Subtitle: Springfield’s immigrant community was targeted by far-right extremists months before Trump shared racist rumors
Nah bruv, as an american, the people are too dumb to not need some sort of protection from hate speech and ideas. A fact checker needs to be a mandatory public service at this point. I feel the same way about the homeless bum who shouts at everyone downtown that their participation in consummerism is destroying everything. If they called for violence, it would be a step too far.
If the people are too dumb to be trusted with an unrestricted marketplace of ideas, the they’re too dumb to be allowed to vote for their own government.
If you believe in democracy, you have to also believe that the majority of people can be trusted with the information necessary to make informed political choices.
If the people can’t be trusted to act in their best interests in an informed manner, then we might as well just adopt Plato’s philosopher-kings system instead, and make all of the peoples’ decisions for them.
This is why the GOP has been working hard for decades to destroy public education in the US. They want to make sure that only the rich are educated because the uneducated can be easily tricked into voting against their own interests. Unfortunately it’s working.
It’s mandatory in a functioning democracy for the public to be educated and well informed or it doesn’t work. Unfortunately it’s highly debatable whether the US still qualifies as educated, and the likes of Fox News and Sinclair are hard at work destroying the informed part.
All that said the ease with which misinformation spreads these days does need some kind of counter, otherwise we open ourselves up to Soviet style disinformation campaigns where the goal isn’t so much to drive a particular narrative as it is to sow confusion and make people distrust all information. They drown the signal in noise, so everyone just makes decisions based on their gut instead of facts. Social media has given a false equivalence where any random person on Facebook is treated as just as reliable a source of news and information as actual reporters are. This is incredibly dangerous.
I have a question for you. Do you think advertising works not just as an informative medium but as a manipulative medium as well? Do people have free will while shopping or are they completely following whatever ad is in front of their faces? Or is it maybe a middle ground between the two extremes that’s actually the truth?
I believe that if we allow advertisements at all, we must do so on the assumption that the majority of people have complete free will while shopping, especially in the modern world where we have so many more ways of accessing and sharing information than has ever been possible. It is, however, reasonable for the majority to enact advertising protections that would benefit the dumb/manipulable minority.
The difference is that we can’t do so for political information in a democracy, because the entity that enacts and enforces the supposed “protections” (i.e. the government) is exactly the same entity that is directly affected by the subsequent political choices of the people based on that information.
Once again, the question is, “Are the majority of people too dumb or easily manipulated to be trusted with the system?” If so, then we should do away with the system altogether and have a government of philosopher-kings decide how resources should be distributed.
As for what I personally think, about both advertising and government? Nowadays I go back and forth. When I was younger and more naive, I believed that people could be trusted with making their own decisions, but the older I get and the more I see how truly stupid people are, the more I question whether that’s actually the case.
At this point, politically I’m still firmly in the camp of, “The people must be fully trusted with information to make their own political decisions, for good or ill,” because to believe otherwise is to believe that democracy is not possible, and I’m not ready to make that step quite yet (and I honestly don’t really want to).
What I do know is that there is no middle ground. I do not believe in “democracy” where the government restricts in any way the information that the people have access to when making decisions about that very government. That’s already autocracy under the guise of “democracy”, so we might as well stop fooling ourselves at that point.
Very interesting “democracy or philosipher-king” point, though maybe another option in between is possible. I believe it is people’s responisibility to self govern and that noone has the right to take that away. I don’t want people to be told what to think, but I also don’t trust them in our current system. I’m saying we need an apolitical tool for flagging lies to help people not accept everything that fits their current worldview. Also, on your point later in the comment chain, I firmly believe elected officials should be suspended and imprisoned if they call for violence and then someone else performs that violence. Rhetoric has power and using that irresponsibly shouldn’t go unpunished. Majority rule with respect to the minority is my most important principle.
And, that’s exactly how we got so dumb.
Check out The Manufacturing of Consent. Or, if lighter reading is your thing, 1984.
