I'd like to be enlightened on the following aspect of how democratic the USA are.
Let's assume that the political system works as expected (i.e. ignore that everything is decided by big $$).
Considering that USA uses military force, spying and monopoly of global currency to enforce its laws and promote its policies worldwide, shouldn't the whole world population participate to the USA elections for it to claim being a democracy ?
In the current situation (and again, assuming an utopia inside USA borders), it's 330 million people trying (and effectively succeeding for the most part) to oppress 8.1 billion.
By that metric, I'd say that North Korea is much more "démocratic" simply because they oppress much less people.

Since we are focusing on the penal consequences of nonexistence of free will (there are other aspects to explore), I'd argue the punishment can still have some potential to avert the societal meltdown:
If the goal is to prevent individuals from engaging behaviors that are considered harmful, we need some means to influence them.
Creating the perspective of dire consequences is one of possible means to exert such an influence.
In fact it matters not whether the individual has free well or not what matters is how they react to the situation we create, if it results in lower crime rate then the method might be considered effective (while other approaches might be more efficient).
It seems common knowledge that epileptic symptoms are not affected by the punishment perspective, but, in fact, could also be sustained by some research. Hence punishing harmful behavior caused by epilepsy seems pointless.

Then, maybe there are better strategies, like education which, ultimately are also is a method to influence to adjust the behavior.

What actually worries me is that the fact that we do not have free well might lead to the conclusion that we don't need a free society either.

I'd love to have a look at those games, does anyone know if they are available ?

It occurred to me that, in fact, money is actually a token that gives You the right of vote over, among other things, the usage of the limited amount of natural resources available to humans.
Whence, whenever You pay for something, You need to be aware that You vote for two things:
1) The use of those limited resources for the product You are acquiring
2) You forego Your right to vote equivalent to the margin of the manufacturer and all of the intermediary

Hence for those who are unhappy about the resources depletion by this space tourism, You need to be aware that those resources are the "votes" of people who allowed the tourists to accumulate wealth and decide on behalf of the humanity on how to use them.

Whatever improves the global awareness of the problem is a good thing, even Greta with all her misguided rants made more good than bad.
However, it would make more impact if it could allow anyone to explore his own impact based on his consumerist behavior.
For instance, does it matter if an electric plant that burns coal is located in China, if it powers a plant that produces goods that I use ?
If I wasn't there to purchase them, there would be less CO2 emissions in China therefore, ultimately, I am causing those emissions, not the "evil Chinese regime".

Gab, a Texas based 900K users strong social media is being corrupted into anti-democrat mouthpiece by Russians!
For sure, with such a massive blow, democracy is done for.

Looks like, as a species, we are looking for an optimum in a field composed of many dimensions.

One such dimension is the specialization: So far we were moving from generalists to specialists. However it seems to be a maximum there, when a person becomes to specialized to be able to grasp a picture big enough to make sensible decisions in its own field.

Another dimension is the stress we can put on an individual: To little stress is a path to sloppiness, to much stress leads to the scarcity of fit candidates.

Yet another dimension is quantity of information we expect an individual to process (some how related to the stress dimension but right now it seems that we are moving to lower stress and more information at the same time, after all it may not be the same variable).

There is also the alignment of interests: it can range from an authoritarian planned regime to anarchy

I probably miss other dimensions and my point is that we need to find a good compromise in order to produce efficient individuals that will be able to keep the civilization going.

Back to our story, it's important to understand that we are talking about multiple dimensions at the same time here:
- grades = stress and selectivity
- relevance of the discipline = specialization & information overload.
- university performance indicators, financial vs competent graduates = alignment of interests

Striking a good balance seems like a very delicate task.

take a guess

Define "confirmed intelligence".
Confirmed by what ? A tweeter post ?
Did it ever occur to You, that the "intelligence service" isn't supposed to share their "intelligence" with outside, unless they try to achieve some specific goal.
Did it ever occur to You that spreading truthful information to large masses was never part of "intelligence" mission ?

"Their entire goal is genocide" where did You get that information from ? Ukrainian "intelligence" maybe ?
How do You reconcile this "genocide" goal with the fact that they are already rebuilding Mariupol ?

Seriously, it's appalling that such nonsense gets "informative" score on Slashdot, it shows how low the IQ of the audience has sunk.
This site was supposed to attract people with critical thinking eager to challenge official narrative and look into the subtleties of any topic being discussed.
Here instead we just have a copy-paste of propaganda by one of the sides.

"Would you like to troll some more?" Amnesty international is now taking care of that.

Nope, that's the ache-typical Anglo-Saxon character.
Bojo and G walkin bush come to mind specifically.

"what does russia do on the soil of the foreign state?"
Basically they are kicking out the puppet power installed there by the West, which is responsible of a genocide in the East of Ukraine.

"What competences, and exactly why, it has decided to bring in there?"
They decided to take control back because russophobia, Neo-nazi ideology and militarization there exceeded their tolerance threshold.
The aforementioned threshold is not a constant value BTW but a function of their perceived capacity to resist the pressure of the anticipated retaliation.

"Get out right now, form of the shit."
Good luck with enforcing that order.

Arguably, they are doing it an a rather rough manner, which marks a blatant failure of their diplomacy and soft power, but this stands nowhere near the barbarity of United States in the countries the have invaded in past 20 years, let alone horrible act of state terrorism which 77th anniversary was yesterday.
And, considering the scale of the conflict, compared to the civil war that was raging in Ukrain before the Feb 24th, they are also much more considerate of civil population than the Kiev regime since 2014 in the Donbass region.

Call me Russian troll as much as You like, it's not as if I gave a slightest f*ck about the wicked opinion of a representative of morally broken western "values".
Also You can spare me the bullshit about sovereignty and territorial integrity, on one cares about that on either side anyway, that just a pretext to vociferate and nothing more.

Same in Ukraine (actually worse).
You can get jail time for doubting war crimes (which are yet to be duly proven in court and some of those claims were confirmed to be fabricated, which led to the dismissal of Kiev official Lioudmyla Denisova) of Russian army in a *private* conversation.
There is a dedicated department to chase and lock down critics of Zelensky.

Yet, somehow, Zelensky is portrayed as a champion of democratic world.

You might disagree with the reasons for prohibiting the material being published, but it is literally prohibited in Russia, not "prohibited".
And Yes, Google violates the law there, again, regardless of Your opinion about the aforementioned law.
Putting quotes around facts that You dislike doesn't make them go away, deal with it.

"Of women, 43% reported having been excluded from a publication, compared with 38% of men. The most common explanation was that others had underestimated their contribution, however, women were twice as likely to cite discrimination or bias as an explanation, while men were more likely to say their contributions did not warrant authorship."

So the other explanation is that women are twice as likely to blame external factors for their lack of performance while men are more honest when assessing their shortcomings.