- cross-posted to:
- brainworms@lemm.ee
- news
Attorney General Dana Nessel's office is ending its pursuit of criminal prosecutions over the Flint water crisis after seven years of no convictions, a decision that came Tuesday after the Michigan Supreme Court rejected an attempt to revive charges against Republican former Gov. Rick Snyder.
If Flint had been a village in China, the offending officials would have gotten the death sentence years ago.
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liberals: "the system doesn't work!"
nah the system works perfectly, you've been lied to about its goals
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
Wonder how many inmates in Michigan Prison are going to be chronically debilitated from toxic lead poisoning inside the next ten to twenty years?
Somehow, I don't think state prosecutors will be shy about locking them up and throwing away the key.
I'm sure Governor Snyder endorsing Biden at the DNC had nothing to do with this.
Living my entire life in the shadows of every great crime being laundered through sham trials really leaves me wondering why anyone places such value in obeying laws. Even if there were "good" laws, how could I ever place faith in them?
That‘s certainly very frustrating.
If Flint had been a village in China, the offending officials would have gotten the death sentence years ago.
Not sure how a situation like this would have played out. If you were under an objectively moral and good dictatorship it would certainly be better, but if it isn’t and doesn’t work out you’re really out of luck. "Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all the others". Understandable reaction though.
Many westerners come to socialism not out of necessity, but out of disillusionment. We are raised with the idea that Liberal Democracy is the best system of political expression humanity has devised. When confronted with the reality of its shortcomings, rather than narrowly discard liberalism or electoralism, the western anti-capitalist tends to draw sweeping conclusions about the inadequacy of all existing systems. Curiously, though it would at first seem that such denunciations are more principled and severe, they are in fact more compatible with existing and widespread beliefs about the supremacy of the western system. That is to say, when a Marxist-Leninist asserts the superiority of existing socialist experiments, they are directly challenging the idea that westerners are at the forefront of political development. By contrast, the assertions from anarchists and social democrats that we need to build a more utopian future out of our current apex are compatible not only with each other, as discussed earlier, but also do not really offend bourgeois society at large. They in fact end up not sounding too different from the arch-imperialist Winston Churchill holding forth on how ours is the worst system, except for all the others which have been tried. Western chauvinists, consciously or unconsciously, struggle with the idea that they should study and humbly take lessons from the imperial periphery. [15] It is much easier for the chauvinist, psychologically, to position oneself as at the very front of a new vanguard.
from https://redsails.org/why-marxism/
Philosophically, which is more democratic?
- A system where you cannot vote for the leadership, but policy and outcome is responsive to public interest and opinion: or
- A system where you can vote for the leadership, but said leaders do what they want after being elected and policy and outcome does not correspond to public interest or opinion.
I'm not saying that there's an objectively correct answer, but it's worth considering whether democracy begins at ends at the procedure of elections or whether democratic outcomes are just as/more important.
As an example, when China had its only fatal HSR crash in history, it dissolved the Ministry of Railways and the Minister responsible was given a death sentence (later commuted to life in prison). When a company was found to be selling milk tainted with melamine, two of its executives were executed and one got a death sentence commuted to life in prison.
The Chinese system might not allow you to vote for who sits on the Politburo, but it's repeatedly demonstrated that it's willing to hold the rich and powerful accountable in a way the American system has repeatedly demonstrated that it cannot.
I‘m far from being an expert on how the Chinese system looks like exactly, but bringing it back to a more general aspect: how a dictatorship treats its people really depends on the situation and where the "power" is coming from. If it comes from things that don’t need workers, such as oil/gas, the population can be in a really bad place. If it relies on its workers that’s a different story. Really interesting video by CGP Grey regarding this: Rules for rulers.
It’s definitely possible to have a much better life and fairer decisions under a dictatorship than under a democracy. Really depends on the circumstances in each of these. The video is also talking about democracies btw.
Whether a country is a democracy or not depends on whether its people are really the masters of the country. If the people are awakened only for voting but enter a dormant period soon after, if they are given a song and dance during campaigning but have no say after the election, or if they are favored during canvassing but are left out in the cold after the election, such a democracy is not a true democracy.
—Xi Jinping
I appreciate your engagement, just wanted to suggest you think about this idea a little differently:
how a dictatorship treats its people really depends on the situation and where the "power" is coming from.
Can you define what you mean when you call something a dictatorship? I think this term gets bandied about as a way to discredit state enemies of western nations without the public having to think about what is meant.
Whatever you may believe about the CPC, what means are actually available to you to prevent your rulers from ignoring you? If you live in the US your state is likely gerrymandered to hell, your rulers are picking their constituencies to preserve their positions.
Do they have to do what the public wants? If you don't like the two parties can you actually pursue an alternative? The public overwhelmingly supports a ceasefire in Gaza, why is almost the entire government lock-step in refusing to even bring up the idea?
This isn't to say that there aren't governments in the world that aren't accountable to the public and that act in their own interest regardless of what anyone else wants. But you can have elections and do all the gesturing that western liberals expect and still be an unaccountable government with no real need for popular agreement or input.
Guess all of that is to say be careful with the word, it might be shutting down questions it would be good to ask about your own (presumably western liberal) society.
but bringing it back to a more general aspect: how a dictatorship treats its people really depends on the situation and where the "power" is coming from.
Is this any different than a liberal democracy? The US is a genocidal slave state which murdered and enslaved Native Americans and Black people. The old European empires like Britain, France, the Netherlands, etc did the same even when they were ostensibly democratic. The "Middle East's only democracy" is carrying out apartheid and genocide as we speak, and the original South African apartheid state was a democracy too. Let's also not forget that the Nazis rose to power directly from the legitimate democratic mechanisms of the Weimar Republic.
Looking at all these examples, it's pretty clear that democracies are perfectly happy to murder and enslave if the victims can't strike back at the democratic country's power structure.
Good point. It’s interesting how, in a democracy, what the majority wants can (by definition?) go against what minorities want and in some instances even against their human rights. Some of the laws, which haven‘t always come to pass in a democratic way, are (hopefully) shielding everyone equally from harm. Certainly not a perfect system and it definitely fails people all the time.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
It would have played out with flint actually getting their water fixed and those responsible brought to justice. Lmfao "dictator" as if that's worse than having a guy voted in just to do fuck all.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/24/china-executes-milk-scandal-pair
gee i wonder what they'd do to somebody responsible for fucking up a town's water supply?
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
China isn't a dictatorship. Their system roughly works by: you vote for your city council, the city council vote for mayor, the mayors vote for governor, etc etc president*.
You may think that's a better or worse system of democracy than voting for a candidate then having your votes pooled by state then given to the per-state winner then weighted by a goofy per-state amount. I don't have a horse in that race. But it's not a dictatorship.
* I'm abstracting wildly because China is a real country with all the exceptional cases you'd expect, and also a huge country with even more of them.
"Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all the others"
What democracy? None of this shit is democratic. Give me a fucking People's Court with a guillotine on the front steps and then tell me about the relative merits of democracy.
Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all the others"
Also, maybe we should pause before adopting the opinion of a massive racist war criminal Imperialist.
