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Why every 12 months the European Commission comes up with a total dumb and authoritarian proposal and we have to actively fight it? It’s just tiring

moffkalast 4y ago
Because of the person who's currently the president of the Commission, that's why. Ask any German about von der Leyen.
- neuronic 4y ago
  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.
  - moffkalast 4y ago
    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.
nnx 4y ago
We have to win every time, but they have to win only once.
- Spivak 4y ago
  This is only true if you give up once it passes. Then you only have to win once to get it repealed.
  - noduerme 4y ago
    Explain that to anyone living under a dictatorship their grandparents originally supported.
    - Jensson 4y ago
      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.
      - cryptonector 4y ago
        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.
        Jensson 4y ago
        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.
        FredPret 4y ago
        So edgy
        Jensson 4y ago
        That doesn't mean I'm wrong.
        revelio 4y ago
sacrosancty 4y ago
Because European people keep voting for their local parties that nominate these commissioners. Your complaint is ultimately with European voters for voting "wrong".
throwawaylinux 4y ago
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.
- jay_kyburz 4y ago
  This is a really dumb thing to say and it really undermines the power of every day people to have a say in how our world is run. 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.
  - throwawaylinux 4y ago
    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.
    - ShroudedNight 4y ago
      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.
      - throwawaylinux 4y ago
        > 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.
nigrioid 4y ago
It's the prototype for the NWO. Only half joking.
bjornsing 4y ago
The EU has always been the bureaucrats’ paradise. Now it’s slowly (but perhaps not surprisingly) turning into everybody else’s nightmare.
- feeela 4y ago
  No turning required. A bureaucrats dream was always everybody else's nightmare. Still, it is disturbing to watch all of Orwell's ideas getting implemented in real life
ssss11 4y ago
You’ve answered your question. It’s tiring. They hope to wear people down.
0xy 4y ago
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] [1] https://www.npr.org/2022/04/23/1094485542/eu-law-big-tech-hate-speech-disinformation https://www.npr.org/2022/04/23/1094485542/eu-law-big-tech-ha...
- derefr 4y ago
  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.
  - feeela 4y ago
    Only tru for those european nations, who hadn't that in their national laws already.
- probably_wrong 4y ago
  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. As far as I'm concerned, GDPR is great.
- anonyfox 4y ago
  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.
- 4y ago
geysersam 4y ago
Who elected those guys anyway? I sure never had the chance to vote for any of them. 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.
- pmontra 4y ago
  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.
- raverbashing 4y ago
  > Who elected those guys anyway? 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."
  - geysersam 4y ago
    Of course. 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.
Proven 4y ago
[dead]
inglor_cz 4y ago
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.
feeela 4y ago
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.
- bt4u 4y ago
  [dead]
- fanagra32 4y ago
  If you really think that those guys are extremists, then you haven't seen nothing yet. Take a peek over to Italian politics and you get a glimpse of what could be coming. Or Israel.
- atlantic 4y ago
  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.
fanagra32 4y ago
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.
ransom1538 4y ago
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.
mikrotikker 4y ago
Remember the "Brexit was just about racism" folks?
- maxilevi 4y ago
  To be fair it’s not like the UK lags behind in randomly proposing authoritarian stuff.
  - mikrotikker 4y ago
    Yes it is true.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
netbioserror 4y ago
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.

moffkalast 4y ago

Because of the person who's currently the president of the Commission, that's why. Ask any German about von der Leyen.

neuronic 4y ago
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.
- moffkalast 4y ago
  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.

nnx 4y ago

We have to win every time, but they have to win only once.

Spivak 4y ago
This is only true if you give up once it passes. Then you only have to win once to get it repealed.
- noduerme 4y ago
  Explain that to anyone living under a dictatorship their grandparents originally supported.
  - Jensson 4y ago
    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.
    - cryptonector 4y ago
      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.
      - Jensson 4y ago
        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.
        FredPret 4y ago
        So edgy
        Jensson 4y ago
        That doesn't mean I'm wrong.
        revelio 4y ago

sacrosancty 4y ago

Because European people keep voting for their local parties that nominate these commissioners. Your complaint is ultimately with European voters for voting "wrong".

throwawaylinux 4y ago

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.

jay_kyburz 4y ago
This is a really dumb thing to say and it really undermines the power of every day people to have a say in how our world is run. 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.
- throwawaylinux 4y ago
  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.
  - ShroudedNight 4y ago
    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.
    - throwawaylinux 4y ago
      > 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.

nigrioid 4y ago

It's the prototype for the NWO. Only half joking.

bjornsing 4y ago

The EU has always been the bureaucrats’ paradise. Now it’s slowly (but perhaps not surprisingly) turning into everybody else’s nightmare.

feeela 4y ago
No turning required. A bureaucrats dream was always everybody else's nightmare. Still, it is disturbing to watch all of Orwell's ideas getting implemented in real life

ssss11 4y ago

You’ve answered your question. It’s tiring. They hope to wear people down.

0xy 4y ago

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] [1] https://www.npr.org/2022/04/23/1094485542/eu-law-big-tech-hate-speech-disinformation https://www.npr.org/2022/04/23/1094485542/eu-law-big-tech-ha...

derefr 4y ago
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.
- feeela 4y ago
  Only tru for those european nations, who hadn't that in their national laws already.
probably_wrong 4y ago
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. As far as I'm concerned, GDPR is great.
anonyfox 4y ago
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.
4y ago

geysersam 4y ago

Who elected those guys anyway? I sure never had the chance to vote for any of them. 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.

pmontra 4y ago
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.
raverbashing 4y ago
> Who elected those guys anyway? 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."
- geysersam 4y ago
  Of course. 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.

Proven 4y ago

[dead]

inglor_cz 4y ago

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.

feeela 4y ago

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.

bt4u 4y ago
[dead]
fanagra32 4y ago
If you really think that those guys are extremists, then you haven't seen nothing yet. Take a peek over to Italian politics and you get a glimpse of what could be coming. Or Israel.
atlantic 4y ago
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.

fanagra32 4y ago

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.

ransom1538 4y ago

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.

mikrotikker 4y ago

Remember the "Brexit was just about racism" folks?

maxilevi 4y ago
To be fair it’s not like the UK lags behind in randomly proposing authoritarian stuff.
- mikrotikker 4y ago
  Yes it is true.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

netbioserror 4y ago

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.