The Net — Democratic Panacea Or Autocratic Tool? 204
Alex writes "On April 6, 10,000 protesters organized in Moldova against the nation's Communist leadership by utilizing new media like Twitter and Facebook, demonstrating the ever-increasing potential of the Internet as a democratic and liberating tool. But in the current Boston Review, Evgeny Morozov critiques the view that the internet will inevitably democratize autocratic regimes like China, Russia and Iran. He argues that the Net's democratic effects are not inherent, and that autocratic regimes have been successful in controlling electronic media to disseminate their ideology. Will the net ultimately spread American democracy, or just American entertainment?"
American? (Score:4, Informative)
Perhaps they will import Australian democracy - after all, even America copied our practice of voting by secret ballot.
Re:Hear hear! (Score:-1, Informative)
By all means, if you so vastly outnumber us, do it. But you won't and you know why? Because you can't. Dream your useless dreams, little kid, the fact is that we can burn you, your family, your city, your whole nation without even flinching. We own the air you breathe. We can shit all over the world and there's nothing you can do about it. Got it, cockroach?
Re:This is so arrogant (Score:3, Informative)
You had and have Actors as heads of state,
Only one actor, singular and lower-case. Reagan had a degree in economics and a fairly long political career; it's not like he stepped right off the silver screen into the White House.
only two parties one can vote for,
Not entirely accurate, although the two major parties hold a strong dominance. Generally, two parties have been dominant in the past, but not always the same two. We've elected one President with no party at all. We currently have two US Senators and a fair few US Reps who are neither Democrats nor Republicans. At the state level, it gets a lot more mixed.
It would be nice if we could loosen the hold the Big Two have over politics, tho'. I think Ross Perot got the closest in my lifetime to breaking that hold - pity he was stark, raving mad.
tolerate torture,
Every nation "tolerates" torture that does not take actions against nations who torture. The US does not torture, although admittedly Bush broke that policy for a while (both by allowing waterboarding and transferring prisoners to nations who do full-blown torture). You'll notice that the majority of Americans were angry about that, while some other nations defended him.
infiltrate other countries ...
Every nation not in the third world (and some that are) engages in espionage. Whatever country you're from does, too.