European Parliament Exposed

[InsaneApache]

Everyone?

Not me. As I've said before, when I left school I knew everything, as I got older I realised how much I didn't know and expect to die a complete ignoramus.

[a completely inoffensive name]

Husar is correct in that ultimately, we must agree that people in general do not know what they need, and even frequently we find that they do not even know what they want.

Fisherking also has a point that this universal characteristic should not or maybe even cannot be fixed by "big government", I use big government in quotations because I feel that regulations mandating the elimination of a type of light bulb isn't necessarily a big government decision.

What this ultimately comes down to is the degree of safety that surrounds a particular issue in regards to the measure of freedom that we sacrifice. There is no shame inherent in recognizing that experts who are knowledgeable about an issue should at times carry out a regiment that we should follow for our own betterment. We do this all the time with our own personal health do we not? Although none of us wishes to swallow the bitter pill, if the doctor(s) tell you "this is what needs to be done" then we do it. But isn't the difference here that following the doctors orders is still our choice? Yes and no, because following the orders of the government is still our choice, with just another level of abstraction applied. We cannot deny that we still live in democratic societies that still allow us, should we chose, to dismantle it all and to remove every last incumbent from office. There is always civil disobedience and there is always violent overthrow.

Are government's evil? yeah, about the big things. When we are talking about swapping light bulbs here, I find myself looking at the freedom fighters with the same disdain that I look at the young liberal "activists" who want to complain about the most minute and inconsequential things possible. I go toe to toe about things like Edward Snowden where real government officials are actively trying to suppress individuals and the public, but I applaud the government's efforts to promote efficient lighting. Why? because common sense tells me that it's not policies like the light bulb regulations which lead to NSA spying, it's our collective attitude towards security and terrorism.

There is nothing to be lost when it comes to light bulbs. Don't give me that nonsense about a violation here emboldens violations everywhere. That just degrades the concept of what freedom is from a state of being to an ability to make choices. There are no experts on how we should all pursue happiness, and that's where we should denounce the big government for claiming it knows best.

[Fisherking]

Some people think mankind is evil and ignorant, incapable of making decisions for themselves. These people think they are wise and have somehow escaped and are apart from the rest of humanity.

They have a mission to enlighten the rest of us.

Of course those who think of themselves as enlightened, usually aren’t. This includes governments.

But then again there are those who just enjoy telling other people how to live their lives.

Evil is usually easy to identify, it is the well meaning idiots that present the greater danger.

[a completely inoffensive name]

Some people think mankind is evil and ignorant, incapable of making decisions for themselves. These people think they are wise and have somehow escaped and are apart from the rest of humanity.

They have a mission to enlighten the rest of us.

Of course those who think of themselves as enlightened, usually aren’t. This includes governments.

But then again there are those who just enjoy telling other people how to live their lives.

Evil is usually easy to identify, it is the well meaning idiots that present the greater danger.

Are humans not constantly confused?

Are there not people who have attained mastery of technical crafts which provide meaningful benefits to us?

Is there not such a thing as knowledge and the ability to apply it to make life better?

What are your answers to these questions, and what is your opposition to theoretical masters of a craft being placed in roles in government? Where do we place our trust?

[InsaneApache]

Why not go the whole hog and have intelligence test mandatory for people before they can vote?

[a completely inoffensive name]

Why not go the whole hog and have intelligence test mandatory for people before they can vote?

Who are you asking that question to?

[InsaneApache]

As they say in Yorkshire; "If the cap fits, wear it!"

[a completely inoffensive name]

As they say in Yorkshire; "If the cap fits, wear it!"

It just seems odd, because I have been talking about knowledge not intelligence.

[InsaneApache]

Can you have one without the other?

[Fisherking]

Are humans not constantly confused?

Are there not people who have attained mastery of technical crafts which provide meaningful benefits to us?

Is there not such a thing as knowledge and the ability to apply it to make life better?

What are your answers to these questions, and what is your opposition to theoretical masters of a craft being placed in roles in government? Where do we place our trust?

I tend to trust the judgment of individuals and distrust the judgment of groups.

I think individuals are more than capable of making decisions for themselves. A group mentality, on the other hand , can make some very poor ones.

These may be generalities but government is usually that collective group mentality.

Choosing to listen to others who may know more than us on a particular subject can be beneficial.

Some people are more open to new ideas than others, however. The extent of the benefit also plays a part. Not every improvement works in every situation.

Sweeping pronouncements are usually short sighted. Authority mandating any one thing to the exclusion of another is likewise heavy handed and dangerous.

It sets a precedent for intrusion and abuse. Should be ban everything that is inferior to something else? Shall we ban all internal combustion engines in favor of electric? Shall we ban some foods as inefficient. Should be ban all autos except for a couple of brands?

How long would it be before the authorities began to ban books and ideas or even the infirm or mentally deficient. Might we not have seen this happen before?

Also, governments judging efficiency is an oxymoron.

As to knowledge in general it is best not to abandon one line of thought or technology for another. Keep them all. Some anachronistic line of thought could be the solution to a modern problem.

[a completely inoffensive name]

Can you have one without the other?

That's an interesting question. Let's explore that. Would you consider Forest Gump to be knowledgeable?

I tend to trust the judgment of individuals and distrust the judgment of groups.

I think individuals are more than capable of making decisions for themselves. A group mentality, on the other hand , can make some very poor ones.

These may be generalities but government is usually that collective group mentality.

Alright, but is it not true that these group mentalities arise to begin with because individuals on their own accord have chosen to identify themselves as part of a group and participate in the groupthink?
How is it that we praise the individual but not the group when if we image the individual to be close to a perfect rational actor, he has willingly chosen to degrade his/her own mental facilities with the intoxication of group validation?

It sets a precedent for intrusion and abuse. Should be ban everything that is inferior to something else? Shall we ban all internal combustion engines in favor of electric? Shall we ban some foods as inefficient. Should be ban all autos except for a couple of brands?

Alright, let us be reasonable about the precedent a light bulb ban sets by being honest about the why's and how's this policy is being implemented. The key point here is that the incandescent is physically and unalterably inferior in its efficiency towards producing light. This is a matter of physics not personal preference and no matter of innovation can produce an incandescent better than an LED or CFL. When you want to make a comparison to banning car brands it falls flat because companies can improve car's energy efficiency relative to other brands since all car companies are working from the same basic blueprint, a combustible engine with wheels. This is different from talking about light bulbs which operate on fundamentally different physical properties. And if we get to the point where the inefficiencies of combustible engines demand that they be replaced with electric engines? Is this such a crisis? Are to lose anything but the subjective beauty of a loud engine roaring down suburban streets?

The food analogy is even more muddled, because what qualifies as an efficient food?

How long would it be before the authorities began to ban books and ideas or even the infirm or mentally deficient. Might we not have seen this happen before?

How long would it take to see how silly it is to jump from kW/lumens to censoring the text of a book?

Also, governments judging efficiency is an oxymoron.

And if the government is relying on experts, real certified engineers and economists who believe that the dangers of the reliance of old technology impede the ability of the US to secure energy security? Is the fact that government is making a decision make it an unqualified one?

As to knowledge in general it is best not to abandon one line of thought or technology for another. Keep them all. Some anachronistic line of thought could be the solution to a modern problem.

When the brilliant engineer that manages to make a glowing piece of tungsten more efficient than a CFL comes along, I am sure the laws can and will be reversed as long as there is a market for lobbyists to open up. But until then, I don't see how the 1890s will come around to solve 21st century engineering problems.

[Fisherking]

I said before this is only a tangent.

The light bulb is only a septum of a wider problem. There are other examples. The dietary supplements and many more. Even the bills in the US and Europe regarding CFCs were misguided.

It is not the product or technology, it is the rush to do something seen as better but untested or just arbitrary and based on perception rater than real benefit.

The idea of government dictating to industry a safety improvement that is proven and tested is much different than dictating what type of light bulb you should have in your home. The government does not pay your bills, you pay theirs and they waste a lot more of everything than the individual could ever dream about, including your money.

It is a distraction from bigger problems they should be addressing. It is also something that plays easily to corruption. Banning the products of one company in favor of another? Or the technology one has and the other has not gotten yet?

We already see activists wanting some foods banned. Is that freedom, should you eat your vegetables like a good boy an give up red meat? Should we all live a Vegan lifestyle? Is this the job of government?

If allowed, everything will be taken to the extreme. Stopping or at least slowing that should be the concern of all of us.

The problem with the EU is that government is unaccountable to anyone. Most are appointed and once there they are beholden to only themselves. They can not be recalled or voted out so they are free to be as foolish as they like.

[Andres]

Can you have one without the other?

Knowledge and experience are sometimes stubborn obstacles against creativity and innovation.

[Husar]

You also don't get to vote on who is head of the national bank or who is head of the supreme court yet these institutions have a whole lot of power.

I'll be with you once they actually try to ban meat, until then color me unconvinced.

Can you have one without the other?

No, if you have no intelligence as in 0 IQ then your brain is most likely not working at all.
As for having a lot of one and little of the other, yes, that is possible.

We shouldn't make the vote dependent on intelligence because the people deserve what they voted for, that's survival of the fittest.

And that's why Europeans are third rate citizens to America who can be spied on as deemed necessary because Europeans keep voting themselves out of a system that would actually make them fit to deal with globalization and superpowers.

The lightbulbs are indeed just a distraction, that's why it surprises me that the topic is constantly brought up.

If the EU is indeed developing into a dictatorship then the only way to overthrow it is a united European citizenry that isn't busy with infighting over who has the best national identity or who is the most American island or can offer the lowest effective tax rates while extorting money from others because the tax income doesn't cover the luxuries.

All these problems stem from a half-way integration because everybody wants to be part of the cake and eat it, too.

[Fisherking]

You also don't get to vote on who is head of the national bank or who is head of the supreme court yet these institutions have a whole lot of power.

I'll be with you once they actually try to ban meat, until then color me unconvinced.

To help understand your position, perhaps you could answer a few questions.

Does that mean we are only to except the status quo and not call for change or reform?

Do you see any issues in making those posts elected?

Is government to be the master of the people or their servant?

Are rights individual or collective?

If collective should one group have more than another? Why?

What do you see as the purpose of government?

At what point do you see government exceeding its scope?

[Husar]

Does that mean we are only to except the status quo and not call for change or reform?

No, it just means the whole "the EU is a dictatorship and needs to be abandoned because it banned incandescents" angle is overblown and not constructive. I'm not saying that's entirely your angle. As I tried to say earlier change is not often achieved by completely blocking everything the "wrong" party does.

Do you see any issues in making those posts elected?

No, it's just funny that these posts were created by our elected politicians whom we can supposedly trust so much more. If that were true, why did they create these posts which can apparently not be trusted?
I'm assuming of course that the EU institutions did not create themselves out of thin air and grew from contracts between the individual nations. There is actually some kind of voting process on which parties get how many seats in the EU parliament or something but I'll gladly admit that I obviously don't know much about how that works yet.

Is government to be the master of the people or their servant?

A bit of both depending on the situation, it cannot function without any power and it does not serve the people if it has all the power.
Still I see more politicians stepping down due to public pressure than top bankers. And I'm pretty sure banks are supposed to serve their customers and not be their masters. I mention this because of priorities and because privatization and other measures seem to have stripped the government of reigning in companies that have become too big/essential to fail and so on.

Are rights individual or collective?

Depends on the right and the situation. Most of them are probably individual but when individuals form a collective they usually surrender some individual rights that are transformed into collective rights which may or may not differ from individual ones. If we look back at tribal structures and older systems of government and democracy, purely individual rights seem like a relatively modern thing that's not all that old and established. Not that I'm an expert on this though.

If collective should one group have more than another? Why?

Because deus vult. Or because might makes right. For a normative statement however, they shouldn't.
In reality it's almost unavoidable however since there will always be conflicts of interest that affect the rights of someone or some group to do something. Does the right to take revenge trump the right of a murderer to live? I don't think society is anywhere near united on these questions and I can't claim to have a strict opinion on it either.

What do you see as the purpose of government?

To establish and maintain order. That's the extensible core. And it has to be taken with a grain of salt because 100% order easily equals tyranny. Extensions of the task of a government in the modern world are to provide a variable level of security since that is often something not everyone can be expected to provide for themselves. Additionally it provides for basic human needs and balances out deficiencies in human behavior if necessary. All in all the task of government is to keep society as a whole in a working condition without infringing anyone too much. The individual details of this are mostly up for debate today. I see few people who want toll booths at the end of every single road or who would rather spend 2000€ from their wallet to have a hole in the road in front of their house repaired.

As such government also functions to distribute costs and risk. Now why is that? IMO it's a historical development because people figured that in the long run everybody is better off if certain things are shared. Trade and alliances developed from peoples' needs and government has always changed and conducted social engineering to provide more stability. The medieval lords already attempted to get more people to settle problems in a courtroom rather than have bloody family feuds even though that meant in rare cases a peasant might win a lawsuit against his lord. Was that a positive change or should people be allowed to murder each other if they so wish?

What would our societies look like if we still had family feuds where two families shoot at eachother on the open street? Is there a basic human tendency towards peaceful resolution or should momentary instincts take precedence after a crime happened? Don't crimes often happen due to momentary instinctual reactions? What I'm saying is that not every individual notion should trump the collective but on the other hand single individuals are sometimes right against the opinion of the majority. It cannot be answered in general as my horribly confusing and imprecise answer proves.

At what point do you see government exceeding its scope?

Depends on the individual case again, to make a generic statement it's probably around the time it starts to try and regulate more than 5-10% of daily personal decisions. If it tells us when we can go to the toilet and what we are allowed to eat, it exceeds its scope. If it tells private businesses that they cannot put harmful substances into food they sell to the public without writing in big letters onto the package that this food is harmful then that's perfectly within what government should do.

Basically you can add establishing information symmetry to the things that government should establish because asymmetry of information destroys the self-regulation on a free market. And to demand that everyone is an expert on everything he buys when the people who produce it studied a collective 180+ years to know what they know then that is completely outlandish and unrealistic given that the whole idea of a market is that people specialize in different areas.
The role of government in this case is to employ experts to make sure that offers on this market are declared truthfully without omitting dangers or praising non-existent benefits. Part of this function also goes to courts of course if the blunder was only found after the fact.

Since you're going to bring up CFLs now most likely, I'm still unsure about the dangers they pose as I couldn't find any statistic on the percentage of CFLs that explode before they go out for other reasons, just some anecdotal scare stories. Excessive energy consumption is detrimental for all however and by now I suggest to buy LEDs anyway. One law alone does not a dictatorship make anyway, it is now several years old and there haven't been hundreds of other laws like it so that slippery slope may take centuries to materialize.

[HoreTore]

Can you have one without the other?

Definitely.

I've had several students who know a whole bunch of facts(knowledge), but who are almost incapable of connecting the dots between those facts and construct meaning from them(knowledge). As the school I work for give separate grades for this, it's easy to see that I have given high scores in one field and a low score on the other for the same student. Although I would add that the discrepancy is rarely extreme, they tend to be around the same level for most students and students with a high score on connecting dots and a low score on knowledge is a lot rarer than the opposite(though that may be because their "connecting dots"-score suffer from a lack of dots to connect in the first place).

[Tellos Athenaios]

Knowledge and experience are sometimes stubborn obstacles against creativity and innovation.

But then again: do I want my MEPs to be creative, soy-latte clichés and all?

More seriously: especially in technical fields it's often a specific set of skills that is useful. Eventually it leads you to build up domain specific knowledge; but the flow is largely one-way. The skills appear to center around problem solving by way of analysis and process of elimination. You'd be surprised how few people appear able to do it. I expect most just play stupid in the hope someone else will do the hard work for them.

[Fragony]

What do scream when you obviously got busted, exactly. That Geenstijl reporter might be a terrorist.

lulz

[Sir Moody]

A bit of both depending on the situation, it cannot function without any power and it does not serve the people if it has all the power.
Still I see more politicians stepping down due to public pressure than top bankers. And I'm pretty sure banks are supposed to serve their customers and not be their masters. I mention this because of priorities and because privatization and other measures seem to have stripped the government of reigning in companies that have become too big/essential to fail and so on.

I mostly agree with what you are saying but the above point fails a touch.

Banks (and any Business in fact) are not their to "serve" their customers - they exist to "serve" their Stake Holders by taking as much money off their customers as they can reasonable get away with.

The public/customers as a whole putting pressure on a Business will not necessarily put pressure on the Stake Holders to force the Company to shed the offending weight.

Elected Ministers have far more at stake and since they require the public to remain in power the public can provide direct pressure on them - in a way the public IS the stake holder in government

[Husar]

I mostly agree with what you are saying but the above point fails a touch.

Banks (and any Business in fact) are not their to "serve" their customers - they exist to "serve" their Stake Holders by taking as much money off their customers as they can reasonable get away with.

Yes, my statement was of a normative nature because in a properly functioning market the customers will let them only take as much money as they deserve and switch to another company if they don't deserve it. How many customers switched to different banks after the banking crisis and how many banks were forced to adapt their policies due to extreme losses in customers? What does this tell us about this market?

The public/customers as a whole putting pressure on a Business will not necessarily put pressure on the Stake Holders to force the Company to shed the offending weight.

If the company goers bankrupt, what happens to the money the stakeholders invested into the company? Are you saying the potential loss of all their invested money is not pressure? There is no pressure however if customers stay no matter what the company does.

Elected Ministers have far more at stake and since they require the public to remain in power the public can provide direct pressure on them - in a way the public IS the stake holder in government

Who are the customers of the government?

[HoreTore]

To build on Husar's post, there's also the iron law of institutions to consider, which holds that leaders in institutions(banks and other big companies, hospitals, schools and academia, goverment, military etc etc) will eventually start caring more about their own power and position within the institution, than the power and position of the institution compared to other indtitutions.

[Pannonian]

To build on Husar's post, there's also the iron law of institutions to consider, which holds that leaders in institutions(banks and other big companies, hospitals, schools and academia, goverment, military etc etc) will eventually start caring more about their own power and position within the institution, than the power and position of the institution compared to other indtitutions.

Some time back, I was discussing with another TWC moderator our exhaustion and desperation to hand over power to someone whilst making sure the whole thing didn't fall down. We discussed the ideal volunteer moderator, and we agreed that we wanted people who didn't particularly value power or desire to be a moderator such as ourselves, but the flipside of that was that they (we) were more likely to burn out quicker and want out. The people we'd probably want to be our representatives are probably not those who'd want to pursue a political career to get into a position to be our representatives.

[HoreTore]

Some time back, I was discussing with another TWC moderator our exhaustion and desperation to hand over power to someone whilst making sure the whole thing didn't fall down. We discussed the ideal volunteer moderator, and we agreed that we wanted people who didn't particularly value power or desire to be a moderator such as ourselves, but the flipside of that was that they (we) were more likely to burn out quicker and want out. The people we'd probably want to be our representatives are probably not those who'd want to pursue a political career to get into a position to be our representatives.

I see the description as more of an observation of the nature of the institutions themselves rather than an observation of the people in question, though.

[Fragony]

Hmmmmmm, the international-socialism not only wants control over what you write about the international-socialism, and a berurftverbot for non-cheering journalists, but they also want to know where you are: chips in your licence-plates comming up. And don't bother asking for a link if you only read quality-media, otherwise feel free to do

[Fragony]

Kewl, Germans on our borders are enriched by our youths who have chances&culture, really easy to get away. Aren't we all blessed with open borders and multiculture. like that plumb DDR-workhorse Merkel says. lol