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"Our freedom of speech is actually greater now than it ever was, but to little avail." It is but it's orthogonal to avail. ;) The freedoms are necessary, the press part has to be solid, and the people have to take action. The press and action are the problems. Freedoms are doing their job of producing opportunities, which I act on regularly. "People forget, but the United States had strict censorship codes for all of the television, film and comic book industries" And through the democratic process these were fought and freedoms expanded. This is less likely to work in a monarchy, communist state, theocracy, or dictatorship. That the people's input matters and with bloodless avenues of it creating change is a pre-requisite to major reforms benefiting the people without full-on revolt. So, what systems and countries are you talking about where people did similar stuff within their system while dissident speech, publishing, and organizations were all illegal? Note: Let's add voting integrity to the list of pre-requisites. The ability to speak about or publish the problems would be a pre-requisite to accountability. If you didn't have that, then privacy in property or communications would help you get word out discretely. Without any of the three, situation starts to sound like like certain South American and Asian countries. |
Theocracies in practice are dictatorial, but nominally it just means your "constitution" would be a religious text. I agree those are undesirable.
"Communist state" is an oxymoron, surely you mean Marxist-Leninist state. Dictatorship is too vague.
I'm not really objecting to the democratic process being a vehicle for change, so much as contemporary implementations of it being riddled with inefficiencies and fallacies, as well as the fact that most people completely overlook the crucially important meta-theory of how democracy operates and assume it's all good because the word "democracy" gives them warm, fuzzy feelings.