Okay Alexa now tell me who tampered with the democracies in Iran, Guatemala, Brazil, Congo and Honduras?
this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2025
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it was... ooh, Big Pink! It's the only gum with the breath-freshening power of ham.
I think the Iranese protests have been cracked down by their government, so if they've gone down in the ranking then this time it's probably their government's fault
Iranese? It's Iranian.
I had a brain fart
The death of capitalism is going to be very ugly.
It's looking more and more like feudalism is going to be what comes next.
Yes, and the lords and kings will be the billionaires, we need a lot of Luigis.
You never can tell what a man with nothing to lose might do, and America is about to be the #1 producer of them.
Right cuz unchecked capitalism had nothing to do with it and no CEOs or right wing gun nuts have suddenly died for imposing any form of cruelty on the masses. Yup yup flawless studies.
Just in time for WW3.
I can't believe Obama did this, WHAT A JERK
See? I knew Harris shouldn't have supported genocide. This is all the Democrats' fault.
Better put a /s on that friend.
Yeah, sad innit.
/s
Listen. It's not sad, it's prudent. Sarcasm and irony is how 4chan brought the nazis back. Sarcasm tag is about denying horrible people space.
Yeah but I don’t give a shit about 4chan and anyone who can’t ride the fine edge of sarcasm and knowing will be outed after a few posts and then bosh they get the block. Besides, it’s like explaining the joke. It’s less fun.
That's not what I mean. I mean if you're sarcastically an asshole, assholes use your comment to recruit kids into thinking this is a normal way to act. The /s isn't so you don't attract nazis or attract them to the platform. It's so they can't use your lame joke to make the world an actively worse place to be.
Sarcasm really only works in juxtaposition to who you are as a person. This is the internet, I don't know who the fuck you are. Kinda ruins the humour if you think about it for more than two seconds.
Whatever you sent isn't working on my end
Wow that's an even better metaphor.
That you have nothing to contribute except being a smug asshole? Agreed
Dag, yo. Username checks out.
Time to re-introduce it in full force throughout the world, isn't it, America?
Meanwhile Canada, Australia, uk vote in libs during the same shitty reporting threatening that the conservatives were going to win in all countries just this last year.
Stupid idiots.
Fails*
Take it with a pinch of salt.
It's a politically biased study, not a neutral scientific study (Unscientific in its parameters for what constitutes a democracy). It's another case of a burger-eagle institute study.
That is not to say that democracy is on a global decline. The study captures that but still it's baseline is flawed.
How does one scientifically define a democracy?
A first step would be to make a basis for your study an ideological interpretation of democracy.
You can quickly see if such studies are burger-eagle institute studies by looking at a few key examples. Compare Switzerland and Cuba. Some of the most democratic nations to have ever existed. Yet Cuba is always rated far worse because it's in opposition to the cultural hegemony of the west. I.e. then a study uses a western definition of democracy that skews heavily in favour of some statistics while completely ignoring others. For example how democratic an economy is run is almost never any observed factor for democracy indexes. Then other things are weighted out of ideological bias, for example more parties = more democracy. Completely ignoring that party democracies are not the only form of democracy.
I agree that cultural hegemony plays a huge role in how studies consider concepts like democracy, and that this can lead to problems in the analysis — it sounds like we're on the same page about that. What I'm struggling with is what you would consider to be a neutral, scientific study? Because even if we agree that this study sets out its baseline poorly enough that we should take it's findings with plenty of salt, I am unclear on how one could set a baseline in a manner that's objective.
Your point comparing Switzerland and Cuba is a good example here. You highlight that ideological values reveal themselves in which statistics are chosen to include, and which are ignored. My question is whether it's possible to do objective research in these areas at all; if one were to take into account the pressure of cultural hegemony in defining democracy, and instead included commonly ignored statistics in one's analyses as part of an effort to produce counter hegemonic research, isn't that just as politically biased as the study in the OP?
Zooming out a bit, my wider question is not just about whether we can analyse things like democracy in an objective, scientific manner, but also whether we should. Science is often rhetorically leveraged to "objectivity launder" issues, which is especially problematic because that involves ignoring how Western science itself is borne of imperialist and classist systems, and often perpetuates elements of these (especially when people buy into the idea that "objective science" is a thing that exists, which I don't).
You're a glass-half-full kind of person.
More of a "the bottom of the glass has cracks and is gonna leak any moment" person.