this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2025
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Women lost the right to abortions in the US very recently because the religious ghouls in the Supreme Court, who are all unelected leaders, decided against it. This is also the reason the US has extremely weak environmental protections, and many other problems that plague US politics.
Other than full control of media, how does this not describe the US?
Edit: just to pre-empt the obvious counterargument that in the US you can oppose the government without being arrested: yes, you can, as long as you aren't speaking out in a dangerous way. The 6 Ferguson organizers who all died under mysterious circumstances should be evidence that if you do speak out in a way that the state deems unacceptable, they'll just kill you. Hopefully you can see how in Iran, not everyone who ever says anything against their government is jailed (we even have Hexbear users from Iran that have posted things that are critical of their government). The thing that would get you jailed is if you destabilize the country with your speech. Every single state in the world will have you jailed for destabilizing it, the only difference is how hard to destabilize each state is.
SCOTUS is democratic because the guy who was president 30 years ago got to make a lifetime appointment of a supreme court justice that makes decisions that affect people who weren't even alive when they were appointed? You have an extremely low bar for what counts as "democratic." If your standards are that low, you could even argue that because most people in Iran are Twelver Shia and the Ayatollah is the leader of Twelver Shiism, that's democracy.
Again, every single state will prosecute destabilizing behavior. Press freedom is gonna be better in wealthy western countries because a few bad news stories don't destabilize the country the way they do in the developing world. As I pointed out, the way the US reacted to events that actually do have the potential to destabilize the country shows that it is exactly the same as the so-called "authoritarian regimes" and this is also true of liberal European countries.