While still in the wrong, how seriously should China or Russia take the country that lead the invasion and occupation of Iraq/Afghanistan for 20 odd years when it offers it's condemnation of their own ambitions?
To be frank, how can we expect anyone to take our condemnation seriously when we are currently doing the same things or have let the same things go unpunished in recent memory. We refuse to hold our own torturers and war criminals to proper account.
A relative handful of people made all the torture decisions for us. I don't think I want them hiding behind the flag, or me.
Personally it varies depending on the official. I think at some level we do bear some responsibility for those who represent us, I don't necessarily believe that crosses into guilt as much it does a call to action. The corrupt and unethical rely on a combination of apathy and normalisation in order to get away with their actions.
> A relative handful of people made all the torture decisions for us. I don't think I want them hiding behind the flag, or me.
I want them pushed out from behind the flag and into a jail cell.
Understatement of the year. We also currently don’t outlaw homosexuality or religion or engage in genocide and we elect our leaders democratically among other things.
Republic is about how the vertex of government is structured.
Democracy is about where the executive/legislative power comes from.
The US is both, you could argue that Canada is not a republic as they have a recognized queen, but it would be a stretch as she has essentially zero power there.
The electoral college is an abstraction so that the states in the United States are able to have a check and balance on federal power. Having a direct democracy of 300 million people would be a bad idea, a lot of political philosophy has been written on why.
If you build on a library that builds on library using AGPL license, you are still bound by the AGPL license, no matter how abstracted. If your country ultimately derives for the people, you are democratic. It is just that the USA is technically a democratic Republic, and intentionally so.
Rather than a boolean, democratic is better understood as a numeric value.
"How democratic are you?" not "are you democratic?"
Dictatorships do exist.
Sometimes power is held by a small group of individuals that control the military and can make dissenting voices disappear.
Sometimes there are elections but the ruling class can simply throw out unwanted votes with impunity.
In both cases power is derived form people, but not The People.
My question for you would be, do you know of a country that IS a democracy by your definition?
Now I am by no means a fan of the electoral system and I think one van argue that the US fails to live up to being democratic in practice for several reasons (I consider the electoral college a very minot part of the issues), however saying that it can not be democratic by principle or definition it can not be a democracy. I mean let's remember that in Athens (where the term comes from) only a minority of male citizens was allowed to vote.
Unfortunately, that kind of rebalancing has zero political support. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, while not as good a solution in my opinion as it doesn't fix the underlying problems with citizen representation, is probably more politically feasible in terms of fixing presidential elections.
Currently it is perfectly possible to win the entire EC minus 2-3 states with less than 50% of the popular vote.
Actually in the US the election of the president is remarkably linear.
In Italy the actual head of state is elected by the parliament (with no underlying direct vote) and then during national elections 1) the people elect a new parliament (with a complex mixture of proportional/non-proportial seats) 2) the parliament proposes various governments to the head of state 3) the head of state selects (and makes suggestions for modifications) the government (the actual executive branch).
And surely there are democracies that follow a more complex process.
The main difference between the US and most other countries is that the US counts votes for the president federally and not nationally, and the difference would almost completely disappear if more states would follow Maine and Nebraska example and drop the Firts Past the Post election style.
Democracy means that the legitimacy of the state is given by the people, not blood, not military, not religion, not oligarchs.
There's an old game, Anachronox, that does a wonderful job of making fun of this when the player is on the planet Democratus. Worth a play if you haven't.
When one group is actively trying to absolve its sins of the past, and the other doesn’t even recognize them while doubling-down, the claim that “everyone has sins” an abdication of the idea that behavior matters.
According to google "Nestlé Pure Life is a brand of bottled water". What's so morally bankrupt about selling bottled water?
But no idea what’s specifically bad about this brand in particular.
There are some serious concerns about bottled water in the US, particularly with how the manufacturers (like Nestlé) often get the water for free or at preferential rates, then sell it with a huge markup, and how some of it is (from what I've read) sourced from places like California, which need the water very badly.
There are also very serious concerns about Nestlé in particular as a company; the big one I always remember (because it's been going on basically as long as I've been alive) is how they aggressively push baby formula on mothers in developing countries despite knowing that the water in their area (needed to reconstitute the formula) is unsafe to drink. There are a number of other problems with their business practices, but I don't recall what they are off the top of my head.
It's kinda crazy that we do this with wireless spectrum but not with resources like water, oil, gas, etc.
Even land should probably work like this. Rather than a property tax, you pay a yearly rent on the land, afterall the US gov is spending quite a bit to protect it from forceful seizure by other nations.
It's from 2012 but I suppose Nestlé hasn't changed much since.
https://www.mashed.com/717227/nestles-water-controversy-expl...
Okay but people have to drink somehow right? It's not like if nestle stopped operating that the demand for water would evaporate. It'll just cause another waterway to be depleted instead.
The other point raised in the article seems to be that nestle is taking water, which it pays little to nothing for, and charging $1/bottle or whatever. This sounds outrageous on the surface, until you realize that water in a well or whatever isn't really useful. You still need to bottle and transport it, which is where most of the value-add is. If people only needed water they'd get it from their tap, not buying $1 bottles. When they are buying bottles, they're paying for the convenience of water being available right then and there.
For a long drawn out analysis: https://youtu.be/R1gcipAvplY