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Comment by stormdennis | Hacker News Reader

"The proposed Chat control EU law will"

If it's a proposed law then it should read

"The proposed Chat control EU law would"

Part of that sentence may have been elided. You could read it as "[If enacted] the proposed Chat control EU law will". That is not an uncommon construct.

Thanks for this comment. I would add restricting chat to 17+ people sounds utterly unfeasable considering how its use is widespread by teenagers of all ages.

At last, an optimistic comment.

Hopefully the Parliament and Council do their job and shoot it down, as they usually do with the average deranged Leyen proposal.

The EU is not very democratic - if they want to do something they will and there’s nothing that can be done about it.

That's not really correct. The European Commission might not be directly elected by EU citizens, but the members of the European Parliament are elected by EU citizens, and the Council of the European Union is made up of one minister from each EU member state. A law doesn't get passed without support from the democratically elected parliament members and the national representatives in the council.

It's also worth noting that the President of the European Commission is elected by the European Council (not to be confused with the Council of the European Union). The European Council is made up of the heads of state of the EU member countries (who are themselves generally elected).

Could it be more democratic? Yeah, sure, maybe the President should be directly elected by constituents rather than by heads of states. But it's not undemocratic, and after a law is proposed by the European Commission, the democratic process decides whether it should pass or not.

EDIT: Thank you for your comment though! I'm not in an EU member state, so I haven't really known about this stuff before (I'm just affected by the laws without being a part of the EU demos). Your comment prompted me to research how this stuff actually works.

> The European Commission isn't very democratic

The commissioners are appointed by the democratically elected government of each country, to push the agenda of the democratically elected government of each country.

Thanks, I was editing my comment as you wrote yours to add that detail. It's an important point.

Each layer of abstraction takes away choice in this model, and is indeed why Republics have Constitutions, among other reasons. The scope elected officials have is frankly too grand, resulting in positions where one wants to restrict your freedoms and lower taxes, and another wants to restrict your freedoms and raise taxes, and in many cases, the freedoms they want to restrict are the same freedoms -- and then when those freedoms of course are restricted, it's the "people" who voted for it!

And then to have elected officials that are elected by people who got in this way in the first place adds a whole layer of not having the interests of the public in mind.

Is it democratic, the way we normally think of the meaning of that word these days? Sure. Is it something we should take comfort in because of that fact? Personally, I lean toward "no."

Illusion of choice does a lot to pacify a population against tyranny, and the authoritarians are well aware of that fact after the last century or so.

Those two layers of abstraction make all the difference. Directly elected officials are particularly bad, imagine that.

Let me say it again: EU citizens elect members of the European Parliament, there is no extra layer of abstraction. And it's precisely the European Parliament which can do something about it if the Commission is proposing a bad law.

The main problem is that the European Parliament can't write new laws. There's no way to directly elect members that write laws. In every democratic country, you do.

I agree. It would have been better if a directly elected body could propose laws. Whether you consider the EU "not very democratic" is kinda subjective, but there are certainly strong arguments that it's not as democratic as it should be.

But "if [the not directly elected parts of the EU] want to do something they will and there’s nothing that can be done about it" remains incorrect.

In my opinion, the EU to be really democratic, the Parliament, that we elect directly, should be able to have the same "right of initiative" (i.e. write laws, not just to approve them) as the Commission/Council.

How many democratic governments are there if "if they want to do something they will and there’s nothing that can be done about it" can be used as a filter for not democratic?

Not that there is anything good about this proposed law, mind you :(

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