This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Tldr; Post trying to explain a facet of the Libertarian thinking process and their inherent disdain towards the government.
The Monopoly on Violence
Seems to be the distinguishing feature of an entity that is or isn't a government.
Imagine you live in a lawless land. There are various warring gangs. Your business is repeatedly ransacked by any of the gangs over and over again. However, one of these gangs gains an advantage over the other gangs. A gang member comes by and offers you protection, provided you offer him a share of your revenue. If you refuse, his gang proceeds to ransack your business and possibly do any number of bad things to you. Given you don't want to die and that his gang is doing better than the other ones, you take his offer. The "tax" you pay him now is ultimately just another cost of doing business.
This is commonplace in many parts of Mexico. Large swathes of area are effectively governed by whichever Cartel has their reigns over that area.
Take a look at a hood in Philadelphia vs Juarez. Despite Juarez having 5 times the violent crime and homicide rate as Philadephia, its looks more functional and livable. The streets the cleaner, the infrastructure isn't as dilapidated, and there are more businesses. This is because the Cartels are very much running shit there. Unlike the gangs in Philadelphia, due to the Cartels influence being that much greater, they have an incentive to make sure things are going smoothly, because ultimately they own the shops and need the roads to work. They have their people in all levels of government.
The high crime rate doesn't affect anyone who doesn't get in the cartels way and as such despite its magnitude doesn't worsen the quality of life in the area to the extent it does in Philadelphia. The point I am making is that if a criminal organization becomes influential enough, they start functioning as a government.
A peace march in Michoacan against cartel violence faced a counter protest in favor of the cartel. Both crowds were equally large in numbers. And were filled with "normal people". Women, children and elderly people on both crowds.
Why did so many people in that area prefer to be governed by the cartel instead of the.. government?
Said very simply. As a libertarian, I don't see much difference between a government and a sufficiently competent/potent drug cartel.
They both take your money by force.
They both kill you if you get in their way.
They both want things to run smoothly, one of them obviously so they can make the most amount of money, the other one.. so they can make the most votes(money)?
If you propose to the average western person that he be ruled by the Cartel (and not the Mexican government), that proposition would be unbearable for him, even if he pays taxes, doesn't try to create his own country, and buys weed from a legal pharmacy and not a street dealer. Yet he would probably prefer to live in a hood in Juarez and not a hood Philadelphia.
And the elephant in the room is not lost to the libertarian. The cartels are inhumanly brutal. But governments are not ?
If there is so much money in drugs that cartels can form paramilitaries, govern cities and buy out big wigs in the police force, why not just legalize drugs??
Why not let the drug money be a part of the GDP, let it be taxed, make it legal so that the cartels don't have to hire Sicarios to settle debts, and instead settle it in court? It's not as if liquor stores wage wars that kill more people than the Syrian Civil War.
Because the government is a Cartel. The reason I feel inherently "wrong" being ruled by a government is the same reason a non libertarian feels inherently wrong about being ruled by the cartel. One of them just compartmentalizes their dirty work really well.
If I don't pay my (protection money) taxes, create a competing business (declare independence) or sell products they don't want me to sell (drugs in both cases), I will have hell to pay. Just the thought of being powerless on that axis is disconcerting for me.
... while I'll generally agree with the 'stationary bandits' thesis, this isn't a great example. Even ignoring the elephant in the room of "livable" with a high (and very unpredictable!) murder rate, the Juarez half of the video focuses on the city center and downtown : while even this area was unsafe back in 2007-2012, today it's more comparable to Philadelphia midtown or at worst North Central. The Philadelphia portion looks to be shots from one of the slums in North Philly, maybe Glenwood area.
Juarez's slums tend to be less obviously messy, but you can still find a lot of spots with trash, graffiti, and unemployed affiliated citizens everywhere, along with a lack of businesses. And the difference in quality of homes is pretty huge! Moreover, that difference right now is kinda a best-case scenario; in 2010, something like a third of businesses in the city either moved out or closed down, with corresponding problems.
More broadly, a lot of Juarez' infrastructure and business appearance reflects tremendous injections of outside cash, largely under the theory that the cartels were able to hire so many expendable and trigger-happy troops due to the rampant poverty, rather than some specific and intentional behavior of the cartel. While a few of the nice buildings and clean streets are specifically due to gang actions (if more in the sense of the gangs liking their own buildings and streets looking nice), a lot of the improvements have reflected state or foreign national investment.
((On the flip side, yes, a lot of the violence came about because of either cartel-on-cartel or cartel-on-government actions. Albeit not all of it; during the height of the 2010-era violence and again with some of the more recent smaller surge, there's been a lot of what's pretty likely 'personal' motivations.))
It is hardly a new observation that non-governmental actors can sometimes exercise state functions. Just one subset of such actors has been the subject of voluminous research , and the argument that, in Europe at least, the state developed when violent actors sought to extract resources from the people under their control so they could continue fighting wars was first popularized in 1975 by Charles Tilly, and his 1982 article, Warmaking and Statemaking as Organized Crime, is required reading in pretty much every comparative politics course.
But to infer therefrom that there can be no distinction between a government and a cartel ignores differences in types of governments; in order to stay in power, the leaders of cartels and the leaders of non-democratic governments need only keep a small group happy, so they have incentives to provide relatively few public goods. Instead, they use the money extracted from the populace to provide spoils to members of that small group. In contrast, governments in democracies must provide public goods, because the number of people they must keep happy is so large. See here
PS: I second those who criticize your use of a video from who knows where, with obviously cherrypicked excerpts and your own dubious inferences therefrom*, and representing n=2, to make generalizations about what life is like under the two types of regimes.
*Eg, you say there is a lack of businesses in the Philadelphia neighborhood, but the video does not show the main thoroughfares of North Philadelphia.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link