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by iamnothere 169 days ago
> Its better to have your government control facts about an on going conflict than what we have today.

This is how you get atrocities and coverups, strategic losses that don’t result in corrective action, and endless graft. Eventually this leads to major military losses. Some degree of wartime censorship is inevitable to conceal information from the enemy, but anything beyond that creates serious problems in a democracy.

1 comments

You get atrocities and coverups regardless. My logic is that a cohesive nation working towards common goals is better than a nation of crabs in a bucket constantly undermining each other and distorting reality.

Ideally you should trust your government. In a healthy democracy the government can create a barrier to entry for the media and then be hands off only intervening when necessary. This isnt a bad thing at all in my opinion.

I prefer this to having 0 barrier to enter the media and allowing anyone to give their opinion.

You live in a fantasy. Democracy exists as a system precisely because you cannot trust governments made up of human beings. If trust were not an issue, monarchy or dictatorship would be more efficient and effective.

There is no such thing as a nation consistently working towards common goals, except in a totalitarian system. At best you can get a few years of alignment in wartime, but even then you often need to brutally repress dissent to maintain that alignment. In peacetime, different people have divergent goals, and unless you are on a civilizational upswing (like the US in the mid-20th century or contemporary China) then discontented voters will multiply, and they need to have a real say in the direction of the country. Thinking you can gaslight people into consistently voting against their interests without consequences is hubris.

This whole “managed democracy” business that Europe is moving towards will end in fire.