How do you recognize a military coup in Egypt and remain silent when the

[Igel]

28. Ukraine is squirrelly.

Imagine is Obama and Biden left. Perhaps they ran because they feared protesters. They agreed to certain things that were legal to salve over problems, but then they turned up in Canada a week later.

In the US there's a mechanism for dealing with that. They can be impeached. The 3rd in charge takes over and is confirmed by Congress. That's a legitimate head of state at that point, even if nobody voted for that person for president. It doesn't matter if Obama at that point says the person's illegitimate or not. The procedure was followed.


Yanukovich inked a deal and then welched. He left town. The elected parliament impeached him and appointed somebody else. The elected parliament's still there, and it's still elected and, contrary to the silence it's received, still fairly representative. It regularly meets, isn't undergoing active intimidation, and still passes measures. A few reps bugged out with Yanukovich, heading towards Hungary or Russia, but even most from the ethnically-Russian areas stayed. Many changed parties, so PR has gone from top dog to on the rocks.

So the appointee of the elected parliament is decreed illegitimate because he wasn't elected? Well, the same would be true for the #3 person in the US. We'd expect nobody to have a problem with that.

And the the same is true for Aksenov in Crimea, with a rather important difference. The parliament that disposed of the former leader and elected Aksenov in his place wasn't representative--members were barred from being there on the one hand, and members that the next day said they hadn't been there were listed as having voted. And the parliament had armed "Russian-but-not-quite-Russian" armed troops at the door.


Democracy and capitalism with some means of ensuring that large economic units don't continue forever are completely compatible. You just have to find the right sub-definitions of each, because democracy and feudalism or slavery are also compatible as are totalitarianism and collective ownership of the means of production. The devil's in the details. Even old-school Christian Reconstruction is a democratic theocracy coupled with an agrarian kind of capitalism.

In fact, what we think of as capitalism and (liberal) democracy typically arose in lockstep. Both are distributed, non-monopolistic power, but with power dependent on things like skill and education, transient traits that tend to be passed down in families but which aren't exactly inheritable, and with power also dependent on having others contribute to your power (either with purchases or with votes). With distributed power associations of individuals form transient power centers--economic units or "civil society" (liberals used to like civil society; we don't now, often because we don't like those organizations' views). Politicans and corporatists have found ways to make their concentrations of power semi-permanent and to use goverment to enhance their power (this to my mind argues for both regulation but also limiting the spoils to be fought over). The solution isn't to concentrate power even further, in hopes of being able to have just the right people in charge and achieve something that's 50% totalitarian under a set of "philosophy-dukes" or technocrats. We all think that we and ours are above temptation; we're all idiots in that regard, self-deluded and wilfully blind, and any power we can get is a good thing because we, of course, will only use power for good. Instead, we need to make sure that there are limits on political and economic concentrations of power and that the associations aren't set in stone. For example, some like the idea of a hefty estate tax (or death tax--the phrase has been around for far longer than it's been used as a RW "frame&quot . However, if you don't let money continue in perpetual trusts like the Kennedy or Bush family you find that most offspring are idiots and over the course of their lifetimes lose most inherited wealth or their economic power's distributed over a plethora of stocks and bonds. (They may be wealthy, but it's not like they do much with it.) And if they do retain it and grow their concentration of economic power, it gets too big for them and they have to issue stock--and tend to lose control. It's also necessary to have a long-term view that includes 2-3 generations and doesn't think of late next month as "long term" or even "medium term."