Is the Netherlands a dictatorship? Do they have a single personalist leader who rules with an iron fist? No, they are clearly a democracy, they simply have a functional transit planning system the prioritizes outcomes over process and does not have a million veto points.

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By no reasonable definition do people in Amsterdam live under a dictatorship. The idea that democracy is in any way reliant upon a million veto points for public transit is insane.

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Literally, yes. Citizen’s time is finite, there’s nothing inherently representative about the people that show up to the meeting, and delay has real and tangible costs in terms of what gets built. A project millions will benefit from being held up by some random cranks is not meaningfully democratic

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They let a guy with active blood cuts and 36 hours straight without sleep play in an American football game?

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Honestly there’s a weird kind of inverse misogyny that pokes through when people assume Elizabeth Holmes can’t be a liar in the exact kind of bleary, obvious, self-delusional way that Donald Trump and Elon Musk are - that she must be using the feminine arts of mind control to weave a careful web.

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