No, the European Council is suppose to represent the interest of the member states. The European Commission is suppose to be the executive of the European Union. Translating to the USA system, it would be like saying that the White House is suppose to represent the USA states. No, It's suppose to represent the interest of Europe as an entity.
Any introduction to democracy explains that the power is separated in the executive, the legislative and the judicial.
The European Parliament is suppose to be the legislative body but can't initiate legislation.
The Commission is suppose to be the executive, but, somehow can also initiate legislation and is not elected directly by the citizens. And the council that, I suppose would be the equivalent to a senate, is not directly elected by the citizens.
And we could talk about how all the important decisions are done in the dark, or how, like in this case, when something is not 'correctly' voted, they just keep bringing it back until it pass, or how they have started to 'sanction' people without judicial supervision.
It's time to open the eyes, because this is not going to improve. The EU 'democracy' is a joke.
No, this is a discussion about the "unelected" European Commission. I haven't mentioned the European Council because it is irrelevant.
The European Commission is formed of representatives of the individual states. They are NOT representatives of the citizens, other than by proxy.
YOUR government can request that THEIR representative raise or support legislation among the commission. If you have a problem with your countries representative at the commission then take that up with your government.
Proposals being "brought back" for discussion in some form is just a part of legislation. It happens EVERYWHERE - not just at the EU level.
Sanctions are proposed through the commission because it is a consensus of state government foreign policy.
How would YOU propose that the EU work to be "more democratic" - while also considering that your government needs to be involved and influential?
The whole idea with the current structure is that it "meets in the middle" between national sovereignty and citizen representation.
I agree it's not a perfect system, and there is certainly a lot of opportunity for positive change (I would like to have some process for parliament to request legislation from the council. I would like more transparency in what the commission does), but to dismiss it as "undemocratic" makes no sense and is just repeating an uniformed rhetoric.
The fact that you think that the Commission represent the states members instead of the interest of the European Union shows how mess up and contradictory the system is. The Council is the body that represent the state members.
You probably think that, because the commission is composed by representatives of every country, but they are "bound by their oath of office to represent the interest of the EU as a whole rather than their home state". That in itself is already contradictory. Those representatives are not elected officials but are the more powerful in the system.
The European Commission is the executive branch of the European Union. In not sane system, the executive branch is in charge of proposing legislation, because that make the all 'separation of powers' concept useless.
>>"How would YOU propose that the EU work to be "more democratic" - while also considering that your government needs to be involved and influential?"
Well, or you give the parliament real legislative and budgetary powers or all the system is a farce and you should dissolve it. If you want to keep the interest of individual countries in the process you need another chamber, elected by the people, that would represent the national interests.
Not only the system is undemocratic but it's winning power. The European Council can sanction you because doesn't like what you are saying without any judicial supervision. The budget is used to blackmail countries that don't agree with the commission views. Even the European Central Bank was used for blackmailing Greece in the Debt crisis of 2011. If that's democracy, the word democracy has not meaning anymore.
The EU could be just a bunch of agreements between countries about commerce and freedom of movement. The EU could be a federation of states with proper institutions. What the EU should not be is a superstructure over member countries without proper democratic control. And this is what is now and going worst by the day.
If you are interested in a federation, you could have an American bicameral model, with the senate representing the countries interest (1).
The current path of the EU is, in my opinion, very worrisome. The important issues are decided in close doors. The Commission and the Council feel that they can 'sanction' citizens without judicial supervision. The countries that not play along are blackmailed. The Commission officials feel that they can speak for all Europe when most citizens disagree with what they are saying. They feel that they can block the public discourse that they don't like, and now they want total control of our communications.
So your ideal is the EU as a federation - i.e. the removal of domestic authority.
Can you give concrete examples of these "important issues" that are supposedly being decided behind closed doors?
What sanctions are you talking about that require judicial supervision? Pretty sure all EU states can issue their own sanctions without needing a court to approve them.
How exactly is the Commission blocking public discourse? What are they doing, and where is this happening?
The american system is the last one we should copy. EU is different, its not a nation, it is made up by nations. All your points reads mainly like you don't understand what EU is now and what it to be more like what you imagine it should be.
Also countries can not be blackmailed enough as the Hungary debacle clearly shows.
Even the built in venv would've solved most of his issues too. But I agree with him in that Python documentation could be better. Or have a more unified system in place. I feel like every other how to doc I read on setting something Python up uses a different environment containment product.
Conda was fantastic up to some point last year and since then I've had quite a few unresolvable version issues with it. It is really annoying, especially when you're tying multiple things together and each requires its own set of mutually exclusive specific versions of libraries. The latest like that was gnu radio and some out-of-tree stuff at the same time as a bluetooth library. High drama. I eventually gave up, rewrote the whole thing in a different language and it took less time than I had spent on trying to get the python solution duct-taped together.
Because I need a new version of python very rarely (years go by). I don't remember all the arcane incantations to set everything up.
I did eventually do that though, and I'm pretty sure I had to mess about with installing and uninstalling torch.
I dread using anything made in python because of this. It's always annoying and never just works (if the version of python is incompatible, otherwise it's fine) .
input: what the f* are we doing? this is the end of times!
output: Reflecting on our current strategic direction: are we truly optimizing for long-term impact? We are navigating unprecedented industry disruption, and it feels like a pivotal moment for global transformation.
I find surprising that the polemic I heard more talking, seems to be in the open source to close source direction.
It seems to me, that the more relevant part of this new development, for the software industry, it's a teenager working in the weekend with a LLM and making a functional clone of Autocad, for instance.
'Drones from ships into California' is just a psi-op for manufacturing consent. This is not our first rodeo. By now, we should know how things work.
It's not in the strategic interest of Iran to do that, and they have been very strategic and rational. It's the Americans who have abandoned rationality. The Iranian goal is very clear: they don't want to sign an agreement and be attacked again in three months or one year.
In order to get that, they want a new security framework in its part of the world. They want Israel to suffer so its population think two times before doing this again. And they want to create enough economic pain to punish the current USA administration, again to teach a lesson.
Go beyond CNN or Fox News, listen to what the Iranians are saying (1).
> The Iranian goal is very clear: they don't want to sign an agreement and be attacked again in three months or one year.
Yes, of course they want to continue to do what they've been doing and not be attacked for that. Yet it is just not possible. Iran's current regime overall main goal is the spread of Islamic Revolution. Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis - these are typical metastasis of that spread. Terrorist acts, highly visible ones, is one of the effective tools of such a spread, and that way the terrorist acts are rational in the minds of Iran's regime and their above mentioned metastatic followers. There is no security framework possible which would still allow such a spread.
There is little evidence of what you say. On the other hand, there is a country in the region that it's using any excuse that it find to expand itself to great cost to the civil population there.
Anyway, it's kind of funny that the USA have military posts more than 7000 miles away from its borders, but the danger of 'expansionism' is from Iran.
We are in a fantasy propaganda land where Iran is attacked in the middle of negotiations and is Iran the guilty party. How many people have to die in those USA wars? I mean, enough is enough.
>There is little evidence of what you say. ... but the danger of 'expansionism' is from Iran.
if you aren't familiar with Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis - i highly recommend reading on it, even if just in Wikipedia.
>How many people have to die in those USA wars? I mean, enough is enough.
I think most important isn'h how many, the most important is who. Iran's regime has just indiscriminately killed 20-30K innocent civilians and uncountable many have been tortured. That is a crime against humanity. So, the top of Iran's regime and its IRGC has to be punished. I'm fine with that punishment being US and Israel's missiles.
> Iran's regime has just indiscriminately killed 20-30K innocent civilians and uncountable many have been tortured. That is a crime against humanity. So, the top of Iran's regime and its IRGC has to be punished. I'm fine with that punishment being US and Israel's missiles.
Israel's regime has killed twice that many in Gaza. Shouldn't they be prioritized for "punishment"?
As i said the key thing isn't how many, it is who, how and what for.
Israel started the war in response to the genocide of Oct 7. So all the legitimate collateral victims and damage from Israel's actions here is responsibility of the perpetrators of Oct 7.
You aren't calling for prosecution of the perpetrators of Oct 7. That is already shows your colors.
Anyway, the number of killed you cite comes directly from Hamas (its Ministry of Health stated those numbers to UN). Hamas is a terrorist org, and can't be trusted at all.
There is no evidence that Israel killed civilians in any meaningful numbers, and that the killings were criminal and not legitimate collateral.
Now, there is a million of cell phones in Gaza. After several years of watching Ukraine war anybody knows the amount of cell footage to expect. Some Russian killings in Bucha were recorded by reconnaissance drone for example. Russian soldiers posted videos of them executing POWs, security cameras recorded Russian soldiers marauding and so forth. Where is pretty much no footage comes from Gaza. "Israel soldiers shoot at the crowd at food distribution center" and nobody recorded anything (especially giving that according to Hamas it happens regularly - and still no footage!)
And on rare occasions when some footage comes out - the analysis in the example below shows that the basic laws of physics wouldn't let even 20 people to be killed when Hamas claimed 400-800 in that "bombing of hospital" (again, if you watch war footage, you'd know what gore of several people killed by explosion would look like, and no way the parking lot would look that way just the morning several hours later - where is all the blood for example? it is pretty obvious that the asphalt hadn't been washed by the time photo was made so blood should be there even if they picked up all the bodies and parts of it)
>Israel started the war in response to the genocide of Oct 7. So all the legitimate collateral victims and damage from Israel's actions here is responsibility of the perpetrators of Oct 7.
>You aren't calling for prosecution of the perpetrators of Oct 7. That is already shows your colors.
The world did not start on October 7th, and it's completely disingenuous to suggest otherwise, which shows YOUR colors. I could equally state " all responsibility lies with the perpetrators of the Nakhba".
>Anyway, the number of killed you cite comes directly from Hamas (its Ministry of Health stated those numbers to UN). Hamas is a terrorist org, and can't be trusted at all.
If the number can't be trusted, why is the IDF acknowledging it?
> There is no evidence that Israel killed civilians in any meaningful numbers, and that the killings were criminal and not legitimate collateral.
If this is your position no further discussion is needed. There is nothing meaningful to be gained from engaging with you. I don't know if you guys realize how insane you appear to every other human being on the planet when you try to gaslight us into thinking the piles of evidence of dead women and children either doesn't exist or is somehow accidental.
Why was Hezbollah created? From wikipedia: "Hezbollah was founded in 1982 by Lebanese clerics in response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon"
Why was Hamas created? From wikipedia: "was founded by Palestinian Islamic scholar Ahmed Yassin in 1987 after the outbreak of the First Intifada against the Israeli occupation"
What about the Houthis? From wikipedia: "The formation of the Houthi organisations has been described by Adam Baron of the European Council on Foreign Relations as a reaction to foreign intervention."
But sure, the problem is Iran.
There is not evidence about that 20-30k civilians dead. I could say it was 3 and I would have the same proof that you have.
This rationale of 'Iran is not democratic enough' (despise they have a constitution, a parliament and elections) but I will support Saudi Arabia (that light of human rights in the middle east) is nonsense.
All this is done for the geopolitical interest of USA, the oil and Israel. Anyone that say otherwise is taking us for idiots.
"The government of Iran's reformist President Masud Pezeshkian has published the names and national ID numbers of 2,985 individuals killed during recent nationwide protests."
So, the USA and Israel started a war with Iran when they were in the negotiating table and the Iranians were accepting all the nuclear demands.
In the first unprovoked attack they killed an important religious leader of a big part of the population of the area (not only Iran) and a bunch of civilians (160 children in a school between them).
But the assesment is that 'is Iran who is threatening and targeting bystanders'. No surprise that we are in the mess we are.
look at the stats of what the UAE has defended against, what is the purpose of those attacks? They make no sense to me.
Iran attacks on the UAE
186 ballistic missiles
812 drones
this article even states that the UAE has been attacked more than Israel itself which, again, blows my mind. The UAE is, wisely IMO, choosing to stay out of it but i mean how much can they take?
> UAE has been attacked more than Israel itself which, again, blows my mind.
UAE is closer and so it is harder for them to intercept attacking missiles and drones. Israel is further and thus harder target. They have more time to destroy the attacking drone or missile, making such attack more wasteful.
Second, the goals are likely American soldiers stationed there and the defense systems themselves. Intercepting missiles can run out and Iran likely wants them to run out.
> So, the USA and Israel started a war with Iran when they were in the negotiating table and the Iranians were accepting all the nuclear demands.
They were not accepting all the nuclear demands[0].
> In the first unprovoked attack they killed an important religious leader of a big part of the population of the area (not only Iran) and a bunch of civilians (160 children in a school between them).
Calling the attack "unprovoked" is just wildly inaccurate, Iran has for years funded terrorist proxies to attack both Israel and US interests in the region.
> But the assesment is that 'is Iran who is threatening and targeting bystanders'. No surprise that we are in the mess we are.
Iran deliberately targets their own civilians as well as 3rd party countries.[1]
I think the massacres and not the nuclear program were however what finally pushed the US and Israel into a war with the regime itself as a primary target as the massacres opened up an opportunity to potentially take out the regime once and for all.
that funding has been for years, and Israel itself has funded some of those same proxies.
the massacres also arent timely. we're months later with the unrest settled down, but its also not something unique to iran. lots of countries, including israel go about massacring civilians
nothing has substantially changed in many years. not even oct 7 is timely anymore
The protest massacres opening up an opportunity for regime change, I think that's ultimately what pushed Israel and the US to take action.
> Israel itself has funded some of those same proxies
Israel facilitating aid/funds into Gaza for humanitarian reasons which often got diverted by Hamas is not the same as Israel funding Hamas.
> the massacres also arent timely. we're months later with the unrest settled down, but its also not something unique to iran.
The war happened as soon as one could reasonably expect it to happen given the necessary logistics involved.
> including israel go about massacring civilians
Israel does not have a top down policy of deliberately targeting/massacring civilians, Iran on the other hand does.
> nothing has substantially changed in many years. not even oct 7 is timely anymore
Oct 7 drastically changed Israel's perspective on containment and deterrence being effective policies for dealing with enemies like Hamas and Iran. Part of the problem with a containment and deterrence strategy here is that groups like Hamas and the Iranian regime don't respond to incentives in the way one would expect a rational actor to respond.
Any introduction to democracy explains that the power is separated in the executive, the legislative and the judicial.
The European Parliament is suppose to be the legislative body but can't initiate legislation.
The Commission is suppose to be the executive, but, somehow can also initiate legislation and is not elected directly by the citizens. And the council that, I suppose would be the equivalent to a senate, is not directly elected by the citizens.
And we could talk about how all the important decisions are done in the dark, or how, like in this case, when something is not 'correctly' voted, they just keep bringing it back until it pass, or how they have started to 'sanction' people without judicial supervision.
It's time to open the eyes, because this is not going to improve. The EU 'democracy' is a joke.
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