I’m sure you are having trouble keeping track, you keep putting words in my mouth and ignoring what I type.

Have a good day.

I think this is where this thread is getting stuck - they did NOT just study “that duck”. They studied multiple ducks. They found that no matter what kind of duck it is, it eats bread. The commentor above that I’m replying to said “why are they afraid to name the duck?”. I said “it’s about more than just that one type of duck, actually - the paper studies a bunch of ducks, and has found that all forms of ducks eat bread”.

Somehow they’ve taken this to mean I think that duck doesn’t eat bread.

We overcome this obstacle by building on recent developments in the measurement of democratic erosion. Doing so allows us to conduct a large, cross-national quantitative study of democratic erosion and economic distribution. Our key conclusion is that income inequality is a strong and highly robust predictor of democratic erosion. This basic result is stunningly robust. In all, we find a consistent, positive association between income or wealth gaps and democratic erosion across more than 100 distinct statistical models.

They studied multiple ducks. My point is that they studied multiple ducks, and getting mad at the paper for not focusing just on one duck is dumb.

Where did I say “it’s not neoliberalism”? I said “inequality can come in multiple forms, one of which is neoliberal corporatocracy”. Not every country is getting ruined by the same thing you’re currently experiencing. Saying the authors “are afraid to say it” is dumb when the authors also studied economies who’s inequality is coming from non neoliberal sources.

That’s true. Perhaps my comment should read “not everything is about Western corporatocracies.” Inequality can come in many forms, and pretending inequality cannot come from anything other than corporate control is misguided at best.

Depends on the economy. You, the American, should blame corporatocracy and private interests. Other economies may blame government corruption or government enforced inequality. Aparthied South Africa, for example, may want to blame the government for their inequality.

The paper is just “economic inequality begets democratic backsliding” and is not prescriptive about where that inequality and backsliding comes from.

Again, the world is not the US, and going after these authors for discussing the general case and not staying US-focused is pretty dumb.

Buddy not everything is about the US. They studied multiple economies. Just because the US is devolving into a corporate hellscape doesn’t mean other countries aren’t devolving into an auth-right government hellscape.

It’s not cognitive dissonance if they’re discussing a situation other than your personal perspective and experience.

Costco has a great Colombian whole bean that they sail from Colombia to Quebec where it’s roasted and packaged. Cafe William’s Sailboat coffee. We love it. We’ll be buying it exclusively now!

I was just in Göcek and Ankara and I had some wildly interesting interactions with locals when they asked me how I liked Turkey.

“I like it, very beautiful country, lovely people, great food.”

“So you’d move here?”

“Uh… perhaps not”

“So you don’t like Turkey”

👀

lol