Everything you say is true. But it's not an argument. Failing to live up to all your stated values in past is not a reason to give up on then for all time.

It's not about giving up on them. It's about being willing to accept that you haven't lived up to those values and make the changes necessary to uphold them.

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.

Do you feel at all represented by your elected officials? Did you vote for them? If not, why would you accept the burden of guilt for 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.

> Do you feel at all represented by your elected officials? Did you vote for them? If not, why would you accept the burden of guilt for their actions?

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.

Russia and China also have lists of noble values that they don't live up to. That's not a distinction.

I think the argument is that there is not so much difference in result at the end, even though the projected image appears opposite.

The irony here of doing exactly what was outlined

> Maybe we didn't punish contrary opinions quite as badly as China / Russia

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.

You should probably check your facts. All but the first one is false. They have engaged in genocide: see Native Americans; trail of tears. The USA is a republic, not a democracy.

Republic and democracy refer to two different axis.

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.

They said they elect their leaders democratically which is simply not true no matter how you want to phrase it. The president is elected by an electoral college and not a democratic vote.

But the electoral college ultimately derives its members from people who are voted on by the general electorate.

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.

Every country is ultimately derived by its people though.

Rather than a boolean, democratic is better understood as a numeric value.

"How democratic are you?" not "are you democratic?"

> Every country is ultimately derived by its people though.

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?

That doesn’t magically make it a democratic election. In fact, the way you describe it working is a relatively new way of doing things and varies from state to state. It is not uniform. Also, if you paid any attention at all in the last election, you’d realize how tenuous it all really is and in multiple elections, the actual person voted in wasn’t even the winner by popular vote. So by definition, it can not be democratic.

> That doesn’t magically make it a democratic election. In fact, the way you describe it working is a relatively new way of doing things and varies from state to state. It is not uniform. Also, if you paid any attention at all in the last election, you’d realize how tenuous it all really is and in multiple elections, the actual person voted in wasn’t even the winner by popular vote. So by definition, it can not be democratic.

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.

I think that some of the problems with the EC would go away if the number of electors/House seats was updated to match current U.S. demographics. The last time that was changed was in the 1930s, if I recall correctly. In the first United States Congress, there were about 65 thousand Americans per representative. Nowadays, that ratio is closer to 760 thousand Americans per representative.

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.

Rebalancing the EC without addressing the widespread use of First Past the Post Winner Take All system used by most states would not do much.

Currently it is perfectly possible to win the entire EC minus 2-3 states with less than 50% of the popular vote.

If your definition of democracy is "nationwide popular vote to elect a single role" you will find that there are very few democracies around.

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.

Do you really want to vote on every little bit of minutia that you would have to if this were a direct democracy?

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.

I believe he means currently, not ever in its history.

Then why even bother having the conversation? No one is free of guilt here, which was my point.

Guilt is not a binary.

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.

Because you can't resurrect people who died hundreds of years ago but you can potentially stop a genocide that's ongoing.

And we certainly still do genocides, we just don't do them locally.

>Nestle Pure Life?

According to google "Nestlé Pure Life is a brand of bottled water". What's so morally bankrupt about selling bottled water?

It’s not quite to the level of geopolitic but selling bottled water is entirely unnecessary in majority of the US. It’s extremely bad for the environment, both for the plastic but of course the transport. When it’s often the same damn thing you get in your sink.

But no idea what’s specifically bad about this brand in particular.

I've yet to visit a country that didn't sell bottled water though. That doesn't seem US specific

Many other countries have tap water that is not potable.

As do some places in the U.S. and many people do fear that their water while technically potable, is full of unhealthy materials like lead. Even for me in a relatively new building, I have no idea about the materials of the lines built into it or the water main in my city. I use a Brita or straight from the tap personally but I can't say I blame people who are concerned (in the U.S.) where infrastructure is quite old and there doesn't seem to be much concern by officials even in the most dire of cases like Flint to fix things.

Not sure what the GP was referring to, but...

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.

Nestlé also is famous for exausting the natural resources.

Natural resources should be owned by the government and rented to the highest bidder.

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.

Checkout this documentary: https://www.bottledlifefilm.com/about-the-film

It's from 2012 but I suppose Nestlé hasn't changed much since.

add “controversy” to search string - depletion of waterways etc

https://www.mashed.com/717227/nestles-water-controversy-expl...

>They say that by extracting ground water to sell, bottled water companies are actually draining natural waterways.

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.

This is like saying the US had segregation and internment camps in the 40s, so it had no moral standing on the USSR and Nazi Germany committing genocide. Which would be complete nonsense.

if youre going to make that comparison, its worth noting that the nazis did draw their inspiration from America.

For a long drawn out analysis: https://youtu.be/R1gcipAvplY

This seems like a mischaracterization of the parent comment and some self serving logic.