On freedom of speech and democracy

  • 🇵🇦 Nuestro primer dominio localizado está en español en kiwifarms.pa. Our first localized domain is on Spanish on kiwifarms.pa.
  • Want to keep track of this thread?
    Accounts can bookmark posts, watch threads for updates, and jump back to where you stopped reading.
    Create account
Wyróżnienie
B

bulletttproof

kiwifarms.net
Dołączono
10 Maj 2026
I'm starting to sour on freedom of speech and democracy. I don't know if both are compatible with modern states.

Modern societies are more complex than they've ever been. There are infinitely many cogs that make a society run. Economics, geopolitics, philosophy, law... it's infeasible to expect a population to be knowledgeable in all these fields. The first democratic state was Athens in 508 BC. Compared to modern states, Athens was far less complex, and a far smaller proportion of its population could vote. I wonder if Cleisthenes, the founder of Athenian democracy, would support democracy under current conditions.

Regarding freedom of speech: social media. People are constantly spreading misinformation and speaking on topics they know very little about. A few hours ago, I read a post about why data centres shouldn't be built. The replies parroted a lie that's been spreading online: "AI is taking our drinking water!1!". Regardless of your stance towards AI, this is very dishonest. It takes two seconds to look at official government statistics and contextualise data centre water consumption, yet many believe this. Another reply said, "Instead of building data centres, we should build more chips". Why would we do that? He gave no reason. Did he understand the economics involved? Was he knowledgeable in either field? Rather, I think he was talking out of his ass. But with social media, you're allowed to, and people will take your words as gospel. This leads to bad decisions at the voting booth.

Lastly, only a portion of the adult population has the faculties to be rational and informed voters. 50% of voters have an IQ under 100, and only a small percentage of the population has the critical thinking skills to identify a sound argument (yes I know mine isn't perfection, use me as an example) and recognise their biases. Most just vote on vibes.

I haven't gone full authoritarian. I'd still consider myself a "liberal". But, in the West we're taught to see democracy as the only choice and anything else a moral failure. I'm not so sure anymore. I'd be more supportive of democracy if schools had a mandatory class on argumentation, source analysis, and cognitive biases.
 
You should look into the arguments Murray Rothbard brought forth against democracy
I haven't ever seen anyone else make such arguments that point out just how completely structurally broken democracy is, even if everybody were perfectly informed and doing the right it would still be replete with contradictions and arbitrariness
 
democracy basically means the government for the people by the people of the people... but the people are retarded
 
I think the world should be totalitarian and ruled by me exclusively, and then when it inevitably fucks up and collapses I will parse the blame onto all of you guys for putting me into this position

1780851066342.png
 
Retarded to a degree. The concepts aren't flawed, the people are, rather than building a society to accept the lowest common denominator we instead need to work towards culling the gene pool of those who pollute it and drag the rest of us down.
 
These seem to be critiques of universal suffrage rather than Democracy per se.

Universal suffrage is a relatively recent phenomenon, mostly appearing after WW1, and it's arguably reasonable to look back across the past century of it as a political experiment and conclude that experiment has failed.
 
I would recommend to anyone who is interested as to why democracy may not be as great of a system to read" Myth of the Rational Voter". It lays out the libertarian view of it and why it fails as a system. It's a good read, even if you don't end up agreeing with it.
 
What democracy do you speak of? Where is this democracy? In which country?
Last time I've checked, we have no say when it comes to the majority of issues.
Can we vote on where our taxes go? No.
Can we vote on whether to go to war or not? No.
We can't vote on anything important, all we can vote for is which fat fuck in an expensive suit gets to fuck shit up for the next several years.

You can't complain about democracy when it's never been tried.
Once we actually get to decide what goes on in a nation and it goes horribly wrong, then we can have this discussion.
 
bulletttproof powiedział(a):
I haven't gone full authoritarian. I'd still consider myself a "liberal". But, in the West we're taught to see democracy as the only choice and anything else a moral failure. I'm not so sure anymore. I'd be more supportive of democracy if schools had a mandatory class on argumentation, source analysis, and cognitive biases.
Kliknij, aby rozwinąć...
Fellow liberals generally have a tendency to mistake the forest for the trees when it comes to democracy. They conflate democratic institutions and the franchise as being a virtue in and of itself as opposed to being a tool that intelligent, highly experienced, and rational people should utilize. Or those who are voluntarily willing to give their life for the well being of the general populace. I tend to concur with the notion that universal suffrage has brought about more problems than it has solved, however I still believe anyone should be able to obtain the franchise given that they put in the effort and have the will power to obtain it.

As for freedom of expression and of speech it is epistemologically, ontologically, and metaphysically valuable. Without it, inconvenient truths could be suppressed and censored without question and society would stagnate as a result. We would not be able to question the pre-existing orthodoxy about the self, the world around us, and more. The infinitesimal mysteries of the world we live in would not be allowed to be studied, taken apart, and reverse engineered.
 
Always remember, things are never so bad they can't get worse. Whatever complaints you have about democratic Republicanism will not be solved by the disenfranchisement of the population and trying to put what you assume are "experts" in charge. Functionally you would be completely removing any of the speed bumps and turning into a full fledged oligarchy, what that translates to would be a long list of societal Ills would only be made far far worse. The ones running society would not be some enlightened specimen of humanity but the likes of soros, fink, and thiel (it should be noted thiel is a supporter of oligarchical governance and hates democracy).

Deindustrialization and major financial bubbles? Oligarchy would permanently give the investor class that created those ills limitless power, mass migration? The elite as they are now are completely rootless, pablo and singhdeep will do the job cheaper, you and them are completely interchangeable to the elite who would be made an oligarch.

For your free speech stance I do not think I have seen a more niggercattle take, to the point you would fit in fine with a leftist during the pandemic. The free flow of information and opinion is an unlimited good and keystone of enlightened society, the consolidation of media into a handful of companies has resulted in an iron grip in legacy media to forcibly manufacture a consensus of opinion in the population (key note, blackrock AKA Larry fink's company owns a sizeable share in every one of those aforementioned media companies, any journoslop article defending him must be seen as paid propaganda). The Internet on the other hand allowing the free flow of information. During the pandemic we got a taste of what total information control would feel like, everything against the ever shifting narrative of corona, the negro riots, the experimental MRNA injection they branded as a "vaccine". Musk for his long list of faults objectively did make the world a better place by buying twitter and exposing the censorship in the Twitter files. I still wouldn't trust that jeet lover with oligarchical power.

Information control simply exists to be abused, labelling something as misinformation has only been used to push a narrative on the population. Open dissent is a key part of democratic governance. The point of democracy to me is a mechanism to keep those in power from acting corrupt or tyrannical. Yes there is a LONG list of flaws but like I said, things are never so bad they can't get worse and removing said mechanism would be damning us all to corrupt oligarchy.

If you want to see this sorta thing in action take a look at the UK (and by extension the EU nations) pioneers of censorship in the Western world and the first pusher of digital ID which had one singular purpose, information control and suppression, see how the ruling aristocracy loves their population, like the (failing) efforts to censor that kid who was stabbed by jeets and cuffed by the police as he bled out.

You could argue we are decaying into an oligarchy, please see the polybius cycle of governments and the aristocracy/oligarchy section.
 
There is simply no arguing on this because the free flow of both bullshit and legitimate information is worth the tradeoff compared to the alternative; the likes of Stalin and Pol Pot. Basically no tolerance billions dead. One wrong word and you are DEAD.

This sort of mass deaths is just unimaginable and impossible in a free, (actual) democratic society. Even when we're talking about modern-day China or Russia, both of which are bona fide oligarchies and technocracies, it is still very hard for them to outright genocide their own people without being exposed out in the open. Even now just look at how much flak Israel got for annihilating Gaza. This is the sign that shit has not gone entirely to hell yet.

But when freedom of speech and democracy dies off and the government is replaced with globalist mass murderers, Islamic caliphates, Inquisitors... then this is the day where everyone dies just for seeing this forum.

I implore you to take a good look at this site. It's made in 2002 and the logic it uses is still applicable to this day.

Wicky Wicky WoW powiedział(a):
You could argue we are decaying into an oligarchy, please see the polybius cycle of governments and the aristocracy/oligarchy section.
Kliknij, aby rozwinąć...
An Oligarchy is actually merciful compared to what I believe we are degrading into; some sort of Communist caste system utopia where the entire world is just one giant labor camp.
 
Wyróżnienie
Musisz się zalogować lub zarejestrować, aby odpowiedzieć.
Wstecz
Top Na dole