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The idea that America EVER had free fucking speech is propaganda. There is no such thing, not in the US and not anywhere. Nations have to control their propaganda or they lose their power. Want an example? Just log into your favorite feed-site in another country and look how radically different every post, every comment and every news story is. Our perspective in the US is as cultivated as it is anywhere else.

The only way we would ever have truly free speech in any capacity would be if we had a borderless world, and I don't see that happening as long as we have money and classes.

Short of some alien species descending and absorbing everyone into a hive-mind, this isn't going to change for a thousand years at least.

We have been on the same track in many respects since Reagan/Thatcher.

Our speech has been controlled here since media's inception. We just live in the world of manufactured perception that because we can argue on the internet or have marches that somehow speech and propaganda isn't a tightly-controlled system.

You don't NEED to jail critics to have control over your country's speech, you just need to control the narratives via news outlets, reddit posts, newspapers, facebook "friends" and popular television fiction shows.

what's happening is our current system right now is in the process of failing. it's dying, it didn't work and it can no longer sustain itself. Someone once said something along the lines of "When the current system fails, the next one will consist of whatever ideas are left"

So what ideas are left? the ideas of the far right, just like far right ideas are ALWAYS left when a system is about to die. So all these governments, all these wealthy individuals, all these people that have the most to gain are are going start backing the new up coming system. We're seeing it in real time.

But this has happened time and time again. We're a collectively dumb species and love watching repeats. it's always the same song and dance "well lets go this way, sure it didn't work out last time but I don't believe it'll happen to us THIS time".

So it's not so much "what the fuck is this timeline" but rather "well it's our generations turn for bullshit". And it always skips a generation. So the boomers didn't experience it, but their parents did, and now it's our turn. Hopefully our children or our Kids children will be smarter than boomers but...we as humans sure do love watching reruns.

As someone still in Russia, a bit of the same.

That is, I expected things to get worse, but not "avalanche of shit, cockroaches and rat bones" levels of worse.

Except the idolization part started receding much earlier, when I actually learned English well enough to understand that these are very intolerant societies. Say, where in Russia people disagreeing with you on some key matters would look at you like a fool or just decide to stop this conversation so that neither of you would offend the other, in English-speaking countries, it seems, there was simply no way to survive outside of some echo chamber and God forbid you find none to fit into. But that was like 10-15 years ago, now, of course, in Russia you can get jailed or strongly fined for words.

But I thought there's some deeper wisdom and in those harsher societies people are also somehow better capable to maintain their common freedom and dignity yadda-yadda. In fact that's not what I see.

As a bit of gloating - at least now the "why are you not all revolting against Putin" Western types can be answered with their own regrettable example instead of common sense and logic, these are fine, but an example is more efficient.

And then there’s Visa and MasterCard telling you what you can and can’t purchase because some conservative cesspool wrote some emails

They didn't just write emails, they actually picked up the phone and called them, non stop. They made it into a problem that couldn't be ignored. Gamers haven't done that, unfortunately.

There's always Canada, a similarly large yet sparsely populated land with awful winters and bad food, you'll fit right in.

Sweden teaches its kids English first now. You'll be fine.

You mean the Republican party? At this point I'm convinced their voter based would elect a serial killer so long as they said they were Republican.

Irony is truly lost on this platform

They are paving the way for feudalism to replace liberal democracies,

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment

Many people seem to ignore that british legislation is choke full of gag laws and restrictions on pretty fundamental rights.

Yeah why shoild they be able to tell me to wear seatbelts.

With a president meddling in both universities and media free speech, there is no way to seriously say USA has free speech.
But even before these issues freedom of speech was very challenged in USA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Press_Freedom_Index

If you're wealthy enough, you can do whatever you want.

Freedom™

Well US free speech is telling lies and misleading millions of people on broadcast television.