4 ms·

Bukele has 91% approval. If that doesn't meet the formal academic definition of people feeling like they are living under the rule of law, then the academic def

Bukele has 91% approval. If that doesn't meet the formal academic definition of people feeling like they are living under the rule of law, then the academic definition was wrong. Both are related in the sense that they said you can't just discipline people, more or less, with the same spirit of focusing on people's good side, to their detriment. Different application, same principles, same failure.

zozbot234 1y ago
How meaningful is that approval statistics in a country where the government can put people in prison more or less arbitrarily without any kind of habeas corpus protections?
- gjsman-1000 1y ago
  Before the government suspended it; the murder rate was nearly the highest in the world, and every attempt previously failed. Freedoms sometimes break down at scale given the right conditions. That's not comfortable to contemplate. If even 20% of people were involved in the gang and using GrapheneOS, you bet that freedom would be revoked. There is no guarantee in natural law that freedom is self-sustaining or chaos-resistant. Freedom is the privilege of a stable nation that can hopefully stay stable, but freedom does not guarantee stability. Thus why we have outliers like Singapore - very stable, minimal freedom; and outliers like El Salvador previously - very free, very unstable. Stable always beats free, because unstable makes freedom a purely academic exercise in nonsense (sure, the government might not arrest you for saying something, but the local thug will happily do worse; bragging "I have habeas corpus" is idiotic when the local drug lord is your problem and he doesn't honor it).
  - estearum 1y ago
    The murder rate was falling for years prior to Bukele’s election Obviously extremely “generous” policies for jailing people involved with or adjacent to crime will reduce crime further, but he’s not singularly responsible for improvements and it’s not clear at all where the cost-benefit will net out North Korea also has very low crime rates, I hear!
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > How meaningful is that approval statistics in a country where the government can put people in prison more or less arbitrarily without any kind of habeas corpus protections? There is diverse polling to support Bukele’s popularity [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_on_the_Nayib_Bukele_presidency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_on_the_Nayib_B...
actionfromafar 1y ago
This has the vibes of "if 91% of people feel like pi is 3.0, then the formal academic definition is wrong."
Hamuko 1y ago
Approval rating for a president seems like a pretty poor relation to "feeling like one is living under the rule of law". Meanwhile El Salvador is ranked 130th out of 180 in the Corruption Perceptions Index with a score of 30/100, and has mostly been sliding lower in the past decade. https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2024/index/slv https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2024/index/slv
JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> Bukele has 91% approval. If that doesn't meet the formal academic definition of people feeling like they are living under the rule of law A starving man will rate highly someone giving him an ounce of food. That doesn’t mean their life is good. Just better than the hell it was. El Salvador’s economy is middling [1]. It is growing faster than when it was ridden with crime. But it isn’t growing like a developed economy with the rule of law. (It can’t.) El Salvadoreans made the best choice they could. When confronted with security versus long-term prosperity, most choose security. And who knows, they might slough off dictatorship as a transitional period like Korea and Taiwan did after all. TL; DR It’s a straw man to claim what Bukele did was some revolution in social thought that confounded thinkers outside El Salvador. It wasn’t. Martial law has always existed. And Duterte had literally just wrapped up doing the same thing. > they said you can't just discipline people Who said this? I can just as easily invent conservative straw men who didn’t like their idiot kids failing grades and getting their states to not implement ESSA. It’s narratively cohesive. But it isn’t credible, same as this allegation. [1] https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/elsalvador/overview https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/elsalvador/overview
estearum 1y ago
It’s pretty unbelievable how many people think “give one person unlimited power to fix our problems” is a novel solution to anything Throughout all of human history, the vast majority of awful people in power were consciously put there by people who wanted solutions to real problems Our Founding Fathers’ insight was to say that it’s actually better the state struggle to solve some problems (including important ones!) than to create an extremely powerful apparatus that can be abused (whether that be with good or poor intentions, with or without popular support etc) We’ve tried the whole dictator thing! Literally countless times in history! The reason we instead accept some amount of crime and “what the fuck why can’t we solve this?” is because dictators almost always end up being absolutely awful!
selectodude 1y ago
Bukele has 91 percent approval according to Bukele. There are plenty of dictators with sky high approval ratings. I would also “approve” of somebody who has the ability to throw me in torture prison for the rest of my life on the flimsiest of evidence. People obviously prefer safety to lawlessness, and El Salvador was uniquely awful. The issue is that once you jail everybody who might possibly be a criminal, you’re left with the entire extrajudicial infrastructure that now needs to find a new reason to exist. Not to mention in this particular circumstance that the government seems to have decided to pay off the cartels and use state violence pick winners and losers in order to quash the drug war. It works until it doesn’t.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > There are plenty of dictators with sky high approval ratings Do you have evidence Bukele’s polling is corrupted? Wikipedia lists several polling organisations [1]. And while there are building risks against fair and free elections [2], I haven't seen a credible monitor call that out as having already happened. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_on_the_Nayib_Bukele_presidency#2024_re-election_polling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_on_the_Nayib_B... [2] https://freedomhouse.org/country/el-salvador/freedom-world/2024 https://freedomhouse.org/country/el-salvador/freedom-world/2...
  - selectodude 1y ago
    > Do you have evidence Bukele’s polling is corrupted? Do I have evidence that the polling coming out of an autocratic single party dictatorship is corrupted? I mean, no, of course not. Even if I did, it wouldn’t matter. > I haven't seen a credible monitor call that out as having already happened. https://www.wola.org/analysis/el-salvador-election-integrity-under-scrutiny/ https://www.wola.org/analysis/el-salvador-election-integrity... One can argue that El Salvador is better off under Bukele than it was prior. I’d probably have to agree - things were really bad there and locking people up and throwing away the key absolutely works. Always has. It just isn’t sustainable and now that Bukele has successfully consolidated power, we just get to wait and see what happens. Similarly, Yugoslavia generally loved Josip Tito. He was still a horrible dictator that butchered millions and when he died, the country collapsed.
micromacrofoot 1y ago
it would be 100% but the other 9% are in prison
mcphage 1y ago
> Bukele has 91% approval. If that doesn't meet the formal academic definition of people feeling like they are living under the rule of law, then the academic definition was wrong I'd love to hear what you think "living under the rule of law" means, and how you feel that relates to approval rating?
lovich 1y ago
The rule of law is not something the voting populace always values. Like, almost every populist movement supports or enacts something explicitly against the law but is popular with their citizenry.

zozbot234 1y ago

How meaningful is that approval statistics in a country where the government can put people in prison more or less arbitrarily without any kind of habeas corpus protections?

gjsman-1000 1y ago
Before the government suspended it; the murder rate was nearly the highest in the world, and every attempt previously failed. Freedoms sometimes break down at scale given the right conditions. That's not comfortable to contemplate. If even 20% of people were involved in the gang and using GrapheneOS, you bet that freedom would be revoked. There is no guarantee in natural law that freedom is self-sustaining or chaos-resistant. Freedom is the privilege of a stable nation that can hopefully stay stable, but freedom does not guarantee stability. Thus why we have outliers like Singapore - very stable, minimal freedom; and outliers like El Salvador previously - very free, very unstable. Stable always beats free, because unstable makes freedom a purely academic exercise in nonsense (sure, the government might not arrest you for saying something, but the local thug will happily do worse; bragging "I have habeas corpus" is idiotic when the local drug lord is your problem and he doesn't honor it).
- estearum 1y ago
  The murder rate was falling for years prior to Bukele’s election Obviously extremely “generous” policies for jailing people involved with or adjacent to crime will reduce crime further, but he’s not singularly responsible for improvements and it’s not clear at all where the cost-benefit will net out North Korea also has very low crime rates, I hear!
JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> How meaningful is that approval statistics in a country where the government can put people in prison more or less arbitrarily without any kind of habeas corpus protections? There is diverse polling to support Bukele’s popularity [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_on_the_Nayib_Bukele_presidency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_on_the_Nayib_B...

actionfromafar 1y ago

This has the vibes of "if 91% of people feel like pi is 3.0, then the formal academic definition is wrong."

Hamuko 1y ago

Approval rating for a president seems like a pretty poor relation to "feeling like one is living under the rule of law". Meanwhile El Salvador is ranked 130th out of 180 in the Corruption Perceptions Index with a score of 30/100, and has mostly been sliding lower in the past decade. https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2024/index/slv https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2024/index/slv

JumpCrisscross 1y ago

> Bukele has 91% approval. If that doesn't meet the formal academic definition of people feeling like they are living under the rule of law A starving man will rate highly someone giving him an ounce of food. That doesn’t mean their life is good. Just better than the hell it was. El Salvador’s economy is middling [1]. It is growing faster than when it was ridden with crime. But it isn’t growing like a developed economy with the rule of law. (It can’t.) El Salvadoreans made the best choice they could. When confronted with security versus long-term prosperity, most choose security. And who knows, they might slough off dictatorship as a transitional period like Korea and Taiwan did after all. TL; DR It’s a straw man to claim what Bukele did was some revolution in social thought that confounded thinkers outside El Salvador. It wasn’t. Martial law has always existed. And Duterte had literally just wrapped up doing the same thing. > they said you can't just discipline people Who said this? I can just as easily invent conservative straw men who didn’t like their idiot kids failing grades and getting their states to not implement ESSA. It’s narratively cohesive. But it isn’t credible, same as this allegation. [1] https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/elsalvador/overview https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/elsalvador/overview

estearum 1y ago

It’s pretty unbelievable how many people think “give one person unlimited power to fix our problems” is a novel solution to anything Throughout all of human history, the vast majority of awful people in power were consciously put there by people who wanted solutions to real problems Our Founding Fathers’ insight was to say that it’s actually better the state struggle to solve some problems (including important ones!) than to create an extremely powerful apparatus that can be abused (whether that be with good or poor intentions, with or without popular support etc) We’ve tried the whole dictator thing! Literally countless times in history! The reason we instead accept some amount of crime and “what the fuck why can’t we solve this?” is because dictators almost always end up being absolutely awful!

selectodude 1y ago

Bukele has 91 percent approval according to Bukele. There are plenty of dictators with sky high approval ratings. I would also “approve” of somebody who has the ability to throw me in torture prison for the rest of my life on the flimsiest of evidence. People obviously prefer safety to lawlessness, and El Salvador was uniquely awful. The issue is that once you jail everybody who might possibly be a criminal, you’re left with the entire extrajudicial infrastructure that now needs to find a new reason to exist. Not to mention in this particular circumstance that the government seems to have decided to pay off the cartels and use state violence pick winners and losers in order to quash the drug war. It works until it doesn’t.

JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> There are plenty of dictators with sky high approval ratings Do you have evidence Bukele’s polling is corrupted? Wikipedia lists several polling organisations [1]. And while there are building risks against fair and free elections [2], I haven't seen a credible monitor call that out as having already happened. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_on_the_Nayib_Bukele_presidency#2024_re-election_polling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_on_the_Nayib_B... [2] https://freedomhouse.org/country/el-salvador/freedom-world/2024 https://freedomhouse.org/country/el-salvador/freedom-world/2...
- selectodude 1y ago
  > Do you have evidence Bukele’s polling is corrupted? Do I have evidence that the polling coming out of an autocratic single party dictatorship is corrupted? I mean, no, of course not. Even if I did, it wouldn’t matter. > I haven't seen a credible monitor call that out as having already happened. https://www.wola.org/analysis/el-salvador-election-integrity-under-scrutiny/ https://www.wola.org/analysis/el-salvador-election-integrity... One can argue that El Salvador is better off under Bukele than it was prior. I’d probably have to agree - things were really bad there and locking people up and throwing away the key absolutely works. Always has. It just isn’t sustainable and now that Bukele has successfully consolidated power, we just get to wait and see what happens. Similarly, Yugoslavia generally loved Josip Tito. He was still a horrible dictator that butchered millions and when he died, the country collapsed.

micromacrofoot 1y ago

it would be 100% but the other 9% are in prison

mcphage 1y ago

> Bukele has 91% approval. If that doesn't meet the formal academic definition of people feeling like they are living under the rule of law, then the academic definition was wrong I'd love to hear what you think "living under the rule of law" means, and how you feel that relates to approval rating?

lovich 1y ago

The rule of law is not something the voting populace always values. Like, almost every populist movement supports or enacts something explicitly against the law but is popular with their citizenry.