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this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2026
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Mildly Interesting
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I'll take a dictator that seems to care about the well-being of their country over a wannabe dictator that only cares about getting paid any day.
"I'll take a dictator..."
This is a MAGA talking point and repeated by MAGA supporters.
No we won't.
In my experience, the kind of person that will purity test a hypothetical is probably gonna join the dictator's vanguard.
Americans scream and spit on Chinese democracy while they cling to electoral colleges and governor appointed senators and the fight to disenfranchise minority voters en mass.
I just don't know how to take any of it seriously. China's a dictatorship because it's ruled by a single, seemingly insurmountable communist party. But Texas and Florida can elect Republicans to a bulletproof supermajority for 40 years and that's just the Will Of The People.
A Congress with a 20% approval rating enjoys a Lockean Mandate, while a Parliament with 50-70% approval is a tyrannical regime of brutal oppression.
And don't even get me started on prison population...
How are we even defining democracy anymore? It just seems like American Exceptionalism.
There are multiple organisations invested in rating democracies worldwide, the main one is from The Economist EIU ,(https://www.eiu.com/n/campaigns/democracy-index-2025/, there are numerous places where the raw data is published more accessible such as here: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/democracy-index-eiu).
I personally prefer the index made by Freedom House (https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world) because it includes what a regular citizen experiences:
Their assessment of the US democracy:
EIU (2024): 7.85/10, "flawed democracy" Freedom in the world score (2025): 81/100
These scores obviously are not about other things that matter, like economic stability or access to healthcare.
Damn, you can't even use China as the positive comparison here without some random tankie getting pissed I didn't adequately glaze China.
Yeah, the comparison is positive, but also anyone who disagrees with you wants you murdered by a tank.
FFS, can you people take any level of criticism?
Oh! All this time and I hadn't clocked that tankie was referencing the Tiananmen Square massacre. That makes a lot of sense.
I thought it was something related to think-tanks or something, some kind of weird way of saying "brainiac" or having "big-brained ideas" in a derogatory manner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
It's not. It's referencing the Hungarian Revolt of '56.
Hahaha.
Well, in my heart of hearts, this is who it's really talking about.
I read your comment as largely, if not entirely, supportive of the guy you responded to. What am I missing?