Quote (Black XistenZ @ 22 Feb 2023 13:15)

The Democracy Index was created by The Economist Group, you know, the ones who publish The Economist, which is THE flagship journal of neoliberal globalism.

Also, if you look at the comparison between Canada and the U.S. over the years, you will see that Canada's democracy index dropped by 0.27 between 2016 and 2022 while the US dropped by just 0.2 points over the same timeframe (which I chose because it starts with the last year of Obama's presidency and contains all of Trump's presidency during which there allegedly was oh-so-much "erosion of democractic norms").




Oh please. First, it should be obvious that public resistance to authoritarian covid policies played a role in pushing them back. Across the world, certain public health figures were suggesting that we should wear masks forever, every winter, irrespective from covid.

Here in Germany, the prime minister of the state of Baden-Württemberg (roughly comparable to the governor of Florida or New York, to give our American friends an idea) was suggesting to suspend inconvenient parts of our constitution and get rid of certain aspects of the separation of powers in favor of a more efficient pandemic regime. And if our minister of health had gotten his way, we would still be wearing masks in every interior setting until Easter (of 2023) at the very least; the only reason we got rid of them was the pushback from our country's classically liberal/libertarian party. The other mainstream parties would happily have gone along with it.

And last but not least, keep in mind that there was a clear majority in favor of a vaccine mandate in the German parliament... in fucking April of 2022, at a time when the worst of the pandemic was already behind us, when there no longer was a threat of hospitals getting overwhelmend and when it was already established by the science that the available vaccines were doing absolutely fuck-all to reduce the transmission of covid against the dominant strains at the time. The only reason the proposal failed was because the majority of yes votes were divided between the governing coalition and the opposition.

Quote (fender @ 22 Feb 2023 16:27)

so you don't think that canada is a significantly more democratic nation than the US, despite literally every index you can possibly find showing that? makes a lot of sense btw, if you keep in mind who REALLY wields all the power in the US, how many millions of votes are quite literally worthless, and what limited impact a "choice" could even have in a two party system...

but hey, in good alt-right fashion, every FACT you don't want to believe simply comes from a source that has some sinister agenda, and can therefore be freely dismissed, huh? your anecdotes and misrepresentations, however, now THOSE are super convincing "arguments", right? you people...

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also funny how you tried to gloss over the fact that 2016 saw the largest dip in the US and went from full democracy to flawed democracy. i wonder if anything significant happened that year. elections or something? who knows? xD

Quote (Black XistenZ @ 22 Feb 2023 16:39)

I neither said that the US democracy is better than Canada's, nor that the democracy index is completely bogus. What I did say is that the publishers of this index have a political agenda of their own, an agenda to which Trump and everything he stood for was anathema, so that we can't take this index as gospel. I'm not accepting the index as the be all end all of assessing democracies, particularly not when a guy like Trump is involved who shakes up the status quo.



Obama was still the incumbent president throughout the entire year 2016, all elections taking place during that year happened under the oversight of his DoJ and his intelligence services. Trump didn't take office until January 2017, blaming the deterioration of American democracy during 2016 on him is asinine.