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Comment by shadykiller | Hacker News Reader

Not much different from many countries e.g. India

Many Muslim countries are also skewed to elect conservative Muslim government. It's not they hate democracy. They just don't trust normal people to make the right decisions.

Apparently, including themselves.

How much of deferring to someone else to make "the right decisions" is looking for someone to blame other than themselves when something goes wrong?

It took a while for me to get what you were saying. But it is true.

They don't trust themselves. They trust government. Which is the opposite in America.

Issue of blame is more of an afterthought, once there is no choice to make.

But when things become bad, an open society is sought by people who have something to provide. Those are educated, skilled, thoughtful, serving, and maybe sacrificial and volunteering kind of people. For a society to have more people like this, it needs historical and cultural precursors so to become more "democratic" or open.

It's more like there is a social philosophy that doesn't afford ideas contradicting orthodoxy. Free elections allow extremists to gain popular support because they're all trying to demonstrate they're the "True Scotsman". In slow increments for Turkey's case. Faster for Egypt.

I am not sure if I understand your comment. Are you saying conservative Muslims are not normal people?

I think the favorable interpretation of his comment is that by normal he means secular.

These are always funny statements because they sort of betray what the person thinks are normal. There's a famous one with world renowned football coach Pep Guardiola:

> My kids go to school with Indian people, black people, normal people, people from everywhere

https://streamable.com/ga3fg

It's pretty easy to forgive that but it's still funny.

Normal as in not exclusively conservative or liberal. Normal as in neutral. Normal as in undecided. Normal as in constantly changing.

Should have said general people. I need to pay more poetic attention to words.

It's sad that we're comparing ourselves to India, rather than something like sweden or switzerland.

I mean, India is more democratic. And there's more than two viable parties.

>I mean, India is more democratic

Is it? By what metric? Also, my point isn't that India is better or worse than the US, it's that it's not a country we should aspire to, considering there are better functioning countries out there.

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