400 comments total is rookie numbers. You should check out the news posts involving either Russia, China, or Taiwan. Or check out this post where the admins of lemm.ee asked for the users' opinions of whether to defederate from hexbear.net. There are 1884 comments. (There was once more than 1900 comments, but I guess the mods removed some.)
randint
joined 2 years ago
Neither is your reply. When I saw your comment, it immediately occurred to me that you must be from hexbear.net. (My client hides the @instance.org part in usernames.) There was something inherently characteristic of hexbears in your comment. I clicked on your name to check, and voila - of course you were. Your comment is extremely condescending. This is how dreaded the userbase of hexbear.net is. I bet that at least 25 of your 30 upvotes are from other hexbears who upvotes anything from hexbears. I wonder why so many instances have decided to defederate from you.
Thank you for your reply. I see what's going on here. We have different definitions for "democracy" and "authoritarianism."
Having a lot of prisoners is not an indicator of authoritarianism. In addition, you should take note of the fact that the while US does have the highest incarceration rate per capita (629/100k in 2021) and the highest prisoner count (just over 2 million), China comes as a close second with 1690k prisoners. Though this is in part due to the massive population of China (the rate per capita is only 119/100k), this number only includes sentenced prisoners. There are many in pre-trial detention and figures for those aren't available (was 650k back in 2009), bringing the total over the US.
ChatGPT failed you.
Yeah, I guessed that when I saw it use the word liberal.
Their claim is clearly true. You should read the comments I linked to one by one.
I feel like you're just quibbling.
Gee, "weaselly little liar" in bold? I might have to revise my stance on not defederating.
Thank you for your comment. I actually do want to know why some people do not view democracy and authoritarianism as opposites.
While it is possible for democracies to possess authoritarian elements, they are somewhat opposites of each other. Authoritarianism is characterized by the rejection of political plurality, and reductions in the rule of law, separation of powers, and democratic voting. The US embraces plurality and democratic voting, and also has a separation of powers. The government of the US does have its flaws, but it is by absolutely no means authoritarian. You are thinking about another word. While I'm not sure what that word is, ChatGPT suggests that it could be "illiberally democratic."
Sorry, I think my sentence was worded poorly. What I meant was that authoritarianism is a concept suppressed by the government, yet some people believe that it is better than democracy.
Not saying that this is a bad thing, but it's kind of amazing how opinions of the public can shift so drastically within a month: https://lemmy.ml/post/2080934. Last month another user posted in the very same !unixporn@lemmy.ml asking whether people consider the term "rice" racist. The majority opinion back then was "if you get offended over a term like this you should take a break from the Internet."