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Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

Nearly every affluent liberal democracy on the planet qualifies as an oligarchy by the premise that gets floated about the US.

Similarly qualified: Britain, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Spain, Japan, South Korea, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Ireland, Iceland.

Have you looked at how many billionaires there are in Sweden and Norway? Oligarchy. Sweden has considerably more billionaires per capita than the US does. They're clearly not a democracy at all. The billionaires control the entire country including its government, obviously.

Ever look at the perpetual old money dominance in Germany and France? Oligarchy.

You're down to there only being a dozen or so liberal democracies that aren't in some way broken, severely tainted by money or entrenched power groups, etc. - if you use the same standard used against the US.

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You're so close to getting the point

Serious question: if you pick any given surveillance state from a liberal western democracy and pick it out of a hat, and set it side by side with China's surveillance state, are you telling me you would not be able to tell them apart?

Because that's the point at issue in the thread you are replying to. And I'm personally kind of amazed that it's possible to lose sight of something I find to be an incredibly obvious distinction.

I think you may have pulled the wrong point. This thread seems more about how the US prides itself on being a role model when we are often hypocritical. If we're good to slide on our principles and ideals "as long as we can tell ourselves apart from China" that's a pretty sad state.

This branch of comments goes back to a commenter who made the accurate point that the US is closer to a liberal democracy than China.

>If we're good to slide on our principles and ideals "as long as we can tell ourselves apart from China" that's a pretty sad state.

This is conflating a differentiation for a justification. We can form coherent thoughts about the relative scale of abuses committed by different powers without that meaning we think those abuses are okay.

If we lose our ability to form coherent thoughts about abuses committed by China because we can't express them without also having to labor through false equivalences to U.S. surveillance, those valid and needed criticisms get derailed and the comprehension of China's unique status as an abuser of surveillance infrastructure gets erased. Judging different scales of moral error is important, because otherwise we can never progress from a position of moral error to positive moral standing and we get bogged down with frivolous exercises in whataboutism.

> This branch of comments goes back to a commenter who made the accurate point that the US is closer to a liberal democracy than China.

No. The comment said the US is a liberal democracy. Not "closer", IS.

It's like "hey, this number is 100!" - "no, that number is 13" - "but 13 is closer to 100 than 2".

I'm just going to note that you glazed over about 95% of the substance of my comment and re-direct you back toward that.

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