Nothing about our history guarantees our future as a democracy, this is hot hand fallacy at its finest. If there's one thing that's consistent across human history, civilizations always fail at some point.
> I wouldn’t lightly consider toying with something so basic as free speech. Several European and Asian democracies are already teetering towards authoritarianism, the first step of which is curtailing public debate.
Free speech existed prior to the internet, it's not like Tim Berners-Lee changes the world and all of a sudden free speech exists. Canada has much stricter free speech laws than the US and their political discourse seems to be just fine. Plus there are already plenty of restrictions baked into "free speech" online. You can't threaten to shoot up a school on social media without consequences, why can't the same principles be applied to people who make death threats towards individuals? Companies already have the ability to lock you out of your account for no reason whatsoever without any defined arbitration system. What about the internet is so truly sacrosanct that we permit such inconsistency from corporate governance while railing against legal protections mandated by governments? Free speech is already being messed with; it's being used to automate the virality of hate speech with ruthless efficiency.
Interesting choice of analogy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_hand#Recent_research_in_su...
Hot hand "fallacy" is only fallacious if cross-event outcomes are unrelated. Back in reality, neither hot hand nor reverse gambler's are actually fallacious.
That would be San Marino.
The U.S. Constitution is the oldest constitution still in force. But we're still pretty young as democracies go. Hell, we haven't even been around as long as one of the first libertarian states, the Icelandic Commonwealth, was.
(Another line of counter-argument is that the US wasn't a democracy until the civil rights act...)
None of those people are in jail. And that regime, despite its best efforts, is being peacefully removed from power.
America is the world’s oldest [EDIT: large, old] extant democracy. I wouldn’t lightly consider toying with something so basic as free speech. Several European and Asian democracies are already teetering towards authoritarianism, the first step of which is curtailing public debate.