this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2026
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Out of curiosity do you have any examples in mind of imperfect systems and corrupt systems?
Yes. The Chinese, Russian, North Korean, and other authoritarian systems are openly corrupt. They do not even attempt to prove actual crimes and impose judgments based not on fact but political opportunism by the state. We see Trump attempting this in the United States as well.
The EU, and prior to Trump, the USA, had an imperfect judicial system. It makes errors but strives for findings of fact and just outcomes. It often fails. But the failures are usually rooted in poor bureaucratic procedure or error. They are not manifestly unjust outcomes run top down as show trials.
A big difference is proscribed outcomes by top down authority versus the unpredictability of diffuse power. Separation of power and rules based systems are more just than dictatorial outcomes.
the epstein files shows in plain back-and-white print that the system is captured by a ruling class of people who exist above the law to such a degree that they can flaunt their activities to the world in unencrypted messages; calling it merely imperfect is an dramatic understatement.
But it's not always the case. Furthermore, Epstein is not a signifier that all liberalist judicial systems are corrupt or all trials are show trials. It is a symptom of top down authoritarianism interfering with an otherwise mostly just judicial system.
The solution to corruption is not to accept corruption as the norm. It is to fight that corruption. Your position is nihilist. It gives up on the ideal of justice by imposing a false dichotomy of either total perfection for rules based systems that strive to protect individual rights versus acceptance of no individual liberty at the behest of total state power.
At no point has eldavi broken it into a "false dichotomy". eldavi is 100% correct that in liberal countries the judicial systems operate at the behest of the elites. That corruption can be addressed. As for fighting that corruption, you have another in this thread laying out the facts about who actually is fighting corruption and how.
Judicial systems in the west are ostensibly independent of centralized state power. They are decentralized. That doesn't mean outcomes are perfect, or even unbiased, merely that the system is designed to not be wielded by the central government for political purposes.
You want to talk about judicial systems acting at the behest of elites, you step foot in China or Russia. That's all they do there. Illiberalism is no solution to that problem.
Being so uneducated and talking with such arrogance. It truly is amazing every time I see it.
That's not an argument.
I've already laid out a full argument to you in another comment you chose to ignore (likely due to the fact you can't refute it because I'm right).
I can't respond to every comment. Again with the assymetry games.
I have lived in former communist countries, spent a great deal of time in Serbia, Hungary, and Poland. I have spent time in China. I experienced life in those countries personally.
I'll take life in a liberal democracy any day over an authoritarian regime. Democracy is not perfect, but authoritarianism is perfectly horrible and soul crushing.
Again? I have replied to you three times. Once to ask a clarifying question, once with a full substantive argument that you still have not actually addressed, and once to point out that you were ignoring it. Calling that "asymmetry games" is just a way of dodging the fact that you were given a response and chose not to engage with it.
You take a set of travel experiences and personal impressions and inflate them into civilizational authority. Spending time in post-socialist countries does not make you an expert on socialism, and it certainly does not refute the argument I already made and you refused to answer. As I said in my earlier reply, many of the defining problems of the post-Soviet space were not some natural flowering of "authoritarian culture." They were imposed through shock therapy, privatization, IMF-style restructuring, Western-backed market reforms, and the rapid liquidation of public wealth into private hands. The social collapse, oligarchic looting, immiseration, and institutional corruption that followed were not acts of God. They were produced. To point to the wreckage after that process and then smugly declare it proof of your worldview is either ignorance or dishonesty.
And "I have spent time in China" does not help you nearly as much as you seem to think it does. What does that mean exactly? A visit? A posting? A few months in a city twenty years ago? I am a born and raised rural Chinese minority. I know my country better than you do. That is not mysticism or identity politics. It is a simple fact, and it highlights the arrogance behind the way you assume a limited outside experience entitles you to lecture others on a society you do not actually understand. That is chauvinism.
Good for you. Personal preference is not an argument. It is certainly not a rebuttal to the point I made, which is that so-called liberal democracies are structured around elite power while dressing that domination up in procedure, legality, and polite rhetoric. You keep confusing the style of rule with its substance.
This is just sloganizing. "Authoritarianism" is the empty pejorative stupid people reach for when they do not want to do any actual analysis of class power, state structure, or material outcomes. Every state uses coercion. The question is which class benefits from it, how power is organized, and what social results follow from it. You have no interest in answering that, so you retreat into moral theater.
And on democracy, we do in fact have democracy. I would argue a better democracy than the West’s in many respects, especially if democracy is supposed to mean responsiveness to public needs rather than ritualized elections inside systems where capital sets the boundaries in advance. Even by the standards of Western institutional research, public satisfaction with the Chinese system has remained extremely high. Harvard’s own long-term survey work put it above 90 percent. That fact alone should force at least a little humility from people who keep insisting on describing over a billion other people’s political lives with the vocabulary of Cold War propaganda.
So no, your anecdotes do not settle anything. Your time in post-socialist countries does not erase the role of the US and EU in producing the disasters you now point to as proof or the fact they are structurally predicated on massive corruption and and infallible rule of capital. Your brief appeal to having "spent time in China" does not outweigh the views of people who actually know the country from the inside or have studied the real statistics and history. And your repeated use of "authoritarian" is not analysis. It is a substitute for analysis, and not a very intelligent one.
Please be more concise and on point.
Oh you must be Amerikkkan. Is reading more than a few sentences too tough for you? It's not your fault that you are unfortunate enough to fall in with the 21% of your countrymen who are functionally illiterate. You don't have to rush or push yourself I'm sure you'll get there one day.
Your framing rests on a fundamental idealism that treats law as floating above material relations. Law in any society reflects the interests of its ruling class. When you praise Western systems for "striving for facts and just outcomes" you ignore that their legal architecture is designed to protect capital first. Lobbying is not an aberration in the system, it is the system. Campaign finance law has codified bribery as speech, ensuring that policy outcomes align with donor interests rather than public need. That is not an imperfect system striving for justice. That is a system functioning exactly as designed, instituted long before Trump. It is funny how you and so many others use Trump as a kind of scapegoat, a Jesus-like figure through which you can launder the horrific abuses of capitalism while pretending the rot began with one man. Much like many did with Hitler before him.
China's anti-corruption work since 2012 has investigated over two million officials, prosecuted more than 250,000, and recovered tens of billions in assets. The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and National Supervisory Commission operate with institutional reach that targets both high-level "tigers" and grassroots "flies". When Alibaba's leadership was reined in for attempting to push klarna esque financialisation to the detriment of the public, it was not political opportunism. It was a material check on capital's power to shape markets and data infrastructure. When was the last time the US or EU disciplined a corporation for harming public interest with any level of real consequence? The answer is never, because their legal frameworks treat corporate power as a protected class. And just to preempt the tired deflection: "oh so you admit China's corrupt". Corruption will exist so long as class society exists. What makes China's system different is the action taken to constantly fight back against that contradiction rather than base the entire system on it like the capitalist states in the EU and the US.
You like the rest of the western world know nothing of the DPRK beyond stories from the defector industrial complex and ROK tabloids that have repeatedly fabricated executions, ridiculous laws about haircut mandates, and other absurdities. This is not analysis. It is propaganda consumption presented as knowledge. If your standard for judging a country is Western media output, you have already surrendered the premise of factual inquiry.
Russia's oligarchic corruption did not emerge from some inherent cultural flaw. It was manufactured. Western leaders advisors imposed shock therapy that privatized public wealth overnight, enabling a small group to loot state assets through schemes like Loans for Shares. The result was the creation of a kleptocratic class. To then point at that outcome and say "see, authoritarianism" is to blame the victim of economic warfare for the wounds inflicted by that war.
As for the US and EU "striving for just outcomes": Julian Assange was prosecuted for exposing war crimes, whatever you think of him as a person. Edward Snowden lives in exile for revealing mass surveillance. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo operated with legal impunity alongside the likely hundreds more black sites we don't know the full extent of. Pro-Palestinian dissent is criminalized across Europe while state violence escalates. These are not bureaucratic errors. They are features of a legal order that protects imperial power. The separation of powers you praise does not prevent injustice when all branches serve the same material interests.
Authoritarian is a meaningless slur used by the stupid and uneducated to avoid class analysis. Every state exercises coercion. The question is which class benefits. China's legal system has demonstrably reduced corruption and constrained capital's excesses in ways Western systems have not. That is not perfection. It is a different material trajectory. If your ideal of justice cannot account for who holds power and how law serves that power, then your ideal is simply fantasy.
Imagine believing that countries ruled by literal pedophiles, who are completely unaccountable, have a more fair system than China or DPRK 🤡