> Of course there's a lot to criticize and also to appreciate about the EU. But this is supposed to be a forum for intelligent, thoughtful discussion and yet as soon as the EU gets mentioned it basically turns into reddit.

You dislike criticism? I find criticism an important part of discourse and discussion. HN is very clearly not anything like reddit - just the insane amount of censorship on reddit alone, is already one argument against that claim. Many more could be given. I have been using reddit in the past for many years, so I know how reddit changed. Not that everything is perfect on hackernews; I dislike the "you are posting too much" limitation, for instance. But we don't have over-eager censor-mods here whereas that was locking down numerous interesting discussions on reddit.

With regards to the EU situation: the EU is in a very strange situation. On the one hand it is doing good things; this then gets cancelled by the EU commission acting as a pure lobbyist group, as well as a huge army of bureaucrats who want more and more money and dream about assimilating more and more countries, which makes zero sense. Whether the EU will succeed with regards to their open source strategy or not, who knows. What I do know is that individual countries, such as France or the Netherlands, are quite intelligent when it comes to good decisions (Germany is absolutely undermined by lobbyists, so it is totally paralysed here); I am not convinced the EU is in a similar situation. It would have to be reformed, but people in Brussels don't want to see their job axxed away, so nothing will improve here.

My recommendation is that if you are unhappy, go and talk about it - but don't expect others to turn to your assumptions about how a discussion should happen when it comes to the EU, because they may not share your opinion here.