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

[deaddmwalking]

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.

Merkel is part of a parliamentary government that doesn't have term limits. If she suspends elections or changes the rules to prevent a non-confidence vote, that'd be a problem. Merkel was recently able to form a new government.

Skin tone has nothing to do with it.

Teddy Roosevelt screwed up when he did the same thing and term limits didn't exist except by tradition.

[Stahlseele]

The German Chancellor is elected for a 4 year term time called a "Legislative Period" There is nothing in any piece of writing limiting how many of those you can have either consecutively or if you manage that feat in a non consecutive order either.
Merkel would not be the first to have 3 or more periods under her belt either.
Our first post WW2 Chancellor had FOUR such periods when HE RESIGNED. He could have kept going, nobody and nothing would have stopped him if he would have wanted to go on and managed to get re-elected.
Helmut Kohl had FIVE such periods.
I think with Merkel bein in her 4th period there are now less chancellors that only did one such period than there ever were that did more than one.

[Kaelik]

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.

Merkel is part of a parliamentary government that doesn't have term limits. If she suspends elections or changes the rules to prevent a non-confidence vote, that'd be a problem. Merkel was recently able to form a new government.

Skin tone has nothing to do with it.

Teddy Roosevelt screwed up when he did the same thing and term limits didn't exist except by tradition.

Evo ran for president in a presidential system that didn't have term limits.

Again, this is an insane nonsense distinction where sometimes running for an election makes you "Leader for Life" and therefore bad, and sometimes it is fine.

And absolutely no one believes that you think FDR was evil and would have used the term "Leader for Life" to describe him just because you pretend to support "traditional" term limits after the fact.

This isn't about your personal opinion about how brown people need to step aside this is about how you are lying when you call people "Leader for Life" when they run for election and win it (and are brown) because you are trying to imply he cheated in an election and isn't democratic, like you make clear when you compare Evo running in an election to Merkel suspending elections.

[Kaelik]

The German Chancellor is elected for a 4 year term time called a "Legislative Period" There is nothing in any piece of writing limiting how many of those you can have either consecutively or if you manage that feat in a non consecutive order either.
Merkel would not be the first to have 3 or more periods under her belt either.
Our first post WW2 Chancellor had FOUR such periods when HE RESIGNED. He could have kept going, nobody and nothing would have stopped him if he would have wanted to go on and managed to get re-elected.
Helmut Kohl had FIVE such periods.
I think with Merkel bein in her 4th period there are now less chancellors that only did one such period than there ever were that did more than one.

Yes, and the point is that white people are allowed to keep running without term limits when their system has not term limits and no one says "this undemocratic of them to keep winning elections, they are an undemocratic leader for life" but as soon as Evo runs in a system without term limits, then suddenly everyone whips out the "Leader For Life" slur to imply that the elections are undemocratic.

[Username17]

Charges of racism by Kaelik are obviously him be an asshole troll. He obviously doesn't believe the white/brown divide because specific examples from every continent were already brought up. Fidel Castro is white be most counts, and Julius Caesar is white by every definition.

Plus, changing the rules of succession after achieving power to hold onto power longer was the modus operandi of both the Axis and the Warsaw Pact, so Europe has literally dozens of examples of rulers who presided over surprise extensions of their allowable time in office. Ceausescu, Salazar, Imrédy, and Franco were obviously white by any particular definitions you care to name.

He has zero examples of a country's leader changing the rules to extend their own allowable rule length and having that work out. Zero. That's why he keeps bringing up Merkel, who isn't a particularly great leader and also very obviously has not changed the rules to stay in power longer than her country's system would normally allow. He's deliberately conflating 'ruling for a long time' and 'breaking the order of the system to rule longer' because otherwise he'd have nothing to say at all.

Don't pretend like his accusations of racism are in any way legitimate or coming from a position of good faith. He knows that there is absolutely no 'white people good, brown people bad' thing going on, he's just accusing people of bad shit because it's offensive and he's a hateful, spiteful, asshole.

-Username17

[Kaelik]

Frank stop fucking lying. You keep saying "cancelling elections is EXACTLY SAME as running for election (when Evo does it, but not when Merkel does it)" but that's fucking bullshit.

No one cares about your bullshit false equivalence between people who cancelled elections and people who ran in elections. That's the reason I'm comparing like examples: People who ran in elections they were constitutionally permitted to run in, instead of examples that are completely irrelevant, where people declared there would be no more elections.

Every time you say "Evo changed the rules" you are lying and it demonstrates that you no actual argument at all.

[deaddmwalking]

F
Every time you say "Evo changed the rules" you are lying and it demonstrates that you no actual argument at all.

Would you agree that the rules changed between when he entered office and when he was forced out of office?

That is, when he was initially elected, he was term-limited, but when he ran for election most recently he was not term-limited?

Because that's the fucking point. When the rules change while you are in office it never goes well. Make the change apply to your successor and there's a good chance that this mess could have been avoided.

Not that it is Morales's fault - maybe things would have happened this way if someone else from his party won an election. But I don't think so.

[DSMatticus]

Hey, guess what, the "Dear Leader / President For Life" thing is a stupid bullshit bait-and-switch Frank is playing because it is the last bastion standing for his shittiness.

Evo Morales ran in an election without any credible evidence of results tampering and won by over a 10pt margin and we call that democracy.

Xi Jinping's party ran in an "election" in which only candidates his party approved were allowed on the ballot and "won" in the sense that any of the delegates who had managed to vote the wrong way would have been executed and replaced before anyone even knew how they'd voted and we mockingly call him a bunch of things that reflect his total lack of a democratic mandate.

To broaden the terms we mockingly call leaders like Xi Jinping to politicians who were ultimately democratically elected is a fucking con and a half. It is absolutely and utterly deceitful. The only actual similarity between the two situations is that... Bolivia got rid of term limits in 2017, and China got rid of term limits in 2018, so... clearly, Evo Morales is the Xi Jinping of South America. That is the connection he is trying to make in your brain with this argument. Removing term limits and letting people keep voting for the same guy after?! Do you want to get authoritarianism? Because that's how you get authoritarianism!

Now, obviously, that is in fact not fucking how you get authoritarianism. Chinese authoritarianism did not start in 2018. 2018 is a completely unnoteworthy year in the grand scheme of China's authoritarianism. The decision to remove term limits is a fucking cliffnote in the epilogue of China's descent into authoritarianism. It's nothing, it's not even remotely causative, that ship sailed a long time ago, and the situation would be no better if Xi Jinping stepped aside for the next party-approved leader. It turns out that's not even how you get you get a fascist military coup. In this case you get a fascist military coup by inviting the OAS to monitor your elections and when they (very likely disingenuously) express concerns about a halt in the informal vote count as official results start being tallied, your own police and military decide they hate you enough to seize on the opportunity of implied impropriety to overthrow your government.

In fact, once you recognize that the timing and mechanism of China's descent into authoritarianism don't line up at all for a comparison with what happened in Bolivia at all, the whole fucking comparison starts looking real stupid. Because it is. It is very stupid. But "undemocratic regimes remove term limits so clearly removing term limits is how you get undemocratic regimes" is literally the only thing Frank Trollman has put out there that still looks even remotely reasonable, so even if the two countries ended up there by completely different mechanisms and one ended up there before they removed term limits and one ended up there after, he's got to keep hammering it. It's logically fallacious, obviously, but it is genuinely hard to find counter-examples - mostly because it's difficult to find any examples of significant electoral reform occurring in stable democracies period. That's what the 'stable' part of that means. African Americans earned their right to vote in the U.S. on the back of fairly serious political unrest and open violence - most of that violence committed by whites against blacks in an attempt to suppress that unrest and failing. You should associate the passage of the Civil Rights Act with a period of dangerous political instability, even though its passage was unequivocally a good thing. Frank is implying the causative relationship on that runs in reverse (electoral reforms cause instability instead of being caused by it), and that's kind of silly. Arguing that Bolivia's removal of term limits caused the current political instability is a lot like arguing that the passage of the Civil Rights Act got MLK assassinated. No, the fascists wanted to destabilize Morales' government all along and needed an excuse, and the excuse they went with was the one the OAS gave them, and no, the white supremacists wanted to murder MLK for a long fucking time, and one of them just finally did it. In both cases, the instability was a systemic issue which caused pivotal events as opposed to being caused by them.

EDIT: And I suppose it is depressing/amusing to note that the passage of the Civil Rights Act coincides very nicely with the political realignment which lead to the almost complete Republican dominance of national politics that we are still suffering under today. If you are so inclined you really can trace our current political dysfunction back to Democrats deciding black people are, you know, people. That is where the plutocrat-white supremacist coalition gets its start. How weird - the U.S. did things 'the right way' and still ended up with fascists seizing the White House through the support of a corrupt foreign power in spite of the democratic will of the people - it just took a little longer. How very Bolivian of us.

Okay, now I'm being a little flippant.

[Kaelik]

That is, when he was initially elected, he was term-limited, but when he ran for election most recently he was not term-limited?

I want you to pay very close attention to this, because boy howdy is what you said here really dumb.

Evo Morales won his first election in 2005. His campaign promise and also the thing he immediately set about doing was to TEAR UP THE OLD CONSTITUTION HE JUST WON UNDER and then write a completely new one because the old one was part of an apartheid state and not acceptable.

Then the 2009 constitution came into existence while he was in office. That constitution had a number of constitutional provisions, including both the ones with term limits, and ALSO the ones that said term limits are unconstitutional.

Those term limit provisions in the 2009 constitution that was written while he was in office have never been used against literally any human being at any point because they were unconstitutional.

So technically the answer to your specific question is "No" in that when he was elected he was elected under a completely different constitution which didn't have term limits, and then, after DELIBERATELY CHANGING THE RULES LIKE MAS PROMISED TO DO they created a completely different constitution which also did not have term limits. So even though the Bolivian people drastically changed ALL the rules completely during his tenure, there was never any point at which he or anyone else was ever term limited.

Because that's the fucking point. When the rules change while you are in office it never goes well. Make the change apply to your successor and there's a good chance that this mess could have been avoided.

OHHH, well then what you MEANT to say was "the military should have couped Evo in 2009 when the MAS carried out the promise they made to remove the white supremacist constitution and create a plurinational state and he should have kept being president under the white supremacist constitution."

[Username17]

Removing term limits and letting people keep voting for the same guy after?! Do you want to get authoritarianism? Because that's how you get authoritarianism!

That is in fact factually one of the ways that you get authoritarianism. See Cuba, Zimbabwe, Romania, and so on.

There are other times when you get a fascist coup and you go from zero to Pinochet in an orgy of repression and blood. But creeping authoritarianism where popular and effective leaders gradually metastasize throughout the government until it's functionally impossible for them to be curtailed by democratic means is also a thing.

'Term Limits Removed For Leader" is a very well established red line of democratic backsliding. It's right up there with "courts choose the winner of major election" like the US had in 2000.

-Username17

[Kaelik]

It's actually amazing how much of what the coup defenders say is so horrifically wrong that knowing literally anything about Bolivia would mean not saying it.

[DSMatticus]

Term limits are bad and it's probably okay to remove them, but if you run again after term limits are removed that's definitely the slippery slope to authoritarianism, and Bolivia proves that because Morales won a democratic election and now authoritarians run the government. Case closed. What do you mean the authoritarians are different guys? What's that got to do with anything? What do you mean they're arguing that Morales' election was illegitimate because the OAS contested the results and not because of term limits?

Alright, I just wanna cut through this bullshit. If term limits are good, it's because they stop one person from building enough loyalty within the government's institutions that they can eventually declare themself fuhrer. In that context, whether you didn't have term limits and kept not having them or had them and removed them means fuck all, because the danger is that you are giving one man too much time to Ship of Theseus your government into his government. Historically, term limits are absolute shit at this, because the road to fascism is... to Ship of Theseus their government into our government over multiple political administrations composed of different fascists that are all part of the same fascist coalition. The fascist in charge isn't the movement, they are the guy who happens to be closest to the chair when the music stops. Donald Trump is American fascism's embarrassing gaffe, not its father. The music stopped and he happened to be there so he smugged his stupid smirk and plopped his fat ass down and if we're lucky he'll break the chair under the weight of his incompetence.

If term limits are bad, it's because you believe they prevent the people from exercising their democratic will to choose their elected representatives or possibly because you shrewdly believe that the left is better able to build a longterm relationship of good will with the people, by virtue of having policies that support those people instead of exploit and oppress them. If either of those is the case, removing term limits is either inherently a pro-democracy electoral reform or a bit of politik intended to increase the extent to which political accountability benefits candidates with platforms that benefit the most people (which is honestly just a longer way to say... a pro-democracy electoral reform). Historically, it certainly seems to be the case that the popularity of specific pro-worker administrations has been a driving factor in the creation of term limits.

It is more than somewhat bizarre to carve out the position that the people should be able to elect Morales as many times as they want to... unless they originally thought they were only going to be able to choose him X times and there was an X+1 time. If you are concerned that Morales is using his time in office to build institutions which are ultimately loyal to him and not the people (he obviously wasn't, the police and military turned on him and the people alike and were in fact more loyal to a racist plutocrat than anyone else), that is not a concern that is any less pressing without the constitutional controversy.

And I am going to remind everyone, again, that the actual cause of the protests in Bolivia, according to the protesters, their fascist organizer Camacho, the police and the military, is not the 2017 Supreme Court ruling. It is that the OAS insinuated that the difference between the unofficial preliminary count and the official final results was because of electoral fraud. But the unofficial preliminary count had not been completed, with most of the outstanding votes in regions Morales was expected to win, and the final results are completely consistent with what you would expect from what we saw in the partial count. There really isn't any evidence of electoral fraud coming from anyone who isn't just peachy with the current violent overthrow of the Bolivian government.

Morales is being accused of electoral fraud. He has been told that if he returns he will be arrested and prosecuted. That is the legitimizing shield that this coup has chosen to adopt for their actions, and it was a shield handed to them by the OAS and the international community, and not by any of Morales' own actions, so far as anyone credible can tell.

All of this other shit that's happening in this thread ... well, it's fascinatingly bizarre at points, but it is in fact mostly irrelevant. It's a rationalization born out of the centrist media's desire to tell socialists to stop punching themselves in the face and not by the reality in Bolivia. Morales is being accused of electoral fraud by the right-wing, by the OAS, and by the broader international community, and a bunch of fascists, especially those in the police and military, took that accusation of electoral fraud as a greenlight to murder their way to a fascist regime. The insinuation that a different socialist would have been more palatable is absurd. It's not the person, it's the politics.

[Chamomile]

Anyone who doesn't see what's going on here is either new around here or very bad at pattern recognition. Frank Trollman has a tendency of making claims that appear to be well-informed on obscure subjects, and indeed are often actually well-informed on obscure subjects, but obviously Frank is a mortal man with limited abilities who fucks things up sometimes and he has a very long history of resorting to egomaniacal bullying in an attempt to shout down anyone who points out his mistakes. Also, the last couple of years have seen this general tendency take a worrying trend towards a Cold War mentality where anyone who opposes the Russians is automatically the good guys, and since Frank was the first one to point out that Putin being a supervillain doesn't mean the Ukrainian junta is the Rebel Alliance as recently as 2014, I'm pretty sure this is directly informed by the events of 2016, specifically, rather than just a general trend caused by aging or accumulation of wealth and status or whatever. The bit about motives and causes is unqualified speculation from a layperson, but the bit about patterns of behavior is easily observable to anyone who can read English and has been watching Frank post for more than a year or two: He will fight anyone on anything for any length of time to defend the illusion that he has never been wrong about anything.

Also, Kaelik will make vapid accusations of racism directed towards anyone who disagrees with him for any reason, even when the facts are clearly on his side and his opponent's disingenuity is easily explained by a non-racist and extremely consistent pattern of behavior spanning over a decade, because ruining other people's reputations is his goal and actually begin right about things is something he does only when it is incidentally useful to that goal. Today, it happens to useful, but it's obviously not his end goal because packaging a very obviously wrong accusation of racism into an otherwise correct defense of Evo Morales' government and decisions only weakens the overall argument. It lets Frank say things like "[c]harges of racism by Kaelik are obviously him be an asshole troll" and be totally correct, which distracts from the points at which he is obviously wrong.

But finally, unless someone has a pro-Morales counter-coup in their pocket and is reading this thread for guidance on whether they should go for it, the most important takeaway from this thread is actually the much more local and minor but nevertheless directly-relevant-to-us issue that Frank tried to package a dismissive counterargument to Kaelik into a post made in a completely unrelated thread that I hadn't even read for lack of interest and which Kaelik might not have either (he responded to it in this thread, so clearly he did in fact see that post, but the point here is that he could plausibly have missed it), which is a pretty bald-faced attempt to manipulate the forum's perception of another user in a venue in which they can't respond without coming across as though they're the ones derailing. This gambit failed because the counter of making a response in the actual correct thread isn't hard to figure out, but it's like the third or fourth time Frank has tried something in this basic genre of bad behavior, targeting three different users (that I can remember), and concerning subjects from those as significant as Evo Morales' culpability or lack thereof in the chain of cause and effect that led to the fascist coup in Bolivia to those as trivial as how improv comedy works. This is apparently just his MO now.

[MGuy]

Frank seems more like a lib than a racist to me. Of course you can't truly know a person but his pattern of behavior doesn't scream racist at me. Frank is out of touch when it comes to actual problems. He thinks all amounts of money are the same (or at least he was willing to pretend to believe that over the ubi thing), all poor neighborhoods are the same, and now that all recurring leaders are the same (at least for the sake of this argument).

We know he is capable of engaging more deeply with this stuff. Lets take the referendum that failed to eliminate term limits in Bolivia. For this argument overturning it was bad but we know that he wants the Brexit vote overturned. So we know he doesn't believe in the sanctity of referendums. The term limits he's saying are always bad? He is willing to argue the case for 'this' argument but as pointed out by others he's very selective with who he uses as bad examples while avoiding others so we know he doesn't believe in the sanctity of term limits.

So why is this being argued? I don't know. What's happening in Bolivia is clearly a disaster and it is unseemly to in response start to quibble about processes that don't matter. From my perspective the matter of term limits is so far removed from what we should be collectively concerned about, and what the fascists who seized control of the country are concern concerned about, that it is actually worrying that anyone would bother bringing it up in the face of this disaster.

[Username17]

Chamomile, what exactly am I wrong about here?

Was Evo Morales allowed to stand for a fourth term when he was initially elected? No. No he was not. Therefore the rules were changed after he was in power to allow him to hold onto power. That's undeniable, and DSM tying himself in knots trying to figure out the minutiae of Bolivian constitutional procedure is utterly pointless. A sideshow of complexity to avoid dealing with the obvious.

They went from A to B and the only way you get from A to B is the massive expenditure of political capital and perceived governmental legitimacy at home and abroad. The specific procedures don't matter to external onlookers. No one on the outside gives a shit that the acts of the British government are nominally royal decrees or that the acts of the Chinese government are nominally written by a people's assembly. What matters is what the governments actually do. And "Our government has decided that it can stay in power longer" is never a good look. It just obviously isn't, and anyone who claims otherwise is subject to motivated reasoning at best.

So there is a horrible right wing coup followed by a horrible right wing junta. Would this have happened if the government hadn't squandered a bunch of political capital and international good will on a monument to Evo Morales' vanity? Maybe. The rise of international fascism is certainly a thing. The Trump administration would obviously support any fascist coup no matter how thin the pretext, and as we see in Brasil the fascists of today don't feel they need to have really great excuses to throw coups sometimes. But it's also possible that it wouldn't have. Democratic forces in Bolivia would have a lot more support in Europe if they hadn't made a bunch of creeping authoritarianism noises with the term extension. It's possible that had Evo Morales simply groomed a successor like he was supposed to that we wouldn't have a coup at all, or that the attempted coup would have more people with cold feet and failed to take over. We'll never know of course, because do overs in politics are metaphysically impossible.

But we do know that the situation we are in right now is worse than one in which Evo Morales had taken the high road and a hypothetical different socialist had won an election. Because in that hypothetical world, even if the coup still went ahead Bolivia would have two leaders of opposition who both would have more perceived international legitimacy than Evo Morales does now and a much better chance of restoring democratic rule in the near future.

Remember, none of this side argument is about whether right wing coups are actually good. It's about whether extending the term limits for the national leader is bad. The reason Kaelik keeps accusing people of racism isn't just because he is an asshole who always accuses people of racism, it's that he has a fundamentally immature world view where the fact that the right wing junta is bad means that every action of the democratically elected government must have been good. And since that's completely ridiculous when you say it out loud, he has chosen to level serious accusations against everyone instead of defending that point with anything remotely resembling a coherent argument.

-Username17

[MGuy]

So here Frank seems to want to rest his entire reason for arguing this out on whether or not the extension of term limits is good or bad. The bad he is asserting is legitimacy at home or abroad. Now at home Evo had enough legitimacy to win another election. So I guess Frank believes that the move ruined his legitimacy abroad and thus made the situation worse because now there is only one party that hasn't been deposed of by the military. Now you have to ask yourself if Frank is implying that this military coup is somehow made more legitimate because a guy who wouldn't have been allowed to run again actually won a free and fair election. He clearly is implying that the military wouldn't have deposed their greatest opposition had another person been rightfully elected. How does he support this? I don't know. None of this coup business was predicated on Evo getting another term. It was predicated on a report by an American organization that has fucked with Latin America since its inception. Why Frank would believe things would be better if another member of Evo's party had won is beyond me. In the hypothetical alt reality I'd imagine the fascists would still be running their greatest opposition out of town because the people in power don't like brown people who help their own being in power.

Frank here is taking a ridiculous position that only makes sense if you ignore what's going on. The idea that the coup itself is made even a little bit more legitimate on the world stage because Evo would have won re-election sounds dumb to me. I must point out that the decision to get rid of term limits came well before this event as far as I know. So why then does it matter only after Evo won? Why argue so ardently over what is pretty much a neutral action (getting rid of term limits itself) and then justify it being bad with the possibility that maybe the fascists would look a bit worse had another brown person taken office? Why not instead just understand that while one may not agree with term limit extensions that in this context it really doesn't fucking matter?

[Username17]

Again and still, the ability to win an election does not mean that the legitimacy of the government has not been lessened. True story: I've actually lived in a country where the 'good guys' extended their own rule by changing the rules and became the bad guys. And they kept 'winning elections' all the way through.

The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia are the good guys in 1943. And they are the bad guys in 1963. Unambiguously in both cases. And in 1946 they contested and won free and open elections. In 1948 they changed the rules and became functionally impossible to remove by democratic means even though of course they did not actually stop having 'elections.' Funny thing is, when you do shit that looks like that, Europeans get upset and are less likely to support you. It has a history. That history is bad.

Pretending otherwise doesn't make you reasonable, it makes you obtuse.

-Username17

[MGuy]

I could probably name a dozen things that have a bad history that happens often that Frank would shrug his shoulders over. Political dynasties being a thing I mentioned and jailing ones opposition being another I already mentioned. Both of these things Frank would and has had no problem in the past with. The history of an action, I guarantee is also not something Frank believes in the sanctity of. I am willing to bet that Frank would actually care about the context of an action if he weren't being so... Let's say uncharitable, right now.

But again, and I can't express this enough, Frank is implying that he and EU states in this context with a military coup bringing in a fascist regime into power are willing to quibble over a decision that was made by another part of the government earlier than this conflict, that allowed a man who is ending the apartheid in his country to fairly win an election in his country.

You know the MLK quote about moderate whites? This is what that argument is. "Oh the blacks are breaking laws, some are saying mean things about whites, some are rioting! That somehow lessens my support of human rights!"

That's what this is. Evo didn't kill anyone. He didn't run a despotic regime. I'm sure he wasn't the perfect head of state but apparently he was a damned good one. But because of something bad that MIGHT happen in some alternate future let's toss away all the context of the current situation. Hmmm I guess I shouldn't wonder why someone ending an apartheid on their country might best be installed for a while longer. Best ignore that the bad actors booted OTHER people who had legitimate places in the government out too, and pretend that this quibbling is nothing more than western whites finding SOME reason that can wring their hands over to not to support a native left leaning head of state during a time of crisis.

When it comes down to it libs end up helping fascists.

[Username17]

MGuy, real talk for the moment: how do you think coups work?

They are not scripted events or rolled up on charts. They are chaotic affairs with thousands of people making individual choices, often without knowing what other important individuals are choosing. People are choosing not just whether they are in favor of or opposed to the government, but how far they are willing to take their opposition.

Do they write angry message board comments?
Do they go to non-violent protests?
Do they engage in vandalism?
Do they disrupt normal government business?
Do they stage walk-outs from their jobs?
Do they slow-walk orders from the government?
Do they actively refuse to follow orders from the government?
Do they take up arms and start shooting people they don't like?

Only a small number of people will choose the last one, with much larger numbers of people choosing any of the others. Every item on the opposition's grievance list (whether justified or not) makes some people more likely to join the protests at some level, but also too every piece of evidence that the government has lost support makes people more likely to join protests and more likely to take their protests farther.

I's impossible to know what the final straw that pushes an opposition movement to the critical mass of being able to violently overthrow the government. Most likely if you were actually omniscient you'd find that the critical event was something dumb. In Czech Republic, they mostly credit the fall of the Soviet occupation on a student who set himself on fire - but the actual truth it probably has more to do with signals that the Soviet Union was distracted in the runup to 1989. Heck, the critical event might have even been a dose of nationalism following Czechoslovakia getting gold in Olympic Tennis the year before. No way to know.

But if you think 'Leader gets the rules changed to allow him to stand for another term' isn't the kind of thing that is obviously going to increase unrest and also decrease foreign support (which in turn will make more members of the opposition be more bold in their opposition), I just don't even know what to say. Because that's extremely obvious.

The bottom line is that Morales standing for a fourth term obviously made a successful coup more likely and obviously makes a successful counter-coup less likely. Because fucking obviously. It is historical fact that a (currently) successful coup happened, which makes standing for a fourth term even harder to justify than it would normally be. He shouldn't have done that, and with the benefit of hindsight we can say he really shouldn't have done that.

-Username17

[Kaelik]

Frank has now joined deaddm in arguing that actually what Evo did that was bad is tear up the 1967 constitution that established white supremacy and replace it with the 2009 constitution and that the 2019 coup is just a response to what evo did in his first years in office.

Every time a moron says "you can't CHANGE THE RULES whole you are in office!" It demonstrates a total ignorance of bolivia where the MAS ran on a platform of changing the rules and then did it.

It is of course also true as has been pointed out over and over, that no one justifying the coup in bolivia claims it is based on unconstitutional term limits that were never applied to anyone and that all of the justification is about fake election tampering allegations.

[Kaelik]

But if you think 'Leader gets the rules changed to allow him to stand for another term' isn't the kind of thing that is obviously going to increase unrest and also decrease foreign support (which in turn will make more members of the opposition be more bold in their opposition), I just don't even know what to say. Because that's extremely obvious.

The bottom line is that Morales standing for a fourth term obviously made a successful coup more likely and obviously makes a successful counter-coup less likely. Because fucking obviously. It is historical fact that a (currently) successful coup happened, which makes standing for a fourth term even harder to justify than it would normally be. He shouldn't have done that, and with the benefit of hindsight we can say he really shouldn't have done that.

This argument is funny because it is definitely 10000000000000000% guaranteed that Evo announcing and running on a platform of Nationalizing Lithium Mines in the most recent election caused more "decrease in foreign support" and "emboldened the opposition" (who are being promised foreign support) more than a Constitutional Tribunal ruling from 2017 that not a single fucking coup participant has ever mentioned.

So the obvious policy prescription from this line of thinking is: "Don't do good things for your people because the foreign capitalists who want to exploit your people will not support you when you are couped" which is while true, kind of giving the fucking game away that you have to build a system that doesn't get couped when the US says they support a coup because the US always supports a coup.

[MGuy]

So I pointed out several times that the coup wasn't started by the decision to change the number of times that Evo could get voted in. They very loudly point to the accusation lobbed by a US backed group that the election itself had been tampered with. This is a known thing. That I repeated. So why would Frank bring this up along with questioning whether or not I know how a coup works? It is a mystery to me. But what I can say for sure is that Frank seems to be attempting to justify a racist fascist take over if Bolivia. We are living in a reality where Frank is trying to legitimately trying to both sides a fascist take over.

[Chamomile]

Chamomile, what exactly am I wrong about here?

Well, this statement is the obvious place to start:

Morales appointed the Supreme Court guys who ruled that. The ruling is patently absurd and is simply Morales declaring the parts of the constitution he doesn't like to not apply to him and then have his own appointees rubber stamp it.

But, really, I'm not particularly interested in being dragged into the reeds of the specific discussion that happened to lead to you trying to force Kaelik between forfeiting the discussion or derailing an unrelated thread, because the thing that mainly concerns me is that you tried to do that. Sure, Kaelik is a toxic piece of shit and not engaging with him on any or even every issue is a valid life decision, but if you wanted to announce that decision, the place to do it was here, not someone's Pokemon thread. And even that would be less alarming except that you've done this kind of thing multiple times in the past not-quite-a-year, so clearly this isn't just you getting angry and doing something dumb the one time.

[Whatever]

Was Evo Morales allowed to stand for a fourth term when he was initially elected? No. No he was not.

Wikipedia has a nice article on the constitutional history of Bolivia. They conveniently link to this book about the country:

https://www.loc.gov/resource/frdcstdy.b ... _0/?sp=211

Morales was elected under the 1967 constitution, which allowed unlimited nonconsecutive terms (that is, a sitting president could not run for reelection, but a former president was always permitted to run again).

[deaddmwalking]

Every time a moron says "you can't CHANGE THE RULES whole you are in office!" It demonstrates a total ignorance of bolivia where the MAS ran on a platform of changing the rules and then did it.

When you change the rules and apply it to your successor, things tend to go well. When you change the rules and apply it to yourself, they tend not to.

That just happens to be a matter of historical fact. Bolivia happens to be one more example of that playing out.

I'm not claiming that the coup is justified or justifiable. But it definitely happened and I think that changes in term limits contributed. If nothing else it makes other people suspicious of the motives of the people eliminating the term limits. Since it is so often associated with an authoritarian anti-democratic turn, it sidelines support from pro-democracy groups. Example A - this thread. Example B - actual events.