So, free and fair elections. Well, now we're back to square one, and pretty much describing how Western democracies work.
Consider Australia: all of the major political parties nakedly serve the interests of capital, and decide who can and cannot run in their elections. This is the case in all of the liberal "democracies". They aren't "free and fair" elections by any reasonable definition.
Normally I don't respond to low level comments like this, but the intellectual laziness here is mind boggling. Dictionaries exist for a reason.
...I really, really hope that you are being deliberately obtuse here in refusing to acknowledge that they are asking what you mean by the term to further the conversation. The other option is that you think there's some context where asking a person you disagree with for some kind of objective definition makes sense, and that really, really doesn't speak highly of your reasoning ability. Different people have wildly different understandings of "authoritarian".
False, that is the result of capitalism when it goes unchecked, not the definition. And different countries have different levels of checks on capitalism.
...you don't think that the existence of a capitalist ruling class is part of the definition of capitalism? Why are liberals always so happy to lecture people on the basis of What I Reckon Sounds About Right Probably...
Destroying Israeli universities wouldn't actually advance Iran's cause but could well lose them some of the small amount of international support they're enjoying. I'm not saying they should be any more scrupulous than anyone else, or than they're currently being, but they should, and presumably would prefer to, concentrate their efforts on targets that could actually impact their enemy's ability to harm them.
That's... You're literally describing capitalism though. Capitalism is defined by a capitalist ruling class which means that government can be expected to use its power in the interests of that class... Such as by bailing out corporations.
Russia is fully thirty-five fucking years into its life as a neoliberal hellhole.
The constitution explicitly, openly vests power exclusively in wealthy and/or slave holding men. Are you seriously claiming that wasn't "intentional"?! Your founding fathers overwhelmingly WERE wealthy slave owning white men, they "extracted" those concessions FROM THEMSELVES.
weird how his neck just did that
I'd also point out that countries like Australia don't have a constitution at all and they've lasted longer than that.
Are you... Feeling okay? Did it even occur to you to maybe google this bonkers claim?! Now personally I don't feel like this neoliberal, white supremacist, settler-colonial project which was founded on a continuing genocide is much of a model for anything regardless of how long it's lasted, but it does in fact have a fucking constitution!
What's really depressing and frustrating about all this is that at no point will this experience ever tempt you even for a second to consider you could be wrong about other things, too. 55+ years on this earth and you haven't bothered to learn the critical thinking skills of an eight year old.
Just that everything it says about its geopolitical rivals can be assumed to be true.