4 ms·

I hope this is obvious to everyone. Russia, India, and the US are all more authoritarian than they were a few years ago. Russia and China aren't even democraci

by smt88 5y ago

I hope this is obvious to everyone. Russia, India, and the US are all more authoritarian than they were a few years ago. Russia and China aren't even democracies.

lghh 5y ago
Given the extreme aggressive voting restrictions, gerrymandering, etc, I'm not really comfortable calling the US a democracy either.
- crazy_horse 5y ago
  There are systematic measures political scientists use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_House https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_House It's a shame that Durov can start off with "there are many studies" and not cite any of them. What?
  - guerrilla 5y ago
    Freedom House is funded in part by the State Department, USNED and USAID and have participated in multiple covert operations and openly biased campaigns. Check the Criticism section of the article you linked and then look into their funding.
    - crazy_horse 5y ago
      Yes, and political scientists are aware of that. Note that much of the criticism is political: China, Russia, Iran. It definitely favors the west but despite the bogeyman a lot of academics just want good data. It also is not rating the US especially high.
      - guerrilla 5y ago
        And what would happen if the rated them mich lower? They'd lose their funding and cease to exist is what.
- max_ 5y ago
  Its still democracy. The so called "Madisonian" strain of democracy [0]. [0]: https://youtu.be/AbFlYLHOSKU https://youtu.be/AbFlYLHOSKU
  - specialist 5y ago
    The relentless sabotaging of majoritarian rule is entirely unrelated to the separation of powers.
- guerrilla 5y ago
  And despite all that, most of the choices are just "red team or blue team?" anyway.
  - exporectomy 5y ago
    What's wrong with just red team or blue team? As long as they're both competing for your vote and not colluding, it sounds like a pretty good way of establishing what popular opinion is. They're not static. When public opinion changes, they have to adapt to maintain their competitiveness. Even people who unthinkingly vote for the same party no matter what are just cancelled out by their counterparts and are effectively abstaining. That's helpful because they didn't vote intelligently anyway.
    - foolinaround 5y ago
      > and not colluding Are we sure? they are both funded by the same corporate lobbyists...
    - slindz 5y ago
      From where I'm standing, it sure looks like buying off both sides is a pretty easy/predictable way to protect the status quo.
    - guerrilla 5y ago
      What's wrong with it is that I can't vote for anyone that I share some views that are important to me with, unlike in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Spain, France, Portugal, Germany, etc. I'm forced into choosing between two parties which both propose many of the same things that I oppose. Whether they are colluding or not, they're identical on many policies that many people oppose and there is no alternative. On your second point, you assume there are an equal number of tribalists without any data on that. It's beside the point anyway.
    - klyrs 5y ago
      > What's wrong with just red team or blue team? Because people care about different things and don't always align neatly with party policies. Suppose I care deeply about both gun rights and abortion rights. Who do I vote for? Pluralistic systems with proportional representation are better at reflecting the values of the electorate. > As long as they're both competing for your vote and not colluding... Now say I want to tax the rich. That's got strong bipartisan opposition. Who do I vote for?
- syops 5y ago
  Some refer to the U.S. as a managed democracy and view the U.S. in totalitarian terms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
sebow 5y ago
Canada, UK, France, Germany are not more authoritarian than before? If anything, these countries (^) have had a bigger growth in authoritarianism than US,Russia,China in the past ~decade.You just don't hear about it because the press in W.E is so biased you probably get more reporting in some parts of China(HK) and Russia.(due to the US press there) Frankly, EU(28*),Canada, AUS and NZ derailed the most when it comes to tyrannical laws, privacy, transparency of leadership, etc. US,Russia & China have been like this for a while now, if not ~ever (in modern history at least). If anything, China has been de facto becoming more and more fascist(incorporating into its government and state body the rapid-growing companies that rose due to capitalism, ironically)
FpUser 5y ago
Formally Russia is. Of course the reality is a bit different but they still do a lot of things that would not fly in China. And yes every country gets worse over the time.
- stkdump 5y ago
  > every country gets worse over the time. How did we get democracy in the first place?
  - Santosh83 5y ago
    After long centuries of tyranny. Unfortunately many decades of democracy has made everything think it is the natural order of things and nothing more needs to be done. But actually non-democratic forces and democracy are always in a dynamic balance that can swing to either side if we don't keep giving active counter-force.
  - smt88 5y ago
    A lot of death, in most cases.
m0zg 5y ago
Don't know about other countries, but even if Putin did not rig presidential elections (which he does), he'd still be winning overwhelming majorities. He enjoys strong popular support. So we can quibble about whether rigging an election you'd win anyway is a departure from "democracy" (whatever that means), but he's still a democratically elected leader, as well as the best leader Russia had in the last hundred years. PS. I always vote against him every time he runs. I think there should be term limits, and I didn't "get" him early on. His results are hard to argue against. At a very minimum (and unlike in the US) the oligarchs don't overtly own the parliament (duma) anymore, and the standard of living has improved massively.
- crazy_horse 5y ago
  He enjoys popular support partially because people feel like there's no point and because he poisons his political opponents.
  - m0zg 5y ago
    Navalny is a Soros puppet and a joke in Russia. He's not an "opponent" to Putin in any way. It's also up for debate whether he was actually poisoned.
    - gizmo385 5y ago
      A Soros puppet? Please explain. Let's get some sources for this, whatever the hell a "Soros puppet" actually means beyond dogwhistling
      - smt88 5y ago
        It's a smear perpetuated by Putin: https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/08/22/turns-out-you-cant-trust-russian-hackers-anymore/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/08/22/turns-out-you-cant-trus...
      - m0zg 5y ago
        "Soros" figuratively speaking, although I would not be surprised - good ol' George tends to have his fingers in a lot of pies worldwide, and this is a tasty one. Navalny had to declare himself and his fund as "foreign agent" because he took funding from abroad. Which is OK under Russian law, as long as you always state you're a foreign agent (this is required by law if someone writes about you in the news for example). It'd be strange, I think you'll agree, to run for the top political office in the country after doing that. But even if he did run, he would not get anything above single digit percentage of support, basically some particularly liberal part of liberal elite in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. I think a lot of people (myself included) sympathise with his anti-corruption work, even though it has zero effect. But even the sympathizers know that politically he has zero prospects in any high level election there even if everything was fair and square (which it is not). The West, on the other hand, is gaslit into believing that he's Putin's arch-nemesis or something, and Putin is losing any sleep over his existence or activity. As they say in Russia: as a dog barks, the caravan goes on. Here's another thing people in the West don't know about him: he's a nationalist and a xenophobe (he shares that with most Russian people, but he's considerably more extreme in his views), but I wonder if his curators from USAID know that. Here he is in 2011 speaking from the stage at a nationalist Russian March: https://youtu.be/BYMbYwL8sQA?t=511 https://youtu.be/BYMbYwL8sQA?t=511. To US folks, this is like Charlottesville, but without the opposing side. "Jews will not replace us" and everything. Plenty of "skinheads" in the crowd. You only don't see swastikas there because they're illegal to show in Russia. So TL;DR: Navalny is a complicated man at best. And he's not, and will never be Putin's "rival".
BoHerfIIIJrEsq 5y ago
I think you're probably right, but you chose some strange examples. I would have said Canada, New Zealand, Australia, UK, Italy, France. US authoritarianism is largely limited to blue states. Edit: to put a finer point on it, Canada, NZ and Australia all seem to be post-democratic, post-constitutional medical police states. If you disagree with that description, please respond with what exactly they lack to be properly described that way.
gremloni 5y ago
Russia and India are chaos. Chaos is the closest thing to complete freedom. Safety and freedom have sort of an inverse relationship.
type0 5y ago
Don't forget our lovely Australia, it's quickly becoming the totalitarian madness in the making https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLTGXblgUoc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLTGXblgUoc
- 0x000000001 5y ago
  Are you Australian?
  - type0 5y ago
    Nope, I'm glad that I am not

by smt88 5y ago

I hope this is obvious to everyone. Russia, India, and the US are all more authoritarian than they were a few years ago. Russia and China aren't even democracies.

lghh 5y ago

Given the extreme aggressive voting restrictions, gerrymandering, etc, I'm not really comfortable calling the US a democracy either.

crazy_horse 5y ago
There are systematic measures political scientists use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_House https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_House It's a shame that Durov can start off with "there are many studies" and not cite any of them. What?
- guerrilla 5y ago
  Freedom House is funded in part by the State Department, USNED and USAID and have participated in multiple covert operations and openly biased campaigns. Check the Criticism section of the article you linked and then look into their funding.
  - crazy_horse 5y ago
    Yes, and political scientists are aware of that. Note that much of the criticism is political: China, Russia, Iran. It definitely favors the west but despite the bogeyman a lot of academics just want good data. It also is not rating the US especially high.
    - guerrilla 5y ago
      And what would happen if the rated them mich lower? They'd lose their funding and cease to exist is what.
max_ 5y ago
Its still democracy. The so called "Madisonian" strain of democracy [0]. [0]: https://youtu.be/AbFlYLHOSKU https://youtu.be/AbFlYLHOSKU
- specialist 5y ago
  The relentless sabotaging of majoritarian rule is entirely unrelated to the separation of powers.
guerrilla 5y ago
And despite all that, most of the choices are just "red team or blue team?" anyway.
- exporectomy 5y ago
  What's wrong with just red team or blue team? As long as they're both competing for your vote and not colluding, it sounds like a pretty good way of establishing what popular opinion is. They're not static. When public opinion changes, they have to adapt to maintain their competitiveness. Even people who unthinkingly vote for the same party no matter what are just cancelled out by their counterparts and are effectively abstaining. That's helpful because they didn't vote intelligently anyway.
  - foolinaround 5y ago
    > and not colluding Are we sure? they are both funded by the same corporate lobbyists...
  - slindz 5y ago
    From where I'm standing, it sure looks like buying off both sides is a pretty easy/predictable way to protect the status quo.
  - guerrilla 5y ago
    What's wrong with it is that I can't vote for anyone that I share some views that are important to me with, unlike in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Spain, France, Portugal, Germany, etc. I'm forced into choosing between two parties which both propose many of the same things that I oppose. Whether they are colluding or not, they're identical on many policies that many people oppose and there is no alternative. On your second point, you assume there are an equal number of tribalists without any data on that. It's beside the point anyway.
  - klyrs 5y ago
    > What's wrong with just red team or blue team? Because people care about different things and don't always align neatly with party policies. Suppose I care deeply about both gun rights and abortion rights. Who do I vote for? Pluralistic systems with proportional representation are better at reflecting the values of the electorate. > As long as they're both competing for your vote and not colluding... Now say I want to tax the rich. That's got strong bipartisan opposition. Who do I vote for?
syops 5y ago
Some refer to the U.S. as a managed democracy and view the U.S. in totalitarian terms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism

sebow 5y ago

Canada, UK, France, Germany are not more authoritarian than before? If anything, these countries (^) have had a bigger growth in authoritarianism than US,Russia,China in the past ~decade.You just don't hear about it because the press in W.E is so biased you probably get more reporting in some parts of China(HK) and Russia.(due to the US press there) Frankly, EU(28*),Canada, AUS and NZ derailed the most when it comes to tyrannical laws, privacy, transparency of leadership, etc. US,Russia & China have been like this for a while now, if not ~ever (in modern history at least). If anything, China has been de facto becoming more and more fascist(incorporating into its government and state body the rapid-growing companies that rose due to capitalism, ironically)

FpUser 5y ago

Formally Russia is. Of course the reality is a bit different but they still do a lot of things that would not fly in China. And yes every country gets worse over the time.

stkdump 5y ago
> every country gets worse over the time. How did we get democracy in the first place?
- Santosh83 5y ago
  After long centuries of tyranny. Unfortunately many decades of democracy has made everything think it is the natural order of things and nothing more needs to be done. But actually non-democratic forces and democracy are always in a dynamic balance that can swing to either side if we don't keep giving active counter-force.
- smt88 5y ago
  A lot of death, in most cases.

m0zg 5y ago

Don't know about other countries, but even if Putin did not rig presidential elections (which he does), he'd still be winning overwhelming majorities. He enjoys strong popular support. So we can quibble about whether rigging an election you'd win anyway is a departure from "democracy" (whatever that means), but he's still a democratically elected leader, as well as the best leader Russia had in the last hundred years. PS. I always vote against him every time he runs. I think there should be term limits, and I didn't "get" him early on. His results are hard to argue against. At a very minimum (and unlike in the US) the oligarchs don't overtly own the parliament (duma) anymore, and the standard of living has improved massively.

crazy_horse 5y ago
He enjoys popular support partially because people feel like there's no point and because he poisons his political opponents.
- m0zg 5y ago
  Navalny is a Soros puppet and a joke in Russia. He's not an "opponent" to Putin in any way. It's also up for debate whether he was actually poisoned.
  - gizmo385 5y ago
    A Soros puppet? Please explain. Let's get some sources for this, whatever the hell a "Soros puppet" actually means beyond dogwhistling
    - smt88 5y ago
      It's a smear perpetuated by Putin: https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/08/22/turns-out-you-cant-trust-russian-hackers-anymore/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/08/22/turns-out-you-cant-trus...
    - m0zg 5y ago
      "Soros" figuratively speaking, although I would not be surprised - good ol' George tends to have his fingers in a lot of pies worldwide, and this is a tasty one. Navalny had to declare himself and his fund as "foreign agent" because he took funding from abroad. Which is OK under Russian law, as long as you always state you're a foreign agent (this is required by law if someone writes about you in the news for example). It'd be strange, I think you'll agree, to run for the top political office in the country after doing that. But even if he did run, he would not get anything above single digit percentage of support, basically some particularly liberal part of liberal elite in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. I think a lot of people (myself included) sympathise with his anti-corruption work, even though it has zero effect. But even the sympathizers know that politically he has zero prospects in any high level election there even if everything was fair and square (which it is not). The West, on the other hand, is gaslit into believing that he's Putin's arch-nemesis or something, and Putin is losing any sleep over his existence or activity. As they say in Russia: as a dog barks, the caravan goes on. Here's another thing people in the West don't know about him: he's a nationalist and a xenophobe (he shares that with most Russian people, but he's considerably more extreme in his views), but I wonder if his curators from USAID know that. Here he is in 2011 speaking from the stage at a nationalist Russian March: https://youtu.be/BYMbYwL8sQA?t=511 https://youtu.be/BYMbYwL8sQA?t=511. To US folks, this is like Charlottesville, but without the opposing side. "Jews will not replace us" and everything. Plenty of "skinheads" in the crowd. You only don't see swastikas there because they're illegal to show in Russia. So TL;DR: Navalny is a complicated man at best. And he's not, and will never be Putin's "rival".

BoHerfIIIJrEsq 5y ago

I think you're probably right, but you chose some strange examples. I would have said Canada, New Zealand, Australia, UK, Italy, France. US authoritarianism is largely limited to blue states. Edit: to put a finer point on it, Canada, NZ and Australia all seem to be post-democratic, post-constitutional medical police states. If you disagree with that description, please respond with what exactly they lack to be properly described that way.

gremloni 5y ago

Russia and India are chaos. Chaos is the closest thing to complete freedom. Safety and freedom have sort of an inverse relationship.

type0 5y ago

Don't forget our lovely Australia, it's quickly becoming the totalitarian madness in the making https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLTGXblgUoc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLTGXblgUoc

0x000000001 5y ago
Are you Australian?
- type0 5y ago
  Nope, I'm glad that I am not