Bryan, I feel like I shouldn't have to explain this to someone as generally anti-statist as you, but this is awfully shortsighted.
The big danger here is not that some innocent young tattooed guys might get caught up in the anti-gang sweeps. The big danger is that if Bukele can tell the police "go round up all the young tattooed guys, don…
Bryan, I feel like I shouldn't have to explain this to someone as generally anti-statist as you, but this is awfully shortsighted.
The big danger here is not that some innocent young tattooed guys might get caught up in the anti-gang sweeps. The big danger is that if Bukele can tell the police "go round up all the young tattooed guys, don't worry about due process," then he can also tell them "go round up all the journalists who write articles critical of the government, don't worry about due process." And then, among many other problems, his political incentive to actually keep crime low is gone, because if crime goes back up, the people who might protest against that are going to be in jail, or keep silent for fear of jail. Authoritarian leaders suppress dissent like this under the guise of crime prevention all the time, so this isn't some speculative hypothetical.
You’ve obviously never heard of anarcho-tyranny. We just lived through mass riots being led by politicians who simultaneously orders everyone to engage in mass house arrest.
A government can simultaneously let criminals run amok and use state power to terrorize whoever they want. Letting criminals do as they please is no guarantee of freedom for the innocent, in fact it’s a sign of government using power arbitrarily.
In fact not enforcing the law is a way for governments to use indirect force against enemies while claiming not to do so.
Sorry, murderers and street shitters running wild is not guaranteeing anyone’s rights.
Not all authoritarians are alike. There's a world of difference between those who genuinely want to run a functioning, modern state (like Lee Kuan Yew, Chiang Kai Shek, Ngo Dinh Diem, Mustafa Kemal, Muhammad Reza, and hopefully Bukele), and psychopathic terrorists with unlimited lust for power and demented visions of glory, bound by no rules aside from doing whatever they believe they can get away with (like Putin,* Rodríguez de Francia, the Ayatollahs, Hitler, Chávez, and every Marxist-Leninist dictator ever). The former is compatible with a rules-based international order; the latter can never be.
* Don't let the revisionists fool you. We've known Putin was a terrorist since September of 1999.
I guess it helped that Singapore is so small; so reality checks came very quickly and couldn't be avoided.
For eg Russia, there's enough size and oil wealth, that Putin only has to face reality when he loses a war he started.
(I think LKY had better intentions than Putin. And he was also more competent. But I am saying that the closer contact with reality helped keep LKY honest.)
I think part of what kept LKY honest was that his goal was to make Singapore from a third-world country into a first-world country. His plan to make this happen was to develop Singapore into a hub of trade, business and foreign investment. But it's hard to do that if you have a reputation for authoritarian brutality. By committing himself to globalism, he effectively allowed the rest of the international community to keep him in check. If he didn't care much about making Singapore a prosperous and internationally-respected country and just wanted to solidify control over it, things might have gone differently.
Bryan, I feel like I shouldn't have to explain this to someone as generally anti-statist as you, but this is awfully shortsighted.
The big danger here is not that some innocent young tattooed guys might get caught up in the anti-gang sweeps. The big danger is that if Bukele can tell the police "go round up all the young tattooed guys, don't worry about due process," then he can also tell them "go round up all the journalists who write articles critical of the government, don't worry about due process." And then, among many other problems, his political incentive to actually keep crime low is gone, because if crime goes back up, the people who might protest against that are going to be in jail, or keep silent for fear of jail. Authoritarian leaders suppress dissent like this under the guise of crime prevention all the time, so this isn't some speculative hypothetical.
You’ve obviously never heard of anarcho-tyranny. We just lived through mass riots being led by politicians who simultaneously orders everyone to engage in mass house arrest.
A government can simultaneously let criminals run amok and use state power to terrorize whoever they want. Letting criminals do as they please is no guarantee of freedom for the innocent, in fact it’s a sign of government using power arbitrarily.
In fact not enforcing the law is a way for governments to use indirect force against enemies while claiming not to do so.
Sorry, murderers and street shitters running wild is not guaranteeing anyone’s rights.
Not all authoritarians are alike. There's a world of difference between those who genuinely want to run a functioning, modern state (like Lee Kuan Yew, Chiang Kai Shek, Ngo Dinh Diem, Mustafa Kemal, Muhammad Reza, and hopefully Bukele), and psychopathic terrorists with unlimited lust for power and demented visions of glory, bound by no rules aside from doing whatever they believe they can get away with (like Putin,* Rodríguez de Francia, the Ayatollahs, Hitler, Chávez, and every Marxist-Leninist dictator ever). The former is compatible with a rules-based international order; the latter can never be.
* Don't let the revisionists fool you. We've known Putin was a terrorist since September of 1999.
I guess it helped that Singapore is so small; so reality checks came very quickly and couldn't be avoided.
For eg Russia, there's enough size and oil wealth, that Putin only has to face reality when he loses a war he started.
(I think LKY had better intentions than Putin. And he was also more competent. But I am saying that the closer contact with reality helped keep LKY honest.)
I think part of what kept LKY honest was that his goal was to make Singapore from a third-world country into a first-world country. His plan to make this happen was to develop Singapore into a hub of trade, business and foreign investment. But it's hard to do that if you have a reputation for authoritarian brutality. By committing himself to globalism, he effectively allowed the rest of the international community to keep him in check. If he didn't care much about making Singapore a prosperous and internationally-respected country and just wanted to solidify control over it, things might have gone differently.