Do you care about the form of a government, or only its results?

[Jacobtm]

Let's look at Honduras.

A democracy, by most definitions. They have an elected President and an elected congress. Wonderful.

The country is terrible, has an insanely high murder rate, terrible rate of poverty. You certainly wouldn't want to be the average Honduran.

But its government is a democracy. That's good, isn't it?

Imagine there were a military coup and the new military government stamped out crime. The cartels operating in Honduras were destroyed, bought off, or otherwise pacified. Honduras went form a place with more than 10X the murder rate of the United States to a place with about the same murder rate as the U.S. The resulting peace helped all aspects of Honduran society flourish. Yet they are not a democracy.

Do you care? Do you think Honduras should go back to democracy just because you like democracy? Or would you accept a positive result from a non-democratic government, and even prefer it to a democratic government, just based on positive results?

Cuba for instance, is not a democracy. They have eliminated a lot of the extreme poverty that is endemic throughout Latin America. They have the lowest AIDS rate in the Caribbean. They have an incredibly low homicide rate for Latin America. Sure they are not rich or flourishing, but their non-democratic government was able to deal with many problems that all their democratic contemporaries have not.

Chile is another case, the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet left Chile as the most economically succesful country in South America, with a very low murder rate, etc. Child returned to democracy but continues to operate under Pinochet's constitution, and his influence on the country certainly was foundational in their modern success.

Can you accept success from non-democratic systems as legitimate? Maybe only leftist non-democratic systems, but not rightist?

[Jacobtm]

We can compare here Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, three countries with a very similar climate, history, culture, and people.

Belarus is "Europe's last dictatorship". According to some Russia is a dictatorship. Ukraine has had the most legitimate democracy, with different parties vying for power and exchanging it more-or-less peacefully until the recent coup installed a western-backed leader without any elections.

So if democracy produces the best results, and Ukraine is the most democratic, Russia somewhere in the middle, and Belarus the least democratic, we would expect any reasonable measure of quality of life to show that same rank. Ukraine is the best, Belarus is the worst.

Let's look at data from 2013 to exclude civil-war related nastiness. You can use Gapminder World for this.

If you look, you see Ukraine actually has the worst Human Development Index, with Belarus ever so slightly in the lead of Russia.

Now if you ever have known anyone who visited Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine, the differences they report are striking.

In Belarus the streets are clean, there is no petty crime to speak of. They run a tight ship there. People don't want to talk about politics, of course, because of the still-extant KGB, but the end result is a place that is safer and better run than its more democratic neighbor Ukraine.

What other somewhat comparable countries are there?

Sinapore used to actually be part of Malaysia. They have a famously "unfree" system that is nominally democratic but really is a one-party state. And of course Singapore is a world-class city on par with London, Tokyo, Paris, and New York. While Malaysia, even Malaysia's capital, is not.

You also have the evidence from the Arab world, where the nicest places to live are formally monarchies.

But even besides monarchies, we have seen that toppling Morsi, Saddam, Assad, and Gaddafi led to only chaos and strife in those countries. Egypt abandoned its democratic experiment after only a year to go back to a military strongman in SISI. Syria, Libya, and Iraq wish they still had strongmen in charge.

Latin America provides many other arguments against democracy having good results. Look at the region in general. Look at Venezuela. They voted for this every step of the way, and now they're more violent than Mexico by many measures and people are fleeing the country in droves. Look at the general level of corruption and low standards of living throughout democratic Latin America.

[Jacobtm]

Gaddafi literally abducted and raped schoolgirls.

The man was cartoonishly evil, and Libya is without a doubt better off without him.

The country has been plunged into a civil war, ongoing since Qaddafi was toppled. ISIS has waged numerous attacks throughout there and in fact claims it as part of their caliphate. Libya still has no effective government that controls it and rival militias continue to fight for its control.

Qaddafi may have been a bad person as an individual but the country was much better stable and with one actual government.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libyan_Civil_War_(2014%E2%80%93present)

A country thrown into civil war is not justified because of the leader being a mean person. His rule was better than most throughout the Arab world.

[Jacobtm]

^ There is so much wrong with that post that I just don't have the physical strength to point it out. I'd be grateful if someone more tenacious than me takes care of it.

This is a pretty lousy post, I have tried to write detailed posts here citing my claims and fleshing out arguments, and I have seen basically one-sentence rebuttals that amount to little more than "no" or the mindless repetition of some creed. If it's too much for you to type out something intellectual, why are you even here, just to write "Lol wut? No way man!"?

[Jacobtm]

The US/NATO/rebel forces didn't just stroll up and shoot Qaddafi. There was an entire f-ing civil war to get him out. "Civil wars not starting on your watch" is the lowest possible bar for good governance...and Qaddafi (and Assad) failed, miserably.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libyan Civil War (2011)

As Qaddafi and Assad told us, the forces against them were terrorists. We see now they were completely right. You can't argue that the fact that organized terrorists began attacking Qaddafi and Assad means that we should take the opportunity to help oust them so that ISIS could take over.

By your logic, "if a civil war starts, you are a lousy leader," England should have assassinated Lincoln. Plenty of countries have civil wars, allow them to sort them out themselves without interjecting.

We have seen that in Syria and Libya, us helping the "rebels", who we were forewarned were terrorists, has just allowed ISIS, Al Nursa, etc. to actually begin getting solid footholds in these countries and actually begin to establish governments.

I would have just let Assad and Qaddafi fight their own wars, with no assistance to either side. They each managed to keep control for decades, I think they would have had at least a fighting chance to defeat the enemies that were within their midsts. Instead the U.S. helped destroy two more stable countries and turn them over to Terrorists.

In 2002, when Saddam, Qaddafi, and Assad were all firmly in power, their countries were without a doubt better places to live, more stable, and free of terrorism. Each of these men were able to control their countries, and after we helped get rid of them, their countries have fallen into chaos and are stomping grouns for all our enemies.

Qaddafi especially was able to halt the flow of migrants from all of Africa to Europe.

I advise you go vacation in Libya or Syria one of these days and see how good a place they are. I actually know people who did just this, when Assad and Qaddafi were in power. You could criticize their leadership on many fronts, but they were places you could peacefully walk the streets. They were stable countries.

You can go here and check out some lovely photos of a globe-trotters trip to Aleppo, A city where he focused on taking pictures of beautiful architecture and delicious looking food at markets:

http://snapshots.travelvice.com/view/syria/aleppo/

Snapshots of Assad's Aleppo:













Aleppo now:





Before/After conflict: