Is there any more context about this? I'd be interested to read logs. Are they saying Andrew Lee got an NSL for freenode?
no of course they are not saying that, they would be punished if they did (because it would be illegal).
now, that such a thing exists in a "democracy"... is a topic on its own broader scope.
Whether a monarchy without a written constitution, or separation of Church and State can be considered a democracy is left as an exercise to the reader.
That's begging the question, since it assumes an objective answer. Rather, "it is up to the reader whether they consider a monarchy without a written consistution, or separation of Church and State, to be a democracy".
Even that is rather silly, since it's drawing arbitrary lines on a spectrum of more/less democratic. Some are pretty clean, e.g. direct democracy is more democratic than representative democracy; an elected head of a republic is more democratic than an inherited head of a monarchy. Others have more overlap, and hence aren't strictly ordered in the abstract, e.g. written versus unwritten constitutions, sortition versus election, etc.
Unless the people want representational democracy but are forced into direct democracy.
Or, in theory (and I can't stress that enough that this is theoretical), representational democracy could better represent people than they can represent for themselves .. I can fix my own windows, but the glazier will probably do a better job. In the same way a group of professional politicians, in theory, could more closely represent the combined will of the demos than could direct democracy -- like how an adult stops a child from eating cake before they're sick -- knowing what is best for oneself, and what's best for society according to ones own choice of self-societal balance, is a hard thing that needs professional input.
I might add I think UK (and probably USA) democracy is seriously broken and that representational democracy isn't working well; but direct democracy is too easy to pervert with propaganda.
That's a category error; you're comparing a decision-making process to a decision. A totalitarian dictatorship is not more democratic than a body of elected representatives, even if the people voted to implement that dictatorship. It's like the XKCD comic which claims the number 4 is random, because it came up in a die roll.
> Or, in theory (and I can't stress that enough that this is theoretical), representational democracy could better represent people than they can represent for themselves
Sure, but what has that got to do with the relative level of democracy between those systems? "Democratic" isn't a synonym for "good" or "best". It's perfectly possible for a more democratic system of governance to produce outcomes which are "worse" (according to whatever measure we care about). The rest of your comment seems to be further conflation between "democratic" and "good".
>A totalitarian dictatorship is not more democratic than a body of elected representatives, even if the people voted to implement that dictatorship. //
To press the useless point: yes, a dictatorship is less democratic as the people no longer have the power vested in them (and would have to reclaim it by a coup, or similar).
On your second point, you're right. My go to for reflecting on democracy is 'government by the people and _for_ the people' and that has coloured my response. I do think there's an element of necessary agency, which suggests a qualitative aspect, however.
But strictly, I concede, government to the utmost detriment of the demos could be democratic in the primary sense of the word.
In other news, the rsync.net Warrant Canary turned 15 years old last month:
Log from after that one (#freenode-staff-discussion): https://paste.sr.ht/blob/4f5c7a6b3f6adb4697572f8cd77582fa16a...