World News
A community for discussing events around the World
Rules:
-
Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
-
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
-
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed. Sources that have a Low or Very Low factual reporting rating or MBFC Credibility Rating may be removed.
-
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
-
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF 10/19
-
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
-
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
-
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
Lemmy World Partners
News !news@lemmy.world
Politics !politics@lemmy.world
World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world
Recommendations
For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/
- Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link
view the rest of the comments
A flawed democracy is still a democracy - and Germany is widely regarded, despite some corruption, as one of the best-functioning democracies in the world (5th best according to the Democracy Matrix - which is admittedly from a German university - and 12th best according to the Economist's Democracy Index). There are no serious scholars doubting this.
Democracy assessments / studies / rankings are heavily flawed. They tend to look at freedom of speech, corruption & integrity of elections, while completely disregarding "legal" corruption such as lobbying, and how much influence money has on the legal process. Which is exactly what I criticized. Germany is not a democracy. It has freedom of speech, and low corruption, and relatively fair elections. However, there is a severe imbalance towards lobbyists and big corporations in the legislation.
Democracy Matrix doesn't disregard "legal corruption":
Neither does the Democracy Index, which has "political participation" as a criteria.
You can't just make up your own definitions. Democracy is a well-defined term. There being an imbalance just like in every society doesn't make a country not a democracy. That's not how this works.
Then the index is just plain biased.
I live in Germany and I can see with my own eyes and hear with my own ears that the power balance is heavily tilted in favor of corporations. You may be one of those who either benefit from the system, or tell themselves a fairy tale of "things are not that bad". I don't need to wait for people starving on the streets to know that this is the direction our system is going at the moment.
Germany is fucked up, but since we're still exploiting the third world and our economy is booming, even those who get cheated out of their livelihoods do not starve yet (for the most part).
But there are already some people in a really bad place here because the government isn't doing the very minimum of it's fucking duty to protect the weakest, and instead giving tax cuts to the richest and the corporations.
So don't give me bullshit about Germany being a "good democracy". The only thing poor people still have left here, is that they are still allowed to call out those stealing their livelihood without being imprisoned for it. Not that it would do them any good.