hakase

As they say, "everything is political". And yes, "only the information I say is political is allowed" is quite the overreach.

Believing that you're the only person who deserves to exist and that everyone else should be killed is still a political view, and one that must be allowed to exist in a democracy as long as you don't actually start killing people. Odious and hateful ideas are still political ideas (see: American Democrats and Republicans arguing that the others' ideas are odious and hateful, for example), and if we believe in democracy we have to believe that the people can be trusted with unrestricted political information.

A manipulable minority that acts on these calls to violence is enough to deeply damage a democracy.

That's why acting on those calls to violence is illegal, while speech is not.

The majority did vote for democratic parties but that isn’t enough, it has to be an overhelming majority that votes for democratic parties.

Yes, that's a huge flaw of coalition system governments, but it doesn't change the overall point - you either trust the people with the choice of electing their government, or you don't. If you only trust some of the people with electing their government, you don't have a democracy - you just have a slightly-larger-than-normal autocracy.

Also, unless I'm misunderstanding something (which I very well may be), it seems to me that 70% of the people voted for democracy in Germany - your elected representatives not being able to agree with each other is what appears to be the problem.

Also: I’d argue that representative democracies are a lot more susceptible to this kind of flaw where parties have to resort to manipulation to get the votes of people.

I was going to argue in my previous comment that representative democracies are dangerously close to autocracies already, but thought it too far afield from my main point. So, I think I agree with you here.

A system where more political decisions are voted on through direct democracy and representatives are only chosen to enact the policies already selected by the people would be less susceptible to these problems (but, again, would rely much more heavily on the people, which, again, is the entire question).

(Also, I've enjoyed this conversation so far - thanks!)

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.

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.

They already have thought about it - see the part where they're glad our rights aren't curtailed just because someone might say some words that hurt your feelings.

Germany can take their nanny state bullshit and fuck right off.

Here's my comment from the last time this came up (like a week ago):

"There's been no meaning shift. The "possessive" and "envious" uses of jealous both date from the 14th century in English, and both senses were present in the ancestors of these words all the way back to Greek."

It's always been synonymous with "envious", as far back as we can trace.

This is horrible logic. If anything, it should be: you need to learn Celsius if you are doing science, but most people aren't scientists and therefore don't need to learn Celsius, so this isn't really a problem that comes up for a lot of Fahrenheit users.

According to Wikipedia Rankine is properly used with the degree symbol, but sometimes is not by analogy with Kelvin.

I just cancelled my gas station rewards program because they moved everything to a mandatory app. I will not use your app.