It also has nothing to do with the subject of the thread.
I sympathize guys, but I’m trying for a teachable moment. I haven’t written DD off: I know lots of readers here disagree, but some of you disagree with me writing off Sam_Stone so give me a chance please and thank you.
No, he’s really not. I realize you are looking for a teachable moment, but he’s had years and multiple suspensions worth of chances with which to learn from. They haven’t accomplished anything. Sammy won’t learn either, but he’s not as much of a consistent asshole to everyone around him, isn’t topic banned and hasn’t to my knowledge been suspended, much less repeatedly. Just the accidental ban for sock puppeting.
It’s sad, he’s a charter member.
Time will certainly tell - but if he keeps making careless and harmful statements, the time is going to be much shorter.
I sort of endorse Dr. Deth’s post on Mexico. It was topical, as it illustrates the downsides of rampant corruption. I would state it somewhat differently though.
I’d say one important factor that separates high income countries from middle income countries is corruption. Investment projects get built because of whose palms can be greased, rather than those with the highest returns. If you look at Transparency International’s corruption rankings, higher income countries have the lowest corruption, low income countries have the highest corruption, and middle income countries are somewhere in between. It’s rather striking, though teasing out causality would require further work.
Mexico could be awesome. And I’ve learned over the past 6 years that the US could conceivably slip back. In 2015 I believed that the path to high income institutions was one way. I no longer believe that.
I’m calling @DrDeth again - please examine @Measure_for_Measure 's excellent post. This is what a nuanced take on the relationship between corruption, income, and nation may reflect. Someone may or may not agree of course, but it’s not a simple dismissal.
The Mexican people are by and large wonderful.
But Mexico is sliding backwards, not forwards, its corruption is getting worse, not better. I am not the only one who thinks that.
As Mexico’s Senate celebrated the passage of a bill designed to curb the power of the National Electoral Institute (INE), the non-partisan and independent agency that oversees elections, the country took another step backward toward its [decades](-long authoritarian past.
Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has long railed against corruption. But on January 30th a consortium of news outlets reported that in 2006 his campaign team had accepted $2m from drug gangs in return for favours. The reports, based on information from the us Drug Enforcement Administration, do not show that the president knew what was going on. But a close aide did, they allege. Mr López Obrador completely rejects the allegations, calling them slander.
Mexico
The PRI’s Agenda: Manipulation, Corruption and Violence
Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party, which has controlled the state for the past 70 years, is loyal to only two concepts: corruption and impunity. Without a shift in economic policy, poverty will continue to increase. And if the PRI remains in the presidency, there will be no shift.
Jorge Alonso
Speaking in Paris in mid-March, the governor of Mexico City, Rosario Rosales, said that the upcoming elections, the university conflict and the situation in Chiapas have combined to create a “very complicated” climate in her country. It is an accurate assessment of a difficult situation, and the picture becomes even more complicated if one adds the problem of poverty, which will only increase unless there is a change in the country’s economic policies.
Officials with the justice department and the Biden administration have downplayed a report that US law enforcement spent years looking into allegations that allies of Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, were investigated for taking millions of dollars from drug cartels after the president took office.
López Obrador, who denied the report, also reacted to the New York Times report on Thursday by revealing the contact details of the journalist at its Mexico bureau, Natalie Kitroeff, including her telephone number – which Mexico’s freedom of information body (INAI) immediately said it would launch an investigation into.
In addition to the challenge of dismantling the structures of corruption so deeply rooted in Mexico that have hurt Mexican society for decades, the country now faces new challenges from the use of artificial intelligence (AI), cyberattacks, vulnerability in compliance with sustainability indicators, and environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) criteria, among others.
So, yes, Mexico’s corruption issues are getting worse- as every experts agrees, thus indeed Mexico is sliding backwards due to corruption, not going forward.
Which is sad because the people of Mexico deserve better.
And if you really wanted to make constructive criticism, you would have sent me a PM, rather than bring this thread back to life again, allowing cowardly shitweasels like Dissachance to come back.
Note that he still hasn’t admitted he was wrong.
Well, it certainly could have been stated better, there I agree. Thank you.
Then, go ahead and make a nuanced reply. No one is stopping you. And I’d probably say “Yes, you said it better”- I am not afraid of saying that. But coming to the Pit is not “nuanced” in any way shape of form.
All you did was feed the cowardly shitweasels. thanks for nothing.
Ps I will not reply to you any more in the pit. You made things worse not better,
-sigh-
You do you. Thus ends my participation in this thread. Thanks all for letting me try.
Well, at least you got a teachable moment out of it. Not the one you were hoping for, but there you go. That’s our DrD.
The same applies to America, of course.
It’s worth noting that DrDeth has also simultaneously defended Mexico as a fine example of an outstanding western country. He does this in debates about gun violence statistics, insisting that the US numbers must be compared with countries like Mexico, Honduras, and Yemen, and that comparing the US with economically similar countries like Canada, the UK, Australia, or the countries of the European Union is “cherry-picking”. In fact DrDeth has previously stated that my insistence that the US numbers should be compared with those of socioeconomically similar countries proves that I’m a bigot who hates brown people.
That kind of nonsensical gibberish also explains how DrDeth can hold two such contradictory opinions of Mexico at the same time: he’s an insincere dumbass who argues in bad faith.
he’s an insincere troll who argues in bad faith
Fixed. 
In the immortal words of our Mexican friends, porque no los dos?
Possibly, “dumbass” could be interpreted as “clueless” which is somewhat absolving, and I want to be crystal clear that this poster is intentionally and with malice disrupting our board.
How about “dumbassic troll”?
Disagree. There is a lot of ruin in a country. US growth is strong, fundamentals are mostly good, our close-to-bottom-corruption-ranking-among-high-income-countries (not so years ago) has stabilized, and there are active threats to our 240 year experiment with democracy. Our foundation is under attack, but it hasn’t yet buckled.
The threats are serious, so I’m trying to be clear-eyed about them, even in the pit.
wolfpup: Yes, I perceive DrDeth as a friend of Mexico, and I read his criticized post in that light. There is a gulf between first world and middle income institutions, and Mexico is on the bad side of it. Leveling up requires a fight and I now recognize that backsliding into authoritarian caprice can be an active threat as well. There is such a thing as democratic antibodies, but they don’t persist indefinitely on their own.
You’re invested in a different argument than the ones I typically have had with DrDeth, which have mostly been about gun violence in America and gun control (which I’m not doing any more, but that’s what set me off about his methods and bad faith). The point I was making earlier and that I have to stress here is that the dumbass in question is on both sides of the fence at the same time, arguing when it suits him that Mexico is steeped in corruption and overrun by violent drug cartels, and then in gun-related threads arguing that Mexico is a fine upstanding first-world country with four times the gun violence of the US and therefore the US doesn’t have a gun violence problem. QED.
This is part of his standard modus operandi of making stupid, uninformed arguments and then doubling down on them. Look at any gun debate or discussion and there he is again, a two-trick pony whose only arguments on the subject are that US gun homicides should be compared with those in El Salvador and Mexico and similar places, and that the reason the US has so many mass shootings while other legitimately comparable countries have almost none is … … … … the fault of the media, for reporting on them! Right, because no other country on earth has “media” except the USA! 
He tries to be on both sides of the fence for multiple topics, like how he has no problem with the Pit when it suits him.
In fairness, he has protested the Pit long enough that he was instructed to no longer complain about it in ATMB threads. So I can see coming back to answer some of the myriad complaints against him in this thread.
Now whether he did that well is another question and I would say no, he didn’t.
Speaking of sitting on both side of the fence. Looks like I just did.
I wasn’t referring to this thread.
He also starts threads here when it suits him.