I find it very frustrating to read about such oppressive regimes. It fills me with anger, I cannot help myself, I just hate injustice.
Then you get the Syrian Christians who voted for Trump in droves because if his anti-Muslim stance, but who’s communities are being gutted by deportations because it turns out all the laws being used against Syrian Muslim immigrants apply just as well to Syrian Christians. Oops.
What is a proper term for this?
I don't want to use "schadenfreude", the "enjoyment obtained from the troubles of others".
That is way too broad. I only "enjoy" the suffering of Trump supporters. (And only if it's not serious. And "enjoy" is probably not the right word.)
It's not that people want to live under oppressive maniacs, it's that the oppressive maniac is depicted as a wonderful great leader that fights for the small people like them and will make their country great again. So even if you hold fair elections, a huge chunk of people think the oppressive maniac seems like a pretty okay guy and will vote for him again.
Imagine if it was impossible for any government to block or censor anything.
But what I mean is that we got more transparency into the world as we have started using the Internet. Before I had to rely on the travel agencies promising words about an hotel. Now I can read hundreds of reviews from past visitors.
This isn't to say that this data is not open to manipulation. But at least in a lot of ways the floodgates are open and we are not going to go back to a world where zero transparency exists in a lot of areas. Hopefully this can expand to how you were treated by the police, the sources of income of scientists releasing papers about how sugar is great for kids and so on. You get the point.
Getting reliable news is obviously one of the big hard problems, as we have seen in last years and as in the example you mentioned. I guess it's another discussion (but relevant to oppressive regimes).
There's research into authoritarianism (think Germans in WWII) and RWA personality type (Right Wing Authoritarian). Most of it is not very "accessible" to the average person.
From what I understand, RWA are just born this way, i.e. some people are naturally critical thinkers, others will say "how high" if a man in an uniform says "jump". Sad.
This is one of the few decent "explainers" that Vox did:
https://www.vox.com/2016/3/1/11127424/trump-authoritarianism
How having an experience such as this can’t shake your belief that the state is infallible I really can’t comprehend.
It’s almost like Stockholm syndrome.
What Turkey is doing is terrible but mild in comparison to the drone war.
"Whataboutism" - so that's.. said to people who tiresomely derail discussion of seriously wrongdoing with their pat diagnosis and dismiss the original topic as naive. Unfortunately you have done that same thing by using the word.
I get why it's useful to have a name for the phenomenon, but there's nothing commendable about the way you used it, it came across sounding like a jerk who thinks they're superior. And made me wonder about what you "want to tell us".
edit: Could the downvoters explain why? Thanks. I tried to say something substantive, I thought successfully. (joosters, I totally agree)
There will always be a more important issue than the one being discussed. (in the eyes of someone, at least). That's no reason to prevent talking about anything else.
Quoting from the article:
> So-called “signature strikes”, targeting people whose behavior is assessed to be similar enough to those of terrorists to mark them for death, will continue, according to senior US officials.
> Human-rights groups have long denounced the practice – whose criteria can be as vague as killing “military-aged males” in regions where terrorists operate – as anonymous killing.
The alleged practice is not something the United States does.
Turkey does that too, though. It has been using combat drones inside its own borders, Iraq and Syria, and the Turkish Air Force has previous for bombing civilians.