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Comment by abrookewood | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure this deserves the downvotes. This behaviour (firing disagreeable public servants, censoring information, blatantly lying) is the exact opposite of what you would expect to see from a strongly democratic nation. It amazes me that the US hasn't fallen further on this chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index

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It's probably because the countries that are ranked lower have even larger and more systemic issues with democracy. Keep in mind that most people in the west and the English-speaking world experience a large reporting bias towards the US (and Europe, etc.), and this compounded with the size of the US means it's very easy to find a new negative story about the US every day.

I don't say this to excuse the problems. I just want to point out (based on my experience with family in some of these places and local news sources there) that the countries that are not ranked as highly tend to have a lot of problems that people who focus on US news genuinely don't often hear about and know about.

The public servant was not fired.

Moreover, consider the fact that the press is reporting the issue. And that we are freely discussing it.

She was not fired. BUT if someone is counting oranges and reports oranges with a defined scientific method and someone flips the switch and asks the same person to count apples and in a half-baked method, and still report it as "oranges" then you either play along their dirty game OR you have the decency to call them out and quit.

She did the decent thing. They did force her to quit.

She was not fired for the dashboard. But after coming public with this information, I guess there is a big chance she will be fired.

> consider the fact that the press is reporting the issue. And that we are freely discussing it

consider there is a "press like apparatus" working very hard to polarise the issue into dead lock. "teams" were already drawn up before the issue even started.

It's a nice sentiment to have, but it's mostly just halo effect. Democracy is nice, but not that nice. In fact, it's completely orthogonal to "firing disagreeable public servants, censoring information, blatantly lying" - these issues happen in democracies as much as everywhere else.

Do you have a source on the claim that democracies have, on average, roughly the same level of these shenanigans as non-democratic nations?

Certainly the United States does some morally dubious things that are comparable to some of the atrocities that e.g. China and Russia do, but I've still had the impression that oversight, transparency and freedom of speech _improve_ things.

I don't have a source on the claim, it's my belief based on observation and reasoning from first principles (e.g. what systems present in a democracy should have prevented this (alleged) situation from ever happening, why they didn't work here, and have anyone ever saw them working anywhere else?).

"Oversight, transparency and freedom of speech" certainly improve things - to the extent they exist in a country - but they don't stop greedy people from lying and scheming. I'd say the same feature that makes democracy a nice system - bloodless change of power - also creates a framework for greedy people to scheme essentially risk-free. You can defraud the state and defraud the voters and retire rich, instead of getting shot by the opposing group for making too many waves. Point being, you shouldn't expect a country to not have these problems by the very virtue of being "a democracy" - and not China/Russia/Turkey/North Korea/whatnot.

Democracy improves things when it is exercised. In the USA and others countries there is a system in place to avoid public dissent. For example, the USA is practically free to do anything they want in terms of foreign policy without opposition from the national media. Except for some faint opinion pieces here and there, the media is very supportive of whatever crazy schemes the government is trying to impose on "enemy" countries, and practically never debates why a country is an "enemy" or not.

What's your proof of this statement?

Here's a paper i found: https://www.e-ir.info/2015/12/20/a-critical-analysis-of-the-...

There seems to be a correlation in some cases.

It's not a paper, it's some student's essay, and the very abstract of it can be shortened to: "some people think democracy helps reduce corruption, others disagree, it sorta seems it really does help except it may introduce its own forms of corruption, and it's extremely hard to measure any of this anyway, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯". I don't think it's very convincing in either direction.

Quoting the "Infinite Monkey Cage" podcast. Democracy is a trial and error political system. You try president/prime minister A political party or coalition A. If they fail, next 4 years people try B, and so on.

People choose well or bad, but People Choose (sorry for the caps). In NK, China, Russia people don't actually choose.

In USA people 'choose less' (check out "Gerrymandering", also check on YT: last week tonight Gerrymandering).

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