Comment by gitremote
9 days ago
How would you know? In countries without free speech where anti-government speech is illegal, the only legal speech is pro-government or neutral.
9 days ago
How would you know? In countries without free speech where anti-government speech is illegal, the only legal speech is pro-government or neutral.
I would know cuz there are independent polls made by western NGOs: https://allianceofdemocracies.org/democracy-perception-index
Immaterial how independent they are because it's completely impossible to get honest opinions of repressive regimes. The people within the regime have no real way to know whether a poll response will make it back to the government or not, so they must assume that it will. When the repercussions for having the wrong opinion are that you disappear or find yourself "volunteered" for the front line, it's best to either lie or say you think the leader is a top bloke.
You can watch Youtube videos of citizens refusing to answer contentious questions quite easily. I believe William Spaniel has produced videos (relating to the Russian General Election) where he points this out, too.
When asked in a way where the opinion can't be identified, the support numbers do drop significantly, but the approval is still estimated to be about 50-70%. In western countries governments with clear minority support start to be almost the norm.
UK government approval has surpassed 50% in a handful of polls in over 10 years, and approval peaks are typically immediately after elections before the government starts to implement its policies. The approval is currently 14%.
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/trackers/government-app...
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/china-quarterly/arti...
1 reply →
How can you tell it is a repressive regime? They have elections, a press and they are pretty satisfied about their form of governance, actually much more than their western counterparts.
So let me sum this up. We cannot ask the people. We cannot base ourselves on how their institutions function and how well they perform.
This discussion highlights how westerners suffer from some serious superiority complex where only THEY can experience genuine freedom and democracy(probably due to their superior phenotype or some inane bs), and everything outside of their little group of friends is a masquerade. The issue with that is that westerners disconnect themselves from reality. They are losing ground and it shows.
14 replies →