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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

This is a common feature of dictatorships: a boneheaded decision from a central government wreaks havoc on the people in the field that would know better.

It reminds me of Mao ordering all sparrows be killed because they eat agriculture seeds.

This of course caused a much bigger crisis with insects destroying crops - because everyone knows sparrows also eat lots of insects.

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Sri Lanka is not a dictatorship. They have regular elections. The Rajapakshas might have been authoritarian, even corrupt. But they won the last election in a landslide. Sri Lankans cannot entirely absolve themselves of blame for repeatedly electing a populist regime.

Are the two mutually exclusive? I don't see why a democracy can't elect a dictator, even a different one every couple of years. In ancient Rome the title dictator was a short-term thing.

In Rome there were two periods when the title of Dictator was used. First during the Republic where it indeed was a temporary role with limitations, then resurrected during the Empire as title only to justify authoritarianism.

You’re not right. What Rome called a dictator is not the modern definition of the term. An elected autocrat can have similarities to a dictator, but they aren’t one. Unless they rig the elections!

You're arguing against something that wasn't said. They said the "title of Dictator" was used, and that is correct, it was used in Roman history as they said.

The Roman title of Dictator is different from a modern day dictator, agreed — but if you read carefully no-one argued otherwise. The Roman title of Dictator more aligns with the modern concept of "emergency powers."

Doesn't dictator means the one who have total control & power over a country? So, by definition, I think srilanka is not a dictatorship.

>>Sri Lankans cannot entirely absolve themselves of blame for repeatedly electing a populist regime.

If you have bigoted populace, it's dead easy to bait them into voting for some immediate emotional relief. Sri Lankan's wanted to have fun watching Tamils and Muslims get hurt, so it wasn't all that hard for some politician to get the people vote for him. The worse thing is they even put up with his bad decisions for the same reasons. And they did this for years.

The population is entirely responsible for this.

As it turns out they ran out of time, there's always that one point after which everything comes melting down.

i think its an unfortunate combination of many things, covid being the main. this shows that democracies are not immune to leaders resorting to populist measures to win elections.. hope its a good lesson to lankans and rest of us.

democracy isn't just about elections (otherwise even the totalitarian fascist Russia could have been called democratic :). Elections is just a basic necessary condition of democracy, a starting point. Many of those populist regimes aren't democracies really, they are more like ochlocracies naturally hijacked by authoritarians.

Yes - exactly. Genuine democracies are a complex patchwork of competing interests which somehow balance to generate policy that benefits most of the population.

As soon as you have a government run for the benefit of a small group, you no longer have a democracy.

Elections don't change this. Not even nominally free and fair ones.

The problem - as always - is that any system of government trends towards capture by Dark Tetrad types. No matter what decisions they appear to make, and no matter whether they're left/right populist/monarchist democratic/authoritarian, the consequences are always disastrous.

It's not that, really. There are only so many boneheaded decisions that can come from a central government, and you risk over-weighting one person directly. More frequently, it's the indirect, created conditions typical of centralized power that allow sycophants and incompetents to run decision-making at lower levels -- where there is more impact and volume -- based on purely political and personal reasons.

'bad government must be authoritarian' meme is interesting to observe, as if it is impossible for bad governance to occur in democratic systems.

Sri Lanka clearly is a democracy, albeit a degenerate one

Its entirely possible for democratic systems to be authoritarian.

Sri Lanka is a democracy, in that they have elections, but it is also hilariously corrupt, with extremely authoritarian governance.

Which country isn't corrupt? I know many nations that are more corrupt than Srilanka. The major difference is Srilanka depended on tourism which led to this downfall.

Regarding the authoritarian governance, can you please supply the valid examples? Srilanka is just one example. There are many countries like Bhutan, Nepal which seems to be sliding day by day. I hope we won't label them authoritarian when they fail?

Democracy is not immune as people expect. We can't label demagouge who sways people as authoritarian. Democracy is only sucessful if majority of people aren't biased and vote based on merit rather than religion, greed etc.

this is not possible as 'authoritarian' is described as opposite to 'democratic'. Witness the recent posture of US alliance building / NATO to Asia pivoting / Anti-BRI funding.

Well to be fair to Mao, sparrows are renowned for their bourgeois capitalists tendencies.

The sparrows in my yard have been exploiting and oppressing the wrens for years.

The wrens are stuck back in the middle ages. They keep having faires about it.

That's a golf clap worthy pun.

Sometimes I think a huge percent of communism's economic overhead is simply everyone having to remember another dictionary's worth of current communist truths.

To the extent they have less mental free space to actually do work.

Even in abridged form... that's a lot. https://campbellmgold.co.uk/archive_definitive/red_book_chai...

it's two words man

Huh?

Organic farming

This is a common feature of most hierarchical structures (and also democracies)...

I'm not sure that "people in the field" would have predicted that killing all sparrows will lead to a surge of insects.

Perhaps Mao appealed too heavily to the sentiment of farmers upset with their seeds being eaten, not realizing that killing the sparrows would have had adverse ecological effects.

This was populalism with a dose of nationalism. Not a dictatorship, more in vain of Trumpism.

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