Large scale surveillance while abusive and harmful has historically been limited in scale by the ability of those in control to trawl through data.
Automated "moderation" of dragnet communications collection with modern AI holds the potential for a scale of abusive privacy invasion at unprecedented scales.
Just as ML vision and surveillance have been used in China to genocide Uyghurs, LLM and anti-privacy laws will be able to trivially replace the need for human collaborators in the perpetuation of any arbitrary atrocity.
You still need people to perform the actual atrocity once the victims are chosen. That is, unless you also assume military robots, which you didn't list.
My personal ability to generate millions of real-looking messages has now exploded and I wonder how these proposed structures will function if everyone sends each other 1k suspicious messages every minute of every day ?
Maybe attach a zip-bomb to every message just for good measure?
You can't use current spam filters to fight against this, provided the system is implemented correctly.
Let's assume you send 1000 automated messages periodically, and they contain a mixed bag of normal looking (so that your genuine comms could hide in plain sight) and malicious messages (to make their detection systems sweat).
All the messages are sent from the same origin (e.g.: a messaging app capable of this), with a specific interval (the genuine msg is timed accordingly), etc..
Let's see a small sample of normal looking messages, with an added genuine manually written message:
- Let's meet up at the Riverside Park soccer field at 5 PM sharp.
- Hey, can you grab a gallon of milk from the corner store on your way back?
- Good morning! Wishing you a fantastic day ahead, especially during your 11 AM meeting!
- Just a reminder: our dinner reservation at Luigi's Italian Bistro is at 7 PM tonight.
- Could you pick up the kids from Maplewood Elementary at 3:30 PM today? Work is keeping me busy.
- Caught in traffic near Main Street, but I'll be at the coffee shop in about 10 minutes!
Which one is the genuine one?
Just like you cannot discern which msg is genuine (are any of them?), you can generate plausible maliciously looking messages as well.
Again, that's not how spam filters actually work in the real world. They hardly care about message contents. They care about how many spam reports users file and those are weighed against non-reported messages for any stable identity like phone number, sending domain name, etc.
Spam meanwhile is defined as messages users don't want. If users can't tell the difference between spam and non-spam then, by definition, the messages are not spam.
If you send lots of "legit" messages to people who don't want them you'll be reported as a spammer and get banned. Doesn't matter what the messages say.
Oh sorry, I missed a part, and you are misunderstanding me.
I understand you know how real world spam filters work, but this is a different use case.
I'm not trying to generate spam, I'm talking about an IM app, where you have your contacts, and you can talk with each other and only see the legit messages.
I can elaborate, but please continue in a non-adversarial way if possible.
But the IM client will need a way to differentiate the noise messages from the ones intended for the human recipient. Whatever denotes a message as being intended for humans can also be used by the surveillance apparatus to ignore the noise messages.
The first people getting onboard the idea have to be brave and assume that others will follow suit to reach useful noise levels, otherwise those few will end up in a world of trouble.
The problem isn't really that it works or doesn't work. The problem is that once we accept digital "evidence" then we're on course to push-button corruption.
Remember "Hacking Team" that got busted a few years back? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Team One of the services they sold was the ability to plant incriminating data on a victim's computer.
Two people with the same LLM weights could generate some powerful stenography. A lot could be hidden in the supposedly random choices the LLM uses to choose it's words. It would all appear to be a normal conversation to any outsiders.
While I appreciate their efforts 100% it's sad people need infographics and ads to know why this is a terrible idea.
Although I've seen enough HN comments in recent years willing to gamble on giving their kind an inch as if they won't take the whole field given the chance. History's only reliable lesson here is humans having a short memory of trusting these systems to do what they initially promised they would do, for longer than the well-intentioned's term in office.
I think people are generally happy when such systems get repurposed, because the new purpose is likely to be something they're happy with when it comes. For example, in New Zealand, a car number plate tracking system that was only supposed to be used for specific purposes like finding stolen cars, was improperly used during covid lockdowns to catch some people who had been given permission to travel to another region and were doing so legally but the government discovered the permission was a mistake and wanted to stop them. Everyone loved it because bogey-man covid was more important than whatever promises some politician seduced people with years ago.
I don't see the EU repealing much. How can there be an expectation of a fruitful campaign to accomplish that? Would it require a sea change in the outlook of the ruling blocs of MPs? Asking sincerely.
They do repeal stuff (though it's usually "changed" not repealed per se), but if this gets approved the next step would be the CJEU or possibly the ECHR
The MEPs don't have the right to change EU law. So it doesn't matter even if they were all voted out and replaced. The commission does what it wants, it's not really a democratic system.
Additionally the Parliament can request the Commission to submit a legislative proposal, and the Parliament can dismiss the Commission at will with a vote of no-confidence. So de-facto it does have some legislative initiative ability, and it is not much different from other legislative systems where the vast majority of the laws are proposed by the Government.
With time the EU Parliament has seen its powers increasing, and there is reason to expect it will continue to do so.
It's not a democratic system and would be easily recognized as such if it were implemented anywhere other than Europe.
Parliament approving what the Commission does is of no use for repealing laws.
The President is not elected by the Parliament. They experimented with that in the Juncker era, now it's back to being controlled (in theory) by the Council. The Parliament was given a "vote" that consisted of a list of options with one name on it. They could literally vote for von der Leyen or not vote at all. Even then she only barely scraped past quorum.
The Council meanwhile isn't democratic. Everything it does is secret. How did von der Leyen get the top job despite being manifestly unsuitable? Nobody knows. It's secret and never leaked.
I think a key difference is that in parliamentary republics, we usually now how the candidate (that the parliement votes on) has been chosen: it's usually by winning the elections as the head of the party with the most parliement seats. In this case, the process is completely opaque. I would say that it would be pretty weird if people say, here in Canada, voted for their MPs (good!) but then said MPs could only choose between an arbitrary list of candidates to be Prime Minister, chosen in a private meeting with 0 explanations.
The fact that there's a vote at some point of the system doesn't make it democratic. Most authoritarian regimes require some people to vote, but they're not democratic.
Moreover, even at the universal suffrage, “democracy” doesn't mean electing a dictator with no popular oversight every x years.
In the case of the European commission:
- No EU citizen gave them the explicit mandate to enforce chat control
- If the initiative is repelled, and they continue to force freedom-reducing initiatives, they'll face 0 consequences.
- At most, the parliament can do is strike down a law. There is of course a very unbalanced distribution of power – the elected people have no initiative.
- The EC is corrupt: many commissioners cash fat checks from the private sector after their term, with 0 consequences.[0],[1]
- Lobbyism is everywhere. Corporations with unlimited money bribe officials, harass them, and push their agenda. Anyone close to the EU will tell you that it's much worse than you think.
“Democracy” is not the power of the corporations, and citizens, maybe, if we have time for it and if it doesn't eat into our profits.
The dictator has to beat down the rebellions every time, but the rebels only has to win once. Is that what you meant?
As long as there are people there will be struggles like this. Being on the winners side makes things easier, so losing once makes it harder to go back, but it isn't impossible since we have gotten here from much worse situations.
GP means that the dictator only needs to win without violence once, but the rebels -while it's true that they only need to win once- may have to resort to violence because the dictator certainly will resort to violence to crush its opposition.
In the case of EU the member states would just leave if the union starts becoming too corrupt. Until they create a no-leave rule there isn't much to worry about. When they create a no-leave rule then we should start worry, since then EU is heading towards becoming USA.
Of course it is not easy, but if it feasible for questionable reasons as in the UK case, certainly it will be more feasible in case of existential threats.
That's not how it works, at all. History should make this clear!
By the time a regime reaches "existential threat" level it's too late. You're already far gone, any and all political opposition has been driven underground and the regime has loyalists in place in all institutions and positions of power. There is no way to organize any resistance because attempts to do so are crushed immediately, the press is controlled and you're in the minority anyway because the majority are propagandized and kept in fear of instability or supposed external threats to their way of life.
The EU is frankly far too close to that dystopian end already. It constantly justifies its own power via reference to external enemies of various kinds e.g. capitalist America, the European press barely challenges it and the institutions are controlled by EU loyalists who are willing to rip up the rules rather than let the EU lose control. Even in the UK that was always more distant than other nations, they went through multiple severe constitutional crises triggered by Remainers fighting to overturn the referendum. It wasn't at all clear that the UK could actually leave despite the referendum result not being in doubt.
IMO the very fact that you think the UK left for "questionable reasons" is already part of the propaganda doing its job. The people who get out early are the only ones who actually can get out. By the time the case is unambiguous (to you), you're the one being labelled as questionable.
They could reintroduce their own currency after leaving. Montenegro is using the Euro despite not being part of the EU or Eurozone. They can switch to other currency if they want to.
They never formally joined the Eurozone to begin with, they just allow the Euro to circulate and accept it for payment. It's not even legal tender there, in theory. The integration issues are more to do with how the banking systems of formally Eurozone integrated countries are wired up to the ECB and how countries come to rely on it for "liquidity" (money printing to pay for expensive large government).
Also note that the EU don't like Montenegro using the Euro and tolerate it only because it's tiny/doesn't matter.
A leaving country could keep using the Euro while working on the transition back to their own currency. When the USSR collapsed - its former members continued to use Soviet rubles for some time until they transitioned to their own currencies.
So yeah - if a country really wanted to leave - a shared currency would not stop it.
It depends on how much cooperation the EU would extend (assume zero). For example paying other companies in euros requires transactions with the central bank. If the EU don't want you to leave they can just say, well, the moment you declare you're out we cut you off from the banking system and you can't settle your government debts anymore because you can't make euro transactions. For example.
Yeah, but I don't think that they would do it. We already had Brexit and the UK was allowed to leave. Had they not colonised Northern Ireland - the leaving process would have been even easier.
For example the UK was threatened at various points with having its electricity supply be cut off, having its planes be banned from overflying Europe, having Spain seize UK territory like Gibraltar, and the EU did impose major financial sanctions against its key industries. The EU also likes to rope in US Democrat Presidents to threaten or suspend cooperation with the UK in various ways, if it doesn't do what the EU wants.
"EU leaders approve updated military plan. The strategy envisions the creation of an EU rapid deployment force of up to 5,000 soldiers."
However the EU doesn't need a physical army to stop a country leaving. It just needs sufficiently good control of local politics and law enforcement via loyalists in the countries establishment, which it has already. The EU has already proven it can replace governments in Italy and Greece against the will of the electorate, simply via "soft power" mechanisms like access to ECB liquidity, ECJ judgements and control over local institutions.
In other words an inability to leave the EU doesn't look like an army crushing a well organized political opposition. It looks like that opposition being blacklisted from the press, being spied on by the EU secret police, found guilty of vague laws like "misinformation" with judgements upheld by the European courts, votes being tampered with or outright ignored and more.
This is no theoretical problem. Anti-EU referendums in European countries are frequently ignored, even when in theory they are constitutionally binding. In the UK the Electoral Commission, the supposedly neutral body that runs the election and referendum process itself, was run by EU loyalists who professed in public that they wanted Leave to lose and spent significant amounts of time prosecuting Leave campaigners (fortunately their cases were ruled harassment and tossed out by the courts).
The EU Commission also had a long track record of classifying true reports about their activities in the British press as "myths". These days they'd call it misinformation and try to prosecute the journalists in question.
Ultimately it doesn't matter if a majority of the population want to leave, or reject a new EU proposal, if the people who rule them don't care about democracy and control the levers of power. That's how all dictatorships work.
>> Yeah, that's why the UK didn't leave in the end right? lol.
UK was the first where it wasn't ignored. After the vote I remember being told several times by Europeans they didn't really believe it'd ever be implemented, exactly due to the track record of European countries in ignoring referendums that didn't go the EU's way.
Even then it was a very close run thing. The Remainers in Parliament were willing to create a constitutional crisis to try and get the referendum overturned a.k.a. the "People's Vote", and were holding the government hostage to get that. It was only a a lucky break (the Lib Dem leader going full delusional) that allowed Johnson to break the deadlock, go the country and allow the electorate to purge the Remainer MPs who had lied to their voters about their true position. But make no mistake, that was the worst constitutional crisis the UK experienced in living memory.
>> Ah yes the trustworthy British press saying German kids can't write to Santa because of GDPR
That story came from the German press and was correct:
You see how easily you're manipulated by the EU? They've convinced you and others that if the press criticizes the EU the press must be lying. But it's almost never the case.
The EU has taken down their myths site now. It was trash. Not only totally focused on the British press, but I remember quite clearly flicking through them back when the site was live and noticing that all of them were admitted to be true, with the "debunking" (such as it was) being always along the lines of, "this is true but it's justified" or "we prefer an alternative interpretation", or "we don't phrase it like that".
> That story came from the German press and was correct:
So one specific case where the lists are sent to the city government and shown in public now means "children can't write to Santa?" Way to blown out of proportion. (And they could, if their parents consented to it)
Thanks for showing how easy it is to be manipulated by anti-EU propaganda.
Yes, the Welt article is not lying, the propagandists are, as usual
lol. so it was the best example of the lying British press, now the press wasn't lying and it doesn't matter anyway. The only thing that changed being the nationality of the newspaper.
No offense, but it's extremely myopic to think that any EU state would protest over privacy rights when so many more economically and geopolitically important considerations exist. And yet this is still how fascism and totalitarianism advances. No one will be left out now, because all EU states are too weak alone without Germany.
It's funny that the results of WWII were for America to enable a soft version of the fourth Reich and the Japanese east asian coprosperity sphere. BUT we built it under our auspices, with the rule being that free speech was somewhat necessary for a free market. (skip the part about torturing Muslims and communists). Here we are. Will Europe now become Hungary or Turkey??!
That's not really true in this case, though. The European Commission is the only institution with the power to propose new EU laws, including repeals or modifications of existing ones. They don't need to be watching their back and making sure that no repeal sneaks through because one couldn't even get started unless they did it. Also, they're not really a democratic institution - their members are decided entirely by behind-closed-doors political horse trading by well-connected European political insiders - so replacing them with more trustworthy representatives isn't an option because they don't represent the public anyway even in theory.
The commission is tasked by the council to translate policy into proposals. If the council directs the commission to repeal a law, they will draft a proposal to do so. The council also appoints the head of the commission, who has final say in the members. The council in turn is composed of the heads of state of the EU members, so it is mostly directly elected.
Maybe people just need to take more care which leaders they elect, if they don't like the policies that result from it.
Because European people keep voting for their local parties that nominate these commissioners. Your complaint is ultimately with European voters for voting "wrong".
Because any government's primary objective is to secure the power of the government, and most governments including western "democratic" ones view their people as the biggest threat to that objective. Which they are right about, mind you.
Unless you can actually address what I wrote, explain why it is a "really dumb thing to say", I'll chalk that up to you being bewildered and terrified by the truth in what I say. That's okay, many people are completely subservient to authority, dependent on the government, want to be ruled and protected. I pass no moral judgement in my comment, merely explain why the EU is desperate to surveil their own citizens.
Hazarding a guess: the 'really dumb thing' is portraying democratic government as a distinct, foreign, hostile, and alien entity that any sane and morally upstanding person would minimize their interaction with, barely giving theirs 'unto Caesar' and getting away as quickly as possible. It teaches and reinforces apathy and learned helplessness when it comes to effecting change on matters of public policy. Ultimately, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
> Hazarding a guess: the 'really dumb thing' is portraying democratic government as a distinct, foreign, hostile, and alien entity that any sane and morally upstanding person would minimize their interaction with, barely giving theirs 'unto Caesar' and getting away as quickly as possible.
That's not how I portrayed it. What I portrayed is the reality of how people and organizations operate within society. It's quite telling that some people are too fragile to hear even a tiny bit of criticism or slightly different perspective about their God, the government.
> It teaches and reinforces apathy and learned helplessness when it comes to effecting change on matters of public policy. Ultimately, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
No it doesn't, subservience and dependence on the government and viewing them as "the experts", the moral authority, to be implicitly trusted, and who aim primarily to serve others above themselves, is what reinforces apathy and helplessness and dependency.
Look at all the wars America and "the west" at large has got into, because all "the experts" said we had to go to war, and you were a traitor, an expert-denier, "against us", etc., if you disagreed. The same exact strategy and rhetoric is used everywhere once you see it. Enemies are created, division is sown, critics are denounced... A little bit less blind faith and trust in government and their alleged "experts", and a bit more rational thinking and questioning would have gone a long way on many occasions. That is the dangerous apathy and faith in government that has quite literally caused the loss of millions of lives and trillions of dollars since WWII.
It's funny, I get a lot of this kind of pushback from people, with my simple observations of reality. Most of it seems to come from the same people who will simultaneously go on endlessly about how corrupt the government is, how much it spends on war, how racist and bigoted it is, how subservient to corporations and lobbyists, how it doesn't provide good healthcare, its police forces are brutal and unjust, justice system provides favorable outcomes for the wealthy, it doesn't do enough to solve climate change, doesn't make billionaires and corporations pay enough tax, etc.
... And yet when I point out the obvious, gee maybe that's because the government care more about themselves than they care about you, these same people suddenly lose their minds.
And I'll bet dollars to donuts I know where you and OP and anybody who criticizes me for making that comment generally on most of those above issues.
The thing about the sad truth versus a happy lie is that the sad truth doesn't prevent you from taking any action, participating in the system, trying to improve it or make it work for you. It's actually the happy lie that does that. Sure there are those who will become paralyzed with terror at the idea that the authority they are subservient to and essentially worship is not completely good and moral, but those people weren't going to change anything anyway.
Given the leverage inherent in government, self-dealing is always going to be a problem. Yes, given the cornucopia of moral hazards, it will always be attractive to charismatic sociopaths. And yes, even people of relatively sound moral intent easily fall prey to the opportunities for personal profit.
That does not require it to be 'the' government and for it to cease being 'our' government. Further, a sense of ownership and a desire to work constructively with the parts that improve our lives does not require me to abdicate moral judgement to its authority. Finally, believing that public office can and should be an honourable pursuit does not imply or require that I believe that my current representation comes anywhere close of meeting that standard.
You are correct to assume that I believe my current government enables or even engages in injustices against certain cohorts of the population. Yes, I even believe that I benefit from significant inter-generational privilege that others were actively denied. No, that neither means that my life is a cakewalk, nor does it compel me to plead forgiveness in the gutter. It does however instill a duty to raise those less fortunate up when I have the means to do so. It also compels me to advocate for collective action to do the same.
Ultimately, I don't see embodying alienation between a democratic government and its citizens to be a reasonable source of tribalistic pride. It's fucked, and fixing it should be almost as existentially compelling as eating or surviving the elements.
It's entirely healthy, and necessary, to treat government as an extremely dangerous necessity that requires constant attention to make sure it doesn't overstep.
But it IS hostile and alien. It's an emergent superorganism that doesn't give a fuck about its component parts, just like the anthill doesn't give a fuck about its component ants or people don't give a fuck about their component choanoflagellates.
It's simple. Once there are enough sovereign citizens, they can band together and form an agreement to work together for mutual protection. They will probably need to lay out at a minimum what is unacceptable for their group and steer towards common ground. I'm not sure what they should call this group. Since they are steering and Latin is popular for naming things how about we call it something like gubernare? I guess that sounds a bit old fashioned. Maybe French would help? Gouvernement? No sounds too fancy. Government? PERFECT! Let's call it that.
Calling things you disagree with "really dumb" is not an effective way to change minds.
Unless you are part of the 0.01% richest (or something like that), governments are not your voice or strength, and you have essentially no ability to influence their actions. Governments are composed of politicians and other people who will act in what they consider to be their own best interest. Those interests will generally be very different from the interests of most other people.
Getting money out of politics is impossible. Politicians are not going to vote to make themselves less well off, and lobbyists will rarely fund the campaigns of those who would make lobbying less effective.
Instead of looking to governments for solutions to problems they are neither capable of solving nor willing to solve, we should try to solve those problems by voluntary cooperation whenever possible.
In reality it's always Michel's Iron law of Oligarchy. It doesn't matter what political system you think you have. In the end what you have is always an oligarchy.
There are bad actors and corruption in every political system. But different systems and different implementations of them have different levels of these.
I would say most governments do an OK job (compared to say 1000 years ago, or compared to what any bloody revolution could do within 10 years), given how difficult the task is of governing a lot of people with vastly different interests and opinions. There is also still a lot of room for improvement. If you don't like the way your government works, try to improve it. Be part of it. Saying everything is corrupt no matter what is completely useless. I also doubt it makes you feel better overall, at least any longer than the moment you take to write such a comment.
It sounds cynical - yes, but we have to deal with reality as it is. Not as we would wish it to be. Surely that is the lesson on the last 10-15 years of poltics.
Power simply doesn't work this way. Power always collects in the hands of an organized minority - be it a king and his inner circle, or in the power brokers, government institutions, political party internal governmental structures, media hacks, NGOs, and state institutions, and the money power of western democracies.
Understand this.
There is no vote you can cast to evict any of these people.
Furthermore, they control the information dissemination aparatus. Like kafabe in pro-wrestling, they have complete control over the narrative story arcs, and they define the oppinions that are acceptable in society.
Take the US government, for example. Just think about the vast - almost boundless state power they have amassed. They spy on every single communication anyone makes on the internet. They even assassinated a sitting US president, for goodness sake.
Do you think if you just meekly ask them, they'll simply hand over the whole structure into the hands of their sworn enemies? No - it won't ever happen. Your guy will be installed, and he will find his every action is thwarted. He will be effectively powerless. And if you complain, they'll laugh in your face.
More generally:
A mass of people is powerless. You must know this from real life: you can't expect a group of 1000 people to take responsibility for achieving some objective. The group will instinctively look to a leader to guide them, and they will wait for someone to take charge. That person will then need a group of lieutenants to administrate his leadership, and hey presto: there's your oligarchy.
There's nothing wrong with this. The Iron Law of Oligarchy is a reflection of human nature. There is nothing wrong with "kings", various "lords" and officials, if they have the people's best intests in mind.
The problem is democracy is that it allows responsibility to be diffused among the people. Who will ever be held responsible for the Afghanistan withdrawall debacle? Or for the Iraq war? Or for the Snowden files? Or for the trillions of US government debt? ..to name just a few.
No one will ever be held responsible, because democracy allows the oligarchs to point the finger back at the people, and blame us for our choices, when in reality we really have no control over the matter whatsoever.
At least our ancestors could pick up pitch forks and carry their heads out on pikes if things became untennable.
We cannot hold power to account in any way at all. They don't fear us in the slightest. In 2023, this should be pretty obvious to anyone who is paying attention.
Any institution's primary objective is to secure it's own power (the second is to expand those powers). It's as true for governments as it is for corporations, religions, and even the home gardening club.
Sounds like good argument for competition. I haven't heard of a case where a garden club expanded it's power enough to prevent members from leaving and establishing their own.
Garden clubs usually don't have police and armies. They have to bend to powers that do have them, usually the judiciary system, which can summon police. A garden club with police and an army doesn't have to bend to anyone and might force members not to leave.
It will never fully work, as we have as many opinions on what good government looks like as there are people on this earth. What one considers good government, is someone else’s nightmare government.
Is this not exactly what was meant by "the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants"? We treat government like a monument to be preserved for posterity, but it is not. Government is a living thing and it follows a cycle of growth and decay that eventually requires culling, just like any other form of life.
> most governments including western "democratic" ones view their people as the biggest threat to that objective
Which is particularly farcical when you realize that in the 20th century, governments murdered tens of millions of people. Governments are concentrations of power that wield monopolies on violence. If governments can be kept under control, kept within some reasonable guardrails, then they're very useful for various reasons. I am not an anarchist, even remotely. But when governments get out of control the result is often millions dead.
Governments which view those guardrails as a threat from the people are a threat to the people. Such perceptions prove the necessity of those guardrails.
Because EU residents allowed them to continue to legislate themselves into irrelevancy. Nobody spoke against GDPR, which is an utterly toothless annoyance.
GDPR achieved nothing notable for data security and privacy, except by spamming cookie prompts and training users to accept anything.
The EU is an incompetent, lumbering, bureaucratic hellscape. It expanded FAR beyond its original remit of a customs union, and in turn created horrific legislation and usurped the power of national governments to centralize power in Brussels.
The EU used its newly seized power to crush all free speech, freedom of expression and dissent, along with explicitly campaigning for censorship. [1]
GDPR has forced many large companies to implement data retention policies enabling the (eventual) purge of data related to closed accounts. Before GDPR, account data was usually just kept around forever.
I got Google to reinstate my locked account thanks to the GDPR. Conversely, my brother in a non-european country was locked out of his Apple account and is SOL because his country doesn't have the same protections I do and Apple can simply ignore him. And the fact that companies have to tell me how they are tracking me has been eye-opening.
The most important critique of GDPR is actually that its not enforced more often/strictly and that the maximum damages are _still_ too low to make many companies actually care.
Only techbros in the mass surveillance industry get bent out of shape over GDPR. I have never once heard a single person outside this description complain about it. It's a pet peeve for peeping programmers.
I don't know where you are from but in my country I never voted for the President of Republic. I can't: the President is elected by the Parliament, which I vote for. I also never voted for the Prime Minister. I can't: it's appointed by the President. Despite currently being the leader of the largest party, her closest predecessors have not been the leaders of the largest party since 10 years ago. Actually the President can appoint anybody, there are not even rules about citizenship, place of residence or being elected. The previous three Prime Ministers were not elected by anyone. By the way, a government is still government even if it does not have a majority support in Parliament. It will have a hard life doing anything but technically that's not a problem.
In the EU we have the Parliament, which is elected by the people, the Council which is composed by Prime Ministers, Presidents, whoever rules each country and the Commission, which is proposed by the Council and elected by the Parliament. Not so different from what I see in my country.
EP elections are well publicized and every EU citizen has the right to vote on it
"Every five years EU citizens choose who represents them in the European Parliament, the directly-elected institution that defends their interests in the EU decision-making process. The next European elections will take place in 2024."
I just find it incredible that when the results are in the people at the top are some guys I've never heard or seen before. And I don't believe I'm uncommonly ill-infomed.
Moving power further away from the electorate should be a last resort for issues that can simply not be handled on the local level.
> I just find it incredible that when the results are in the people at the top are some guys I've never heard or seen before. And I don't believe I'm uncommonly ill-infomed.
that may happen when many separate countries merge their candidate pools to form a single parliament, and its up to the parties to distribute their seats - I would think that an exact representation of members from all countries within the available seats for the party would be hard to achieve, though.
> Moving power further away from the electorate should be a last resort for issues that can simply not be handled on the local level.
This is true to some extend, however you have to somehow ensure that all individual pieces work in a collaborative mode and support each other, because once you get in competitive mode, its a race to the bottom for everyone.
> because once you get in competitive mode, its a race to the bottom for everyone.
I don't understand / buy that argument. I find it quite neo-liberal in the sense that it assumes countries will deterministically mindlessly engage in a race to the bottom.
The "prisoners dilemma" is a problem of course. But people and countries can and do cooperate despite that.
For this reason, it's not clear to me that EU countries would automatically slash their environment regulations and corruption prevention efforts in a "race to the bottom" if the EU wasn't there stopping them.
sometimes, a decision _could_ be made local, but an _even better_ ooutcome could be achieven going a bit higher level.
Like, image some county that needs energy, has no natural gifts regarding that but has land to farm upon. Instead of exporting food and importing coal from somewhere to fire up a new plant, it could also exchange energy with a more gifted county that has plenty of green energy but doesn't need something from them.
To make this work, a higher level entity can force the exchange, and ensure that the whole area doesn't suffer from pollution despite that being the cheapest or even only possible way for the individual county. It COULD be solved there, but everyone is worse off by not cooperating.
Actually, the EU has a huge power potential if only the member states would finally cut back on individual national interests so that mutual agreements and shared legislation/taxes/military/... could be setup properly - which might worse some situations in the short term, but ensures greater wealth for everyone longterm. The "I I I" egoistic thinking of individual member states is the greatest weakness the EU has - unified we can achieve so much more!
Sure I'm all for standardization and cooperation. But this is not that. What parlament in Europe would pass this legislation if it was a motion in the national parlament? (Assume for a second it would be feasible even for smaller countries to pass legislation that international tech giants has to comply with.)
Every society has its petty bureaucrats and mean nannies, and in a democracy, they can't always get what they want.
So they migrate to non-democratic sections of the political sphere to assert themselves, and EC is one of those. The EU has a significant "democratic deficit" as a whole, too much indirection between people and the ruling Eurocrat class.
Because the European Commission is not a democratic institutionen! Those bureaucrats are mostly announced, not elected. And each European nation is only sending those politicians into the Commission, that are unwanted in national politics.
In other words: The European Commission is the autocratic reservoir for conservative politicians that were to extremistic for national audiences.
Politicians are sent to Brussels as a reward, not as a form of exile. Those who are most compliant, lacking in initiative, devoid of original ideas, are sent there, after a career in national politics. They're not unwanted, and they're not conservative. They are just obedient non-entities.
It is a large machinery and what you are seeing there is the long tail on one end.
There are lots of good things coming out of the European Commission and some really great things. Obviously there is going to come some crap to, and a few really really bad things, like this one. I agree that it's tiring to fight those, but there is no sunshine without rain.
Yes. Then. For the next decade on HN we are reminded, during almost every thread "This is against European Commission title X". Well, too bad for them, all my products strictly adhere to Congolese law for data privacy and Ecquadorian law for data retention. Since we are randomly deciding which counties laws we should abide by - yet don't live in.
It's the iron law of oligarchy. In democracies, politicians need to constantly justify their existence or people might question how their taxes are spent. If you're a sociopath after money and power (elected and appointed roles self-select these traits), you must reinforce a constant narrative of "solving" society's ills.
This pushing, forever persistent, accretes ever greater power to departments and their bureaucrats until the people have no say, and the highest elected offices have no say. Of course, the EU was initially designed this way, so you're fucked any way you frame it.
German here, that name triggers PTSD. Merkel removed this clowness from domestic politics by surprise-inserting her in the European Commission. Merkel simply removed a political opponent from German domestic relevance and the rest of Europe has to suffer for it.
I am sorry. There is mostly vile hate and vitriol for her in the entire country. Her entire career was a show of the Peter Principle.
Well for what it's worth it's usually the reverse. Local politicians get rid of good people by sending them to the EU, so the EU parliament on average consists of better people than local governments. Consequently it's also why so few proposals from the current commission ever pass I suppose.
This is so awful that it strikes me as likely being a door-in-the-face[1] proposal designed to make a more 'reasonable' proposal that is still vile on its own merits seem palatable.
...but yes, this is why in the US republicans are constantly floating all sorts of batshit regressive policies on social welfare programs, LGBTQ people, voting rights, immigration - it shifts the ultimate compromise closer to their desired outcome, and even if it doesn't, it still is virtue signaling to their base, something to shout about at campaign rallies.
"See what I tried to do for you? But those evil liberals shot me down! I need your support!"
Dems too. They're both as nutty as each other. You hear that? Someone in the distance is shouting "I just want public healthcare". Russia is about to find out why USA doesnt have public healthcare.
Don't you think it'd be better to ratify the most vile proposal while the ideals of freedom still have majority reign? To create a fiasco so enduring it won't soon be forgotten? And before tools of mass manipulation become any more technologically sophisticated?
If I'm reading [1] correctly, we're just picking up momentum down a decades-long slippery slope.
I expect initially only those who are unpopular and unlikely to be defended by the public will be prosecuted. Then over time more political enemies (probably starting with "trans women aren't women" activists) will be prosecuted and the slow slide begins...
Again, culturally- and regionally-specific. My anecdotal evidence is that the people I've talked to (a narrow, biased group of people) have more nuanced views than the surveys pick up. Where I live, more people support the death penalty than are transphobic (according to polling, no less!).
Most people don't know the first thing about anything. Ask them what we should do about climate change, and they'll say "household recycling". Ask them whether they're okay with the environmental impact of a nuclear power station, and they'll say they're outraged about it. The uninformed opinion of people who haven't really thought very hard, when presented with a loaded question, is not particularly indicative of the process they use to form their views: it's more indicative of your sampling method.
I don't know much about how sanctuaries and safe spaces are run, but it's my understanding that they don't generally have "we accept anyone who meets this sentence-long description" policies. Round these parts, shelters have always been able to discriminate against trans people with reason, and they haven't been doing so, and it hasn't been an issue: public sentiment is just that. People have been medically-transitioning in English-speaking cultures for well over a century, now, and it's only been a Big Deal in the last couple of decades. Politics.
…? No? It indicates that the anti-discrimination law permits you to discriminate, so long as you have a good reason for it.
I'll add: the current fuss about "protecting women's spaces" is pointless, because the right they're arguing for already exists, and the people running shelters by-and-large aren't invoking it. If they want domestic violence shelters to refuse service to trans people (who are, btw, more often victims of domestic violence than their cisgender counterparts), they should be campaigning against the charities that run the shelters, not campaigning, protesting and petitioning to change laws that are already the way they want them.
If helping the vulnerable were causing actual problems, they'd be able to cite instances of those problems over the past three decades, rather than just appealing to hypothetical situations that might even have happened, once, somewhere in the world, but probably haven't.
> I'll add: the current fuss about "protecting women's spaces" is pointless
> rather than just appealing to hypothetical situations
These aren't hypothetical situations. In some jurisdictions, prisoners are housed based on their self-declared "gender identity". So men who declare themselves as women are being incarcerated in the female prison estate. Women inmates have been raped, sexually assaulted, and even impregnated by some of these men.
This is what happens when this polite fiction becomes law and policy, abusive men take advantage of it - undermining the very reason why we have sex-separated spaces in the first place. Protecting women's spaces from men who call themselves women is very important for the safeguarding of vulnerable women.
> These aren't hypothetical situations. In some jurisdictions, ...
It would be very interesting to see the actual official statistics on this, alongside the data on the number of women prisoners raped and impregnated by male guards.
My suspicion is that the former numbers are over exagerated in importance and the later numbers are sharply underr reported .. but I'd still be interested in your best link to back up your claim and put it in context.
> women prisoners raped and impregnated by male guards
This is why in the UK, women's prisons have a policy where at least 50% of prison officers must be female, and only female officers are allowed to conduct intimate searches where needed, to mitigate against the risk of sexual abuse by males.
That there is an existing, mitigated risk of male sexual predation from prison staff, does not justify further increasing this risk to female inmates by locking them up 24/7 with men, just because these men call themselves women.
We have sex-segregated prisons for good reason, this was the result of very well documented evidence, from prison reformers of the 19th century, of the harm and abuse of woman that is enabled by mixed-sex prisons.
So ... you've no actual official link to back up your "non hypothetical" story .. no per capita figures on women in prison being raped by either guards or other inmates (other women or trans)?
Here are some search terms for you, these are examples of men in women's prisons who have sexually assaulted or raped women inmates while incarcerated: Janiah Monroe, Karen White, Ramel Blount.
None of these men should have been there in the first place, of course.
Clearly (to anyone conversant in English) I am not claiming no such thing has happened.
I am asking how frequently this happens and, in hard risk terms, how does it compare to the risks faced by inmates of being raped by other women or by prison guards.
I assume you are not claiming these events do not happen.
So again I ask - do you have any relevant links re: comparative frequency, absolute occurrence, etc.
I'm not convinced there have been more than five cases. Everyone cites the same ones.
I would expect there to be more, given base rate – but if there were, I'd expect those cases to be yelled about, which they aren't. (That leaves open the possibility that trans people are significantly less likely to assault others… Given the correlation between being trans and autistic, and the tendency for autistic people to be highly moral, that's not a hugely far-fetched theory, but it wouldn't explain such a large discrepancy.)
Even one case of women prisoners being raped by men who are incarcerated in a women's prisons is sufficient to show that this recent experiment in removing this safeguarding measure for women inmates has been a failure, and must be abandoned.
That we have several documented cases already only supports this point further.
Any instance of inmates being abused by other inmates or by guards in a prison system is a violation of duty of care.
I absolutely agree that measures should be in place to eliminate such abuse and to uphold duty of care.
You have failed to demonstrate that trans people in prisons pose any additional risk over and above what already exists - measures put in place should stop same sex abuse and guard abuse equally as well as they stop trans abuse of others (or, indeed abuse of trans by others - which you have blindly overlooked).
That abuse does occur highlights a failure of protective measures overall - and the incidence of abuse by trans prisoners appears to be the very least of the actual incidents that actually occur.
Unless, of course, you can actually link to actual comparative numbers.
Otherwise you are just engaged in blinkered and selective pearl clutching.
I'm talking about men in women's prisons. Any man can call himself a woman, and under policies that elevate "gender identity" over sex, will be believed. Effectively making women's prisons mixed-sex environments.
Sex-segregation of prisons (and other spaces where women are vulnerable) exists for good reason: the safety and dignity of women. The need for this has been well-documented since the 19th century, when reformers campaigned for improvements to prison conditions, including making them separated by sex. Elizabeth Fry in particular kept extensive diaries of the horrors that women had to endure in mixed-sex prisons.
This isn't "pearl clutching", as you put it, it is based on significant evidence of the risk men pose to women. Evidence that has since been added to with these cases I've cited, that resulted from prison authorities deciding to reintroduce mixed-sex environments.
On the flip side, you've presented no argument whatsoever as to why men should be incarcerated in women's prisons. You appear to have simply assumed that this should be the case, and are basing your rhetoric upon this assumption.
> and under policies that elevate "gender identity" over sex, will be believed.
This does not apply to the actual policies I assume you're complaining about. Please read the policies – or name them, if you have found some that work that way.
> it is based on significant evidence of the risk men pose to women.
Nobody's disputing that (much as I'd love to live in a world where I could). You haven't demonstrated the risk that trans women pose to the women around them.
> you've presented no argument whatsoever as to why men should be incarcerated in women's prisons.
I'll provide one: male-on-female prison violence is a well-established phenomenon. What do you think is going to happen when you put a handful of women in an all-male prison?
> This does not apply to the actual policies I assume you're complaining about. Please read the policies – or name them, if you have found some that work that way.
California, Washington, Ireland, for example. All places where prisoners are being incarcerated based on their claims of "gender identity" rather than sex.
> Nobody's disputing that (much as I'd love to live in a world where I could). You haven't demonstrated the risk that trans women pose to the women around them.
Sorry, but this isn't how this works. It is already well established that men present significant risk to women, particularly in spaces where women are vulnerable. If you want to claim that a subset of these men - that is, any man who calls himself a woman - poses a significantly lower risk to women, then you need to argue this based on evidence, rather than simply assuming it.
> I'll provide one: male-on-female prison violence is a well-established phenomenon. What do you think is going to happen when you put a handful of women in an all-male prison?
I entirely agree that women who call themselves men must not be placed in men's prisons, just as men who call themselves women must not be incarcerated with women. As I argued above, this is the whole point of sex-segregated prisons, safeguarding women from male sexual abuse and violence.
You've just named countries. Pick one. Read the actual policy. It might surprise you.
> then you need to argue this based on evidence, rather than simply assuming it.
The fact that people only seem to have the same five examples to argue otherwise – versus the many hundreds of easily-accessible examples that show that men are (for whatever reason¹) more prone to violence? You can't just weaponise the null hypothesis like that: how am I supposed to prove this point in the hypothetical world where it's correct?
If trans women behaved the same as men, you'd expect them to – as a population – behave the same as men. From the evidence I have access to, they don't.
> I entirely agree that [thing I didn't say]
One can't change how reality works by sheer force of rhetoric.² You know full well how I'm using words, here (just as I know how you're using them), and it should be clear what I was trying to say.
What happens when you put people with breasts and soft features and lower-than-average physical strength in a men's prison?
Reactionary policies are rarely good ones, even where it would be better to go back to the way things were. Don't you know you can't go home again? Unless you address the flaws, not just the perceived benefits, of your proposals, I won't see them as thought-through.
Doing the right thing is hard. Working out what the right thing is is hard – and usually painful.³ Do you care more about believing yourself to be right already, or about ultimately doing the right thing? The specific details of this pointless internet argument aside, your strategy here is not one that will help you to learn and improve and become better at making things better.
---
¹: Personally, I place a large portion of the blame on patriarchy. Many men I know are decent people: violent macho behaviour doesn't seem to be inherent.
²: Unless what you seek to alter is the political landscape, of course – but this website is not an effective place to do that.
³: I shy too much from that pain to be confident in making policy decisions myself. I can often, however, spot flaws in bad policy.
> You've just named countries. Pick one. Read the actual policy. It might surprise you.
Sorry but this is just vague insinuation. You haven't given any hints as to what you believe will be a surprise. Could you enlighten me please?
I mentioned those three regions because they have self-identification policies for "gender identity" that extend to prisons, and men who call themselves women are currently incarcerated in women's prisons there.
> If trans women behaved the same as men, you'd expect them to – as a population – behave the same as men. From the evidence I have access to, they don't.
Okay then, please share your evidence? Keeping in mind that any man can call himself a woman.
> One can't change how reality works by sheer force of rhetoric.
Agreed, so please refrain from implying that these men are female, as you did with your mention of "male-on-female violence". I'm sure you know they are male.
> What happens when you put people with breasts and soft features and lower-than-average physical strength in a men's prison?
You are presumably referring to men with self-induced gynecomastia. This will likely be a subset of, or at least have a significant intersection with, men who call themselves women.
The same argument I made in other comments applies to these men too - their safety is an issue for the male prison estate to deal with. Men's prisons have plenty of experience handling at-risk prisoners, for example paedophiles, ex-police officers, ex-gang members. If men with breast tissue are at elevated risk, they can be handled in the same way. There is no reason to place these men in women's prisons.
> Sorry but this is just vague insinuation. You haven't given any hints as to what you believe will be a surprise.
Well, I did say earlier:
> > and under policies that elevate "gender identity" over sex, will be believed.
> This does not apply to the actual policies I assume you're complaining about.
You misunderstand what "self-identification policies" are – or, at least, what current implementations look like. They don't "just believe" people: the processes for getting recognition can be quite convoluted.
> Okay then, please share your evidence?
I can't share the sum total of my relevant life experience, I'm afraid. You'll just have to make do with what I've already provided: the evidence from your own comments. As somebody who has researched this, and – presumably – is motivated to portray trans people in a bad light, you are not in possession of the statistical data I would expect to exist if trans women were statistically like men.
People like you pick at every single case you can to paint $insert_group_here in a bad light, but in this case, you can't even get enough data points to make a statistically-plausible argument – and neither can anybody else who argues the same as you. (I have absolutely no idea why you can't: I would expect you to be able to. Apparently, reality is even more biased than I am!)
> I'm sure you know they are male.
:eyeroll: I'm sure you can't even define "male" coherently, consistently, in a way that lines up with your ideological beliefs about what it is and isn't.
You know how I'm using words. I'm extending you the courtesy of accepting your language use: please return it.
> The same argument I made in other comments applies to these […] too
And by this argument, why have segregated prisons at all? Your original argument was about reducing harm… so why are you suddenly switching to a different argument, now that I've brought up the increased harm your proposal would cause?
You've got two different criteria now. Please weigh both situations (thing you're complaining about, and your alternative proposal) according to both criteria. Don't just pick and choose, otherwise I'll have to assume you're arguing in bad faith.
just because there are (very) bad apples in a group doesn't mean that the entire group purely and only exists to take advantage of others. By your logic cis women also should be imprisoned for their identity because cisgender women have sexually assaulted others in prison
The full expression this term is taken from is: "a few bad apples rot the whole barrel".
Women don't know in advance who the bad apples are amongst men, so in contexts where women are particularly vulnerable to predation from such men, the whole barrel must be considered as being rotten. This is why we have sex-segregated spaces.
But why draw the boundary there? Men are a problem because of the society that lets them do what they want. Society doesn't treat trans women like men – and, largely, it does treat trans men like men. Isn't it dangerous to have trans men – many of whom will have testosterone running through their systems – in vulnerable women's spaces?
Treating someone who seems like a woman, acts like a woman, is at risk from the gender-based violence inflicted upon women… as a man… is making people safer, how exactly?
How would you even determine which women to exclude? If someone's saying "hey, I'm trans, I'll leave if my existence makes you uncomfortable", they're clearly not one of the Evil™ Ones… so are you proposing to check everyone who enters these spaces? Oh, but wait, the state of medical treatment is actually pretty good, these days. Better make that a thorough check. (No. Just, no.)
And how is it a good idea to put trans men in with women victims of (usually male-perpetrated) domestic violence? Isn't the whole point of the "women's spaces" thing to avoid that? (Or do you propose to just ban all trans people from support services entirely?)
> Isn't it dangerous to have trans men – many of whom will have testosterone running through their systems – in vulnerable women's spaces?
To be fair to the OP, I don't think there exists a history of abuse of females from trans men, which strengthens their allegation that the underlying sex might be an important factor to consider in these scenarios. The sex hormones alone maybe just aren't a factor.
It's likely not safe to place trans women into male prisons either though, so I think there ought to another axis than just male/female along which we can segregate, such as violent/non-violent criminal history/tendencies. Come to think of it, that seems almost obvious in retrospect. Put violent offenders together, and non-violent ones together, and then non-violent offenders are far less likely to become harder criminals upon release.
> It's likely not safe to place trans women into male prisons either though, so I think there ought to another axis than just male/female along which we can segregate, such as violent/non-violent criminal history/tendencies.
Male-on-male violence is a problem for the male prison estate to solve within its walls. It doesn't make any sense to put women at increased risk of male violence to protect men from male violence. Women don't exist as some sort of violence shield to protect men from each other.
Men's prisons already have safeguards in place for vulnerable male prisoners, such as paedophiles, ex-police officers, ex-gang members and so on - putting them on separate wings of the prison, moving them to a different category of male prison (which is in practice similar to your suggestion of violent/non-violent separation). If men who call themselves women are at elevated risk from other men, the same safeguards can be applied to them. There is no reason whatsoever to house them in a women's prison.
> which strengthens their allegation that the underlying sex might be an important factor to consider in these scenarios.
"Underlying sex" isn't a particularly coherent concept to begin with. By what potential mechanism could "underlying sex" influence behaviour, other than hormonally?
Lacking an answer to this question doesn't mean we should rule out the possibility while investigating, but we shouldn't take too much heed of the possibility until we have a reason to believe it. «"Excess male violence in prisons" problem is a consequence of the patriarchy» is a concise explanation, introducing no additional entities or mechanisms, consistent with the observations mentioned in this thread, and… well, as far as I'm aware, it's the mainstream feminist position on this matter.
> Come to think of it, that seems almost obvious in retrospect.
I've had thoughts like that, on occasion. Unfortunately, segregationist policies are a much more politically feasible approach than anything like what you're proposing, and I don't think that will change any time soon. How to segregate is the question: whether to segregate is a pretty radical question to be asking.
I don't think your proposal is quite perfect, but it's a start.
> "Underlying sex" isn't a particularly coherent concept to begin with. By what potential mechanism could "underlying sex" influence behaviour, other than hormonally?
By that argument, trans people shouldn't exist because they have the hormonal profile of their birth sex, therefore they shouldn't exhibit observable behavioural differences.
Calling people you dislike “stupid” and “low intelligence” is indicative of bigoted attitudes.[0] While I'm in favour of reclaiming some meaning from the word “stupid”,[1] what you're doing here is not that. If you care about this sort of thing (which you seem to), you might want to reconsider how you go about it.
> > Using circular logic
It is best for your criticisms of things to be founded in truth, where possible. The first and last resort is the truth. It's a good habit to get into. There were plenty of other things you could have said, including:
> No, it's actually quite relevant.
You needn't worry about the truth justifying bigotry, in case that's the issue: while it's theoretically possible for a given piece of bigotry to have a basis in fact, reality seems to have some rather strong opinions on the matter! :-) If bigoted rhetoric had a habit of being correct, I think I would've found out by now. And if it were true, you would expect to see certain kinds of bigotry popping up in multiple places independently; rather than having traceable provenance, either as adaptions of prior bigotry, or as traced back to a historical figure with a strong and documented motivation for having people believe it.
That's not to say you need to put much effort into responding. But if you feel like putting that little effort in, it's best not to respond at all.[2]
Interesting that it has a name, to make "Door in the face" akin to the opposite "Foot in the door".
It is discussed by Charlie Munger as part of what he calls the "reciprocation tendency", after the studies from Robert Cialdini in the practice of "«ask for a lot and back off»".
The proposal does outline Options A-E, and of course decides that Option E, the most aggressive one, is the way to go. Maybe they plan to fall back on D or C, if E gets rejected.
If I lived in the EU I'd want to know who are proposing this kind of stuff and help with anything that gets them far from public and government -related jobs forever, but hey, that's me. Lots of people like to give up a bit of freedom and privacy in exchange for an increased sense of security.
It is EU commissioner Ylva Johansson. Unfortunately, there is not much you can do. She is not elected to this position, but appointed, and in this case by a former government who is no longer in power.
That sounds like she's pretty close to being a lame duck, and has little to lose, popularity wise. If that's correct, she's in an optimal place to become unhinged from a lack of accountability. I'm curious in this case if it's being a professional fall-guy or engaging in their own (u|dys)topian radicalism.
EU seems to have an abundance of unelected regulatory positions. Eurosceptics are right in that EU represents a form of non-democratic decision-making which has the power to supersede (more) democratically formulated laws from member states. Ideally, the autocratic tendencies of the EU and the member states should cancel out by disagreeing with each other, but in reality member states seem unwilling to oppose them most of the times.
Partially yeah, as well as the complete lack of legislative initiative for the parliament, the only part that's directly elected by citizens.
On the other hand though: Europeans kinda suck as a blob. See Italy electing fascists again, Germany stagnating for decades under Conservative control, basically everything east of Germany etc. Etc. The parliament is dominated by Conservative authoritarian forces as well. In that sense EU legislature is just too good at representing it's people.
I gave a speech to my computer science course when the new copyright directive was about to go into its final trilogue round in 2018. Wide agreement in discussion afterwards, but not a single student cared enough to make their wishes known to their MEPs. If even they don't do it, i can only say we're getting what we asked for.
> EU seems to have an abundance of unelected regulatory positions.
Like many other system in the World, elections are to chose people's representatives, not to chose the government nor the technical apparatus (like the EU commission).
The US president is one notable example of non elected position.
Anyway, the proposals must be approved by the parliament, which is elected directly by the EU people in number proportional to the population of the single countries and then ratified by the single EU parliaments, which are again elected by the people.
I wouldn't exactly call it "abundance of unelected regulatory positions".
Oh, it's clear? Why did nobody tell me. I take it back then. I am glad to hear a complex evolving geopolitical situation can be easily reducted to a simple judgement like that. It's a relief.
It's clear it's going badly now yes. That's obvious. What you're confusing is the situation now with the situation in the future. I wish I could say it's an easy mistake to make, but it's not. Maybe you can plausibly argue that Brexit will be a success one day in the future, but you absolutely cannot argue that it's a success right now. That would not be serious.
if the EU is anti democratic, then there's no democracy on this planet.
Show me another place where 27 countries live peacefully together and jointly govern an entire sub continent, by collaborating together and discussing publicly about their political proposals.
Of course it has its problems, of course it takes a lot of effort to bring 27 countries together on a subject, of course there will be controversial opinions among its members, depending on the POV (a lot more people in EU agree with the chat control proposal than those who disagree), but that's the price of democracy.
>if the EU is anti democratic, then there's no democracy on this planet.
Switzerland is very democratic. People get to vote on individual laws, instead of having 3 different layers of abstraction between who you vote for and what laws are passed.
The price of democracy in a region or organization is the minority of votes not getting the result they want and only that. Nothing to do with privacy.
Not having privacy is a consequence of authoritarianism, be it for a greater good (to find child abusers) or not (to find dissidents).
> The price of democracy in a region or organization is the minority of votes not getting the result they want and only that.
The price is having to make compromises every day.
It means putting together and listening to the people who say "immigration must be stopped" and "countries should have no borders" and everything in between, but no side tries to silent the others using violence.
What you're talking about is the tyranny of the majority, which is not democratic and is not categorized as democracy, in a democracy the effect of the majority taking it all is moderated by a carefully balanced separation of powers.
For example in a democracy the justice system is usually independent from the government.
> Not having privacy is a consequence of authoritarianism, be it for a greater good (to find child abusers) or not (to find dissidents).
But we have privacy in Europe, unlike most places in the World.
Blindly repeating that EU is authoritarian doesn't make it true.
The point of mentioning flexing "democratic" status is, in general in these contexts (say, the EU), about unnatural distancing of government, i.e. having dramatic decisions over everybody taken by an entity "distant" from the sub-regions. As opposed to a federalism in which substantially the special rules over the special, and the broad rules only when appropriate.
> having dramatic decisions over everybody taken by an entity "distant" from the sub-regions
Yes, Europe is big, but those "dramatic decisions" need to be ratified by your "local" government, that it's probably more distant than the EU commission.
At least in the EU commission they do their job, which is to write proposals, local governments lately have only been preoccupied by their own chairs.
And it's basically the only place where "dramatic decisions" can be discussed right now in Europe.
I would love that my National government focused on "privacy" and "E2E encryption" and sparkled a discussion about those topics in the parliament, instead of doing this:
I happen to be reading 1984 for the first time right now - that book was published in 1949, and gee did Orwell have the EU scoped out - even though he kind of missed by a couple of decades. There's so many real life parallels that I'm getting the chills.
This is when I get super hopeful that more draconian bullshit like this gets passed. The only way to get regular people to stop accepting their government's bullshit is to severely outrage them. Tiny outrages just get accepted as the new norm.
There are too many countries in the world with oppressive regimes where people seem willing to accept the status quo without much resistance to be as optimistic as you about people's desire for freedom. Even in countries where extreme suffering and censorship exist, like N.Korea or, less known, Turkmenistan (which, by the way, is the craziest country of the former USSR - the cult of personality in Turkmenistan has been taken to the extent of idiocy, censorship works like in the worst times of Stalin, and people suffer from hunger, poverty, and constant fear) protests and uprisings are rare. I personally know people who demand even more control in some of these countries, and after hearing about their extreme complacency (think mobilization in russia), I'm not as hopeful that people truly want to be free anymore. IMHO the only form of freedom that is attainable is personal "nomadic" freedom, as in Sovereign Citizen book. We need to vote with our feet and wallets, and choose to live in places where our individual freedoms are respected and protected.
I'm sorry if this all sounds a bit bleak, it's personal...
I hope the people who think this is a bad idea are equally horrified by what factions of the US government and media did to silence speech not in alignment with their preferred ideology. Lying, obfuscating and preventing information from reaching everyone.
When you are for free speech, you have to actively protect that with which you disagree. That’s the only way it works.
If you don’t, someone will eventually come for what you think should be protected…and there will be nobody left to defend it.
Suggested alternative: The "End Political Corruption Proposal"
"Given that political corruption is rife in European countries, with great detriments to the healthy function of government, all politicians in positions where they may be engaging in corrupt behavior must submit to 24-7 audio and video surveillance, which will be piped over public platforms for crowdsourcing of corruption detection. All personal communications of politicians and of government bureaucrats will become matters of public record for the same reason. Since we cannot trust a corrupt head of government to investigate their own corruption, or one of their underlings, this kind of public exposure of all politicians and bureaucrats is the only reasonable, rational solution to the problem of endemic government corruption in the EU."
> Suggested alternative: The "End Political Corruption Proposal"
I'm probably in the minority on HN, but I think this is a good thing. It should be a matter of course, in a democratic society. Free speech doesn't live solely in digital communication (universally owned by some company) any more than it does in the classified ads in a newspaper.
It would be world changing, the complete abolition of all privacy.
Little drones that followed everybody around, everywhere, broadcasting and storing every thing everybody does, or says, everywhere they go, and what they do.
No. I do not recommend it. But the thought experiment is interesting.
> It would be world changing, the complete abolition of all privacy.
> Little drones that followed everybody around, everywhere, broadcasting and storing every thing everybody does, or says, everywhere they go, and what they do.
That's an interesting 0-100% (eclipse all possible free speech possibilities!) imaginary scenario. I don't subscribe to it.
Politics already suffers heavily from not getting the best-of-the-best. Making it even less attractive to become a politician is unlikely to improve upon that.
In the totality of all politicians out there that you have an opinion about, which fraction of them do you like, in terms of thinking they are the right person for the job? Do you think this fraction would improve with that opt-in scenario implemented?
"Politics already suffers heavily from not getting the best-of-the-best"
It is repeated often, but is this really true?
Number 1 trait of a politician should be honesty and integrity in my opinion - and I don't think that you can increase that factor, just with throwing more money on them. Then you maybe just get more smart people, who are in it for the money and use their smarts and cunning to extract even more money. I think politicians should want that job, because they primarily feel the call to achieve something bigger.
So a adequate payrise is alright in my opinion, but I don't want the top managers who run a big compony for profit to also run states. As states are (or should not be) profit orientated, but to serve the greater good of its people.
If H. Clinton vs D. Trump or D. Trump vs J. Biden are the only choice for the most powerful politic job in the world .. I think they are really not the-best-of-the-best
This is a better argument for the American public making in general poor choices and political parties giving them the kind of people they are apt to vote for rather than paying insufficient salaries.
There is no reason to believe that the factor dragging political quality into the gutter is insufficient salaries. The fact that the Republican party turned down higher caliber more capable candidates in favor of trump suggests that candidate quality is limited by voter choice not insufficient compensation.
These folks really are in fact deplorable and you need to appeal to at least a substantial minority of awful idiots to be elected president or if on team red most of them.
This is why every Republican president in half a century has been an embarrassment and every democratic relatively conservative because nothing else flies here and upping the ante won't help.
If I look around at (a) politicians and (b) people I respect for traits needed in politicians, then those sets are not fully but largely disjoint.
> Number 1 trait of a politician should be honesty and integrity in my opinion
There are other necessary traits though. Empathy. Diplomacy. The ability to compromise. Keeping an eye on the big picture. Current processes don't always select for those traits and there are tons of BS-ers and populists out there while I see people with the desirable traits outside politics and not having any desire to get involved. Putting a camera over their head 24/7 is not going to improve that.
If we're not getting the best of the best, then this 'opt-in politicians must submit to the record so their paymasters can vet them' idea would protect us from the one's who take the job for the 'side perks'.
we are FAR AWAY from that being a problem. An average Joe that isn't corrupted by money/lobbyists/... will make dramatically better decisions than any smartass that also tries to hide the corruption under the rug of meritocracy ("you don't understand, I am the expert!!11").
Decisions that are made in good faith from average people would be so much better than anything we experience today, its almost comically absurd. The decision-making process including all talks being recorded and publically available would also be a massive factor to restore trust in politics.
> we are FAR AWAY from that being a problem. An average Joe that isn't corrupted by money/lobbyists/... will make dramatically better decisions than any smartass that also tries to hide the corruption under the rug of meritocracy
Citation needed. Actually, a lot of citations needed.
When's the last time you spoke to an "average Joe" ? The average joe can't even make the right decisions regarding their own life and health, and is probably struggling to keep their family together and make ends meet.
What in the world makes you think they are qualified to make decisions on behalf of millions of constituents? I would drop dead before I let someone like that be my voice in politics.
> Decisions that are made in good faith from average people would be so much better than anything we experience today, its almost comically absurd.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So far, none is provided.
I'm not sure privacy as a concept should be off limits. It wasn't always a thing, in fact it's fairly recent. However there's a fairly big leap from "you can't always expect privacy" to "drones recording your whole life".
While you're at it there should be a 1 year look back. So if you want to run for election you have to start recording a year earlier so we can compare your actions to that of the other Big Brother^d^d^d^d^d^d^d^d^d^d^d candidates.
I do suspect that having a hot spouse and active sex life would become a significant advantage when running.
Public position = gate to corruption, license and regulation = gate to corruption. Do not expect the ones who make the laws to make them against themselves. That is idealist thinking.
If history teqches something is that the more of those, the more corruption and handing of favors and "legal corruption" pops up.
It is not by chance. It is just bc of how incentives are aligned. Those incentives, IMHO, can only be destroyed by strong deregulation and privatization. I dnt know how much of it but certainly a country should not be 45-50% or more GDP going public. Besides that centralized planning (we r going towards that) is usually super inefficient. So it is also a technical problem.
More when the peoople to arrange budgets do not pay a penalty even for their corruption in many cases, let alone for their management mistakes. Lagarde is still there and she gets 400.000 eur per year and took the decisios that made us go to these levels of inflation...on top of that she was involved in a corruption case that prescribed (not sure is the appropriate term in english, translated from spanish) I am no economist but I knew what would happen very likely... do they really pull our leg? I think so honestly.
problem is deregulation and privatisation doesn't work either, because then instead of corrupt politicians who make decisions based on greed despite being told not to, you get CEOs and big corporations who make decisions based on profit (essentially greed) because that is their entire purpose
If you look a bit deeper though; you'll find that greed can lead to good and bad outcomes. People make decisions because in some sense they feel like they will profit personally. That is basically the same as saying they do things for reasons. We know that most people aren't especially principled because they are regularly tested and don't make principle-based decisions. Nevertheless there is a great deal of good in the world.
Corporations are greedy, but they operate in a world where it is hard for them to enrich themselves without enriching others too.
how is this different/better for corporations than for politicians? Also how do corporations, that focus their efforts on using the cheapest possible production methods regardless of effects on the environments or peoples' health, paying their workers the absolute minimum for them to continue living, and paying their shareholders the absolute maximum amount 'enrich others' by accident?
Not that I am defending corrupt politicians, I just really don't know what to do about this, and looking at all the bad things corporations do i can't comprehend how they would suddenly become good when even less regulated than they already are
Corporations in a free market offer products and services. Politicians coercion.
They do not improve your life objetively, usually they do not pay for the price of them when there is a mistake but get benefits from trafficking favors.
> you get CEOs and big corporations who make decisions based on profit (essentially greed) because that is their entire purpose
That would be fine if you had hundreds of CEOs competing in a market. Unfortunately they tend to merge and create monopolies. And some people salute this because of the growth at all costs mindset.
What else in nature grows at all costs? Oh right, cancer.
Profit is not greed when you serve people with products and services. Or if it is greed, regulation and corruption is not another kind of greed even worse? No service, no product, no benefit for anyone.
If there is benefit in a regulation, the person imposing it is not the person paying the negative outcomes of it. Never. So no, CEOs competing cannot get more than what they generate unless they distort the market in some way.
This is a complicated one, because it runs the risk of both harassment of diplomats under fake crimes and also the elevation of real petty crimes to diplomatic incidents. The Okinawa business is difficult enough _without_ real diplomatic immunity. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-42048473?ocid=socialfl...
I'm totally fine with raising their paychecks by a factor of 10 for their loss of privacy if we implement this... the amount of money we'd save elswhere dur to less corruption would be a few orders of magnitude higher.
You don't even need to raise it that much. One can implement onlyfans.com business model when their electorate pays to them for access to their cam feeds.
The richer would be the ones that do things on their livefeed that attract people. Do you want politicians orgies? Because that's how you get politicians orgies. The poorer politicians would be the perfectly honest and completely boring ones, not a great way to encourage honesty.
Now wait, let not be too hasty here. We should whiteboard this out. There are a lot of moving parts, and shutting down an idea too soon, would be wrong.
So to start, uh, just wondering, which politicians? Also, what would they be wearing?
We've already had some experiments about "what if we select politicians based on their love for being on TV and their lack of concern about concealing their corruption" and the results aren't good...
Public figures kinda need to be narcissistic just to be able to face seeing themselves so much each day. And that includes the good ones.
I'm more worried about the fact that humans are, collectively at least, so hypocritical.
For the following examples, bare in mind that neither I nor the general public understand the actual laws, so any nits you pick need to be the kind that even a non-lawyer will accept:
I'm old enough to remember Clinton being impeached for lying about his affairs, and yet Republicans (collectively) are defending Trump for lying about affairs.
Or vice versa, Trump's classified documents at home vs. Biden's.
Probably the same elsewhere, but I don't trust that I'm not part of the problem with regard to UK politics (where I'm from), and my German isn't good enough to pay attention to what's happening where I now live.
Violence serves a purpose - although it doesn't serve this purppose well, it stands in place as a last resort. Removing that resort, what do you propose replaces it for the purposes which must be served?
Much earlier than Trump, politicians discovered that they could further advance their own interests by virtue signaling during Congressional sessions instead of actually make progress on legislation. Now, all meaningful negotiation happens behinds closed doors. If that also gets broadcast, then I'd be surprised if they get anything done at all.
Singapore remains an authoritarian state, not a democracy. It allowed for massive progress in a difficult political climate but it does so at the cost of a good amount of political freedoms. That might be fine, but not in all cultures.
I also challenge the notion that higher pay leads to less corruption. If so, then why are Denmark, Finland, New Zealand and Norway ranked higher in the corruption perception index[1], when they are paid much, much less annually (especially Finland)[2]?
This is the best authoritative source that I could find. The few assertions I've seen that Singapore is less corrupt than most european and north american countries quote Transparency International as a source, so I assume it might be an acceptable one.
They also supplement their findings with a "GCB" survey[1] (which is less recent), and given enough time I guess there are other sources one could find.
These are surveys, so there's a limit to how reliable their results can be. However, I find surveys are a pretty good start when you need to get a general idea on how something does and you can't just measure it. How you value that is up to you, that's why I quote it in my comment.
Yeah it's not entirely crazy when you are talking about something to quote whatever you can find.
But on this particular index, I strongly suspect it is simply continuing existing biases. It's the thing people quote and by quoting it you get reinforce next year's rankings. Plus it's the kind of thing nobody can ever verify due to its nature.
Assuming what you say here is true (which in my opinion is a pretty high leap), one could then ask why those biases exist in the first place. I expect authoritarian states to enable corruption but it's the contrary in the case of Singapore. Why? Because I doubt it boils down to the salary of the ministers.
On a side note, it might be interesting to see the evolution of this index over the years for any given country; that might lead to interesting conclusions on the bias confirmation you're talking about!
Crazy that you've been downvoted for this. The single ruling party of Singapore for the past 70 years, the People's Action Party, is overtly fascist. But I guess people are eager to overlook that because they like the results? Seems like a barely warmed over reformulation of 'they make the trains run on time.'
I don't think we should impose loss of personal privacy.. even in this scenario a politician acting impeccably could fall to one one signalling for part of the public's irrational approval, like two gladiators in the colosseum. The decisions of the politician's themselves need to somehow be opened up for scrutiny as they are, artifacts independent of their origin. Like code being submitted for review, and being subjected to human + automated checks. I know people will decry this as naive / impractical to implement but I still think it has got a better shot then 'create dystopian state where politicians are monitored 24 / 7, and trust the ever rational cooler heads of the public mob to (a) properly reward the good and punish the bad, (b) advocate for the best policies'. Not to mention that if such a system were invented then politicians were just get corrupted in advance of their career, in secret.
Your two statements seem to be a contradiction - decision meetings should be public, but the meeting where you are getting a blowie from your assistant on the sofa in your office should be private?
It is an abuse of power when they support laws they know they won't be charged with even if caught. The hypocrisy is also annoying, but not the main problem.
> Also speeding is a bad example since the cops let people off all the time
If a lawmaker creates a law to make something illegal, sends police to prosecute the population doing said thing, affirms that arresting people for having a cup of coffee is absolutely the intention of writing the law - that is perfectly reasonable.
If at the same time they are breaking the law they created - that is corruption. For the people prosecuted for said crime with trials pending, it is information that is useful for them to know that the lawmaker conducted themselves in this manner.
Yes. Once one meets a journalist or two, you become aware that every scandal that comes to light was known by everyone for a long time.
There is someone else, however, the Whip. While the end recipient would ultimatley be the press, the power they hold is by collecting up little secrets like which Prime Minister was having an affair with their Chancellor ...
1. Why do you think 'whataboutism' is a bad thing? It is comparison. Comparison is a fine tool for reasoning about policy. Not the end of the conversation, but something to consider.
2. The corruption of EU politicians is a major concern. If they think so little of privacy that they are willing to vote for laws like this, then they should certainly have to defend why they get any privacy at all. Corruption in government is one of the most damaging things happening in our society, and total surveillance would make it easier to detect & prove when they are lying.
> The corruption of EU politicians is a major concern
Yes. I never said otherwise.
> then they should certainly have to defend why they get any privacy at all
That's the funny bit: they won't. They - and their family - will have the same if they use the same platforms. Which is why I firmly believe this isn't about corruption, this is about false beliefs and zealots who genuinely believe the internet and open communication is bad.
In the US whataboutism is used to justify current crimes because in the past someone else did not get charged. It is a way to dismiss current crimes made by 'my side' because 'whatabout' that time 'your side' got off. It ends up reducing
what can be criticized to the lowest common denominator, because you can't criticize anybody if anybody had every done it before.
That's false. Whataboutism, in its traditional and non-negative sense, is the long-standing assurance of equal-enough application of the law as a defense against Bananaism.
See, I can make up truly stupid neologisms as well. But at least mine isn't an effort to subvert foundational democratic norms.
Because unequal application of the law isn't law.
Whataboutism's necessity increases as the parties and potential charges under scrutiny are ever more alike.
In Whataboutism's novel sense, it is a brain-dead effort to try to get away using the law as a politicized cudgel.
You can tell by the need to invent a new word in order to describe an old concept.
Insofar as their is not any legal jeopardy involved, my explanation still applies however adjusted.
"Precedent" is actually pretty fundamental to tons of legal systems. Because yes, it is important to call out hypocrisy. The people most concerned about whataboutisms nowadays are usually just using it as a way to completely avoid self retrospection and shield themself from what they are accusing others of. Yes, sometimes it is a non sensical argument (when you bring up something completely unrelated), but it is a very very overused online buzzword now.
Saying that if we start scanning all chats for illegal activity then we should also require all communications of politicians to be part of public record is not exactly the strongest argument.
I mean those systems are already in place, at a minimum you'd have to argue they're ineffective or not as intrusive. And your hyperbole is not doing you any favours on that front.
Be careful what you ask for. There's no good reason that public service should be a "curse".
Humans are not angels, and we should not build systems that hold out some unrealistic expectation that they are.
Too often politicians are viewed as "saviors of the people" only shortly before they become "corrupt villains".
If we want to attract competent public minded people, we need to do a lot of deep thinking and system design to get there.
<personal pain point>
One good place to start is to get rid of this idea that every citizen's input is equally informed, sane, reasonable, actionable, legal, or thoughtful.
In a democracy, every person hopefully is afforded certain rights, such as due process and free speech, but this does not mean what you say is "free from consequences".
The corollary is that not all ideas have to be given equal consideration. Some people say batshit crazy things sometimes, and frankly, these kinds of comments make life hell for many public servants. School boards come to mind.
Speaking, personally, I would like to be a public servant, in some regard (again), but I don't think we have realistic processes in place to really gather thoughtful feedback from the public. Until we do, public servants have to deal with a lot of informed nonsense.
I think software developers and UX people might not realize how skilled and motivated we are at building systems that actually work. I'm not saying that we build the right thing all the time. But so many government processes are fundamentally broken in terms of information processing. I'm not saying that they are broken by e.g. the tropes like "lazy people in government". I'm saying that the systems are (anti) designed (or evolved) in such a way that they're so painful that driven people get driven out.
If you think of a government as a way of processing citizen input in a way that is consistent with budget constraints and laws, it seems that many government agencies are not built using the principles that so many of us take for granted: system design, failure analysis, testing. This isn't just government problem, of course ... it is characteristic of large organizations of all kinds.
Democracy does not function well when too many people are simultaneously uninformed and yelling. This crowds out informed people trying to have a discussion.
> being a politician should be a curse that the dedicated bear for the good of humanity, not cushy job and badge of pride
Nobody I know would run for state office. They pay poorly. You have to work in the state capitol, which in most state's is awful. You lose your privacy. And for what, a marginal legislative role?
The historic benefit was pride. But with nihilism in vogue and trust in government low, that reward is non-existent. Our intelligent and ambitious don't aim for public office. (It even feels trite to call it public service.) That's a problem.
I have friends who ran for and won local and federal offices. I specifically called out state because it min-maxes the power-honor trade-off.
That said, I’ll stand by my broader point. Normalised derision has made public service more taxing than it ever was. This is true globally, and has been called out by high-profile resignations in e.g. New Zealand and Scotland.
Local and federal offices are also, if not more, lucratively profitable. Maybe it's not about some Platonic notion of power-seeking behavior but rather small people pursuing their own small monopolies.
my boss knows one of the former US press secretaries. At a dinner a while back my boss went on and on (for like 30min) how she couldn't believe her acquaintance was picked and how she should have been press secretary and would have been oh so much better. I asked her why in the world would you ever want that job, the pay sucks and you're just getting yelled at all day by reporters. She couldn't believe someone would turn down a chance to work in a presidential admin. We both had a little bit too much to drink and argued for like an hour. I had a tshirt made for her with a headshot of her, apparent, nemesis haha
It is incredibly lucrative to take one of these jobs. The last three white house press secretaries went on to become commentators and/or high ranking politicians. It's really not that hard to understand why people want the job.
The more unpleasant you make public service, the more you filter and select for people who want to use that power for evil ends and self-dealing. This is the same backwards thinking that causes people to want to cut legislative salaries, not understanding that this just makes it so the only people who can run for office are millionaires who can live off their accumulated wealth.
As it was in pre-agricultural tribal chiefdoms, where the most esteemed and high-ranking individuals were those who contributed the most hard work to the tribe. Although chieftains enjoyed certain privileges, it pales in comparison to the opulence in modern politics. And at least their status was genuinely earned.
You say this in jest, but it's a good idea.
The more power you have, the less privacy you should have.
This would be an appealing catch-up mechanic in society.
Media exposure is not the same as loss of privacy.
Fox "News" hosts have a ton of exposure.
But they also have a ton of privacy.
We know this because it was noticable when they lost their privacy in the Dominion lawsuit discovery.
Their (previously private) texts to each other admitting openly lying to their viewers, that they themselves saw through Trump's obvious and destructive lies.
And it was, is, a fantastic look behind the curtain, even if their primary victims won't/can't ever see it.
(Just like none of them watched the 1/6 hearings.)
But it's still a very good thing that we need more of.
If we required politicians to stream their lives 24/7, then the unintended consequence would be a government run exclusively by Instagram influencers who already stream their lives 24/7. I get your point about sunlight on secrets. But limiting our governance to the pool of people I see on TikTok seems like a high price to pay.
(This is just a 2023 rephrasing of the age-old concern of electing someone willing to be a politician.)
I have thought for some years now that any country wanting to implement some kind of restrictions or surveillance should start with politicians and authorities first. With some select authorities being exempt from this due to national security.
For example, if a country wants to implement the installation of state-owned anti-harassment "spyware" on their citizens phones, then this would first apply to politicians and those who work for the government, like anyone employed in a city hall or the traffic authority (normal citizens working there) or the like. This would run for 5 years, while citizens have the right to attempt to hack these systems without repercussions, in order to ensure that the security is up to the highest standards.
If after those 5 years the politicians and government employees are ok with it, if no major security concerns exist and the benefit has shown to be an obvious one, then it could be up for debate to implement this new technology.
> With some select authorities being exempt from this due to national security.
I fear your carveout would quickly become an "Inner Party" situation, with those with real power declaring themselves exempt due to "national security" reasons. Imagine then that anyone in any position of authority but not real power would be subject to the surveillance as an "Outer Party" member.
I get that the intent is to show the people in charge the negative consequences of such policies, but I don't think that's the worst that could come of this.
You understand that there is already an inner party, not in a conspiracy sense, but in a privacy sense. Yo have to actually argue why partial transparency is way worse than full obscurity.
If thought of something similar but comprehensive and far reaching, as follows:
Any law voted yes by a politician would have:
A 6mo cool off period, and in that interim periodthe following would apply: the law in question would be Tripled (3x) and both ways (I.e. retroactive and future) to the elected officials, his immediate parents, sons, and siblings, as soon as the law is passed.
So if they pass a tax increase, the entire tax applies immediately to their family before it applies to the public.
Same would be surveillance. Same for healthcare changes. OR draft etc. They would eat their kill.
Its about time no?
Any regulatory body unelected chief + deputy should be subject to the same rules with a tidy bonus: agency rules would also impact the portfolio (materiality can be set at say FV in excess of 300% poverty line), or business relationships past + present for the "czars" and family members.
So If you want to run FDIC and want to make rules for banks, thats swell, but those rules will apply to bank X where your brother works, AND to bank Y where you were CEO. The new rule would apply to those banks first, the changes would be tripled, AND that would be applied retroactively.
This feels just like punishing governments and their families for doing their jobs. We already have elections and law enforcement, thats all we need to "punish" corrupt officials. What we lack to make elections effective is more information available to the public about what they do and why they do it. More accountability and transparency, not punishment for their children if they want to tax big corps. The threat of punishment is never the best incentive to get stuff done.
We should also start to judge them based on outcomes rather than pointless metrics like GDP. How much did poverty decrease during your governments? How about crime? Life expectancy? And so on.
Government is NOT a job. Government is Public Service. Emphasis on 'service'
If you are not ready to do your service or duty, you are not fit to work in government.
The honor and duty of being a king came with the downside of the risks (beheading) to you and to your royal family, if you did a particularly bad job.
Current government officials have all the upside (revolving door) with almost zero downside. Some plebs break into congress and they get their pants in a jiffy.
We need to make them accountable. Them, and their families.
Yes that's exactly what I said. How about we forbid them from ever trading in stocks or participate in any investment where they might even have a remote conflict of interest?
I feel that would be the best way to keep crooks like Pelosi out of politics.
> Them, and their families.
This is nonsense but you must hate politicians apparently. I don't, I hate corruption.
I think you live fantayland if you think restricting their investment options will result in less politicians. Whats simply going to happen is that they will shift their activities to other income avenues.
Less stock trading. More board jobs and speaking fees. The river of corruption keeps flowing even if in a different direction.
Instead, id like less incentives to corruption. That means eat what you kill. Id like more lincolns that take tremendous personal risk to themselves and their families, and declare wars against global superpowers, to then "close shop" and go back to their farm to retire.
Instead we have pelosis, mccains advancing the war lobby, or obamas making bank on "speaking fees"
Stock prohibition wont do a thing. You need to cut the incentive to sell favors. You need to re-introduce risk.
If all meeting by public officials on duty were recorded (as police officer bodycams now are) then we would avoid tons of wars and geopolitical conflicts. We’d realize these guys are bozos who didn’t actually even understand each other and should be replaced by diligent teams who have to develop better frameworks. THESE POLITICIANS OWE US THE PEOPLE to do this IN ALL COUNTRIES. Instead of shaming us into supporting their “unprovoked and unjustified” wars.
That's a start. Governments need to be 100% transparent in all things. Government officials should have nothing to hide. All meetings are open, all documents are accessible to all, all communications are recorded and open. Convert the NSA into an agency which watches government 24x7.
Any government official that is found to hide/obscure information from the public gets three strike after which they are out. For life.
Workers who actually deal with confidential/personal information on citizens are the ones with the privilege to work without such monitoring.
I urge fellow HN members to take a stand against this proposal by informing others, participating in public debates, and reaching out to their representatives in the EU Parliament. Let's work together to protect our democratic values and the future of the internet as we know it.
Facebook does this already. Not only posts and comments but also messages between two people.
The system is used to hide content, change content, shadow ban and the like.
Even by its own standards it's typically used incorrectly, but most users have no workable way to appeal.
The content reviewed is often visible to low paid workers in various countries. Similar systems have been infiltrated by hostile governments. (Twitter is a case in point.)
(If you use FB you can sometimes probe the system and better establish the details.)
The system is also used to prevent one user informing another that they've been squelched.
My guess, this would give rise to even less competent implementations and actual elimination of political opponents and the like.
"does this" is maybe a little misleading here. Facebook has their own platform which they monitor. Like or not, that's something very different than mandating that every system should have a backdoor.
The fact that this being justified with the pretense of being "for the children" seems like such a transparent way to play on people's emotions.
From the start of the proposal itself:
"At least one in five children falls victim to sexual violence during childhood 3 . A 2021 global study found that more than one in three respondents had been asked to do something sexually explicit online during their childhood, and over half had experienced a form of child sexual abuse online"
I am (obviously) against child sexual abuse. I can also say, with very high certainty, that those numbers are being blown completely out-of-proportion, with the widest definition possible used.
To justify such a wide-reaching proposal behind this thin veneer of justification is absolutely nuts to me.
Almost all child abuse is perpetuated by people the child knows in person. The fact that there's a fuckton of creeps online has very little to do with it.
It doesn't matter, the EU has already crossed the point of no return. Europe is either collapsed or an authoritarian dystopia by the 2030s, no in-betweens. I've been saying this for years and it will be funny to see europeans to catch up to this fact in real time.
Eh. You can _say_ that, but it's clearly no coincidence that the word for 'male' and for 'person' were the same for a long time. 'Person' seems like the obviously neutral choice to make, hence my question: why not just use 'person'?
It seems very wrongly - because it just «seems» ignorant. Because where you read 'person' the normal and correct action is to search where the reference to the personality is. And in that case, _there is not_, and such lack was clearly expressed.
Again: no, you cannot use 'person' where you do not mean "a collection of special traits". You can go on annoyingly inventing language, but it was already there. And you cannot demand that others adopt your code, which has no real foundation.
Edit:
> seems like the obviously neutral choice
I missed that detail. «Neutral»? Neutral to what?! Gender? We should be obsessed by that?! We should introduce that in salads, in geometry, in this very page?!
You must have not read my text, to which you just replied: you cannot use 'person' instead of 'man', because they mean two very different things! The meanings of each are written right there where you replied - how can you see them overlapping?
'Man' has the same root of "mind", it means "having a mind", but so many things have it, so it must be a special one, must it not?
'Person' is a mask - that thing in which the voice "per-sonat". It means the mask, the specific one - crying, laughing, irate, whatever.
No, you cannot use 'person' if you do not mean "that with a personality" - because that is what it means.
Somebody flagged my former reply to the above, for reasons unknown: here is a copy. Yes, the content remains important, in terms of the above reply to the original.
====
Which language are you speaking? Before something "«comes across»" to you, do you have your duly interposed cold-minded understanding modules on?
-- A "Man" is that entity which has a mind superior to that of e.g. monkeys. (In the context, the nuance is that of Dignity.)
-- A "person" is that entity which expresses a particular side of the possible expressions of being.
...Your proposal would be translated as "People with their own special ideas and leaning would etc." - it is not only hardly relevant to what was communicated, but possibly even stating the opposite. The original post, like in general the rest we post, was not meant to be written in demotic.
====
And again to another reply, now hidden, if the above still needed:
'Man' has the same root of "mind", it means "having a mind", but so many things have it, so it must be a special one, must it not?
'Person' is a mask - that thing in which the voice "per-sonat". It means the mask, the specific one - crying, laughing, irate, whatever.
No, you cannot use 'person' if you do not mean "that with a personality" - because that is what it means.
====
Edit: Oh, and incidentally - "why not just sticking to invented groupspeak?"
Well, paradoxically, also because it is not inclusive, is it, if some demand the normalcy of speaking actual Language, or maybe just when dealing with individuals from other groups! A convention is limited to convention adherents; this public is varied!
The subheading of the proposal is, not surprisingly, "laying down rules to prevent and combat child sexual abuse". Nowadays it seems that every privacy-demolishing law that is proposed is a some form of "Think of the children" [0].
424 comments
[ 558 ms ] story [ 559 ms ] threadLarge scale surveillance while abusive and harmful has historically been limited in scale by the ability of those in control to trawl through data.
Automated "moderation" of dragnet communications collection with modern AI holds the potential for a scale of abusive privacy invasion at unprecedented scales.
My personal ability to generate millions of real-looking messages has now exploded and I wonder how these proposed structures will function if everyone sends each other 1k suspicious messages every minute of every day ?
Maybe attach a zip-bomb to every message just for good measure?
Let's assume you send 1000 automated messages periodically, and they contain a mixed bag of normal looking (so that your genuine comms could hide in plain sight) and malicious messages (to make their detection systems sweat).
All the messages are sent from the same origin (e.g.: a messaging app capable of this), with a specific interval (the genuine msg is timed accordingly), etc..
Let's see a small sample of normal looking messages, with an added genuine manually written message:
- Let's meet up at the Riverside Park soccer field at 5 PM sharp.
- Hey, can you grab a gallon of milk from the corner store on your way back?
- Good morning! Wishing you a fantastic day ahead, especially during your 11 AM meeting!
- Just a reminder: our dinner reservation at Luigi's Italian Bistro is at 7 PM tonight.
- Could you pick up the kids from Maplewood Elementary at 3:30 PM today? Work is keeping me busy.
- Caught in traffic near Main Street, but I'll be at the coffee shop in about 10 minutes!
Which one is the genuine one?
Just like you cannot discern which msg is genuine (are any of them?), you can generate plausible maliciously looking messages as well.
Spam meanwhile is defined as messages users don't want. If users can't tell the difference between spam and non-spam then, by definition, the messages are not spam.
If you send lots of "legit" messages to people who don't want them you'll be reported as a spammer and get banned. Doesn't matter what the messages say.
I understand you know how real world spam filters work, but this is a different use case.
I'm not trying to generate spam, I'm talking about an IM app, where you have your contacts, and you can talk with each other and only see the legit messages.
I can elaborate, but please continue in a non-adversarial way if possible.
The equation is more like # of ppl × # of msgs in a time period = noise
We can increase the # of msgs to bring down the other side from "billions" I think.
Remember "Hacking Team" that got busted a few years back? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Team One of the services they sold was the ability to plant incriminating data on a victim's computer.
Although I've seen enough HN comments in recent years willing to gamble on giving their kind an inch as if they won't take the whole field given the chance. History's only reliable lesson here is humans having a short memory of trusting these systems to do what they initially promised they would do, for longer than the well-intentioned's term in office.
https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/poll-72-of-citizens-oppose-...
* 10 countries being: Netherlands, Poland, Germany, Italy, France, Austria, the Czech Republic, Spain, Sweden and Ireland
It’s just tiring
With time the EU Parliament has seen its powers increasing, and there is reason to expect it will continue to do so.
Parliament approving what the Commission does is of no use for repealing laws.
The President is not elected by the Parliament. They experimented with that in the Juncker era, now it's back to being controlled (in theory) by the Council. The Parliament was given a "vote" that consisted of a list of options with one name on it. They could literally vote for von der Leyen or not vote at all. Even then she only barely scraped past quorum.
The Council meanwhile isn't democratic. Everything it does is secret. How did von der Leyen get the top job despite being manifestly unsuitable? Nobody knows. It's secret and never leaked.
that's how confidence votes work on most parliamentary republics.
Moreover, even at the universal suffrage, “democracy” doesn't mean electing a dictator with no popular oversight every x years.
In the case of the European commission:
- No EU citizen gave them the explicit mandate to enforce chat control
- If the initiative is repelled, and they continue to force freedom-reducing initiatives, they'll face 0 consequences.
- At most, the parliament can do is strike down a law. There is of course a very unbalanced distribution of power – the elected people have no initiative.
- The EC is corrupt: many commissioners cash fat checks from the private sector after their term, with 0 consequences.[0],[1]
- Lobbyism is everywhere. Corporations with unlimited money bribe officials, harass them, and push their agenda. Anyone close to the EU will tell you that it's much worse than you think.
“Democracy” is not the power of the corporations, and citizens, maybe, if we have time for it and if it doesn't eat into our profits.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/15/european-commi...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/jul/10/former-eu-digit...
As long as there are people there will be struggles like this. Being on the winners side makes things easier, so losing once makes it harder to go back, but it isn't impossible since we have gotten here from much worse situations.
Realistically current EU countries are locked in. They aren't allowed to reintroduce their own currency, but doing so is step one towards leaving.
By the time a regime reaches "existential threat" level it's too late. You're already far gone, any and all political opposition has been driven underground and the regime has loyalists in place in all institutions and positions of power. There is no way to organize any resistance because attempts to do so are crushed immediately, the press is controlled and you're in the minority anyway because the majority are propagandized and kept in fear of instability or supposed external threats to their way of life.
The EU is frankly far too close to that dystopian end already. It constantly justifies its own power via reference to external enemies of various kinds e.g. capitalist America, the European press barely challenges it and the institutions are controlled by EU loyalists who are willing to rip up the rules rather than let the EU lose control. Even in the UK that was always more distant than other nations, they went through multiple severe constitutional crises triggered by Remainers fighting to overturn the referendum. It wasn't at all clear that the UK could actually leave despite the referendum result not being in doubt.
IMO the very fact that you think the UK left for "questionable reasons" is already part of the propaganda doing its job. The people who get out early are the only ones who actually can get out. By the time the case is unambiguous (to you), you're the one being labelled as questionable.
Also note that the EU don't like Montenegro using the Euro and tolerate it only because it's tiny/doesn't matter.
So yeah - if a country really wanted to leave - a shared currency would not stop it.
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-leader-approve-defense-mi...
"EU leaders approve updated military plan. The strategy envisions the creation of an EU rapid deployment force of up to 5,000 soldiers."
However the EU doesn't need a physical army to stop a country leaving. It just needs sufficiently good control of local politics and law enforcement via loyalists in the countries establishment, which it has already. The EU has already proven it can replace governments in Italy and Greece against the will of the electorate, simply via "soft power" mechanisms like access to ECB liquidity, ECJ judgements and control over local institutions.
In other words an inability to leave the EU doesn't look like an army crushing a well organized political opposition. It looks like that opposition being blacklisted from the press, being spied on by the EU secret police, found guilty of vague laws like "misinformation" with judgements upheld by the European courts, votes being tampered with or outright ignored and more.
This is no theoretical problem. Anti-EU referendums in European countries are frequently ignored, even when in theory they are constitutionally binding. In the UK the Electoral Commission, the supposedly neutral body that runs the election and referendum process itself, was run by EU loyalists who professed in public that they wanted Leave to lose and spent significant amounts of time prosecuting Leave campaigners (fortunately their cases were ruled harassment and tossed out by the courts).
The EU Commission also had a long track record of classifying true reports about their activities in the British press as "myths". These days they'd call it misinformation and try to prosecute the journalists in question.
Ultimately it doesn't matter if a majority of the population want to leave, or reject a new EU proposal, if the people who rule them don't care about democracy and control the levers of power. That's how all dictatorships work.
Yeah, that's why the UK didn't leave in the end right? lol. Does "Non-biding referendum" rings a bell?
> long track record of classifying true reports about their activities in the British press as "myths".
Ah yes the trustworthy British press saying German kids can't write to Santa because of GDPR. Yes
Yes, keep talking, I like to make a collection of anti-EU talking points (from Peter Thiel's think tank most likely).
For all the criticism the EU deserves, it's very telling when the narrative turns into manipulation
UK was the first where it wasn't ignored. After the vote I remember being told several times by Europeans they didn't really believe it'd ever be implemented, exactly due to the track record of European countries in ignoring referendums that didn't go the EU's way.
Even then it was a very close run thing. The Remainers in Parliament were willing to create a constitutional crisis to try and get the referendum overturned a.k.a. the "People's Vote", and were holding the government hostage to get that. It was only a a lucky break (the Lib Dem leader going full delusional) that allowed Johnson to break the deadlock, go the country and allow the electorate to purge the Remainer MPs who had lied to their voters about their true position. But make no mistake, that was the worst constitutional crisis the UK experienced in living memory.
>> Ah yes the trustworthy British press saying German kids can't write to Santa because of GDPR
That story came from the German press and was correct:
https://www.welt.de/kmpkt/article183978370/Weihnachtsmarkt-i...
You see how easily you're manipulated by the EU? They've convinced you and others that if the press criticizes the EU the press must be lying. But it's almost never the case.
The EU has taken down their myths site now. It was trash. Not only totally focused on the British press, but I remember quite clearly flicking through them back when the site was live and noticing that all of them were admitted to be true, with the "debunking" (such as it was) being always along the lines of, "this is true but it's justified" or "we prefer an alternative interpretation", or "we don't phrase it like that".
So one specific case where the lists are sent to the city government and shown in public now means "children can't write to Santa?" Way to blown out of proportion. (And they could, if their parents consented to it)
Thanks for showing how easy it is to be manipulated by anti-EU propaganda.
Yes, the Welt article is not lying, the propagandists are, as usual
"they could, if their parents consented"
double lol
It's funny that the results of WWII were for America to enable a soft version of the fourth Reich and the Japanese east asian coprosperity sphere. BUT we built it under our auspices, with the rule being that free speech was somewhat necessary for a free market. (skip the part about torturing Muslims and communists). Here we are. Will Europe now become Hungary or Turkey??!
Yes... this was the original comment I was responding to, which seems to have totally disappeared. Thanks.
> we have gotten here from much worse situations.
A wise remark. But we'll only keep finding better situations if we keep calling out bullshit.
Maybe people just need to take more care which leaders they elect, if they don't like the policies that result from it.
The Government is our voice and our strength, and we are going to need that voice heard and our will exercised in the coming years.
We need to stop undermining our governments, we need to get money out of politics, and we need to sort out our democracies.
That's not how I portrayed it. What I portrayed is the reality of how people and organizations operate within society. It's quite telling that some people are too fragile to hear even a tiny bit of criticism or slightly different perspective about their God, the government.
> It teaches and reinforces apathy and learned helplessness when it comes to effecting change on matters of public policy. Ultimately, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
No it doesn't, subservience and dependence on the government and viewing them as "the experts", the moral authority, to be implicitly trusted, and who aim primarily to serve others above themselves, is what reinforces apathy and helplessness and dependency.
Look at all the wars America and "the west" at large has got into, because all "the experts" said we had to go to war, and you were a traitor, an expert-denier, "against us", etc., if you disagreed. The same exact strategy and rhetoric is used everywhere once you see it. Enemies are created, division is sown, critics are denounced... A little bit less blind faith and trust in government and their alleged "experts", and a bit more rational thinking and questioning would have gone a long way on many occasions. That is the dangerous apathy and faith in government that has quite literally caused the loss of millions of lives and trillions of dollars since WWII.
It's funny, I get a lot of this kind of pushback from people, with my simple observations of reality. Most of it seems to come from the same people who will simultaneously go on endlessly about how corrupt the government is, how much it spends on war, how racist and bigoted it is, how subservient to corporations and lobbyists, how it doesn't provide good healthcare, its police forces are brutal and unjust, justice system provides favorable outcomes for the wealthy, it doesn't do enough to solve climate change, doesn't make billionaires and corporations pay enough tax, etc.
... And yet when I point out the obvious, gee maybe that's because the government care more about themselves than they care about you, these same people suddenly lose their minds.
And I'll bet dollars to donuts I know where you and OP and anybody who criticizes me for making that comment generally on most of those above issues.
The thing about the sad truth versus a happy lie is that the sad truth doesn't prevent you from taking any action, participating in the system, trying to improve it or make it work for you. It's actually the happy lie that does that. Sure there are those who will become paralyzed with terror at the idea that the authority they are subservient to and essentially worship is not completely good and moral, but those people weren't going to change anything anyway.
That does not require it to be 'the' government and for it to cease being 'our' government. Further, a sense of ownership and a desire to work constructively with the parts that improve our lives does not require me to abdicate moral judgement to its authority. Finally, believing that public office can and should be an honourable pursuit does not imply or require that I believe that my current representation comes anywhere close of meeting that standard.
You are correct to assume that I believe my current government enables or even engages in injustices against certain cohorts of the population. Yes, I even believe that I benefit from significant inter-generational privilege that others were actively denied. No, that neither means that my life is a cakewalk, nor does it compel me to plead forgiveness in the gutter. It does however instill a duty to raise those less fortunate up when I have the means to do so. It also compels me to advocate for collective action to do the same.
Ultimately, I don't see embodying alienation between a democratic government and its citizens to be a reasonable source of tribalistic pride. It's fucked, and fixing it should be almost as existentially compelling as eating or surviving the elements.
Unless you are part of the 0.01% richest (or something like that), governments are not your voice or strength, and you have essentially no ability to influence their actions. Governments are composed of politicians and other people who will act in what they consider to be their own best interest. Those interests will generally be very different from the interests of most other people.
Getting money out of politics is impossible. Politicians are not going to vote to make themselves less well off, and lobbyists will rarely fund the campaigns of those who would make lobbying less effective.
Instead of looking to governments for solutions to problems they are neither capable of solving nor willing to solve, we should try to solve those problems by voluntary cooperation whenever possible.
In reality it's always Michel's Iron law of Oligarchy. It doesn't matter what political system you think you have. In the end what you have is always an oligarchy.
There are bad actors and corruption in every political system. But different systems and different implementations of them have different levels of these.
I would say most governments do an OK job (compared to say 1000 years ago, or compared to what any bloody revolution could do within 10 years), given how difficult the task is of governing a lot of people with vastly different interests and opinions. There is also still a lot of room for improvement. If you don't like the way your government works, try to improve it. Be part of it. Saying everything is corrupt no matter what is completely useless. I also doubt it makes you feel better overall, at least any longer than the moment you take to write such a comment.
It sounds cynical - yes, but we have to deal with reality as it is. Not as we would wish it to be. Surely that is the lesson on the last 10-15 years of poltics.
Power simply doesn't work this way. Power always collects in the hands of an organized minority - be it a king and his inner circle, or in the power brokers, government institutions, political party internal governmental structures, media hacks, NGOs, and state institutions, and the money power of western democracies.
Understand this.
There is no vote you can cast to evict any of these people.
Furthermore, they control the information dissemination aparatus. Like kafabe in pro-wrestling, they have complete control over the narrative story arcs, and they define the oppinions that are acceptable in society.
Take the US government, for example. Just think about the vast - almost boundless state power they have amassed. They spy on every single communication anyone makes on the internet. They even assassinated a sitting US president, for goodness sake.
Do you think if you just meekly ask them, they'll simply hand over the whole structure into the hands of their sworn enemies? No - it won't ever happen. Your guy will be installed, and he will find his every action is thwarted. He will be effectively powerless. And if you complain, they'll laugh in your face.
More generally:
A mass of people is powerless. You must know this from real life: you can't expect a group of 1000 people to take responsibility for achieving some objective. The group will instinctively look to a leader to guide them, and they will wait for someone to take charge. That person will then need a group of lieutenants to administrate his leadership, and hey presto: there's your oligarchy.
There's nothing wrong with this. The Iron Law of Oligarchy is a reflection of human nature. There is nothing wrong with "kings", various "lords" and officials, if they have the people's best intests in mind.
The problem is democracy is that it allows responsibility to be diffused among the people. Who will ever be held responsible for the Afghanistan withdrawall debacle? Or for the Iraq war? Or for the Snowden files? Or for the trillions of US government debt? ..to name just a few.
No one will ever be held responsible, because democracy allows the oligarchs to point the finger back at the people, and blame us for our choices, when in reality we really have no control over the matter whatsoever.
At least our ancestors could pick up pitch forks and carry their heads out on pikes if things became untennable.
We cannot hold power to account in any way at all. They don't fear us in the slightest. In 2023, this should be pretty obvious to anyone who is paying attention.
It seems like it’s becoming a behemoth that will need to be killed and redesigned in the future, just like it happened in the past
Which is particularly farcical when you realize that in the 20th century, governments murdered tens of millions of people. Governments are concentrations of power that wield monopolies on violence. If governments can be kept under control, kept within some reasonable guardrails, then they're very useful for various reasons. I am not an anarchist, even remotely. But when governments get out of control the result is often millions dead.
Governments which view those guardrails as a threat from the people are a threat to the people. Such perceptions prove the necessity of those guardrails.
Still, it is disturbing to watch all of Orwell's ideas getting implemented in real life
It’s tiring. They hope to wear people down.
GDPR achieved nothing notable for data security and privacy, except by spamming cookie prompts and training users to accept anything.
The EU is an incompetent, lumbering, bureaucratic hellscape. It expanded FAR beyond its original remit of a customs union, and in turn created horrific legislation and usurped the power of national governments to centralize power in Brussels.
The EU used its newly seized power to crush all free speech, freedom of expression and dissent, along with explicitly campaigning for censorship. [1]
[1] https://www.npr.org/2022/04/23/1094485542/eu-law-big-tech-ha...
As far as I'm concerned, GDPR is great.
I'd be more fine with that if they only regulated narrowly defined inter-state issues in the EU.
But stuff like this... There's no mandate. And there's no reason this couldn't be done locally in every member state where the population wants that.
In the EU we have the Parliament, which is elected by the people, the Council which is composed by Prime Ministers, Presidents, whoever rules each country and the Commission, which is proposed by the Council and elected by the Parliament. Not so different from what I see in my country.
EP elections are well publicized and every EU citizen has the right to vote on it
"Every five years EU citizens choose who represents them in the European Parliament, the directly-elected institution that defends their interests in the EU decision-making process. The next European elections will take place in 2024."
I always vote in the EP election.
I just find it incredible that when the results are in the people at the top are some guys I've never heard or seen before. And I don't believe I'm uncommonly ill-infomed.
Moving power further away from the electorate should be a last resort for issues that can simply not be handled on the local level.
that may happen when many separate countries merge their candidate pools to form a single parliament, and its up to the parties to distribute their seats - I would think that an exact representation of members from all countries within the available seats for the party would be hard to achieve, though.
> Moving power further away from the electorate should be a last resort for issues that can simply not be handled on the local level.
This is true to some extend, however you have to somehow ensure that all individual pieces work in a collaborative mode and support each other, because once you get in competitive mode, its a race to the bottom for everyone.
I don't understand / buy that argument. I find it quite neo-liberal in the sense that it assumes countries will deterministically mindlessly engage in a race to the bottom.
The "prisoners dilemma" is a problem of course. But people and countries can and do cooperate despite that.
For this reason, it's not clear to me that EU countries would automatically slash their environment regulations and corruption prevention efforts in a "race to the bottom" if the EU wasn't there stopping them.
Democracy gets diluted when the electorate becomes too large and too diverse. It's important that decisions stay as local as possible.
Like, image some county that needs energy, has no natural gifts regarding that but has land to farm upon. Instead of exporting food and importing coal from somewhere to fire up a new plant, it could also exchange energy with a more gifted county that has plenty of green energy but doesn't need something from them.
To make this work, a higher level entity can force the exchange, and ensure that the whole area doesn't suffer from pollution despite that being the cheapest or even only possible way for the individual county. It COULD be solved there, but everyone is worse off by not cooperating.
Actually, the EU has a huge power potential if only the member states would finally cut back on individual national interests so that mutual agreements and shared legislation/taxes/military/... could be setup properly - which might worse some situations in the short term, but ensures greater wealth for everyone longterm. The "I I I" egoistic thinking of individual member states is the greatest weakness the EU has - unified we can achieve so much more!
So they migrate to non-democratic sections of the political sphere to assert themselves, and EC is one of those. The EU has a significant "democratic deficit" as a whole, too much indirection between people and the ruling Eurocrat class.
In other words: The European Commission is the autocratic reservoir for conservative politicians that were to extremistic for national audiences.
Take a peek over to Italian politics and you get a glimpse of what could be coming.
Or Israel.
There are lots of good things coming out of the European Commission and some really great things. Obviously there is going to come some crap to, and a few really really bad things, like this one. I agree that it's tiring to fight those, but there is no sunshine without rain.
This pushing, forever persistent, accretes ever greater power to departments and their bureaucrats until the people have no say, and the highest elected offices have no say. Of course, the EU was initially designed this way, so you're fucked any way you frame it.
I am sorry. There is mostly vile hate and vitriol for her in the entire country. Her entire career was a show of the Peter Principle.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Door-in-the-face_technique
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring_(cognitive_bias)
...but yes, this is why in the US republicans are constantly floating all sorts of batshit regressive policies on social welfare programs, LGBTQ people, voting rights, immigration - it shifts the ultimate compromise closer to their desired outcome, and even if it doesn't, it still is virtue signaling to their base, something to shout about at campaign rallies.
"See what I tried to do for you? But those evil liberals shot me down! I need your support!"
If I'm reading [1] correctly, we're just picking up momentum down a decades-long slippery slope.
1. https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/2022-02/FIW_202...
Most people don't know the first thing about anything. Ask them what we should do about climate change, and they'll say "household recycling". Ask them whether they're okay with the environmental impact of a nuclear power station, and they'll say they're outraged about it. The uninformed opinion of people who haven't really thought very hard, when presented with a loaded question, is not particularly indicative of the process they use to form their views: it's more indicative of your sampling method.
I don't know much about how sanctuaries and safe spaces are run, but it's my understanding that they don't generally have "we accept anyone who meets this sentence-long description" policies. Round these parts, shelters have always been able to discriminate against trans people with reason, and they haven't been doing so, and it hasn't been an issue: public sentiment is just that. People have been medically-transitioning in English-speaking cultures for well over a century, now, and it's only been a Big Deal in the last couple of decades. Politics.
I'll add: the current fuss about "protecting women's spaces" is pointless, because the right they're arguing for already exists, and the people running shelters by-and-large aren't invoking it. If they want domestic violence shelters to refuse service to trans people (who are, btw, more often victims of domestic violence than their cisgender counterparts), they should be campaigning against the charities that run the shelters, not campaigning, protesting and petitioning to change laws that are already the way they want them.
If helping the vulnerable were causing actual problems, they'd be able to cite instances of those problems over the past three decades, rather than just appealing to hypothetical situations that might even have happened, once, somewhere in the world, but probably haven't.
> rather than just appealing to hypothetical situations
These aren't hypothetical situations. In some jurisdictions, prisoners are housed based on their self-declared "gender identity". So men who declare themselves as women are being incarcerated in the female prison estate. Women inmates have been raped, sexually assaulted, and even impregnated by some of these men.
This is what happens when this polite fiction becomes law and policy, abusive men take advantage of it - undermining the very reason why we have sex-separated spaces in the first place. Protecting women's spaces from men who call themselves women is very important for the safeguarding of vulnerable women.
It would be very interesting to see the actual official statistics on this, alongside the data on the number of women prisoners raped and impregnated by male guards.
My suspicion is that the former numbers are over exagerated in importance and the later numbers are sharply underr reported .. but I'd still be interested in your best link to back up your claim and put it in context.
This is why in the UK, women's prisons have a policy where at least 50% of prison officers must be female, and only female officers are allowed to conduct intimate searches where needed, to mitigate against the risk of sexual abuse by males.
That there is an existing, mitigated risk of male sexual predation from prison staff, does not justify further increasing this risk to female inmates by locking them up 24/7 with men, just because these men call themselves women.
We have sex-segregated prisons for good reason, this was the result of very well documented evidence, from prison reformers of the 19th century, of the harm and abuse of woman that is enabled by mixed-sex prisons.
That seems odd to say the least.
Here are some search terms for you, these are examples of men in women's prisons who have sexually assaulted or raped women inmates while incarcerated: Janiah Monroe, Karen White, Ramel Blount.
None of these men should have been there in the first place, of course.
I am asking how frequently this happens and, in hard risk terms, how does it compare to the risks faced by inmates of being raped by other women or by prison guards.
I assume you are not claiming these events do not happen.
So again I ask - do you have any relevant links re: comparative frequency, absolute occurrence, etc.
I would expect there to be more, given base rate – but if there were, I'd expect those cases to be yelled about, which they aren't. (That leaves open the possibility that trans people are significantly less likely to assault others… Given the correlation between being trans and autistic, and the tendency for autistic people to be highly moral, that's not a hugely far-fetched theory, but it wouldn't explain such a large discrepancy.)
That we have several documented cases already only supports this point further.
I absolutely agree that measures should be in place to eliminate such abuse and to uphold duty of care.
You have failed to demonstrate that trans people in prisons pose any additional risk over and above what already exists - measures put in place should stop same sex abuse and guard abuse equally as well as they stop trans abuse of others (or, indeed abuse of trans by others - which you have blindly overlooked).
That abuse does occur highlights a failure of protective measures overall - and the incidence of abuse by trans prisoners appears to be the very least of the actual incidents that actually occur.
Unless, of course, you can actually link to actual comparative numbers.
Otherwise you are just engaged in blinkered and selective pearl clutching.
Sex-segregation of prisons (and other spaces where women are vulnerable) exists for good reason: the safety and dignity of women. The need for this has been well-documented since the 19th century, when reformers campaigned for improvements to prison conditions, including making them separated by sex. Elizabeth Fry in particular kept extensive diaries of the horrors that women had to endure in mixed-sex prisons.
This isn't "pearl clutching", as you put it, it is based on significant evidence of the risk men pose to women. Evidence that has since been added to with these cases I've cited, that resulted from prison authorities deciding to reintroduce mixed-sex environments.
On the flip side, you've presented no argument whatsoever as to why men should be incarcerated in women's prisons. You appear to have simply assumed that this should be the case, and are basing your rhetoric upon this assumption.
This does not apply to the actual policies I assume you're complaining about. Please read the policies – or name them, if you have found some that work that way.
> it is based on significant evidence of the risk men pose to women.
Nobody's disputing that (much as I'd love to live in a world where I could). You haven't demonstrated the risk that trans women pose to the women around them.
> you've presented no argument whatsoever as to why men should be incarcerated in women's prisons.
I'll provide one: male-on-female prison violence is a well-established phenomenon. What do you think is going to happen when you put a handful of women in an all-male prison?
… Or do they not count?
California, Washington, Ireland, for example. All places where prisoners are being incarcerated based on their claims of "gender identity" rather than sex.
> Nobody's disputing that (much as I'd love to live in a world where I could). You haven't demonstrated the risk that trans women pose to the women around them.
Sorry, but this isn't how this works. It is already well established that men present significant risk to women, particularly in spaces where women are vulnerable. If you want to claim that a subset of these men - that is, any man who calls himself a woman - poses a significantly lower risk to women, then you need to argue this based on evidence, rather than simply assuming it.
> I'll provide one: male-on-female prison violence is a well-established phenomenon. What do you think is going to happen when you put a handful of women in an all-male prison?
I entirely agree that women who call themselves men must not be placed in men's prisons, just as men who call themselves women must not be incarcerated with women. As I argued above, this is the whole point of sex-segregated prisons, safeguarding women from male sexual abuse and violence.
You've just named countries. Pick one. Read the actual policy. It might surprise you.
> then you need to argue this based on evidence, rather than simply assuming it.
The fact that people only seem to have the same five examples to argue otherwise – versus the many hundreds of easily-accessible examples that show that men are (for whatever reason¹) more prone to violence? You can't just weaponise the null hypothesis like that: how am I supposed to prove this point in the hypothetical world where it's correct?
If trans women behaved the same as men, you'd expect them to – as a population – behave the same as men. From the evidence I have access to, they don't.
> I entirely agree that [thing I didn't say]
One can't change how reality works by sheer force of rhetoric.² You know full well how I'm using words, here (just as I know how you're using them), and it should be clear what I was trying to say.
What happens when you put people with breasts and soft features and lower-than-average physical strength in a men's prison?
Reactionary policies are rarely good ones, even where it would be better to go back to the way things were. Don't you know you can't go home again? Unless you address the flaws, not just the perceived benefits, of your proposals, I won't see them as thought-through.
Doing the right thing is hard. Working out what the right thing is is hard – and usually painful.³ Do you care more about believing yourself to be right already, or about ultimately doing the right thing? The specific details of this pointless internet argument aside, your strategy here is not one that will help you to learn and improve and become better at making things better.
---
¹: Personally, I place a large portion of the blame on patriarchy. Many men I know are decent people: violent macho behaviour doesn't seem to be inherent.
²: Unless what you seek to alter is the political landscape, of course – but this website is not an effective place to do that.
³: I shy too much from that pain to be confident in making policy decisions myself. I can often, however, spot flaws in bad policy.
Sorry but this is just vague insinuation. You haven't given any hints as to what you believe will be a surprise. Could you enlighten me please?
I mentioned those three regions because they have self-identification policies for "gender identity" that extend to prisons, and men who call themselves women are currently incarcerated in women's prisons there.
> If trans women behaved the same as men, you'd expect them to – as a population – behave the same as men. From the evidence I have access to, they don't.
Okay then, please share your evidence? Keeping in mind that any man can call himself a woman.
> One can't change how reality works by sheer force of rhetoric.
Agreed, so please refrain from implying that these men are female, as you did with your mention of "male-on-female violence". I'm sure you know they are male.
> What happens when you put people with breasts and soft features and lower-than-average physical strength in a men's prison?
You are presumably referring to men with self-induced gynecomastia. This will likely be a subset of, or at least have a significant intersection with, men who call themselves women.
The same argument I made in other comments applies to these men too - their safety is an issue for the male prison estate to deal with. Men's prisons have plenty of experience handling at-risk prisoners, for example paedophiles, ex-police officers, ex-gang members. If men with breast tissue are at elevated risk, they can be handled in the same way. There is no reason to place these men in women's prisons.
Well, I did say earlier:
> > and under policies that elevate "gender identity" over sex, will be believed.
> This does not apply to the actual policies I assume you're complaining about.
You misunderstand what "self-identification policies" are – or, at least, what current implementations look like. They don't "just believe" people: the processes for getting recognition can be quite convoluted.
> Okay then, please share your evidence?
I can't share the sum total of my relevant life experience, I'm afraid. You'll just have to make do with what I've already provided: the evidence from your own comments. As somebody who has researched this, and – presumably – is motivated to portray trans people in a bad light, you are not in possession of the statistical data I would expect to exist if trans women were statistically like men.
People like you pick at every single case you can to paint $insert_group_here in a bad light, but in this case, you can't even get enough data points to make a statistically-plausible argument – and neither can anybody else who argues the same as you. (I have absolutely no idea why you can't: I would expect you to be able to. Apparently, reality is even more biased than I am!)
> I'm sure you know they are male.
:eyeroll: I'm sure you can't even define "male" coherently, consistently, in a way that lines up with your ideological beliefs about what it is and isn't.
You know how I'm using words. I'm extending you the courtesy of accepting your language use: please return it.
> The same argument I made in other comments applies to these […] too
And by this argument, why have segregated prisons at all? Your original argument was about reducing harm… so why are you suddenly switching to a different argument, now that I've brought up the increased harm your proposal would cause?
You've got two different criteria now. Please weigh both situations (thing you're complaining about, and your alternative proposal) according to both criteria. Don't just pick and choose, otherwise I'll have to assume you're arguing in bad faith.
The full expression this term is taken from is: "a few bad apples rot the whole barrel".
Women don't know in advance who the bad apples are amongst men, so in contexts where women are particularly vulnerable to predation from such men, the whole barrel must be considered as being rotten. This is why we have sex-segregated spaces.
Treating someone who seems like a woman, acts like a woman, is at risk from the gender-based violence inflicted upon women… as a man… is making people safer, how exactly?
How would you even determine which women to exclude? If someone's saying "hey, I'm trans, I'll leave if my existence makes you uncomfortable", they're clearly not one of the Evil™ Ones… so are you proposing to check everyone who enters these spaces? Oh, but wait, the state of medical treatment is actually pretty good, these days. Better make that a thorough check. (No. Just, no.)
And how is it a good idea to put trans men in with women victims of (usually male-perpetrated) domestic violence? Isn't the whole point of the "women's spaces" thing to avoid that? (Or do you propose to just ban all trans people from support services entirely?)
To be fair to the OP, I don't think there exists a history of abuse of females from trans men, which strengthens their allegation that the underlying sex might be an important factor to consider in these scenarios. The sex hormones alone maybe just aren't a factor.
It's likely not safe to place trans women into male prisons either though, so I think there ought to another axis than just male/female along which we can segregate, such as violent/non-violent criminal history/tendencies. Come to think of it, that seems almost obvious in retrospect. Put violent offenders together, and non-violent ones together, and then non-violent offenders are far less likely to become harder criminals upon release.
Male-on-male violence is a problem for the male prison estate to solve within its walls. It doesn't make any sense to put women at increased risk of male violence to protect men from male violence. Women don't exist as some sort of violence shield to protect men from each other.
Men's prisons already have safeguards in place for vulnerable male prisoners, such as paedophiles, ex-police officers, ex-gang members and so on - putting them on separate wings of the prison, moving them to a different category of male prison (which is in practice similar to your suggestion of violent/non-violent separation). If men who call themselves women are at elevated risk from other men, the same safeguards can be applied to them. There is no reason whatsoever to house them in a women's prison.
"Underlying sex" isn't a particularly coherent concept to begin with. By what potential mechanism could "underlying sex" influence behaviour, other than hormonally?
Lacking an answer to this question doesn't mean we should rule out the possibility while investigating, but we shouldn't take too much heed of the possibility until we have a reason to believe it. «"Excess male violence in prisons" problem is a consequence of the patriarchy» is a concise explanation, introducing no additional entities or mechanisms, consistent with the observations mentioned in this thread, and… well, as far as I'm aware, it's the mainstream feminist position on this matter.
> Come to think of it, that seems almost obvious in retrospect.
I've had thoughts like that, on occasion. Unfortunately, segregationist policies are a much more politically feasible approach than anything like what you're proposing, and I don't think that will change any time soon. How to segregate is the question: whether to segregate is a pretty radical question to be asking.
I don't think your proposal is quite perfect, but it's a start.
By that argument, trans people shouldn't exist because they have the hormonal profile of their birth sex, therefore they shouldn't exhibit observable behavioural differences.
Using circular logic to refute someone's point isn't too smart either.
If your position is congruent with the parent comment, I know exactly what you are. I have no reason to debate small humans.
"Using circular logic to refute someone's point isn't too smart either."
Also, straw man. I chose "disregard" intentionally. Disregard is not synonymous with refute.
> > Using circular logic
It is best for your criticisms of things to be founded in truth, where possible. The first and last resort is the truth. It's a good habit to get into. There were plenty of other things you could have said, including:
> No, it's actually quite relevant.
You needn't worry about the truth justifying bigotry, in case that's the issue: while it's theoretically possible for a given piece of bigotry to have a basis in fact, reality seems to have some rather strong opinions on the matter! :-) If bigoted rhetoric had a habit of being correct, I think I would've found out by now. And if it were true, you would expect to see certain kinds of bigotry popping up in multiple places independently; rather than having traceable provenance, either as adaptions of prior bigotry, or as traced back to a historical figure with a strong and documented motivation for having people believe it.
That's not to say you need to put much effort into responding. But if you feel like putting that little effort in, it's best not to respond at all.[2]
[0]: https://thebodyisnotanapology.com/magazine/stupid-is-an-able...
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20110824041258/http://www.stupid... (see especially page 24)
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deny_recognition
While I understand your point, I decline.
Silence favors the wicked.
It is discussed by Charlie Munger as part of what he calls the "reciprocation tendency", after the studies from Robert Cialdini in the practice of "«ask for a lot and back off»".
On the other hand though: Europeans kinda suck as a blob. See Italy electing fascists again, Germany stagnating for decades under Conservative control, basically everything east of Germany etc. Etc. The parliament is dominated by Conservative authoritarian forces as well. In that sense EU legislature is just too good at representing it's people.
I gave a speech to my computer science course when the new copyright directive was about to go into its final trilogue round in 2018. Wide agreement in discussion afterwards, but not a single student cared enough to make their wishes known to their MEPs. If even they don't do it, i can only say we're getting what we asked for.
That’s because when some of them do they get threatened with sanctions while others can simply dictate policy. The eu is not an equal members club.
Like many other system in the World, elections are to chose people's representatives, not to chose the government nor the technical apparatus (like the EU commission).
The US president is one notable example of non elected position.
Anyway, the proposals must be approved by the parliament, which is elected directly by the EU people in number proportional to the population of the single countries and then ratified by the single EU parliaments, which are again elected by the people.
I wouldn't exactly call it "abundance of unelected regulatory positions".
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/08/21/meta-wont-allowe...
Oh.
[0]: https://www.thorn.org/about-our-fight-against-sexual-exploit...
She is appointed and vetted by the parliament, who is elected directly by the people.
So the commissioners do not come from Mars, they are emissaries of the elected parliament.
Show me another place where 27 countries live peacefully together and jointly govern an entire sub continent, by collaborating together and discussing publicly about their political proposals.
Of course it has its problems, of course it takes a lot of effort to bring 27 countries together on a subject, of course there will be controversial opinions among its members, depending on the POV (a lot more people in EU agree with the chat control proposal than those who disagree), but that's the price of democracy.
Switzerland is very democratic. People get to vote on individual laws, instead of having 3 different layers of abstraction between who you vote for and what laws are passed.
The price is having to make compromises every day.
It means putting together and listening to the people who say "immigration must be stopped" and "countries should have no borders" and everything in between, but no side tries to silent the others using violence.
What you're talking about is the tyranny of the majority, which is not democratic and is not categorized as democracy, in a democracy the effect of the majority taking it all is moderated by a carefully balanced separation of powers.
For example in a democracy the justice system is usually independent from the government.
> Not having privacy is a consequence of authoritarianism, be it for a greater good (to find child abusers) or not (to find dissidents).
But we have privacy in Europe, unlike most places in the World.
Blindly repeating that EU is authoritarian doesn't make it true.
Yes, Europe is big, but those "dramatic decisions" need to be ratified by your "local" government, that it's probably more distant than the EU commission.
At least in the EU commission they do their job, which is to write proposals, local governments lately have only been preoccupied by their own chairs.
And it's basically the only place where "dramatic decisions" can be discussed right now in Europe.
I would love that my National government focused on "privacy" and "E2E encryption" and sparkled a discussion about those topics in the parliament, instead of doing this:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/italy-migrant-deaths-mini...
We all know who these people are.
It's a public discussion.
> and help with anything that gets them far from public and government
It simply means winning the elections at the EU parliament, which, unfortunately for Mullvad, it's not something they will ever be able to do.
Mullvad posts might be popular here on HN, maybe, but they move no more than a few thousands votes in the EU (we are 450 million people).
You mean unplusvoted, citizen.
Technically, (presumably) because of the missing payload. Subtle or patent, the actual «real life parallels» are the substantive part.
The last 8 or so years has taught me otherwise.
When you are for free speech, you have to actively protect that with which you disagree. That’s the only way it works.
If you don’t, someone will eventually come for what you think should be protected…and there will be nobody left to defend it.
"Given that political corruption is rife in European countries, with great detriments to the healthy function of government, all politicians in positions where they may be engaging in corrupt behavior must submit to 24-7 audio and video surveillance, which will be piped over public platforms for crowdsourcing of corruption detection. All personal communications of politicians and of government bureaucrats will become matters of public record for the same reason. Since we cannot trust a corrupt head of government to investigate their own corruption, or one of their underlings, this kind of public exposure of all politicians and bureaucrats is the only reasonable, rational solution to the problem of endemic government corruption in the EU."
I'm probably in the minority on HN, but I think this is a good thing. It should be a matter of course, in a democratic society. Free speech doesn't live solely in digital communication (universally owned by some company) any more than it does in the classified ads in a newspaper.
Little drones that followed everybody around, everywhere, broadcasting and storing every thing everybody does, or says, everywhere they go, and what they do.
No. I do not recommend it. But the thought experiment is interesting.
> Little drones that followed everybody around, everywhere, broadcasting and storing every thing everybody does, or says, everywhere they go, and what they do.
That's an interesting 0-100% (eclipse all possible free speech possibilities!) imaginary scenario. I don't subscribe to it.
In the totality of all politicians out there that you have an opinion about, which fraction of them do you like, in terms of thinking they are the right person for the job? Do you think this fraction would improve with that opt-in scenario implemented?
It is repeated often, but is this really true?
Number 1 trait of a politician should be honesty and integrity in my opinion - and I don't think that you can increase that factor, just with throwing more money on them. Then you maybe just get more smart people, who are in it for the money and use their smarts and cunning to extract even more money. I think politicians should want that job, because they primarily feel the call to achieve something bigger.
So a adequate payrise is alright in my opinion, but I don't want the top managers who run a big compony for profit to also run states. As states are (or should not be) profit orientated, but to serve the greater good of its people.
These folks really are in fact deplorable and you need to appeal to at least a substantial minority of awful idiots to be elected president or if on team red most of them.
This is why every Republican president in half a century has been an embarrassment and every democratic relatively conservative because nothing else flies here and upping the ante won't help.
If I look around at (a) politicians and (b) people I respect for traits needed in politicians, then those sets are not fully but largely disjoint.
> Number 1 trait of a politician should be honesty and integrity in my opinion
There are other necessary traits though. Empathy. Diplomacy. The ability to compromise. Keeping an eye on the big picture. Current processes don't always select for those traits and there are tons of BS-ers and populists out there while I see people with the desirable traits outside politics and not having any desire to get involved. Putting a camera over their head 24/7 is not going to improve that.
Decisions that are made in good faith from average people would be so much better than anything we experience today, its almost comically absurd. The decision-making process including all talks being recorded and publically available would also be a massive factor to restore trust in politics.
Citation needed. Actually, a lot of citations needed.
When's the last time you spoke to an "average Joe" ? The average joe can't even make the right decisions regarding their own life and health, and is probably struggling to keep their family together and make ends meet.
What in the world makes you think they are qualified to make decisions on behalf of millions of constituents? I would drop dead before I let someone like that be my voice in politics.
> Decisions that are made in good faith from average people would be so much better than anything we experience today, its almost comically absurd.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So far, none is provided.
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt11542920/
In the novel it is extremely disruptive, but perhaps that is what is needed.
I do suspect that having a hot spouse and active sex life would become a significant advantage when running.
If history teqches something is that the more of those, the more corruption and handing of favors and "legal corruption" pops up.
It is not by chance. It is just bc of how incentives are aligned. Those incentives, IMHO, can only be destroyed by strong deregulation and privatization. I dnt know how much of it but certainly a country should not be 45-50% or more GDP going public. Besides that centralized planning (we r going towards that) is usually super inefficient. So it is also a technical problem.
More when the peoople to arrange budgets do not pay a penalty even for their corruption in many cases, let alone for their management mistakes. Lagarde is still there and she gets 400.000 eur per year and took the decisios that made us go to these levels of inflation...on top of that she was involved in a corruption case that prescribed (not sure is the appropriate term in english, translated from spanish) I am no economist but I knew what would happen very likely... do they really pull our leg? I think so honestly.
Corporations are greedy, but they operate in a world where it is hard for them to enrich themselves without enriching others too.
Not that I am defending corrupt politicians, I just really don't know what to do about this, and looking at all the bad things corporations do i can't comprehend how they would suddenly become good when even less regulated than they already are
They do not improve your life objetively, usually they do not pay for the price of them when there is a mistake but get benefits from trafficking favors.
That would be fine if you had hundreds of CEOs competing in a market. Unfortunately they tend to merge and create monopolies. And some people salute this because of the growth at all costs mindset.
What else in nature grows at all costs? Oh right, cancer.
If there is benefit in a regulation, the person imposing it is not the person paying the negative outcomes of it. Never. So no, CEOs competing cannot get more than what they generate unless they distort the market in some way.
Now wait, let not be too hasty here. We should whiteboard this out. There are a lot of moving parts, and shutting down an idea too soon, would be wrong.
So to start, uh, just wondering, which politicians? Also, what would they be wearing?
Again, only asking for an accurate framing here.
https://futurama.fandom.com/wiki/Sprunjer?file=Srunger.png
I'm more worried about the fact that humans are, collectively at least, so hypocritical.
For the following examples, bare in mind that neither I nor the general public understand the actual laws, so any nits you pick need to be the kind that even a non-lawyer will accept:
I'm old enough to remember Clinton being impeached for lying about his affairs, and yet Republicans (collectively) are defending Trump for lying about affairs.
Or vice versa, Trump's classified documents at home vs. Biden's.
Probably the same elsewhere, but I don't trust that I'm not part of the problem with regard to UK politics (where I'm from), and my German isn't good enough to pay attention to what's happening where I now live.
Humans are violent too. If we tried as hard to train it out of people we'd make good progress.
The old Ted Kennedy maneuver
On both sides. It's all theater like WWE. You have the good guy and you have the heel. Each side has their own story with this format.
This is fundamental to loss aversion and compromise. There was never a "before." Open "negotiations" reward posturing, not compromise.
I also challenge the notion that higher pay leads to less corruption. If so, then why are Denmark, Finland, New Zealand and Norway ranked higher in the corruption perception index[1], when they are paid much, much less annually (especially Finland)[2]?
[1] https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2022 (https://archive.ph/fabjP)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_salaries_of_heads_of_s... (https://archive.ph/XGbpO)
Of course it's hard to find the "actual corruption" figures, but that doesn't mean the perceptions index is of any value.
These are surveys, so there's a limit to how reliable their results can be. However, I find surveys are a pretty good start when you need to get a general idea on how something does and you can't just measure it. How you value that is up to you, that's why I quote it in my comment.
[1] https://www.transparency.org/en/gcb
But on this particular index, I strongly suspect it is simply continuing existing biases. It's the thing people quote and by quoting it you get reinforce next year's rankings. Plus it's the kind of thing nobody can ever verify due to its nature.
On a side note, it might be interesting to see the evolution of this index over the years for any given country; that might lead to interesting conclusions on the bias confirmation you're talking about!
A horrifyingly large amount of UK political decision-making that should be minuted is instead carried out secretly on whatsapp.
If a politician votes for a law that reduces the speed limit to 50mph then is caught speeding is that corruption?
I think corruption is when someone abuses their position of power. This isn't abuse they just violated their own rules.
If more laws were objective (like speeding) and politicians were as surveilled as everyone else it wouldn't be an issue.
Also speeding is a bad example since the cops let people off all the time
> Also speeding is a bad example since the cops let people off all the time
That's why I said "and surveilled".
If at the same time they are breaking the law they created - that is corruption. For the people prosecuted for said crime with trials pending, it is information that is useful for them to know that the lawmaker conducted themselves in this manner.
That is, who's collecting kompromat on UK ministers, and for what purpose, and in exchange for what? (It's the press, isn't it)
Yes. Once one meets a journalist or two, you become aware that every scandal that comes to light was known by everyone for a long time.
There is someone else, however, the Whip. While the end recipient would ultimatley be the press, the power they hold is by collecting up little secrets like which Prime Minister was having an affair with their Chancellor ...
https://www.politicalite.com/exclusive/dirty-dossier-full-li...
2. The corruption of EU politicians is a major concern. If they think so little of privacy that they are willing to vote for laws like this, then they should certainly have to defend why they get any privacy at all. Corruption in government is one of the most damaging things happening in our society, and total surveillance would make it easier to detect & prove when they are lying.
Yes. I never said otherwise.
> then they should certainly have to defend why they get any privacy at all
That's the funny bit: they won't. They - and their family - will have the same if they use the same platforms. Which is why I firmly believe this isn't about corruption, this is about false beliefs and zealots who genuinely believe the internet and open communication is bad.
See, I can make up truly stupid neologisms as well. But at least mine isn't an effort to subvert foundational democratic norms.
Because unequal application of the law isn't law.
Whataboutism's necessity increases as the parties and potential charges under scrutiny are ever more alike.
In Whataboutism's novel sense, it is a brain-dead effort to try to get away using the law as a politicized cudgel.
You can tell by the need to invent a new word in order to describe an old concept.
Insofar as their is not any legal jeopardy involved, my explanation still applies however adjusted.
I mean those systems are already in place, at a minimum you'd have to argue they're ineffective or not as intrusive. And your hyperbole is not doing you any favours on that front.
Humans are not angels, and we should not build systems that hold out some unrealistic expectation that they are.
Too often politicians are viewed as "saviors of the people" only shortly before they become "corrupt villains".
If we want to attract competent public minded people, we need to do a lot of deep thinking and system design to get there.
<personal pain point>
One good place to start is to get rid of this idea that every citizen's input is equally informed, sane, reasonable, actionable, legal, or thoughtful.
In a democracy, every person hopefully is afforded certain rights, such as due process and free speech, but this does not mean what you say is "free from consequences". The corollary is that not all ideas have to be given equal consideration. Some people say batshit crazy things sometimes, and frankly, these kinds of comments make life hell for many public servants. School boards come to mind.
Speaking, personally, I would like to be a public servant, in some regard (again), but I don't think we have realistic processes in place to really gather thoughtful feedback from the public. Until we do, public servants have to deal with a lot of informed nonsense.
I think software developers and UX people might not realize how skilled and motivated we are at building systems that actually work. I'm not saying that we build the right thing all the time. But so many government processes are fundamentally broken in terms of information processing. I'm not saying that they are broken by e.g. the tropes like "lazy people in government". I'm saying that the systems are (anti) designed (or evolved) in such a way that they're so painful that driven people get driven out.
If you think of a government as a way of processing citizen input in a way that is consistent with budget constraints and laws, it seems that many government agencies are not built using the principles that so many of us take for granted: system design, failure analysis, testing. This isn't just government problem, of course ... it is characteristic of large organizations of all kinds.
Democracy does not function well when too many people are simultaneously uninformed and yelling. This crowds out informed people trying to have a discussion.
</personal pain point>
Nobody I know would run for state office. They pay poorly. You have to work in the state capitol, which in most state's is awful. You lose your privacy. And for what, a marginal legislative role?
The historic benefit was pride. But with nihilism in vogue and trust in government low, that reward is non-existent. Our intelligent and ambitious don't aim for public office. (It even feels trite to call it public service.) That's a problem.
I have friends who ran for and won local and federal offices. I specifically called out state because it min-maxes the power-honor trade-off.
That said, I’ll stand by my broader point. Normalised derision has made public service more taxing than it ever was. This is true globally, and has been called out by high-profile resignations in e.g. New Zealand and Scotland.
No, they become lobbyists instead. They have more power as they are the ones controlling the elected officials.
>That's a problem.
I would vote yes.
Beware the peculiar human creature who craves attention from strangers.
If we required politicians to stream their lives 24/7, then the unintended consequence would be a government run exclusively by Instagram influencers who already stream their lives 24/7. I get your point about sunlight on secrets. But limiting our governance to the pool of people I see on TikTok seems like a high price to pay.
(This is just a 2023 rephrasing of the age-old concern of electing someone willing to be a politician.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance
For example, if a country wants to implement the installation of state-owned anti-harassment "spyware" on their citizens phones, then this would first apply to politicians and those who work for the government, like anyone employed in a city hall or the traffic authority (normal citizens working there) or the like. This would run for 5 years, while citizens have the right to attempt to hack these systems without repercussions, in order to ensure that the security is up to the highest standards.
If after those 5 years the politicians and government employees are ok with it, if no major security concerns exist and the benefit has shown to be an obvious one, then it could be up for debate to implement this new technology.
I fear your carveout would quickly become an "Inner Party" situation, with those with real power declaring themselves exempt due to "national security" reasons. Imagine then that anyone in any position of authority but not real power would be subject to the surveillance as an "Outer Party" member.
I get that the intent is to show the people in charge the negative consequences of such policies, but I don't think that's the worst that could come of this.
Fallacy =/= thing I don’t like.
Any law voted yes by a politician would have:
A 6mo cool off period, and in that interim periodthe following would apply: the law in question would be Tripled (3x) and both ways (I.e. retroactive and future) to the elected officials, his immediate parents, sons, and siblings, as soon as the law is passed.
So if they pass a tax increase, the entire tax applies immediately to their family before it applies to the public.
Same would be surveillance. Same for healthcare changes. OR draft etc. They would eat their kill.
Its about time no?
Any regulatory body unelected chief + deputy should be subject to the same rules with a tidy bonus: agency rules would also impact the portfolio (materiality can be set at say FV in excess of 300% poverty line), or business relationships past + present for the "czars" and family members.
So If you want to run FDIC and want to make rules for banks, thats swell, but those rules will apply to bank X where your brother works, AND to bank Y where you were CEO. The new rule would apply to those banks first, the changes would be tripled, AND that would be applied retroactively.
Have fun with that revolving door!
We should also start to judge them based on outcomes rather than pointless metrics like GDP. How much did poverty decrease during your governments? How about crime? Life expectancy? And so on.
Government is NOT a job. Government is Public Service. Emphasis on 'service'
If you are not ready to do your service or duty, you are not fit to work in government.
The honor and duty of being a king came with the downside of the risks (beheading) to you and to your royal family, if you did a particularly bad job.
Current government officials have all the upside (revolving door) with almost zero downside. Some plebs break into congress and they get their pants in a jiffy.
We need to make them accountable. Them, and their families.
Yes that's exactly what I said. How about we forbid them from ever trading in stocks or participate in any investment where they might even have a remote conflict of interest?
I feel that would be the best way to keep crooks like Pelosi out of politics.
> Them, and their families.
This is nonsense but you must hate politicians apparently. I don't, I hate corruption.
I hate the kind of people it attracts.
We dont need politicians. We do need statemen.
I think you live fantayland if you think restricting their investment options will result in less politicians. Whats simply going to happen is that they will shift their activities to other income avenues. Less stock trading. More board jobs and speaking fees. The river of corruption keeps flowing even if in a different direction.
Instead, id like less incentives to corruption. That means eat what you kill. Id like more lincolns that take tremendous personal risk to themselves and their families, and declare wars against global superpowers, to then "close shop" and go back to their farm to retire.
Instead we have pelosis, mccains advancing the war lobby, or obamas making bank on "speaking fees"
Stock prohibition wont do a thing. You need to cut the incentive to sell favors. You need to re-introduce risk.
Workers who actually deal with confidential/personal information on citizens are the ones with the privilege to work without such monitoring.
The system is used to hide content, change content, shadow ban and the like.
Even by its own standards it's typically used incorrectly, but most users have no workable way to appeal.
The content reviewed is often visible to low paid workers in various countries. Similar systems have been infiltrated by hostile governments. (Twitter is a case in point.)
(If you use FB you can sometimes probe the system and better establish the details.)
The system is also used to prevent one user informing another that they've been squelched.
My guess, this would give rise to even less competent implementations and actual elimination of political opponents and the like.
From the start of the proposal itself:
"At least one in five children falls victim to sexual violence during childhood 3 . A 2021 global study found that more than one in three respondents had been asked to do something sexually explicit online during their childhood, and over half had experienced a form of child sexual abuse online"
I am (obviously) against child sexual abuse. I can also say, with very high certainty, that those numbers are being blown completely out-of-proportion, with the widest definition possible used.
To justify such a wide-reaching proposal behind this thin veneer of justification is absolutely nuts to me.
Don’t tell me, it’s to “protect the children”, the excuse under which all draconian citizen monitoring laws are introduced.
“To protect the children”….. no one can argue with it without sounding like a pedophile.
And it always comes with an assurance that the dramatic power overreach will never be used for anything else but hunting pedophiles.
But it’s never too long until they’re using it to hunt copyright breakers and all sorts or ordinary crime.
Switzerland and Costa Rica might be candidates, but I don't know enough to be sure.
LatAm there are a good few places left where you have a paradisiac nature/weather and no psychopaths trying to control your every move.
This allows to propose conditions that "Men" would never accept. It is the very idea that is fading.
...In fact, for a number of today's common practices we suggest the proposer to think whether [prominent figure] would have ever accepted it.
It seems very wrongly - because it just «seems» ignorant. Because where you read 'person' the normal and correct action is to search where the reference to the personality is. And in that case, _there is not_, and such lack was clearly expressed.
Again: no, you cannot use 'person' where you do not mean "a collection of special traits". You can go on annoyingly inventing language, but it was already there. And you cannot demand that others adopt your code, which has no real foundation.
Edit:
> seems like the obviously neutral choice
I missed that detail. «Neutral»? Neutral to what?! Gender? We should be obsessed by that?! We should introduce that in salads, in geometry, in this very page?!
'Man' has the same root of "mind", it means "having a mind", but so many things have it, so it must be a special one, must it not?
'Person' is a mask - that thing in which the voice "per-sonat". It means the mask, the specific one - crying, laughing, irate, whatever.
No, you cannot use 'person' if you do not mean "that with a personality" - because that is what it means.
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Which language are you speaking? Before something "«comes across»" to you, do you have your duly interposed cold-minded understanding modules on?
-- A "Man" is that entity which has a mind superior to that of e.g. monkeys. (In the context, the nuance is that of Dignity.)
-- A "person" is that entity which expresses a particular side of the possible expressions of being.
...Your proposal would be translated as "People with their own special ideas and leaning would etc." - it is not only hardly relevant to what was communicated, but possibly even stating the opposite. The original post, like in general the rest we post, was not meant to be written in demotic.
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And again to another reply, now hidden, if the above still needed:
'Man' has the same root of "mind", it means "having a mind", but so many things have it, so it must be a special one, must it not?
'Person' is a mask - that thing in which the voice "per-sonat". It means the mask, the specific one - crying, laughing, irate, whatever.
No, you cannot use 'person' if you do not mean "that with a personality" - because that is what it means.
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Edit: Oh, and incidentally - "why not just sticking to invented groupspeak?"
Well, paradoxically, also because it is not inclusive, is it, if some demand the normalcy of speaking actual Language, or maybe just when dealing with individuals from other groups! A convention is limited to convention adherents; this public is varied!
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children