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Disinformation is the deliberate use of lies to manipulate people, whether to extract profit or to advance a political agenda. Its unwitting accomplice, misinformation, is spread by unknowing dupes who repeat lies they believe to be true. In America today, both forms of falsehood are distorting our perception of reality.
In a democracy, the people need a shared set of facts as a basis to debate and make decisions that advance and secure their collective interests. Differences of opinion, and even propaganda, have always existed in the United States, but now, enemies of democracy are using disinformation to attack our sovereign right to truthful information, intellectual integrity, and the exercise of the will of the people. Online disinformation is particularly insidious because of its immediacy, its capacity to deceive, and its ability to reach its target.
“People that believe in liberty”
Like I said, rational people don’t go into politics.
Liberty is not an obtainable goal but an ideal, defined as “the state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one’s way of life, behavior, or political views”.
This idealistic principle is fundamentally incompatible with Democratic Society, because my liberty to breathe clean air is an oppressive restriction to those who want the liberty to pollute it and vice versa.
Any political idealist who promises to support “liberty” without clarification should be treated with suspicion, as that sort of rhetoric is only useful for distracting from more specific policy goals.
Eh, there’s a difference between believing in liberty, and believing in all the liberty.
Hence, the need for clarification. “Liberty” is a meaningless buzzword unless the person using it is specific about whose liberty to do what.
I dunno, I think it’s pretty clear that it’s basic freedoms within the law. Words like Libertarian takes over after that, going into dismantling a lot of the existing laws.
It’s all over the writings around the founding of our country, at any rate, so it’s not going anywhere no matter how much people fuck around with it.
Seems to me like the founders had a very specific kind of liberty in mind and a very narrow fraction of the population it would apply to…
Pretty much, yea. Things like that are why we have an amendment process though.
Sure, but the amendment process is predicated upon broad agreement between the dominant political parties and hasn’t been used in 30 years, for an amendment about congressional salaries that took over 200 years to be ratified.
As justice delayed is justice denied, I don’t think we can rely on constitutional amendments as sufficient. It took almost 200 years to finally ban poll taxes despite this country’s constant rhetoric about liberty and justice being for all.
I don’t think justice was much in the founder’s minds as much as self-determination. The two are not the same at all. Justice is a more recent value.