I need to host my emails somewhere. This means that you can't reject the EU in isolation, you have to compare it to the alternatives. And the most prevalent alternative is the US

Now of course if somebody has a better alternative that's neither in the EU nor US (nor Russia, or China) that'd be interesting to hear about

The post is about moving stuff from US to EU, so it's not like the US is brought up out of nowhere.

The comment does not exist in a vacuum. It exists in a thread where the topic is, eminently, migrating away from US services to EU ones.

> critiquing the authoritarianism going on in the EU

What?

AFAIK there's no murdering of citizens going on in any EU member country by the same countries government at the moment.

Trends are various. You had Poland remove rightwing goverment 2 years ago (yes and elect righwing president few months ago). Romania electing a European centric president.

We can go on. EU is not a single country, not a single community of people.

>(though currently a little bit less marked)

Again this is a false equivalence, 'a little less marked' isn't close to imparting the true state of things and to be honest a little disingenuous.

The EU is not in full motion to dismantle democracy across her 27 states. The US should it not turn this around in the midterms is finished as a liberal democracy.

So 'ah yes but Hungary' doesn't persuade me even though I'll concede it's a problem for the EU. If Tisza is elected in April, Hungary will be on course to turn things around. So you're comparing 1 out of 27 to 50 out of 50 states.

Europeans are so blind to how they are essentially on the same path as the US, the US just got there first.

Not really.

Most European countries have parliamentary democracies.

It's not a winner-takes-all system ala presidential and semi-presidential republics where effectively individuals:

1. rule without opposition. There's no opposition it's not represented in that branch.

2. rule without even needing support of their own parties. The Italian prime minister or the German chancellor have to fight every day in parliament to have support of their parties and the other parties coalitions.

3. a single individual can claim popular mandate. In parliamentary systems you vote for parties/coalitions, not individuals

There's a reason why this authoritarian trend goes from the Philippines, Nicaragua, to Belarus, to Turkey, to Russia, to most African countries and now US. They are all presidential republics.

The last parliamentary democracy to turn authoritarian has been...Sri Lanka. Almost 50 years ago. Presidential ones? It's basically every year.

Systems with winner-takes-all mechanics do not represent voters, and power is too concentrated.

Parliamentary democracies might be labeled as less efficient, that I can agree, but they have strong antibodies to such people.

See Austria or the Netherlands as examples where strong far right authoritarian-wannabes individuals became prime ministers...and then nothing happened and their governments didn't last.

I’m in the US and generally pretty level-headed. Nothing makes me become a red-blooded patriot nationalist temporarily faster than seeing Europeans completely ignore the similarities in our political ills. It always boils down to, “but it’s the good kind of authoritarianism we have that preserves social order!!!” as if that has never failed to produce desired results. Thanks for being much more rational. We have a concerning political trend here in the US, it can’t be denied, but the EU is following in step.

Just saying, the vast majority of services people are moving from would be US based given it is where all of big tech comes from. So comparing it to the US is relevant?

If you're trying to say the eu isn't a saint either, sure.

Is the commenter the "delusionally stupid" one or did you mean something else?

What a disingenuous comparison. The wiki article you've linked ("List of killings by law enforcement officers in Germany") sums to 552 people over the last 100 years. In contrast, the corresponding wiki article on the US ("Lists of killings by law enforcement officers in the United States" [1]) estimates more than 900 deaths per year. Indeed, the number of slayings is so great that the article does not tabulate the sum in a single table (as the German article does) but instead links to separate wiki articles with tabulated results by month.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_killings_by_law_enfor...