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Comment by johnecheck | Hacker News Reader

Democracy thrives on information, reason, and participation. A democracy that concludes it should "[f]abricate and / or blow out of proportion any issue that comes [it's] way to blame the fascists" is dying. A society where the winners of elections are the most egregious liars is broken. Its days are numbered. I'd rather we pull a random general's name out of a hat and make them Supreme Leader than watch some pathological liar take power when such a decaying democracy falls apart.

The truth is our greatest ally. We need to harness it as a weapon, not abandon it in a pathetic attempt to insult our enemies and preserve the status quo.

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I read it as "the left should do what the right is very successfully doing." One can disagree about whether this is the right course of action, and I'm not really confident it is. Just to play devil's advocate: I would note that common "norms" of behavior often come into existence because a situation develops where both sides take arms against the other, and in these cases it becomes optimal for everyone to disarm -- hence the "norm" develops. If you view this kind of behavior as one version of "taking up arms" then maybe it's necessary for all sides to engage in the behavior before the norm reasserts itself.

Neccessary...

Perhaps. Sounds cyclical. I wouldn't expect that reasserted norm to hold for long.

If this democracy is dying, it doesn't speak particularly well of the virtues of democracy.

We had truth. It's still there, readily accessible. We got here despite that.

It’s probably something more like truth x prevalence

If you have a massive ecosystem dedicated to churning out un-truths and it can crowd out truth, then the truthiness hardly matters… in the near term at least.

In the long run, truth-seeking systems work better because it’s hard to operate effectively without it. Which I suspect we’ll re-learn in a few short months.

What gives me hope is how the sentiment has turned against that massive ecosystem. Everyone knows it's terrible and damaging our society. The time is ripe for a new information ecosystem to emerge. Authority structures and truth heuristics are key considerations.

It's a damn shame that the only sizable social network that brands itself on veracity is Truth Social.

Agreed. Right now, the truth is losing the information war. But abandoning it in favor of a contest of lies? Against fascists? Really?

I don't think so. I value credibility, and I'm not alone. You care about what's true, right? Almost everyone does. It's just really damn hard to figure it out. If we actually want to fix things, our job is to make that easier.

Really? Because history totally disagrees with this assessment. Winston Churchill is a hero of democracy, and deservedly so.

But fuck man, that guy was a lying bullshit artist ... he was a drunk. He abused his power with women. He lied to the public, to the army, to preserve his own power. And worse. He was a terrible, terrible person by all accounts.

And frankly, in that he was not exceptional. Get some papers from the 1920s, 1930s, and compare against the history books, or against science, against the truth. Again: WTF.

No, what makes democracy work, is not truth. I don't really know what does make it tick, but truth? No way. Participation? I don't have that big a smoking gun, but I doubt it. It's the option to participate that matters, not whether people actually do. In my opinion, what matters a great deal is that the government is forced to drastically change course when a large portion of the population is unhappy (which is, let's face facts, why Trump got elected, and it is why republicans are in for a world of hurt next time)

Even today, the fact of the matter is that European governments are fundamentally forced to scale back the welfare state. It is framed as a money problem, but really it is a problem of labor availability, money is only the abstraction the government uses for everything. We're blaming the abstraction. The real problem is not being seriously discussed in any European country, instead democratically elected governments are trying to sneak in cutback after cutback because "immigrants suck" or "criminals are expensive" or ... bullshit essentially.

"[A democracy] is forced to drastically change course when a large portion of the population is unhappy."

I concur. But the odds of that course-correct being the right one must relate to the prevalence of the truth in the population, right?

Was Churchill's election a grand triumph of democracy? I can see why you might think so. They elected what seems to have been the right man for the job, despite his flaws.

Was he really? Was that lying drunk really the only guy who could have pulled it off? Or did Britain elect a terrible person and just got lucky that his failings didn't muck everything up?

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