Comment by jacquesm

5 years ago

My sympathies, these are hard times and there are very few absolutes. I really hope that at least someone in a position to make a difference will do so and soon because the clock is running out for lots of people if that doesn't happen.

Note that you are closer to the point of origin so people will automatically assume that you have more agency than they do. Some people in Russia are already taking action, depending on how many will stand with them they may succeed, there is ultimately safety in numbers, you can't jail a whole country.

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jacquesm

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morpheos137  5 years ago
  • dennis_jeeves1  5 years ago

    >whether you live in a pretend democracy like Russia or the USA

    Thanks, I've always maintained that there are no real democracies. Democracy is typically a sophisticated form of dictatorship. They are sophisticated enough that most people believe they have 'rights' and so on.

    • rstuart4133  5 years ago

      Of course democracy is a dictatorship. If it's working well it's a dictatorship by the majority of citizens.

      If you aren't in the majority democracy could be not so rosy, but from a utilitarian point of view is far better than dictatorship by the kleptocracy. A kleptocracy is what Russia / N.Korea and meany 3rd world countries have.

      But the West isn't either of those. People in the West tend to manage themselves using a democractic dictatorship whose dictators have decided to ceed a great deal of their powers to laws and judges. Mostly that power is about adjudicating property disputes, because the power they ceed is mostly the ability to seize property and labour. In a capitalist economy those things are exchanged freely between individuals so the democratic dictators get almost no say. This system is occasionally called "rule of law".

      Capitalism has its failure modes too - a total monopoly is a dictatorship, a dictatorship of far fewer than a democracy or your average kleptocracy. So the West is a democracy that manages a capitalist economy, steering it away from that failure mode.

      I'd say that's the best system mankind has invented so far. I expect China would disagree. They have a different different sort of system that manages a capitalist economy. While I think they are wrong which one is best, it's probably fair to say the jury is still out.