bbor • yesterday at 7:04 PM

  democratic states like Iran

...whelp, this thread is gonna get shut down. Everyone was being reasonable, but all it takes is one person to say some out-of-pocket shit like "the country currently massacring protestors is the real democracy" for it to descend below HN's standards for political discourse.

  non-democratic states like north korea

And FWIW, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is ostensibly a democracy, too. AFAIR the list of openly non-democratic states is quite small: Saudi Arabia, some microstates like the Holy See, and ~6 non-micro "Executive constitutional monarchies" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_monarchy#List_o...)