For example in that speach he clearly states that USSR was a a flawed totalitarian system from the start https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06-XcAiswY4
(he has in fact also stated many times that his political views were indeed censored in the US)
"Wasn't much better than USSR" is such bullshit on so many levels that it's hard to even to begin. In the US:
- you didn't have quotas to write "correct literature"
- you wouldn't disappear in a gulag for 10 years
- you didn't have to worry about standing in a queue for 1-2h to get fresh bread and sausage (it's easier to contemplate stupid shit when you don't have to worry about food)
- you didn't get assigned to a specific workplace where you HAD to work
- the books you read didn't have ideological crap (due to quotas) like "and children stopped starving because country X is a part of a friendly USSR"
I skipped not relevant bits but probably I still missed quite a few because I can only relay what my parents and others told me (I was born in the late 80s so I didn't get to experience the full glory of USSR).
EDIT: I forgot to mention a well-known practice of labelling people physically ill[1], getting them into physical wards, and pumping them with drugs until they are no longer "a thread". There is no need for a trial, and you can be held there indefinitely.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry_...
There was a lot more freedom than in the USSR, but the same shitty phenomena occurred, just less so.
- you wouldn't disappear in a gulag for 10 years
I totally agree. The US is much more better. There's no doubt that an Ecuadorian embassy or a Guantanamo are much better places than a gulag.
Difference of several orders of magnitude, right?
"Sarnoff(chief of book operation, Warner communications) complained that too many of Warner Modular's(small publishing company under Warner communications) works were written by left-wing writers. McCaleb replied that conservative writers were also represented, and that Warner Modular had planned to publish works by Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek.
Sarnoff then canceled the ads for CRV, ordered the destruction of the first printing of CRV, as well as the Warner Modular catalog that listed them, and announced that he would not release one copy of CRV to anybody. When McCaleb replied that such an outrageous move would shatter Warner Modular's staff and shock the publishing world, Sarnoff replied that he did not "give a damn what I, my staff, the authors, or the academic community thought and ended by saying that we should destroy the entire inventory of CRV".
Warner Publishing decided to shut down Warner Modular before CRV could be published. The print run was not initially destroyed because of contractual obligations, but the book was passed on to MSS Information Corporation for promotion and distribution after Warner Publishing shut down Warner Modular. However, MSS engaged in no promotion, as it was not a commercial publishing company and had no distribution facilities. Only 500 copies of the 20,000-copy printing survived. Radical America obtained and distributed some copies, because its staff already knew of CRV's existence.[6] According to Chomsky, the rest were "pulped," not burned. Despite its suppression in the United States, it was translated into several European languages, had two printings in France by the time that The Washington Connection was printed, and CRV's suppression became a "minor cause celebre" in France."
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-Revolutionary_Violence...
Not to mention that Chomsky was on the verge of being put in prison for protesting Vietnam, while journalists and activists who have either gone to prison or forced to accept terrible plea deals thrown upon them for minor offences. Barrett Brown and Aaron Swartz comes to mind.
The FBI assassination of Black Panther leaders being another.
https://mashable.com/2016/01/10/1985-move-bombing/
This happened in probably most of our lifetimes.
Preach revolution and pose as a victim of police brutality ...
> when police tried to evict them from their house. A firefight erupted, killing one police officer and injuring several more on both sides.
Oh right, they were just cop killers
> MOVE members boarded up the windows, built a fortified rooftop bunker and broadcasted profanity-laced political lectures with bullhorns at all hours, drawing complaints from neighbors. Members continued to rack up violations from contempt of court to illegal possession of firearms, to the point where they were considered a terrorist organization by the mayor and police commissioner.
> Arriving with arrest warrants for four residents of the house, the police ordered them to come out peacefully. Before long, shooting began.
How exactly was that story supposed to end ?
> The Mayor's failure to call a halt to the operation on May 12, when he knew that children were in the house, was grossly negligent and clearly risked the lives of those children.
What kind of person does this kind of things with their children in the house ?
If I were to transform a house into an armed bunker I would most definitely not take my children there.
Exposing children to such violence ... How is there on earth an excuse for that ?
Reminds one of Google, Twitter, et. al.
What's old is new.
If that's not a free speech issue, there are no free speech issues.
The government also has a mechanism where someone inadvertently impacted by sanctions can appeal to the Treasury Department and be granted an OFAC "license" that gives them permission to operate outside of the sanction(s). If the goal is to silence those who are subject to the sanctions that would be an odd way to do it.
Here's a 2012 law review article (which I haven't read, yet), "Information Wants to be Free (of Sanctions): Why the President Cannot Prohibit Foreign Access to Social Media Under U.S. Export Regulations", https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3...
Arguably, Microsoft and Github are simply choosing to participate more strictly than what is legally required--including what's constitutionally permissible for OFAC to enforce. And of course that's the problem with these large, centralized, free services. They can kick people off whenever they want whether it was legally required by law or not, and they will because they're going to be very risk averse in situations where they're not directly deriving revenue. There are many other areas where corporations, in the pursuit of profits, play fast & loose with the law in the face of far greater potential fines and liability.
Although it may not have a legal obligation under the current menu of precedents, I disagree that it has no obligation tout court.
The real facts on the ground here are that a person's website was censored at the behest of the US Government. This is chilled speech. That the target happens not to be a US National, and also a national of a nation under sanction by the US government does not put it outside the realm of speech.
> The United States government has no obligation to care about the collateral silencing of non-citizen speech in a foreign country subject to economic sanctions.
You have inverted the “care about”: if they simply did not care, it would be fine, as they wouldn’t be interfering with anyone’s rights. However, they are caring quite a lot, in the sense that they are willing to use violence to enforce these prohibitions.
Software export is restricted to varying degrees, mostly encryption but there are other circumstances where export control exists on software (they used to be far more severe but have become considerably reduced). The BIS - https://www.bis.doc.gov - handles this and other CCL items.
Here is the relevant CFR https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/CFR-2012-title15-vol2/CF...
To export anything that contains encryption over 64 bits you have to register with the BIS and be reviewed before you export. Even open-source software requires that you notify the BIS.
Other countries have similar export/import controls, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wassenaar_Arrangement
See also:
https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/policy-guidance/encryption
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureau_of_Industry_and_Securit...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_Administration_Regulati...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
At a lower level, the answer gets close to "no" - I suspect that, in cases like this, something in the ballpark of Kleindienst v. Mandel will be controlling in the eyes of SCOTUS, so no.
But even if this particular matter is not specifically regarded as protected speech under the 1st amendment by US Courts, it is still a free speech issue in general terms. This person's basic human right of expression has been abridged by the act of a foreign state and a spineless and compliant corporation.
> If that's not a free speech issue, there are no free speech issues.
There are plenty, when exclusion is based on the content. This is not one of them. That's why filing a First Amendment lawsuit against trade embargo wouldn't do you any good.
Using that definition, censoring all publications of a given group (say, black people) would not be censorship. That's a big hole in the definition.
It's not censorship, it's discrimination. Bad thing, but different. If it was censored because these people write about specific racial issues, it'd be censorship. If it's blanket denial regardless of the content, it's racial discrimination, not censorship. It doesn't mean it's not bad - one could argue it's even worse since it doesn't leave you any chance - you could probably talk in another way to route around censorship but you can't stop being black - but it's not that issue, it's a different one.
The definition you use seems to be a legal one rather than the usual one.
Indeed, but it's not for lack of trying.
> exclusion is based on the content
The pretext the speech falls short of inclusion in the category of "protected speech" because a different common thread can be drawn across its particulars is simply not convincing.
Censoring speech in the basis of nationality instead of content doesn't making the underlying expression any less censored.
US companies have to follow US law. I worked for a company that was fined because they still had employees working in Syria when the war started.
Are you saying that you don't think that humans in other regions qualify for this basic human right, which happens to be codified in (among many other places around the world, including the UDHR) the 1st amendment to the US Constitution?
> US companies have to follow US law.
If US law is wrong, companies, like all other people, have an obligation to break it. Whether that's the case here, I'm not sure, but I think that Microsoft can certainly have made a lot more of a stink before just yanking this guy's page.
> I worked for a company that was fined because they still had employees working in Syria when the war started.
What war? The civil war? Are there US sanctions specific to the Syrian civil war?
Rather, it is because there is no sort of tyranny or abuse that is not aided by lies, and indeed usually dependent on them. And, although free speech permits the diffusion of lies just as it permits the diffusion of truth, the liar fears the freedom of the truth-teller far more than the truth-teller fears that of the liar; because the truth can be proved, while the lie cannot. This is why censorship in the USSR was so pervasive and costly: it had to be profound to sustain the profound tyranny of the Soviet system.
As Gorgias points out, a man who can persuade you to believe lies can enslave you and turn you against your closest allies. So freedom of speech, the freedom to demonstrate the falsity of a lie however powerful and popular the liar, is the freedom that underlies the effective enjoyment of any other possible freedom. We must be vigilant against whatever stands in the way of our freedom to be informed, whether the US, Microsoft, Putin, or merely popular opinion.
And if what stands in our way purports to be a law, that law is an immoral, illegitimate law, a law in name only, a law serving not the ends of honest citizens but if tyrants—the end of destroying justice and Law itself. Such a “law” must be utterly destroyed.
Trade policy can reasonably apply to some of GitHub’s services, certainly, but I don’t see how a trade embargo that prevents a publisher from (virtually) printing some material passes Constitutional muster.
Meanwhile for decades I remember many software EULAs saying things vaguely equivalent to "don't use this software in Cuba", etc. That is what I would compare this to.
Github, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Sourceforge, HN, Slashdot... These free services are not public. You might treat them as such, but you are foolish believing they are.
If you cannot see the difference, I suggest to read the excellent Wikipedia article. [1]
We should be putting our collection of code in something else with a mission around those ideals.
I put it in quotation marks because it is my laymen's understanding of what the sanctions are intended to cover. I could be wrong and the actual boundaries could be subject to debate and disagreement.
I think they've realized that the argument that they are a commercial publisher is quite strong. Thus they are not eager to challenge it and wind up heavily fined for sactions-busting. Especially since Microsoft is a significant supplier to US government entities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism
> In 1952, the Supreme Court upheld a lower-court decision in Adler v. Board of Education of New York, thus approving a law that allowed state loyalty review boards to fire teachers deemed "subversive".
It had certainly cooled down from outright McCarythism by 1960 but nobody wanted to be accused of Soviet sympathies back then...
Presumably if the US is beginning to institute Soviet-style censorship, it indicates a strong risk that prisoner numbers will go up and the treatment will get worse.
China is locking up huge numbers of Muslims simply for having a religion and it still comes no where near the number of Americans incarcerated today without even having faced trial.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...
You won't find that in the US or China. As much as it hurts some people's sensibilities think that's a fair thing to say. I'd be terrified to be a black person in many places in the United States. Hilariously think China is actually more free for the average human. Spent fair amount of time in both and as an outsider is my honest opinion. Where is best to be a political dissident is obviously a very different story.
If certain people want to repeat ad nauseum their respective propaganda media talking points fine. But the world is watching. History will judge you no matter how salty you get on the internet.
Survivorship bias is a very real phenomenon, does anyone disagree that the United States has both the most people incarcerated along with per-capita rates of prisoners?
The numbers are right there, are Americans just bad people in general and deserve to be locked up en masse? Don't think that's the case, would love to see anyone defend the status quo as it exists.
Until you're critical of the party leadership, or have forbidden religious beliefs, and then you get whisked away to a concentration camp (if you're lucky!) or get surgically parted out for organ transplants, often without anaesthetic.
The US has plenty of problems, but to say China is more free is a very distasteful and not particularly funny joke.
Y'all need to take a serious fucking step back and evaluate the words said here. I love America and everyone in it. People stateside are incredibly nice people on the whole and sometimes you need a rude foreigner to say some blunt stuff for the sake of honesty.
Get a grip on these criticisms mate. I stand by everything said above. It's fucking true and challenge you to prove otherwise.
I wouldn't care nor be commenting if I didn't like you guys, leave the nationalism at the door please.
China is far more free. 100% stand by that statement. Have you tried living there lately?
Its astounding how many people are willfully ignoring what's happening in the biggest country on Earth for the sake of some sort of nationalist pride matter. Do so at your peril. Honestly. The media is straight up lying to you about what's happening there and yet people lap it up.
I haven't but I heard from people that did that you can't even connect to the Internet there without government interference. That's some definition of freedom that you don't find in every dictionary.
I gotta push back on this "China is more free" thing. China is definitely a very free place when you roll in as a white foreigner flush with a high value currency. I've been there, I remember thinking it's crazy what you can get away with there.
But this is like arguing you're more free there because you don't have to wear a seatbelt. Sure. Not having the government force you to wear a seatbelt means you are more free, by some definitions of free.
But it also means that when I'm driving around I'm not free to relax as much as I am on an American freeway because I have to watch out for shit falling off uninspected, falling to pieces construction vehicles. It means crossing the road is a game of frogger. It means I have to worry about whether my food will put me out for a week.
And if I'm native Chinese, I don't get nearly the freedoms in China that white dudes teaching English do. Putting aside the cultural restrictions (your family not letting you study art and shit like that) you actually DO have to worry about what you put on social media, because unlike a visiting white tourist, the PRC will have no problems with whisking you off to a reeducation camp.
Living in a dictatorship, but feeling more personal freedom than I ever had in the US.
On a day-to-day basis, there's significantly more curtailment of personal freedom in the US than there was in one of the stans.
The one thing I wouldn't feel safe doing there? Openly speaking against the government. Here, however, if I were part of a movement that was gaining any strength or public good will against the political and capitalist powers that run the US, I'd still be afraid for my life.
Like how nearly every leader of the Black Lives Matter movement in Ferguson, MO, has been killed over the last few years. That's not a coincidence, not a random series of killings.
Alicia Garza - alive and well
Patrisse Cullors - alive and well
Opal Tometi - alive and well
Under "key people" - Shaun King, DeRay Mckesson, Johnetta Elzie, Tef Poe, Erica Garner. Of those, only Erica Garner is not alive - she died in 2017 of two heart attacks and the following brain damage.
BLM is a decentralized movement, so there are a lot of people that could be called "leaders", but clearly claim that "nearly every leader" has been killed is false. I suspect none were actually killed for any activities related to BLM (I did not check that but consider it plausible), though in large enough group of people there would always be people that die prematurely, either due to illness, or accidents, or crime (many BLM activists live in places where crime situation is not very good).
I think you'd better to put down the conspiracy Kool-Aid for a while.
"The emergent consensus among scholars who utilize official archival data is that of the 18 million who were sent to the Gulag from 1930 to 1953, roughly 1.5 to 1.7 million perished there or as a result of their detention."
yeah... prisons in the US are definitely worse.
But many, perhaps most, of those deaths were during the German invasion, which killed about 25 million of the 169 million subjects of the USSR (most of them not in GULAG). It remains to be seen how well the US cares for the populations of its prisons and concentration camps if it suffers an invasion that kills an eighth of its population. Hopefully such an event will remain safely in the realm of speculation.
Not so much free speech in Russia.
Not it doesn't, unless you want it to seem that way.
but then, for the first couple of decades, neither did the USSR.
The USSR very much had these within the first years, not decades. One of the most famous germinal camps:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solovki_prison_camp
Learn from history.
We should, but it's useful to get the history right first.
The "massive prison camp system full of political dissidents" I refer to was the GULAG system, which at times contained millions of people, slightly more even than the whole US prison system of today, of which a substantial fraction were suspected of nothing more than political disloyalty. But that didn't happen in ten or twenty years after the Russian Revolution. It took about a quarter century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag
And more importantly, it was a system that was both theoretically and practically founded on political violence. It didn't take it a couple of decades to get there and its the expressions of violence weren't limited to prison camps. Politically motivated forced collectivization, for instance, ran concurrently and ended up being exterminatory.
Illegal entry is a misdemeanor, thus criminal. QED.
Still, it seems like a rather desperate rhetorical move to describe even a reckless driver as "a criminal, by definition", much less a person fleeing political persecution and seeking refuge in another country — a right guaranteed to them by international law, even if the US is abrogating its obligations under that law. Technically, it's true that under US law they are guilty of a misdemeanor, just like a wino getting drunk in the park, but clearly neither of these is a central example of the class of people to which we normally refer when we say "a criminal"; it seems more like an argument for disregarding US law.
As somebody who actually lived in the USSR I call bullshit on this. There's a huge difference between arresting people for saying something the powers don't like and restricting business links to certain aggressive dictatorial regimes. True, many citizens of those regimes suffer twice - once because they live under a dictatorial regime and second time because of the effect of economic sanctions. And it is true that economic sanctions disrupt free flow of information and trade. They are a kind of warfare but one where people don't get killed - which is not good, all warfare is bad, but better than the other kind.
It is bad when there is a war between two countries. It is worse when the government wages war on its people, and that what happened in the USSR. It is nothing like what is happening in the US. Nowhere in the US you can be arrested or imprisoned for saying anything - including praising USSR, Russia, Putin, ayatollas, Hezbollah, whatever you like.
> The US doesn't yet have massive prison camp systems full of political dissidents
"Yet" is extremely disingenuous here - there's absolutely no indication US is anywhere close to have it, on the contrary, US has the strongest free speech laws among all developed countries, and the high courts consistently reject any attempt to change that. In fact, what I am hearing every day is how there's too much free speech and how it should be suppressed and restricted for my own good, lest I read something wrong and get offended.
> but then, for the first couple of decades, neither did the USSR.
Technically might be true, if you say reduce first couple of decades to first decade - Gulag started in 1929. But not because the bolsheviks were kind of heart - before, they just murdered whoever they considered the enemy of the people (or, in rare cases, kicked them out of the country). After Stalin came to power, he realized there's a lot of work to be done and he can't use the capitalist way of paying people for the work, and if he just keeps killing everybody there would be nobody left to do his grand projects. So he used the other way - put people in prison and force to work (of course, he still killed plenty but some were spared for prison camps). Even Soviet space program and nuclear program was done by people who were effectively prisoners (word to look for is "sharashka").
You said this in 2 consecutive sentences. Please reconsider your position.
-- another USSRian
There's nothing to reconsider. There are people that hate how free the speech is in the US, but their efforts are largely limited to the environments where they have full cultural and administrative control over - such as certain university campuses, or online platforms they own - and once you go outside these censorship areas, your speech is free, and the government - absent occasional local stupidity outbursts routinely corrected by courts - is not able to suppress speech in any meaningful way, and the courts are determined to keep it this way.
TLDR: some people want speech not to be free in the US, but so far they fail.
You just described what's happening in the UK or Canada. Yet, I give it, neither have "free speech", but moral point remain that what happened in the USSR is happening today in the western world.
UK is a democratic country. In a democratic country, the government is elected by people, and can exist only while people support it. Not literally everybody, of course, but a significant part of people must support any government system for it to be able to function as a democratic society. By attacking the government, you offend these people and their deepest held beliefs, and imply that they are either not smart enough to figure out how the government should be, or are too lazy to go and vote for a proper government. Moreover, if you argue that a particular elected official is stupid, or corrupt, or bigoted, or criminal - you also imply people who voted for that person either are OK with these things or are too stupid to recognize them (at least if these things were known before the election). Both can be deeply offensive to people. Of course, some people would be OK with being called bigots or idiots, but many would take it as a gross offense. Similarly, calling their chosen representative such words would be possibly a less personal, but no less hurtful offense - after all, if somebody insults your friend, you'd be also hurt as if they'd have insulted you, wouldn't you? Maybe a bit less, but same goes for your representative.
Thus, it is clear that political speech can be grossly offensive. Moreover, I would go further and claim that it is more offensive than, for example, a racial insult. You do not choose your race, so if somebody insults you on the base of your race, it has very little to do with you personally - it's not directed at you as a person, but at a vague concept of race which largely exists in the mind of the speaker and nowhere else. You could shrug it off as empty words having nothing to do with you specifically. Insulting your political creed goes much deeper to the core of your identity and hurts on much more personal level - it is offending part of your identity that you yourself chose and built!
Thus, one can consider proven that criticizing the government is as much and maybe more hurtful than regular slurs and insults, and must be prosecuted at least as harshly.
(for people not watching it closely, the above is not my opinion but a demonstration how one could prove censorship of political opinions is necessary if one is allowed to censor "offensive speech").
The solution of this problem is that government should not ban any speech (with obvious and well-known exceptions, blah blah) and not be allowed to determine what is "offensive" and prosecute people for that.
As with all law, a certain amount of interpretation is unavoidable. Your example doesn't prove anything because it relies on a particular meaning of "grossly offensive" which you have contrived to make it work. It is not generally a gross offense to merely object to or question someone's beliefs. "Gross" in this sense means that the communication must be a flagrant and obvious violation of acceptable language in a tolerant society.
[0] http://merlin.obs.coe.int/iris/2006/8/article101.en.html
[1] https://research.edgehill.ac.uk/files/20207198/Bliss%20-%20C...
[2] https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/social-media-guideline...
No, but they have several full of people who were trying to escape from countries which were falling to pieces...
I think the intent is not that, and a company could probably argue that the law doesn't mean that because it probably can't mean that.
In this case though, AFAICT it's a restriction on use of private repositories, a feature considered to have commercial value, and thus subject to sanctions.
(P.S. I think your characterization of history is kinda wack [though I understand you can't write an essay before getting to the point], in ways that other commenters will point out in more detail)
You may want to reread that last part of history.
[...] established in 1918 and legalized by a decree "On the creation of the forced-labor camps" on April 15, 1919. The internment system grew rapidly, reaching a population of 100,000 in the 1920s.[1]
Yep... thats my cue to get off hackernews
> Yep... thats my cue to get off hackernews
Surely Fox News will be happy to have you back.
US courts, at least the Supreme Court, have admitted they do not have the expertise to rule on changes of technology. When the courts realize that GitHub is primary the modern equivalent of a printing press for software code and websites. They will view such sanctions - at least for public code, issues, & websites - quite harshly.
Right now, I imagine they view it as a store for the digital equivalent of tools or an advanced technological service that the US has denied it's enemies in the past. Once they realize the communicative aspects: opening issues (coordination), contributing copyrightable expressions in code, even coordinating employment dissent (996), such views will change.
Also, let's not forget that Communist Party sympathizers were purged from various domains of social activity - obviously, and that was indirect legal sanction of promoting pro-socialist/pro-USSR content.
People can, and still do with much regularity, publish criticism of the USA, the US government and the US president.
The NY Times has even published op-eds by Putin himself.
This is about providing commercial services. It has nothing to do with free speech.
The USSR was the thing that executed my great grand parents for being liberals (he was a doctor) when they invaded Budapest.
But I wasn't talking about what the US was during the Cold War. I was talking about new US policies. The invasion of Hungary was in 1956, 39 years after the Russian Revolution. What do you think the US will be doing 39 years after, to take a convenient date, November 2016? That would be 2055. Do you really doubt that they will hesitate to commit genocide after two generations of propaganda, censorship, and repression designed to Make America Great Again?
If someone expressed a concern in 1917 or 1920 that the Communists had become what the czarist autocracy was, would you think it reasonable to respond with a catalogue of czarist crimes that the Communists had not yet had time to match?
This will help you to get the facts straight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4Uu5eyN6VU
Democracy doesn't require a lot of parties, it requires that the people actually have the power to elect someone in charge. The EP is powerless and none of the EC members are elected or can be removed by a public vote.
No, this problem has been studied and democracy (that is, rule by the people) empirically requires an electoral system that had the capacity to support multiple competitive parties; to the extent systems artificially limit the option space they produce results that are not representative of the will of the people.
First democracy: ca. 500 BC
First political parties: ca. 1800 AD
We could discuss in detail whether the EU system or the US system enforces more artificial limits, in the end the EC remains much less democratic due to its relative power and independence from the electorate.
Prototypal modern, organized political parties started to emerge in the 1700's. Do you think before then that everyone was an independent and had no common goals? Political factions predate even the first demcracy. There where a number of competing, and from many accounts solid, factions in both the greek and roman governing systems, which where for all intents and purposes a party.
Isn't the European Commission elected by the European Council, and formed of commissioners nominated by the democratically elected leaders of each member state?
Democracy doesn't have to equal direct election.
More concerning is the inability of the European Parliament to repeal legislation, but things are gradually moving to change this.
And now let's look at the past 3 presidents: always the same routine, the EP gets presented with 1 candidate and can say yes... or yes. Awesome democracy.
Living in a small, entirely democratic EU country, I can't say I'm impressed with how the Commission was formed and it's also obviously an inferior system to that of the USA.
The power to directly elect or remove the top spot is certainly an important facet of democracy, maybe even the most important, but it's still just one of many measures. to be honest I don't think it's really that meaningful to talk about one system being "more democratic" than another, or that "entirely democratic" can apply coherently to anything except some kind of anarchist utopia.
That said, there is such a thing as the global [democracy index](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index) in which the US comes well below the UK and plenty of other EU countries. Note that Norway, also a constitutional and hereditary monarchy, tops the list.
This is rather meaningless as an indicator of the quality of the political system. The USA was downgraded there in 2016 for various reasons (probably mostly "Trump anxiety") while the political system was left unchanged.
It seems like the US has become what the USSR was: companies who publish speech from people in Iran or Crimea are now violating the law by doing so. Moreover, in cases like this one, already-published material is being destroyed, in a way that wasn't practical in the USSR, due to technological limitations (though they did try — famously Beria was airbrushed out of official photographs). The US doesn't yet have massive prison camp systems full of political dissidents — but then, for the first couple of decades, neither did the USSR.
This is a crucially important reason to move away from centralized and proprietary systems and onto decentralized, peer-to-peer, secure, free-software systems.
Learn from history.
(Edit: previously I gave Noam Chomsky as an example of someone sympathetic to the USSR, but that is at best debatable. The Communist Party USA, now in its 101st year, is a much clearer example, one that published continuously throughout the Cold War despite US prosecutions of its leadership.)