So the fixes are still fixes, but we (I am also a OSS maintainer) are unwilling to accept them as they boost the contributor’s status where we think the merit is very or extremely limited.
Why not have these PRs counted differently (by the platform), and/or colored differently in the timeline(s) thus made less visible or more clear?
Unless the change is an obvious improvement, it has to be worth the time for the maintainers to spend attention reviewing it (and supporting the code forever, and all the rest).
Even if these particular changes are "harmless" and easy to review, accepting them sets a precedent that encourages an unsustainable flood of AI-generated changes that will overwhelm the project.
That’s a totally unnecessary high bar you’re setting. Most change is mediocre (a tautology, I realize). I really don’t believe that you can think that fixing a bunch of spelling mistakes is not a small improvement.
About setting a precedent: if you think like that you probably never accept any contributions at all, by humans or otherwise. Contributions by strangers have always been very minor things in general, things that the author cared enough about to make a pull request. In this case I don’t see the difference except for the fact that ai was used. If you just don’t accept ai at all , fine. But just be clear about it. In this case they are calling spelling correction slop. That’s not what slop means. Pretending human contributions were always “great” and nothing else would do is kind of ridiculous and shows a lack of experience in open source.
Change is bad. It takes engineers time to understand and approve. It confuses users. Changes should be made for good reasons, not frivolously.
Just because writing code is easier does not mean you should write more of it. It is more important than ever to carefully consider what you work on and what work you accept.
The user says "this is just spelling corrections" but a maintainer - a volunteer - needs to read all the files and make sure it's harmless and doesn't introduce security vulnerabilities, change meanings, and so on. That's not free.
I think Goodhart's law applies really well here. When people make commits for the sake of having made a commit to some famous repo, the "merit" that a commit measures is already useless. Remember Hacktoberfest 2020, before LLMs were popular? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24643894
What merit was there to have anyway. Would the author accept the same changes from a human?? I am inclined to believe they would, I certainly would. Would you have attributed merit to someone just fixing typos? I mean it’s quite helpful. But I wouldn’t think a commit fixing typos ever attributed merit to a developer. So it’s hard to understand the problem with AI doing this. If it was a bot like dependabot but for fixing grammar errors would that be a problem? I assume no, hence the problem is entirely that the human author of the PR is being attributed nonexistent merit by people who should know better.
Well, as I mentioned there was already in 2020 the problem of (human-generated) slop commits causing unnecessary work for maintainers.
The commit in itself might add some minuscule value to the project, but when you take into account the time it takes to check the commit and approve it, you're probably back at negative value again.
Plus, there's the problem of people doing this in an adversarial way. How can you tell whether a random commit touching 100 files is the work of an enthusiastic beginner, or a malicious hacker that's hidden a subtle attack somewhere? Well, you need to spend your time carefully checking it.
So it's way more pragmatic just to set up some automated filter to put all of this stuff in the bin.
Oh and by the way:
> I wouldn’t think a commit fixing typos ever attributed merit to a developer.
The first sentences of the article in question:
> Successful contributions to open source projects are a kind of currency. GitHub in particular encourages this in a number of ways: [...] Potential hiring managers often take note of this. Recruiters often find and screen candidates this way.
Why should a maintainer care about keeping PR count as a signal of developer status? A good quality contribution is a good quality contribution. You only have a responsibility to your own users, keeping out bad code from your repo while accepting as much good code as you can without getting overworked. You don't have to look after other people status games.
If you judge first time contributors on accepted PRs that's as dumb as doing it based on their activity. It tells you nothing about quality. You're the stupid one for assuming all maintainers are as strict as you are.
It's less about being a maintainer and more about being on the SWE job market. Making it possible for any person to appear to be a prolific open source contributor even though his contributions are net negative for the projects he contributes to hurts the contributors who actually make improvements.
Because letting sloperators near your codebase, even for a very minor obvious and correct change, may have long-term negative consequences for your project. It sends a signal to other sloperators to keep doing what they do, when we really need to send them a signal to get a life, learn a craft, and let Claude burn in hell.
Surprisingly prompting takes skill. The more you know about something the more precise you can be and the better AI actually works. I’ve found just saying “here is my bug/issue, fix this” is about the absolute worst way thing you could do, but give it a clear direction and precise step by step instructions and it will not only do well but sometimes blow your mind.
Because every merge request and every merge comes with cost and (potential) more cost in the future.
Linux lately received a lot of fixes for drivers nobody has cared about for ages. They decided to remove them. Maybe they should have done this earlier, I don't know, but that happened because every code change comes with cost down the line. For real contributers, this cost is much more limited and they have a higher probability of burden the cost down the line.
Pure AI MRs are just rude, because it's just "here take this, don't really care what this is, but AI said it being good, I won't be around, so you will have to deal with this code after the merge and you better don't overlook anything, because I personally don't really know what I am doing, I only know how to have AI making something that looks convincing. Good luck fixing the bugs this change introduces".
I think what you're saying is fair, tbh. Imagine you put in months or years into a project to make it a quality piece of work. It develops into something notable and you took all the risk. Then someone comes along to fix a spelling error with a pull request so their name effectively appears on the repo as a "contributor." And you just know right after its going on their resume as "contributed to [...]" or maybe if they're bold "software engineer working on [...]" which implies substantial investment. Then you're effectively sharing credit for YOUR work with someone who did nothing. That is rage inducing. ((Of course: it probably is just juniors trying their best in this horrible industry.))
On the other hand: lets be careful not to dismiss valid but inexperienced attempts to contribute. Having someone want to genuinely contribute to your software is incredibly generous. If someone seems like they're trying its better to give advice than act like a snob because its not good enough. Often pull requests only need small fixes to get in, anyway.
maybe, the maintainer would need to review them to determine that, and that can be time-consuming especially because LLMs tend to provide walls of sometimes dense text
since the human submitting the PR (if there is one) couldn't be bothered to understand whether the change is a valid one (and therefore submit the change as their own work), why should the maintainer take on that work. if they wanted an LLM to find bugs in their code they could run it themselves with less work than sorting through LLM-generated PRs.
These fixes, regularly destroy the architecture, accrue bloat for little gain, refuse to rewrite while demanding to rewrite- and many other such funny noises. Most code contribution by LLMs is garbage if you long-term care about the project. Look at closed source projects that ingest all this madness - windows with its seconds to open the explorer and other catastrophes.
My solution is to ask them for proof of work. Many of these disappear after opening a PR that they never tested. How can you claim to have fixed a visual issue without a screenshot? Insta-close.
I have noticed a lot of my Github followers who are either newer students or just new to Github have an immaculate green board of commits on their profile page, but it's so over the top I only like the ones that have creative illustrations or just very limited edits. Some seem so automated that it's hard to know how much they actually work on it. Others even are programmed to follow accounts then drop off once the person doesn't reciprocate, which is technically better than them staying but also systematically checking what sticks (also Github should limit some of these automated follows).
Not just that how the maintainer was treated by the attacker which tells you something about the way people feel entitled to maintainers time and efforts for nothing even by people not looking to exploit the project. And the abuse after he received despite it being an easy mistake that the culture encourages people to make.
> And the abuse after he received despite it being an easy mistake that the culture encourages people to make.
I believe that that was in part simply people defending their reality.
Because if it's not the maintainers fault, then why did it fail? What are the implications of that? What does it mean for me personally? Do I have to do something differently? Do I have to change my assumptions?
People do not like these feelings. They want to simply push them away.
The easiest way of doing so is blaming that guy and being done with the negative emotion.
Most people do suck at this whole "being human" business.
Second Reality was art indeed, but the GUS didn't make all that much difference for it. The soundtrack didn't have higher rate samples for the GUS's memory to hold or more channels for it to mix. Later demos and games did use these capabilities, but for Second Reality, the GUS sounded just about the same as a 16-bit Sound Blaster.
I seem to remember to have watched a recent comparison on YT between Second Reality using SB vs GUS, and I did appreciate an audible improvement with the latter, but it may have been a placebo -- I admit you may be right, as sources seem to confirm that the track used 8 channels that minimised if not outright eliminated synthesis differences. I am not an audiophile or audio engineer by any stretch so more informed people will have to chime in here, but what I had going for me then was the fact I never had a Sound Blaster to compare with directly. I think the fact my card died mere months into my purchase, kind of prevented me from forming a more objective opinion on the quality difference between it and SB.
On a system of that era, some scenes look far smoother with the GUS than SB16. With the GUS running, the CPU could focus on graphics because the audio was offloaded to the GUS. This was particularly true of the 3d flight scene.
I do feel impaired around 1000ppm. I get headaches. At home I got a few Air Gradient Ones (no affiliation, but they are great) and connected those to my Home Assistant to turn up the ventilation in stages (above 650ppm go up, above 800ppm again, at 1000ppm max). I also do this for the bedrooms, cause in the night it goes up too.
The article talks about "within the hour". With four people in my living room doing normal things it jumps within 20min to around 1000ppm. If I am wrestling with my kids much sooner.
In offices companies often neglect it.
edit: if you are cooking on gas it also has an immediate effect on co2 of course apart from other small particles
It indeed is a wake up call. But at the same time the strong data protection laws, copyright and privacy laws make it extremely difficult for a European company to develop a frontier model. Activist lawyers can sue and drag startups for training their model on a news article and the legal expenses would be higher than the engineering costs.
ChatGPT was released 4 years ago and still out of 27 countries in EU, only Mistral based in France has a model closer to a frontiers and IMO EU has already lost the race and still trying to catch up to yesterday models.
Google Deepmind is headquartered in the UK and has R & D in multiple countries. How would the US ban non-nationals from using something that is largely developed outside the US by people who are not US nationals?
Mistral might be a bit behind but this might give them a lot more business.
Most of all, a lot more people will switch to Chinese models. They will catchup, soon enough.
I have not had much of a chance to try Fable, but it did not seem better than Opus for what I tried it out on. Maybe its better on bigger jobs/vibe coding type tasks which is not something I do anyway.
Certainly to stop people with US businesses from doing business with Iran or Cuba. To stop an American owned British company from doing business in the UK? To stop a French company doing business in France? To stop either doing business with the rest of the world? To stop anyone doing business with China?
They absolutely can impose sanctions on foreign companies by restricting their access to US markets, investments and penalizing US banks doing business with them.
For some EU companies this is irrelevant, but for global companies this becomes a problem.
So did they stop any Iranian companies doing business with Iran? Did they stop China or Russia doing business with Iran? If Google Deepmind has to stop doing business with non-US citizens what will they do with their R & D in the UK and other countries? Will Mistral stop doing business in France? Will the Chinese AI companies stop doing business with everyone else (including China?) to retain access to US markets and banking?
The likely end result of this is that it will shrink the market to which American companies have access by more than it will shrink the market for anyone else.
I am not assuming anything. Military force is not the same thing as economic sanctions. Are you suggesting the US would be willing to use military force to stop the UK or France using technology developed in their own countries? Or from using Chinese LLMs? Otherwise this is irrelevant.
I like Luhmann’s theory better. What i like about it is that Luhmann argues that the smallest denominator of a social system is a realation between two. Habermas says it can be brought down to an individual. Which in my mind defeats the “social” part.
Havin not read the underlying theory, is the society of one constructed with the belief that one has relations to one's self?
That is, I could see that the idea of a society of two could be derived from a society of one in that I could extend my desire to be kind to my past, present, and future selves, to a desire to be kind to selves that are not my own.
Kind of like a computing network being a generalisation of the network that exists inside anyone one machine in that networking is just i/o with more steps and more wire?
I have SentinelOne as part of my install. Since that got upgraded, my Mac started eating its battery during sleep. Possibly due to SentinelOne's network scanner, as that takes up 100% cpu for awhile when just returning from sleep. So my mac awakes 3 times an hour to connect to iCloud and then adding SentinelOne overhead...
I think I might try this setting (Prevent Wake for Maintenance)
I've heard people on the radio (ha yes I listen to that ;-)) that they disagree with Le Pen being banned from running for president.
That seems strange to me as this was public (eu) money that was funneled into her own movement, i.e. bolstering her popularity in some way. So letting her run in the elections would basically mean she would get away with the fraude.
At the risk of just repeating a previous comment, if you actually want to live in a democracy you have to trust the electorate at some level. I don't know the specifics of this case but if it's clear cut corruption it should be easy to make that case to the electorate and absolutely destroy Le Pen in the election.
If it's not that easy, then banning her from running is even worse.
That's what happened - some officials trusted the electorate at some level and decided that the rules the electorate chose to make via their representatives should be followed. Those officials also trust the electorate to change the rules if they want to.
That's a very charitable way of explaining away literally anything.
Let me try:
It's not like Putin started a war, but rather some officials trusted the electorate at some level and decided that the rules the electorate chose to make via their representatives should be followed. The representatives being Putin and friends. Those officials also trust the electorate to change the rules if they want to.
There were no actual attempts at a coup btw, so the electorate is evidently happy with this.
Ultimately, rules come from the people in a democracy.
If they decide they want a candidate who broke the rules, that's where it gets messy in political philosophy.
Should the democratic will of the people from years ago or decades ago override the democratic will of the people now? Of course that's the general idea of having constitutions and such, but it can only ever be a matter of degree, and there's no right answer as to how much.
Rules should be followed. If when rules are broken no punishment is applied, the rules are meaningless. Once rules become meaningless, everyone will be emboldened to break the rules, to the detriment of society as a whole.
If you want the rules changed, vote for them being changed, don't give free pass for any asshole to break them.
But free, democratic elections is a "rule" too -- not just a rule, but a bedrock principle.
Why should people be prevented from voting now for someone because of previous rules made by a previous electorate? Why should someone from the past be allowed to nullify my preferred vote in the present?
There's always something inherently anti-democratic about preventing someone from running for office. The question is whether it's outweighed by other democratic concerns. It's messy.
> Why should people be prevented from voting now for someone because of previous rules made by a previous electorate? Why should someone from the past be allowed to nullify my preferred vote in the present?
All elections follow rules set by a previous electorate unless you want to first vote on defining the rules for an election every time you have an election.
If Trump were to actually run for a 3rd term, would you argue that he should be able to because term limits were set in place by a previous electorate?
Obviously they have to follow the rules for how to count votes, establish boundaries, etc.
But there is definitely a serious philosophical argument that term limits are inherently undemocratic.
I personally think they're necessary, but at the same time I realize they are undemocratic. They're literally taking away the ability for an electorate to freely choose.
All I'm saying is, the tradeoffs get messy. Restricting candidates from running can be a slippery slope. Look at what's happening in Turkey, where the popular opposition candidate was just barred from running. How do you know when you've gone too far? Barring candidates can corruptly entrench power, even when following the "rules" to the letter. What then?
This entire argument can be summarized as "no popular politician should ever have to obey any law." I realize you'll respond that you don't mean anything that extreme, of course. But the set of principles you're trying to articulate are, in fact, exactly that extreme. I don't want to live in that world and neither will you, when you have to experience it.
Erdogan has consolidated power independently and undemocratically and is using it to jail his opponents. That is completely different from this situation where a politician is engaging in anti-democratic actions and is then barred from running by an independent judiciary.
> term limits are inherently undemocratic
A society where the people are not able to participate in the electoral process is not a democratic society. True democracies represent the will of all people, regardless of whether they are part of the majority or whether they were eligible to vote in the single election which transitioned the political system from democracy to dictatorship.
Oh, Erdogan consolidated his power over the last few decades democratically. Rural turks came out in mass to vote for him over past decades. Incidentally, in the past he was actually jailed by his political opponents and banned from politics.
> Look at what's happening in Turkey, where the popular opposition candidate was just barred from running.
Ironically Turkey is in this situation precisely because Erdogan removed term limits and spent decades consolidating his power. Same with China where Xi Jinping did the same. And Russia with Putin. All prime examples of functioning democracies, right?
These rules are specially to prevent people from setting themselves up as emperor for life and if they are removed that's almost always the exact thing that happens.
Democracy isn't a perfect system, as much as Americans tend to believe it is. It needs some guidelines to keep it functional. And even with them it's a compromise, not perfection.
> Why was she the only one barred from running from office?
Because she was judged by an independent court and found guilty of embezzlement.
> Why not the other eight officials also found guilty?
I would have to read the decision to give this answer. Many things are considered when a judge gives out a sentence. Two murders may result in different prison length depending on circumstances, for example.
> The crimes of which Ms Le Pen has been convicted are serious, but not of the same order. France’s harsh sentence in this case limits the choice of citizens who are capable of judging for themselves who should get their vote. By creating a mechanism that politicians might be thought to have co-opted, the law encourages talk of conspiracy—especially if, like Ms Le Pen, the barred politician belongs to a party that is founded upon a suspicion of the elites.
> The danger of courts aggressively sentencing politicians is that both the law and the courts become seen as partisan. Judiciaries rely on citizens accepting verdicts with which they disagree. Elections are supposed to generate consent for the incoming government. A poll after Ms Le Pen’s conviction found just 54% of French thought she was treated like any other accused, a narrow margin of confidence in judicial independence. Among RN voters, 89% thought she was singled out for political reasons.
> France’s harsh sentence in this case limits the choice of citizens who are capable of judging for themselves who should get their vote.
That vote would be tainted by her embezzlement of campaign funds. The rest of this analysis is void once the author fails to consider how badly democracy can be damaged once election regulations are not respected.
Of course, the author may jave ulterior motives, and wants to defend Le Pen in this case because he wants to see democracy in Europe weakened from within. But I sm giving the benefit of doubt here and presuming stupidity rather than malice.
But voters would decide how much the embezzlement continued to matter, after she had already served time and paid a large fine. That would be the actual democratic outcome. Letting the people choose, as opposed to taking away their choice.
You, on the other hand, are presenting Marine Le Pen as a threat to democracy, presumably because you don't like the far right. But you're just one voter. Why not trust the electorate? Voters chose Giorgia Meloni and I don't see Italian democracy falling apart.
I'm not far right at all. I'm not even right. But I worry it's dangerous and will backfire to take choice away from an electorate because of some misuse of funds (that didn't benefit herself financially) that she is already being heavily punished for at a personal level. She's being punished. Voters shouldn't be by taking away their right to choose.
Only when the rules are respected by everyone involved.
If we are playing football (or soccer for the barbarians across the pond), a core principle is to score goals. If in the middle of the game I punch you in the face, that principle stops mattering super fast.
> Why should people be prevented from voting now for someone because of previous rules made by a previous electorate?
Because that is how rules and regulations work. If you want them changed, change them properly, don't go breaking them because your pet right wing politician was punished for breaking them.
> There's always something inherently anti-democratic about preventing someone from running for office
I fundamentally disagree. The only thing anti-democratic is to allow someone that does not respect the democratic rules for running for office, for they will undermine democracy from within.
> The only thing anti-democratic is to allow someone that does not respect the democratic rules for running for office, for they will undermine democracy from within.
Surely you see the catch in this belief. If there is a group of people who can "allow" others to run for election then the system is not democratic at its core.
Or if the judiciary has any sort of bias as is implied in this case. (I don't pretend to know the details)
I enthusiastically endorse the separation of powers and firmly believe that people should follow systems, not people. Perhaps it just a global coincidence, but the recent spate of candidate disqualification (US, Romania, Turkey, France) gives the appearance of democratic decay.
> Or if the judiciary has any sort of bias as is implied in this case. (I don't pretend to know the details)
Then don't assume the judiciary is biased by following up with a disclaim that you are repeating baseless conjecture. Le Pen was judged with her right to legal defense, found guity, and punished accordingly. This is democracy working as it should.
> I enthusiastically endorse the separation of powers and firmly believe that people should follow systems, not people.
Based on the content of your posts, I sincerely doubt your enthusiastic endorsement.
You are very quick to make excuses for the right wing politician that was punished for embezzlement, claimed repeatedly that her being banned from office is undemocratic, and claimed without a shred of evidence that the court that judged her is biased.
Forgive me if I think you are bullshitting me here.
> Perhaps it just a global coincidence, but the recent spate of candidate disqualification (US, Romania, Turkey, France) gives the appearance of democratic decay.
Comparing France to Turkey is pure bad faith argumentation. If you genuinely think that Turkey and France share any sort of democratic decay you are very ill informed.
If Le Pen was not punished, I would agree France was taking a step in creating its own French Erdogan.
You must be confusing my posts with someone else. Or claim doesn't mean what you think it means. Forgive me if it's difficult to forgive you when you place so much negative spin on what I wrote.
Only if those people act in anti-democratic ways. E.g. if they apply the law selectively, if they forego or restrict due process, and if they play around with the meaning of words and crimes then yeah, that's anti-democratic. For example, people brought up what's happening in Turkey, and I agree what's happening there is anti-democratic.
But if the people involved are not making up crimes, but prosecuting crimes; if they are not targeting people specifically, but enforcing the law that applies to everyone; and if they are allowing for the maximum possible due process, then there really isn't much of a case for that process being anti-democratic.
> There's always something inherently anti-democratic about preventing someone from running for office.
i’m curious, do you think age minimums are ok? i feel like with this opinion have to throw out all restrictions on the ability to run for office to be consistent.
You're acting like computers, or neutral actors external to the political system, decide "when rules are broken" and what "punishment" to apply.
That's entirely the wrong way to think about government. Government isn't about rules, it's about allocation of power. You have to think about government in terms of who is entrusted with power to make which decisions. If you entrust judges and lawyers to decide "when rules are broken" by elected officials, you give them power over those officials, and over voters.
Now that's okay to a degree, but the question is: where does the buck stop? If you design a system where the buck stops with lawyers and judges, then you've effectively given those lawyers and judges power to overrule voters. It's better to design a system where the lawyers and judges demur in situations like this, to avoid a "tail wagging the dog" situation where the legal system is invoked to resolve a political dispute.
You seem to have failed to see the thorniness of the problem maybe because in the current instance (Le Pen's ban by the French judiciary) you agree with the outcome.
Probably impossible to separate Le Pen's disqualification from the situation in the U.S. It's the song of the day. I seem to recall some account arguing in 2020, nominally on their expertise as a lawyer, that the election result could not be determined except in the courtroom. If you asked in 2020, should lawyers be disgraced if not disbarred for attempting to nullify the election - answer from GOP would be no. When asked today, suddenly answer is yes.
I agree only in the sense that K think that politicians should be punished for their wrongs.
I would only see thorniness is the courts refused to punish Le Pen out of fear of punishing a somewhat popular politician, as this would embolden others to act in ways to break the rules, and would undermine the independence of the court, which is a core tenet of a functioning democracy.
I think you only see thorniness here because you wanted Le Pen to keep doing her thing. See? it works both ways.
That's why we have nowadays Republics, with either written constitutions or fundamental legal texts like Habeas Corpus, not just pure democracies à la antique Athens.
The way out of your conundrum is to admit there is no "the People"; there is a collection of diverging, often incoherent trends, and no voting system is perfect (no voting system is even logical, as proven by Condorcet and Arrow[0])
Arrow is not at all "procedural", the French know it well: the 1995 presidential election ended with a Chirac vs Le Pen (the patriarch) duel, even though Lionel Jospin was the favorite and would have beaten both if he had faced them off... A clear example of non-transitivity in elections.
That's my point, sorry if it wasn't clear. Non-transitivity is resolved procedurally. We can theorize about Arrow all we want; in the meantime we can write rules that actually do produce electoral results.
My point is that it wasn't resolved: Jospin was the favorite, but the French were forced to choose between two candidates the majority of them loathed. The rules were a failure.
The definition of democracy according to Ricœur is:
> Est démocratique, une société qui se reconnaît divisée, c’est-à-dire traversée par des contradictions d’intérêt et qui se fixe comme modalité, d’associer à parts égales, chaque citoyen dans l’expression de ces contradictions, l’analyse de ces contradictions et la mise en délibération de ces contradictions, en vue d’arriver à un arbitrage.
In English, more-or-less:
> A society is democratic if it acknowledge that it is divided, which means that it contains contradictory interests, and if it creates modality to analyse and debate these contradictions so that we can reach arbitration, with each citizen having an equal share in the debate.
I don't believe that a society is democratic if a majority of the people have decided something that is harmful or unfair to a minority without properly having debated if this decision is fair or not for the minority.
Because of that, no, it's not "whatever the majority decides". In a democracy, the will to guarantee justice and fairness is more important than "the people", and if they say "there is suspicion of fraud from this candidate but let's just close our eyes because we like this person or because it is profitable for us", this is clearly a behavior where they are not trying to reach a just and fair situation.
This is what distinguish democracy from ochlocracy.
And I don't understand how people can really defend that we should ignore the justice/fairness condition: what is the point of following "the people" when these people are not trying to be just and fair? How will it be a good society?
> For democracy to work properly politicians need to follow the rules.
Democracy doesn't require that, except for a narrow subset of rules relating to voting and things like that.
The system you're describing isn't even democracy--it elevates lawyers and judges above the voters. Think about it: if there was a class of people you could trust to neutrally administer and enforce "the rules" then you wouldn't need multiple branches of government, separation of powers, etc. You could just make rules for everything, and trust the neutral arbiters to enforce those rules in politically neutral ways.
Here's one: Jacques Chirac was condemned in 2011 to 2 years with suspension (so, less than Le Pen) for something very similar (party members paid for fictitious jobs at the Mairie de Paris when he was mayor), and no ineligibility (so again, different consequences).
So it sounds like other politicians have indeed been convicted of similar things. The difference in punishment would then require you to examine the difference in the severity of the actions, which is beyond my pay grade.
> It seems that the system does work as intended after all.
Does it though? One common thread in the comments here is whether ineligibility is or is not warranted in political embezzlement cases. If hers is justified, how is the lack of Chirac's justified? That he was not seeking to be elected?
Whether or not it's actually a politically motivated difference, it's not a stretch that people question whether it is. Because it's a very convenient sentence. And let's face it, she was very likely to make it to the second round of the presidential election, and I can totally see a number of people being extremely bothered that it was a possibility, because if it did happen, if she wouldn't have won, it would have been very close (although who knows, a miracle could happen, and the political field might be less of a mess in 2 years).
> If hers is justified, how is the lack of Chirac's justified? That he was not seeking to be elected?
As stated in another reply, being sentenced to ineligibility for embezzlement is only possible since 2017.
It simply wasn’t a possible sentence in 2011. Note that this is not because it was considered too harsh. Ineligibility was systematic before 2010 as anyone condemned for embezzlement was automatically removed from voting lists for five years. However this was judged unconstitutional in 2010 (because it was automatic and sentences have to be individualised, ineligibility in itself is fully constitutional).
I think you're wrong here. A law can't be applied retroactively except if it would benefit the defendant and the RN case is about facts that happened before 2017.
Chirac's case happened more than 3 decades ago. Perhaps the judiciary had a different understanding on the gravity of those crimes back then. Perhaps what Le Pen did was more serious.
If Le Pen won, or if she would make to the second round is meaningless. The election would be tainted by having her running. That people are burthurt that their pet right wing populist became ineligible is of no substance. If anything it proves the courts are independent, and not acting to please a subset of the people.
Unsurprising. The laws making ineligibility a sanction for embezzlement, “Lois pour la confiance dans la vie politique”, is from 2017.
Note also that the 2011 verdict was somewhat unusual because before 2010 when this was judged unconstitutional, Chirac condemnation would have led to him being removed from the voting list for five years and therefore de facto ineligible. Chirac was “lucky” to be sentenced during the seven years window when ineligibility wasn’t possible.
I mean, "trust the electorate" sounds like a nice ideal, but I think it conveniently ignores the shithose of news and information that makes its way into the public discourse. We can't agree on basic facts in most places. What hope do we have to "trust the electorate" when most people are given straight propaganda and they buy it whole cloth.
If you want to live in the world where we "trust the electorate" you first have to figure out how to make the electorate informed. In the meantime, I would gladly accept equally applied and adjudicated laws as a way to remove corrupt individuals from the electable population. A lot of places do this already, so making it so someone can't run for a given election cycle seems like a relatively small slap on the wrist compared to barring felons from ever being allowed to vote or hold office.
They applied a law against corruption for which Le Pen herself voted. At some point, you need to trust the laws that elected members of parliament have enacted and also apply it to politicians.
At some level, yes. At the level of letting convicted criminals run for the highest office, no, that would be stupid.
> it should be easy to make that case to the electorate
It turns out if you have enough money for endless propaganda it is easy to make any case to the electorate. And who will be making the case anyway? The state cannot because it has to be inpartial in the elections; their opponents have a clear agenda (they want to be the president) so it's easy to dismiss their case.
So that leaves no one with standing.
> If it's not that easy, then banning her from running is even worse.
If the result is that a convicted criminal will not be elected into the highest office of the state, that's not a worse outcome, that's a perfect outcome.
Allowing some people to be above the law is a bad idea in general. Selecting elected officials to be above the law in particularly is ill-thought-out, IMO. Perverse incentives abound . Elections shouldn't be a get-out-of-jail card.
> The official position appears to be that a political party is given money by the EU but can only use it if they're pro-EU. A party that wishes the EU to be smaller or for their country to exit is then considered to be engaged in "national" politics rather than "European" politics, which makes their spending the money they were given as a political party, to do politics, "embezzlement".
No need for the scary quotation marks. This was plain embezzlement, as you very aptly described.
> Yes, but it is bad for democracy if only one specific viewpoint, the viewpoint of the people in charge no less, is actively sponsored via taxes.
And that is not what is happening. You can hold quite a lot of viewpoints, including opposing who is in charge. You just can't use EU funds to campaign for EU to be effectively abolished.
Imagine someone running for presidency in the US campaigning for it to disintegrate.
> Sorry, but you are representing the “a dark path”, where power is concentrated in the hands of a few.
Quite the opposite. EU fragments power so much that fucking Orban gets to block any initiative, even though Hungary is far from being one of the main countries in the block.
Also, very cute of you to cry authoritarianism when we are talking about Le Pen of all people, someone who holds very authoritarian views herself. Quite telling, whenever such a politician faces consequences of their bullshit, a lot of people come out of the woods to make excuses for them. Fuck that noise.
And why shouldn’t you be able to use EU funds for that? It seems perfectly reasonable to me that if a political organisation that is pro EU gets funding, the opponents should be funded as well. What is beneficial to the EU as a organisation shouldn’t be a parameter at all, that’s not how democracy works.
I agree that Marie Le Pen holds authoritarian views. When it comes to politicians this seems to be the rule rather than an exception. But that doesn’t make EU a particularly democratic organisation.
In my opinion, it is rare to find politicians who try to increase democracy.
Regarding your USA example, I believe it is only a nominally democratic state. I don’t think what they do over there is particularly good and should not be wused as a positive example.
I believe the best example of a functioning democracy is Switzerland.
> And why shouldn’t you be able to use EU funds for that? It seems perfectly reasonable to me that if a political organisation that is pro EU gets funding, the opponents should be funded as well. What is beneficial to the EU as a organisation shouldn’t be a parameter at all, that’s not how democracy works.
I fundamentally disagree with that. It would be like using public funds to run for presidency in a country while campaigning for that country to cease to exist.
Note that they didn't forbid her to campaign on a platform that is against the EU - which I think they should - they only forbid her to use public EU funds to do so.
That you want to paint this as undemocratic is very bizarre.
> But that doesn’t make EU a particularly democratic organisation.
To the opposite, EU fragments power quite a lot. It is one of the main reasons why it is slow to act sometimes, many changes requires unanimous approval from all member countries (which is why Orban gets to veto any initiative while he is gurgling on Putin's balls).
> In my opinion, it is rare to find politicians who try to increase democracy.
I don't even know if we would agree what a perfectly functioning democracy even is.
> It would be like using public funds to run for presidency in a country while campaigning for that country to cease to exist.
You seem to think this is an absurd scenario - I don't know how to tell you this, but it's not. It's allowed in healthy democracies. To give just three contemporary European examples:
1. In the UK the Scottish National Party gets public money for being in Parliament, yet has the stated goal that the UK should cease to exist. SNP MPs aren't thrown in prison or banned from politics. That's because the UK is a democracy.
2. Flanders has independence parties that poll highly and take part in regular politics without being banned from Belgian politics.
3. MEPs themselves are frequently arch Euro-nationalists. They get public money and then campaign to effectively abolish the countries they represent, demanding their national governments be replaced by the EU institutions. This is of course not considered illegal.
Whilst there are regions that criminalize attempts to actually become independent (which they shouldn't), even they typically don't criminalize merely being in favor of it.
> Note that they didn't forbid her to campaign on a platform that is against the EU - which I think they should - they only forbid her to use public EU funds to do so.
She's been banned from politics entirely and given a prison sentence. That meets the threshold for something being forbidden.
It honestly sounds like you'd have been happy with all the other attempts to unite Europe under a single government that happened in the 20th century. Not only are you delighted by this clearly despotic move, you think it should be illegal to even be against the EU at all: a purist argument for the EU as totalitarian dictatorship. You should really think about whether that's the place you want to be, philosophically. Especially as frustration over the EU's undemocratic approach was the primary reason the UK left.
> 1. In the UK the Scottish National Party gets public money for being in Parliament, yet has the stated goal that the UK should cease to exist. SNP MPs aren't thrown in prison or banned from politics. That's because the UK is a democracy.
SNP is a very particular case in that Scotland is a country, and the UK is a country made up of countries.
Also, Scotland is not trying to abolish the UK, it would still be a United Kingdom of England, Wales, and Northen Ireland.
> 2. 2. Flanders has independence parties that poll highly and take part in regular politics without being banned from Belgian politics.
Again, you are speaking of a portion of a country that desires independence. This is not the same as abolishing the country. Belgium would not cease to exist.
I could bring up movements that desire the separation of Catalonia and Basque Country in Spain too.
> 3. MEPs themselves are frequently arch Euro-nationalists. They get public money and then campaign to effectively abolish the countries they represent, demanding their national governments be replaced by the EU institutions. This is of course not considered illegal.
Replacing national institutions with more EU integration is not trying to abolish the existence of that country. You are extrapolating something there in a weird slippery slope.
> She's been banned from politics entirely and given a prison sentence. That meets the threshold for something being forbidden.
Perhaps she should not have engaged in embezzlement. Good that she was banished. It is important to respect the rules in place, else they become irrelevant and more politicians would feel emboldened to break them.
> It honestly sounds like you'd have been happy with all the other attempts to unite Europe under a single government that happened in the 20th century.
Nice way to try to paint me as a Nazi while you are crying about Le Pen of all people.
Protip, I am not the Nazi in this conversation.
> Not only are you delighted by this clearly despotic move, you think it should be illegal to even be against the EU at all: a purist argument for the EU as totalitarian dictatorship.
EU is far from being totalitarian, and far from being a dictatorship. If it was we wouldn't have to handle Orban being a pain in the ass for every initiative.
In fact, it is so democratic that things move slooooowly, because it needs a lot of consensus for things to move forward. It's a price I agree to pay, even if Orban is the cost for it.
> You should really think about whether that's the place you want to be, philosophically.
I am very much in favor of more EU integration, and I certainly vote for pro EU politiciand and parties for that matter. EU federalization should be the goal for me.
> Especially as frustration over the EU's undemocratic approach was the primary reason the UK left.
There have been other cases like this one yes, the EU fined UKIP for the same reason iirc. UKIP of course was a party that had only one policy: getting Britain out of the EU. Therefore any political activity by them was considered illegal under this policy.
In other cases the same things have been done without fines, I think, e.g. the German Greens. Because their policies align with the Commission their campaigning in Germany isn't considered "embezzlement".
The basic issue the EU has is that the Parliament isn't actually a Parliament. It's not genuinely the legislative branch because it can't change the law, which is the dictionary definition of Parliament. As a consequence it fills up with anti EU parties put there as a protest vote. These parties then want to spend their time advocating against the EU back home which is embarrassing to the EU as there is no other so-called Parliament in the world with so many members who think it shouldn't exist. These kinds of legal actions were conventionally about that.
This one has gone further because it's a way for the left to continue locking down mass immigration policies. Although you will read that Le Pen is far right in reality she is a classical left wing socialist with the policies typical of such a person, she is just against the EU and its migration policies. It's a purely ideological action, hence the ankle bracelet.
> This one has gone further because it's a way for the left to continue locking down mass immigration policies. Although you will read that Le Pen is far right in reality she is a classical left wing socialist with the policies typical of such a person, she is just against the EU and its migration policies. It's a purely ideological action, hence the ankle bracelet.
You are absolutely delusional.
This is on the same ballpark of the argument some brain damaged people repeat that the NSDAP was leftist because it had "socialist" in the party name.
> That post was for the Americans who are waking up about now.
You are just trying to excuse a plain case of embezzlement by dressing up as authoritarianism. Good that a cheater such as Le Pen is removed from elections. If democracy allows cheaters to run, that is shortcut to disaster.
Were Le Pen able to win an election without embezzlement of EU funds, I would agree she is as popular as you claim.
> And to the people who call themselves "European citizens", I would say this: you can build a positive, shared European identity without the EU.
As someone that lives in an EU country, I fully disagree. Even the largest EU countries are relatively small for the world stage. Consider that Germany has the population of Chinese provinces.
EU is an absurdly positive to every country involved, to the point where I actively desire further integration. Federalization of Europe should be the goal, not less integration.
> The average rock concert does more for long term European integration than any EU regulation because the EU is not Europe and Europe is not the EU. The EU is a transient political arrangement, one that is by now actually working against true European integration.
And this is the point where I come to conclusion you are arguing in bad faith.
> The path it's on leads to ever harsher authoritarianism.
Funny you mention this when you are crying about Le Pen and fucking AfD.
Yeah, nothing authoritarian from those people. It is the EU that is truly authoritarian. Sure.
VAT is applied on every good sold. So no. If you are able to produce cheaper and shipped cheaper than your EU competitor it will be cheaper when a consumer buys it.
Your European competitor will be able to deduct all their local VAT taxes on business inputs but you won’t be able to deduct your local sales taxes on your inputs.
Why not have these PRs counted differently (by the platform), and/or colored differently in the timeline(s) thus made less visible or more clear?