cross-posted from: https://fedia.io/m/news@lemmy.world/t/2006492
Fox News appears to have removed their DOW ticker in a pattern for the company, choosing to block out the steep drop in DOW points after Trump’s tariff announcement
cross-posted from: https://fedia.io/m/news@lemmy.world/t/2006492
Fox News appears to have removed their DOW ticker in a pattern for the company, choosing to block out the steep drop in DOW points after Trump’s tariff announcement
I agree to a certain extent, but what’s become clear to me as I get older, is that democracy represents the will of the electorate, and when your democracy is setup to give the dumbest 50% of the electorate the most representation, shit falls apart.
If we want a progressive, effective, and beneficial government, then we need an electorate that will vote for it. For a while, we’ve tried providing education and mostly free information access to the populace so they can make informed decisions, but it’s evident that the voters don’t care for that. The only other way to get past that information apathy is to eliminate their representation.
I don’t expect this to be a morally defensible position, but more “if we want to survive as a nation, we need to do something about people living in an alternate reality formed by regressive hate propaganda”.
In reality, “Democracy” as invented by the Greeks was never intended to be held by the uneducated. Ever citizen got a vote, but frankly not everyone was a citizen.
The rights of a citizen came with certain expectations, and that included knowledge of the Ars Liberalis, or “Liberal Arts”, which…far from today’s demonized meaning created in order to attack higher learning, literally translated in the greek world as “the exercise of freedom”.
In other words, citizenship and voting rights obligated a person to be knowledgeable of things like Logic, History, Rhetoric, etc… You TRAINED to partake in the affairs of state just like you would prepare for any other task that requires skill and THAT was what granted you the priviledge of citizenship. (Well…that an being part of the wealthy class…)
Modern “Democracy” is predicated on the opposite; not just citizens that are ill-informed, but citizens that are so intellectually incurious that they can’t be bothered to exercise their right properly.
Absolutely.
I don’t think the qualifications for voting should be “white wealthly land-owning men”, but there has to be a filter we can use to validate that the person voting as at least 2 brain cells.
I’d like to have a basic test with blanket true/false statements around recent political talk… Maybe things like…
The 2020 election was conducted fairly without significant evidence of fraud that could have changed the result.
Vaccines have a direct and undeniable link to autism and long term damage.
Tariffs are an export tax paid by the country sending the product to another country.
Individuals with visas and green cards are not illegal immigrants.
Just a quick test like that, and then weight the vote based on how many statements they identififed correctly as True or false.
You need a way to prevent this from being corrupted. Conservatives would love to use this to prevent black folks from voting. They’re single minded and will chip away at it for decades.
Perhaps honey pots? Set up fake meetings to discuss how to prevent “those people” from voting, and everyone who attends is barred from working in government for life.
Ideally, this would filter out most if not all of the support for those conservatives who’s entire platform is based on lies and fear. MTG, Boebert, etc… They only exist as public figures because they went along with Qanon conspiracies.
Sounds more like we need to more heavily regulate sources of misinformation, rather than deeming some people too stupid to participate in the system.
The same Constitution that upholds the right to vote is the same one that protects freedom of speech. I consider both options equally damaging to the underlying fabric of this country. The point being that republicans are already eroding the foundations of this nation to poison our water and air, shift wealth from the poorest people up to the richest, steal the money we’ve put aside for social services, and implement a Christian theocracy. It’s happening, so we might as well throw out the constitution as well, but use that gap to build a society where people are protected from discrimination because of immutable characteristics, and that builds for the long-term health, wellness and safety of it’s citizens.
Preventing corporate entities from presenting falsehoods as facts is not a meaningful infringement on free speech.
If it is, then it’s clear that truly free, totally unrestricted in any way speech isn’t a good idea.
Maybe corporations shouldn’t have constitutional rights.
Glances at Citizens United