Civil Society

The Nature of Dictatorships

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It seems like there are a lot of people these days who justify–or at least make excuses for–dictatorships. “Well, it’s true there are some things you can’t do,” goes one typical line. “But if you steer clear of politics, you’ll be just fine.” Dictatorships are justified based on many purported benefits, including suppression of internal violence, enabling economic development, and above all “stability.”

Mario Vargas Llosa talks about what dictatorship really is and what it does to people.

Related: Ralph Peters takes on the “stability is always good” argument. I have related thoughts here.

Vargas Llosa link via Neptunus Lex.

Usenet and Discussion Moderation: Religion and Politics

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Here’s a long discussion in a Usenet group devoted to bicycling that begins when a veteran, reasonable, commenter announces that he is leaving the group because he is tired of the vicious personal attacks and speech-suppression attempts that increasingly accompany discussions of technical topics as well as anything that veers toward politics. The commenter singles out another contributor for having driven him to decide, finally, to stop commenting.

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Stoic Warriors 2 — Where Risk, Pain, and Death Are Ignored

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In an earlier blog review of Stoic Warriors – The Ancient Philosophy Behind the Military Mind, I looked at some of the issues facing the American military as society changes its attitude toward individual suffering.

For several years past, I’ve attended the Banff Mountain Film Festival, which is a spectacular assembly of films on mountain subjects — usually relating to outdoor pursuits, natural environments, and exotic cultures. There, I found the same male appetites for adventure, risk, and camaraderie … with many of the same grim consequences of fear, trauma, loss, and sudden death faced by soldiers. But there was a difference. A big one.

The trailer (below) for a recent year of the Banff film festival runs about five minutes. It does contain advertising but the ads are as interesting as the film excerpts for giving a feel for the festival and, by implication, for the prevailing social ethos.

After the jump, my views on the difference …

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The Rough Zones of the Ten Commandments

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Lex’s link to Robert Fogel reinforces much that is said – and said often – on this blog. It doesn’t seem to me particularly good if we have a wide divergence in wealth and some is back scratching. Nonetheless, I’d worry more if all incomes were the same – for all the reasons mentioned here so often. It isn’t just, or even mainly, productivity that is gauged by differing wages. Our desires are different; so are our priorities. Someone who spends twenty hours a week reading to and playing with her child may not expect to be as compensated in money as if she were working a 60-hour executive week; she is, however, richly rewarded in other ways. As Fogel observes, the differences between the way we can live is not all that dramatic and many differences are driven by choice. As the comments indicate, discussions of poverty are often snapshots in time. My children should not be making the wage that their parents, after forty years of work experience and three degrees do; my husband’s mother deserves comfort but is not, at 88, a wage earner nor is she building capital but rather spending it.

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