| ▲ | bradley13 4 hours ago |
| The European Commission has far too much power, and answers far too little to the populace. In reality, they want to be dictators. If you don't know, the unfortunate way thf EU is structured, the Parliament cannot initiate legislation. They can only vote on whatever the Commission puts in front of them. If the Parliament votes "wrong", the Commission just repackages the idea in a new bill, pulls a couple of dirty tricks, and tried again. They only have to succeed once. See ChatControl for a prime example. So the EU will eventually require backdoors in encryption. It's only a question of how many tries it takes... |
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| ▲ | dingdingdang an hour ago | parent | next [-] |
| Given the almost religious attention the term limit of sitting presidents of the US has it is interesting that so very little attention is given to the fact that the EU structure has no effectual limit at all; if the current EU President were to be nominated by the European Council in a circular manner she will effectually serve for perpetuity (while the Parliament can in principle say no they are only ever given one candidate to vote for (...) and has thus far never said no to any nominee). |
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| ▲ | betteryet 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The dictators part is false, the EU is not a structure you can easily dictate. But this encryption backdoor thing is somebody's pet project and extremely alarming. The UK has a similar bend they've already put in place with IPA and TCNs. The US is way gone on decrypted stored data and metadata, but not on encryption backdoors yet, though legislators have tried. |
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| ▲ | trinsic2 42 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Can you please explain to me why you think this is the case? Can parliament make law or not? Why is the commission the only body that can make law? Its staffed with people that appear to serve special interests. I saw this during the Stop Killing Games Where the EU commission meet with the game industry privately in EU before the decision on the Stop Destroying Video games Initiative. If there is no way to challenge the EU commission's practices that are not democratic, how can you consider the EU commission a body that actually works for I members? | |
| ▲ | an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | shevy-java 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You can. The way this works is via something called money. Or more generally, financial incentives, kickbacks, you name it. Using the UK as bad example, which it is, does not excuse the EU being bad too (or rather here, the EU commission). | |
| ▲ | leonidasrup 29 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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| ▲ | p_l 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Unfortunately every attempt at reforming it is blocked with "but my sovereignty!" - as EC and Council of Ministers are very much controlled and steered by member nations' governments. Not to mention it makes for perfect scapegoat |
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| ▲ | ajb an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | This is true. However there's a potential way to fix it, and it would only take one member state, no matter how small to start the landslide. And it's basically the same thing that happened to the US Senate. The Senate, like the Council of Ministers, was intended to represent the member states. Originally, Senators were appointed by state legislatures. A few states started to have direct primaries, with the legislative appointment amounting to ratification of the popular choice. Then this was made the way for every senator by the 17th amendment. (It took until 1913!) The same thing could happen to the EU council of ministers. It's a little more obfuscated because the representative to the council of ministers is formally a delegate of the government of the EU member state. But, since the process is under the control of the member state, there's nothing stopping them being directly elected by the public of that EU country. They can simply decide that that's who they want to send. Unlike any other democratic reform of the EU, this doesn't require consensus among all member states (which in practice, means the political elites). There would have to be some kind of groundswell of support for it in several nations, as otherwise the government of bigger nations would do everything to make an individual small nation regret it; unless they would pay some political cost. But if there is a movement to democratise the EU, this is the one move that doesn't need the permission of the incumbents. | | |
| ▲ | wbl an hour ago | parent [-] | | The more democratic the EU the less sovereign legitimacy countries have. That's the tension that makes Euroskeptic parties oppose reforms. | | |
| ▲ | ajb 9 minutes ago | parent [-] | | There is a dilemma, but I don't think it's lots of legitimacy so much as authority. They are quite similar but not the same; an institution that loses authority but is still legitimate, and there is potential for it to regain authority (like the strategic concept of a "fleet in being"). But for many states, they have significantly greater power by virtue of being in the EU than they would without. Arguably, even the UK lost power by leaving. |
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| ▲ | Xelbair 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | because it is a perfect tool for all governments to 'wash' unpopular political bills that would be a political suicide in local politics. You're asking the group profiting from current arrangement to change it. | |
| ▲ | shevy-java 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | That is also true - national countries sabotage any reform. Basically the EU would have to be designed anew from the get go, but lobbyists will prevent this from ever happening. | | |
| ▲ | LaurensBER 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I have many concerns about the rise of populism in Europe but the (few/very few) good things that might come out of this is that there will finally be (enough?) pressure on the EU to reform. Despite all their talk about being pro human-rights and pro democracy in practice the voter turnout percentages for the EU elections are extremely low. As an EU citizen I almost never meet someone who's interested or who feel represented by the EU. There's, no doubt, several reasons for it but the biggest one might be that an additional abstraction layer that's cultural too far away from the average voter. | | |
| ▲ | sveme 7 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | It’s more likely that the rise of the populist right (or left, like Melenchon) will lead to the destruction of the EU. They do not want reform, they want to go back to the fifties. | |
| ▲ | Xelbair 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | EU and EC have been made as a resistant to populism by design, the end result is that we citizens can't change anything, and decisions are arbitrarily made behind closed doors. The amount of layers between your vote, and the elected official that matters is just too big to have any form of accountability, especially when you couple it with national issues. I'm frankly less concerned about populism, but more concerned about sheer disregard of opinions of citizens. |
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| ▲ | bojan 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The last concrete attempt was blocked at Dutch and French referenda, not the lobbyists. That was in 2004. Since then, basically any referendum about anything related to the EU anywhere returns a negative result, with a couple of small exceptions like a Danish defense opt-out. So the money doesn't really go to the lobbying, more to the population-wide propaganda. And the money is available, as it's in the interest of both the major state actors as the major corporations for the EU to weaken and dissolve. | | |
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| ▲ | AnssiH 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > So the EU will eventually require backdoors in encryption. It's only a question of how many tries it takes... So how many tries (i.e. EU parliamentary votes on an actual legislative text brought in by commission) has there been for encryption backdoors or mandatory screening of chat content? There has actually been only one, the November 2023 vote on CSAR regulation, and it was rejected overwhelmingly (https://edri.org/our-work/eu-parliament-committee-rejects-ma...). There is no reason to believe the same thing won't occur in future votes. |
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| ▲ | qwytw 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Until they come up with a procedure to workaround the fact that there is no majority in the EU parliament and push it through anyway (like they did a couple of weeks ago with ChatControl 1.0). | | |
| ▲ | AnssiH 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | "ChatControl 1.0" is entirely voluntary so there is much less opposition in parliament. | | |
| ▲ | fwn 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Chat Control 1.0 is not at all voluntary for those controlled by it. For example: there is no setting in Facebook Messenger where users can enable or disable Chat Control. This is like saying that private prisons are voluntary because the corporations that run them were not forced into the market. | | |
| ▲ | inigyou 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | There's no setting in Facebook where I can tell Meta to bake me a cake either. But I'm still allowed to buy cakes. |
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| ▲ | applfanboysbgon an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | There was opposition in parliament, though. It was only passed because they snuck it in while MPs had left for summer vacation, and the parliamentary rules are absolutely pants-on-head idiotic and default to passing proposed legislation if a majority of all MPs do not vote it down (rather than merely the ones present). In other words, they passed it by default without achieving any kind of majority, because there weren't enough people physically present to vote it down. The EU never delegitimised itself more than it did with that act. Actively undermining parliament to knowingly impose legislation the population absolutely does not want is validated every concern anti-EU advocates ever had. |
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| ▲ | stymaar 41 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > The European Commission has far too much power, and answers far too little to the populace. In reality, they want to be dictators. As much as I hate the political leaning of the Commission, this is complete bullshit. The commission is named by the member states' head, with the head of the commission and the individual commissioners' nomination being validated by the European parliament. Yes they aren't elected, but that's no different from a minister in most country, nobody elected the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the UK, the Secretary of Defense in the US or the Ministre de l'Intérieur in France. But we don't call them wannabe dictators because that would be silly. That's equally silly when talking about the European commission. |
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| ▲ | 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | surgical_fire an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Who picks the comissioners are the national governments. It's important to lay the blame on who is actually pushing this crap. It's little coincidence that the EU parliament, who actually represents the people, that keep shooting shit like this down. |
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| ▲ | MrBuddyCasino 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > In reality, they want to be dictators. Its much worse than that. They want to be unaccountable bureaucrats. |
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| ▲ | bartleeanderson 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Very funny if it weren't so true! | | |
| ▲ | MrBuddyCasino 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I‘m not being ironic. With a dictator you have full responsibility concentrated in a single person. Bureaucracies are the opposite: they’re intentionally setup to diffuse responsibility as much as possible and hold no one accountable. Instead of a single guy, you now have to fight something resembling a fungus. This is much harder: instead of a decapitation strike, you face an enemy that is more resilient and resistant to change, and near impossible to kill. | | |
| ▲ | plufz 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Are you saying that historically very bureaucratic countries have been worse to live in than dictatorships? Not sure I follow actually. It sounds very strange to me. Isn’t also the first move of all dictators to take over all institutions with their own people? | | |
| ▲ | ablob an hour ago | parent [-] | | They are saying that in bureaucratic countries there is not a single entity that can be held accountable, which means that "bad" decisions, are not easily undone.
Likewise it means that "good" decisions are hard to change.
It is a statement about the momentum of change, not about it's worth or intention. There is no further comparison made between these governmental forms and how they affect their subjects. Why would you create such a blatant red herring? |
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| ▲ | inigyou 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| That is the structure of the EU. Wannabe fascists propose all kinds of laws, then a democracy chooses which ones it wants. |
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| ▲ | christkv 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| This its more like an oligarch edict with democratic dressing. Its set up so the European elite can force political chance without having to deal with annoying things like democracy other than in name |
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| ▲ | delichon 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I agree, but to be fair, the US constitution is set of limitations on democracy from beginning to end, and I do support that document. | | |
| ▲ | christkv 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | The U.S. constitution would be a much better constitution for the EU than what we have now. | | |
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