> In America, we understand that there is absolutely nothing more dangerous than an entity that feels entitled to control what is true. It might make things easier, and it might actually produce better results so long as the entity doing so is competent and benevolent, but nearly every structure in America is meant to serve as a bulwark for the cases in which the entity in power is precisely the sort that you do not want to be making those decisions. And to be frank, Europe should probably be more wary of that.
This is such blatant and obvious nonsense. You philosophize on basis of the assumption that central authorities ('government') by definition cannot be trusted, and we should therefore be wary of anything that reeks of centralized decision making.
That is a supremely American way of looking at the world.
Despite the good intentions behind the decentralization of power and the checks and balances that have been built into your system, you have ended up with a nation where the most powerful person has blatantly and publicly broken all the norms and all the rules, who regularly and repeatedly tells the most outrageous lies, and where a very large amount of people stand behind him nevertheless because of large scale & organized disinformation campaigns by the likes of (decentralized) propaganda entities like Fox News.
How does your system deal with that then? Not very well, it seems.
Wouldn't it be great if you would have a powerful centralized body that can say "Ehm, you guys keep on telling outrageous lies, we're going to forbid it and if you keep in doing it you'll be slapped with a fine that really hurts and your CEO might have to go to jail"?
What you don't seem to take into account in your comment is that centralized bodies can protect the weak from the powerful. If you only have decentralized entities, it's survival of the fittest – which is a nice way of saying that the weakest get eaten or die. I don't want to live in a society that has these values.
This is such blatant and obvious nonsense. You philosophize on basis of the assumption that central authorities ('government') by definition cannot be trusted, and we should therefore be wary of anything that reeks of centralized decision making.
That is a supremely American way of looking at the world.
Despite the good intentions behind the decentralization of power and the checks and balances that have been built into your system, you have ended up with a nation where the most powerful person has blatantly and publicly broken all the norms and all the rules, who regularly and repeatedly tells the most outrageous lies, and where a very large amount of people stand behind him nevertheless because of large scale & organized disinformation campaigns by the likes of (decentralized) propaganda entities like Fox News.
How does your system deal with that then? Not very well, it seems.
Wouldn't it be great if you would have a powerful centralized body that can say "Ehm, you guys keep on telling outrageous lies, we're going to forbid it and if you keep in doing it you'll be slapped with a fine that really hurts and your CEO might have to go to jail"?
What you don't seem to take into account in your comment is that centralized bodies can protect the weak from the powerful. If you only have decentralized entities, it's survival of the fittest – which is a nice way of saying that the weakest get eaten or die. I don't want to live in a society that has these values.