5 ms·

So what you're observing is the process in which states originally asserted themselves as sovereign in the first place. Ie with a ton of violence. Say in ~20 y

So what you're observing is the process in which states originally asserted themselves as sovereign in the first place. Ie with a ton of violence. Say in ~20 years if those states failed, and Narco states were born out of them, eventually they'll establish a version of governance and im sure sure the cycle would continue.

edgyquant 5y ago
There was an old (facetious) John Stewart bit where he said the cheapest way to defeat (iirc ISIS) was to not fight them at all but let them get bogged down in having to actually govern. Obviously ISIS is an extreme example but I do think this method could be applied in a way to cartels. I’m not up to date on the situation but I do know that Columbia officially ended its civil war in 2019 with the FARC becoming a political party.
- vmception 5y ago
  Some cartels in Mexico govern way better than the Federal government there. So, funny joke, but we'd be better off inviting them to the UN and sternly demanding that they codify their random executions into some form of law that they follow consistently.
  - qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
    >Some cartels in Mexico govern way better than the Federal government there. Do you have a citation for this?
    - vmception 5y ago
      Experience? Infrastructure? Level of development? You can act afraid of Mexico or just go there and have a good time and notice the difference. The only bad parts of Mexico is where the recognized government and the local cartel haven't ceded power and are in conflict. They both like a booming economy and market confidence, just a different strongman to pay from a user experience perspective.
      - qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
        Supposing my pocket is picked in a cartel-governed part of Mexico, what remedies are available?
        nsomaru 5y ago
        To be fair there are few places in the world that would be able to offer you significant recourse in that situation.
        vmception 5y ago
        Exit the market Negotiations can break down very quickly
        ddingus 5y ago
        Insurance is likely your best option for an actual remedy. That kind of crime can be very difficult to deal with. Prosecution, enforcement, all of it is very expensive. Damages to the victim can be severe or minor. Best defense is to avoid being a victim and or having options should it happen anyway, and or limiting your personal risk exposure. As another said, remedies are not robust and that is true for many governments / parts of the world. Scams, and other petty crime work in similar ways. Maybe the best overall approach is to run the nation well enough to make the risk / reward equation less favorable by reducing the value of the reward. Another option is education delivered in immediate, can't miss it fashion. Happy, healthy people tend to not need these crimes, and they will happen less. Educated travelers tend to present unfavorable risk / reward scenarios. As a potential target, your best defense is to also make that risk reward equation less favorable by both increasing risk perception and marginalizing the perception of there being a reward in like kind. Similar dynamics apply right here in the USA as anyone living in the wrong part of town can tell you. Just for general interest, my spouse and I got to put all that to work after buying our first home. After experiencing a little of that kind of crime, we lit the place up, got a dog, and began to approach the neighbors. Some were moving, and other starter families like us moved in. It took about a year. Everyone cleaning up, lighting up, dogs, other basics, and lots of positive activity on the streets. Prior to all of us doing that work, minor property and person crime, as well as the occasional shooting nearby were the norms. Police would respond, take reports and basically could offer nothing but the promise of more frequent patrols. I am not sure that had any impact. After talking with a friend who does security for a living, we gained insight: Simply not being a desirable target is by far and away the most effective thing one can do. Risk / reward thinking is very highly effective! We noticed posotive impact after only a month or two and after a sustained time, it was a different neighborhood. One where kids could play in the street, go from home to home, etc... it also was one where people did not need locking gas caps and lug nuts too. We enjoyed roughly a decade. As people moved, it began to break down. The big change was working on jeeps guy right across the street. Unwilling to participate, the area saw more crime return. Just did not take long. We left, and two years later it was the same warzone we had changed for a decade. In the case of pick pockets, you being a stranger, doing your best to not look like a mark, not act like one, and blending in, not flashy all add right up. To the pick pocket, you become elevated into undesirable and will be fine. They want lower risk, easy marks that offer solid to great rewards. They can be in, do it, and out and may not even be identified before anyone can really understand what has happened and convince authorities to respond. Some regions post info on this for travellers unaware and who may act on the info to better their chances. We do it in airports with the often heard, "it is illegal for others to offer you a ride" notices we hear after air travel arrivals, for example. We do that because poisoning the waters, so to speak, is effective in ways policing cannot easily be. Heck, a cartel interested in tourism may well do the same thing any local government would with similar outcomes and maybe a bit more harsh penalty for regular offenders. None of that is a remedy for you directly, but it all can make the equation less favorable, which does help you, and can be considerable help given indirectly. The rest is on you, hopefully savvy traveler. Source: regular attendance when the bell at the fine school of hard knocks rang, graduated with honors eventually.
- papito 5y ago
  ISIS did actually govern. They had their own DMV.
  - Guthur 5y ago
    Which was always the reason I thought there was more to ISIS than the western portrait of a group of extremist ideologues. State construction and maintenance is not a trivial thing and their are not the sort of skills you stumble upon within a group of "madmen". The groups spontaneous arrival and near immediate success in this regard was a little remarkable imo, and raises interesting questions on support and backing.
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      > the western portrait of a group of extremist ideologues. That was not just the West's portrait, but Da'esh' own self-portrait as well. They focused their own recruiting on extremist madmen who were single-mindedly committed to their violent interpretation of Islam - hardly an exercise in peaceful state-building.
    - juskrey 5y ago
      More thoughtful commenters (e.g. Taleb) actually noticed early that ISIS and wahhabism in general is a deeply rooted and quite old political movement, not all-of-a-sudden religious cult and madness. Partly because of this conflation the whole narrative (heavily sponsored by oil money of course) have kept blind Western elites for very long time, especially in Europe, where they only start to understand that worship places with heavy foreign aid inflow are not necessarily harmless community centers, and "religious liberties" must have strict bounds to be classified as so.
      - Yoric 5y ago
        ISIS is wahabist? I thought they were salafist and Al-Qaeda is wahabist (or at least its leadership is)?
        5y ago
- wrycoder 5y ago
  That’s not a defeat - it’s a race to the bottom. And a country can stay there for a long time. Example - Venezuela.
qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
I think it's a bit more complicated than that. First, just because the state loses its monopoly doesn't mean some other entity gains a monopoly. In Mexico, cartels aren't just fighting the state, they are also fighting each other. If the state collapsed, they will continue fighting each other, and the people of Mexico will effectively live in a semi-permanent warzone. Second, not all violent entities are created equal. Cartel members are motivated by greed and lust for power. Many are willing to employ tactics such as torture and terrorism to advance those goals: https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Mexican-drug-cartels-new-scare-tactic-beheadings-2488578.php https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Mexican-drug-cartels-new... I'm not claiming every cop is a saint, far from it. There is certainly room for improvement in the US at least. However, bad cops are newsworthy because we expect better from our cops than our gangsters. On a statistical basis, a much larger fraction of the police force is motivated by a desire to protect and serve the public. And our police forces are subject to at least nominal democratic accountability. If due process requirements don't meaningfully differentiate cops from gangsters in your eyes, we might as well do away with them anyways.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > In Mexico, cartels aren't just fighting the state, they are also fighting each other. To be fair, states also sometimes fight each other. They also tend to de-escalate these fights over time as long-term institutional arrangements come to predominate.
  - rnd0 5y ago
    "To be fair, states also sometimes fight each other. " That's basically European history in a nutshell. The middle ages was basically walled cities fighting other walled cities, renaissance too.
- lifeformed 5y ago
  > Second, not all violent entities are created equal. Cartel members are motivated by greed and lust for power. Many are willing to employ tactics such as torture and terrorism to advance those goals First world governments are known to employ torture and terrorism to achieve their goals, but it's abstracted away as much as possible. While I think the same motivations of greed and power lust exist in governments too, I do agree there is a big difference between cartels and "good" governments: a good government represents the will of the people, and has checks and balances to at least reduce the brazenness and frequency of their violent excesses. To me, the takeaway is that we can't really rely just on individuals to run moral power structures, but that we need to encode these values into the rules of structure itself - the democratic principles, laws, and enforcement - to get a decent approximation of a civil society. I don't know the details of cartel governance, but I imagine it's authoritarian without much oversight.
Bancakes 5y ago
The mafia's idea of economy is based on sucking people dry via their vices and weaknesses. I don't want any sort of governance by pushers, pimps, and goons.
- rnd0 5y ago
  vices and weaknesses -such as fast food, lottery and tax-free religions? pushers -like the pharmaceutical industry? Pimps like the folks in Hollywood who make money off of titillation (and more -see Harvey Weinstein for one example) and goons such as the ones who raid travellers of cash in the name of "civil forfeiture"(eg https://www.huffpost.com/entry/civil-asset-forfeiture-cash-money_n_6623972 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/civil-asset-forfeiture-cash-m...? ) The difference is becoming less profound than you may perhaps be aware of. Ask yourself -why do the police still commit violent abuses even with body cams and the bad publicity? The answer is -because it doesn't matter, because they can. That is different from "goons" how?
  - Bancakes 5y ago
    The biggest fast food chains are a mafia in business terms and treat their employees and IP accordingly. Same with patented Monsanto GMO, for instance. Non-government lotteries are dubious at best and held by the mafia at worst (at least in eastern euro). Non-instituionalised religions prove time and time again to be cults. The pharmaceutical industry is based on science, and subject to audits and regulation. In fact, one of the best ways to rehabilitate people is gradually decrease their intake with pure, medical-grade narcotics. That aside, the infamous ADHD/OCD pills are last-ditch effort - nobody talks about schizophrenia and mania pills that do a good job. A small fraction of police still commit violent abuses because America is full of aggressive, suppressed, violent people. Again, police officers' actions are subject to audit and regulation, and action in a court of law. Let's not forget they have the right to apply necessary force to make you comply, a lot of people simply earn a beating. The rest of the cases are a minority nonetheless. We must move on and escape the mob mentality. Root it out of our DNA. Amortise punishments over time and rationality.
    - 5y ago

edgyquant 5y ago

There was an old (facetious) John Stewart bit where he said the cheapest way to defeat (iirc ISIS) was to not fight them at all but let them get bogged down in having to actually govern. Obviously ISIS is an extreme example but I do think this method could be applied in a way to cartels. I’m not up to date on the situation but I do know that Columbia officially ended its civil war in 2019 with the FARC becoming a political party.

vmception 5y ago
Some cartels in Mexico govern way better than the Federal government there. So, funny joke, but we'd be better off inviting them to the UN and sternly demanding that they codify their random executions into some form of law that they follow consistently.
- qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
  >Some cartels in Mexico govern way better than the Federal government there. Do you have a citation for this?
  - vmception 5y ago
    Experience? Infrastructure? Level of development? You can act afraid of Mexico or just go there and have a good time and notice the difference. The only bad parts of Mexico is where the recognized government and the local cartel haven't ceded power and are in conflict. They both like a booming economy and market confidence, just a different strongman to pay from a user experience perspective.
    - qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
      Supposing my pocket is picked in a cartel-governed part of Mexico, what remedies are available?
      - nsomaru 5y ago
        To be fair there are few places in the world that would be able to offer you significant recourse in that situation.
      - vmception 5y ago
        Exit the market Negotiations can break down very quickly
      - ddingus 5y ago
        Insurance is likely your best option for an actual remedy. That kind of crime can be very difficult to deal with. Prosecution, enforcement, all of it is very expensive. Damages to the victim can be severe or minor. Best defense is to avoid being a victim and or having options should it happen anyway, and or limiting your personal risk exposure. As another said, remedies are not robust and that is true for many governments / parts of the world. Scams, and other petty crime work in similar ways. Maybe the best overall approach is to run the nation well enough to make the risk / reward equation less favorable by reducing the value of the reward. Another option is education delivered in immediate, can't miss it fashion. Happy, healthy people tend to not need these crimes, and they will happen less. Educated travelers tend to present unfavorable risk / reward scenarios. As a potential target, your best defense is to also make that risk reward equation less favorable by both increasing risk perception and marginalizing the perception of there being a reward in like kind. Similar dynamics apply right here in the USA as anyone living in the wrong part of town can tell you. Just for general interest, my spouse and I got to put all that to work after buying our first home. After experiencing a little of that kind of crime, we lit the place up, got a dog, and began to approach the neighbors. Some were moving, and other starter families like us moved in. It took about a year. Everyone cleaning up, lighting up, dogs, other basics, and lots of positive activity on the streets. Prior to all of us doing that work, minor property and person crime, as well as the occasional shooting nearby were the norms. Police would respond, take reports and basically could offer nothing but the promise of more frequent patrols. I am not sure that had any impact. After talking with a friend who does security for a living, we gained insight: Simply not being a desirable target is by far and away the most effective thing one can do. Risk / reward thinking is very highly effective! We noticed posotive impact after only a month or two and after a sustained time, it was a different neighborhood. One where kids could play in the street, go from home to home, etc... it also was one where people did not need locking gas caps and lug nuts too. We enjoyed roughly a decade. As people moved, it began to break down. The big change was working on jeeps guy right across the street. Unwilling to participate, the area saw more crime return. Just did not take long. We left, and two years later it was the same warzone we had changed for a decade. In the case of pick pockets, you being a stranger, doing your best to not look like a mark, not act like one, and blending in, not flashy all add right up. To the pick pocket, you become elevated into undesirable and will be fine. They want lower risk, easy marks that offer solid to great rewards. They can be in, do it, and out and may not even be identified before anyone can really understand what has happened and convince authorities to respond. Some regions post info on this for travellers unaware and who may act on the info to better their chances. We do it in airports with the often heard, "it is illegal for others to offer you a ride" notices we hear after air travel arrivals, for example. We do that because poisoning the waters, so to speak, is effective in ways policing cannot easily be. Heck, a cartel interested in tourism may well do the same thing any local government would with similar outcomes and maybe a bit more harsh penalty for regular offenders. None of that is a remedy for you directly, but it all can make the equation less favorable, which does help you, and can be considerable help given indirectly. The rest is on you, hopefully savvy traveler. Source: regular attendance when the bell at the fine school of hard knocks rang, graduated with honors eventually.
papito 5y ago
ISIS did actually govern. They had their own DMV.
- Guthur 5y ago
  Which was always the reason I thought there was more to ISIS than the western portrait of a group of extremist ideologues. State construction and maintenance is not a trivial thing and their are not the sort of skills you stumble upon within a group of "madmen". The groups spontaneous arrival and near immediate success in this regard was a little remarkable imo, and raises interesting questions on support and backing.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    > the western portrait of a group of extremist ideologues. That was not just the West's portrait, but Da'esh' own self-portrait as well. They focused their own recruiting on extremist madmen who were single-mindedly committed to their violent interpretation of Islam - hardly an exercise in peaceful state-building.
  - juskrey 5y ago
    More thoughtful commenters (e.g. Taleb) actually noticed early that ISIS and wahhabism in general is a deeply rooted and quite old political movement, not all-of-a-sudden religious cult and madness. Partly because of this conflation the whole narrative (heavily sponsored by oil money of course) have kept blind Western elites for very long time, especially in Europe, where they only start to understand that worship places with heavy foreign aid inflow are not necessarily harmless community centers, and "religious liberties" must have strict bounds to be classified as so.
    - Yoric 5y ago
      ISIS is wahabist? I thought they were salafist and Al-Qaeda is wahabist (or at least its leadership is)?
      - 5y ago
wrycoder 5y ago
That’s not a defeat - it’s a race to the bottom. And a country can stay there for a long time. Example - Venezuela.

qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago

I think it's a bit more complicated than that. First, just because the state loses its monopoly doesn't mean some other entity gains a monopoly. In Mexico, cartels aren't just fighting the state, they are also fighting each other. If the state collapsed, they will continue fighting each other, and the people of Mexico will effectively live in a semi-permanent warzone. Second, not all violent entities are created equal. Cartel members are motivated by greed and lust for power. Many are willing to employ tactics such as torture and terrorism to advance those goals: https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Mexican-drug-cartels-new-scare-tactic-beheadings-2488578.php https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Mexican-drug-cartels-new... I'm not claiming every cop is a saint, far from it. There is certainly room for improvement in the US at least. However, bad cops are newsworthy because we expect better from our cops than our gangsters. On a statistical basis, a much larger fraction of the police force is motivated by a desire to protect and serve the public. And our police forces are subject to at least nominal democratic accountability. If due process requirements don't meaningfully differentiate cops from gangsters in your eyes, we might as well do away with them anyways.

zozbot234 5y ago
> In Mexico, cartels aren't just fighting the state, they are also fighting each other. To be fair, states also sometimes fight each other. They also tend to de-escalate these fights over time as long-term institutional arrangements come to predominate.
- rnd0 5y ago
  "To be fair, states also sometimes fight each other. " That's basically European history in a nutshell. The middle ages was basically walled cities fighting other walled cities, renaissance too.
lifeformed 5y ago
> Second, not all violent entities are created equal. Cartel members are motivated by greed and lust for power. Many are willing to employ tactics such as torture and terrorism to advance those goals First world governments are known to employ torture and terrorism to achieve their goals, but it's abstracted away as much as possible. While I think the same motivations of greed and power lust exist in governments too, I do agree there is a big difference between cartels and "good" governments: a good government represents the will of the people, and has checks and balances to at least reduce the brazenness and frequency of their violent excesses. To me, the takeaway is that we can't really rely just on individuals to run moral power structures, but that we need to encode these values into the rules of structure itself - the democratic principles, laws, and enforcement - to get a decent approximation of a civil society. I don't know the details of cartel governance, but I imagine it's authoritarian without much oversight.

Bancakes 5y ago

The mafia's idea of economy is based on sucking people dry via their vices and weaknesses. I don't want any sort of governance by pushers, pimps, and goons.

rnd0 5y ago
vices and weaknesses -such as fast food, lottery and tax-free religions? pushers -like the pharmaceutical industry? Pimps like the folks in Hollywood who make money off of titillation (and more -see Harvey Weinstein for one example) and goons such as the ones who raid travellers of cash in the name of "civil forfeiture"(eg https://www.huffpost.com/entry/civil-asset-forfeiture-cash-money_n_6623972 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/civil-asset-forfeiture-cash-m...? ) The difference is becoming less profound than you may perhaps be aware of. Ask yourself -why do the police still commit violent abuses even with body cams and the bad publicity? The answer is -because it doesn't matter, because they can. That is different from "goons" how?
- Bancakes 5y ago
  The biggest fast food chains are a mafia in business terms and treat their employees and IP accordingly. Same with patented Monsanto GMO, for instance. Non-government lotteries are dubious at best and held by the mafia at worst (at least in eastern euro). Non-instituionalised religions prove time and time again to be cults. The pharmaceutical industry is based on science, and subject to audits and regulation. In fact, one of the best ways to rehabilitate people is gradually decrease their intake with pure, medical-grade narcotics. That aside, the infamous ADHD/OCD pills are last-ditch effort - nobody talks about schizophrenia and mania pills that do a good job. A small fraction of police still commit violent abuses because America is full of aggressive, suppressed, violent people. Again, police officers' actions are subject to audit and regulation, and action in a court of law. Let's not forget they have the right to apply necessary force to make you comply, a lot of people simply earn a beating. The rest of the cases are a minority nonetheless. We must move on and escape the mob mentality. Root it out of our DNA. Amortise punishments over time and rationality.
  - 5y ago