It's not the first time, though, look at McCarthyism. We mostly bounced back from that, we'll probably do the same this time.

Sure, but people have to fight for their rights. The world doesn't swing towards freedom automatically. The rise of authoritarianism around the world (China, Russia, etc.) makes that clear.

It's a small but crucial part of a wider class war, which is beyond belief in its scale and sheer evil.

"Vote blue no matter who" isn't gonna get us out of this one, and neither is donating to the ACLU and NPR.

It's really a shame that my options right now are either the anti-freedom "no abortions, no weed, and absolutely no criticizing us" party, or the anti-freedom "no critical thinking, no guns, and absolutely no criticising us" party. Unfortunately under first past the post tribalism is rewarded, and moving to the center only gives room for a more radical same-party challenger to appear making you both lose. In my opinion, the greatest boost to freedom in current American politics would be the introduction of a better voting system[0] to allow third parties to exist and encourage them to work together to legislate.

[0] I prefer score voting, but I'll vote for anyone who will get any alternate form of voting out there. For an easy explanation of the different voting systems, look at https://ncase.me/ballot/

Come to slovenia... we just had an election which was (a bit simplified), "a bad guy we have now, and most people hate, but right leaning grandmas like" vs "a guy we didn't know existed two months ago, but media propped him up, and he's the only chance to take on the current guy".

Because of the voting systems, parties need 4% of the votes to make it into the parliament, and all the votes for <4% parties are basically "lost".

The end effect was people not voting for the "new guy" because they liked the new guy, but because they didn't want the new guy to stay, causing a huge discrepancy between the the parties they actually wanted to win vs the voting results.

Score Voting, Runoff Voting, something, anything to fix the red/blue mess here.

Trump was pro medical and thought rec should be decided at the state level. Seems pretty balanced and mainstream to me.

I'm outside the US, but I see similar issues everywhere. I think it's time modern democracies stoped having "representative of the people" voting on laws. Laws should be considered each on their own value, and everybody should be able to vote for/against them.

Perhaps going back to one representative per 10,000 would help? We'd have to use technology to hold a quorem though.

Unfortunately, United States has a population of ~330 million and that would mean a House of Representatives with 33,000 members. There's no way it would be able to effectively deliberate topics with that many people. Just imagine how little time each representative could be allocated to speak, given there are only 8,760 hours in a year. Additionally the individual power of each representative would be so watered down as to be practically meaningless.

It's an unacceptable solution but it seems to me that the US is just too big and splitting it up would make more sense.

Why do people need to debate on the house floor? Do such debates actually change anyone's mind or how they vote? Let them debate in an electronic forum with written arguments, let them debate in public and on social media (a good portion of political debate already happens on social media). Debate on the floor isn't so sacred we can't do without it.

And yes, the power of individual representatives would be watered down, that's ok. It would be much closer to the direct democracy the parent comment suggested (and the reason I brought it up).

It allows representatives to deal with boring bills the public doesn't care about, but there are enough representatives that I can reasonably expect to be on a first name basis with my representative if I care enough to get involved.

Debate on the floor of the House and Senate is largely faked for TV cameras already in the current era.

CSPAN camera angles are limited on purpose to hide this, but most speeches are given to an empty or nearly empty chamber. Actual floor debate that might change viewpoints is rare to non-existent now - the real debate and discussion happens off of the floor in private intra-party meetings and lunches, or in 1:1 meetings between leadership.

Yes. I want specialists debate ideas out in the open, not politicians forging stronger alliances to support parties of heterogeneous agendas.

> It's an unacceptable solution but it seems to me that the US is just too big and splitting it up would make more sense.

We already have this. The divisions are called states. And it's solid argument for a weaker federal government.

I wholeheartedly agree, but sadly the Federalists "won" this power struggle long ago.

I think the same thing, for the most part.

The issue is coming up with the text of a bill to actually vote on and finding a way to avoid laws that contradict each other unintentionally.

In my country a law saying "you don't have to work, but you still get 10k eur from the government" would win by a huge margin... how this would actually work, noone cares...

Sadly, an average person is stupid, and half are even stupider.

There are countries that do something close to that, and it does in fact work. In many, many ways. Basic Income is a very real and powerful thing.

Reduced crime, increased economic strength, increased education and skills, better overall wellbeing, a stronger economy, better health.

Whichever European country you're in, I'd wager that the .1% are using tax loopholes and straight up fraud to fleece more taxpayer money than 10k per citizen would cost.

Sounds a bit like you're a victim of class war propaganda. Try looking into BI and how it actually works.

Then specialists will explain that to be able to spend this, other budgets will have to be cut, like healthcare.

If people are stupid and we need to be ruled by elites, then why do we have democracies? Why popular vote? Shouldn't we have PhD's decide who are rulers are?

Lookup "sortition", experiences show that common people tend to make better decison for the good of society, while any "club" (politicians, elites) end up working towards expanding their power.

Some ancient democracies did similar things. You should read about what the people who lived in them had to say.

Switzerland does this today. They have a blended system of direct and representational democracy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_in_Switzerland

The "citizens", the people who could vote, did pretty well. Not surprisingly, laws were not so good for slaves and other non-citizens, laws were not good for the people who could not vote.

Look how favourable our current laws are to politicians!!

That's probably worse.

Nothing really shifted to the left, certainly not the DNC. We just gave Bezos a $10B bailout. The rich are getting richer and richer. Roe is being overturned. There is not "far-left" presence in the US with any actual power. The right-wing (and Elon) freakout about the "far-left" is about people expressing their gripes with the state of things online, much of it being actual, salient criticism that gets handwaved away as "communism."

There isn't a single far-left politician in the federal government. There are a few that are maybe left of center, but "far-left?" Absolutely not.

Show me a rep or senator calling for public ownership of the means of production and then we have a conversation, but there simply isn't one. Nobody with a say is advocating for abolishing money, the state, class, etc. Even the list of politicians that support worker unions is really short. The furthest left US politicians go is social democracy, which is just democracy with strong safety nets to help keep as many people as possible from rock bottom.

What are some examples of this? (Aside from the posted article, which is debated in other comments.)

One might think the recently announced Disinformation Board would count.

Those are examples of private companies not platforming certain speech. But how is that a modern change? Are you saying that decades ago, the big media companies at the time (say, NBC, CBS, ABC) platformed a greater variety of speech than now? I don't think you can earnestly claim that.

You're making the wrong comparison.

Did VISA, in the 1970s, kick people off of their network 'because speech'?

Did ABC Shipping refuse customers, 'because speech'?

That's not 'platforming' - those are just businesses that do business.

Second - what happened in the past is irrelevant.

Businesses should not really vetting customers unless there's a material reason.

Certainly banks, telcos, retail - should be barred from this. VISA is not 'platforming' anyone, that's ridiculous.

Twitter, Appstore - because they are directly related to the content, this is more arguably 'platforming' and there's more likely to be some kind of content management, but we have to be very careful about it.

Notable examples include kicking people who post white supremacist articles off of Twitter and Facebook. Or DirectTV dropping OAN from their lineup because their ratings have tanked after Trump left office. Or when Marjorie Taylor Green lost her committee assignments for merely stating her belief that white genocide is a major problem that Congress must take action against the Jewish space lasers immediately before they cause more wildfires that kill white people.

First they came for the communists…

> It is basically only immunity from consequences for the rich and powerful. Only they're allowed to have substantive influential speech without consequences, and only they are allowed to reclassify bribery as "speech".

This is simply not true and I'm curious if you have any examples to support this.

> Anybody not in that set saying something the rich and powerful don't agree with gets sued into oblivion and/or gets their soap box taken away.

Again that is simply not true. In fact compared with the UK for instance it is _far_ harder to sue for libel or defamation in the US.

> Billionaires have been too blatant with media manipulation for everyone else to be OK with the rules as they are.

Rich people have access to resources the poor don't. That's not new.

> BTW I'd also note that "free speech" American style is almost like a religion, you can't argue against it. I'd just note that no other country Europe (or the world) subscribes to this absolutist version of free speech.

In general we are free speech absolutists. Honestly along with fast food, very entertaining movies and our love affair with guns it's quintessentially American.

This is a great post illustrative of the currently widespread misunderstanding of freedom of speech in the US. It's not about the powerless wanting to control the speech of the rich and powerful. It's about the powerful of one side wanting to control the speech of the powerful of the other side by weaponizing ignorant masses of the populace to do their fight for them in defeating the ability of their opponents to have speech.

It's a scary precedent and even more scary that so many don't see what's happening.

> Billionaires have been too blatant with media manipulation for everyone else to be OK with the rules as they are.

The powerful have controlled the media in the past WAY more than they do now or even in recent decades. Even the people gaining control of the media recently are outside of the normal historical rich as they're all of the nouveau riche class.

This is all one more example of the recent trend of not wanting to bring UP the less privileged but to tear DOWN the privileged to the level of the less privileged. The former is beneficial for society the latter is self-destructive.

The result of lack of speech is violence. If people (parts of the rich) can't voice their opinion with words they do so with actions by galvanizing people into violent actions.

Could you please provide specific examples of how this current trend of wanting to outlaw hate speech, "disinformation", etc., applies to billionaires, rather than the common people?

"Free speech absolutism" is a nonsensical slur. There are sensible restrictions on the freedom of speech that have been engrained into American jurisprudence. There actually used to be more exceptions (for instance, anti-war speech was illegal during World War 1) but, to their credit, the political left pushed for expanding those rights.

But yes, we do take our free speech with religious seriousness. That is because many of our ancestors came here to escape religious persecution from Europe (and other places). We do not wish to return to the bad old days where our beliefs could again be criminalized.