Considerations on Totalitarian government as beneficial.

[Perinquus]

How is this any different from the "benevolent dictator" scheme? The nature of a dictatorship is completely dependent upon the whims of one man. That is precisely what is wrong with it, and while some dictators are better or worse than others, the fact remains that it is a fundamentally unjust society. Fascism, in and of itself, is still wrong.

As for transitioning to democracy, all you need for a democracy is a reasonably aware populace, hence the importance of public education (which the Founding Fathers of the US understood, but which right-wingers today dismiss in favour of vouchers/private schools for elites and shit for everyone else).

Your argument is a straw man. Vouchers aren't meant to go to elites only, the proponents of vouchers want to apply them on a pretty broad scale. They want to do this because the U.S. public education system has become a joke. In a 1999 survey of seniors at 55 of our best colleges and universities, almost 80 percent earned a D or F grade on a high-school level American history test. Take a look at our colleges; you will see a high percentage of foreign student in graduate level scence and engineering courses, up to half in some classes, because American kids aren't making it there. Vouchers are at least an attempt to break the stranglehold of the teachers unions and the NEA, which are more responsible than anyone else for creating this mess.

I agree that an informed electorate is essential to a republic such as ours. Unfortunately, our public schools today are not giving us one. Quite the opposite, in fact.

As for whether or not a dictatorship is morally defensible... Well, I grant you there can be dictators who can be relatively benevolent. But the system has a giant flaw in that it facilitates arbitrary rule and abuse of power. Most dictators have not been benevolent; they've usually been corrupted by their power. The fact is that a so called "benevolent despot" could potentially be the best ruler of all - needn't pander to an electorate, can make swift decisions where parliaments take forever to debate things, etc. But finding individuals who can resist the corrupting effects of power is the tricky part. And when you install someone who turns out not to be such a noble character, you're screwed; he can become a tyrant, and he now has all the machinery of a modern state to help maintain his power. This is why for all its faults, a democratic republic remains, in the words of Winston Churchill, "the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried."

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Hey, as long as it's taken this turn ... what about Marcos?

*tee hee*

*runs away*

Uhm, his wife liked shoes?

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Direct Democracy is better than Representative Democracy. It's just that about the only countries today that it could work for are San Marino, Monaco, the Vatican, Lichtenstein and Andorra. Oh, and maybe Singapore if they built a really big stadium-style assembly or something. There's probably a few micro-states or marginal countries I'm missing it would work in: but population and geographical size severely restrict applicability.

Failing that, Representative Democracy is good enough. I'm just saything that some countries aren't ready for it - and if a dictatorship creates the conditions necessary for it to function normally, then that dictatorship has had some positive influence.

[weemadando]

The Cold War fits Sun-Tzu's definition of War, and that's good enough for me. The Soviets had no intention of a peaceful resolution in the 70s; they broke every one of the agreements they signed during detente and would have kept pushing for more if Reagan hadn't showed up and pushed back against the inherent weaknesses of their system.

Ahem. BULLSHIT.

The Russians were diplomatically engaging Europe with some success. Ostpolitik policies throughout Europe became popular and it looked like there could well have been a peaceful resolution of TENSIONS, not war, TENSIONS - in Europe at least.

But peace is bad for business, especially capitalist business.

One of the most notable results of Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik was the establishing of trade routes between the soviet states and the capitalist Western Europe. These trade routes focused on oil and some raw materials being brought out of from the Eastern Bloc and food and other raw materials entering from the West. This dropping of the closed sphere policy by the Soviet leadership of the time, headed by Brezhnev, led to the reduction in overall tension by the cold war superpowers. The United States saw the opening of the boundaries of the Soviet Union and their many agreements with Western Europe as a threat to their superiority in the world arena.

To the degree that détente “took” in Europe, the alliance (NATO), became less important. The Europeans never pushed things to the breaking point with Washington, for it was nice having the United States back there just in case. That was the problem. America had become a contingency plan for Europe. <James O. Goldsborough, in At Issue: Politics in the World Arena, p248>

The threat to the United States was that they were at risk of losing support in Europe both militarily and economically as the Western European powers turned to the newly opened borders of the Soviet Union for trade. The greatest threat however was the rapidly growing number of Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) in the Soviet Union’s arsenal. The concept of the Soviet Union amassing similar amounts of nuclear weapons scared the American government who were concerned about the loss of effectiveness of their deterrent force. As such, the limitation of the expansion of nuclear power became the most important point on the agenda for the American government throughout the period of détente.

The US started the arms negotiations in order to try and limit the "missile gap". The US ceded a few pie in the sky programs in order to make sure that the Soviet bloc didn't get so many missiles that "victory" in a nuclear war would become impossible.

Lets not forget the fact that both the West and East were fighting by proxies in Africa, Latin America, Asia and the Middle East. There was never an official war. There were tensions and various military actions, but never once a war. Sun-Tzu can say all he want, but he isn't a 20th century international law expert.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Sun-Tzu can say all he want, but he isn't a 20th century international law expert.

There's a reason he's still quoted, and that's because his theories are constants that have remained true for far longer than the transitory nature of international law, which is a fabrication entirely dependent on the power of individual States.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

We could bash each other over detente all day long, but since I'm a maximal realist and you're not we'll never agree over what it meant; all we'll do is interpet it through our own prevailing geopolitical theories and shout at each other as we fail to budge each other, so it would be pointless to debate the point.

[weemadando]

but since I'm a maximal realist and you're not we'll never agree over what it meant;

Please tell me that wasn't an attempt at "I was right and you were wrong, I'm gonna sing the I was right song..."

If its an admission that different political standpoints are often irreconcilable when debating history, thats fine.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Please tell me that wasn't an attempt at "I was right and you were wrong, I'm gonna sing the I was right song..."

If its an admission that different political standpoints are often irreconcilable when debating history, thats fine.

It is an admission that different political standpoints are often irreconcilable when debating history. God! Especially theory - Even the fallout from the various schools of geopolitical thought can get quite heated. What would be the point?

[Gil Hamilton]

Why is that immoral? Why couldn't you have a legitimate and absolute morality based around the principle that the end always justifies the means? It certainly would be more legitimate, at least in my view, than an arbitrary morality system like that espoused by many religions. It also seems to fit largely with the way the world seems to work, IE, it is a liveable and functional morality because it is realist.

I would think this would be obvious, but the reason that an "ends justifies the means" philosophy is completely flawed as a system of morality is because it literally declares all other morality null and void. For instance, rape is an utter immoral and dispicable act. But under your "ends justifies the means" philosophy, it's retroactively made moral as long as it has a beneficial result to the person doing it. Tough shit for the person on the ground being raped, the person with the power to commit the act is getting benefit from it and it's retroactively moral to occur. Same with murder. Some guy guns down a poor shlub on the street and takes his fat wallet, thus making 54 dollars and change, which is more than the cost of the bullet he used to aquire it. By the "ends justifies the means" principle, the murderer and theif is not a murderer or thief, but a capitalist who morally aquired more funds for his operation of gunning down people and using the proceeds to buy more bullets. Too bad for the person who was involved in the "means" part of the equation. This applies to all universally immoral acts, especially stuff like theft and murder.

Apply this on a national scale and you've got dictatorships and fascism. Fascism thrives on the thoroughly immoral "ends justifies the means" principle, commiting terrible immoral acts for the benefit of itself and then retroactively calling them moral, as you are doing in this thread, if they actually work. The government moving in an stealing all your farmland because you're white and they don't consider you a citizen? Moral act, as long as they manage to grow something on it. Concentration camps? If it's good for you and your state, then it's off to the gas chamber with a smile for them. Et cetera.

There is no way that "ends justifying the means" is a moral principle. It's emphatically immoral and anti-moral, thus not livable or realistic as a system of morality.

I'm not saying I have that sort of morality, but I'm arguing you can't call it "immoral" - It is a potentially legitimate moral philosophy. I also don't think you could assign a baseline number for people killed before a dictatorship becomes bad in such a situation, because it really depends on the positive result, and negative results may also be more complex than just slaughter - A fixed number like that would be impossible to calculate when you consider all the moral, perceptual, and other variables that influence it - a thing beyond the limits of even the extremities of Game Theory.

See above, the "ends justifying the means" completely immoral.

And you see to be. If you judge a number of dictatorships good, then it's a simple division problem to get a mean average for how many people it's a dictatorship can kill for the benefit of the average "benign" dictatorship and still be called benign. You claim that you cannot, but you seem to be doing it everytime you look at a scumbag fascist like Franco and Pinochet. They killed X amount of people but were still good... so that means X amount of people is acceptable in any fascist system or else you're a hypocrite.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

You're being fallacious in your attacks on an ends justify a means. Rape might be considered beneficial by the rapist, but would still have a clearly negative effect - Punishment by the government of the nation-state. It would also be moral of the nation-state to institute such laws, because the legalization of rape would create societal conditions which lower the level of functional efficiency in society; IE, society would have a more positive outcome to have rape illegal, and thus the duty of the government in arbitrating society overall, would be to ban it. Then, the rapist, living within the laws of a single government, would be forced to consider that negative outcome as well, and in calculating it, rape would indeed be immoral.

[Gil Hamilton]

You're being fallacious in your attacks on an ends justify a means. Rape might be considered beneficial by the rapist, but would still have a clearly negative effect - Punishment by the government of the nation-state. It would also be moral of the nation-state to institute such laws, because the legalization of rape would create societal conditions which lower the level of functional efficiency in society; IE, society would have a more positive outcome to have rape illegal, and thus the duty of the government in arbitrating society overall, would be to ban it. Then, the rapist, living within the laws of a single government, would be forced to consider that negative outcome as well, and in calculating it, rape would indeed be immoral.

Ah, so your position gets worse!

First of all, haven't a moral argument at all and you just made it more immoral. Just about any ethicist will tell you that being moral out of fear of punishment is an immoral thing. Moral acts are only more acts when they are done not out of fear of being caught not doing them, but because they are good. Likewise, not doing immoral acts, though you desire to, but fear punishment is not moral. There is a work of fiction on the matter which illustrates this point beautifully. That book is "A Clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess. I suggest you read it some time, but I fear that you'd actually agree with the procedure in the book that "fixes" people. The fact that you claim that an act is only immoral because some authority may catch you and then punish you proves that you don't understand morality and ethics at all.

Secondly, it's not a fallacious attack on the "ends justifies the means", it's a truthful one. The rapist in that position has a position of authority over the person on the ground. At the point when the act occurs, there is no higher authority that will make it stop, no one to tell the rapist that it is wrong and immoral. If he is just going by the "ends justifying the means" the act as of itself is completely moral, even if we follow your frankly idiotic idea that some higher authority of a state determines morality. He got his rocks off, he benefited and there is no guarentee anyone will stop him (in fact, it's statistically unlikely that he will be caught or even reported to a higher authority, look up the statistics yourself). For the scenario, the ends (him getting his rocks off) justified the fact that he had to brutally attack a woman to get it. The ends justified the means for the rapist. That's the "ends justifies the means" at work on a personal scale. Just like the murderer who guns people down for their wallet is only practising good economics (the cost of the bullet is less than that of the sum of the wallet, he's turning a profit!) when he acts, following the "ends justifies the means" philosophy.

Finally, you seemed to miss the metaphor for fascism entirely, either out of the fact that it demonstrates you are wrong or because you just plain missed it I don't know. Even if we go with the thoroughly inethical idea that state authority determines morality, in a fascist dictatorship there is no higher authority. The dictatorship is the authority and is the state. What higher authority punishes the state when it commits atrocities for it's own benefit? Some god? Don't make me laugh. If a dictatorship butchers thousands on thousands of people in cold blood for it's own benefit, then under the "ends justify the means" policy, it's actually being moral by your definition! I had no idea that you thought people like Hitler and the Nazis were moral people, since those death camps were only there to solve a problem that they preceived plagued the nation-state and eliminating would benefit everyone (IE the survivors). The ends, after all, justifies the means, right?