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Understanding Democracy

A story from Newsbusters suggests that the Obama campaign (or its supporters) may have used Blogspot's spam control system to flag and thus shut down several anti-Obama blogs.

Apparently, this campaign merely took advantage of Google/Blogger's flawed system of finding spam blogs. So, it looks like what we have here is an Obama dirty trick to shut down political opposition.

Newsbusters remarks, "Looks like Obmatons aren't much for that whole democracy thing, eh?"

If this is indeed what happened, the Obama crew may very well understand democracy.

In a sense, flagging spam is like voting. "Spam" is a subjective classification. Spam is unwelcome, useless, or even harmful information. Who should decide what is spam and not spam? There is much discussion of the "Wisdom of Crowds" in generating knowledge, especially through the Net. Do we allow ideas that go against the crowd?

There is a false notion that by installing voting systems that aggregate preferences of the public that we get liberal protections for speech and action. In fact, it is liberal concepts and institutional protection of these concepts that defend our "rights" against the will of the majority. Democracy, in replacing autocratic regimes, may generate liberalism. But democracy has also been a force for oppression.

Obama has lovely transpartisan rhetoric, but we should recognize that many of his policy proposals will increase the power of the state and diminish liberty. We should not be surprised that rabid supporters of statist policies will violate discourse ethics in the process of getting their way.

/KDR


Posted by Kevin D. Rollins on June 30, 2008 12:45 PM |

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