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Agnosticnixie posted:(Also this thread is so predictable I already knew it would be trying to defend a loving military invasion; "the people" will not be giving a poo poo about Maduro when the bombs start killing them) Nobody's supporting an invasion. Try reading.
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Aug 12, 2017 05:30
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Agnosticnixie posted:
You're a moron, hth.
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Aug 12, 2017 05:31
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Agnosticnixie posted:(Also this thread is so predictable I already knew it would be trying to defend a loving military invasion; "the people" will not be giving a poo poo about Maduro when the bombs start killing them) Literally nobody in this thread is advocating for a military invasion.
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Aug 12, 2017 05:33
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Sorry, all these "but what if an invasion was easy/good" scenarios aren't quite support, just getting there.
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Aug 12, 2017 05:38
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Nckdictator posted:How long will it take to capture [...] The ghost of Grover strikes
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Aug 12, 2017 05:50
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Maduro would look stupid like a fox when the poor repair of Venezuela's ports and, well, everything else hindered foreign invasion. Can't capture a functioning port if there aren't any! Seriously though any actual US intervention would be sanctions against the PDVSA and that would be a far crueler cut than whatever the military would do. Maduro is smart to be trying to cozy up to Trump, because that's the best way to try and stop such a thing from happening.
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Aug 12, 2017 06:41
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Nckdictator's thing is a rephrase of some poo poo I think grover? said as the US first contemplated invading Iraq after 9/11.
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Aug 12, 2017 07:04
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Ofaloaf posted:Nckdictator's thing is a rephrase of some poo poo I think grover? said as the US first contemplated invading Iraq after 9/11. How long will it take to capture Baghdad? 2 days Will Saddam be killed? Yes Total Iraqi civillian casualties: 500 dead Total military casualties Iraq: 3000 dead Total military casualties U.S.: 15 dead Will the Iraqi army regulars hold the lines? No Will the Republican Guard fight to the end? No Will chem/bio weapons be used on invading troops?: Yes Will Saddam launch attacks on the Kurds? Yes Will Saddam launch attacks on Israel? No -If yes; will Isreal retaliate harshly? Yes Will Saddam sacrifice Baghdad (gas/nuke it)? No Will the Kurds make a grab for independence? Yes Will Iran do anything silly like try for land? Yes Will Saddam burn the oil fields? Yes How long will the US be occupying Iraq? ~15 years Will the Iraq war catalyze increased terrorism in America?No In the long run, will this war be good or bad for the world? Good We have to look at what those civilian casualties are- just because they're civilian doesn't make them innocent! Lets take a look at a few possibilities: 1) A civilian walking down the street to market gets killed by a cruise missile fired at the market. 2) A civilian asleep in their house is killed when their house is targetting by a smart bomb and blown up. OK, these two are regrettable innocents being killed- but since the US doesn't make a habit of targetting markets or houses, they're very small in number! 3) A civilian working at a chemical weapon factory gets killed when the chemical weapon plant is bombed. 4) A civilian security guard at a weapons depot is killed when the weapons explode. 5) A civilian contractor repairing a tank is killed by a MOAB dropped on the unit. 6) A civilian engineer is killed when the military command center he works at is destroyed. 7) A civilian delivering snackiecakes to the baghdad bunker vending machines eats a 5,000lb bunker buster. etc, etc. The list goes on. My point is that there are a lot of civilians directly supporting the military that aren't exactly "innocent" and would be mire rightly counted among the military casualties than civilian. I'm a civilian and work for the US military, but I acknowledge I'm also a valid military target because of what I do. And I think the vast majority of civilian casualties in this campaign will not be innocent.
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Aug 12, 2017 07:10
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i love how its about 50-50 that the reason trump even knows about venezuela's existance is because models from his models tv shows come from there
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Aug 12, 2017 07:18
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It's way too early to be talking about intervention in Venezuela. This is still the put pressure on Maduro and wait to see what happens phase.
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Aug 12, 2017 10:50
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/12/world/americas/trump-venezuela-military.html Say what you will about Tillerson, but he's a master at keeping a poker face when The Boss says something idiotic.
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Aug 12, 2017 13:11
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Trump is a monumental idiot with no redeeming qualities. He is the living, breathing amalgamation of everything that is bad about humanity: greed, arrogance, ignorance, the whole works. I think that his presidency is in the running for the most unfortunate fact of our age (along with our inability to act on climate change, I think). A military intervention in Venezuela in any capacity (from the dropping of a single bomb to a full invasion) would be so ill-advised, so short-sighted and so catastrophic that it's difficult for me to put it into words. Trump's "military option" comment yesterday was irresponsible and will only serve to strengthen the regime. Trump is clearly suffering from some kind of mental condition on top of being a profoundly ignorant person, and I would like to dismiss his comment yesterday as the ramblings of an idiot but unfortunately this man commands the most powerful military on the planet. The White House also said yesterday that Maduro had called Trump looking to have a chat but that Trump said that he wouldn't accept the call until democracy was restored in Venezuela. In other news, Minister of Defense Vladimir Padrino Lopez said last night that Captain Caguaripano and a few of his accomplices were arrested in Caracas yesterday. Caguaripano is the man who headed the attack on the Fuerte Pamaracay military base in Valencia last Sunday. nothing to seehere posted:I have to say, thanks for your high-quality effortposting Chuck Boone. It means I can actually get infomation from this thread, not just trolling. I think that you've tapped into an interesting facet of the crisis here (I'm actually writing a short piece for a website on this right now). The regime operates largely outside of Venezuelan law, yet it appeals to law in order to justify its law-breaking. We see a similar phenomenon in places like the US, for example, where we see legislation like the PATRIOT Act that allows the government to legally break the law in certain cases. However, Venezuela takes this principle to its absurd conclusion by essentially making every one of its decision a law-breaking one. The example of the Constituent Assembly is the perfection of this concept. The Constituent Assembly was convened illegally (there was no referendum vote on whether or not people wanted it), and now its in charge of running the country. I think the fact that the regime will often appeal to the law is found in the history of chavismo. Chavez was elected president, and specially in the early years he stressed the democratic, popular nature of his government. The people were the ones who had to decide everything. Today's PSUV is built on this foundation, so I think that it's forced to play along with the idea that it's doing things democratically in a reflection of the people's will. What's also interesting is how the opposition plays into this as well (and this gets at your comment regarding the lack of violent protests so far). The opposition wants republican Venezuela back, the Venezuela of democratic exceptionalism of the 1960s-1990s. This means that at least on paper, the rule of law is paramount for the opposition. This is part of the reason why the opposition does things that appear to be completely self-defeating and illogical sometimes, like deciding to run in the regional elections. Henrique Capriles said the other day that since the struggle against the regime was a struggle to bring back democracy, the opposition had no choice but to run in the electoral process even though he and everyone else knows that the process will be rigged. And you're welcome!
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Aug 12, 2017 14:44
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Trump comments often come off as a strategy of just bullying someone to get his way; Hey I command the most powerful military in the world why shouldn't they be scared? The problem is this often doesn't work and has some unintended consequences as the people he bullies are often narcissistic dictators(its like they feed off each other). The problem with invading a country like Venezuela not comes from overthrowing the dictatorship but rebuilding the country and its democratic institutions which seeing as how hopelessly damaged they all are you would almost be starting from scratch. Most of the local individuals who would have the technical capabilities of doing this have been run off or have joined the current regime. The US has a poor track record of nation building recently and often the military industrial complex which governs our nation building activities are highly corrupt and semi-competent at the job in and of themselves(as the articles below often demonstrate). http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/u-s-spent-43-million-afghanistan-gas-station-sigar-report-n454036 http://www.newsweek.com/us-paid-335-million-power-plant-afghanistan-no-one-using-362574 The is also the question of the criminal organizations they have intertwined themselves with the PSUV like the Chavistas Armados could they turn into an insurgency organization, stay a criminal enterprise or disperse(my money's on option 2).
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Aug 12, 2017 15:58
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You people are giving more thought to Trump's comment than he ever has. The US isn't going to invade Venezuela.
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Aug 12, 2017 16:29
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Homeroom Fingering posted:You people are giving more thought to Bush's comment than he ever has. The US isn't going to invade Iraq.
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Aug 12, 2017 16:57
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bush clearly wanted to invade Iraq from before 9/11, whereas trump lacks object permanence and has no political positions that survive longer than 3 minutes. It's not a good comparison.
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Aug 12, 2017 17:03
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US aside, what are relations like within SA? I think I saw something like Peru kicked out the Venezuelan ambassador a couple days ago. How fractured are relations becoming? Seems like the SA neighbors completely isolating Venezuela after this joke constitutional assembly is the way to go.
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Aug 12, 2017 17:13
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Yeah Trump was just blustering because it came up and he was trying to do the "all options are on the table" tough guy thing he heard Bush and Obama do, but botched it/didn't realize it didn't apply here. Back to reality, did the food crisis improve? I guess maybe the violence has overshadowed it a bit, but it really feels like that has disappeared as a story recently, whereas the impression given a year ago was that if things continued the way they were people would be starving by now. I don't mean to downplay the shortages and hunger people were actually facing, I'm just wondering if the situation is more that people are more resilient in lovely conditions than we give them credit for/there's a difference between hunger and starvation, or if the government found a way to meet people's basic needs. Dr Kool-AIDS fucked around with this message at 17:25 on Aug 12, 2017 |
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Aug 12, 2017 17:13
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Sinteres posted:Yeah Trump was just blustering because it came up and he was trying to do the "all options are on the table" tough guy thing he heard Bush and Obama do, but botched it/didn't realize it didn't apply here. The answer is no.
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Aug 12, 2017 19:00
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Chuck Boone posted:
That's probably for the best, Trump is demonstrably pretty easy for horrible dictators to sway and I'm not sure the rest of his administration gives enough of a poo poo about Venezuela to push back.
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Aug 12, 2017 19:14
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Back to MUD fragmenting. Couldn't it be a good sign, if it's so incompetent and maybe even bought up by the regime in some way, that a fragmentation would occur? Couldn't that open a way for a real left alternative to Chavismo that would learn from it's mistakes? The composition of MUD is mistery to me. Some claim it's being fully controlled by far-right and domestic corporate groups, others that it's more a mishmash of social-democratic center-leftists. What do you vene-goons think about it? Fados fucked around with this message at 20:31 on Aug 12, 2017 |
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Aug 12, 2017 20:28
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Fados posted:Back to MUD fragmenting. Not a vene-goon, but the opposition represents some 70% of the country at this point. Painting it as a front for the far-right is ridiculous.
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Aug 12, 2017 20:41
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The Consejo Nacional Electoral has agreed to abide by a Constituent Assembly request that the regional elections be moved up from December to October. The head of the CNE, Tibisay Lucena, made the announcement just a few hours after the Constituent Assembly approved the request. In a press conference yesterday, Lucena said that every one of the 1,200+ candidates would have to get in all of their paperwork by the end of the day tomorrow, that the CNE would check it to make sure that it was all in order on Tuesday and Wednesday, and that the final ballots would be published by the end of Friday. Think about that for just one minute: on the same day that the Constituent Assembly said "Hey, can you move an election involving 1,200+ candidates for 23 governorships forward two months?", the CNE replied within a few hours that yes it could, and that all it needed was less than a week to set up the whole thing. It took the CNE seven months to tell Venezuelans that they could not hold a recall referendum against Maduro, after forcing the opposition through a Kafkaesque maze of signature collection drives, signature collection drive verification drives, and a nightmarish amount of red tape. All of that involved a ballot with a single question: "Do you want to hold a recall referendum against Maduro? Yes/No". For months and months the PSUV told us that a year wasn't enough time to organize a recall referendum, and yesterday the CNE told us that it would organize an election involving 1,2000 candidates spread across 23 states in a week. It's important to point out also that the regional elections that are now taking place in October will only be to elect governors, not state legislators. Lucena said as much yesterday. The regional elections were also supposed to be for mayors, but I think that this isn't going to happen because a Constituent Assembly member (Francisco Ameliach) said yesterday that the vote for mayors should happen "in the first months of 2018". This, even though term limits set in the Constitution say that we should have voted for governors, state legislators and mayors at the end of last year. I've said it before and I'll say it again: In Venezuela, people vote when and if the regime lets them vote, not when the law says they have to vote. Fados posted:Back to MUD fragmenting. I think that there are probably a couple of things to consider here, and they have to do with challenges from what we traditionally call the opposition and challenges from within chavismo. As far as the challenges from what we know as the opposition go, fragmentation could go either way. We could get new contenders who are better than the current opposition leadership. I think that what is more likely to happen, however, is that we're going to see more and more radical elements coming to prominence. This is a factor both of the MUD fracturing (i.e, people losing faith in the mainstream opposition and looking elsewhere for leadership), as well as the regime's relentless persecution of political dissidents ([url=http://www.el-nacional.com/noticias/presos-politicos/ascendio-676-numero-presos-politicos-venezuela_198236there are now 676 political prisoners in Venezuela[/url]). I think this is partially why we're seeing more videos of people dressed in black with guns saying in essence "the opposition has failed, the regime is going to throw us all in jail and only force will stop them". In short: I think the MUD fracturing might not be a great thing since it could introduce/drive people to more radical elements. If we're talking about real left alternatives to chavismo, you have to remember that Venezuela is an authoritarian dictatorship. Any challenge to Maduro's power is unacceptable (see: Venezuela since 2013). I think that out of all possible political challengers, Maduro would be harshest against "real left alternative" types, since they're likely to be able to speak to the PSUV base directly and could actually gain some political traction. In other words, as long as we've got an authoritarian dictatorship in power, the PSUV is going to persecute any viable political challengers, and I think they'd go after sensible leftist alternatives to chavismo the hardest.
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Aug 13, 2017 15:03
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There's another catch with this whole deal. The elections are for governors and mayors, but not for state legislature, which have been under overwhelming control by the PSUV since 2012. These state parliaments have very broad attributions and can serve as a legal roadblock to anything the governors may try to implement. This is all within the constitution, it's not even necessary to take the simpler, yet more authoritarian path of simply having the ANC remove attributions from governors, or just flat out remove that position from the constitution. So, the election is rigged even if the votes counts are correct since it will result in the government once again taking away power from the opposition through some bizarre catch; the opposition will then whine without actually committing to any action like they did when they had their super-majority from the AN removed arbitrarily or when the CNE flat out refused to call for a recall referendum, and thus Maduro will stay in power for far beyond his constitutional term which ends in 2019. Anybody who sees this coming yet is still committing the opposition to this path anyway, is a moron who doesn't deserve to be considered part of the opposition.
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Aug 13, 2017 15:46
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Chuck Boone posted:The Consejo Nacional Electoral has agreed to abide by a Constituent Assembly request that the regional elections be moved up from December to October. The head of the CNE, Tibisay Lucena, made the announcement just a few hours after the Constituent Assembly approved the request. In a press conference yesterday, Lucena said that every one of the 1,200+ candidates would have to get in all of their paperwork by the end of the day tomorrow, that the CNE would check it to make sure that it was all in order on Tuesday and Wednesday, and that the final ballots would be published by the end of Friday. Do you have a blog or something where you could post this? I would dearly love to be able to send links to your writing to people who aren't on the forums.
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Aug 13, 2017 17:14
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Apparently Maduro's son threatened to take the white house with rifles if we attack Venezuela?
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Aug 13, 2017 18:12
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Chuck Boone posted:I think this is partially why we're seeing more videos of people dressed in black with guns saying in essence "the opposition has failed, the regime is going to throw us all in jail and only force will stop them". In short: I think the MUD fracturing might not be a great thing since it could introduce/drive people to more radical elements. So then violence is the last recourse and its going to come down to guns. Besides international intervention there are no peaceful means for the people to regain democratic power?
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Aug 13, 2017 18:22
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Feinne posted:Apparently Maduro's son threatened to take the white house with rifles if we attack Venezuela? Sounds about right for Maduro's genetic stock
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Aug 13, 2017 18:47
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M_Gargantua posted:So then violence is the last recourse and its going to come down to guns. Besides international intervention there are no peaceful means for the people to regain democratic power? Welcome to every dictatorship ever.
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Aug 13, 2017 18:57
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Feinne posted:Apparently Maduro's son threatened to take the white house with rifles if we attack Venezuela? M_Gargantua posted:So then violence is the last recourse and its going to come down to guns. Besides international intervention there are no peaceful means for the people to regain democratic power? Farmer Crack-rear end posted:Do you have a blog or something where you could post this? I would dearly love to be able to send links to your writing to people who aren't on the forums. Yes, I do. (EDIT: The stuff about the CNE that you quoted in your reply will be in today's update). Chuck Boone fucked around with this message at 21:48 on Aug 13, 2017 |
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Aug 13, 2017 21:05
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Chucks blog posted:PDVSA announced today that its net earnings fell in 2016 by 89% from the previous year Jesus Christ.
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Aug 13, 2017 21:38
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In other Batshit Crazy PSUV news, Diosdado Cabello may have attempted to order a hit on Senator Marco Rubio. http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/venezuela/article166981822.html
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Aug 13, 2017 22:46
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MullardEL34 posted:In other Batshit Crazy PSUV news, Diosdado Cabello may have attempted to order a hit on Senator Marco Rubio. The PSUV really has degenerated into becoming a gang of criminals if Cabello did this. I can see the FBI/CIA classifying venezuelas PSUV government and military as a criminal orginization if they become even worse. Pharohman777 fucked around with this message at 23:19 on Aug 13, 2017 |
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Aug 13, 2017 23:15
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Pharohman777 posted:The PSUV really has degenerated into becoming a gang of criminals if Cabello did this. I mean, its crazy, but it is something I could totally see Cabello doing.
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Aug 13, 2017 23:35
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Holy poo poo if there's any actual evidence that Cabello actively has people trying to kill Rubio then could turn really ugly really fast.
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Aug 14, 2017 01:05
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Feinne posted:Holy poo poo if there's any actual evidence that Cabello actively has people trying to kill Rubio then could turn really ugly really fast. Apparently US intelligence intercepted communications between Cabello and Cartel affiliated hitmen in Mexico, and thought the threat was credible enough to provide Rubio with an extra security detail that included undercover Miami-dade police officers. Considering that Cabello is a Druglord that makes insane threats against opposition politicians on his TV show almost daily, him personally being in contact with cartel hitmen isn't much of a stretch. MullardEL34 fucked around with this message at 08:11 on Aug 14, 2017 |
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Aug 14, 2017 01:20
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Also. Why Rubio? I mean thats a pretty stupid person to try to kill. Real low hanging fruit on the political spectrum.
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Aug 14, 2017 01:24
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Rubio keeps saying mean things about him.
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Aug 14, 2017 01:25
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M_Gargantua posted:Also. Why Rubio? I mean thats a pretty stupid person to try to kill. Real low hanging fruit on the political spectrum. Rubio speaks fluent Spanish, is Cuban, ardently anticommunist, and is probably the most vocal critic of the Maduro and Castro regimes in the US Senate. He also gives speeches in Spanish directly to the Venezuelan opposition. To make it even more dumb, this hit may have originated in Cabello being pissed off over a twitter feud with Rubio. MullardEL34 fucked around with this message at 01:30 on Aug 14, 2017 |
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Aug 14, 2017 01:27
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Oh thats very dumb. TYOOL2017 levels of dumb in fact. Also I feel weird agreeing with Rubio about something.
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Aug 14, 2017 01:29
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