalities, perhaps there are solutions other than "let people lie about how they vote"?
This quote from George Bernard Shaw highlights the value of some "antisocial" behavior and seems like a rather democratic ideal:
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
Some people can be publicly unreasonable. We have unpleasant names and consequences for such people, as you demonstrate. Other people can be privately unreasonable.
If all progress depends on the unreasonable man, isn't there value in facilitating cowards to be unreasonable? Obviously a great deal of damage is also done by unreasonable people. But I suspect that the balance of a few heros outweighs the many villains and it is better to err on the side of individual privacy.
I just wonder why I promote individual privacy while discouraging government privacy. What arguments can be made for or against that seeming contradiction?
The most important one should be: Every citizen is free to express his opinion.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
Any nation can have stronger free speech protections if it chooses to and the EU bodies can’t prevent it.
Your argument is nonsense.
And if their opinion is that, all Jews are subhuman and have to be exterminated? (real life example)
Most EU countries have "hate speech" laws explicitly banning hate speech such as Nazis and Anti-Semites. Nobody sheds any tears over their opinions being restricted, and nobody should. Debating with pidgeons doesn't work.
Once you make it a crime to express certain opinions, all opinions are up for negotiation. It's not hard to imagine an ultra conservative getting elected and what that would do to discussion around LGBT, for instance.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-67110119
Noam Chomsky - Should Neo-Nazis Be Allowed Free Speech?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ui1vmS9Yz5M
Wrong, wrong and in my experience the people most similar to pigeons (e.g. shitting on the table rather than debating) are the young teens on reddit with vaguely leftist ideas with no foundation (proper communists are generally good debaters), the actual heriditarians and ethnic nationalists might be wrong, but they do try and actually debate rather than insult.
you are, but if you commit a crime in doing it you go to trial.
which is fair.
edit: libel is a crime punishable by the law, everywhere in the west. Doesn't mean you are forbidden to say what you want.
democracy without a justice system as a counter power is not democracy as we intend them in modern era.
This confuses me.
Saying someone is "free to do X" normally means that X is allowed by law. Or else what could it possibly mean?