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zapplez posted:Just for curiosity sake, do you believe there is never a situation that requires intervention? Do you believe a guy like bashar al-assad who uses chemical weapons on his own people should just be left alone as ruler? There's a very, very narrow window, when a self-deterministic opposition movement develops organically and enjoys widespread support, where you can maybe justify an intervention in order avoid the chaos and suffering of a prolonged internecine conflict, and under full acknowledgement that you're doing this because you're a geopolitical big boy nation that doesn't have to play by the rules you and the other big boys make the rest follow. For reference, Syria had that window, and the US missed it and then made the worst possible move.
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Mar 14, 2019 01:46
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can't believe all the vital pieces of venezuelan infrastructure happened to explode at exactly the same times exactly when the usa needed it to, what a fantastic coincidence
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Mar 14, 2019 01:48
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complete list of valid reasons for intervention: nazis e: whops wrong forum, sorry for the double post
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Mar 14, 2019 01:48
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Ah, I stand corrected on the gases involved. This reminds me of a specific case, then (though ofc there are massive differences, mostly an excuse to post a CSB vid) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a96kriSo6EQ
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Mar 14, 2019 01:49
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Yinlock posted:complete list of valid reasons for intervention: (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Mar 14, 2019 01:50
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zapplez posted:Just for curiosity sake, do you believe there is never a situation that requires intervention? Do you believe a guy like bashar al-assad who uses chemical weapons on his own people should just be left alone as ruler? Imminent material threat to the United States. Possession, real or imagined, of WMD doesn't count. See the loving thing is, here, if you draw a Red Line and say, "As a US Citizen, I support unilateral intervention if Foreign Leader does X," then guess what the State Department and their media allies are going to tell you that Foreign Leader did. And the less stringent your Red Line is, the easier it is for the them to trick you into supporting imperialism. If we had a history of humanitarian intervention that was, in fact, humanitarian both in intent and effect, then I might be persuaded to feel differently. But we don't. We really, really don't.
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Mar 14, 2019 02:02
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zapplez posted:Just for curiosity sake, do you believe there is never a situation that requires intervention? Do you believe a guy like bashar al-assad who uses chemical weapons on his own people should just be left alone as ruler? I think the related question to this has to be 'do you believe there has ever been a historical example of when intervention in a foreign nation has IMPROVED things'
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Mar 14, 2019 02:25
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Discendo Vox posted:Ah, I stand corrected on the gases involved. This reminds me of a specific case, then (though ofc there are massive differences, mostly an excuse to post a CSB vid) Here's one that actually involved a Naphtha explosion at a US refinery in 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCfNau54h6I
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Mar 14, 2019 02:36
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MullardEL34 posted:Napthas are extremely light, and evaporate quickly at room temperatures, creating lots of flammable vapor. Think paint thinner, or Coleman camp fuel aka "white gas". It's frankly amazing that this hasn't happened to PDVSA before considering how badly the infrastructure is maintained and how poorly the PDVSA workforce is trained. According This Bloomberg article Venezuela used to import 2-3 million barrels of naptha per month, almost all from the United States. US supplies were completely cutoff by sanctions. PDVSA has turned to places like Russia for alternatives, but before this accident was only scheduled to receive something like 1 million barrels this month from Rosneft. During the power outage, Reuters reported all crude exports completely ceased as the ports stopped functioning. So Venezuela is now desperately short of essential industry inputs with little ability to resupply and domestic infrastructure is completely shutting down. Meanwhile Venezuelan crude production is already at the lowest level since the 1940s. I expect next month's production will mark another record low. During his Congressional hearing last month, Elliot Abrams predicted Venezuelan production might be halved by the end of this year, falling from 1.1 million bpd in January to perhaps only 0.5 million bpd. I saw another industry analyst predict 700,000 but still, the result will be a severe worsening of the shortages.
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Mar 14, 2019 03:07
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sexpig by night posted:I think the related question to this has to be 'do you believe there has ever been a historical example of when intervention in a foreign nation has IMPROVED things' Marshall Plan, Berlin Airlift, Nigeria in 2017. There are famines averted by international aid all the time, but they rarely make the news because news tends to garner better ratings when it's about tragedy.
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Mar 14, 2019 03:09
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Hey I know that probably most of the Venezuelans have been chased out of this thread by gringo Maduro supporters but I seriously would like to know, from the Venezuelan point of view, how do you feel about this newest round of more restrictive sanctions? Before Trump decided to get involved here this thread was full of Venezuelans sharing information with us and each other and I want to know how they feel and my Spanish isn't good enough to read through mountains of Twitter posts.
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Mar 14, 2019 03:15
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Sergg posted:Marshall Plan, Berlin Airlift, Nigeria in 2017. There are famines averted by international aid all the time, but they rarely make the news because news tends to garner better ratings when it's about tragedy. Do you really think that when people criticize "intervention" they're poo poo-talking international aid or are you trolling?
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Mar 14, 2019 05:57
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dirty lousy tramp posted:Do you really think that when people criticize "intervention" they're poo poo-talking international aid or are you trolling? I think it's quite clear the main roadblock to international aid has been the Maduro regime. What various posters mean by "intervention" seems very flexible. Ed: looks like I picked a good night to stay offline. Rust Martialis fucked around with this message at 06:27 on Mar 14, 2019 |
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Mar 14, 2019 06:24
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dirty lousy tramp posted:Do you really think that when people criticize "intervention" they're poo poo-talking international aid or are you trolling? I've seen quite a few people poo poo-talking international aid in this thread, haven't you? Y'know, like all those trucks full of food and medicine on Venezuela's borders in Colombia and Brazil. I waded through pages and pages of people saying they shouldn't allow the trucks in. Did I miss something? Have the trucks been allowed in?
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Mar 14, 2019 08:07
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Nope. Maduro has until now largely refused any foreign aid, for what appears to me as basically political posturing - the regime obviously doesn't like admitting there are shortages. On top of that, taking aid from the USA has obvious risks, including the risk the USA will leverage aid into active intervention, either smuggling weapons for armed insurrection by opposition groups or by using any incidents arising during aid shipment or distribution as a pretext for military action. Plus taking US aid delegitimizes Maduro in a way. From the points raised by various Venegoons, I don't think shipping weapons is a serious risk; you could just buy them openly or corruptly from sources inside Venezuela. That odd incident of the one plane with 19 weapons on it aside, which hardly would make a dent in the weapons situation. The issue of the regime siphoning aid is a problem, plus the fact that various major governments recognize the National Assembly as the legitimate governing body, with Guaidó as de jure President, obviously they would first coordinate with them, not Maduro.
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Mar 14, 2019 08:22
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Sergg posted:I've seen quite a few people poo poo-talking international aid in this thread, haven't you? Y'know, like all those trucks full of food and medicine on Venezuela's borders in Colombia and Brazil. I waded through pages and pages of people saying they shouldn't allow the trucks in. Did I miss something? Have the trucks been allowed in? no they were burned by the opposition's supporters
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Mar 14, 2019 09:37
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Condiv posted:no they were burned by the opposition's supporters Before they were burned, however, they were indeed blocked by Maduro sending police to the border. During the standoff someone (seen on video) started throwing molotovs towards the police and/or trucks and they caught fire. The police also fired tear gas which could have played a role in the fires, but the molotovs look more likely as a primary cause to me.
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Mar 14, 2019 09:44
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sexpig by night posted:I think the related question to this has to be 'do you believe there has ever been a historical example of when intervention in a foreign nation has IMPROVED things' Really, you cant think of a single time intervention worked out? Not a one?
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Mar 14, 2019 09:59
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Rust Martialis posted:Nope. Maduro has until now largely refused any foreign aid, for what appears to me as basically political posturing - the regime obviously doesn't like admitting there are shortages. Maduro is letting humanitarian aid in through the Red Cross, the UN, and other international aid organizations, though. "Largely refused" means specifically that which is being sent by the US politicized aid campaign through Colombia and Brazil, which the organizations above have objected to. (And ofc he's also accepting aid from Russia and China unfiltered) Conspiratiorist fucked around with this message at 10:05 on Mar 14, 2019 |
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Mar 14, 2019 10:03
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zapplez posted:Really, you cant think of a single time intervention worked out? Not a one? He is from an alternate dimension where DPRK is a successful and rising star country, while the South Korea is mired in poverty and desperation under the dictatorship of the grandson of Chung-hee Park. It's probably not worth your time to keep replying to posts that keep emanating from that dimension into this thread, unless you want to call a physicist and see if you can get on a Nobel prize-winning paper. Anyway back to Venezuela, please? One thing I was kind of surprised about is how the refrigeration issue hit so many people. I kind of figured most food in Venezuela was dry packaged stuff, but I guess anyone in the steadily-shrinking middle class that can has been stockpiling meat and other things for as long as possible in freezers? I can definitely see how that would blow for someone like Blue Nation that has animals and, presumably, at one point had meat and dairy stockpiles.
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Mar 14, 2019 10:12
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zapplez posted:Really, you cant think of a single time intervention worked out? Not a one? Yugoslavia? Like even intervening in active civil wars with mass casualties has a very iffy track record outside of few very genocide-centric examples, and lets not even talk intervening into states that are simply unstable which is what we're discussing in this thread.
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Mar 14, 2019 10:13
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Conspiratiorist posted:Maduro is letting humanitarian aid in through the Red Cross, the UN, and other international aid organizations, though. Thread regulars think the UN only objected cause they’re tools if the kremlin
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Mar 14, 2019 10:55
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MiddleOne posted:Yugoslavia? Saying the intervention in yugoslavia was a success is a bit silly when it was pressure from the west that contributed to the events that transpired in the first place. Just stopping the genocide we accidentally helped create, oops! Also, that intervention culminated in NATO bombing of mostly civilian targets in serbia over the bullshit they were pulling in kosovo, so it's probably still not a good example. Honestly, yugoslavia example is just more reasons why sanctions against venezuela should stop immediately. Worsening the already bad situation isn't going to help anybody and will at the very best lead into further destitution of the people.
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Mar 14, 2019 11:08
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Ha, I saw this poo poo coming. Maduro's choosing to blame Guaido for supposedly sabotaging the power grid.  He's also being blamed for the looting that happened in a lot of places while the power was out.https://www.france24.com/en/20190313-venezuela-government-maduro-investigate-guaido-sabotage-power-grid-blackout
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Mar 14, 2019 11:29
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Conspiratiorist posted:Maduro is letting humanitarian aid in through the Red Cross, the UN, and other international aid organizations, though. Basically, most of what you just posted is untrue, and where it is true, it is trivially so. Various such claims have been repeatedly shown to be wrong many times in this thread. In short, the regime has denied a crisis exists and has rejected almost all aid for multiple years. The Maduro regime has consistently denied there is any food crisis, even in mid-February their foreign minister refused a ramp-up of foreign aid via the UN. https://www.france24.com/en/20190212-venezuela-un-says-no-aid-crisis This pattern of crisis-denial is not new. While the regime is allowing minor amounts of aid in (the article mentions a deal with UNICEF to improve school feeding programs), they have consistently refused food aid, because they have denied there is a food crisis, so aid is not organized or permitted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortages_in_Venezuela There have been shipments in from countries supporting the regime - an article from Feb 20 mentions 300 tons of humanitarian aid from Russia, for example. https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/02/20/venezuela-accepts-shipment-russian-humanitarian-aid-reports-a64572 Obviously any aid is good, but 300 tons of aid to a country that has been in food and medical crisis for several years is merely a drop in the bucket. I am unable to find any source describing humanitarian aid from China at all, can you provide, since you claim they have sent "aid". In short, "largely refused" means exactly that. The Maduro regime has largely refused humanitarian aid from ANY source over multiple years. Organizations like the ICRC and Caritas have operated on some scales, for example the ICRC posted this on 01 March: https://www.icrc.org/en/document/qa-humanitarian-situation-venezuela but from reading the article they have not been engaged to provide humanitarian aid on any significant scale based on the size of their budgets mentioned. Caritas is a Catholic charity, and is clearly overwhelmed but is trying to deal with the food and medical crisis: https://www.caritas.org/where-caritas-work/latin-america/venezuela/ These are indeed worthy charities and should be supported as they are one of the few ways to actually aid Venezuelans in need.
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Mar 14, 2019 11:33
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MiddleOne posted:Yugoslavia? Theres one really big intervention. Like the biggest one of all time. That seemed to work out well for germany and france and italy and etc etc etc
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Mar 14, 2019 11:40
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zapplez posted:Theres one really big intervention. Like the biggest one of all time. That seemed to work out well for germany and france and italy and etc etc etc I feel bringing full-on nation on nation-state wars into your definition of 'interventions' muddles the territory enough to make it pointless.
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Mar 14, 2019 12:18
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Condiv posted:Thread regulars think the UN only objected cause they’re tools if the kremlin No, thread regulars object because it is not true that Red Cross and UN aid are getting into the country. Or rather, Maduro is letting some in, but only about as much as was stockpiled in Cucuta, i.e. some trivial amount that is nothing more than enough to virtue signal about how he cares about his people, just as the Cucuta aid was just enough to virtue signal about how evil Maduro is and how he wants to starve Venezuelans, because five warehouses of food in Cucuta was really going to turn the humanitarian crisis. This is VoA and I can't immediately find a direct UN source, but I have no reason to suspect the numbers themselves are fabricated: https://www.voanews.com/a/un-ramps-up-humanitarian-aid-inside-venezuela/4779823.html ~$50 million of food aid from the UN to Venezuela. That's nothing (although it doesn't give the timeline for that $50m but I bet it's "to date" and not "monthly"; see articles below from the UN directly). The typical annual UN money spent on the Gaza strip, with its population of approximately 5% of Venezuela's, is approximately $1000m/year, or 20x that of the amount going to Venezuela. $50m is just what they spend on the Venezuelan refugees in Colombia for food alone: https://news.un.org/en/story/2018/04/1008432 The UN has many, many posts about the refugee crisis and humanitarian crisis in Venezuela, e.g. https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/02/1033361 and says approximately $800m is needed for the year: https://news.un.org/en/story/2018/12/1028541 E: I also follow the inflation rate pretty closely and I notice it's been stable for a full month now. What's up with these periods of stability in between hyperinflation? How does the government (or economy) manage that? Saladman fucked around with this message at 12:38 on Mar 14, 2019 |
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Mar 14, 2019 12:33
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MiddleOne posted:I feel bringing full-on nation on nation-state wars into your definition of 'interventions' muddles the territory enough to make it pointless. So I guess you wouldn't include Korea either
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Mar 14, 2019 13:40
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The director of the electrical engineering department at the Universidad Central de Venezuela has published a report on the blackout, and it echoes what we've been hearing from the electrical worker's union and other experts all week. I unfortunately don't have time to translate it all (plus, it's quite technical and I'm not an engineer), but the report says that a fire near the Malena substation caused three 765kV transmission lines to overheat, and this resulted in a sudden power loss at the Guri generating station. This power loss caused the turbines at Guri to spin faster than normal, which activated Guri's safeguards; when the safeguards proved inadequate to resolve the turbine issue, workers at the plant were forced to "totally disconnect the generators", which knocked off 80% of the country's electrical supply. The failure at Guri caused a "domino" effect that also knocked Macagua and Caruachi plants offline.
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Mar 14, 2019 14:06
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Saladman posted:He is from an alternate dimension where DPRK is a successful and rising star country, while the South Korea is mired in poverty and desperation under the dictatorship of the grandson of Chung-hee Park. It's probably not worth your time to keep replying to posts that keep emanating from that dimension into this thread, unless you want to call a physicist and see if you can get on a Nobel prize-winning paper. I think it's unfair you get to functionally call me whatever the DPRK version of a tankie is and then go 'anyway moving on'. Do you think South Korea's current state is because of US intervention? Do you think the immediate post-war South Korea wasn't our influence, or is this when you reveal you think that as soon as the ceasefire came South Korea as we know it now sprung up from the dirt because of good ol US freedom?
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Mar 14, 2019 14:30
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Condiv posted:no they were burned by the opposition's supporters I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess there's more aid than just those trucks. I'm aware that some of them caught fire when the people trying to get them into the country had a fight with the police using molotov cocktails. I find it very interesting that one would have to use deadly weapons in a pitched battle with Venezuelan military forces just to attempt to get food and medicine in. You'd think the military would just steal it when it got to the other side and sell it on the black market like they've been doing with CLAP rations. That's what I was assuming would happen.
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Mar 14, 2019 14:44
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South Korea isn't a great example, there's been unrest in South Korea for pretty much its entire existence because at the behest of the US the ROK has been led by people who have ties to the old Japanese imperial occupiers, who have done plenty of horrific things like massacring suspected communist sympathizers. South Korea is doing pretty well but much of that is down to the struggle of the people, not the US mucking things up.
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Mar 14, 2019 14:50
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Saladman posted:One thing I was kind of surprised about is how the refrigeration issue hit so many people. I kind of figured most food in Venezuela was dry packaged stuff, but I guess anyone in the steadily-shrinking middle class that can has been stockpiling meat and other things for as long as possible in freezers? I can definitely see how that would blow for someone like Blue Nation that has animals and, presumably, at one point had meat and dairy stockpiles. I am again without power so before my battery runs out: While I was lucky that I didn't stockpile much meat and dairy many farmers and dairy industries had massive losses, one dude had killed 12 cows to sell the meat and like 80% of that rotted away given that even when he was selling at a loss very little people were buying. Same with milk, many places were giving it away rather than selling cheap. A local lady died because she couldn't get her dialisis, and while I don't have the numbers, people did die at the hospitals in El Vigia and Merida.
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Mar 14, 2019 14:56
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Sergg posted:I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess there's more aid than just those trucks. I'm aware that some of them caught fire when the people trying to get them into the country had a fight with the police using molotov cocktails. I find it very interesting that one would have to use deadly weapons in a pitched battle with Venezuelan military forces just to attempt to get food and medicine in. You'd think the military would just steal it when it got to the other side and sell it on the black market like they've been doing with CLAP rations. That's what I was assuming would happen. The US is stealing about 20 billion a year from Venezuela as part of their economic ‘aid’.
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Mar 14, 2019 15:28
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Presenting Nipples posted:The US is stealing about 20 billion a year from Venezuela as part of their economic ‘aid’. Do you have a source with which you can support that statement?
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Mar 14, 2019 15:32
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Sergg posted:I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess there's more aid than just those trucks. I'm aware that some of them caught fire when the people trying to get them into the country had a fight with the police using molotov cocktails. I find it very interesting that one would have to use deadly weapons in a pitched battle with Venezuelan military forces just to attempt to get food and medicine in. You'd think the military would just steal it when it got to the other side and sell it on the black market like they've been doing with CLAP rations. That's what I was assuming would happen. "The purpose of our aid is to enable our people to use more violence" -Guess Who
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Mar 14, 2019 15:33
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Giggle Goose posted:Do you have a source with which you can support that statement? It's a Maduro speech about the purported cost of US sanctions. No, the subdivision of sanctions wasn't clear.
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Mar 14, 2019 15:38
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Discendo Vox posted:It's a Maduro speech about the purported cost of US sanctions. No, the subdivision of sanctions wasn't clear. No it’s not. https://venezuelablog.org/crude-realities-understanding-venezuelas-economic-collapse/
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Mar 14, 2019 16:09
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Presenting Nipples posted:No it’s not. 20b per year relies on the assumption that the vast majority of reduced production is due to US sanctions rather than - for example - lack of maintenance finally catching up to the PDVSA. The article you link does not make this assumption, you may be thinking of the venezuelanalysis article that linked to it earlier in the thread... but iirc THAT one reached a conclusion that the number was more like 6b per year, using assumptions with which I quibble a bit (and as such the number I would pull out of my rear end would be more like 4). Goatse James Bond fucked around with this message at 16:25 on Mar 14, 2019 |
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Mar 14, 2019 16:22
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