This is sadly so obvious to see, that you don't need a report to know that.
Romania and Slovakia — are becoming the center of democratic growth in Europe
The report is even already way off regarding Slovakia, who just elected an authoritarian with sympathies towards Russia.
Romania is a bit shaky too, they have very little trust in the democratic government, and could probably easily be swayed by a populist who says what they want to hear.
It doesn't mention USA, Brazil, Argentina that are all becoming more shaky too, instead of stabilizing.
It also doesn't mention China, that also became more authoritarian, with Xi grabbing even more power much like Putin.
Being young in the 70's, I never in my worst nightmares imagined things would ever become this bad.
When the Berlin Wall was broken, I never imagined it could become this bad. It's kind of worse than before the wall was broken, because USA alone is such a huge influence, and Republican have gone completely nuts for Authoritarianism for some reason???
Republican have gone completely nuts for Authoritarianism for some reason???
two reasons:
in 2010 they got to gerrymander the fuck out of districts and thus got a whole bunch of safe seats where even total wackos can win primaries and then go on to safely win the general
the republican's whole ideology and support base is crumbling away and it's basically unstoppable at this point. old racists who fondly remember jim crow are all retired and young people are leaving christianaity at a consistent rate of around 1%/year. their economic policies are totally out of whack with what the bottom 90% need or want and no one believes tax cuts on the rich will benefit anyone but the rich. their only hope is overthrowing the government and installing a dictator and everyone knows it
Republican have gone completely nuts for Authoritarianism for some reason???
Conservatives have always been authoritarian. The difference between now and before is that decades ago, the political parties were aligned differently with some Southern conservatives being Democrats and some Northern progressives being Republicans, so the overall party platforms were more moderate. Also, conservatives back then couldn't admit to their desires to go full-on "papers, please" because the Soviet Union existed as a geopolitical enemy that they needed to maintain ideological distance from. (In contrast, they're happy to be buddy-buddy with fascist Russia, since it's right-wing authoritarian instead of left-wing authoritarian.)
TL;DR: Because coalitions and geopolitics have realigned, conservatives can express the true agenda they've always had in a way they couldn't before.
Republican have gone completely nuts for Authoritarianism for some reason
I feel like this is a power grab. With everyone online and interconnected, it's a lot easier to see where the real problems are. Our collective blame shifts more and more to the top and it's becoming a lot harder to defend the actions of the rich.
I feel like that's a source for all of this, not just the USA. They know the party is over, but they'll fight like hell to keep it going.
The article is about direction, not position.
The report is even already way off regarding Slovakia, who just elected an authoritarian with sympathies towards Russia.
Romania is a bit shaky too, they have very little trust in the democratic government, and could probably easily be swayed by a populist who says what they want to hear.
The article uses the report to show that Slovakia and Romania have improved relative to their prior measurement. It is silent on their positions relative to other democracies.
Slovakia and Romania have improved relative to their prior measurement.
Slovakia improved how? From potentially electing a Russia friendly authoritarian to actually having elected one is progress?
As for Slovakia, not all hope is lost.
The party that was elected has been ruling for ages, so they're very entrenched especially for older voters.
There is a new-ish party (PS) that gained a lot of momentum in this election, and I have even better hopes for them in the next election.
Churchill was a racist idiot and that’s still a dumb quote.
Democracy is a plane with 20 people on it. Nine vote not to crash it and eleven vote to fly it into a mountain, and that means everyone dies because democracy
So instead you choose authoritarianism: 20 people on a plan and one of them shoots the pilot, takes over, and crashes it. Everyone dies.
Yeah, the problems with democracy are rarely solved by less democracy. It just turns into "Instead of many idiots voting to do something stupid, one idiot votes to do something stupid."
Think bigger. Fly the plane in circles, and demand the people give you whatever you want to occasionally land it and bring some supplies onboard.
Just don't die of old age.
Love how you think that not only are there only two options, but that democracy isn’t also authoritarian. It’s just mob rule instead of an individual.
Why don't you enlighten us on the other options then? I'd love to hear it.
That's... precisely why the original quote said "democracy is the worst form of government". It has fundamental flaws. But it's still the better than everything else.
Churchill's point is that stupid things can still happen in democracies, but no one has come up with a better alternative. What would you suggest as the better alternative? If you don't have one, then you just helped prove Churchill's point!
Every human knows and has used a superior system from the time they first started playing with other people: Consensus.
...which is basically what democracy is, but systemitized such that it can be applied at scale.
If we had a consensus based government I wouldn’t have a fascist as a representative
There are more people than just you in your district
Yes and we should all agree on who is going to represent us. Otherwise the losing party is disenfranchised.
You're not going to get unanimous approval for anything when your group size is several thousand people
Democracy is majority rule, and fuck whatever the minority wants.
Consensus is we don’t do anything unless we all agree.
Then you don't do anything. Ok got it, 👍🏾
So the only way to get anything done is to do it against the will of at least some people? You've never been in a group where you agreed on a course of action together?
In a group.. you mean a very limited setting where you can discuss directly with everyone and get direct feedback in real time from everyone?
How do you suggest that this might work on a large scale, with millions of people?
Edit: And if for example 10 million people somehow found consensus and then one guy is like "lmao no", everything gets canned?
There's lots of ideas about this, but my solution is to simply eliminate the idea that we need to rule millions of people.
1 votes with the hijackers because they share a hometown
2 vote no
another 2 vote strong no
the other 12 don't participate because they don't want to get too political (we have 40% voter turnout where I live)
and I've been through enough elections to see how we are all heading to a crash, every time.
But if we made you running everything it would be perfect.
That's the thing with anti-democracy sentiment the people who advocate for it always assume they, or someone who agrees with them on everything, is going to run things. No one imagines themselves in a slave society being a slave.
No, nine vote to crash it, seven vote to go left and four vote to go right.
Crashing it is! Thanks, first past the post voting system.
Go back to school dude, and this time stay awake during the lecture.
I did not learn that in any of my schooling lol
I did not learn anything in any of my schooling lol
FTFY
Damn, you guys are pretentious as hell in this thread lmao
take a break
It's ok. It requires a reading and comprehension level above 5th Grade so it can be difficult for some to understand subtle nuances and phrases such as "apart from" and "the".
Well, you convinced me. Guess I’ll read Marx to find out why.
I strongly encourage ACTUALLY reading Marx and not just the facebook post equivalents that various influencers love to spout.
But, at a very high level: Marxism is largely built around communism (well, the other way around, but just roll with it). Which does have implications for governing and decision making, but is largely a socioeconomic system. So the better "opposite" would be Capitalism. Although, even that is a pretty reductive approach and is arguably wrong.
That said: Communism requires some form of centralized planning. And while there is nothing that says that can't come from a true Democracy, it tends to favor republics which may or may not use democracy to select. The US, as the chuds so often like to exclaim, is a Democratic Republic (sort of) in that we use Democracy-ish to select our representatives.
Communism most certainly doesn't require centralized planning - all it requires is a method of providing start up capital without giving away ownership.
It could be from local government taxes, federal coining of money, crowdsourced or some combination of these - you'd just need a mechanism of some sort to give loans to groups looking to start a worker-owned company. That's the only requirement
There's an infinite number of ways to slice it - centralized planning is super worrisome IMO because it creates a locus of power. But not only is it unnecessary, the same result
can be achieved far more effectively with a digital marketplace that matches buyers and sellers. You just have to remove incentives and power from the entities managing it - with a fairly small amount of money, you could host a standard system with an open and auditable code base
But you could also just design an open market without ownership of companies - that's communism. You'd have to decommodify certain basic needs and shape incentives carefully, so it's a bit more complicated than that... But not much
The problem with communism is bcz it requires strong central planning it tends to devolve into authoritarianism quickly.
Computers and databases with logistics didn’t exist in 1918. Walmart and Amazon have strong central planning. Chile began to do it in 1971 with Project CyberSyn, but the CIA and capitalism couldn’t have that in their backyard.
Edit: There is a failure of imagination concerning what socialism and communism could like in the future. Lenin was materially bound by his time. Actual Communism (worldwide) might look sufficiently different than what’s been done before.
Yeah, because a world run like Amazon sounds like such a utopia. /s
Yeah, I think we have proven over and over that human nature doesn't do communism well at large scales. Not that I don't think at small scales it's a perfectly good system. Capitalism isn't really any better tho. I don't have a solution for how to avoid the pitfalls of socialism and communism. Worker owned means of production is really the thing I want, attainable or not. No single person should own all of the gains off the backs of worker blood, sweat, and tears.
Anarcho-Syndicalism or Anarcho-Communism? There’s the rub. I’m still exploring that myself.
I think there are a LOT more problems than just that, but yeah.
You can more or less "break" libertarianism and many anarchies by asking about "what happens to the orphans?". For Communism and its derivatives, the question is usually "Who gets to be a scientist, a doctor, a movie star, and the person who cleans out the sewers? And do they all get the same benefits?"
Personally? I think the bigger issue is women's rights. If you consider sex work to be work, how do you figure out who is most suited to be a sex worker? And, regardless, how do you decide who is best suited to be a mother and how that impacts the centralized planning?
It is one of the many reasons that what we truly need are hybrid socioeconomic models.
Why would you rather have Amazon and Walmart plan your economy than a democratically elected government?
Communism doesn't require central planning. The fact that you think it does tells me you don't know what communism even is.
Depends on your definition. Each of these is a definition from the web, and two of them involve dictatorship like control of the economy. Next time you decide to basically call someone stupid, make sure you know what you're talking about first.
A theoretical economic system characterized by the collective ownership of property and by the organization of labor for the common advantage of all members.
A system of government in which the state plans and controls the economy and a single, often authoritarian party holds power, claiming to make progress toward a higher social order in which all goods are equally shared by the people.
The Marxist-Leninist doctrine advocating revolution to overthrow the capitalist system and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat that will eventually evolve into a perfectly egalitarian and communal society.
Well, we all know now that ML wasn't about installing a dictatorship of the Proletariat.
Turns out, maybe straight communism isn't what humans need, but some kind of.......democratic socialism.
No, he's into super-democracy. Democratize everything, including ownership and the workplace.
Lenin was the one who came up with the idea to centralize everything, Marxist-Leninists mistake the proletariat as better, when the truth is it's all structural.
Marx differentiated two groups in different social classes and drew a straight comparison from feudal lords to the ownership class, and said "their interests are different from the rest of ours, and capitalism benefits them at our expense - including by giving them an unfair advantage in the political process"
Lenin took that to mean "the bourgeoisie are unlike the proletariat, they are uniquely evil". Assuming that by overthrowing the nobility and oligarchs they could build the perfect state, he did the dumbest thing possible. He built the "ideal" system for someone who hadn't studied sociology...a single, central view from on high.
In theory, that's the ideal way to manage resources - you can see where there's a surplus and where there's a need, and respond appropriately.
In practice, he created a system that incentivizes and normalizes lying until you're caught in the same way that a corporation incentives pushing morality and legality to the point you get backlash... It selects for the worst people to rise to the top
Add in the propaganda the US pushes about China and Russia being Communist (they're both absolutely authoritarian but a form of capitalism by any informed definition), and you get a bunch of people who have no idea what they're talking about (tankies) spreading a highly flawed conception of communism, or even just authoritarianism with some Marxist terms painted on
You mean as opposed to the free and fair two party capitalist democracy where Americans have to choose between two old men they don't like?
Funny that Politico are the ones reporting on this.. given the fact that they're owend by Axel Springer
At least it's not Murdoch - but that's a very low bar
US is about to fall into a semi-fascist state next year, so it's gonna get way worse
If you are referring to Trump, it's far from a done deal.
Though some would say that the US has been a fascist state for a while.
Semi-fascist, unarguably, because one of the two political parties is fascist and currently controls the House and Supreme Court.
Some would say that the other party is not much better. Given their close ties to finance, industry and military. And the revolving doors associated with those.
Really... hadn't noticed.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“In Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Slovakia, Israel, and the United States, just to name the most familiar examples, the erosion of democratic norms has been engineered by leaders claiming to speak in the name of, and with the authority of, the people,” the new report warned.
IDEA’s report bases its analysis on 173 countries and takes into account 17 metrics ranging from civil liberties to judicial independence to credible elections to the rule of law, using the most recent figures from 2022.
EU countries Hungary and Poland are still the “most notable examples illustrating the bloc’s limited ability to exert more direct influence over the (non-)democratic trajectory of its member states,” the report said.
Poland — which is set for a change of political direction after election results earlier this month that saw the ruling right-wing Law and Justice party defeated — might now be on a more positive trajectory.
In contrast to Hungary and Poland’s recent performance, other Central and Eastern European countries — such as Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Kosovo, Latvia, Lithuania, North Macedonia, Romania and Slovakia — are becoming the center of democratic growth in Europe due to notable five-year improvements, the report said.
According to the report: “Ex-Chancellor Sebastian Kurz has been implicated in schemes to shut down critical media and purchase positive coverage by using public funds through the Ministry of Finance.”
The original article contains 692 words, the summary contains 222 words. Saved 68%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
This is literally said in a "new report" every year of my life. I'm totally desensitized to this.
So the tactics work on you.
You have a fix?
Join and help the organization of your choice that actually wants to do something instead of just tread water.
I donate to UNISEF and Wikipedia and write my congressperson. That's all I have in the tank.
That's not about just O, T and E etc really.
It's about the average Westerner just loving to blabber about realpolitik and subjective interests on the subject of enabling richer and stronger cannibals against poorer and weaker humans.
And also about democratic countries having no immunity against foreign states buying their politicians and officials and the general population not really caring.
Jailing for life a few people who've been paid by Qatar, Azerbaijan, Russia, Israel etc would do wonders as an example to the rest.
Bombing their infrastructures when they start wars would also be nice. Most don't have WMD. Not for the realpolitikers, of course, that would have negative strategic and economical effect, but if your goal is preserving democracy and civilization, then there are plenty of places to be bombed right now without dancing all the quadrilles.
Wtf did I just read?
I'm pretty sure they want America to bomb Russia.
Which specific part is hard for you to understand? I've made a few shortcuts.
Well, of course it is. You all blatantly threw out human rights because you were afraid after 9/11 and because of covid. 🤦
9/11, yes, but what human rights did we lose from covid? Having to wear a mask for a while? Or being heavily encouraged to get a vaccine? ...
This is sadly so obvious to see, that you don't need a report to know that.
The report is even already way off regarding Slovakia, who just elected an authoritarian with sympathies towards Russia.
Romania is a bit shaky too, they have very little trust in the democratic government, and could probably easily be swayed by a populist who says what they want to hear.
It doesn't mention USA, Brazil, Argentina that are all becoming more shaky too, instead of stabilizing.
It also doesn't mention China, that also became more authoritarian, with Xi grabbing even more power much like Putin.
Being young in the 70's, I never in my worst nightmares imagined things would ever become this bad.
When the Berlin Wall was broken, I never imagined it could become this bad. It's kind of worse than before the wall was broken, because USA alone is such a huge influence, and Republican have gone completely nuts for Authoritarianism for some reason???
two reasons:
in 2010 they got to gerrymander the fuck out of districts and thus got a whole bunch of safe seats where even total wackos can win primaries and then go on to safely win the general
the republican's whole ideology and support base is crumbling away and it's basically unstoppable at this point. old racists who fondly remember jim crow are all retired and young people are leaving christianaity at a consistent rate of around 1%/year. their economic policies are totally out of whack with what the bottom 90% need or want and no one believes tax cuts on the rich will benefit anyone but the rich. their only hope is overthrowing the government and installing a dictator and everyone knows it
Conservatives have always been authoritarian. The difference between now and before is that decades ago, the political parties were aligned differently with some Southern conservatives being Democrats and some Northern progressives being Republicans, so the overall party platforms were more moderate. Also, conservatives back then couldn't admit to their desires to go full-on "papers, please" because the Soviet Union existed as a geopolitical enemy that they needed to maintain ideological distance from. (In contrast, they're happy to be buddy-buddy with fascist Russia, since it's right-wing authoritarian instead of left-wing authoritarian.)
TL;DR: Because coalitions and geopolitics have realigned, conservatives can express the true agenda they've always had in a way they couldn't before.
I feel like this is a power grab. With everyone online and interconnected, it's a lot easier to see where the real problems are. Our collective blame shifts more and more to the top and it's becoming a lot harder to defend the actions of the rich.
I feel like that's a source for all of this, not just the USA. They know the party is over, but they'll fight like hell to keep it going.
The article is about direction, not position.
The article uses the report to show that Slovakia and Romania have improved relative to their prior measurement. It is silent on their positions relative to other democracies.
Slovakia improved how? From potentially electing a Russia friendly authoritarian to actually having elected one is progress?
As for Slovakia, not all hope is lost.
The party that was elected has been ruling for ages, so they're very entrenched especially for older voters.
There is a new-ish party (PS) that gained a lot of momentum in this election, and I have even better hopes for them in the next election.
Democracy is the worst form of governance, apart from all others
It's only the morning where I am, but I think I've read the dumbest thing I'm going to read all day.
It’s a Churchill quote. https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/quotes/the-worst-form-of-government/?ssp=1&setlang=pt-PT&safesearch=moderate
Churchill was a racist idiot and that’s still a dumb quote.
Democracy is a plane with 20 people on it. Nine vote not to crash it and eleven vote to fly it into a mountain, and that means everyone dies because democracy
So instead you choose authoritarianism: 20 people on a plan and one of them shoots the pilot, takes over, and crashes it. Everyone dies.
Yeah, the problems with democracy are rarely solved by less democracy. It just turns into "Instead of many idiots voting to do something stupid, one idiot votes to do something stupid."
Think bigger. Fly the plane in circles, and demand the people give you whatever you want to occasionally land it and bring some supplies onboard.
Just don't die of old age.
Love how you think that not only are there only two options, but that democracy isn’t also authoritarian. It’s just mob rule instead of an individual.
Why don't you enlighten us on the other options then? I'd love to hear it.
That's... precisely why the original quote said "democracy is the worst form of government". It has fundamental flaws. But it's still the better than everything else.
Churchill's point is that stupid things can still happen in democracies, but no one has come up with a better alternative. What would you suggest as the better alternative? If you don't have one, then you just helped prove Churchill's point!
Every human knows and has used a superior system from the time they first started playing with other people: Consensus.
...which is basically what democracy is, but systemitized such that it can be applied at scale.
If we had a consensus based government I wouldn’t have a fascist as a representative
There are more people than just you in your district
Yes and we should all agree on who is going to represent us. Otherwise the losing party is disenfranchised.
You're not going to get unanimous approval for anything when your group size is several thousand people
Maybe the groups should be smaller then
So... A form of democracy?
Democracy is majority rule, and fuck whatever the minority wants.
Consensus is we don’t do anything unless we all agree.
Then you don't do anything. Ok got it, 👍🏾
So the only way to get anything done is to do it against the will of at least some people? You've never been in a group where you agreed on a course of action together?
In a group.. you mean a very limited setting where you can discuss directly with everyone and get direct feedback in real time from everyone?
How do you suggest that this might work on a large scale, with millions of people?
Edit: And if for example 10 million people somehow found consensus and then one guy is like "lmao no", everything gets canned?
There's lots of ideas about this, but my solution is to simply eliminate the idea that we need to rule millions of people.
So nothing gets done then.
...what do you think democracy is?
Are you....high???
Yes but also yes
It's more like,
and I've been through enough elections to see how we are all heading to a crash, every time.
But if we made you running everything it would be perfect.
That's the thing with anti-democracy sentiment the people who advocate for it always assume they, or someone who agrees with them on everything, is going to run things. No one imagines themselves in a slave society being a slave.
No, nine vote to crash it, seven vote to go left and four vote to go right.
Crashing it is! Thanks, first past the post voting system.
Doesn't make him right.
Churchill is saying that democracy is the best form of government in the quote. He is just saying it in a funny way.
I think that person gets it. Just that they are probably some tankie.
Read the quote again but slowly this time.
Go back to school dude, and this time stay awake during the lecture.
I did not learn that in any of my schooling lol
FTFY
Damn, you guys are pretentious as hell in this thread lmao
take a break
It's ok. It requires a reading and comprehension level above 5th Grade so it can be difficult for some to understand subtle nuances and phrases such as "apart from" and "the".
Expand your mind.
Next time try not sleeping through your history class champ? That’s a famous historic Churchill quote.
Not unless you re-read your comment after you finally finish waking up
I seriously doubt it
Yup, it matches my observations as well.
What song is that from?
I Want Your Sex- George Michael
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
George Michael
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Marx would be the opposite of democracy.
Well, you convinced me. Guess I’ll read Marx to find out why.
I strongly encourage ACTUALLY reading Marx and not just the facebook post equivalents that various influencers love to spout.
But, at a very high level: Marxism is largely built around communism (well, the other way around, but just roll with it). Which does have implications for governing and decision making, but is largely a socioeconomic system. So the better "opposite" would be Capitalism. Although, even that is a pretty reductive approach and is arguably wrong.
That said: Communism requires some form of centralized planning. And while there is nothing that says that can't come from a true Democracy, it tends to favor republics which may or may not use democracy to select. The US, as the chuds so often like to exclaim, is a Democratic Republic (sort of) in that we use Democracy-ish to select our representatives.
Communism most certainly doesn't require centralized planning - all it requires is a method of providing start up capital without giving away ownership.
It could be from local government taxes, federal coining of money, crowdsourced or some combination of these - you'd just need a mechanism of some sort to give loans to groups looking to start a worker-owned company. That's the only requirement
There's an infinite number of ways to slice it - centralized planning is super worrisome IMO because it creates a locus of power. But not only is it unnecessary, the same result can be achieved far more effectively with a digital marketplace that matches buyers and sellers. You just have to remove incentives and power from the entities managing it - with a fairly small amount of money, you could host a standard system with an open and auditable code base
But you could also just design an open market without ownership of companies - that's communism. You'd have to decommodify certain basic needs and shape incentives carefully, so it's a bit more complicated than that... But not much
The problem with communism is bcz it requires strong central planning it tends to devolve into authoritarianism quickly.
Computers and databases with logistics didn’t exist in 1918. Walmart and Amazon have strong central planning. Chile began to do it in 1971 with Project CyberSyn, but the CIA and capitalism couldn’t have that in their backyard.
Edit: There is a failure of imagination concerning what socialism and communism could like in the future. Lenin was materially bound by his time. Actual Communism (worldwide) might look sufficiently different than what’s been done before.
Yeah, because a world run like Amazon sounds like such a utopia. /s
I liked bolo'bolo
Thanks, I’ll read it.
Yeah, I think we have proven over and over that human nature doesn't do communism well at large scales. Not that I don't think at small scales it's a perfectly good system. Capitalism isn't really any better tho. I don't have a solution for how to avoid the pitfalls of socialism and communism. Worker owned means of production is really the thing I want, attainable or not. No single person should own all of the gains off the backs of worker blood, sweat, and tears.
Anarcho-Syndicalism or Anarcho-Communism? There’s the rub. I’m still exploring that myself.
I think there are a LOT more problems than just that, but yeah.
You can more or less "break" libertarianism and many anarchies by asking about "what happens to the orphans?". For Communism and its derivatives, the question is usually "Who gets to be a scientist, a doctor, a movie star, and the person who cleans out the sewers? And do they all get the same benefits?"
Personally? I think the bigger issue is women's rights. If you consider sex work to be work, how do you figure out who is most suited to be a sex worker? And, regardless, how do you decide who is best suited to be a mother and how that impacts the centralized planning?
It is one of the many reasons that what we truly need are hybrid socioeconomic models.
Why would you rather have Amazon and Walmart plan your economy than a democratically elected government?
Communism doesn't require central planning. The fact that you think it does tells me you don't know what communism even is.
Depends on your definition. Each of these is a definition from the web, and two of them involve dictatorship like control of the economy. Next time you decide to basically call someone stupid, make sure you know what you're talking about first.
Well, we all know now that ML wasn't about installing a dictatorship of the Proletariat.
Turns out, maybe straight communism isn't what humans need, but some kind of.......democratic socialism.
No, he's into super-democracy. Democratize everything, including ownership and the workplace.
Lenin was the one who came up with the idea to centralize everything, Marxist-Leninists mistake the proletariat as better, when the truth is it's all structural.
Marx differentiated two groups in different social classes and drew a straight comparison from feudal lords to the ownership class, and said "their interests are different from the rest of ours, and capitalism benefits them at our expense - including by giving them an unfair advantage in the political process"
Lenin took that to mean "the bourgeoisie are unlike the proletariat, they are uniquely evil". Assuming that by overthrowing the nobility and oligarchs they could build the perfect state, he did the dumbest thing possible. He built the "ideal" system for someone who hadn't studied sociology...a single, central view from on high.
In theory, that's the ideal way to manage resources - you can see where there's a surplus and where there's a need, and respond appropriately.
In practice, he created a system that incentivizes and normalizes lying until you're caught in the same way that a corporation incentives pushing morality and legality to the point you get backlash... It selects for the worst people to rise to the top
Add in the propaganda the US pushes about China and Russia being Communist (they're both absolutely authoritarian but a form of capitalism by any informed definition), and you get a bunch of people who have no idea what they're talking about (tankies) spreading a highly flawed conception of communism, or even just authoritarianism with some Marxist terms painted on
You mean as opposed to the free and fair two party capitalist democracy where Americans have to choose between two old men they don't like?
Funny that Politico are the ones reporting on this.. given the fact that they're owend by Axel Springer
At least it's not Murdoch - but that's a very low bar
US is about to fall into a semi-fascist state next year, so it's gonna get way worse
If you are referring to Trump, it's far from a done deal.
Though some would say that the US has been a fascist state for a while.
Semi-fascist, unarguably, because one of the two political parties is fascist and currently controls the House and Supreme Court.
Some would say that the other party is not much better. Given their close ties to finance, industry and military. And the revolving doors associated with those.
Really... hadn't noticed.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“In Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Slovakia, Israel, and the United States, just to name the most familiar examples, the erosion of democratic norms has been engineered by leaders claiming to speak in the name of, and with the authority of, the people,” the new report warned.
IDEA’s report bases its analysis on 173 countries and takes into account 17 metrics ranging from civil liberties to judicial independence to credible elections to the rule of law, using the most recent figures from 2022.
EU countries Hungary and Poland are still the “most notable examples illustrating the bloc’s limited ability to exert more direct influence over the (non-)democratic trajectory of its member states,” the report said.
Poland — which is set for a change of political direction after election results earlier this month that saw the ruling right-wing Law and Justice party defeated — might now be on a more positive trajectory.
In contrast to Hungary and Poland’s recent performance, other Central and Eastern European countries — such as Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Kosovo, Latvia, Lithuania, North Macedonia, Romania and Slovakia — are becoming the center of democratic growth in Europe due to notable five-year improvements, the report said.
According to the report: “Ex-Chancellor Sebastian Kurz has been implicated in schemes to shut down critical media and purchase positive coverage by using public funds through the Ministry of Finance.”
The original article contains 692 words, the summary contains 222 words. Saved 68%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
This is literally said in a "new report" every year of my life. I'm totally desensitized to this.
So the tactics work on you.
You have a fix?
Join and help the organization of your choice that actually wants to do something instead of just tread water.
I donate to UNISEF and Wikipedia and write my congressperson. That's all I have in the tank.
That's not about just O, T and E etc really.
It's about the average Westerner just loving to blabber about realpolitik and subjective interests on the subject of enabling richer and stronger cannibals against poorer and weaker humans.
And also about democratic countries having no immunity against foreign states buying their politicians and officials and the general population not really caring.
Jailing for life a few people who've been paid by Qatar, Azerbaijan, Russia, Israel etc would do wonders as an example to the rest.
Bombing their infrastructures when they start wars would also be nice. Most don't have WMD. Not for the realpolitikers, of course, that would have negative strategic and economical effect, but if your goal is preserving democracy and civilization, then there are plenty of places to be bombed right now without dancing all the quadrilles.
Wtf did I just read?
I'm pretty sure they want America to bomb Russia.
Which specific part is hard for you to understand? I've made a few shortcuts.
Well, of course it is. You all blatantly threw out human rights because you were afraid after 9/11 and because of covid. 🤦
9/11, yes, but what human rights did we lose from covid? Having to wear a mask for a while? Or being heavily encouraged to get a vaccine? ...