Breaking: U.S. official response to non-stop blatant state sponsored Russia/China cyberterrorism
Comment on ‘Major incident’: China-backed hackers breached US Treasury workstations
PerogiBoi@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
It just occurred to me that Russia and china are going to get everything they want while America and the west sit on their hands.
RxBrad@infosec.pub 1 week ago
gencha@lemm.ee 1 week ago
Best to sit your hands if you have greasy palms
DdCno1@beehaw.org 1 week ago
Democracies are notoriously slow to react to outside threats, but when they finally do, they can be incredibly effective. See: WW2. This doesn’t mean it’s inevitable, but the thing with democratic countries is that they are also by far the most successful and resilient economies and leading in research thanks to their strong institutions. Meanwhile, strong institutions and research are threatening to autocratic rule, which means they are constantly hampered in countries like Russia and China - while the rampant corruption inherent to autocratic regimes limits economic success after the initial mass mobilization boost. You can see both of them falling behind already as Xi’s and Putin’s grip on power is intensifying. A typical symptom of this are mandatory ideological classes being rolled out and taking up vital time in the curriculum.
Both countries are also hampered militarily by corruption and nepotism - and loyalty being valued more than actual competence is an inherent disadvantage, since competent military leaders are an inherent threat to any autocratic rule. Russia’s embarrassing performance against the much smaller, poorer and weaker Ukraine even long before significant Western help arrived is an obvious symptom of this, but China is even worse in this regard. We haven’t seen their performance in an actual full-scale war yet, but previous military encounters - e.g. during UN missions in and around Africa - showed just how incompetent, inexperienced, poorly trained, -led and -equipped the Chinese military is.
Another aspect to democratic rule is that it remains so attractive that even the majority of autocratic regimes at the very least pretend to be democracies. No amount of democratic backsliding in the world changes the fundamental appeal behind the concept or democratic participation, of each individual citizen having a say in matters of state.
SweetCitrusBuzz@beehaw.org 1 week ago
It is a shame then that very few countries can claim to actually be democratic then, since representative democracy is not true democracy.
It is closer to the ideal perhaps, but it is not truly for the people in a way that matters. Only direct democracies where people vote on policies etc are actual democracies, representative democracies tend to teater on that autocratic/totaletarian edge where the elected and unelected (at least by the people) representatives/government often enact policies and laws not in line with what people actually want, especially in first past the post systems with effectively only two parties.
There are still many problems even with direct democracy in this current system as capitalism allows those with the most money and to lie and influence, however, that’s true of representative democracy also, if not moreso in the case of bribes and lobbying.