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Squalid posted:there were a lot of things happening at once. In history you don't get to do controlled experiments, you just have to learn to live with a good deal of uncertainty. relatedly, this is why we need to make more economists absolute dictators it's the only way we get proper scientific-method economics experiments
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Jun 15, 2019 04:52
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Squalid posted:...you just have to learn... This is pretty funny, all things considered.
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Jun 15, 2019 05:08
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Squalid posted:there were a lot of things happening at once. In history you don't get to do controlled experiments, you just have to learn to live with a good deal of uncertainty. Probably a good argument against interventionist foreign policies, particularly with regard to Venezuela. The US armed forces are unlikely to be greeted as liberators in Caracas.
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Jun 15, 2019 05:20
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Squalid posted:there were a lot of things happening at once. In history you don't get to do controlled experiments, you just have to learn to live with a good deal of uncertainty. were the sanctions more impactful, or the indiscriminate massacre of entire villages that demonstrated insufficient diffidence to the Sandanista government? no way to draw conclusions, but it was probably sanctions as far as squalid's concerned. this is a sensible conclusion to draw, about the good results of Venezuelan sanctions, imo.
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Jun 15, 2019 05:27
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Yeowch!!! My Balls!!! posted:were the sanctions more impactful, or the indiscriminate massacre of entire villages that demonstrated insufficient diffidence to the Sandanista government? no way to draw conclusions, but it was probably sanctions as far as squalid's concerned. in this context i'm not sure why it matters which form of pressure was more/less impactful. If the Contra campaign increased Chamorro's vote share in the 1990 election 5%, while the embargo increased her share by 2%, it would still be correct to say the sanctions "worked" as they still would have contributed to accomplishing the outcome desired by the Bush administration. Regardless, in 1990 the contras were essentially militarily defeated and confined to their barracks in Honduras, so it is fairly difficult to argue their war was sufficient to completely explain the Sandinista's electoral defeat. The economic campaign however was still devastating the Nicaraguan economy, and Bush was quite explicit that it would continue as long as Ortega was President. Also I don't know why you are dragging Venezuelan sanctions into this, as I did not make a statement about them. I was merely answering punk rebel ecks question. While I believe sanctions worked in Nicaragua insofar as they helped President Bush accomplish his goals, they were failures in a moral sense, because the entire American campaign against the Sandinistas was cruel, unnecessary, and evil. BTW, if you are convinced sanctions don't work, why did you ignore the other example I provided, France and Britain in 1956? Of course if you really want to be argumentative you could try attributing the European withdrawal from Egypt entirely to the Soviet threats and Egyptian resistance, although honestly that's such a stretch I can see why you would want to avoid having to try.
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Jun 15, 2019 06:20
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caps on caps on caps posted:Maduro and the whole political system is a disaster and needs to be replaced, but I literally do not understand what the USA has to do with it. Assuming good faith sanctions for the benefit of the people were even a possibility, which they aren't under bourgeois controlled government, this could be a good idea. We should start with Saudi Arabia and other absolute monarchies and then work our way down from there.
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Jun 15, 2019 07:27
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Yeowch!!! My Balls!!! posted:were the sanctions more impactful, or the indiscriminate massacre of entire villages that demonstrated insufficient diffidence to the Sandanista government? no way to draw conclusions, but it was probably sanctions as far as squalid's concerned. You were agreeing to the sanctions when I stated exactly what they did without calling them sanctions. That is literally what they are and what they do, Venezuela is not being targeted by an embargo or any sort of heavier economic action, the sanctions are targeted against individuals who had assets in the US and are high ranking PSUVistas or military men, and they deny Maduro from fireselling assets. Venezuela can sell oil, they can buy food and medicine, they can import goods from the states, Venezuelans can go to the US legally, the average citizen isn’t targeted by these actions. Matter of fact, it wasn’t until very recently that the US embassy in Venezuela had personnel recalled, up until last year it was offering consular services, tourist visas were still being granted. The effects of sanctions is exaggerated to distract from Maduro’s share of the blame. This is yet another loving thing that, whenever I've asked someone to explain, they've yet to come up with a satisfactory answer. How did the sanctions cause this crisis? I already said the timeline doesn't work, that there isn't an embargo, that Venezuela is still to this day selling most of its oil to the US. The only explanation I seem to have gotten is "it causes reputational damage"? Did you all forget Goldman Sachs was doing business with the Venezuelan government almost immediately before the 2017 sanctions? fnox fucked around with this message at 08:33 on Jun 15, 2019 |
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Jun 15, 2019 08:18
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Yeowch!!! My Balls!!! posted:didn't say they were content. said they were unwilling to take action to change it. Yeowch!!! My Balls!!! posted:as of right now, most Venezuelans are, if not content with the status quo, unwilling to challenge it. So which is it? Are people content with the situation or not? Or do people flee the country just for shits and giggles? Even you have to realize you are being dishonest with how you downplay how serious the situation is in Venezuela.
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Jun 15, 2019 14:20
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Squalid posted:in this context i'm not sure why it matters which form of pressure was more/less impactful. If the Contra campaign increased Chamorro's vote share in the 1990 election 5%, while the embargo increased her share by 2%, it would still be correct to say the sanctions "worked" as they still would have contributed to accomplishing the outcome desired by the Bush administration. mostly giving you poo poo for calling Nicaragua a case of sanctions and sanctions alone working, tbh. your presentation neatly elided a program of mass murder of those viewed as likely to oppose our puppets there and blowing up ships trying to use their harbors. this MAY have also played a role in ramping up the pressure on them. call me crazy. won't pretend for a second I know poo poo about the other case, though
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Jun 15, 2019 15:30
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zapplez posted:So which is it? Are people content with the situation or not? Or do people flee the country just for shits and giggles? is it you or your doppelganger accusing me of dishonesty because you've never encountered that turn of phrase? let me help you both out. "where people are not happy, they do not see a way to change things for the better." as brutally evidenced by the guy whose whole thing was 'follow me, and I'll make things better somehow' throwing a coup and nobody coming. someone who feels helpless is not content. but from a trying-to-knock-maduro-over standpoint they are identical, in that neither one is going to get off their rear end to help you. and the opposition has done a singularly god-awful job at changing that. which do you think energizes the people more: "I promise to sell off all national assets immediately" or "I'll kick out those doctors providing free health care." like for fucks sake, you're in the revolution game, you can at least say something slightly less openly contemptuous of your people end result of which being that now the opposition are reduced to begging Daddy Abrams to come and give them their turn on the XBox, because hey, what's the worst that could happen. they have abandoned any hope of building up domestic support, and told themselves any possibility for change lies in Uncle Sledgehammer's Home Depot of Mystical Wonders. "Hey, it's not like Pinochet was THAT bad" turns out to be a real lovely sales pitch
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Jun 15, 2019 15:44
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Yeowch!!! My Balls!!! posted:is it you or your doppelganger accusing me of dishonesty because you've never encountered that turn of phrase? Hint, getting Cuban doctors in exchange for oil is a bad deal. Like many other things that Chavez attempted, they're short sighted solutions to wider problems. The problem that Venezuela had wasn't even in the amount of doctors they had available, or the quality of education. Venezuelan doctors are incredibly well trained, and both the ULA and UCV have been public universities since the 70s. There was a brain drain problem due to hospitals being constantly underfunded, so doctors stuck to private practice rather than struggle with being unable to not treat patients. Following the Chavista trend of creating parallels instead of fixing what's already there, Mision Barrio Adentro was created. The end result was that, when Cubans started defecting beginning in the turn of the decade, what Venezuela was left with was an abandoned parallel ambulatory system, and an abandoned health care system. The domestic support was there. It was shaky, most of the time, but when it was focused it had the support of a clear majority. "Throwing a coup and nobody coming" is a fairly dishonest statement. That the military didn't desert doesn't mean that civilians didn't tag along. If you understand the keys to power, you understand that at this stage, what's propping up Maduro is the military, not civilian support. Hence, why it failed, it didn't fail because it was an unpopular idea, it failed because it didn't sway the military, and it turns out civilians cannot do poo poo against the military and that Maduro isn't going anywhere so long as he has that support. We can then ask, why didn't it sway the military? This is a much more helpful and interesting discussion rather than pretending that Maduro has the support of the civilian population. fnox fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Jun 15, 2019 |
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Jun 15, 2019 17:33
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https://twitter.com/dancohen3000/status/1139750016753569792?s=20
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Jun 15, 2019 17:47
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So, reading through this, the really scandalous part isn't the money. It's in line with the level of grafting I've seen from basically everywhere in Venezuela when dollars are involved, we're talking about tens of thousands, not the billions that were stolen by Maduro. Definitely not a way to lead by example, that's for sure, and those people should be removed from their posts and possibly have their asylum revoked. What I'm more worried about is the claim that president Piñera's aid is just rotting away at the border. I really want to know the cause of that and I hope it's not the same corruption that led to previous incidents such as the Pudreval fiasco.
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Jun 15, 2019 18:15
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zapplez posted:yeah some serious victim blaming going on. next thing you are going to tell me the people stuck in slave camps in NK are "content with the situation" otherwise they would just revolt. There aren't slave camps in the DPRK for them to revolt over.
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Jun 15, 2019 19:16
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WhiskeyWhiskers posted:There aren't slave camps in the DPRK for them to revolt over. Seems like a poorly executed AstroTurf campaign supplemental to a successful coup operation. The Venezuela opposition is much smaller, poorly organized, and not really motivated to show some self determination. This is what happens when The School of America becomes a charter school and passes out participation medals. I give this coup and the ensuing flood of crocodile tears a C-. This would have been a solid D if not for Guaidos sweet Vogue photoshoot. That hombre has photogenic as gently caress.
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Jun 15, 2019 19:34
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WhiskeyWhiskers posted:There aren't slave camps in the DPRK for them to revolt over. You dont seem to get the point I am making here. The other poster implied that if conditions were actually as bad as reported then you would have people succesfully overthrowing the government, which is ridiculous. We can all agree conditions in NK are some of the worst in the modern world, and yet there are no popular attempts to overthrow the government. The combination of a starving population, strong government with frequent assassinations of dissenters, as well as military support means there arent any coups. That doesn't mean the people are "content".
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Jun 15, 2019 19:35
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zapplez posted:You dont seem to get the point I am making here. The other poster implied that if conditions were actually as bad as reported then you would have people succesfully overthrowing the government, which is ridiculous. We can all agree conditions in NK are some of the worst in the modern world, and yet there are no popular attempts to overthrow the government. The combination of a starving population, strong government with frequent assassinations of dissenters, as well as military support means there arent any coups. Only in a world where reality is dictated by Zapples Jump-To-Conclusions Mat would this post make sense.
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Jun 15, 2019 19:39
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zapplez posted:You dont seem to get the point I am making here. The other poster implied that if conditions were actually as bad as reported then you would have people succesfully overthrowing the government, which is ridiculous. We can all agree conditions in NK are some of the worst in the modern world, and yet there are no popular attempts to overthrow the government. The combination of a starving population, strong government with frequent assassinations of dissenters, as well as military support means there arent any coups. No, we really can't. That's ridiculous. They're a stable state with no active war, they have an open border and trade with China and their main problems are caused by US sanctions.
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Jun 15, 2019 19:39
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WhiskeyWhiskers posted:They're a stable state That is inflicting some serious abuse to the normal meaning of "stable", right there.
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Jun 15, 2019 19:44
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Rust Martialis posted:That is inflicting some serious abuse to the normal meaning of "stable", right there. They're just trying to be realistic in the face of disinformative argumentation.
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Jun 15, 2019 19:48
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Yeowch!!! My Balls!!! posted:mostly giving you poo poo for calling Nicaragua a case of sanctions and sanctions alone working, tbh. your presentation neatly elided a program of mass murder of those viewed as likely to oppose our puppets there and blowing up ships trying to use their harbors. this MAY have also played a role in ramping up the pressure on them. call me crazy. I don't think you're really giving me poo poo for "calling Nicaragua a case of sanctions and sanctions alone working" because I quite explicitly repudiated idea, and did so in a post that you quoted. Maybe it just went over your head, but I don't think that's what really happened. I think you understood my meaning, but chose to act as if you did not. Instead what I see here is you doing something that I often see in this thread. You are engaging in moral reasoning. You aren't really interested in breaking down the comparative contribution to Chamorro's vote share in the 1990 Nicaraguan election, even if that's they way you framed your argument. In this discussion you are not really making arguments grounded in empirical observations or a theoretical understanding of political-economy. Instead your reasoning is based on something more intuitive. When I say "sanctions worked in Nicaragua," (in the sense of accomplishing George Bush's agenda) you read this to mean "sanctions WILL work in Venezueala," It is not a logical inference, however emotionally, it is easy to understand the connection. This is how most people reason in practice, and in many contexts it basically works. As you believe the policy of the United States is not moral or just, you want to argue against applying sanctions to Venezuela. This is where I see you beginning to engage in moral reasoning. Because you believe sanctions are bad in a moral sense, you also want to argue that they will not and cannot accomplish their goals. If we are not thinking , it can be easy to conflate that which is moral and that which is true. Sometimes this is a mistake but often it is a rhetorically useful tactic. Certainly it would be nice if this were true and good always triumphed over evil, but I don't think that is the world we live in.
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Jun 15, 2019 19:48
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Rust Martialis posted:That is inflicting some serious abuse to the normal meaning of "stable", right there. Other than Khrushchev's attempted coup in 1956, what instability has it faced?
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Jun 15, 2019 19:52
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WhiskeyWhiskers posted:Other than Khrushchev's attempted coup in 1956, what instability has it faced? I think instability would represent the perception of state of affairs for the Venezuelan Diaspora who lost their plantations thanks to that meddling Chavez and that criminal bus driver Maruro.
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Jun 15, 2019 19:55
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With 3.5 million Venezuelan refugees, there must have been quite a lot of plantations.
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Jun 15, 2019 20:03
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WhiskeyWhiskers posted:Other than Khrushchev's attempted coup in 1956, what instability has it faced? NK's reliance on necromancy to murder and revive high ranking political figures is not a sustainability process. Flirting with the dark arts will only lead to the wholesale destruction and subjugation of the state by the poisonous blood vampires, also known as Americans
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Jun 15, 2019 20:05
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Squalid posted:I don't think you're really giving me poo poo for "calling Nicaragua a case of sanctions and sanctions alone working" because I quite explicitly repudiated idea, and did so in a post that you quoted. Maybe it just went over your head, but I don't think that's what really happened. I think you understood my meaning, but chose to act as if you did not. Looking at the discussion on context I think it was clear that when people talked about sanctions "working" the implication was that they were an efficacious alternative to military action. Citing examples where sanctions were used in conjunction with military acts and then saying "look, sanctions worked in this case" is, I think, a misreading of what was being argued in the first place.
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Jun 15, 2019 20:15
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North Korea's conditions are some of the absolute worst in the world along a whole set of various criteria, and many of them relate to or are directly involved with quality of life, availability of food, and the general brutality of the government and the way they handle political or social dissent. I have stories of how things tended to play out for the average family in North Korea anytime from the great(est individual) famine to today, and could talk about how "political or social dissent" can include anything ranging from being caught with south korean dramas on DVD or flash drive, to eating beef when not sufficiently politically connected to the ruling party, to being caught/sold out for attempting to harvest enough tree stems or soybean dregs to not starve to death in a particularly bad living assignment. It's very strange in that country, it's a weird dystopian story for another day or thread, and it's also not at all equivalent to the issues in Venezuela for way too many reasons to count. It's really a poor subject of comparison except to say that neither country is a particularly great example of a "leftist" or "socialist" government entity to celebrate or defend. In particular, many of North Korea's problems are matters of grotesquely counterproductive government overreach in centralized policy and agriculture, which created wholly different conditions of famine than you have detailed in Venezuela. The general theme of the Venezuelan food shortages are a story of a once generally (or even adamantly) functional socialist system that certainly has entire periods of good or great times, and which many countries should really strive to emulate, but which is very gradually but extremely concerningly falling apart and enlarging a nascent humanitarian crisis because of general corruption and favoritism from a government that became too autocratic and then had few means of course-correcting a general disintegration of non corrupt oversight. Public systems become political spoils handed off to connected party apparatchiks, and slowly lose functionality and stability over time because of a general introduction of incompetent measures to cover up the gradual buildup of policy and system failures. The food shortages and food crisis issues built up slowly in response to all this, with few "shocks" that cause acute famine events. It's just that food gets harder to come by each year and the situation grows desperate in a timeframe which doesn't really cause mass deaths from food shortages. Instead, you have mass migration out of the country over the years, brain drain, and everything else we're talking about here in this thread. To contrast against Venezuela, North Korea's failures are more about tremendously ambitious, tremendously authoritarian, tremendously isolated police state centralized agricultural and industrial initiatives, of the sort you see emulating other large scale communist projects, and they were things that didn't work and would already have been really bad in a situation where the country WASN'T recovering from a clusterfuck situation of occupation and horrendous war. The Kims were very thoroughly committed to doing things like building giant dams that put way too much farmable land underwater, centralizing all agricultural initiatives in a scattershot, repeatedly "adjusted" fashion, and utterly swearing by a policy of self-sufficiency that doublespoke over their clear issue of economic dependency upon the USSR. And other things. And any otherwise manageable shock, whether economic or natural, could spiral out into famines that killed legitimately unknown quantities of people, but definitely in the millions almost each time. Nothing Maduro has done (or would do!) can compare, and won't easily compare. You don't have absurd critical shocks leaving millions dead. You don't have consistent and constant imprisonment or execution of political dissidents or other Uncooperatives. It's the difference between being in a house that is violently swept up in a mudslide versus being in a house which is having the foundations rotted out by flooding. Both the PSUV and the DPRK are alike, though, in the sense that there is an entire apologist body of thought that suggests that the country would be totally fine if not for US sanctions, or some variety. In the Koreas, this is a debatable and fraught issue and probably not really very true, but it's complicated enough not to be able to gloss over easy. In Venezuela, it's definitely not true, even if I consider one of the greatest dangers of Maduro to be that he leaves the country exceptionally and increasingly vulnerable to neoliberal manipulations and American aggression, and situations involving Guaido are early temperature checks on that severe issue.
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Jun 15, 2019 20:30
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Fiend posted:I think instability would represent the perception of state of affairs for the Venezuelan Diaspora who lost their plantations thanks to that meddling Chavez and that criminal bus driver Maruro. You're a loving rear end in a top hat. Go tell that to the people in refugee camps in the Colombian border. Go gently caress yourself. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Jun 15, 2019 20:44
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I bet he gets all giggles over the women who fled who have been forced into sex work to survive. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-colombia-venezuela-slavery-idUSKCN1NX22X
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Jun 15, 2019 20:49
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Helsing posted:Looking at the discussion on context I think it was clear that when people talked about sanctions "working" the implication was that they were an efficacious alternative to military action. Citing examples where sanctions were used in conjunction with military acts and then saying "look, sanctions worked in this case" is, I think, a misreading of what was being argued in the first place. I disagree, but regardless I also provided an example where there was definitely no military action. Anyway, the contras had just had their funding slashed and were already in the process of disbanding when Ortega lost the 1990 election. If you want to point to an alternative explanation than the sanctions for this result you'd do better to bring up the gigantic sum of US funding spent on Chamorro's campaign, rather than the war that was already in the process of ending. for the record i also think caps on caps on caps idea that sanctions should be used more was stupid.
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Jun 15, 2019 20:53
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Squalid posted:I don't think you're really giving me poo poo for "calling Nicaragua a case of sanctions and sanctions alone working" because I quite explicitly repudiated idea, and did so in a post that you quoted. Maybe it just went over your head, but I don't think that's what really happened. I think you understood my meaning, but chose to act as if you did not. railing about the horrors of people engaging in moral reasoning because they don't like the idea of death squads is a very bad look. people aren't motivated by a theoretical understanding of political-economy, but by internal moral codes. just because the actions of the contras don't make you squeamish don't mean that they don't repulse other people. plus, if the only way that sanctions have worked in the past is coupled with economic blockade and terrorism, is that really a rational argument for sanctions? if you want to argue that sanctions alone are effective at regime change, you should probably find a case where only sanctions were applied, and not make equivocating statements about how nothing is truly knowable in history, and therefore your complete disregard for morals makes you more rational.
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Jun 15, 2019 20:55
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Rust Martialis posted:I bet he gets all giggles over the women who fled who have been forced into sex work to survive. Of all the thin agitprop stories I've read about Venezuela, that one has to be one of the thinnest. The only person interviewed other than the Colombian cop doesn't even work at the organization anymore.
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Jun 15, 2019 20:59
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Considering that the migration patterns out of venezuela are fairly matched to food insecurity, the reality is going to be that most everyone who has crossed the border out of venezuela is going to be representative of that the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder are the first to lose reliable access to food in a food crisis. It's mostly going to be people who left the country because they were already the closest to food crisis before and have few ways to feel like they have any real way to survive the continued collapse of the economy and agricultural infrastructure. It says something of the people who have the reactionary willingness to go along with labeling them as plantation owners or robber barons who are fleeing only to protect themselves from accountability to their economic predation. I suppose one easy way to support kleptocratic rule is to revise the definitions of who's a victim and who's a perpetrator.
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Jun 15, 2019 21:05
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GoluboiOgon posted:railing about the horrors of people engaging in moral reasoning because they don't like the idea of death squads is a very bad look. people aren't motivated by a theoretical understanding of political-economy, but by internal moral codes. just because the actions of the contras don't make you squeamish don't mean that they don't repulse other people. There is a time and a place for moral logic. However the problem is when you conflate what you think is good and just and right, with the way things are. You may believe US actions in Venezuela are morally wrong, but that doesn't mean they won't succeed. If you disagree with this conclusion, why don't you take a look at the history of US intervention in Latin America, and then tell me how much goodness and morality has to do with the actual outcome. I don't recall making an argument for sanctions itt, and I don't really plan on ever doing so. I'm not really sure why you are now suggesting I "want to argue that sanctions alone are effective at regime change," When I have repeated rejected that this was ever an intention of mine. This is at least the third time I have done so, arguably the fourth. I have never made an argument for sanctions in Venezuela, I have merely made the theoretical observation that it is possible for them to contribute to accomplishing the goals of policy makers. In this claim I have been unequivocal.
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Jun 15, 2019 21:10
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Kavros posted:North Korea's conditions are some of the absolute worst in the world along a whole set of various criteria, and many of them relate to or are directly involved with quality of life, availability of food, and the general brutality of the government and the way they handle political or social dissent. I have stories of how things tended to play out for the average family in North Korea anytime from the great(est individual) famine to today, and could talk about how "political or social dissent" can include anything ranging from being caught with south korean dramas on DVD or flash drive, to eating beef when not sufficiently politically connected to the ruling party, to being caught/sold out for attempting to harvest enough tree stems or soybean dregs to not starve to death in a particularly bad living assignment. It's very strange in that country, it's a weird dystopian story for another day or thread, and it's also not at all equivalent to the issues in Venezuela for way too many reasons to count. It's really a poor subject of comparison except to say that neither country is a particularly great example of a "leftist" or "socialist" government entity to celebrate or defend. Great post.
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Jun 15, 2019 21:10
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Squalid posted:I have never made an argument for sanctions in Venezuela, I have merely made the theoretical observation that it is possible for them to contribute to accomplishing the goals of policy makers. In this claim I have been unequivocal. This statement is "sanctions alone can cause regime change." Nobody in the thread has provided and example in which sanctions alone can cause regime change, even you are arguing that the situation in nicaragua was complex. if you want to drape yourself in realpolitik, fine, but you are then obligated to provide logical arguments, not equivocate constantly and accuse the people you are arguing with of being naive.
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Jun 15, 2019 21:28
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Kavros posted:Considering that the migration patterns out of venezuela are fairly matched to food insecurity, the reality is going to be that most everyone who has crossed the border out of venezuela is going to be representative of that the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder are the first to lose reliable access to food in a food crisis. It's mostly going to be people who left the country because they were already the closest to food crisis before and have few ways to feel like they have any real way to survive the continued collapse of the economy and agricultural infrastructure. To say that anybody leaving the country is part of some elite class is appalling and it is only ever done through the safety of anonymity. You can go anywhere in Latin America and find Venezuelans, they're literally everywhere, you can ask them what they did in the country before. If they had riches, they lost them, if they didn't have any, then they lost whatever they had. It's extremely loving frustrating to hear this from the people who are defending literal elites such as the PSUV ruling class, who have a well documented history of corruption, who have been photographed in loving yatchs abroad, who have their entire family residing in expensive condos in Miami. But it seems like those posters are more concerned about trying to seem witty than contemplate reality.
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Jun 15, 2019 21:42
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GoluboiOgon posted:This statement is "sanctions alone can cause regime change." Nobody in the thread has provided and example in which sanctions alone can cause regime change, even you are arguing that the situation in nicaragua was complex. if you want to drape yourself in realpolitik, fine, but you are then obligated to provide logical arguments, not equivocate constantly and accuse the people you are arguing with of being naive. who are you quoting here? I couldn't find the phrase "sanctions alone can cause regime change" using ctrl-f going back three pages. Certainly you are not referring to anything that I have said. I feel I have been perfectly clear about my claims, which were addressed at punk rebel ecks when he asked if sanctions have ever worked. I also do not consider myself an advocate for realpolitik, as I believe as a framework for international relations it tends to neglect the internal dynamics that drive policy.
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Jun 15, 2019 21:50
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fnox posted:To say that anybody leaving the country is part of some elite class is appalling and it is only ever done through the safety of anonymity. You can go anywhere in Latin America and find Venezuelans, they're literally everywhere, you can ask them what they did in the country before. If they had riches, they lost them, if they didn't have any, then they lost whatever they had. It's extremely loving frustrating to hear this from the people who are defending literal elites such as the PSUV ruling class, who have a well documented history of corruption, who have been photographed in loving yatchs abroad, who have their entire family residing in expensive condos in Miami. It is an essentially forced requirement of revisionist defenses of Maduro, at this point. The PSUV has mismanaged the country greatly enough to create a mass migration of refugee immigrants, and that's a bad enough look that you can't really acknowledge it and still have a satisfactory footing to speak in support of the existing regime. But the anti-imperialist revisionary toolbook has repeatedly used and made a common practice of settling the issue of political or economic refugees, political asylum seekers, and the like: you reinvent them as the bourgeoisie, fleeing accountability, demonizing them. It's usually packaged with revisionist defenses of sealed borders and allowing autocratic regimes to prohibit people from leaving your country. At least in venezuela, there is no effective or functional means to contain the mass exodus even were it to be desired.
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Jun 15, 2019 21:57
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Kavros posted:It is an essentially forced requirement of revisionist defenses of Maduro, at this point. The PSUV has mismanaged the country greatly enough to create a mass migration of refugee immigrants, and that's a bad enough look that you can't really acknowledge it and still have a satisfactory footing to speak in support of the existing regime. People do the same poo poo with Cuba all the time holding the nation up as some type utopia despite tens of thousand of people traveling over 200 miles on make shift rafts on the endless ocean to leave the country. It's very difficult for diehards to acknowledge that just because a government is anti-American and anti-capitalist doesn't mean said the government is pro-people and pro-worker. punk rebel ecks fucked around with this message at 23:10 on Jun 15, 2019 |
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Jun 15, 2019 23:08
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