You keep spreading this, but the eurocommssion president gets appointed by the European Council, which consists of democratically elected heads of state.
She is no less democratically elected than the prime minister of a parliamentary republic... They get appointed by the democratically elected parliament.
To be frank, it is a quite eccentric way to appoint an executive leader: imagine POTUS being chosen by state governors.
> She is no less democratically elected than the prime minister of a parliamentary republic
Well I would say this is arguable. Sure, her power is ultimately resulting from a popular mandate. But, if your country elects the head of state directly (say, France) then there are two "hops" between a popular mandate and the head of the EC. Whereas, if you are in a parliamentary system, it's three "hops" (MPs -> head of State -> EC president).
> You keep spreading this, but the eurocommssion president gets appointed by the European Council, which consists of democratically elected heads of state.
It does not matter who elects the EU commission, there needs to be a popular vote across the EU for every commissioner job and the EU Commission head. What we have today in EU is pure BS: every country gets a commissioner based on that country's influence within the bloc and every time a new country joins the EU, a new commissioner role just happens to be created.
I want to be able to choose from a number of candidates who should run the EU, not the prime minister or the president of a member country.
Everybody who holds even a little power in the EU construct needs to be voted by EU citizens, not appointed by who knows who.
This second- or third-hand "democracy" is not a democracy at all.
The US (electoral collage and 2 senator seats per state) and the UK (government ministers don't need to be MPs) also fail at this definition, and I would like them to be better in general too.
This is incorrect. The European Parliament elects the Commission President, not the European Council. In fact, von der Leyen narrowly squeaked through in 2019, getting 383 votes with 374 votes required (with her making it being attributed to her hawkish stance on Russia to an extent, which supposedly earned her additional Eastern European votes).
The European Council does nominate the candidate and infamously in 2019 overrode the informally agreed on spitzenkandidaten process, by which the nominee of the political group (EU Parliament equivalent of parties) with the most seats should have gotten the nomination.
That said, the EU Parliament is not bound by the nomination. It can very obviously reject any candidate it doesn't like, though of course the dynamics of candidate selection are heavily influenced by the European Council's nomination power.
But yes, there's nothing per se undemocratic about it and I'm a bit bewildered by people asking for direct election of the President rather than cleaning up the existing process, given that most EU member states elect their heads of government indirectly.
Believe it or not but the american system isn’t exact a blueprint for actual democracy. Many democratic systems don‘t make the election of the president a vote.
In actual democracy, like ancient Athens, most offices are filled by sortition rather than election.
Election is characteristic of oligarchy, where a few people make decisions for the many. Usually the few are supposed to be more qualified for or deserving of office, and election is a way of deciding which volunteer is most worthy.
In democracies, everyone is assumed to be equally qualified, as governing requires no special knowledge beyond some basic morality. So, lists of volunteers for office are compiled and names drawn from those lists at random, and for every office something like nine names are drawn, so volunteers can split their time between public service and their private affairs. This random selection also prevents the creation of political parties: you can’t get randomly selected by spending more on a campaign.
So, election of officers is oligarchic, rather than democratic. Democracies have votes instead on legislation, declarations of war snd peace, and jury trials.
Not really. In many of them the president is elected through the parliament (which is democratic in the indirect sense only). In quite a few of them they still have kings/queens instead of presidents. So they do put the ones holding the executive power to a vote, but that's not necessarily the president.
BUT in those countries the president (or royal) has mostly a more "decorative" type of role and not actual power. It is the government constituted by the parliamentary majority (or close to that) elected through general elections that holds the executive power. In EU there is no direct election of the president/commission, AND it holds most of the institutional executive power, which is what makes it undemocratic imo.
I love that argument now parroted all over the Internet. Love it because what these people actually eman is they want an elected president, which would legitimize EU even more, hopefully with its own constitution.
Not necessarily. One can eg want more power to the actually elected part of the EU structure and less power to the commission. Imo electing or not a president does not necessarily help with democracy, as the US example shows. And in europe most countries do not have a strong presidential system, except France and 2-3 others. So I doubt having "strong elected president" is what people actually have in mind for the EU.
People bring this up they may consider EU to be historically a centralized power structure. Whether it can practically be actually democratized or not is a matter of debate. One can bring up the democratic deficit of EU without harbouring actual thoughts or hopes that it can be fixed.
Why? Seems the US doesn't like democracy anymore and the EU for all its faults still does. I can see Japan joining too and potentially South Korea, Philippines, and others who are concerned about the state of the world and want to work together rather than drive the world apart.
If I’d said to you last year “Hey! I bet Canada is going to join the EU! No, of course not as charter-violating full member, as a newly invented ‘associate member’!” You’d probably have said “That’s both crazy and oddly specific, the chances of that have to be approaching zero”.
Yes but also "associate member" is, despite specificity, less surprising than full membership would have been.
Same as economic gravity meant that Brexit didn't disconnect UK from EU it only made trade harder, neither this kind of deal nor full membership can be much more than a band-aid for Trump's BS, it won't fully compensate for the harm he and his administration are doing to Canada.
Further cooperation between the EU and Canada has been talked about for a decade or so (see CETA). Just because it is news to you, it doesn't mean it is news.
Reality doesn't need to be plausible; we're all characters in each other's first-person narratives, with no access to the voice of an omniscient narrator.
I mean, it's only what the US is doing that's strange.
It's a country with tons of raw resources and a large consumer market, they're the "dream partner" for the large blocks (USA/China/EU, and Japan/India a bit behind). You buy their resources, they make a lot of money from it, you turn it into a final product and you make a lot of money from the value added, everyone is happy.
It's really weird that the US is suddenly not happy about this arrangement, and for resource-starved EU it's a golden opportunity; of course we will happily buy if the US doesn't want to anymore. That's why there is so little friction showing up (there will be more later, of course, but relatively little), why Canada can get so many deal quickly with everyone during this turnaround, it's that obvious of a win for everyone involved.
(as usual, the key blocking point that will need lots of work will be food, eve more than it is with the US, I wish we could scrap that entire part to get a v1 going quickly but alas it's not how trade deal work)
> (as usual, the key blocking point that will need lots of work will be food, eve more than it is with the US, I wish we could scrap that entire part to get a v1 going quickly but alas it's not how trade deal work)
I mean food/dairy/autos (which is also a major EU issue) have been 90% of the issues with Canada/USA trade for decades too so I have my doubts of them figuring it out any better.
I guess Canada is way more motivated then ever before as rapid souring of the relationship with the USA from this point would be a near economic collapse for them.
Trump knows it too, which is why he talks out of both sides of his mouth. He wants to decrease the trade deficit with Canada, but he wants to increase imports of oil and critical minerals and other raw resources. That's the majority of American imports from Canada, thus the source of the deficit.
Carney has said Canada is not looking to become a "member" of the EU. Meanwhile, "associate member" is an entirely new thing that has yet to be defined. These aren't incompatible statements.
It appears more accurate to say that Canada and the EU want to work together more closely than they do now. There will be something more than CETA. Perhaps more shared standards on food, etc.. Likely more military procurement cooperation. Perhaps something akin to NATO style military cooperation, just in case NATO implodes*. Perhaps there will be some cooperation in trade disputes as well.
I suspect there is recognition that middle powers like the EU, Canada, Australia, etc. can do a better job of cooperating without everyone joining the EU and giving up an uncomfortable amount of sovereignty. Slightly more cooperation than currently exists may be all that's required for middle powers to do a better job of standing up to the supers.
_________
*NATO imploding is unlikely, but it's always good to have a fallback.
The EU is NOTHING like the US. The difference between each member is the same as the difference between the US and Mexico, not like the difference between California and Utah.
It's utter ignorance to suggest that the EU could one day become a single country.
Nevertheless that exact plan is in the minds of every higher-up running the EU. Individual counties are an anachronism that will eventually be got rid of if the EU is to continue.
It also reflects how Europeans increasingly feel about the EU, especially young people who don't see or live within national borders and very much enjoy those freedoms. They are the future and what the EU will eventually become.
English is indeed the de facto common language of the EU, spoken by almost all young people. It's a great thing, English is the global language. Don't know why you think it would be a mess, but your comments seem to be fairly negative towards the EU.
Because I’m in an unfortunate and arbitrary situation having been born in the EU and believing in the project and spending 35 years of my life fine with being an EU citizen, to then find that I’m not one any more and as an organisation it actually has zero interest in having me as one or allowing me the rights and freedoms that I had as a member. Yet randomly, millions of people in my homeland get to enjoy all the rights that come with citizenship while also retaining all their rights as EU citizens because they randomly or accidentally have a parent or ancestor with an EU passport. And even further afield, I have a Finnish friend who is an Australian citizen and her son who has never been to the EU and is fully Australian has a right to live and work anywhere in the EU. And now it seems that Canadians are going to have the opportunity for that too.
It’s also the fact that the EU has some fairly significant structural failings, but it’s like some kind of Teflon organisation - if there’s something seriously wrong it can’t be pinned down or critiqued and issues become national issues out of its purview. Yet it gets to take all the credit while having none of the pushback when things go well.
We know that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, yet the EU seems to avoid the proper kind of scrutiny, and indeed, is now above and beyond any kind of scrutiny. What started as a trading block to ease transactions is a full-blown government with a president and multiple parliaments and a single-speed direction towards more and more power and integration, never less or for its job to be complete. This seems like a bizarre state of affairs, and one that trades on “well you enjoy the benefits, so do not see or critique the issues” and it seems to get away with that in the minds of pretty well everyone in Europe. And I was one of those people until I felt like I switched from being a welcome citizen to a barely-welcome visitor through no major fault of my own, and now have to be fingerprinted and scanned and computerised in exchange for visiting the Schengen area, as if I’m a potential criminal. Hence I think it’s actually a much darker organisation than it purports to be, and it trades on its lack of scrutiny, democracy, and transparency.
Finally, Von der Leyen is the kind of unelected aryan Übermensch who would have given Hitler a wet dream. I don’t like my government enough to believe that it would have needed a government with her as the president in making decisions for it. So I think there was actually some kind of intelligence of the UK crowd in pulling back, in hindsight. I think the EU needed the UK just as much as the UK needed it. Without the UK’s sobering “bad guy” influence to take the heat for vetoing the poor decisions, now there will be few limits to integrate and integrate and integrate until people realise that they’ve no nations left or no local control over anything and the fighting will begin again. Seems almost destined at this point.
“A single country” is pretty vague. For some definitions the EU already is one, for other definitions the EU can never be one.
What we do need is doing more things on the EU level. E.g. there’s no point in all member states building a nuclear umbrella or a space program. Some taxes also work better on an EU level because capital flows freely in the union and makes taxation hard for individual members.
You've obviously not a (patriotic) European. You also don't understand that Europeans are more similar to each other than they are to the rest of the world. Ask one how many views they share with Americans, Asians or Africans.
I am European first and foremost, I have an ethnic nationality which is secondary and almost irrelevant. In my mind Euorpe is actual a large collection of regions, which hold more meaning for inhabitants than nation states. But we all love our European brethren no matter who they are.
This is complete nonsense and absolutely no European considers themself European first and their own country's nationality second. You're neither European, nor American, nor Asian or African or anything else, you're clearly a bot.
The other day in a Dutch geopolitics podcast (Boekestijn en de Wijk) it was mentioned that if there's one country that could be added to the EU "at the stroke of a pen", it would be Canada. In terms of state of the democracy, shared values, etc. And I agree with that perspective. But at the same time I thought that if there's one way to get into conflict with the current US administration - who declared EU their only adversary in the US National Security Plan - this is it. It would be like a mirror image of Russia feeling encroached by NATO, but then in the Western hemisphere. And perhaps a red cloth invitation to the frothing bull(ies) of the Trump administration to invade their neighbor.
Then that means Canada must build overwhelming firepower clearly and mine the border to hell, build anit aircraft systems everywhere and take whatever steps needed to prevent and repel an unprovoked invasion, just like it is logical for Ukraine to do the same to protect itself from Russia.
This seems to be what Canada and Europe want from each other. Both have interests in repelling other powers that deserve to have their economic and military capabilities weakened, and both seem to be able to help each other on expanding economic base, energy security, food supply, and resource availability/manufacturing capability with existing intellectual and trade property that will distance them from the US MIC.
The US-Iran war is very unpopular and it's not even that the US is winning it.
Going against Canada would mean .. what? Having tanks roll in Toronto downtown? Assuming it would be a military success, which isn't guaranteed after what happens in Iran,that would be unpopular beyond anything we've seen.
Tough words, that's the worse we may expect from the US gov realistically.
From what I read about what they wanted Canada to sign (the "new deal" Canada walked out of), they want to give them strict conditions and no abilities to make new deals with someone else to make them fully dependant. So the goal was not really military conquest but economic stranglehold. All the while apparently asking to tone down their minorities including the french one.
There is an alternate timeline where Canada signed that, and it looks much bleaker for them down the road.
This “at the stroke of the pen” idea is fantastical. Actual Canadians would have next to no interest in this. Whole provinces of Canada don’t even want to be part of Canada so their appetite for having the EU parliament and Commission anywhere near them would be slim to none. Having 250million Europeans eligible to migrate to Canada would similarly be dead in the water even if a few people in Toronto and Quebec might warm to the idea of going the other way.
The context in the podcast was that EU was too picky in their reform criteria for inclusion for current candidates on the European continent, but that Canada as a modern country would sail past and pass the exam. The ease with which these experts concluded it would make sense for Canada to join struck me, because impact on geopolitical relationship with US was imho too easily overlooked. It is a sentiment I hear more often now, in the news.
> But at the same time I thought that if there's one way to get into conflict with the current US administration - who declared EU their only adversary in the US National Security Plan - this is it.
As stated by Carney, this is not exactly true, but something like this has been expected. From a legal and sovereignty standpoint, EU membership of any kind does not make sense. A novel bloc of nations centered around military and economic cooperation that includes the EU and Canada however, does.
Portugal is not part of the Benelux. Poland is not part of the Western Union. Ireland is an island. Yet here we are, because we have enough in common that we would rather cooperate than compete.
Who knows, maybe after all the doom and gloom the EU might just win by default because the other world powers have become so unattractive the rest of the world rallies around them?
And it's not even "novel" in the sense that this group already exist, except so far it was gravitating around the US, and it might just reorient to gravitate around someone else.
You don‘t want to have any level of association with us, as you‘ve made clear repeatedly over many years, involving many insults.
Don‘t expect the EU to actively offer anything again. Do the first step (after getting a clear view what proportion of your population actually wants that).
The United Kingdom would be a great member, as you had been. But that ship has politically sailed.
If your country initiated a divorce, it makes no sense for the other party to invite you again. You should have to request first and show to them eg with a vote you won't again flake out in a few years.
The UK will likely be welcome back right after everyone's confident Leave (be that Tory, Farage, or whoever the even worse party that Musk now supports are) definitely won't win a general election for at least another generation.
Well the issue there then is that Farage’s Reform party seem likely to win that election. The current ostensibly-left-wing Labour government also have absolutely no appetite for rejoining either. Even the coalition of anti-growth eco-warriors and islamists which is the contemporary Green Party don’t say much which is a real surprise because it seems like such an easy vote-winner for them. Finally, it seems strange that the EU should pretty-well require the governments of its potential members to be left-wing or centrist, especially as this demand is now causing constituents of the EU to start to swing to the hard right too.
Far right wing and nationalism caused two world wars in european soil. May or may not be related. And right wing parties themselves generally hate the EU, so nobody is asking for it anyways.
How will a voluntary organization with no military force cause a world war,.while actual physical war is being waged by Russia right in its neighborhood?
Tell me immediately and bluntly in full the mechanism of EU causing a world war right now, otherwise back off that absurd statement.
I agree with your moderation in general, but this time I need some help to understand what did I say that was nationalistic. People from different nationalities are broadly approaching this subject of international cooperation according to their country of origin. And that is flamebait?
Sweeping generalizations about people from countries A, B, C are almost certain to end in flamewar. Opinion is certain to be split in every country, and you can't know where all the commenters are from, even if a few people happen to say so.
I would also say that "I think it is telling" (without saying what the tell is) and "while Americans explain to us" have clear flamebait overtones that point in a polarized, if not hostile direction. This is not the curious conversation we're trying for here.
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[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 24.4 ms ] threadBut not democracy when electing/selecting her.
She is no less democratically elected than the prime minister of a parliamentary republic... They get appointed by the democratically elected parliament.
> She is no less democratically elected than the prime minister of a parliamentary republic
Well I would say this is arguable. Sure, her power is ultimately resulting from a popular mandate. But, if your country elects the head of state directly (say, France) then there are two "hops" between a popular mandate and the head of the EC. Whereas, if you are in a parliamentary system, it's three "hops" (MPs -> head of State -> EC president).
It does not matter who elects the EU commission, there needs to be a popular vote across the EU for every commissioner job and the EU Commission head. What we have today in EU is pure BS: every country gets a commissioner based on that country's influence within the bloc and every time a new country joins the EU, a new commissioner role just happens to be created.
I want to be able to choose from a number of candidates who should run the EU, not the prime minister or the president of a member country.
Everybody who holds even a little power in the EU construct needs to be voted by EU citizens, not appointed by who knows who.
This second- or third-hand "democracy" is not a democracy at all.
The US (electoral collage and 2 senator seats per state) and the UK (government ministers don't need to be MPs) also fail at this definition, and I would like them to be better in general too.
1. The majority of representatives in Bundestag represents (up to rounding issues) the majority of voters.
2. Parties advertise their chancellor candidate before the election, and voters take that into account when choosing which party to vote for.
The European Council does nominate the candidate and infamously in 2019 overrode the informally agreed on spitzenkandidaten process, by which the nominee of the political group (EU Parliament equivalent of parties) with the most seats should have gotten the nomination.
That said, the EU Parliament is not bound by the nomination. It can very obviously reject any candidate it doesn't like, though of course the dynamics of candidate selection are heavily influenced by the European Council's nomination power.
But yes, there's nothing per se undemocratic about it and I'm a bit bewildered by people asking for direct election of the President rather than cleaning up the existing process, given that most EU member states elect their heads of government indirectly.
Election is characteristic of oligarchy, where a few people make decisions for the many. Usually the few are supposed to be more qualified for or deserving of office, and election is a way of deciding which volunteer is most worthy.
In democracies, everyone is assumed to be equally qualified, as governing requires no special knowledge beyond some basic morality. So, lists of volunteers for office are compiled and names drawn from those lists at random, and for every office something like nine names are drawn, so volunteers can split their time between public service and their private affairs. This random selection also prevents the creation of political parties: you can’t get randomly selected by spending more on a campaign.
So, election of officers is oligarchic, rather than democratic. Democracies have votes instead on legislation, declarations of war snd peace, and jury trials.
BUT in those countries the president (or royal) has mostly a more "decorative" type of role and not actual power. It is the government constituted by the parliamentary majority (or close to that) elected through general elections that holds the executive power. In EU there is no direct election of the president/commission, AND it holds most of the institutional executive power, which is what makes it undemocratic imo.
People bring this up they may consider EU to be historically a centralized power structure. Whether it can practically be actually democratized or not is a matter of debate. One can bring up the democratic deficit of EU without harbouring actual thoughts or hopes that it can be fixed.
That’s why.
Same as economic gravity meant that Brexit didn't disconnect UK from EU it only made trade harder, neither this kind of deal nor full membership can be much more than a band-aid for Trump's BS, it won't fully compensate for the harm he and his administration are doing to Canada.
It's a country with tons of raw resources and a large consumer market, they're the "dream partner" for the large blocks (USA/China/EU, and Japan/India a bit behind). You buy their resources, they make a lot of money from it, you turn it into a final product and you make a lot of money from the value added, everyone is happy.
It's really weird that the US is suddenly not happy about this arrangement, and for resource-starved EU it's a golden opportunity; of course we will happily buy if the US doesn't want to anymore. That's why there is so little friction showing up (there will be more later, of course, but relatively little), why Canada can get so many deal quickly with everyone during this turnaround, it's that obvious of a win for everyone involved.
(as usual, the key blocking point that will need lots of work will be food, eve more than it is with the US, I wish we could scrap that entire part to get a v1 going quickly but alas it's not how trade deal work)
I mean food/dairy/autos (which is also a major EU issue) have been 90% of the issues with Canada/USA trade for decades too so I have my doubts of them figuring it out any better.
I guess Canada is way more motivated then ever before as rapid souring of the relationship with the USA from this point would be a near economic collapse for them.
It appears more accurate to say that Canada and the EU want to work together more closely than they do now. There will be something more than CETA. Perhaps more shared standards on food, etc.. Likely more military procurement cooperation. Perhaps something akin to NATO style military cooperation, just in case NATO implodes*. Perhaps there will be some cooperation in trade disputes as well.
I suspect there is recognition that middle powers like the EU, Canada, Australia, etc. can do a better job of cooperating without everyone joining the EU and giving up an uncomfortable amount of sovereignty. Slightly more cooperation than currently exists may be all that's required for middle powers to do a better job of standing up to the supers.
_________
*NATO imploding is unlikely, but it's always good to have a fallback.
Carney can see this and wants a piece of the action. The question is if the EU can escape its parochial myopia and see it.
Hopefully Russia will do something even stupider and precipitate the existential crisis that the EU desperately needs to get off its ass.
"Shit Americans say"
The EU is NOTHING like the US. The difference between each member is the same as the difference between the US and Mexico, not like the difference between California and Utah.
It's utter ignorance to suggest that the EU could one day become a single country.
It’s also the fact that the EU has some fairly significant structural failings, but it’s like some kind of Teflon organisation - if there’s something seriously wrong it can’t be pinned down or critiqued and issues become national issues out of its purview. Yet it gets to take all the credit while having none of the pushback when things go well.
We know that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, yet the EU seems to avoid the proper kind of scrutiny, and indeed, is now above and beyond any kind of scrutiny. What started as a trading block to ease transactions is a full-blown government with a president and multiple parliaments and a single-speed direction towards more and more power and integration, never less or for its job to be complete. This seems like a bizarre state of affairs, and one that trades on “well you enjoy the benefits, so do not see or critique the issues” and it seems to get away with that in the minds of pretty well everyone in Europe. And I was one of those people until I felt like I switched from being a welcome citizen to a barely-welcome visitor through no major fault of my own, and now have to be fingerprinted and scanned and computerised in exchange for visiting the Schengen area, as if I’m a potential criminal. Hence I think it’s actually a much darker organisation than it purports to be, and it trades on its lack of scrutiny, democracy, and transparency.
Finally, Von der Leyen is the kind of unelected aryan Übermensch who would have given Hitler a wet dream. I don’t like my government enough to believe that it would have needed a government with her as the president in making decisions for it. So I think there was actually some kind of intelligence of the UK crowd in pulling back, in hindsight. I think the EU needed the UK just as much as the UK needed it. Without the UK’s sobering “bad guy” influence to take the heat for vetoing the poor decisions, now there will be few limits to integrate and integrate and integrate until people realise that they’ve no nations left or no local control over anything and the fighting will begin again. Seems almost destined at this point.
What we do need is doing more things on the EU level. E.g. there’s no point in all member states building a nuclear umbrella or a space program. Some taxes also work better on an EU level because capital flows freely in the union and makes taxation hard for individual members.
I am European first and foremost, I have an ethnic nationality which is secondary and almost irrelevant. In my mind Euorpe is actual a large collection of regions, which hold more meaning for inhabitants than nation states. But we all love our European brethren no matter who they are.
Going against Canada would mean .. what? Having tanks roll in Toronto downtown? Assuming it would be a military success, which isn't guaranteed after what happens in Iran,that would be unpopular beyond anything we've seen.
Tough words, that's the worse we may expect from the US gov realistically.
Trade wars and sanctions can get very nasty too. I don't know about Canada, but most of the EU runs on US Big Tech to name just one sensitive sector.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2we30p661o
They whole point of that article is that it's a weird, curious thing from the past that doesn't exist any more.
That's true, right now. The way things are going though the EU is spurred to finally cut the cord with US Big Tech because of the security risk.
It didn't used to be like that before Trump got into power. Trump is bad for business because he's an unreliable partner that's turning on his allies.
There is an alternate timeline where Canada signed that, and it looks much bleaker for them down the road.
That would be the icing on the cake.
Founded by Europeans, still mostly populated by people of European ancestry, with laws written by Europeans and based on European ideas.
European isn't just a geographic descriptor :-)
With the US self-destructing these countries need a new plan. They are routinely being pushed around by China and need a counterweight.
Don‘t expect the EU to actively offer anything again. Do the first step (after getting a clear view what proportion of your population actually wants that).
The United Kingdom would be a great member, as you had been. But that ship has politically sailed.
Tell me immediately and bluntly in full the mechanism of EU causing a world war right now, otherwise back off that absurd statement.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
I would also say that "I think it is telling" (without saying what the tell is) and "while Americans explain to us" have clear flamebait overtones that point in a polarized, if not hostile direction. This is not the curious conversation we're trying for here.