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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   36586 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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Dictators always follow the same pattern – start with breaking the two-term rule and then break the country.

A lot of places don't have a two term rule or anything similar, leading to prime ministers who sit 10-15 years and there are no issues. In short, I'm not really understanding the doom and gloom in your post.

All those places have serious issues.

Most places have serious issues.

I don't subscribe to the view that every country is basically the same. Serious issues in poor countries are much much worse than those in rich countries.

I agree completely. Where I don't agree is that if we just had voting booths and term limits, those problems would be in any meaningful way affected.

Netherlands, a famous hotbed of authoritarianism and dictators, currently has its longing serving prime minister in history surpassing 3 American president terms.

I don't know even his name. Apparently he is of no significance because the system is stronger than the leader. Very timely tweet from Tabeb in this regard: https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1584882478287757312

Stop complaining about the turnover in Britain. You don't seem to get it. It is much healthier and more stable than Russia, Saudi Arabia, and other nations that have NO turnover. The virtue of the system is that it does not depend on a single person

This is why we should abolish term limits if we want to protect America from dictators.

Ironically the PRC has been the opposite. From 1986 until 2018 the office of the president which is considered largely ceremonial had an official two-term limit while general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party does not have a formal term limit. Wikipedia seems to think that the general secretary post had an informal two-term limit after Mao (they mention it on Xi's bio page) in-spite of Jiang Zemin holding the post three times as well. Jiang might be categorized as dictatorial but that's going to be heavily influenced by Falun Gong aligned sources.

If the country has a term limit, and the leader breaks it, it's very likely they're going to move to be a permanent dictator. And most countries without term limits have weaker executives, where most of the power is in how the party votes in parliament, not in the executive themselves.

Saying that countries have weaker executives is irrelevant to the fact that there are people in power who sit there for years.

My country, generally considered one of the best in the world when it comes to democracy stuff, had a president who sat in office for 20 years. An office that had the executive power to refuse to sign laws into effect, which the president used more than once. During the same time the prime minister had held office for 12 years as such. You can play pretend and say that because the country is run by a parliament filled with political parties there is some wiggle room for... whatever it is you think is not 'dictatorship', but in reality, the prime minster was also the guy that had executive control over the biggest party in the country and was very buddy buddy with another party leader of a very big party which meant they had de facto complete control over the country. Having a weaker executive was irrelevant. These guys could do what they want, which they did.

I don't see why the label of 'dictator' is in any way relevant nor, still, do I understand the doom and gloom of your post or the implied optimism of alternatives.

Winnie-the-Panda getting a third term is not news, although it is an important event. The composition of the new PSC may be - Western media is saying that it is all "hard-liners" and this is unexpected. I am not an expert, so the only thing I can say is that the promotion of Li Qiang (who was responsible for the Shanghai lockdowns) looks like bad news, but I thought it was expected.

The ejection of Hu Jintao arguably is news. I don't know what it means though.

We can't tell how much of the market drop is reaction to the political news because there was a lousy economic data release at roughly the same time. FWIW the FT blames the economic data.

Winnie-the-Panda

What’s with this? We wouldn’t call Trump “The Orange Cheeto-in-Chief” here, just bizarre

If Donald Trump was aggressively censoring media comparing him to an Orange Cheeto, I would be calling him The Orange Cheeto-in-Chief at every safe opportunity.

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