4 ms·

> the free world Ah the famous free world where our social media posts are heavily censored, where lock-down was / is mandatory for a lot of us, and where prot

> the free world Ah the famous free world where our social media posts are heavily censored, where lock-down was / is mandatory for a lot of us, and where protesting can cost you an eye (at least 20 people lost an eye last year in France's Gillets Jaunes protests). Yes we still have it better than the Belorussians but free our world is certainly not.

ClumsyPilot 6y ago
Would you be content with calling it 'somewhat democratic world'?
- jmnicolas 6y ago
  Depends what you mean by democratic. If you mean people can vote, then yes. But if it means ruled by the people then I only see elites at the top. I'm disillusioned with the western narrative about freedom. We can and should do much better than the oligarchies we actually live in. Don't get me wrong, I don't think the rest of the world has it better than us, but we're certainly not the paradise we pretend to be.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- blaser-waffle 6y ago
  I'll take a mostly democratic world over an openly despotic one a la the CCP.
  - jmnicolas 6y ago
    Me too. But the fact that our prison is shinier than the neighbors isn't enough to make me proud living in it.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
scroogeydop 6y ago
Oh no you are so persecuted. I am so sorry for you that you can’t post racism and gore on Facebook.
- jmnicolas 6y ago
  First : except a YouTube account that I use to manage my videos playlists I don't use social medias at all. I still see what's going there and I find it appalling. Second : you don't know me. So don't assume who I am and why I lament the loss of freedom on the web. Lastly there are plenty of reasonable topics that are censored : you can't even emit any doubt about the COVID "religion" for crying out loud.
  - geewee 6y ago
    The Covid.. religion..?
    - drummer 6y ago
      See comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23762363 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23762363
    - averros 6y ago
      You can't call the COVID masquerade "science", for a simple reason: it isn't. The science on the subject of masks is actually pretty much settled: they have exactly zero effect on transmission of airborne viral diseases. Dozens of studies, some are largish RCTs. No effect. Must be a religion, then. Cult of State Almighty or something.
  - scroogeydop 6y ago
    Thanks for confirming exactly who I thought you were.
komali2 6y ago
Why do you conflate corporate enforced moral positioning with people protecting themselves from a pandemic as well as police brutality? None of those 3 things seem at all related to me.
- jmnicolas 6y ago
  We are not free to post certain things on social media. We are not free to move wherever we want to go. We are not free to protest without being harmed. Those 3 things are proofs that there is no free world.
  - bobthechef 6y ago
    Well, there's freedom and there's liberty. We often use the former to include the latter, but they're completely different. We only have the freedom to do the right thing. We are not free to do evil things. We may have the liberty to do them, of course. Now in a liberal society like the US, we are at liberty to do many things we ought not which is partly motivated by either skepticism on the one hand and a wish to maintain the peace on the other because enforcing certain behaviors would actually result in an even worse status quo (there's a hint: make it uneconomical to suppress certain freedoms). So no perfect liberality exists nor could it. The question of which liberties ought to be tolerated is answered by our constitutions, but even those are bounded in practice. You have blasphemy laws and you have hate speech laws, both of which constrain speech. Now, I don't think which are in force is arbitrary or that it's all the same or relative--tyranny has an objective standard and not suppression of what I happen to want to do--but the fact that we always have had them is proof that freedom (liberty) of speech is always limited. To your point, the proper way to characterize the current status quo is that a certain kind of leftist orthodoxy or ethos has come to dominate institutions, organizations, and corporations that otherwise pretend to some kind of "neutrality" in ways that don't actually obtain. So what you have is a religious war of sorts and this leftist religion currently has the upper hand. As a result, laws that constrain liberties along traditional lines have been eliminated over the course of the last century, replaced with new ones reflecting leftist norms. What irks me most is the mendacity. At least confessional states give you the courtesy of telling you they're confessional. You can work with that even if the confession is wrong and at least everyone's clear about the circumstances you're in instead of living in a fog of lies. But lying about ideological orientation, also while knowing fully well others disagree with it, is dishonest. But people are noticing. (As people are booted off YouTube and Twitter by an increasingly severe leftist standard, a new market opens up for alternative services. Of course, that doesn't quite extend as nicely to laws. We might have to begin to have to resort to samizdats.)

ClumsyPilot 6y ago

Would you be content with calling it 'somewhat democratic world'?

jmnicolas 6y ago
Depends what you mean by democratic. If you mean people can vote, then yes. But if it means ruled by the people then I only see elites at the top. I'm disillusioned with the western narrative about freedom. We can and should do much better than the oligarchies we actually live in. Don't get me wrong, I don't think the rest of the world has it better than us, but we're certainly not the paradise we pretend to be.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
blaser-waffle 6y ago
I'll take a mostly democratic world over an openly despotic one a la the CCP.
- jmnicolas 6y ago
  Me too. But the fact that our prison is shinier than the neighbors isn't enough to make me proud living in it.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

scroogeydop 6y ago

Oh no you are so persecuted. I am so sorry for you that you can’t post racism and gore on Facebook.

jmnicolas 6y ago
First : except a YouTube account that I use to manage my videos playlists I don't use social medias at all. I still see what's going there and I find it appalling. Second : you don't know me. So don't assume who I am and why I lament the loss of freedom on the web. Lastly there are plenty of reasonable topics that are censored : you can't even emit any doubt about the COVID "religion" for crying out loud.
- geewee 6y ago
  The Covid.. religion..?
  - drummer 6y ago
    See comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23762363 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23762363
  - averros 6y ago
    You can't call the COVID masquerade "science", for a simple reason: it isn't. The science on the subject of masks is actually pretty much settled: they have exactly zero effect on transmission of airborne viral diseases. Dozens of studies, some are largish RCTs. No effect. Must be a religion, then. Cult of State Almighty or something.
- scroogeydop 6y ago
  Thanks for confirming exactly who I thought you were.

komali2 6y ago

Why do you conflate corporate enforced moral positioning with people protecting themselves from a pandemic as well as police brutality? None of those 3 things seem at all related to me.

jmnicolas 6y ago
We are not free to post certain things on social media. We are not free to move wherever we want to go. We are not free to protest without being harmed. Those 3 things are proofs that there is no free world.
- bobthechef 6y ago
  Well, there's freedom and there's liberty. We often use the former to include the latter, but they're completely different. We only have the freedom to do the right thing. We are not free to do evil things. We may have the liberty to do them, of course. Now in a liberal society like the US, we are at liberty to do many things we ought not which is partly motivated by either skepticism on the one hand and a wish to maintain the peace on the other because enforcing certain behaviors would actually result in an even worse status quo (there's a hint: make it uneconomical to suppress certain freedoms). So no perfect liberality exists nor could it. The question of which liberties ought to be tolerated is answered by our constitutions, but even those are bounded in practice. You have blasphemy laws and you have hate speech laws, both of which constrain speech. Now, I don't think which are in force is arbitrary or that it's all the same or relative--tyranny has an objective standard and not suppression of what I happen to want to do--but the fact that we always have had them is proof that freedom (liberty) of speech is always limited. To your point, the proper way to characterize the current status quo is that a certain kind of leftist orthodoxy or ethos has come to dominate institutions, organizations, and corporations that otherwise pretend to some kind of "neutrality" in ways that don't actually obtain. So what you have is a religious war of sorts and this leftist religion currently has the upper hand. As a result, laws that constrain liberties along traditional lines have been eliminated over the course of the last century, replaced with new ones reflecting leftist norms. What irks me most is the mendacity. At least confessional states give you the courtesy of telling you they're confessional. You can work with that even if the confession is wrong and at least everyone's clear about the circumstances you're in instead of living in a fog of lies. But lying about ideological orientation, also while knowing fully well others disagree with it, is dishonest. But people are noticing. (As people are booted off YouTube and Twitter by an increasingly severe leftist standard, a new market opens up for alternative services. Of course, that doesn't quite extend as nicely to laws. We might have to begin to have to resort to samizdats.)