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I'm starting a new top-level regarding trigger happy Iceman meets wine mom in Minneapolis because, rather than debating the videos, I'd like to focus more on a compare and contrast to get a true culture war angle. People have made an analogy to the woman who died on Jan 6th but I don't think it lands strongly enough. Permit me to cut closer to the bone, friends.
The only fatality on Jan 6th was an unarmed woman being shot by a federal agent[1] because she was opposing what she considered an illegitimate government action. Liberals tearlessly argued this is what happens when you Fuck Around while conservatives argued she was righteously Resisting (TM).
Today the players are the same but the jerseys are flipped. Liberals cry with so, so many tears of empathy for the dead woman in the car while conservatives argue they were obstructing a legitimate state function and put the officer in danger and this is what happens when you Fuck Around.
In broad strokes it's clear neither side cares about democracy or rule of law per se. Conservative faith in rule of law evaporates when it says no to Trump and liberal empathy for the scrappy civil disobedients dries up when it's a Chud. Both sides are happy with mob violence when it's their side doing it and cry tyranny whenever they Find Out.
Both were fine, if not justified (the latter as the narrower question).
In general, people overestimate the risk of tyranny and underestimate the risk of anarchy.
How many truly tyrannical, totalitarian states are there in the world? North Korea, obviously. Eritrea, to some extent. After that the lines get a lot more blurred. You certainly wouldn’t want to be a dissident in Iran or China, but the vast majority of the population is not really ‘enslaved by the state’ (or ‘under constant, totalitarian absolute surveillance with extreme penalties for the tiniest stepping out of line’) the way that people are in a true tyranny.
Even across the 20th century, true tyranny was rare. Neither the Gestapo nor the KGB were capable of it, for example, nor was any CCP domestic intelligence agency, certainly until very recently. In fact, the only major Marxist nation that was truly, terrifyingly totalitarian in the 1984 sense was East Germany.
By contrast, how many ungovernable shitholes are there in the world in which criminals, gangs and others run riot, with the central government hopelessly weak, corrupt or otherwise powerless to stop them? Many, many more. Half of the Sahel, Haiti and a large chunk of Central America, Papua New Guinea, big parts of Somalia and Northern Kenya, large parts of Nigeria and Niger, parts of Syria etc.
We should be much more concerned about anarchy than tyranny.
The failure state of tyranny has the potential to be much more deadly. The highest crime-related murder rates in the world tend to cap out around 100 per 100,000 per year. The Khmer Rouge murder rate was something like 7,000 per 100,000 per year.
Even in Somalia it's not clear that the anarchy of the present is any worse than the tyranny of Siad Barre.
And of course, to bang my usual drum, lockdowns were tyranny, so that made the number of tyrannical states be at least 100 just a handful of years ago.
I don't what method you used to arrive at this figure but I'd mention that according to the Pol Pot biography by Philip Short, about 3/4 of all excess deaths in Cambodia attributed to the Khmer Rogue were due to malnutrition and disease, in turn caused by government negligence and incompetence, plus the wholesale collapse of state capacity after five years of brutal civil war during the US-aligned military dictatorship.
With regard to Somalia I won't disagree with your point outright but would mention that the repression during the last years of Barre's rule was pretty damn bad by anyone's standards: the wholesale slaughter of "treasonous" clans, indiscriminate aerial bombing, mass rapes, the destruction of water reservoirs and livestock.
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I don’t think counting extremely destructive, ideologically motivated civil conflict as “tyranny” is particularly productive in this discussion, or else plenty of early modern European countries that don’t really count ask ‘tyrannies’ are tyrannies. A totalitarian tyranny isn’t “when you kill half of your population for being the wrong race/religion/sect/caste”, that’s far too broad and common throughout human history. Humans living in tribes before the Neolithic revolution also saw very high male death rates to murder per year in many cases, is that ‘tyranny’?
The reality is that North Korea and Eritrea both probably still have higher quality of life than Haiti right now.
Taking GDP per capita as a rough proxy, NK is considerably worse than Haiti.
This just goes to show how bad GDP is as a measure. There is no way this is correct.
I don't think this is a problem with GDP as a measure, but a problem with measuring North Korea's GDP. Kim's regime doesn't exactly put out accurate economic reports.
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I'm not a political science expert, but I tend to agree with this. Another factor to consider is that tyrants are always tempted to start wars with other countries as a of holding on to power.
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