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Its just me that thinks there is something really wrong with the way politicians try to pass such controversial laws? Politicians bring up something controvers

Its just me that thinks there is something really wrong with the way politicians try to pass such controversial laws? Politicians bring up something controversial. Most of the time influenced by some lobby with very little interest in public benefit. To combat this lots of people need to do activism. Those people need to devote your time and energy to prevent such thing. So far it sounds good but after the dust settles the same politicians and lobbysts bring the thing again this time with another name or sneakily group it into some other law. Perhaps something bad happened and that momentarily gained public support, of course with lots of emotions involved and very little context given to the common folk. The politicians and lobbyists are literally being paid for this. You are not. They can pretty much push the same bullshit forever until it stays while you are devoting your life to prevent it.

layer8 3y ago
What alternative do you propose? The politicians are elected representatives of and by the people.
- spencerflem 3y ago
  Take the money out of politics as much as possible and there will be less incentive for politicians to sell out their people
  - layer8 3y ago
    What do you mean by that? There’s already anti-corruption laws, and corruption is actually being prosecuted. To have less incentives, you’d actually have to pay politicians more, which would constitute putting more money into politics.
    - raincom 3y ago
      Anti-corruption laws don't deal with collusions much, as there is no tangible proof of "pay for play" in such situations. Look at the US Senator Menedez case of late: he and his wife are stupid to accept cash, gold bars, Benz cars, etc. Sophisticated players in the beltway don't accept such "play for cash", because these colluders trust each other beyond the term limits.
    - ekianjo 3y ago
      > and corruption is actually being prosecuted. In which world do you live?
    - mcpackieh 3y ago
      > To have less incentives, you’d actually have to pay politicians more This theory presumes that when people have more money, their desire to have even more money diminishes. This presumption is not true. (It might be somewhat true for common sorts of people who find pleasure in simple things and only want enough money to satisfy their basic material needs (food, shelter, medical care). But it's definitely not true when you're talking about people with high levels of ambition, which includes virtually all politicians.)
    - spencerflem 3y ago
      Oh, yea I'm for paying politicians directly. Meant more like, the money you need to run a campaign
- logicchains 3y ago
  Something like "There are only X laws allowed. Every time you want to add a new law and already have X laws, you must remove one existing law". Then we'd get laws covering the most important things without a bunch of bureaucracy on top of that.
  - layer8 3y ago
    How do you define “number of laws”? Laws usually consist of many individual rules, and one can just make the law “bigger” to reduce the nominal number of laws without actually reducing the contents. In addition, I don’t see how this would cause the laws to become more in the interest of the citizens than of the legislators.
    - logicchains 3y ago
      >How do you define “number of laws” It's not an easy thing to do but that doesn't mean it couldn't be done. Maybe something like defining it as a limit on the total sum amount of text in all laws? A limit on the amount of new laws that could be passed would make it much easier for citizens to keep up with the proposed changes and oppose any they disagreed with; they couldn't be ddossed by the legislators.
      - layer8 3y ago
        Certain details (procedural and technical specifications) of laws are often relegated to secondary texts. This would just start a game of how to encode the desired legislation so that it still nominally fits the rules (law golfing instead of code golfing). The whole approach is a fool’s errand, IMO, and would just make the legislation even more inscrutable for the layperson.
  - jokethrowaway 3y ago
    That's a brilliant game mechanic. I think for reality we should still remove power out of politicians
  - madacol 3y ago
- hanniabu 3y ago
  If a law doesn't pass, the contents can't be brought up in a new law for a minimum of 5 years.
  - layer8 3y ago
    How do you define that? It’s never exactly the same contents, usually has substantial changes in the approach.
  - pca006132 3y ago
    So now malicious users can give bad proposals, get it rejected, and block other potentially good proposals for 5 years? Sounds like a good DoS scheme.
  - _jal 3y ago
    Please explain how you would forbid these from being serially brought without allowing bad actors to disrupt normal legislative business. "No abortion after 49 days." "No abortion after 50 days." "No hospital shall be used for abortions." "Doctors cannot perform abortions."
- t0bia_s 3y ago
  Eurpean Commison is not elected by citizens of EU. They are nominated by the European Council and confirmed by the European Parliament. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Commission https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Commission Similar system is for WHO. They are not elected organisations, yet shape our laws. This bother quite a lot of people and don't bring a trust in system.
  - misnome 3y ago
    Neither are government cabinets, ambassadors or generals.
    - hannofcart 3y ago
      Assuming that you're taking about liberal democracies, ambassadors and generals don't pass laws that the rest of us have to abide by. The government cabinet has some more democratic legitimacy in so far as that they generally comprise of elected representatives. So your statement is a non-sequitur.
      - growse 3y ago
        In the UK, there's no requirement that the cabinet is formed of elected representatives. Government ministers are often Lords. Besides, even if the defense secretary is an MP, he wasn't elected on a platform of national security by the population. So if there's a non sequitur anywhere, it's in application of any democratic legitimacy to the job of holding a significant cabinet post by winning the votes of a few ten thousand people for commons seat.
        hannofcart 3y ago
        Sure, but the UK cabinet draws its power from the fact that it explicitly has support of a majority of the directly elected members of Parliament. When it's established that they don't, they end up getting ousted (as happens with no confidence motions).
      - 3y ago
- jokethrowaway 3y ago
  What about every service owned by the government becomes private and offered by private companies and we remove the goverment completely? I'd kill to see The Machinery of Freedom by D. Friedman in real life
  - Tagbert 3y ago
    then you have everything run by the equivalent of insurance companies. That would be much worse. Companies are not inherently more responsive or even more efficient.
- Gud 3y ago
  Swiss style direct and decentralized democracy. https://www.eda.admin.ch/aboutswitzerland/en/home/politik-geschichte/politisches-system.html https://www.eda.admin.ch/aboutswitzerland/en/home/politik-ge... "Switzerland is governed under a federal system at three levels: the Confederation, the cantons and the communes. Thanks to direct democracy, citizens can have their say directly on decisions at all political levels. This wide range of opportunities for democratic participation plays a vital role in a country as geographically, culturally and linguistically varied as Switzerland."
dsign 3y ago
I wonder what would happen if there were not politicians, if the parliament of Europe were the sum of all its citizens voting for laws in some sort of mega-stack-overflow consensus system. A part of me wants to believe this madness would end. Another part fears that we would try, at least for a few months, total surveillance and bisections as a form of capital punishment. But on the bright side, we would be able to correct for bad legislation much faster.
- ulnarkressty 3y ago
  More targeted ad campaigns, as per the article. The interests will always be there.
- logicchains 3y ago
  >I wonder what would happen if there were not politicians, if the parliament of Europe were the sum of all its citizens voting for laws in some sort of mega-stack-overflow consensus system There's another way to achieve something similar less chaotically: demarchy, which was used for some things in ancient Greece. This involves electing people at random for a limited time period; if the selection is truly random, then the outcome of a couple hundred randomly selected people voting on something should usually match the outcome of the whole population voting on something. And due to it only being for a short period of time, you avoid anyone accumulating too much power.
  - noman-land 3y ago
    I think you're basically describing the Byzantine fault tolerant consensus mechanisms used by blockchains.
  - amelius 3y ago
    It's nice in theory but politicians will never allow themselves to be replaced by random people, so good luck getting this implemented.
    - scott_w 3y ago
      That’s not why it won’t work, the reason is even more fundamental: most people won’t want to do it because it’s a fucking hard job that puts you in the limelight.
NoZZz 3y ago
It's about time we have some standing voted directives originating with the people. Perhaps an AI could verify law proposals and shoot them down if the citizenry oposes it. Properly tallied and percentaged of course.
jokethrowaway 3y ago
That's exactly why we need to STOP taxation and DECENTRALIZE power away from a central goverment. Of course, they'll always have an interest in enriching themselves and their friends
- patrickmay 3y ago
  Exactly. The problem isn't the specific abuses of power, it's the power itself. The EU (and the US federal government) simply shouldn't be able to do most of what they do.
  - eigenket 3y ago
    > The EU (and the US federal government) simply shouldn't be able to do most of what they do In my opinion this sentence straight up does not make sense. The EU and the US federal government are dramatically different, you can't even really compare their roles meaningfully. The EU is, and behaves like, a club of seperate individual nations. The US federal government is a real national government in ways the EU simply isn't. Even restricting attention to the EU it doesn't even really make sense. Which part of the EU are you complaining about? You're writing this in response to a proposal from the EU commission, so I guess you're pissed with them, but the commission can't make its proposals into law without parliament voting on it and the European Council agreeing. The EU parliament is (overwhelmingly) unlikely to pass this proposal into law and the European Council also has big problems with it. This proposal is essentially one country (Sweden) sending a particuarly idiotic comissioner (Ylva Johansson), and the rest of the EU apparatus resisting the shit she is trying to push.
BHSPitMonkey 3y ago
Meanwhile, other groups of people you might find insane are also devoting their lives to shouting down changes you actually support or find critical. The lesson for even the most faithful elected representative is that the signal/noise ratio of public opinion is too unreliableto take seriously.
usea 3y ago
It's a lot easier to do something than it is to stop people from doing something. Usually to prevent actions you need total control or strong incentives. This is the same dynamic as browser feature development. Adding things is easy. Preventing additions is hard. We end up saying yes to things that disadvantage most people.
- scott_w 3y ago
  If that were true, how come NIMBYism is so successful?
  - patmorgan23 3y ago
    NIMBYs don't win all the time.... And in a lot of places they do have near total control. NIMBYs are usually suburbanites, and if they're in a smaller municipality they can exert a large amount of control over the city government and planning process. The auto dependent single family suburb has been heavily propagandized and ingrained in American culture that many times no one questions it, and those advocating for some walkable, or mixed use areas are in the minority. Just look at California, the state requires every city adopt and update a multipart plan for various purposes. One of those parts is called the "Housing element", it requires cities to plan and zone for a minimum amount of growth and affordable housing. over the last year or two many of these plans have come up for renewal and lots of the smaller (and especially more conservative) cities have been reluctant, or out right refused to meet the states requirements. They want to keep their car oriented suburban small community, affordability be Damned. The state did pass this fun law that created this thing called "the builder's remedy". Where if a city does not have a compliant housing element the city loses its discretion and must approve any permit that meets its building code, sans any density requirements. And these rights vest, so even if the city latter approves a compliment those builders can still utilize those permits. (Carrot and stick approach to getting cities to comply) But this is only after decades of the California housing affordablility crisis growing and yimby advocates fighting for less restrictive zoning. https://openscopestudio.com/californias-zoning-holiday-what-to-know-about-the-builders-remedy https://openscopestudio.com/californias-zoning-holiday-what-... TL;DR NIMBYs are ussally the majority (or at least the louds and most engaged).
wkat4242 3y ago
It's nothing new for the EU. They tried to pass software patents through a meeting of agricultural ministers. The polish delegation saved us that time but later the industrials got their wish anyway.
- omoikane 3y ago
  > software patents through a meeting of agricultural ministers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_directive_on_the_patentability_of_computer-implemented_inventions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_directive_on_the_pate... https://www.theregister.com/2004/12/20/patents_vote/ https://www.theregister.com/2004/12/20/patents_vote/ I had to look it up because it sounded bizarre, but it's true.
  - pas 3y ago
    yes, it's bizarre, but it wouldn't had rammed it through though. and just because it's agricultural ministers it doesn't mean they don't have contact with their respective government, etc.
- pas 3y ago
  it wouldn't have become law. it sounds fishy (because it was at the meeting of agriculture and fisheries, eheh), but the EU Parliament would had to vote on it anyway.
- ana_winters 3y ago
  [dead]
- eigenket 3y ago
  To be fair that was just a rubber-stamping process to get the law back to the european parliament to be debated and discussed, where it was (rightfully) rejected. It had already been agreed (correctly, at a competitiveness meeting of the council) that it would go back to the parliament. They sent it through the fisheries Commission because the board that had the responsibility for it wasn't due to meet for another 6 months. I guess some people care deeply about the details of which commission sends the proposed legislation to the parliament to be debated & amended / rejected, but in reality I think it doesn't really matter. In either case the correct thing for the commission to do was send the legislation to the parliament.
bboygravity 3y ago
This is the main reason that direct democracy is a better system: you can lobby all you want, but it ain't going to happen unless the people want it too.
- 4bpp 3y ago
  People tend to approve of direct democracies up until the point that they vote for something they don't like (in European settings, this will nowadays most likely be some anti-immigration measure like the Swiss minaret ban). Then all the talking points about dangerous populism and how politics is better left to professionals who can dedicate time to understanding what is actually good policy and are not swayed by base emotions re-emerge.
  - Longhanks 3y ago
    Which is exactly proving the point of direct democracy; the current model enables politicians that blatantly ignore that the majority of people in Europe do not want any more migrants. The minaret ban is popular within the actual Swiss population.
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AlbertCory 3y ago
Exactly, and this is why the people in the thread saying, "don't worry, it won't pass" are not serious. In a year or two, they'll raise it again, except then they'll know what the opposition thinks and what arguments resonated with the public, so they'll be smarter. "They can't bring it up again for five years!" -- also not serious. They can resurrect the least controversial parts and call it something else. The only answer is to fire every single person associated with this, such that they can never work for the EU in any guise, ever again. I'm not optimistic about that happening.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  It’s hopeless. The “anti” team has to fight and win an infinite number of times. The “pro” team only has to win once, and that’s that. The deck is stacked.
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    The only answers are (1) massive retaliation, i.e. everyone connected with it is fired and can never work for EU again (2) a Constitutional amendment, forcing a supermajority referendum result for any such laws in the future. (1) unlikely. But imagine that the EC put out a proposal mandating a swastika underneath the EU flag, everywhere. Most likely those people would all be blacklisted permanently. So it's not inconceivable. (2) probably doesn't exist in the EU, but maybe it's in a bylaw somewhere.
montagg 3y ago
You’ve described all of late stage capitalism + democracy, for things you agree with and things you don’t. This is as good as it gets when money has any influence on policy.
- godelski 3y ago
  > This is as good as it gets when money has any influence on policy. I agree with this but I think the problem is bigger than "capitalism" and "democracy" (quotes because it seems none of us can agree on these -- to be fair -- vague definitions). Capital is more than money, and capital is what is abused. Capital can be your house, where you live, the food you eat, the clothes you wear, and so on. Regardless of ruling systems there are no (other than short lived) cases where this imbalance does not exist and creep larger. The reason I hate these "yep that's capitalism for yah" comments is not that there aren't things to criticize about capitalism (if you can't criticize a system you're in trouble) but because it hinders the ability to have this conversation. I'm sure the conditions will relax as we approach post scarcity but there is no possible means to have true equality on all levels. Capitalism, socialism, whatever, all need to have a real discussion about how to place people into power while minimizing the ability to influence those people while maximizing the ability to do good for people. Which some of these seem to be in direct opposition from one another. A part I see clearly missing is the temporal factor in all of this. It does not matter if you elect someone who is a saint if the environment will corrupt them. Nor is there a way to have an environment that is not rapidly changing. So how do you create a system that can adapt (be iterative) but not be influenced by those with more power/capital? If we can't have this discussion it doesn't matter much which system we choose because the truth is that you can't maximize both because they're not orthogonal.
- Gud 3y ago
  This is not true. Switzerland has a much more evolved democracy than the rest of the (so called) democracies. https://www.eda.admin.ch/aboutswitzerland/en/home/politik-geschichte/politisches-system.html https://www.eda.admin.ch/aboutswitzerland/en/home/politik-ge...
godelski 3y ago
> To combat this lots of people need to do activism. Those people need to devote your time and energy to prevent such thing. I think the issue is of complexity and energy. The world and a lot of these problems are often extremely complex and there are no optimal solutions. There is always slap, noise, and limits. Many of these things are also hard to understand and take a lot of time and energy to actually understand what is even seemingly simple. But the cost I believes to a lot of apathy. For example, how difficult is it to switch people to tools like Firefox or Signal? The noise is quite high and non-experts will not know how to navigate this. Even mentioning these two tools will cause controversy on sites like this with people pointing out the imperfections. But the truth is that these always exist (same thing politicians exploit) and the complaints just make non-experts confused. Yeah, there are things better than Signal but there's no tool that is better for the masses and communication systems rely on people being on the same platform. The network effect. Which getting into the network effect is the quite disappointing part of many things in politics. We have a lot of people that operate under the notion "if you don't like it, then don't use/participate/whatever." But this is not a realistic notion. As an example, I've used Firefox for over a decade and a lot has been to simply push against the Chrome domination. But that happened anyways and the thing is that Chrome still took over and Google has a lot of control over the internet. The truth is the differences in browsers isn't really that large, but we become quite passionate about defending our decisions. The same is exactly true for political concepts. We can point out flaws in other systems/ideas but do not weigh these equally when they are the thing we chose vs the other option. But the entire landscape is exceptionally complex and there are no optimal solutions. Until we can at least remember that it's difficult to solve anything.
tpmoney 3y ago
>They can pretty much push the same bullshit forever until it stays while you are devoting your life to prevent it. This is the nature of democracy, and any way of stopping this from happening would be a case of the cure being worse than the disease. This same process is how women's suffrage, civil rights, gay rights, medical marijuana and many many many other smaller victories for rights have been enabled over the years. Each one of those was brought up by politicians and lobbyists time and time again, defeated time and time again, until one day it wasn't and it stuck. Personally I think that smaller, decentralized, local government is the best way to minimize the harm of this nature, but I fully recognize that it also means every group must fight the same fight multiple times in multiple places in order to secure their rights all over, and that's its own harm. But I can't think of any way that you could "permanently" defeat "bad" bills that wouldn't equally have harmed those other movements.
- Incipient 3y ago
  Banning any form of paid lobbying, sponsorship, etc. All the politicians should be interested in are votes (eg the preference of the people). It won't fix it, but it'll help.
  - tpmoney 3y ago
    > Banning any form of paid lobbying, sponsorship, etc. The problem with this is then the only people that are able to meet with / influence your representatives are the people that are independently wealthy enough to travel to them and take the time off from work to do so. If you can't pay someone to speak on your behalf, and you can't afford to take the time to speak for yourself, how do you get heard? Are you personally willing to fly out to your representatives offices every time something comes up that the EFF lobbies against or for on your behalf?
    - darthoctopus 3y ago
      how is this substantially different from the current situation, where people are able to simply purchase influence? At least banning paid lobbying has the advantage of forcing the wealthy to spend time rather than money. Everyone has only 24 hours a day.
jjav 3y ago
> bring the thing again this time with another name There should ideally be a rule that if an idea doesn't pass it can't be brought up again for 4 years. If defeated again, not in 8 years. And so on, each defeat doubles the number of years it's not allowed to be discussed again. Still not perfect but at least slow them down.
- rocho 3y ago
  They'd just bring it up shortly after under a different disguise.
_a_a_a_ 3y ago
> To combat this lots of people need to do activism. Those people need to devote your time and energy to prevent such thing. I did the activism. I did the walk so I'm going to talk the talk here. The problem is only an utterly microscopic number of people will actually do anything. A larger proportion will, to some degree inform themselves of the issue but still do nothing. An even larger number will simply complain on a forum and call for other people to get stuff done but do nothing (looking at you@irusensei). It takes a remarkably small number of people to make a difference, but IRL the number who will do something is even smaller so nothing happens. Those that do, like me, end up exhausted and despairing, feeling we've wasted a fair chunk of our lives, and had there been just a few other people willing to involve themselves things might be different, but that didn't happen. If you want change it's there for the taking. But you won't.
- madacol 3y ago
  when you "do something" what are you talking about?, can you give me a couple of examples please?
  - _a_a_a_ 3y ago
    Join an organisation and work actively with them (just joining is doing nothing). Contact MPs or other representatives[1]. Contact relevant bodies and pressure them. Give cash (making sure it gets used wisely). Offering your skills as a professional, where relevant. [1] Despite what people say, this works, if slowly.
    - madacol 3y ago
      I personally feel powerless, or that it requires a huge amount of work to have a significant impact. If what you say is true, It could be very persuasive to inform about the expected impact a single person could have by just doing X. For example, describing how contacting MPs work, why would they care about what I say? giving a specific example, with rough estimates of number of people that need to contact or if it's more important the words chosen to achieve impact I would be interested in reading a good blog post describing the expected impact of activism in politics, especially on topics that I really care about, like privacy and freedom. I want to know what powers I have to change the things I care!

layer8 3y ago

What alternative do you propose? The politicians are elected representatives of and by the people.

spencerflem 3y ago
Take the money out of politics as much as possible and there will be less incentive for politicians to sell out their people
- layer8 3y ago
  What do you mean by that? There’s already anti-corruption laws, and corruption is actually being prosecuted. To have less incentives, you’d actually have to pay politicians more, which would constitute putting more money into politics.
  - raincom 3y ago
    Anti-corruption laws don't deal with collusions much, as there is no tangible proof of "pay for play" in such situations. Look at the US Senator Menedez case of late: he and his wife are stupid to accept cash, gold bars, Benz cars, etc. Sophisticated players in the beltway don't accept such "play for cash", because these colluders trust each other beyond the term limits.
  - ekianjo 3y ago
    > and corruption is actually being prosecuted. In which world do you live?
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    > To have less incentives, you’d actually have to pay politicians more This theory presumes that when people have more money, their desire to have even more money diminishes. This presumption is not true. (It might be somewhat true for common sorts of people who find pleasure in simple things and only want enough money to satisfy their basic material needs (food, shelter, medical care). But it's definitely not true when you're talking about people with high levels of ambition, which includes virtually all politicians.)
  - spencerflem 3y ago
    Oh, yea I'm for paying politicians directly. Meant more like, the money you need to run a campaign
logicchains 3y ago
Something like "There are only X laws allowed. Every time you want to add a new law and already have X laws, you must remove one existing law". Then we'd get laws covering the most important things without a bunch of bureaucracy on top of that.
- layer8 3y ago
  How do you define “number of laws”? Laws usually consist of many individual rules, and one can just make the law “bigger” to reduce the nominal number of laws without actually reducing the contents. In addition, I don’t see how this would cause the laws to become more in the interest of the citizens than of the legislators.
  - logicchains 3y ago
    >How do you define “number of laws” It's not an easy thing to do but that doesn't mean it couldn't be done. Maybe something like defining it as a limit on the total sum amount of text in all laws? A limit on the amount of new laws that could be passed would make it much easier for citizens to keep up with the proposed changes and oppose any they disagreed with; they couldn't be ddossed by the legislators.
    - layer8 3y ago
      Certain details (procedural and technical specifications) of laws are often relegated to secondary texts. This would just start a game of how to encode the desired legislation so that it still nominally fits the rules (law golfing instead of code golfing). The whole approach is a fool’s errand, IMO, and would just make the legislation even more inscrutable for the layperson.
- jokethrowaway 3y ago
  That's a brilliant game mechanic. I think for reality we should still remove power out of politicians
- madacol 3y ago
hanniabu 3y ago
If a law doesn't pass, the contents can't be brought up in a new law for a minimum of 5 years.
- layer8 3y ago
  How do you define that? It’s never exactly the same contents, usually has substantial changes in the approach.
- pca006132 3y ago
  So now malicious users can give bad proposals, get it rejected, and block other potentially good proposals for 5 years? Sounds like a good DoS scheme.
- _jal 3y ago
  Please explain how you would forbid these from being serially brought without allowing bad actors to disrupt normal legislative business. "No abortion after 49 days." "No abortion after 50 days." "No hospital shall be used for abortions." "Doctors cannot perform abortions."
t0bia_s 3y ago
Eurpean Commison is not elected by citizens of EU. They are nominated by the European Council and confirmed by the European Parliament. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Commission https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Commission Similar system is for WHO. They are not elected organisations, yet shape our laws. This bother quite a lot of people and don't bring a trust in system.
- misnome 3y ago
  Neither are government cabinets, ambassadors or generals.
  - hannofcart 3y ago
    Assuming that you're taking about liberal democracies, ambassadors and generals don't pass laws that the rest of us have to abide by. The government cabinet has some more democratic legitimacy in so far as that they generally comprise of elected representatives. So your statement is a non-sequitur.
    - growse 3y ago
      In the UK, there's no requirement that the cabinet is formed of elected representatives. Government ministers are often Lords. Besides, even if the defense secretary is an MP, he wasn't elected on a platform of national security by the population. So if there's a non sequitur anywhere, it's in application of any democratic legitimacy to the job of holding a significant cabinet post by winning the votes of a few ten thousand people for commons seat.
      - hannofcart 3y ago
        Sure, but the UK cabinet draws its power from the fact that it explicitly has support of a majority of the directly elected members of Parliament. When it's established that they don't, they end up getting ousted (as happens with no confidence motions).
    - 3y ago
jokethrowaway 3y ago
What about every service owned by the government becomes private and offered by private companies and we remove the goverment completely? I'd kill to see The Machinery of Freedom by D. Friedman in real life
- Tagbert 3y ago
  then you have everything run by the equivalent of insurance companies. That would be much worse. Companies are not inherently more responsive or even more efficient.
Gud 3y ago
Swiss style direct and decentralized democracy. https://www.eda.admin.ch/aboutswitzerland/en/home/politik-geschichte/politisches-system.html https://www.eda.admin.ch/aboutswitzerland/en/home/politik-ge... "Switzerland is governed under a federal system at three levels: the Confederation, the cantons and the communes. Thanks to direct democracy, citizens can have their say directly on decisions at all political levels. This wide range of opportunities for democratic participation plays a vital role in a country as geographically, culturally and linguistically varied as Switzerland."

dsign 3y ago

I wonder what would happen if there were not politicians, if the parliament of Europe were the sum of all its citizens voting for laws in some sort of mega-stack-overflow consensus system. A part of me wants to believe this madness would end. Another part fears that we would try, at least for a few months, total surveillance and bisections as a form of capital punishment. But on the bright side, we would be able to correct for bad legislation much faster.

ulnarkressty 3y ago
More targeted ad campaigns, as per the article. The interests will always be there.
logicchains 3y ago
>I wonder what would happen if there were not politicians, if the parliament of Europe were the sum of all its citizens voting for laws in some sort of mega-stack-overflow consensus system There's another way to achieve something similar less chaotically: demarchy, which was used for some things in ancient Greece. This involves electing people at random for a limited time period; if the selection is truly random, then the outcome of a couple hundred randomly selected people voting on something should usually match the outcome of the whole population voting on something. And due to it only being for a short period of time, you avoid anyone accumulating too much power.
- noman-land 3y ago
  I think you're basically describing the Byzantine fault tolerant consensus mechanisms used by blockchains.
- amelius 3y ago
  It's nice in theory but politicians will never allow themselves to be replaced by random people, so good luck getting this implemented.
  - scott_w 3y ago
    That’s not why it won’t work, the reason is even more fundamental: most people won’t want to do it because it’s a fucking hard job that puts you in the limelight.

NoZZz 3y ago

It's about time we have some standing voted directives originating with the people. Perhaps an AI could verify law proposals and shoot them down if the citizenry oposes it. Properly tallied and percentaged of course.

jokethrowaway 3y ago

That's exactly why we need to STOP taxation and DECENTRALIZE power away from a central goverment. Of course, they'll always have an interest in enriching themselves and their friends

patrickmay 3y ago
Exactly. The problem isn't the specific abuses of power, it's the power itself. The EU (and the US federal government) simply shouldn't be able to do most of what they do.
- eigenket 3y ago
  > The EU (and the US federal government) simply shouldn't be able to do most of what they do In my opinion this sentence straight up does not make sense. The EU and the US federal government are dramatically different, you can't even really compare their roles meaningfully. The EU is, and behaves like, a club of seperate individual nations. The US federal government is a real national government in ways the EU simply isn't. Even restricting attention to the EU it doesn't even really make sense. Which part of the EU are you complaining about? You're writing this in response to a proposal from the EU commission, so I guess you're pissed with them, but the commission can't make its proposals into law without parliament voting on it and the European Council agreeing. The EU parliament is (overwhelmingly) unlikely to pass this proposal into law and the European Council also has big problems with it. This proposal is essentially one country (Sweden) sending a particuarly idiotic comissioner (Ylva Johansson), and the rest of the EU apparatus resisting the shit she is trying to push.

BHSPitMonkey 3y ago

Meanwhile, other groups of people you might find insane are also devoting their lives to shouting down changes you actually support or find critical. The lesson for even the most faithful elected representative is that the signal/noise ratio of public opinion is too unreliableto take seriously.

usea 3y ago

It's a lot easier to do something than it is to stop people from doing something. Usually to prevent actions you need total control or strong incentives. This is the same dynamic as browser feature development. Adding things is easy. Preventing additions is hard. We end up saying yes to things that disadvantage most people.

scott_w 3y ago
If that were true, how come NIMBYism is so successful?
- patmorgan23 3y ago
  NIMBYs don't win all the time.... And in a lot of places they do have near total control. NIMBYs are usually suburbanites, and if they're in a smaller municipality they can exert a large amount of control over the city government and planning process. The auto dependent single family suburb has been heavily propagandized and ingrained in American culture that many times no one questions it, and those advocating for some walkable, or mixed use areas are in the minority. Just look at California, the state requires every city adopt and update a multipart plan for various purposes. One of those parts is called the "Housing element", it requires cities to plan and zone for a minimum amount of growth and affordable housing. over the last year or two many of these plans have come up for renewal and lots of the smaller (and especially more conservative) cities have been reluctant, or out right refused to meet the states requirements. They want to keep their car oriented suburban small community, affordability be Damned. The state did pass this fun law that created this thing called "the builder's remedy". Where if a city does not have a compliant housing element the city loses its discretion and must approve any permit that meets its building code, sans any density requirements. And these rights vest, so even if the city latter approves a compliment those builders can still utilize those permits. (Carrot and stick approach to getting cities to comply) But this is only after decades of the California housing affordablility crisis growing and yimby advocates fighting for less restrictive zoning. https://openscopestudio.com/californias-zoning-holiday-what-to-know-about-the-builders-remedy https://openscopestudio.com/californias-zoning-holiday-what-... TL;DR NIMBYs are ussally the majority (or at least the louds and most engaged).

wkat4242 3y ago

It's nothing new for the EU. They tried to pass software patents through a meeting of agricultural ministers. The polish delegation saved us that time but later the industrials got their wish anyway.

omoikane 3y ago
> software patents through a meeting of agricultural ministers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_directive_on_the_patentability_of_computer-implemented_inventions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_directive_on_the_pate... https://www.theregister.com/2004/12/20/patents_vote/ https://www.theregister.com/2004/12/20/patents_vote/ I had to look it up because it sounded bizarre, but it's true.
- pas 3y ago
  yes, it's bizarre, but it wouldn't had rammed it through though. and just because it's agricultural ministers it doesn't mean they don't have contact with their respective government, etc.
pas 3y ago
it wouldn't have become law. it sounds fishy (because it was at the meeting of agriculture and fisheries, eheh), but the EU Parliament would had to vote on it anyway.
ana_winters 3y ago
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eigenket 3y ago
To be fair that was just a rubber-stamping process to get the law back to the european parliament to be debated and discussed, where it was (rightfully) rejected. It had already been agreed (correctly, at a competitiveness meeting of the council) that it would go back to the parliament. They sent it through the fisheries Commission because the board that had the responsibility for it wasn't due to meet for another 6 months. I guess some people care deeply about the details of which commission sends the proposed legislation to the parliament to be debated & amended / rejected, but in reality I think it doesn't really matter. In either case the correct thing for the commission to do was send the legislation to the parliament.

bboygravity 3y ago

This is the main reason that direct democracy is a better system: you can lobby all you want, but it ain't going to happen unless the people want it too.

4bpp 3y ago
People tend to approve of direct democracies up until the point that they vote for something they don't like (in European settings, this will nowadays most likely be some anti-immigration measure like the Swiss minaret ban). Then all the talking points about dangerous populism and how politics is better left to professionals who can dedicate time to understanding what is actually good policy and are not swayed by base emotions re-emerge.
- Longhanks 3y ago
  Which is exactly proving the point of direct democracy; the current model enables politicians that blatantly ignore that the majority of people in Europe do not want any more migrants. The minaret ban is popular within the actual Swiss population.

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AlbertCory 3y ago

Exactly, and this is why the people in the thread saying, "don't worry, it won't pass" are not serious. In a year or two, they'll raise it again, except then they'll know what the opposition thinks and what arguments resonated with the public, so they'll be smarter. "They can't bring it up again for five years!" -- also not serious. They can resurrect the least controversial parts and call it something else. The only answer is to fire every single person associated with this, such that they can never work for the EU in any guise, ever again. I'm not optimistic about that happening.

ryandrake 3y ago
It’s hopeless. The “anti” team has to fight and win an infinite number of times. The “pro” team only has to win once, and that’s that. The deck is stacked.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  The only answers are (1) massive retaliation, i.e. everyone connected with it is fired and can never work for EU again (2) a Constitutional amendment, forcing a supermajority referendum result for any such laws in the future. (1) unlikely. But imagine that the EC put out a proposal mandating a swastika underneath the EU flag, everywhere. Most likely those people would all be blacklisted permanently. So it's not inconceivable. (2) probably doesn't exist in the EU, but maybe it's in a bylaw somewhere.

montagg 3y ago

You’ve described all of late stage capitalism + democracy, for things you agree with and things you don’t. This is as good as it gets when money has any influence on policy.

godelski 3y ago
> This is as good as it gets when money has any influence on policy. I agree with this but I think the problem is bigger than "capitalism" and "democracy" (quotes because it seems none of us can agree on these -- to be fair -- vague definitions). Capital is more than money, and capital is what is abused. Capital can be your house, where you live, the food you eat, the clothes you wear, and so on. Regardless of ruling systems there are no (other than short lived) cases where this imbalance does not exist and creep larger. The reason I hate these "yep that's capitalism for yah" comments is not that there aren't things to criticize about capitalism (if you can't criticize a system you're in trouble) but because it hinders the ability to have this conversation. I'm sure the conditions will relax as we approach post scarcity but there is no possible means to have true equality on all levels. Capitalism, socialism, whatever, all need to have a real discussion about how to place people into power while minimizing the ability to influence those people while maximizing the ability to do good for people. Which some of these seem to be in direct opposition from one another. A part I see clearly missing is the temporal factor in all of this. It does not matter if you elect someone who is a saint if the environment will corrupt them. Nor is there a way to have an environment that is not rapidly changing. So how do you create a system that can adapt (be iterative) but not be influenced by those with more power/capital? If we can't have this discussion it doesn't matter much which system we choose because the truth is that you can't maximize both because they're not orthogonal.
Gud 3y ago
This is not true. Switzerland has a much more evolved democracy than the rest of the (so called) democracies. https://www.eda.admin.ch/aboutswitzerland/en/home/politik-geschichte/politisches-system.html https://www.eda.admin.ch/aboutswitzerland/en/home/politik-ge...

godelski 3y ago

> To combat this lots of people need to do activism. Those people need to devote your time and energy to prevent such thing. I think the issue is of complexity and energy. The world and a lot of these problems are often extremely complex and there are no optimal solutions. There is always slap, noise, and limits. Many of these things are also hard to understand and take a lot of time and energy to actually understand what is even seemingly simple. But the cost I believes to a lot of apathy. For example, how difficult is it to switch people to tools like Firefox or Signal? The noise is quite high and non-experts will not know how to navigate this. Even mentioning these two tools will cause controversy on sites like this with people pointing out the imperfections. But the truth is that these always exist (same thing politicians exploit) and the complaints just make non-experts confused. Yeah, there are things better than Signal but there's no tool that is better for the masses and communication systems rely on people being on the same platform. The network effect. Which getting into the network effect is the quite disappointing part of many things in politics. We have a lot of people that operate under the notion "if you don't like it, then don't use/participate/whatever." But this is not a realistic notion. As an example, I've used Firefox for over a decade and a lot has been to simply push against the Chrome domination. But that happened anyways and the thing is that Chrome still took over and Google has a lot of control over the internet. The truth is the differences in browsers isn't really that large, but we become quite passionate about defending our decisions. The same is exactly true for political concepts. We can point out flaws in other systems/ideas but do not weigh these equally when they are the thing we chose vs the other option. But the entire landscape is exceptionally complex and there are no optimal solutions. Until we can at least remember that it's difficult to solve anything.

tpmoney 3y ago

>They can pretty much push the same bullshit forever until it stays while you are devoting your life to prevent it. This is the nature of democracy, and any way of stopping this from happening would be a case of the cure being worse than the disease. This same process is how women's suffrage, civil rights, gay rights, medical marijuana and many many many other smaller victories for rights have been enabled over the years. Each one of those was brought up by politicians and lobbyists time and time again, defeated time and time again, until one day it wasn't and it stuck. Personally I think that smaller, decentralized, local government is the best way to minimize the harm of this nature, but I fully recognize that it also means every group must fight the same fight multiple times in multiple places in order to secure their rights all over, and that's its own harm. But I can't think of any way that you could "permanently" defeat "bad" bills that wouldn't equally have harmed those other movements.

Incipient 3y ago
Banning any form of paid lobbying, sponsorship, etc. All the politicians should be interested in are votes (eg the preference of the people). It won't fix it, but it'll help.
- tpmoney 3y ago
  > Banning any form of paid lobbying, sponsorship, etc. The problem with this is then the only people that are able to meet with / influence your representatives are the people that are independently wealthy enough to travel to them and take the time off from work to do so. If you can't pay someone to speak on your behalf, and you can't afford to take the time to speak for yourself, how do you get heard? Are you personally willing to fly out to your representatives offices every time something comes up that the EFF lobbies against or for on your behalf?
  - darthoctopus 3y ago
    how is this substantially different from the current situation, where people are able to simply purchase influence? At least banning paid lobbying has the advantage of forcing the wealthy to spend time rather than money. Everyone has only 24 hours a day.

jjav 3y ago

> bring the thing again this time with another name There should ideally be a rule that if an idea doesn't pass it can't be brought up again for 4 years. If defeated again, not in 8 years. And so on, each defeat doubles the number of years it's not allowed to be discussed again. Still not perfect but at least slow them down.

rocho 3y ago
They'd just bring it up shortly after under a different disguise.

_a_a_a_ 3y ago

> To combat this lots of people need to do activism. Those people need to devote your time and energy to prevent such thing. I did the activism. I did the walk so I'm going to talk the talk here. The problem is only an utterly microscopic number of people will actually do anything. A larger proportion will, to some degree inform themselves of the issue but still do nothing. An even larger number will simply complain on a forum and call for other people to get stuff done but do nothing (looking at you@irusensei). It takes a remarkably small number of people to make a difference, but IRL the number who will do something is even smaller so nothing happens. Those that do, like me, end up exhausted and despairing, feeling we've wasted a fair chunk of our lives, and had there been just a few other people willing to involve themselves things might be different, but that didn't happen. If you want change it's there for the taking. But you won't.

madacol 3y ago
when you "do something" what are you talking about?, can you give me a couple of examples please?
- _a_a_a_ 3y ago
  Join an organisation and work actively with them (just joining is doing nothing). Contact MPs or other representatives[1]. Contact relevant bodies and pressure them. Give cash (making sure it gets used wisely). Offering your skills as a professional, where relevant. [1] Despite what people say, this works, if slowly.
  - madacol 3y ago
    I personally feel powerless, or that it requires a huge amount of work to have a significant impact. If what you say is true, It could be very persuasive to inform about the expected impact a single person could have by just doing X. For example, describing how contacting MPs work, why would they care about what I say? giving a specific example, with rough estimates of number of people that need to contact or if it's more important the words chosen to achieve impact I would be interested in reading a good blog post describing the expected impact of activism in politics, especially on topics that I really care about, like privacy and freedom. I want to know what powers I have to change the things I care!