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> That sounds very dogmatic to me, "you cannot", "they are necessary", "you just have to", "an attack on democracy". There is no dogmatism necessary, it's a logical proposition. If people are not allowed to decide for themselves what is true, they are not self-governed. Unfortunately, we can see from the ample historical record that people will frequently believe things that aren't true, or lack context, and will decide on courses of actions that appear to be foolish, reckless, or wicked. But the reason we live in a democratic society is because we decided this was better than oligarchs or monarchs choosing for us, even if a given set of oligarchs or monarchs may have been better and wiser. And we also have an ample historical record showing us that governments and other power-systems, given the power, will censor true things as well as false ones for various reasons, usually self-interested, but not always in a direct sense. You can argue that some kind of managerial technocracy with arbiters of truth is a better system of government, but it isn't really a democratic one, in the usual sense. Perhaps in the "you are allowed to choose from these pre-approved opinions, held by the earl and the duke, respectively" sense. > with the refusal to Trump at al to accept the result of last year's election. But that is not down to censorship. I am personally more worried about CIA directors torturing people, murdering people, spying on the Senate, and leading the attacks on democratically elected officials as a threat to democracy than this, which is not a new problem at all in America. But even in the latter case, censorship certainly played a major role: the Biden laptop story was censored because intelligence agencies said it was the sort of thing the Russians might do (not that they had any evidence they did it - but because they would have done it if they could), and this certainly aggravated the sense of aggrievement and persecution held by these people, even though I personally doubt the "revelation" that Hunter got jobs because of who his dad was and had to pay his dad some of the money would have swayed anyone, considering how common it is in DC. |