[lordloki]

It's very simple, Americans believe that the individual is responsible for themselves while most of the rest of the world wants to be "protected" by a restrictive government. One leads to innovation and one stifles it. We would rather be responsible for discovering the truth on our own, than trust a central authority to decide what is and isn't true(or propaganda). I find it funny how Europeans think their governments are protecting them from propaganda instead of drowning them in propaganda.

[flir]

Heh. This is not the month to be making that argument.

I like having food hygiene standards - it means I don't have to worry about chalk in my bread, arsenic in my sweets, or antibiotics in my beef.

I honestly believe we'd be better off with informational hygiene standards, too. The last two decades have taught me this lesson - free speech absolutism is a giant "kick me" sign on the back of society, and when you find a security hole that big, you patch it.

I recognize there's a balance to be found, and reasonable people will disagree on where the tipping point is.

[Ray20]

>free speech absolutism is a giant "kick me" sign on the back of society

How does this work? What danger represents freedom of speech? With lack of it dangers is understandable: it is a giant "welcome" sign for bloody totalitarian dictatorship.

[danaris]

If megacorporations can lie to you about what they're selling you (which is one of the things that free speech absolutists generally argue for), then you will have no way of knowing if what you buy is going to kill you.

[pdonis]

I don't know any "free speech absolutists" who argue that fraud should be legal. Misrepresentation of a product or service you're selling is fraud. We already have laws against that.

[danaris]

Then consider yourself lucky, but I've seen that position argued strenuously right here on HackerNews in the past.

[rvense]

This has actually been a fairly common position among American libertarians. Alan Greenspan, for instance, was strongly against fraud laws until some time after the financial crisis. The idea was that the market would sort it out.

(And no, I don't understand how this is a serious position that serious people can seriously hold, but then that is how I feel about libertarianism in general.)

[pdonis]

> American libertarians

The term "libertarian" I feel is almost useless as a description of the political views of Americans, because it gets used to describe views that don't make any sense with that label. Greenspan, for instance, often described himself as a libertarian (or "libertarian Republican", whatever that means), but that seems a bit rich for someone who was chairman of one of the most powerful central planning organizations on the planet for so long. If central planning is libertarian then I'm a blue whale.

The term "free market" gets misused just as much. It's not a free market if the government (or the Fed, which is just an arm of the government) has its thumb on the scales.

[Ray20]

>If megacorporations can lie to you about what they're selling you

But this has nothing to do with freedom of speech. Freedom of speech does not in any way cancel out responsibility for fraud.

[flir]

Then you are not a free speech absolutist, and reasonable people will disagree about where the tipping point is.

Fire in a crowded theatre? CP? Threats of violence? Hate speech?

[pdonis]

> I like having food hygiene standards - it means I don't have to worry about chalk in my bread, arsenic in my sweets, or antibiotics in my beef.

And yet somehow humanity survived for tens or hundreds of thousands of years without such standards, and without having our ancestors' food poisoned.

Also, if you actually believe that government food hygiene standards prevent all possible bad things from being in your food, I've got some oceanfront property in North Dakota I'd like to sell you. You do know, don't you, that antibiotics in your beef, for example, is done all the time in factory farming with government approval?

[flir]

> prevent all possible bad things

Well that seems like a bad faith interpretation of my argument.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1858_Bradford_sweets_poisoning

[pdonis]

You included in your argument at least one bad thing that, as I pointed out, is not only not stopped by government regulation, it's explicitly permitted by it. The fact that there was a bad thing that happened before government regulation, which a government regulation was then passed to try to prevent, doesn't make your argument valid.

[flir]

Which government are we talking about, please?

[altruios]

> And yet somehow humanity survived for tens or hundreds of thousands of years without such standards

Narrator: "Most humans didn't survive past year five due to preventable illnesses and food born contamination, the humans' ancestor's infant mortality rate was rather high before the age of food safety and soap".

[pdonis]

> Narrator

Of what? Where are you getting this from?

[MyOutfitIsVague]

It's a reference to the Arrested Development television show.

[pdonis]

Last I checked that wasn't a documentary.

[johnnyanmac]

>And yet somehow humanity survived for tens or hundreds of thousands of years without such standards, and without having our ancestors' food poisoned.

Sure, with reduced life expectancy. If you're fine dying out in your 30's, maybe 40's at best you can eat whatever you want. Your body is pretty resilient to poison short term.

>, if you actually believe that government food hygiene standards prevent all possible bad things from being in your food

Extremist takes aren't doing you a favor here. Like I just said, we can resist a surprising about of poisons short term. Many people indulge in alcohol after all. We have no need to strive for "all bad things" out of our food.

[pdonis]

> with reduced life expectancy.

Most of that was due to high infant mortality. The average person who lived to adulthood did not die in their 30's.

[Detrytus]

This approach is great in theory, the problem is: it does not scale. We are bombarded with a lot of information in the news, ads, social media, and average individual does not have enough time (not to mention access to information, or intelligence to interpret it) to fact check everything on their own. "The last man who knew everything" lived in early 19th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Man_Who_Knew_Everythi...

[pdonis]

You don't need to fact check the torrent of information you describe. You can just ignore it. None of it is worth the time and effort to fact check anyway. You don't need any of that information to make the decisions you need to make in your daily life.

If you want to argue that you need to fact check all that information to, for example, decide how to vote in elections, none of that information is of any value for that purpose either, because it's basically all propaganda at this point. There are no "independent" sources of information that you can trust, other than your own eyeballs and brain. (Possibly you are lucky enough to have some friends and family whose eyeballs and brain you can also trust.)

[card_zero]

First of all, there's a difference between facts and understanding. Thomas Young may have understood the wave theory of light, but he could say nothing with certainty about Queen Victoria's underwear. Secondly, it's getting easier to understand everything, because ideas are becoming more powerful. We are however bombarded with facts, that part is true.

[card_zero]

Not sure European governments do much to combat external propaganda anyway.

[thrance]

Sadly very true, I hope the hostility American officials recently showed toward our values and institutions will prompt them to do something. Not to mention America siding with Putin a few days ago.

A ban on X and Meta would be a start.

[LuciOfStars]

Hi, American here. Just want to say I'm embarrassed to share a nation with this nutcase. Sorry, friends.

[krunck]

Those who turn discussions about degrees of something into fights about binary extremes are the true problem. Media and politicians included.

[RajT88]

Not even most Americans believe that. I would say paradoxically we have a slice of folks who want liberty from the government and also have plenty of government protections.

Then there is the "liberty at all costs" types, the fringe of which idolizes the David Koresh lifestyle.

There are plenty of folks who also think it is OK to ruin someone's entire life if they post something sexist to Twitter.

Americans are not so easily generalized; they come in many flavors.

[thrance]

Seeing how almost everyone here in France despises our current government, I don't think this propaganda you mention is very effective, if it's as present as you claim.

Meanwhile money basically dictates who gets elected on your side of the pond, whith billionaires being crazy over-represented in your political offices, despite being a tiny minority in your population.

Also, the people advocating for smaller government are often on board with executive power consolidation and increased police and army funding, so I think it's little more than a stance.

You can't "discover the truth" on your own, no one can. Are you able to go everywhere something happens in the wordl to get a first hand account of the event and then build your own conclusions? Of course not, you rely on media (social or legacy) to digest the facts for you, and they might (and do) influence you and how you think about the world. It can't be another way, so fighting obvious lies isn't a bad thing in my book.