It’s trivial to lead a functional country with strong institutions where the rule of law is sufficient to the task. Where great leaders emerge is when the country is dysfunctional and the institutions are broken. Such a person must venture outside the law, outside the usual process judiciously, proportionally and as humanely as possible. Whether that’s what Trump is doing/has done remains to be seen. As I said, every government that breaks the rules is self-serving and deceitful in its justifications for doing so. But it is plainly not the case that one should never break the rules when those rules have been subverted beyond a certain point. View quoted note →

Feels like Popper's Paradox of Tolerance is more relevant than ever. You can be tolerant, but if you tolerate intolerance, tolerance is gone. So you must not tolerate intolerance. When people complain (and I have in the past) about El Salvador almost certainly violating rights (even gang members are innocent until proven guilty), you get to a contradiction: if the tolerant system wherein everyone gets full due process under the law has been destroyed and abused beyond recognition, then you might have to use supra-constitutional force. If a neighboring country is actively harming and undermining your own, you might have to use force that violates its sovereignty. Whether El Salvador was really in such a situation (I’ve never been there), I don’t know for sure. I can only go by what I read online. And whether Maduro was really doing everything he’s alleged to have done and it had a material impact on the security of our votes or the health of our citizens, I don’t know. Governments who want to use these extra-legal powers to achieve desired ends are notoriously deceitful and self-serving in the justifications for their actions. But it’s naive and misguided IMO not to acknowledge the principle in itself: namely, that if circumstances are such that the institutions themselves are no longer capable of delivering justice and/or protecting the liberty of the people, then you cannot restrict your actions to what’s legal within their own rules. You must make an exception and be intolerant to this intolerance. It cannot be correct that one should rely on the courts to ensure due process or comply with international law if those institutions are coopted and broken. The question as to whether Bukele in ES or Trump in seizing Maduro were justified in doing what they did can and should be argued. That Trump says so is obviously not good enough. But what I see now is people who believe that even if Venezuela were deliberately and materially harming the US that Trump needed to play within the rules even if the harms done were set up to circumvent them.

There’s no such thing as capitalism. There’s just voluntary exchange among human beings and involuntary coercion. You get to pick which model you prefer, but if you pick the coercion one, you only get to pick once.

One thing I’ve learned over my 54 years on planet earth is it’s important not to try to be “good.” Be truthful and honest, trust yourself wholeheartedly, but let go of “good” like a dog happy to ditch its collar after his last walk of the day.

Rough day for those who think elections don’t matter:

I read that Venezuela's vast oil reserves have not really been developed, and that the regime was siphoning off the 15 percent that it had developed for itself and its cronies, basically transnational criminal organizations, while impoverishing the people. So the US will come in with its oil companies and over a few years get it up to speed and extract/make good use of its plentiful and valuable reserves. I would expect *some* of the profits therefrom to flow to the locals, and conditions there to improve, maybe substantially since it’s starting at a low point. But I very much doubt the locals will see the lion’s share of it — I’d expect most of the wealth to flow to oil companies and the American government entities cutting them in on the deal. I could be wrong about all of this, of course, I get my information from the internet like everyone else. But I see it playing out mostly as a benefit to certain US factions, the US economy to some extent and the Venezuelan economy to some lesser extent. The other big issues with Venezuela are the drug cartel/rogue CIA/foreign intelligence agencies that were benefitting, and if what I’ve gathered is true, they will be disrupted/damaged by this. And Venezuela’s alleged involvement (with rogue CIA and foreign intelligence) in stealing US (and other countries’) elections. If Maduro really does have intel on this and spills the beans, that too would be seismic result of his capture. Draw your own conclusions as to whether this is true, and if so whether that makes Maduro’s capture a good thing. I tend to think it’s net positive and might be, but of course it could also go very wrong.

Don’t confuse weakness or ineffectiveness with virtue.

Today is really the first day of the new year.

The stalest genre of geopolitcal analysis is the one-note retards who see EVERYTHING as “this is a distraction,” “this is another neo-con forever war,” “this is done at Netanyahu’s behest,” “this is more of the same” no matter what happens. That’s not to say that these conclusions couldn’t be correct in any given case — they might, and surely they have at times in the past — but applying them lazily to EVERY case is retarded. The world-weary “I told you so” mantra in the face of ANY development is a tell a person hasn’t looked into what’s going on, and just wants to sound savvy to others. You are under no obligation to pay attention to geopolitics — maybe you’d even be better off hiking in the mountains and swimming in freezing lakes. But if you’re not paying attention except to headlines and hot takes, why make the discourse dumber?