With time the EU Parliament has seen its powers increasing, and there is reason to expect it will continue to do so.

Parliament approving what the Commission does is of no use for repealing laws.

The President is not elected by the Parliament. They experimented with that in the Juncker era, now it's back to being controlled (in theory) by the Council. The Parliament was given a "vote" that consisted of a list of options with one name on it. They could literally vote for von der Leyen or not vote at all. Even then she only barely scraped past quorum.

The Council meanwhile isn't democratic. Everything it does is secret. How did von der Leyen get the top job despite being manifestly unsuitable? Nobody knows. It's secret and never leaked.

that's how confidence votes work on most parliamentary republics.

Moreover, even at the universal suffrage, “democracy” doesn't mean electing a dictator with no popular oversight every x years.

In the case of the European commission:

- No EU citizen gave them the explicit mandate to enforce chat control

- If the initiative is repelled, and they continue to force freedom-reducing initiatives, they'll face 0 consequences.

- At most, the parliament can do is strike down a law. There is of course a very unbalanced distribution of power – the elected people have no initiative.

- The EC is corrupt: many commissioners cash fat checks from the private sector after their term, with 0 consequences.[0],[1]

- Lobbyism is everywhere. Corporations with unlimited money bribe officials, harass them, and push their agenda. Anyone close to the EU will tell you that it's much worse than you think.

“Democracy” is not the power of the corporations, and citizens, maybe, if we have time for it and if it doesn't eat into our profits.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/15/european-commi...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/jul/10/former-eu-digit...

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.

Realistically current EU countries are locked in. They aren't allowed to reintroduce their own currency, but doing so is step one towards leaving.

By the time a regime reaches "existential threat" level it's too late. You're already far gone, any and all political opposition has been driven underground and the regime has loyalists in place in all institutions and positions of power. There is no way to organize any resistance because attempts to do so are crushed immediately, the press is controlled and you're in the minority anyway because the majority are propagandized and kept in fear of instability or supposed external threats to their way of life.

The EU is frankly far too close to that dystopian end already. It constantly justifies its own power via reference to external enemies of various kinds e.g. capitalist America, the European press barely challenges it and the institutions are controlled by EU loyalists who are willing to rip up the rules rather than let the EU lose control. Even in the UK that was always more distant than other nations, they went through multiple severe constitutional crises triggered by Remainers fighting to overturn the referendum. It wasn't at all clear that the UK could actually leave despite the referendum result not being in doubt.

IMO the very fact that you think the UK left for "questionable reasons" is already part of the propaganda doing its job. The people who get out early are the only ones who actually can get out. By the time the case is unambiguous (to you), you're the one being labelled as questionable.

Also note that the EU don't like Montenegro using the Euro and tolerate it only because it's tiny/doesn't matter.

So yeah - if a country really wanted to leave - a shared currency would not stop it.

https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-leader-approve-defense-mi...

"EU leaders approve updated military plan. The strategy envisions the creation of an EU rapid deployment force of up to 5,000 soldiers."

However the EU doesn't need a physical army to stop a country leaving. It just needs sufficiently good control of local politics and law enforcement via loyalists in the countries establishment, which it has already. The EU has already proven it can replace governments in Italy and Greece against the will of the electorate, simply via "soft power" mechanisms like access to ECB liquidity, ECJ judgements and control over local institutions.

In other words an inability to leave the EU doesn't look like an army crushing a well organized political opposition. It looks like that opposition being blacklisted from the press, being spied on by the EU secret police, found guilty of vague laws like "misinformation" with judgements upheld by the European courts, votes being tampered with or outright ignored and more.

This is no theoretical problem. Anti-EU referendums in European countries are frequently ignored, even when in theory they are constitutionally binding. In the UK the Electoral Commission, the supposedly neutral body that runs the election and referendum process itself, was run by EU loyalists who professed in public that they wanted Leave to lose and spent significant amounts of time prosecuting Leave campaigners (fortunately their cases were ruled harassment and tossed out by the courts).

The EU Commission also had a long track record of classifying true reports about their activities in the British press as "myths". These days they'd call it misinformation and try to prosecute the journalists in question.

Ultimately it doesn't matter if a majority of the population want to leave, or reject a new EU proposal, if the people who rule them don't care about democracy and control the levers of power. That's how all dictatorships work.

Yeah, that's why the UK didn't leave in the end right? lol. Does "Non-biding referendum" rings a bell?

> long track record of classifying true reports about their activities in the British press as "myths".

Ah yes the trustworthy British press saying German kids can't write to Santa because of GDPR. Yes

Yes, keep talking, I like to make a collection of anti-EU talking points (from Peter Thiel's think tank most likely).

For all the criticism the EU deserves, it's very telling when the narrative turns into manipulation

UK was the first where it wasn't ignored. After the vote I remember being told several times by Europeans they didn't really believe it'd ever be implemented, exactly due to the track record of European countries in ignoring referendums that didn't go the EU's way.

Even then it was a very close run thing. The Remainers in Parliament were willing to create a constitutional crisis to try and get the referendum overturned a.k.a. the "People's Vote", and were holding the government hostage to get that. It was only a a lucky break (the Lib Dem leader going full delusional) that allowed Johnson to break the deadlock, go the country and allow the electorate to purge the Remainer MPs who had lied to their voters about their true position. But make no mistake, that was the worst constitutional crisis the UK experienced in living memory.

>> Ah yes the trustworthy British press saying German kids can't write to Santa because of GDPR

That story came from the German press and was correct:

https://www.welt.de/kmpkt/article183978370/Weihnachtsmarkt-i...

You see how easily you're manipulated by the EU? They've convinced you and others that if the press criticizes the EU the press must be lying. But it's almost never the case.

The EU has taken down their myths site now. It was trash. Not only totally focused on the British press, but I remember quite clearly flicking through them back when the site was live and noticing that all of them were admitted to be true, with the "debunking" (such as it was) being always along the lines of, "this is true but it's justified" or "we prefer an alternative interpretation", or "we don't phrase it like that".

So one specific case where the lists are sent to the city government and shown in public now means "children can't write to Santa?" Way to blown out of proportion. (And they could, if their parents consented to it)

Thanks for showing how easy it is to be manipulated by anti-EU propaganda.

Yes, the Welt article is not lying, the propagandists are, as usual

"they could, if their parents consented"

double lol

It's funny that the results of WWII were for America to enable a soft version of the fourth Reich and the Japanese east asian coprosperity sphere. BUT we built it under our auspices, with the rule being that free speech was somewhat necessary for a free market. (skip the part about torturing Muslims and communists). Here we are. Will Europe now become Hungary or Turkey??!

Yes... this was the original comment I was responding to, which seems to have totally disappeared. Thanks.

> we have gotten here from much worse situations.

A wise remark. But we'll only keep finding better situations if we keep calling out bullshit.

Maybe people just need to take more care which leaders they elect, if they don't like the policies that result from it.

It seems like it’s becoming a behemoth that will need to be killed and redesigned in the future, just like it happened in the past

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.

Unless you are part of the 0.01% richest (or something like that), governments are not your voice or strength, and you have essentially no ability to influence their actions. Governments are composed of politicians and other people who will act in what they consider to be their own best interest. Those interests will generally be very different from the interests of most other people.

Getting money out of politics is impossible. Politicians are not going to vote to make themselves less well of, and lobbyists are not going to fund the campaigns of those who would make lobbying less effective.

Instead of looking to governments for solutions to problems they are neither capable of solving nor willing to solve, we should try to solve those problems by voluntary cooperation whenever possible.

That's not how I portrayed it. What I portrayed is the reality of how people and organizations operate within society. 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, and those who aim primarily to serve others above themselves is what reinforces apathy and helplessness and dependency.

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 people in 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. I mean sure there are people who get paralyzed with terror at the idea that the authority they are subservient to is not completely good and moral, but those people weren't going to change anything anyway.

That does not require it to be 'the' government and for it to cease being 'our' government. Further, a sense of ownership and a desire to work constructively with the parts that improve our lives does not require me to abdicate moral judgement to its authority. Finally, believing that public office can and should be an honourable pursuit does not imply or require that I believe that my current representation comes anywhere close of meeting that standard.

You are correct to assume that I believe my current government enables or even engages in injustices against certain cohorts of the population. Yes, I even believe that I benefit from significant inter-generational privilege that others were actively denied. No, that neither means that my life is a cakewalk, nor does it compel me to plead forgiveness in the gutter. It does however instill a duty to raise those less fortunate up when I have the means to do so. It also compels me to advocate for collective action to do the same.

Ultimately, I don't see embodying alienation between a democratic government and its citizens to be a reasonable source of tribalistic pride. It's fucked, and fixing it should be almost as existentially compelling as eating or surviving the elements.

In reality it's always Michel's Iron law of Oligarchy. It doesn't matter what political system you think you have. In the end what you have is always an oligarchy.

There are bad actors and corruption in every political system. But different systems and different implementations of them have different levels of these.

I would say most governments do an OK job (compared to say 1000 years ago, or compared to what any bloody revolution could do within 10 years), given how difficult the task is of governing a lot of people with vastly different interests and opinions. There is also still a lot of room for improvement. If you don't like the way your government works, try to improve it. Be part of it. Saying everything is corrupt no matter what is completely useless. I also doubt it makes you feel better overall, at least any longer than the moment you take to write such a comment.

It sounds cynical - yes, but we have to deal with reality as it is. Not as we would wish it to be. Surely that is the lesson on the last 10-15 years of poltics.

Power simply doesn't work this way. Power always collects in the hands of an organized minority - be it a king and his inner circle, or in the power brokers, government institutions, political party internal governmental structures, media hacks, NGOs, and state institutions, and the money power of western democracies.

Understand this.

There is no vote you can cast to evict any of these people.

Furthermore, they control the information dissemination aparatus. Like kafabe in pro-wrestling, they have complete control over the narrative story arcs, and they define the oppinions that are acceptable in society.

Take the US government, for example. Just think about the vast - almost boundless state power they have amassed. They spy on every single communication anyone makes on the internet. They even assassinated a sitting US president, for goodness sake.

Do you think if you just meekly ask them, they'll simply hand over the whole structure into the hands of their sworn enemies? No - it won't ever happen. Your guy will be installed, and he will find his every action is thwarted. He will be effectively powerless. And if you complain, they'll laugh in your face.

More generally:

A mass of people is powerless. You must know this from real life: you can't expect a group of 1000 people to take responsibility for achieving some objective. The group will instinctively look to a leader to guide them, and they will wait for someone to take charge. That person will then need a group of lieutenants to administrate his leadership, and hey presto: there's your oligarchy.

There's nothing wrong with this. The Iron Law of Oligarchy is a reflection of human nature. There is nothing wrong with "kings", various "lords" and officials, if they have the people's best intests in mind.

The problem is democracy is that it allows responsibility to be diffused among the people. Who will ever be held responsible for the Afghanistan withdrawall debacle? Or for the Iraq war? Or for the Snowden files? Or for the trillions of US government debt? ..to name just a few.

No one will ever be held responsible, because democracy allows the oligarchs to point the finger back at the people, and blame us for our choices, when in reality we really have no control over the matter whatsoever.

At least our ancestors could pick up pitch forks and carry their heads out on pikes if things became untennable.

We cannot hold power to account in any way at all. They don't fear us in the slightest. In 2023, this should be pretty obvious to anyone who is paying attention.

Which is particularly farcical when you realize that in the 20th century, governments murdered tens of millions of people. Governments are concentrations of power that wield monopolies on violence. If governments can be kept under control, kept within some reasonable guardrails, then they're very useful for various reasons. I am not an anarchist, even remotely. But when governments get out of control the result is often millions dead.

Governments which view those guardrails as a threat from the people are a threat to the people. Such perceptions prove the necessity of those guardrails.

Still, it is disturbing to watch all of Orwell's ideas getting implemented in real life

It’s tiring. They hope to wear people down.

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-ha...

As far as I'm concerned, GDPR is a great.

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.

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.

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."

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.

that may happen when many separate countries merge their candidate pools to form a single parliament, and its up to the parties to distribute their seats - I would think that an exact representation of members from all countries within the available seats for the party would be hard to achieve, though.

> Moving power further away from the electorate should be a last resort for issues that can simply not be handled on the local level.

This is true to some extend, however you have to somehow ensure that all individual pieces work in a collaborative mode and support each other, because once you get in competitive mode, its a race to the bottom for everyone.

I don't understand / buy that argument. I find it quite neo-liberal in the sense that it assumes countries will deterministically mindlessly engage in a race to the bottom.

The "prisoners dilemma" is a problem of course. But people and countries can and do cooperate despite that.

For this reason, it's not clear to me that EU countries would automatically slash their environment regulations and corruption prevention efforts in a "race to the bottom" if the EU wasn't there stopping them.

Democracy gets diluted when the electorate becomes too large and too diverse. It's important that decisions stay as local as possible.

Like, image some county that needs energy, has no natural gifts regarding that but has land to farm upon. Instead of exporting food and importing coal from somewhere to fire up a new plant, it could also exchange energy with a more gifted county that has plenty of green energy but doesn't need something from them.

To make this work, a higher level entity can force the exchange, and ensure that the whole area doesn't suffer from pollution despite that being the cheapest or even only possible way for the individual county. It COULD be solved there, but everyone is worse off by not cooperating.

Actually, the EU has a huge power potential if only the member states would finally cut back on individual national interests so that mutual agreements and shared legislation/taxes/military/... could be setup properly - which might worse some situations in the short term, but ensures greater wealth for everyone longterm. The "I I I" egoistic thinking of individual member states is the greatest weakness the EU has - unified we can achieve so much more!

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.

In other words: The European Commission is the autocratic reservoir for conservative politicians that were to extremistic for national audiences.

Take a peek over to Italian politics and you get a glimpse of what could be coming.

Or Israel.

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.

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.

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.