Comment by ericmay
10 hours ago
As a society we just get to decide that. We can simultaneously be a democracy and also prohibit people from doing things. We can even be hypocritical. It's great!
There's nothing contradictory about it because living in a democratic society doesn't mean that you have free reign to do anything that you want.
Hell, yall can put people in concentration camps, enslave folks, summarily execute them.
It's great. /s
Look: I live next to a reservation, where the US gov committed war crimes. There's a fort up the hill a quarter mile up from where I am, which was a "residential school" where the US gov put kidnapped children to "educate them".
You are 100% right that democracy can coexist with all manner of depravity.
We get it, yall can happily do enact horrors you feel like enacting on the rest of us and still enjoy feeling smug that we don't like it.
But that fact means that something being "democratic" does not mean that we should respect what you do just because you have a veneer of democracy across it.
I am profoundly grateful I have so many greater crimes commited by the US to contextualize what, in the big scheme of things, is a meaningless and goofy action. If I didn't know that they were spearheading the literal ecocide of the planet while incarcerating more people than have every been locked up, while simultaniously funding a genocide in Israel, I'd probably feel like this is some kind of espeically bad thing.
But it's not; it barely even registers once you start looking at the millions of people that the US has directly murdered in the last 250 years.
But It's Great! (tm)
I know I know.
Americans... sorry I meant United Statesians, are really bad people. We might even be the worst people on the planet by any conceivable measure.
Since we're so bad and we've murdered so many millions of people, I guess there's no redeeming us and anything good we've ever done was meaningless so I say we go ahead and ban TikTok as our final coup de grâce in this terrible and twisted timeline.