I think this attitude is wrong. A strong democracy doesn't need to fight "fake news" legally and doesn't need their own propaganda op in foreign states like Radio Free Asia etc. If you are banning foreign media in your own country, you are doing the same as China in the end. Why not establish a great firewall?
Do you think the USG would have allowed the USSR to buy NBC?
These aren’t new issues, there are certain types of corporations where there is a national security interest in American ownership and capability (see also: Intel). Ownership of airlines is another example, you can’t have a foreign controlling interest in a domestic airline (Richard Branson couldn’t save Virgin America due to this).
There are good reasons for a nation to have rules about foreign control in certain types of companies that carry a national security risk.
In the case of airlines it is just straight up protectionism. There's no national security risk there: if push came to shove in time of war the government could simply seize the assets and operate them as they saw fit.
If that’s your view, then it seems better to be up front about the ownership limitations than pretending otherwise until a war comes along and pulling the rug.
It is already law in the United States that companies may be compelled to act in certain ways during emergencies. There is no pretending, it's all there in plain writing in the USC. Look up the Defence Production Act.
> A strong democracy doesn't need to fight "fake news" legally and doesn't need their own propaganda
your argument to me sounded like :
> Brave people don't fear heights, you are brave and hence you should jump from empire state building. And you don't need protection, remember you are brave.
Since you are straw manning the argument, brave people should be protected from their foolishness by banning rock climbing and base jumping. How does that sound?
A well-informed electorate isn’t a prerequisite to democracy. This is precisely why fake news proliferates - it’s relatively easy to elicit an emotional response, and that tends to win over critical thinking.
While fake news and undue outside influence absolutely must be protected against, the line is hard to draw. For instance, would Snowden have been considered undue influence, would Wikileaks have been considered fake news, at least sufficiently enough to cross the ban threshold?
There are pros and cons to both approaches, and it really doesn’t come down to whether or not people agree with a statement that contains such vague terms. It comes down to interpretation of those terms.
Of course the clear meaning of this paradox is that everybody who disagrees with me is intolerant of me, therefore it is my moral imperative to be intolerant to everybody I oppose. /s
Or here's a better idea: The Golden Rule. Eye for an eye is how you run a war, not a civil society.
That doesn't always work so well. If some Viking expedition is coming to pillage your "civil society," for example, there's really not much you can do except to fight. Of course, you can decide who to support or oppose as your moral imperative, but don't be surprised if it has negative consequences to you.
If a war comes to you, then you've got to fight a war and an eye for an eye is the way to do that. But that's no principle on which to organize a civil society.
> The United States does not have a strong democracy. Half (more or less) of the population believes the election was rigged.
From various recent polls, it looks like somewhere between 30-40%, somewhere under 2/3 of Republicans and Republican-leaners and basically no one else.
30% is about par for the course when it comes to contemporary controversial POTUS elections [1][2].
It seems to ebb and flow: each side takes their turn being the aggrieved party and then alternate next go around (2000, 2016, 2020).
Consecutive cycles of animosity on one side could be worrying.
The tapestry of dysfunctional patchwork that make up the American Constitutional Republic, while tattered and frayed before, has found ways to persist.
> Consecutive cycles of animosity on one side could be worrying.
Is that not what we're experiencing now?
It's hard to 'both sides' this issue with a straight face, when the biggest election denier in America is a former president and current presidential candidate. When was the last time that happened?
> It’s hard to ‘both sides’ this issue with a straight face, when the biggest election denier in America is a former president and current presidential candidate. When was the last time that happened?
The closest parallel was probably Aaron Burr and his…whatever exactly he was trying to achieve in 1806-1807 in the Southwest after being dumped as VP in 1804 in part resulting from Jefferson’s suspicions that he was trying to pull electoral shenanigans in 1800. But that’s a long time ago, in very different circumstances, and not a particularly close parallel. So, never anything really similar.
For better or worse, I've found reading (deep dives) US history adequately anesthetizes one to modern day shenanigans.
But you raise a good point in that Al Gore was far more gracious when aggrieved. He comported himself with the norms established in the last 60 years during the modern mass media era.
For the most recent presidential election maybe. For the previous one a majority of Democrats including many high ranking Democrat politicians and officials were election deniers.
Clearly you aren't going to have a large contingent of deniers of elections that your favored party won.
When push came to shove, how many Democratic leaders (Reps and Senators) voted against or objected to the electoral college results in 2017? It was less than 10 Representatives and no Senators, meaning none of the objections were even put to a vote[1]. That is a far cry from what occurred in 2021.
Talk about clutching at straws and trying to find any possible metric to deflect from the dangerous 2016 election deniers and conspiracy theorist lunatics.
You can't just pick out some other thing and claim that is what is matters most. Just saying "when push comes to shove" doesn't mean anything. How many times did the Republican chair of the House Intelligence Committee lie about something like having evidence for the delusional conspiracy theory that "Trump colluded with Putin to hack the election", dangerously fueling election denial and undermining confidence in the democratic process, like Adam Schiff did? Aside from rhetoric and assertions by partisans and conspiracy theorists involved in the whole mess, where is the evidence to say what one side does is better or worse or more or less "damaging to democracy"? There isn't any.
If you in denial of the reality that both sides question elections and make up conspiracy theories when it suits them, you are incapable of anything approaching an objective understanding of the topic. Sorry.
> For the most recent presidential election maybe.
Yes, that’s generally what “believe the election was stolen” without further qualification means; its not a reference to the total sum of people who believe at least one election in the history of the US was stolen.
> For the previous one a majority of Democrats including high ranking Democrat politicians and officials were election deniers.
A large percentage of Democrats believe Russian interference and other improper interference influenced the election results, but that’s different than thinking the actual vote was rigged or invalid.
Yes they were a huge number of election deniers for the 2016 election and a vast amount of irresponsible rheotoric around it that was very dangerous to democracy. Don't try to gaslight on this one. A lot of uneducated morons and delusional conspiracy theorists thought "Trump colluded with Putin to hack the election", fueled by dangerous and irresponsible rhetoric from certain anti-democratic election denier politicians and media corporations.
The one question you present evidence of is not questioning the legitimacy and validity of the election; there is a difference between believing (rightly or wrongly, with or without sufficient cause) that improper activity effected the popular vote tally and believing that the election is illegitimate.
You present no evidence relating to actual election denial.
If you keep this up we're going to have to ban you. I don't want to ban you. Therefore could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules? Including, but not limited to: not being snarky, not calling names, not making personal attacks, not posting flamewar comments, and not using HN primarily for political battle.
Yes, if that's what they were doing, but I'd have to see specific links. (For example I don't think https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35366985 broke the site guidelines although it wasn't entirely un-edgy either.)
I don't have a problem with the comment you linked. But this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35366133 kicked off the snark with the first sentence, and quickly escalated to namecalling, calling me a liar a few comments later.
So yes I should have just ignored them or kept the higher ground, but sometimes that kind of trolling sucks me in.
I don't think the first sentence of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35366133 was snarky. Interpretations differ, of course, and often by quite a bit when someone is speaking to you personally, but FWIW that sounds rather neutral to my ear.
They can bitch and whine as much as they like, letting people blow off steam is part of the process by which democracy keeps the peace. Aside from various small and short riots, there has been very little political violence in America since the 1860s.
Attempting to overturn the results of the election as the votes were being counted in the Capitol is quite an escalation, though. Sure, it's not up to 1860s standards, but it's still unprecedented in modern times.
While true, the law has also come down harshly on the participants. It should have a chilling effect for other would-be rioters. It was bad, I agree. But perhaps the silver lining is that its occurrence may help set a firm line on what behaviors are acceptable.
