"SBU Drones Destroyed $100 Million Russian Radar System in Crimea
Sources from Ukraine’s special services told Kyiv Post about the latest successful SBU operation, which has rendered Russian air defenses in Crimea “blind.”"
1/ Okay, while the Trump verdict has been very riveting, I'd like to talk about failure states in democracies for a bit.
Any stable democracy needs peaceful transfers of power. If a ruling government loses in an election and thus loses power, they are free to moan about it - but in the end, they should leave office without violence because (unless they screwed up bigly) they realize that they will likely return to power one day. They are invested in the system, and do not want to overthrow the basic democratic order of their country - because it works for them.
Thus, a country needs multiple parties with an investment in democracy, who are willing to form a government - but who are also willing to leave peacefully. If this is not the case, then the democracy in question is in a failure state.
An good (or rather, very very bad) example of a "proportional representation" democracy in a failure state was the late Weimar Republic. Starting in 1932, the NSDAP (Nazis) and the KDP (Communists) received a majority of the vote and thus representatives. Both wanted to overthrow the Republic and its democracy in its own way, and thus it became impossible to form a democratic government - let alone switch between different ones. But the Weimar Republic had problems in this regard even earlier, since there were numerous miniscule parties with only a very small number of candidates. They only cared about a small number of issues, had no motivation to compromise, and thus were not willing to join a working government.
4/ We are seeing what this means in the #USA (I don't follow #UK politics as closely, but my impression is that it's not quite that bad yet). The #Republicans have fully committed to #fascism . The #Democrats are the only viable non-fascist voting option, and thus must not lose power if whatever democracy the USA has left is to survive. In a healthy democracy, voters could voice their dissatisfaction with the ruling party by voting for another party - but that's no longer possible in the USA, because if they do that in sufficiently large numbers, the USA will no longer have a democracy.
Thus, the only hopes the USA have of surviving this is for the Democrats to hold out until either (a) the Republicans reform themselves and purge their fascists (which seems exceedingly unlikely), or (b) collapse and are replaced by a party that is committed to democracy and the peaceful transform of power. Which also seems exceedingly unlikely.
The whole situation in the USA is horrible, and I feel for all Americans who suffer under it - although if the USA becomes a fully fascist nation, no person on Earth will ultimately be safe. But I feel that this whole mess is also a searing condemnation of the "First Past the Post" voting system, since it makes reaching such a failure state fairly easy.