[duxup]

It's heartbreaking seeing what happened to Venezuela.

It is also really scary as Venezuela was doing relatively quite well compared to other nearby nations. Democracy, functional institutions (relatively) and then .... people chose to vote in some strong men who trashed it.

Granted oil prices would have resulted in real problems anyway, but nothing to the extent we're seeing now. While nobody would want that situation, people in a democracy chose people who set them on that path (since then it hasn't been a democracy) ... and that is scary.

[megaman22]

[flagged]

[duxup]

Yup, Turkey is swimming in debt... and the water is getting deeper.

[duxup]

I don't know what you're saying there.

[dang]

Please keep generic ideological battles off HN.

[Bizarro]

Interesting that dang is making his own political comment here.

Notice that when a comment is ostensibly the same tone, but one with that dang agrees with, dang is nowhere to be found.

dang, do your bosses know that you're still making political comments on the forums?

[dang]

I know it feels that way, quite convincingly, but I think it's empirically wrong. I post such replies with boring consistency, and you can't conclude anything from them about what I disagree with. That feeling isn't reliable. It's called the Hostile Media Effect and both sides of every controversy experience it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_media_effect

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22hostile%20media%20effect%22...

[downrightmike]

Democracy is hardly democratic anymore. It is mostly just a show. Votes don't seem to matter. Trump won the vote, putin won the vote.

[duxup]

I think the state of democracy can be a wide range of various forms and states and just declaring it "hardly democratic anymore" shows very little perspective and really favors the folks you think might be manipulating it....

[downrightmike]

And that's the difference between theory and practice.

[duxup]

What do you mean?

[microcolonel]

> Trump won the vote, putin won the vote.

Not sure how you could be convinced that these elections are even remotely similar in terms of legitimacy, I suggest diversifying your news sources.