So having 2 braincells is a policy then!
Comment on Instead of everyone leaving NATO, could everyone else just kick the US out?
14th_cylon@lemmy.zip 1 day agowe have the whole field of expertise for that, we call it the political science. and no one with more than 2 brain cells thinks china or russia are democratic countries.
Guilvareux@feddit.uk 1 day ago
14th_cylon@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
that would be necessary, not sufficient condition.
Cowbee_Admirer@reddthat.com 1 day ago
I doubt political scientists in China agree with, say, German political scientists’ definition of democracy. What supranational organization will decide which countrie’s political scientists are correct?
I could perfectly well argue that France isn’t Democratic. The majority of the population voted for a leftist coalition that is being blocked by the president of the republic from being elected, and Macron has already skipped the democratic will of the people by declaring emergency measures to pass antidemocratic legislation such as the increase of retirement age.
In Greece, when a leftist government (Syriza) was elected around 2010 after the huge economic crisis around a platform of reviewing the state debt and democratically decided on referendum to do so, the European Central Bank threatened with dropping its obligations towards Greece and forced neoliberal austerity policy.
In Berlin, the people democratically voted through direct referendum for a cap to rent prices, and shortly after the highest court of Germany declared it illegal and rent prices were uncapped again (despite economic studies of the policy results in its limited lifespan prove it was effective in lowering rent pricing).
In Spain (my homeland), when a leftist party (Podemos) was getting ranked 3rd in the country by polls and was on trend to overtake the socialdemocrats (PSOE), an illegal police operation directed from the ministry of internal affairs fabricated false evidence of funding of said leftist party from Venezuela and Iran and leaked these falsified police reports to all media before the elections, which destroyed the popularity of the party.
I gotta say, being a leftist in Europe, it doesn’t feel democratic at all that all the choice we have is to vote on the colour of the party that will impose neoliberal austerity policy and raise military expenditure (all parties in the EU do this).
14th_cylon@lemmy.zip 23 hours ago
No serious political scientist claims democracy is a matter of ideology or “who feels represented.” There is broad cross-national agreement on procedural criteria: competitive elections, universal suffrage, freedom of association and expression, independent courts, civilian control of the military, and peaceful transfer of power. Chinese or Russian academics may reject these standards, but that doesn’t make them arbitrary—just inconvenient for regimes that fail to meet them. There’s no need for a supranational authority to decide this any more than there is one for physics; standards emerge from scholarly consensus and empirical comparison.
Second, pointing out abuses and contradictions inside democracies doesn’t negate their democratic character. What you describe in France, Greece, Germany, and Spain are are events happening within constitutional systems, not the absence of those systems. Courts overturn referenda because constitutions limit majority rule; executives misuse emergency powers; police and media manipulate narratives. That is democracy functioning badly, not democracy not existing.
The decisive distinction is whether these actions can be challenged, exposed, reversed, and punished. In Europe, governments lose elections, courts rule against executives, journalists investigate police misconduct, and opposition parties—leftist ones included—can recover and return. In Russia, journalists, opposition politicians, and anti‑corruption activists don’t lose court cases; they lose their freedom, their lives, or very famously, fall out of windows.
That is the difference between democracy and dictatorship, comrade.
Cowbee_Admirer@reddthat.com 19 hours ago
This simply isn’t true, ask Cuban political scientists or Chinese ones or Vietnamese ones.
Argument from the majority. By that logic, Taylor Swift objectively makes the best music in the planet, and Jazz isn’t real music.
Ridiculous comparison. Political sciences are not a hard science, and different political systems give rise to different interpretations. The fact is that this “broad cross-national agreement” is rejected by many, many scholars, particularly Marxist ones, with Marxist political scientists describing the western system as “bourgeois democracy”, meaning that despite suffrage once every four years, the outcomes are functionally the same as if only the 10% wealthiest voted. This is serious criticism based on empirical studies (such as likelihood of laws to pass based on what percentage of the population agree with them by income), and you cannot simply disregard it as “it’s not the consensus”.
Macron is president and won’t go to jail, the ECB is still operative and no bureaucrat will go to jail for destroying the Greek economy, nobody has gone to jail in Spain for tampering with democracy and fabricating false evidence from within the police, and the judges in the highest court of Germany won’t go to jail.
The fact that you aren’t aware of these things happening in Europe or the USA doesn’t mean they don’t happen. You could look up the cases of Rita Barberá or Miguel Blesa, both higher ups of the conservative party in Spain (PP) who died in mysterious circumstances shortly before going to trial, or Fabra winning the lottery 3 or 4 times. Ask the Catalonian pro-independence politicians if there is democracy and political freedom in Spain, with many of them enjailed or fleeing the country as political refugees. Ask Julian Assange or Edward Snowden about freedom in western “democracies”.
humanspiral@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
In Romania, they declared a candidate illegal.
Putin has higher approval ratings than any western leader. Chinese people are happier with their level of democracy than any country in the west.
Our countries are extremely corrupt with elections fully determined by Zionism, CIA and oligarchy, with parliaments/congress providing 0 useful bills of any kind, including avoiding popularly requested freedoms.
An empirical definition of democracy, as best fit, is nations with performative elections that result in a winner that is in full agreement with US foreign policy.
The cognitive dissonance of popular discontent within US’s NATO colonies is that because the US is a directly stated enemy intent on destroying them, they would be far more advantaged to be in an alliance with Russia and China, and to contain the US, instead of finding the most extreme way of subjugating themselves harder to the US.
14th_cylon@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
you are joking, right? a dictator who falsifies elections and statistics has good “approval ratings”, oh wow, we should abandon democracy immediately and opt in for a dictatorship, must be so sweet!
Cowbee_Admirer@reddthat.com 1 day ago
In Estonia they also recently determined a decade in jail for a few pro-Russian politicians. Not saying that necessarily that’s a bad thing, those are just right wing ghouls, my problem is more why those same mechanisms aren’t used against our autoctonous far-right
14th_cylon@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
china is free to form an alliance with anyone they want to, as long as that entity wishes same. and the democratic countries have the same right. you are either one of the <2 brain cells people, or a sea-lion, either way, i am done with you.
Cowbee_Admirer@reddthat.com 1 day ago
No need to get rude and ableist just because I gave you my reasoning
14th_cylon@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
good news, i just checked and google is up today.
michaelmrose@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Lol why are they ableist again?