taw comments on Our House, My Rules - Less Wrong

36 Post author: David_J_Balan 02 November 2009 12:44AM

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Comment author: taw 03 November 2009 12:35:02AM -1 points [-]

Old South African government didn't really "work" for anyone who wasn't white.

Comment author: teageegeepea 03 November 2009 05:37:51PM 2 points [-]

Some black south africans disagree.

Comment author: taw 03 November 2009 06:32:41PM 1 point [-]

Just because the new black government is bad, doesn't mean the old white government wasn't bad.

Some government collapses go quite well, others like South Africa and Soviet Union don't.

Comment author: teageegeepea 03 November 2009 07:47:04PM 2 points [-]

Fair enough. The point wasn't that white rule is good, but that democratic rule is bad.

Comment author: taw 04 November 2009 08:53:40AM 2 points [-]

There's plenty of countries where democratic rule is good and stable, and it's not too hard to predict those. Some obvious predictive variables are tradition of rule of law (which you get transitioning out of some dictatorship like Korean, but not some others like Soviet), low economic inequality, and stability of political system.

All happen to be false in case of South Africa. But these also tend to correlate with wellness and stability of any other political system - so democracy might still be the least bad system for South Africa, given such constraints.