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Comment by qubex | Hacker News Reader

I strongly disagree. There might be a tendency to over-legislate in some areas (after all, there is now an exposed central authority that can be lobbied by special interest groups) but on the whole, the EU has been a strong positive influence on the continent of Europe and Britain is facing a serious self-inflicted wound as a result of Brexit. I say this as somebody who has dual citizenship in both a EU country (Italy) and the UK.

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The EU has a huge problem of people who have absolutely no idea what they're voting for. The cookie law was a very obvious example of that. The EU parliament is a mix of politicians who vote for what they want and ones who very obviously vote for whatever their party's or their corporate connections want. The moment any kind of technology is involved, the first group doesn't know what they want and so the second group can out-vote the crap out of them.

So yes, they have done a lot of good, but only in fields they understand. In fields they don't, however, they are a much too powerful weapon in the hands of (effectively) the highest bidder.

In what way is the "cookie law" a result of voting for whatever their party's or their corporate connections want? Which corporations benefit from that?

The cookie law is so incredibly stupid and ineffective, my best explanation for it is that it was made by people who didn't actually want more privacy for users, and the ones who did, voted for it because they didn't understand how useless it was.

The EU has important geopolitical reasons for existing on the continent of Europe.

However, the UK does not share the history of the continental countries of being occupied by their neighbours.

The compact "I surrender much of my sovereignty for security from being periodically exterminated by my neighbours" - has a very different balance on the scales for the country of the UK than it does for countries with a recent memory of occupation, that have seen large percentages of their populations dying from violence in continental wars going back centuries.

I agree with your observation that the UK has never been occupied, but disagree that the UK can afford to disregard continental matters. The UK has deployed soldiers to fight and die in continental Europe since the Middle Ages, and the last World War heralded in a period of untold suffering for civilian populations on the Home Front, all of whom were well within the reach of industrial-era weapons and legitimate targets within the remit of the doctrines of Total War.

It’s not for no reason that the past 300 years of British foreign policy has revolved around the principle of ensuring that no continental power could rise up to the point of posing a threat to her navies. Admittedly, this is now truly superseded, but it should bear an impact on people’s decisions.

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