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China courts Germany's far-right populist AfD
(www.dw.com)
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this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
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President for life doesn't sound democratic.
Term limits that silence the will of the people don't sound democratic to me
Neither does censoring criticism of the government and proxy depictions of it.
Imagine for a split second that the strongest government in the world is constantly attempting to cause the overthrow of your legitimately popular government, despite it being popular and significantly beloved by almost all people there. This external, most powerful government in the world tried to cause unrest in every possible way, including funding all opposition groups and organizations regardless of their violent/genocidal intent (e.g. Falun Gong, Islamic terror groups) and cause unrest on your borders (Pakistan, Afghanistan, Korea).
What do you do? When good faith polling shows that you're popular and fulfilling the needs and desires of your country's working class but a foreign press tries to speak about the terribleness and need for overthrow, do you just let that happen with more money and propoganda than you can possibly provide to support yourself? Or do you censor the BS and report to your population that these images/ideas/orgs are actually subversive and attempting to change the government they legitimately love.
In this hypothetical situation, what do you propose? Allowing the propaganda but claiming it's wrong has failed in many projects, and resulted in massacres once fascism won (Chile, Indonesia). Just trying to set up a wall of no information works for a bit, but info can cross anyways (USSR). Allowing limited access if you search for it but not allowing it's widespread propagation is the method of china. A VPN allows you to see it all, but it can't be spread too widely before it is stopped from being viral.
Do you have a better solution? Because this is how China presents itself and how the Chinese population sees it
What's that got to do with China?
Oh I think he's talking about FDR, the most popular president in U.S. history and one consistently ranked amongst the best
And in hindsight, not such a great person. Or at least had a lot of negatives to go along with his positives. Probably best to hard code not only a term limit, but an age limit on elected officials. I'm tired of the world being run by geriatrics. Culture seems to be consistently 20 year ahead of government.
Term-limits are blatantly anti-democratic and age limits are clumsy, but a cognitive evaluation and probably an MRI would be good for rooting out cases of cognitive decline.
There is an informal age limit in China and Xi is still below it, though just barely. I'm curious if he'll go for another term after crossing it. I think he understands that he needs to retire sometime -- no one wants to become a late '60s Mao.
Unlike in China, the people here actually have the right to vote. That right does not exist in China
What are you talking about? Of course the people in China have a right to vote.
Honestly, how did you come to be so confidently incorrect about this? You would have to have done no research at all to think the people of China don't vote, but a normal person who has done no research about a subject will have the humility not to assume they know what they're talking about.
It's okay to admit you don't know something. Like the other person said, Chinese people can vote
Learn yourself so that you can make informed opinions
It's better to have no knowledge than negative knowledge (knowing "facts" that are completely wrong because of a gut feeling assumption rather than any evidence or research)