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> No society can police everything all the time, least of all a democratic society. A healthy society rests on a consensus about what is a deviation and what is
by yew 6y ago
> No society can police everything all the time, least of all a democratic society. A healthy society rests on a consensus about what is a deviation and what is normal. We venture out from the norm, but we know the difference between the outfield and home, the reality of everyday life. Without that, as we have now experienced, things fall apart.
> [...]
> Society renews itself as common sense evolves. This requires trustworthy, transparent, respectful institutions of social discourse, especially when we disagree. Instead we are saddled with the opposite, nearly 20 years into a world dominated by a political-economic institution that operates as a chaos machine for hire, in which norm violation is key to revenue.
> Social media's no-longer-young men defend their chaos machines with a twisted rendition of First Amendment rights. Social media is not a public square but a private one governed by machine operations and their economic imperatives, incapable of, and uninterested in, distinguishing truth from lies or renewal from destruction.
- sirspacey 6y agoIf democracy relies on a consensus of what is “normal” than it has no possibility of surviving and probably shouldn’t. If democracy has a feature worth keeping at all, it is a shared functional definition of rights that we honor whether the other person or people seem “normal” or not. Our votes are not agreement. They are consensus.