Astonishing. The EU was caught using targeted ads in twitter to get support for a very intrusive law.
Smells really bad, but I'm too cynical to believe that anyone responsible will face consequences.
Smells really bad, but I'm too cynical to believe that anyone responsible will face consequences.
The EU has mechanisms which can deal with this sort of nonsense, however. The comissioners can't pass laws themselves, only propose them. The EU parliament has to actually vote the law proposed by the commission into law and it seems unlikely for this one to pass.
The EU parliament is directly elected by normal people, and is generally rather more in touch with reality than the commissioners are.
And who was almost successful in doing so. She still may be successful a year or two from now.
It is as if the EC was a big carousel of special interests where every commissioner takes his/her turn and others help them pass things, on order to be able to pass their own things later.
A classical oligarchy, the ancient Greeks would immediately recognize the problem.
Like c'mon folks. It sucks. It's really bad. We should do something about it and stop falling all over ourselves to explain how it's not that bad. You don't think the actual lawmakers are listening to their advice? Of course they are. They elected those proposers.
This weird defense we keep rallying to is tiresome. It's ok to criticize the EU. It's really not a paradise in any sense of the word and many, many of its constituent countries look far less democratic than the US.
Saying that indirect elections are undemocratic is like saying Switzerland is not a "liberal democracy" because its federal council is elected by the federal assembly instead by direct popular vote.
The CPC governing bodies are indirectly elected too, by members of the Party, of which most anyone can join. That doesn't make it democratic.
Let's not play fast and loose with democracy here. We deserve, and should agitate for, more representative democracies else we slide slowly toward the very tyrannies we oppose.
My point is that the EU commission is bad, its a shitty system that doesn't work well and needs to be reformed. Pointing at the EU as a whole and saying things like "The EU was caught..." lets the commission (and this commissioner) off the hook.
If we clearly say that the EU parliament works pretty well, and the commission doesn't then its obvious what needs reforming. If you just point at the EU as a whole then the problem looks impossible.
By the way I am no longer a citizen of a country in the EU, I'm from the UK (although I happen to live in the EU currently).
Then what's the point of them?
They are indirectly elected so that they can submit proposals that would normally be political suicide.
> who is pushing things way beyond her remit
I completely disagree. She is working exactly how the system is designed.
Europe needs to replace the commission with a democratically elected body. One that is elected in a different way to the parliament to get a different cross section of the population.
However as someone in the UK we have the exact same situation with the House of Lords.
The US is no better or worse than Europe, it's just a different alignment of values.
The "better or worse" argument is based entirely on each individual's alignment being closer or further away from one alignment or the other. This will come from personal experience, highly affected by the boundary the individual grew up within - which can affect can ones biases in both directions.
Obviously the EU is not without fault, but to be honest, I see more negatives around it, especially on HN than warranted.
Probably a bonus will happen to them.