House Speaker Mike Johnson says God will punish “depraved” U.S. because more teens identify as LGBTQ+
"God is mocked openly in the public square," he said this past Sunday...
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This "reasoning" is quite similar to what patriarch Kirill of Moskov declared a year ago, with the difference that it referred to the depraved "West" (not US specifically). He was harshly criticized by western media and even ridiculed for being expression of a retrograde and superstitious approach to religion.
Ironically, now the most democratic country of the world, the homeland of freedom itself, is having its political (not even religious) leaders telling basically the same thing.
How quickly the tide turns.
Most democratic country is Norway.
USA is at position 26.
https://wisevoter.com/country-rankings/most-democratic-countries/
USA is also anything but "the homeland of freedom itself"
The phrase only implies that modern democracy grew in popularity as a system of government after its start in the United States, not that the U.S. is a perfect democracy. I took a closer look at the list of "most democratic" countries in the comment to which you're replying. Have you? It's kind of shocking how new most of those governments are.
I’m always baffled by these charts. How is anything under North Korea? I seriously struggle to think of anything worse that isn’t a nationwide literal concentration camp.
As long as there's a system, I think they're useful. You can argue they weight things incorrectly but it's useful to have some way to see how a country does against the same evaluation for rest of the world. I don't know if this is the best data, but I don't see anything that pops out as particularly odd.
At the bottom, it's not much between NK and the two below. But the two below are Myanmar and Afghanistan, which I don't think is too crazy.
Oh that’s for sure, those charts are still useful, it’s very rare for them to be extremely inaccurate. I’m just in disbelief at most of them having something below NK since it’s basically a slave nation. Would like to see the exact criteria, but I didn’t find them.
The list is interesting to be sure, but as with most linear rankings of large datasets it leaves lots of room for debate. But I think that's the point. It's not meant to be used as a rhetorical sledgehammer to silence discussion the way you have used it here.
It's kind of shocking how many of them have an actual monarchy still, with real actual powers over the government despite claims that they are mostly symbolic. Top of the list, Norway, still has a King. New Zealand, still a colony with a King. Finland and Iceland actually have elected presidents. Sweden, curators of the democracy ranking list, still have a monarchy. Each monarch claims they are only symbolic, but if that's true and these countries are truly the more perfect democracies they claim to be, one has to wonder why the people have kept such oligarchs in a position of power over them. In some cases the power seems to have only passed from the monarch to the parliament out of custom, not actual legislation or constitution.
Agreed, we need some more guillotine based fashion.
I certainly never intended to silence discussion. I'd have said I was opening up the discussion, if anything, by poi ting out that there's some data available that suggests the USA is far from the most democratic nation. Which, as I read it, was a tongue in cheek statement in the comment I replied to.
But, now it is being discussed, I'm interested in the view that monarchy should have a paeticylarly large negative weight on the ranking. I'm not a royalist and think any monarchy with even a hint of power means less than absolute democracy. But I don't think many of the monarchies in those high ranking countries have as much of a negative impact as other factors that can reduce the input of a population to the democratic process. The big one for me would be how individual voting gets weighted.
I'm having difficulty with the bit where you call the USA the "homeland of freedom itself". I know Americans like to believe they live in the best country in the world but the evidence to the country is pretty substantial.
Personally I think that a free country probably doesn't have a police force that's killed more of its own citizens than a hostile nation state could ever hope to achieve.
I was being sarcastic, and I had to edit that sentence multiple times before publishing to eliminate more polemic bits. I try to follow the etiquette but sometimes my bad temper emerges.
quotation marks probably would help.
now the most democratic country of the world, the homeland of freedom itself
Neither of those are even close to true...
Or ever have been
Yall queda