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Comment by sva_ | Hacker News Reader

This kind of shit is one of the reasons why people stop believing in western democracy.

And yet democracy so tarnished still appears better to me than the alternatives we have tried so far.

I haven’t lived in some of the alternatives, but I have visited some, and I feel fortunate to have been born in New Zealand.

> and I feel fortunate to have been born in New Zealand

Just make sure you don't have the wrong opinions. Such as not going with the medical coercion and banning of civil rights that occured from 2020.

Oh, my bad, that authoranianism is good and they deserved it - Signed, Mr G.

There are places that were welding people's homes shut at that point.

Do you suggest we move away from democracy or try to fix the failings of our systems?

> There are places that were welding people's homes shut at that point.

Yes. Many places including new Zealand did unthinkable authortiarian things. Easily could be classified as torture.

> Do you suggest we move away from democracy or try to fix the failings of our systems?

How on earth did you arrive at "move away from democracy"?

Also, the coercive and sometimes violent authortiarianism perpetrated by govs with media/big tech collaboration (who saw massive profits from lockdowns) had little to do with democracy. In fact, extreme powers that go against different constituinal documents were enacted in the most damaging security theater ever.

They are wrong here. A regime which is not western democracy probably would pretend that nothing happened. It is much more suspicious when there are not investigations like this. Sometimes it is worse: such kind of investigations are conducted by independent entities, which are then prosecuted and silenced.

I agree, that fine is a joke and cast doubt on western democracy, but what I want to say, is like Chircill's:

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.[1]

In practice absolute level of your belief doesn't matter, only a relative one when comparing with alternatives.

[1] https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/quotes/the-worst-form...

Net Neutrality was one of the handful of things I wrote my representatives about. I knew it was going to be mostly fruitless, but goddamn this is disgusting.

The same people who wrote the comments also sent about half a million fake letters to members of congress, about 900 per representative.

The bad news is that they did this. The good news is that they thought this would help, so writing your representative perhaps isn't entirely useless?

I'm not sure why my previous comment is flagged.

Clearly democracy is better than the alternatives.

This is the actual "vote with your money" everyone's talking about.

Well, there's always that expat camp in Russia if you just can't take oppressive Western democracy anymore.

"Stop" should be past tense and you forgot the quotation marks around "democracy"

Public comments aren't votes so they aren't part of democracy. Influencing an unelected official like the FCC chair who gets to rule however he wants isn't democracy.

Democracy is far, far, far more than just mere voting and that fact that you believe this basically just proves the original point.

Comments that have no legal force (because they're not actually required to respond or respect them) surely aren't.

There's other situations like community meetings for land use that are far more democratic. Although, those are mostly bad, because it means only people with lots of free time can attend them!

Yet public commentary was requested and even required to be evaluated. Therefor, fraud existed. Either is was the US government implying this was a democratic process, or the perpetrators of identity theft committed a crime. Which was it?

Being able to influence (both up and down the social pecking order) seems to be a very prominent characteristic of Democracy, but I could be wrong.

Seems more like petitioning a monarch to me. A more democratic system would be that if an official doesn't listen to you, they lose their election. Ajit Pai doesn't have an election.

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