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by like_any_other 38 days ago
This kind of lukewarm attitude is why every Western country is speedrunning to become China. There are powerful interests turning your country into a panopticon cage, and the best you can do is "well as long as they give a good excuse, I guess it's okay"??
1 comments

I'm not sure I see the connection, but I'm open to debate it with you. I'm about as maximalist for individual freedom as you can get without being an anarchist. I don't want to live under majoritarian rule when it comes to my bodily choices or personal picadillos or my family's, or my right to bear arms. But I think it's ignorant to compare the United States in any way to China. I don't think that a freely elected, democratic society, choosing to enforce social norms at times through contested law and legal wrangling in courts is remotely the same thing as a totalitarian state issuing a dictat. And I also don't think that the primary way to distinguish our system of governance from a dictatorahip would be to legalize everything imaginable.

This is not a lukewarm approach to personal liberty, any more than sympathy should be mistaken for weakness. It's an understanding that we also need a somewhat functional and coherent society, even if it comes at some personal cost, and that without that we would end up in a power vacuum that led eventually to us being slaves in a dictatorship like China.

Your proposal was red-flag laws for visiting the wrong website, or just censoring them entirely [0]. That's not "as close to maximum freedom without being anarchy". That's the opposite.

[0] "Some things should be hard to access. Accessing some things should also be taken as a red flag that you are not OK. The rest of the people around you have a right to their security as much as, or more than, you have a right to your freedom to view illicit information."