Tunisia rejects Tunisian Government.

No. People who vote for seemingly legitimate figures who then take away democracy often have no idea what the ultimate result will be until it happens.

edited 18th Jan '11 5:16:51 PM by Pykrete

Oh. I was talking about people voting for a party whose programme explicitly includes the elimination of democracy, if only for "provisional" time.

I suppose there's the ideology for people who vote for "security", who are often blind to what freedoms they may lose in gaining this security.

Perhaps people in different contexts have differing standards for "legitimacy"? If a population would rather have more safety and less rights, is it ok for them to want that?

Sometimes it's not even that. If the culture has enough Values Dissonance with ours, it might not even occur to them that regular elections are a good idea, and they may want to apply Asskicking Equals Authority by electing and trusting the most Bad Ass among, say, the warlords, not because he's nice or competent, but because they think he deserves to rule... or because they think he won't be challenged... which boils down to security again...

In practice, this tends to mean more safety for the majority and less rights for the minority.

^ Is there a problem with that? The first duty of a government is to protect its citizens. It's better if they also get some rights out of the bargain while they're at it, but I think that most people find it preferable to death.

Read moar carefully. What I'm saying is that the people who didn't vote to exchange liberty for security are the ones who get exterminated.

Possibly, but a brutal dictator is probably still better than someone who can't hold the country together at all, leading to civil wars or invasion.

Belgium needs a dictatorship? Cuz no-one is holding it down.

edited 19th Jan '11 9:14:57 AM by RawPower

Error, page not found. Regardless, I'm pretty sure my claim was that voting someone into power who can at least keep the country in one piece is your first priority. Civil rights have to come after that. In a case like Belgium it's really not the same thing.

Apparently the Belgians are more concerned with keeping the civil rights than with keeping the country whole. In fact, they are about to slip, and it's not like there were riots or anarchy or anything. That is because the Res Publica (even when it's a monarchy) is a shared reality of all citizens, and as long as they all believe in that reality, it holds up. Individual leaders as a necessary symbol of a nation are a holdover from another era where men would rather answer to a man than to the Law. As of now, the Law can stand without a Man to be its Face: the People hold it Together, for the sake of All (except for those who are dead).

Well, then the government hasn't secured the faith of the people. They don't trust it and it doesn't seem strong enough to just deal with that. If the people don't have confidence and vote against their own interests, the government is going to fail and the people will suffer. Though it might very well be a wealthy enough country so that the suffering won't really be that bad I think their insistence on civil rights over stability will make them worse off.

You Anglo-Saxons and your obession for Stability, as if it was something good in and of itself. The English Revolution is still haunting your political thought, it seems. 'This is your fucking stability'

I can't watch that right now, but I would rather be unable to vote than dead or in the middle of a civil war.

^ Here I'm the reverse. I'd rather be dead or fighting a forever-long civil war than dare give up my rights including the right to vote.

A hard-line/Fundamentalist government is unlikely to form in Tunisia without significant imposition of outside forces. To credit Bourguiba, he kept the Nahda from laying the groundwork for a strong Fundamentalist movement. There is also the matter of the citizenry of Tunisia who, despite having a corrupt secular president, are wary of Fundamentalist interpretations of Islam in the rule of law; it doesn't help that Ben Ali fled to the most hard-line country in the region (Saudi Arabia) for refuge.

Egypt, on the other hand, will be a different matter entirely when the dominoes fall (and they will).

Here is to hoping the US doesn't do something stupid and intercede, thereby increasing the role Fundamentalists will play in the foundations of a new Tunisian government.

edited 19th Jan '11 1:53:15 PM by UnabashedFornicator

^^ Once you have them they're hard to give up (I think Machiavelli wrote about it in the Prince) but they're simply less important than actually living if you can't have both. Worth fighting for, but I'm speaking of a situation where you can't have both.

I'd make it so I can have both. There is no such thing as can't have both. Even the horribly oppressed can fight back or call for aid.

edited 19th Jan '11 2:08:35 PM by MajorTom

Do you not understand hypotheticals? The point is just that safety has to come before rights. A government that fails at protecting the people from external threats or internal divisiveness is a failure no matter how many rights it grants.

Safety and stability have to come before oppression, too.

Simply put, if enough people raise enough protest, cause enough damage, cripple enough systems, authorities have to grant their demands or the structure of authority will collapse anyways when the governed refuse to cooperate it. You think we got the right to vote/unionize/be treated equally regardless of gender/be treated equally regardless of race/etc. etc. because we asked nicely? Hell naw. Those rights were granted because our predecessors made it damn well clear to those in power what would happen if they weren't.

They had to have a stable government before they could worry about that. It's a matter of priorities. First you want to not get killed by invaders, then you want to not starve, then when that's all taken care of you can worry about the other issues.

While I agree that rights should come first, you can't enforce/protect the people's rights unless your government is stable. At the same time, a government that doesn't respect rights (i.e. an autocratic dictator) is inherently unstable. So you've got to have both at once. Given that, I don't really think it matters which side you start from, as long as you work toward both of them in the long run.

Not that such an abstraction really helps us make the question less muddled...

Edit: I guess I sorta rehashed everything that's already been said, but there you go.

edited 19th Jan '11 5:38:09 PM by darksidevoid

Bump with update.

I like the social diversity◊ those images show... Reminds me of a classic◊ (warning, mildly NSFW)...

It's interesting to see they want to avert The Thermidor...

Others in the crowd debated the return of the banned Islamic political party. Several said they welcomed or even cheered its revival, but all insisted that any Islamist political movement must be distinctively Tunisian, predicated on democracy, pluralism and women’s rights.

Here you have it. No communists, no islamists.

And this

For now, the government owes its tenuous grip on stability to Gen. Rashid Ammar, who is believed to have prompted the end of Mr. Ben Ali’s rule by refusing an order to fire at demonstrators.

The government also said its prosecutors had opened an investigation into the family’s overseas assets, while the Swiss government moved to freeze their assets in Swiss banks.

edited 20th Jan '11 8:49:03 AM by RawPower