One might argue — wait, you can break the rules if there’s sufficient urgency to do so? So force-vaccinating people and locking them down was cool because of the scary *pandemic*? No! If you break the rules, you had better be correct. There was no science to justify lockdowns, no precedent to quarantining healthy people, no double-blind placebo controlled studies for ANY vaccine let alone this novel mRNA product that turned out not even to stop the spread. And in breaking the rules you MUST do so in the least invasive, most judicious way possible, e.g, extracting Maduro, not destroying Iraq. But how do we know in advance? Well, we knew the science was fake in advance, and the measures were extreme, unprecedented and unsupported by evidence. But to some extent, we really don’t know in advance. The mark of a great leader is to know when to break the rules and when not to, and if you break them, only break them to the minimum extent necessary. But if we don’t know, and we can’t formulate a rule how do we know if the action is justified? We don’t. Being a leader requires taking a chance sometimes, and if you get something wrong, error correcting quickly and decisively, something that did not happen with Covid. It would be great if there were just a rule book you could follow in all cases and we could consult it to see whether something applied or not. But I’m talking about cases in which the book in on fire, and in any event, no book can contain the complexity of real life. View quoted note →

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.