Hacker News Reader

Comment by samsonradu | Hacker News Reader

I had a very positive feeling about the people's atitude and what they achieved by protesting, considering that the government did a terrible thing from all points of view. There was probably no other way to roll it back but for how things went. However I'm concerned though that the majority of people misuse their voting power and make bad choices. It happened that the oposition wanted to stop this and all the media was encouraging people to go out and protest. Think what happens when both parties/coalitions agree on a bad law/resolution and it all goes under the table.

Point is this is not the way to go on the long term. We were lucky this time but it's gonna fail soon. We need to educate people better in hope that they will cast their vote properly.

View on HN

Direct democracy could help here. Ask people whether they want to decriminalize corruption and even those who voted for populists are going to say no.

Are you sure about that?

The president did trigger a referendum on this, but the ruling party jumped the gun and passed (and now revoked) this law before the referendum question was even finalized. The referendum will still go ahead.

Even if you phrase the question as "Do you want to decriminalize corruption?", or a more probable "Do you agree with softening the legislation toward combating corruption?" a significant amount of people will say yes, not because they think corruption is good, but rather they've been lead to believe that the National Anticorruption Directorate is biased toward PSD (the successor to the communist party).

(Small note, the two main networks saying this are Antena 3 (whose owner is in prison and would have benefited from this law) and Romania TV (whose owner is on the loose and on Europol's most wanted list).)

The Anticorruption Directorate is not biased. They just happened to catch more criminals out of PSD simply because PSD is ridden by criminals. It is the party of the former communist secret police and their friends, disguised as socialists.

I'm not sure this would help, as the sibling comment pointed out. I only see one solution on the long term. It's focusing on the education of our young generation, and here I'm looking at kids from a very young age.

During the past 2 decades Romania has been neglecting education big time. Teachers had terrible salaries, corruption was present even in our highest ranked colleges and institutions. Education quality has been degrading throughout this entire time and we need to make that a priority.

Then there is also the psychological aspect of it. We need to make school and education look cool again. We need to use proper role-models for children, like the Americans use Silicon Valley stars to show how success looks like. Meanwhile every time I turn on the TV here I see high-profile millionaires, going to or out of prison, giving preaches about what do to in life and how to outsmart others. These are the popular figures presented by our media.

Mostly, in Romania, education was never cool, work was never cool, paying taxes was damn right stupid and making millions of $ illegally was regarded with admiration. If we can change that our future looks better already.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com