Sry, meant the european ones. I'll fix it.

I'm sure our european, government-funded and therfore independend public broadcasting services will be outraged after they hear that our cute little Greta was tortured in a prison that looks Guantanamo-like, with blood and bullet holes in the cells!

The most just army of the world torturing a young, peaceful lady. An army we support!

This will result in weeks of coverage: Politicians being interviewed, human rights experts, Greta herself, debates on what sanctions should be put on Israel....

Just kidding. They'll hide it between news about a massacre in Africa and the weather report. And in two days, it will all be forgotten.

The wonderful western values:

• Murdering innocents in Britain: 😡 Go to prison for life!
• Murdering innocents in another country: 😊 I see nothing wrong. 5mph of speeding is much more severe than that.
• Murdering innocents in a country that is at peace with Britain: 😡 Go to prison for life! Or maybe not, because the law is too old?

I'd rather have a new Witcher game in the quality of Witcher 3 ($80m) than 3 episodes of a series.

But then, what do i know?

1. True.
2. Does not make it painless.
3. Would not help those with those diseases that are (for now) incurable.
4. If you put a pig in a small pen, prevent it from moving, and slaughter it in the 'ideal' moment, the meat will be cheap. If you allow it to walk on grass, it will burn loads of calories and therefore be much more expensive. If you wait until it dies of old age rather than killing it before it becomes a teenager, the meat will be unaffordable in a society where everyone is equal (for not 3 billion live from a few dollars per day). Lab meat is Sci-fi. If we allow Sci-Fi, we can also allow uploaded conciousness, eliminating all biological suffering, but that's a ideal Sci-fi scenario that no one living today will see.
5. If nobody cleans the toilets and the sewers, it will become nasty rather quickly. If you pay those that do the dirty work more, you create inequality and envy. Robots are Sci-fi.
6. The human brain has a agenda of it's own.
7. There would still be an insane level of suffering required until someone abandons all hope and chooses voluntary euthanasia.

Life is not subjective because suffering is not subjective. If you really believe that life is what you perceive it to be, prove it to yourself by sleeping on a nail-bed starting tomorrow.

Let's say we lived in an ideal global society. No inequality, no hatred, no pedo-governments, no war.

• We would still be immersed 24/7 in a corrosive gas that slowly kills us with each breath we take.
• Our bodies would still require constant maintenance trough regular and painful excercise.
• Our bodies would still be ravaged by disease: The cold. The flu. Tooth decay. Anxiety/Depression. Corona. Aging. Cancer. Death.
• Billions of Pigs would still be tortured every day so this ideal society does not have to waiver anything.
• We would still work 9-5 doing necessary but boring stuff like cleaning toilets, assembling devices, maintaining machines, disposing of waste, spraying the fields. Because all those modern ameneties require much more work to produce than happiness they generate.
• We would stilk fear the day when this ideal society collapses, even when this society was actually eternal. Because brains are designed to worry.
• There would still be plenty of disabled people. Physical and mental. They would not be equal, even in an ideal society. Millions of those would be in constant pain, with no cure in sight.

Life is only beautiful to masochists and or sadists.

Creating 1500B € out of thin air to build killing machines: Whatever it takes to protect the country!

Spending 50B € to actually protect the people from poverty/malnutrition/starvation: Nooooo we can't afford that.

Humanity at it's best: Limitless effort to create suffering, 0 effort to reduce suffering.

In political science, the term polyarchy (poly "many", arkhe "rule") was used by Robert A. Dahl to describe a form of government in which power is invested in multiple people. It takes the form of neither a dictatorship nor a democracy. This form of government was first implemented in the United States and France and gradually adopted by other countries. Polyarchy is different from democracy, according to Dahl, because the fundamental democratic principle is "the continuing responsiveness of the government to the preferences of its citizens, considered as political equals" with unimpaired opportunities. A polyarchy is a form of government that has certain procedures that are necessary conditions for following the democratic principle.

So yeah, you are right. A representative "democracy" is not a democracy. It's a monarchy with more than one ruler.
A gummy bear is as much a bear as representative democracy is a democracy.

I didn't know that, because i was taught in school that a representative "democracy" is a form of democracy. And the name makes it sound like one. But it isn't. It's not even supposed to be in theory. I am sure 99% of people living in a representative "democracy" don't know this.

I hereby encourage everyone to abandon the word representative "democracy" in favor of polyarchy or maybe oligarchy. This makes it much clearer what we are talking about.

Also i doubt the authors of this article know this, because they imply that representative "democracy" is desirable, but it is obviously undesirable.

Here in Germany there are constantly scandals where politicians sign off illegal deals with the industry, and when the word get's out, the contract is kept secret to minimize the damage to reputation. Whistleblowers are hunted and politicians that did blatantly illegal things are protected under "immunity".

In that case i'll give the Netherlands the title of actual democracy. Let's hope it lasts for a long time.

I was thinking about the time before the internet, like 1980s, not like the more distant past

For me democracy means rule of the people.
Of course you can define words as you want, and say that only direct democracy is rule of the people, while representative democracy can be oligarchy dressed as democracy, but for me using such a definition makes the word democracy meaningless and undesirable.