Not arresting protestors is probably a good thing to emulate regardless of your feelings about the US.

as another example, US lets you bring guns to protests, i am 100% on board with how my government (canada) arrests any idiots who show up with a firearm to a protest.

I generally like the right to protest, but i dont want 100% free for all.

When you have counterprotestors/rioters throwing bricks/molotovs/etc. with the tacit consent of the local government, going to a protest armed can be the only way to safely exercise your constitutional right to protest.

What is with americans and might makes right?

What happens when the other side starts shooting at you? Do you think the guns still help you safely protest. For that matter, what use is a gun if someone from behind cover throws a molotov at your face?

>What is with americans and might makes right?

The fact that all state power eventually comes down to men with guns.

>What happens when the other side starts shooting at you? Do you think the guns still help you safely protest.

You either get out of there or you shoot back, that's really not a hard question. And to your second question yes, especially if the other side is shooting or threatening to shoot. Safer if you have guns as well than only they have guns. And just look at Kyle Rittenhouse, he would have been dead if he hadn't been armed. The third person he shot straight up said that he would have shot Kyle if Kyle hadn't vaporized his bicep first.

>For that matter, what use is a gun if someone from behind cover throws a molotov at your face?

Once again it makes you safer, because they can't risk throwing molotovs at you from out in the open. Your being armed helps you control when and from where they could possibly attack you with molotovs or whatever.

Why does everything have to be so extremist with the US? Everything taken to the absolute maximum imaginable?

Protests should be allowed, but it's not an absolute god given right - if you're being a dick, destroying public property, advocating violence or hate - then no, you shouldn't be allowed to protest. I know in America you let even neo nazis march your streets and boast how that's "freedom" but that's not freedom - that's blindly following certain ideology(freedom to do anything AT ALL costs) without any consideration as to what that does to your society.

USAian here:

> Protests should be allowed

They are.

> destroying public property

Is illegal and you can be arrested for it.

> advocating violence or hate

Is illegal and you can be arrested for it.

You just can’t be arrested for “being rude”. You have to commit a crime.

Protesting does not mean you’re immune to prosecution for non-free-speech crimes. What happened with the BLM riots was simply governments deciding, for one reason or another, not to stop the crimes being committed.

> > advocating violence or hate

> Is illegal and you can be arrested for it.

This is untrue. Immediate, direct, actionable threats are illegal, saying "I/we/you need to go hunt down and murder X now" can be construed as an actionable threat.

Extolling the virtues of murder and opining about how nice it would be if someone finally hunted down and killed X is legal free speech.

You can talk about how X needs to die all you want, but if you start making immediate, direct, actionable threats towards X, that crosses territory from free speech to illegal threats.

This is correct, I'm not sure why it's being down-voted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_threat

Eh, it's an ugly truth and my examples could have been less extreme.

Various circuit courts have different tests for what constitutes a true threat versus legal free speech, some of which can be found here[1].

For example, here's the 2nd Circuit's opinion:

> a true threat is “on its face and in the circumstances in which it is made is so unequivocal, unconditional, immediate, and specific as to the person threatened, as to convey a gravity of purpose and imminent prospect of execution.”

[1] https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1025/true-threats

What makes it weird? Why is it barely functioning?

Well to start, right now there is 24/7 news coverage about how an ex-president took state documents with him on his way out. Seperation of office from officeholder is a pretty key part of a functioning democracy (hell even the british monarchy can do that one).

Or how about how everyone knows the political affiliations of supreme court judges? In a normal country judges are apolitical.

See the dozens of voting restrictions which were passed in various states over the last two years. See the 200 year old compromise with slave holder states which is still in effect to this day. See the consistent disenfranchisement efforts over the last decade led by a particular major political party. See any and all voter rights laws being stymied by that same party.

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voti...

First past the post is inherently undemocratic. Combine with the facts that Senate representation is based on lines on a map and not population, and House of Representatives representation is based on population numbers from a century ago, there's blatant gerrymandering to abuse the first past the post. Did you also miss the former president attempting a coup, getting away with multiple crimes while in office due to political affiliation? Or how about the fact that your supreme court wields enormous power and is blatantly political, with life appointments.

There's a bunch of reasons why the US is considered a flawed democracy, with the score going down every year, in the Democracy Index.

I think you're just seeing an example of the raging inferiority complex that many members of the rest of the West exhibit towards the US. There's a noticeable cultural difference along certain axes, with both significant downsides and significant upsides for both sides of the cultural divide. But there are many out there who aren't cognitively capable of processing the breathtaking nuance of global cultural differences, and unsurprisingly they end up with a reductive view of the culture they don't understand (same as it ever was).

My personal experience of backpacking around the world was replete with lectures from 25-year-old European women about the US's issues. They were of such poor quality that I mostly just smiled and shrugged it off, knowing that it'd be a waste of my vacation to try and explain to them the nuances of cultural difference. But I had the delightful catharsis of schooling a particularly-obnoxious British girl on her country's role as the primary contender for history's greatest supervillain (unsurprisingly, her grasp of history and politics was.... poor).

Okay but our democracy is actually barely functional. It's not relevant to the above conversation but it is a true statement.

This is exactly why I refuse to walk. I'm told that Hitler once walked.