This is amazing. I’d love to see this. Probably wouldn’t pay, but I’d clap vigorously afterwards.

Mind sharing what you mean, “or whatever?” Are you arguing using facts that came to you in a dream?

I guess it was just no term limits? Still, he’s got control of all the levers of power and without term limits he can continue to consolidate power over time, gathering favors, loyalty, etc. There’s a reason people like term limits and Mexico fought a couple wars over the idea.

In what way?

Power goes from father to son. They have elections but the person in power always wins like 100% of us vote, and I don’t even think they have alternative candidates. Someone else above had a link that showed they have a person and you just vote “yes or no” for that person, which isn’t very democratic if you don’t know the alternative.

Do you have evidence that there were not popularly elected bodies making all of the decisions, and that leaders of AES states were never contested successfully?

I don’t, but if you have proof that those things have happened before, I’d be curious to see them.

What about Stalin who purged rivals and sent out hit men with ice picks to take out his critics? Or Xi Jinping who’s been made President for life or whatever recently? Or Fidel Castro who basically led the country from the revolution until he was too old to run it? The DPRK which looks like a monarchy in all but name? No one says dictators run whole countries literally by themselves but they do dictatorial things to make sure people only loyal to them can have power, their word is law without going through other checks or balances by the people, like some popularly elected body or something.

I will admit though that after Stalin, the USSR changed out rulers pretty regularly so that doesn’t seem like a dictatorship to me. Same with Cuba now after Castro. Now people just say it because those countries allow only one party I guess.

The duality of Man…

Ya,thats fair. I was hot and cold on it myself, and stopped after the 3rd episode for a long time out of bored. But I liked the ending well enough which already makes me enjoy it more than most of the internet lol.

So that’s what happened to it. Well that’s sad =(

There are dozens of us!

That is hilarious. I can imagine it with perfect clarity lol

I haven’t seen these posts, either. But I have to ask, are you this person?

I love it!

This is really cool. It totally brought me back.

By that logic, the NY Times should be banned as a source. They’re opinion section is chocked full of basically the pro US point of view and defending Israel (including a memo advocating genocide denial). One-sided coverage, poorly sourced, nakedly biased, it all applies to them, too.

Allowing sources from all points of view, as long as the facts are true, seems better than picking and choosing due to bias. Even these “centrist” institutions have their own biases.

The downside of the fediverse =(

Wasn’t that the German or instance? I wonder why they went down. They seemed so big and established.

That’s true lol

History is exactly why I’m skeptical.

The USA is the world’s sole superpower and this is in their area of influence. It’s always about them when they get involved (as they have in 2002, 2013, 2017, and 2019, etc.).

It’s not really democracies vs dictators, it’s countries in the US’s sphere vs countries not in the US’s sphere. It becomes more obvious and easy to see then. The OAS has been a puppet of US interests since the beginning (there’s a reason they didn’t let Cuba in). It literally started by a pledge to fight communism in the western hemisphere. Basically, it’s the US empire and it’s puppets and allies vs a rising new order of old colonized and sanctioned countries, which admittedly looks scary, but hopefully will one day lead to a multipolar world where people can deal with their own local issues without worry of western interference (which has almost always been net bad for the people of those countries in the global south Asia, Africa, and South America).

Plenty of Democratic administrations have done coups and wars all over the world. It’s just a US empire policy, no matter who is President, mostly because of capitalism. Sure, conservatives are usually worse about it, but Democrats do it, too. Biden is supporting a genocide in Israel. McKinley fought the Philippines, Teddy Roosevelt in the Spanish American, JFK invaded Cuba and tried to coup it, Truman led the war in Korea and established a US puppet dictatorship in n the south for, JFK and LBJ were also involved in Vietnam, etc.

Not in the same period of time for the same level of development. And when it did, they accomplished it mostly through colonies and 1800’s imperialism.