[Non-US] News That Makes You laugh/cry/neither...

[Kaelik]

The "president" of bolivia who got zero votes and heads the third largest party in bolivia gave the military a global pardon for all past and future murders needed to stop protests and the new communication minister has a list of seditious newspapers that will be shut down.

Glorious victory for democracy, way better than having that guy who came into office after Merkel still serving in office just because he won all the elections.

EDIT: They have now decided to arrest a bunch of MAS legislators. You know, the party that actually got the most votes. Very Democracy. Such improvement.

[fbmf]

The "president" of bolivia who got zero votes and heads the third largest party in bolivia gave the military a global pardon for all past and future murders needed to stop protests and the new communication minister has a list of seditious newspapers that will be shut down.

Glorious victory for democracy, way better than having that guy who came into office after Merkel still serving in office just because he won all the elections.

EDIT: They have now decided to arrest a bunch of MAS legislators. You know, the party that actually got the most votes. Very Democracy. Such improvement.

I couldn't help reading that in Trump's voice.

Game On,
fbmf

[Kaelik]

Apparently the new Bolivian dictatorship has taken great pains to correct the reports that they are going to arrest some of the MAS legislators.

They want us to know they have lists, it will not be haphazard, they will arrest all of them.

[Kaelik]

Since Frank is doing his thing of running away from the place he's wrong because he has no response but then lying about it somewhere else where anyone responds is now the "the bad guy" for responding, I guess I'll go over the actual merits of the Constitutional Tribunal decision about term limits.

Now we of course know that the Constitutional Tribunal were not appointed by Evo, but instead elected from over a hundred choices presented by the Legislature, the presumption should be that rather than being toadies they are in fact making constitutional decisions, but if you don't know literally anything about the Bolivian constitution, you might justifiably be confused about the merits of the decision, because if you live in the US, your primary example is constitutional supremacy, where the constitution overrules all other possible laws and stuff. Now there are certainly other systesms, like the UK Parliamentary supremacy, where any law passed by Parliament supersedes anything else (they don't have a constitution per se, but a sort of set of rules that exist drawing from statutes, case law, and stuff people keep doing (like the queen not making her own decisions and just doing what people ask when she suspends parliament) but to the extend all those things are 'the constitution' parliament can change any of them with a majority vote).

Bolivia has an explicit constitution, but considered and rejected constitutional supremacy when writing it.

I. The international treaties and instruments in matters of human rights that have been signed and/or ratified, or those that have been joined by the State, which declare rights more favorable than those contained in the Constitution, shall have preferential application over those in this Constitution.

II. The rights recognized in the Constitution shall be interpreted in agreement with international human rights treaties when the latter provide more favorable norms.

So when Bolivia is a member of human rights treaty which gives people a right to run for office unlimited except by a few specific things, and none of those things are term limits, the decision that the term limits in the constitution must give way to the human rights treaty is not "an attack on the constitution!" it is in fact following the actual principles laid out in the constitution.

So in fact, the evil bad man running for office for fewer years than Angel Merkel is not an evil dictator "President For Life" destroying the constitution by winning an election, he's just a leftist leader of a country who won an election.

And of course, now that we've seen the results of the coup which are a right wing minor party with less support than the main opposition party becoming president after the military forced 4 straight successors to resign, excluded the majority party from the chamber (the only party that represents indigenous people) and installed an "interim" president without a quorum of the legislature, then the "interim" president radically changed foreign policy, announced they would never allow indigenous people in the halls of power again, appointed ministers, gave the armed forces explicit permission to murder people, and then announced lists of seditious newspapers and that they are arresting every single member of the majority party (the only one that represents indigenous people) in the legislature, and then they army conducted a massacre.

So if hypothetically someone had said "the faster [Morales] gets out of town the less damage is going to be done to the country" they might have a bit of egg on their face. And if they made that claim by accusing Morales leadership being the path to a unrepresentative "regime" doubly so.

[Pseudo Stupidity]

I'm surprised anyone hears of a leftist head of state in South America (or anywhere, but South America is more of a gimmie here) getting pushed out by force of arms while US media praises the change and thinks anything but "this is a coup and if we give it a couple weeks we'll find out the US is involved."

[Iduno]

I'm surprised anyone hears of a leftist head of state in South America (or anywhere, but South America is more of a gimmie here) getting pushed out by force of arms while US media praises the change and thinks anything but "this is a coup and if we give it a couple weeks we'll find out the US is involved."

What? The US has never gotten involved politically in South and/or Central America. And also what do Iran or selling crack to black people in Florida have to do with anything? [/sarcasm]

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

But how can the CIA be bad if they also don't like the orange man? The TV keeps telling me I should trust them.

[Mask_De_H]

This whole thing is fucked. Fucked in the standard way the US fucks South/Central America, but apparently with right wingers who might as well be the Iscariot from Hellsing.

As an aside: you are the definition of "No you're not wrong, you're just an asshole," Kaelik. I hope you're not like this in meatspace; I don't know how anyone could stand being physically in your presence when you get riled up.

[DSMatticus]

I get that "Kaelik is an asshole" is such a Den meme that his signature is literally a quote of me joking about it, but Kaelik did fuck all this time. Frank put his foot in his mouth on a topic he knew fairly little about in order to blame a fascist military coup on the dirty irresponsible socialists, decided he would rather continue talking about it in a thread about the monster tamer featuring a Kaelik quote from ten years ago than he would here, and Kaelik put his response here where it belongs.

You can say that Kaelik should just let Frank stomp around the Den taking unchallenged swipes at him, but why? If Frank still wants to talk about it in some random thread on the other side of the Den - and he apparently does - why the fuck can't Kaelik still talk about it in the actual thread where the actual discussion actually happened?

And if Kaelik had responded in that thread, he would have looked like the bad guy, because if two people are talking about fascists coups in South America that's a derail but if one person does it meh that's just Denners hating on eachother. This was the reasonable and correct way to respond to Frank - take it to the thread it belongs in and discuss actual Bolivian constitutional law. Giving Kaelik shit for responding to a post that directly calls him out is the stupidest fucking thing.

People really need to stop sucking Frank's dick. Or hating Kaelik's face. Or whatever brainworm it is that's given you such ridiculous ideas about etiquette that Frank baiting derails out of his grudge with Kaelik isn't a dick move but Kaelik responding to the bait in a way that doesn't actually derail the baited thread is.

[Username17]

DSM, fuck you. I stopped responding to Kaelik because he's off on one of his diatribes. Again. Still. He does this more and more often, and I get more and more tempted to just put him on ignore.

But yes, the Bolivia situation is interesting to talk about because it's horrible and it's real, and no talking to or with Kaelik on this subject is obviously not worth doing. Because he's an asshole.

So just to get things nice and firmly settled:

• Is it a bad thing that a racist right wing junta is murdering Aymara people in Bolivia?
  Obviously yes.
• Is it a bad thing that Evo Morales and his political allies tore up the constitution in order to attempt to extend his rule?
  Obviously yes.
• Is the first thing worse than the second thing?
  Obviously yes.

Every sane person should agree on those three things. Kaelik doesn't agree, because he's an asshole.He thinks that me agreeing to the second proposal means I'm negating the third, and that's actually insane.

Now Kaelik responded to me by going off on a tirade about FDR and Angela Merkel - two people who very distinctly did not overturn the constitutionally determined term limits for a leader of their respective countries. He obviously did that because he is an asshole, but also because defending the choice to extend your length in office while already in office is something that can't be done. It's just obviously a bad thing to do. Always has been. And you can't name one leader in the entire history of the world going back to Julius Fucking Caesar who has pulled this particular trick and had it work out well.

I would argue that Evo Morales' clumsy power grab was a bad thing precisely because it made the current situation more likely and harder to deal with. By undermining the legitimacy of the elected leadership, he alienated support both at home and abroad. People who should have been in the corner of the elected leader of Bolivia simply weren't because he had shat the bed.

Now we can't have a do-over and see whether Evo Morales stepping down according to his constitutionally mandated duties and having the election held for literally any other Bolivian socialist would have kept the current shit show from happening. But it would have made it much harder for the current Junta to claim they weren't violently overthrowing a legitimate elected government - and that alone might have been enough to keep them from pulling it off.

And moving forward, how does Bolivia ever get back to some semblance of legitimate democratic rule? Evo Morales can't do it, and there isn't anyone else who was up for election because Morales hogged the spotlight last time. If Evo Morales had just done his fucking job and stood down, he'd be a retired elder statesman right now, and him coming back on a white horse to save democracy might actually work. Or the legitimately elected president would be a legitimately elected president. Either position is a better position to restore the republic from than where anyone is now.

Bolivia is fucked. A murderous racist right wing junta is in power, and the socialists burned their legitimacy on a pointless personality cult.

And Kaelik is still an asshole.

-Username17

[Kaelik]

"Of course it was unconstitutional I said so didn't I? What, no of course I didn't read the constitution, I don't know jack fucking shit about the constitution!"

Is maybe not as compelling an argument as you think it is.

[DSMatticus]

Frank, your argument is that duly appointed Supreme Court justices have no authority to make rulings on the constitutionality of referendums. It's a ridiculous fucking argument. Your definition of constitutional in this instance is just "the parts of the constitution that don't make me wrong" and it's stupid and shitty and shut the fuck up about it.

You would have a leg to stand on if you were arguing that ethically democratic referendums are important and need to be respected regardless of their legality. It would be a strange argument for someone opposing Brexit to make, but it would be valid, and you could probably even square those beliefs fairly easily by citing foreign interference and the like.

But you do not have a leg to stand on arguing that Morales' decision to run again was strictly unconstitutional. Not only in the "might makes right" sense that ultimately the government gets to say what its own laws are in some form or another, but because the relevant legal text the court used to reach their decision is now right in front of you, and the legal argument is relatively straight forward. It's just the observation that the referendum conflicts with existing constitutional law, so... something has to give. It's not John Roberts declaring that laws have expiration dates because he wants to give states the greenlight to bring back Jim Crow.

And to be completely honest you also don't have a leg to stand on arguing that Morales' action are the underlying cause of the coup. When the military pulls out their guns and tells the entire presidential line of secession to step aside so they can skip straight to the genocide and fascism bits, it's not because they hate that one guy Morales. It's because they fucking love fascists.

You are confusing pretense with motivation. The question "would there have been enough of a smokescreen and international support to get away with it if Morales' hadn't run?" is a valid one, I guess, but the answer is in fact "yeah, probably." It's worth noting that the OAS's claims about a rigged election were almost certainly bullshit. Morales was projected to win by large enough margins to avoid a run-off and now that we've seen the actual vote counts and people have had a chance to break the demographics down the final results were almost certainly legitimate - almost like the OAS just made shit up in order to provide a smokescreen for a coup. Well, I'm sure there's no way they'd have done the exact same thing if a different socialist were running, right? It's not like they hate socialists or are trying to promote corporate-friendly fascism or anything. They just had some personal beef with Morales that's gone way out of control. Tee-hee! Oops! Sorry!

No, what actually happened in Bolivia is that outside forces made a deliberate effort to generate doubt about an election that was very likely legitimate and then when that successfully whipped the right-wing into a public frenzy the military used that as an excuse to drive out the government and start murdering people in the name of "restoring public order" - except they're just murdering the socialists, not the right-wingers, and the 'order' they're restoring isn't the 'order' people voted for.

[DSMatticus]

To be clear, I do want to say that Morales did make an actual political mistake that cost him his presidency and the Bolivian people their democracy - the mistake of believing that the right-wing would ever follow democratic norms. He and his party had control over Bolivia long enough that they had a credible chance to build a military loyal to democratic principles, but they chose not to do so (or more accurately, failed to choose to do so) because as with many South American countries the military in Bolivia is a barely leashed fascist power structure and to challenge the fascists' grip on it is to invite an immediate military coup. So Morales' soldiered along under the impression that so long as he could maintain a democratic mandate and did not directly challenge the military, they would not fucking murder him dead out of basic respect for Bolivia's institutions, fear of popular revolt, or concern about international reprisal.

Then Donald Trump ended up the fucking president of the United States and spent three years sucking off violent authoritarians on Twitter, the OAS strongly hinted that Morales had fabricated his election results, and the international community made a bunch of public statements boiling down to "we're really concerned about this Morales guy." And so the Bolivian military came to understand that there would be no reprisal headed their way, and all they needed to do was murder their way back to stability, slap a nominally centre-right figurehead at the front of their government once things had quieted down, and they'd be invited back into the international community without problem because that is an acceptable state of affairs to the international community. Ugly business, but now it's all behind us and things are back as they should be - 'should be' meaning 'without any of those socialists.'

Morales' failed because the world is run by fascist-sympathizing capitalists who can ignore a little genocide here and there in order to ensure unchecked capitalism remains, well, unchecked, and the venn diagram of "Bolivians who despise democracy" and "Bolivians who have access to military equipment and training" was too much of a circle. That's really it.

EDIT: This should be a familiar story to you. You may recall that large portions of the FBI effectively went rogue during the 2016 election in a bid to throw the election to Trump. You can blame that on that fascists, and while it's certainly an ethical failing for which they are responsible, it's not particularly effective to do so because they're fucking fascists, they don't care, they got what they wanted. The correct person to blame for that mistake is... Obama, for convincing himself that any right-winger would ever respect, or could ever be trusted with, institutional authority. Yes, he should have spent these eight years rooting out Republican loyalists. That was an important step of safeguarding our democracy, he failed to do it because he was a naive institutionalist, and that is the reason (among others, some of which are also his fault) Donald Trump is now president.

[Username17]

Frank, your argument is that duly appointed Supreme Court justices have no authority to make rulings on the constitutionality of referendums. It's a ridiculous fucking argument. Your definition of constitutional in this instance is just "the parts of the constitution that don't make me wrong" and it's stupid and shitty and shut the fuck up about it.

When Xi Jinping announced that his position as General Secretary was for life, that was technically legal. When McConnell announced that they were scheduling hearings on the Garland appointment "never" that was technically legal. When the US Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that Bush was president and also go fuck yourself - technically legal.Something being technically legal doesn't make it not an obvious assault on democratic norms and constitutional law.

Extending the term of the head of state after he is already head of state is usually something that is technically achievable within the law under most systems. And it's always bad. Always. No exceptions. It's happened a lot of times in history and it is literally always bad. If there was even a single counter example in the history of the world, people would never shut up about it. But there isn't and there never will be.

It is always an attack on the governing norms of society. It is always done for stupid, selfish, and short sighted reasons. And it always goes wrong. Literally always. And I have hundreds of examples across thousands of years of history to support me on this.

-Username17

[Kaelik]

Extending the term of the head of state after he is already head of state is usually something that is technically achievable within the law under most systems. And it's always bad. Always. No exceptions. It's happened a lot of times in history and it is literally always bad. If there was even a single counter example in the history of the world, people would never shut up about it. But there isn't and there never will be.

It is always an attack on the governing norms of society. It is always done for stupid, selfish, and short sighted reasons. And it always goes wrong. Literally always. And I have hundreds of examples across thousands of years of history to support me on this.

"Extending the Term of the head of state after he is already head of state" by winning another election for head of state is something that every president except Ford and the ones who died too soon to try has also attempted. It is also what Trudeau did, it is also what Merkel has done.

It is called having an election.

Your steadfast refusal to acknowledge that you have no moral or legal argument for term limits is kind of the point. You don't have a moral argument, because you don't apply them to anyone who isn't trying to fix an Apartheid system, and you don't have a legal case because amongst other things you want to dodge as far as possible away from talking about any actual facts on the ground because you are completely colossally ignorant of them and didn't even know how the Constitutional Tribunal was selected and don't know anything about the constitution you've never once read a single word of and don't want to admit that.

So instead you are trying to walk your way around the words "term limits" with bullshit like "extending the term of the head of state" a thing he didn't do to create an arbitrary distinction between when Morales ran again for election in a system that did not have any constitutional term limits and when FDR did the same thing.

Re: DSM: 1) Technically the Constitutional Tribunal decision had nothing to do with the Referendum since it wasn't about adding them and they were added, but was about removing them, so the decision was only about the existing constitution. It also of course, is at least equally if not more susceptible to process criticisms as Brexit, since there was a lot of alleged outside interference from other countries with a stake and the total number of votes on both sides was less than Morales got in any election including the most recent one, and heavily skewed away from rural indigenous communities.

2) I would again reiterate that none of the people doing a coup are basing their justification for couping on term limits, the OAS acknowledges that Morales was a legitimate candidate, and the people doing the coup didn't say he was illegitimate for running, they said he was for cheating in the election. Part of the reason is of course, because they want a justification for throwing out the entire legislature, but also just because recent manufactured bullshit is better than years old manufactured bullshit.

[DSMatticus]

Re: DSM: 1) Technically the Constitutional Tribunal decision had nothing to do with the Referendum since it wasn't about adding them and they were added, but was about removing them, so the decision was only about the existing constitution. It also of course, is at least equally if not more susceptible to process criticisms as Brexit, since there was a lot of alleged outside interference from other countries with a stake and the total number of votes on both sides was less than Morales got in any election including the most recent one, and heavily skewed away from rural indigenous communities.

Yeah, I've completely twisted myself around on the referendum. I remembered term limits had won (making the case for a democratic mandate to enforce them), but not that that meant the referendum had failed.

Fortunately, it does not actually substantively affect the discussion. If you believed the Supreme Court should have followed the democratic mandate, then in your eyes the Supreme Court case is no more or less unjustly decided. And the 2017 Bolivian Supreme Court case was still about two supposably conflicting articles in the constitution, except that the second article is now from the original 2009 constitution and not a 2016 amendment.

2) I would again reiterate that none of the people doing a coup are basing their justification for couping on term limits, the OAS acknowledges that Morales was a legitimate candidate, and the people doing the coup didn't say he was illegitimate for running, they said he was for cheating in the election. Part of the reason is of course, because they want a justification for throwing out the entire legislature, but also just because recent manufactured bullshit is better than years old manufactured bullshit.

I would like to elaborate on this.

This is the man who is most responsible for organizing the Bolivian protests and who succeeded in pulling in the police and military. Protests which did not start after the Supreme Court struck down term limits, or when Morales announced his presidential bid, or any of that shit, but on October 21st when it was clear Morales had won and after the OAS had declared they would demand a run-off election regardless of the outcome (which they did before they saw the results) and then also insinuated that the election had been fraudulent (which they did when they saw partial results that suggested Morales might actually secure the necessary 10pt margin in the first round). His political career involves being a member of violent nationalist groups which organize protests that are actually just mob violence and intimidation against their political opponents and also helping international plutocrats evade taxes and launder money.

He does not give a single fuck about Morales transgressions, existent or otherwise. If he could have convinced the military and police to start murdering people because Morales wore a tan suit a la Fox News's coverage of Obama, he would have done so in a heartbeat. And this man is, for the time being, the real power in Bolivia even if Jeanine Anez has her nameplate on a desk somewhere. These are the kind of people organizing the right-wing protests in Bolivia. These are the kinds of people coordinating those protests with police and military forces. They and their followers are not concerned citizens upset about a matter of constitutional law. They are violent far-right radicals. The OAS gave them an excuse - among their own people and among the international community - to overthrow their government by telling them Morales had fabricated election results. So they did that, because that's what they wanted to do all along.

If the international community recognized that OAS was a... biased, untrustworthy entity over which the U.S. has way too much goddamn influence for it to be trusted to not project that influence into its member states' elections, this would not be happening.

If the international community had made it clear that any attempt to overturn the election or seize power would have resulted in crippling sanctions on the new government, this would not be happening.

If Morales had spent more time chipping away at fascism in his military until the remaining fascists lived in fear of him instead of the other way around, this would not be happening.

If Morales had groomed a successor and put them forward and then the military had dragged him out of the capitol and executed him, Donald Trump would still have gone on twitter to congratulate the Bolivian military for protecting democracy and the fascists in Bolivia would still be able to count on his support for legitimacy. And frankly with the OAS to sell them excuses so would the rest of the world, as long as the military is willing to cede control to a 'respectable' right-wing figure when they're done. That's how it always goes.

[Username17]

Yeah, I've completely twisted myself around on the referendum.

Yes. Watching you chucklefucks get yourself twisted around trying to act like you can follow the fine points of Bolivian constitutional law arguments despite the fact that you don't actually speak the language they are written in is certainly a thing.

Here's the bottom line: it doesn't fucking matter what the constitutional arguments were or whether the constitutional process was followed or even whether there was a democratic mandate. None of that matters, because extending the allowed terms for the head of state is still always bad. Literally always. No exceptions. It's a major red flag of democratic backsliding regardless of what the process for it is and whether that process was followed correctly.

Fascists, Monarchists, Theocrats, Soviets, and any other anti-democratic group can and have won fair elections. And then they have a democratic mandate to end democracy and that's still bad. When the head of state announces they will seek an additional term despite that not previously having been allowed, it doesn't matter whether they do that by decree or push a bill through the legislature or have courts declare they can do it or hold a referendum. It is the outcome itself that is democratic backsliding, and the process followed to get there is just interesting to historians.

Xi Yinping didn't personally decree that his term in office was now "for life." The Chinese National People's Congress voted for a new office length that never ends for the General Secretary. That's legal and has as much legitimacy as anything has in China, but it's bad because the outcome is bad. Debating the fine points of legal process is a pointless distraction.

-Username17

[MGuy]

I'm not Bolivian so I don't have a solid opinion about the particulars but it seems really shitty to put "being elected by the people for another new term" in the same negativity column as "a military coup put a racist national in power while ousting a rightly popular native born public figure out of the country".

Political dynasties are bad but no one here is looking back at 2016 and saying that Hillary should never have run.

Wanting the political opposition party to be jailed sets off red flags but the three people who are arguing here and have advocated for that would not take that back.

And I'm sure there'd be someone pointing out context but that's what seems to be missing here. In context Evo has by all accounts done the most to end the apartheid state for his people and looked as though he would continue doing so. At the small cost of a popular anti apartheid leader being freely voted into office again in a fair race he likely would have continued. The fact that his also democratically elected SC decided it was good to give him that chance really makes it hard for me to care about term limits. Again, I'm not not Bolivian so I can't speak for them. However looking at Morales and seeing what happened to there and comparing it to China? That's some extreme bad faith.

[phlapjackage]

Here's where I don't follow the given argument - why is extending the ALLOWED terms always bad? There was still an election, democracy had spoken and elected the person that the people wanted. Barring any election fraud (seems like there wasn't), why is it bad to allow people to decide who they want to lead them? And sure there might be edge cases of someone elected 25 times or whatever, but this doesn't seem like one of those times.

And bringing up China is not at all the same thing. Those aren't elections. Those have nothing to do with democracy or the people's will. The "People's Congress" is the oligarchy, not the people. Having the oligarchy decide to install a leader for as long as they want is miles away from a democratically-elected official.

*edit* And you don't speak Chinese, so you probably should stay away from any comments on how they run their government. It cuts both ways.

[Username17]

Here's where I don't follow the given argument - why is extending the ALLOWED terms always bad?

Because it's literally always been bad. Even when it was done by people who were on the right side of history when they did it like Mugabe or Castro. People who did it who were already on the wrong side of history like Kim and Mubarak are of course too numerous to mention.

There are seriously zero examples of a national leader arguing that they should be allowed to stand for an extra term that wouldn't normally be allowed and having that work out well. Zero. It's literally always bad. Always. No exceptions. No exclusions. No refunds.

If you're arguing that the current head of state should have the rules changed so they can be head of state longer, you are wrong. Period.

That doesn't automatically make you the worst person in the country. And in Latin America it's usually actually pretty hard to be the worst person in the country because there's a lot of competition. But you're definitely in the wrong on that issue, and it's not ambiguous or close or subject to whataboutisms.

-Username17

[DSMatticus]

Frank has nothing left except to point out that Xi Jinping declared himself president for life and that's bad and that's kind-of-sort-of-not-really-please-don't-think-about-it-too-hard like the Bolivian Supreme Court arguing that term limits are unconstitutional and then a socialist winning a fourth term so that must also be bad.

Whether or not term limits are a good thing, who the fuck knows. Historically, functioning democracies have a strange tendency to adopt them in response to successful socialist movements because some damn socialist won't stop winning elections and someone believes it will be electorally advantageous to limit the amount of goodwill and reputation one individual can earn with the electorate. It's harder to fearmonger about the dude who's been president for more than a decade because everyone knows what he's about. Term limits don't seem to do a wonderful job of stopping someone from becoming president for life, because the reason someone becomes president for life is that they have already succeeded in capturing sufficient control of the government that they and their party can do whatever the fuck they want. Nonetheless, I tentatively support term limits.

But at the end of the day, as much as Frank does not want to talk about it Kaelik correctly summarized the argument before the Supreme Court and the ruling they made is not a blatantly delegitimizing powergrab in the way the nullification of the Voting Rights Act by John Roberts was. It is a categorically different beast entirely.

And even that is ultimately a poor refuge for Frank. The protesters in Bolivia are not marching because Morales ran for a fourth term. They are marching because... well... they're fascists trying to overthrow the government, and the OAS telling them their elections were rigged was sufficient to give the police and military 'casus belli' against Morales and join the radical right-wing nationalist protesters without fear of significant retribution from the international community. At the end of the day, Morales' decision to run for a fourth term is really just a talking point for Very Concerned centrists who need to somehow blame fascist coups on their victims. "If the left just played the game the way the fascists wanted them to play it, then maybe the fascists would stop hitting them so much!" It's the tired notion that institutionalism is the refuge of the oppressed, because the alternative - that your institutions can't fucking help you at all in the face of a dedicated effort to subvert them - is fucking terrifying. When one side has no respect for your country's institutions, that usually only amounts to corruption and the gradual, almost imperceptible decline in the rule of law. When neither side has respect for your country's institutions, that's an express train to civil war brinksmanship.

[Username17]

That's a bunch of non sequitur bullshit, DSM. There is a giant difference between 'Are Term Limits a Good Idea?' and 'Is changing the rules so that Dear Leader can hold on longer than the social contract allowed a good idea?'

That is, I don't actually think term limits are a great idea full stop. Certainly they work out very poorly in the legislatures they've been tried. But that does not in any way change the literally unbroken record of heads of state working to appeal their own term limits working out badly for literally thousands of years.

You have zero counter examples. I'm starting with Julius Caesar and just going from there. There are literally no counter examples.

Having the leader repeal their own term limits is at best squandering an enormous amount of political capital and governmental legitimacy on a giant narcissistic monument to hubris. That is the best possible case, and it's still pretty bad. There's no up side. There's never been an upside.

Defend Evo Morales with all the real good things he's done. Bolivia had a legit golden age (for Bolivia) for like 8 years. Don't blow smoke up our asses by claiming that his one massive ego-driven failure is actually good. Because it's not. It was bad. And it certainly contributes to how fucked Bolivia is for the foreseeable future.

-Username17

[Kaelik]

"Term limits are for brown people not white people" is basically franks entire contention.

"You can't find a single positive instance of this thing that happened once or zero times ever in history"

Evo ran for office for another term in a system that had no constitutional term limits just like fdr, merkel, Trudeau, ect. But because he is an indigenous leader of a brown country fighting against white supremacism instead of a white leader of a western country Frank believes he has the obligation to not try to win too many elections.

Frank has internalized the racist double standard the west imposes on Latin America and it's people and thinks that if Latin American leaders run for too many terms they are bad. Remember his very first post in this thread was specifically about how Evo needed to find a successor and all this "extending the term" bullshit has been a second order justification to defend why he supports a bunch of white western leaders who didn't have to find successors and still dont.

[deaddmwalking]

When you're running the government, you have a lot of power. When you change the rules while you're in charge, it can appear to be an abuse of power at the best of times.

Morales ought not to have run for reelection even if the term limits were struck down - not because it was NECESSARILY wrong, but because it APPEARS suspect, and that was always the best case scenario. Clearly, things did go badly, so hindsight, running for another term WAS a bad idea.

Frank is right that it should have been obvious BEFORE the election.

There are a lot of good reasons why the military shouldn't have overthrown the democratically elected government. There are a lot of good reasons why Morales should have been allowed to serve the term he was elected. But those reasons are all moot because that's not what happened. Morales didn't deserve everything that happened, but a reasonable person could see something like this happening.

You don't change the rules in the middle of the game. Someone ALWAYS claims that you're cheating.

Putin gives an example of how you ought to do it. He finished his term and stepped down with his hand-selected patsy in his place. Then they changed the rules, but his patsy stepped down as if the old rules still applied. Then Putin returned to office. Putin isn't any type of paragon for democratic ideals (far from it) - it's just that declaring yourself leader for life while you're currently in power is always and obviously bad.

[Kaelik]

When you're running the government, you have a lot of power. When you change the rules while you're in charge, it can appear to be an abuse of power at the best of times.

Except that he didn't.

Morales ought not to have run for reelection even if the term limits were struck down - not because it was NECESSARILY wrong, but because it APPEARS suspect, and that was always the best case scenario. Clearly, things did go badly, so hindsight, running for another term WAS a bad idea.

No, there is no evidence that him running again had ANYTHING to do with the coup, the people who did the coup didn't even use it as a pretend justification! Even their PRETEND justifications have nothing to do with this nonsense.

it's just that declaring yourself leader for life while you're currently in power is always and obviously bad.

Please stop being a racist piece of shit. He didn't declare himself leader for life. He ran and won in an election. He has been "Leader for Life" less time than Merkel, and you aren't going to EVER call her "Leader For Life" when she runs again because she's white.