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Comment by PenguinCoder | Hacker News Reader

By those metrics (and others), United States isn't a civilized country either.

This is silly. Please don't make easily-refuted, throwaway political statements like this. On almost any corruption index, the United States ranks far, far better than China. Here's one example:

https://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_percept...

People do try to measure this stuff.

That link measures peoples perception. My perception is that the influence of money is blatantly epidemic in US politics. But it uses an euphemism; lobbying. Luckily it's not corruption if it's legal.

Lobbing is not inherently corrupt. When a small group cares a lot about a specific issue say astronomers and light pollution lobbing is simply trying to get politions to pay attention to an issue. That effort is not free, in some cases they approach the issue by mailing or dolling people directly, in others they pay somone else to make these calls and phrase things in political terms etc.

Now, that does open the door for people to game the system, but you can’t simply define all lobbing as corruption or even all lobbing you disagree with as corruption.

So, yes their are plenty of blatant cases of corruption but they are relatively rare compared to China.

Why is it important for you to issue a petty nuance to this that you should, and probably do, realise that I already acknowledge?

Compare: "China is actually not inherently undemocratic there's a lot of local officials etc being voted in".

Yes, but on the systemic, overall, scale there's a blatant democratic deficit present for all to see.

Because it's a question of scale not kind, when you go to the DMV etc in the US you don't expect to bribe anyone. That's far from culturally or historically universal, so day to day it's just not that corrupt relative to other countries.

Now, is politics in the US rigged? Ehh. You do need to actually participate to be counted. Don't vote and don't lobby then sure they your voice is not heard. Now does everyone get equally rewarded when they vote or lobby? Clearly not as every vote is not equal and frankly that's part of our constitution. So is the US a democracy? Nope.

On the other hand the US is not a totalitarian state, the will of the people does actually matter and things happen without bribes every day. Compare it to say England where the landed gentry got to hold extra special power rather than ever shifting groups in the US and yea it's not that bad.

Indeed it is. The scale I wrote about above was lobbying [people in power], not giving the highway cop half the official fine.

Not true: Corruption: The USA ranks 16th (1 is best) out of 180 countries according to Transparency International: https://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_percept... Free speech: If anything, there is too much free speech in the USA, as people can and do say all kinds of nonsense, starting at the very top.

Man I would hate to live in a country that is ostensibly more corrupt than North Korea...

1. Lets its citizens die destitute of curable illness.

2. Condemns children at birth to poverty and / or crime due to their birth parents as a result of how the public education system is structured.

3. Ten year wait list for housing if homeless.

4. Epidemic police state where officers are unaccountable for any atrocity comitted.

5. Justice system is bribeable out of almost any crime comitted, including wrecking the whole economy.

6. Uses the measure of a three hundred year dead kings foot as its base unit of measurement, and uses a temperature scale where 0 and 100 mean nothing. Both of which nobody else uses.And they have daylight savings time across four time zones.

7. Puerto Rico still isn't a state.

8. Two out of the three heads of state this millennia won election after losing the popular vote to their opponent.

As an American, we certainly aren't civilized.

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