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536 posted:Do you follow the same rules of "oh my god we can't figure out if anything is wrong or not because the media" with North Korea too? Yes, a lot of the bullshit you read in the media about NK is bullshit too, is that somehow a shocker? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/13/why-do-north-korean-defector-testimonies-so-often-fall-apart vvv: nah, kim is gonna start losing weight any day now Truga fucked around with this message at 13:15 on Aug 17, 2019 |
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Aug 17, 2019 12:53
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And similarly, sanctions makes everything worse without really accomplishing anything
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Aug 17, 2019 13:12
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Truga posted:Yes, a lot of the bullshit you read in the media about NK is bullshit too, is that somehow a shocker? Is there a hunger crisis in NK? How about labour camps? Yes or no.
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Aug 17, 2019 13:18
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536 posted:Is there a hunger crisis in NK? How about labour camps? Yes or no. Yes? What are you trying to achieve here?
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Aug 17, 2019 13:40
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Noshtane posted:Do we file the Bachelet report, WHO and Amnesty international under the US propaganda column? Amnesty international for sure
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Aug 17, 2019 13:55
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536 posted:Is there a hunger crisis in NK? How about labour camps? Yes or no. What do you call US prisons?
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Aug 17, 2019 13:56
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536 posted:Is there a hunger crisis in NK? How about labour camps? Yes or no. This post is not about the thread topic, Venezuela.
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Aug 17, 2019 13:56
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Ron Paul Atreides posted:Amnesty international for sure US propaganda? They seem pretty down on the US lately: https://www.dw.com/en/amnesty-international-issues-travel-warning-for-us/a-49939151 https://www.amnestyusa.org/reports/the-hidden-us-war-in-somalia/
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Aug 17, 2019 14:19
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Flavahbeast posted:US propaganda? They seem pretty down on the US lately: Yup. In no way does that negate their many ties to the CIA and their very convenient Laundering of US actions when needed. A mix of reporting helps that in fact, creates the sense that all their reports are credible. A tune that happens alot with high profile NGOs. Ron Paul Atreides fucked around with this message at 15:24 on Aug 17, 2019 |
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Aug 17, 2019 14:23
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Noshtane posted:Do we file the Bachelet report, WHO and Amnesty international under the US propaganda column? No doubt about it. BigFactory posted:Maduro was succumbing to US pressure in 2014-2018? He certainly wasn't selling oil on the moon. Flavahbeast posted:US propaganda? They seem pretty down on the US lately: Am I reading that right in that they are they asking the US to investigate itself over their own drone strikes? 
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Aug 17, 2019 18:32
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536 posted:Is there a hunger crisis in NK? How about labour camps? Yes or no. 420 Gank Mid posted:This post is not about the thread topic, Venezuela. But VZ and NK do have a commonality in their U.S. relations, you know.
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Aug 17, 2019 18:43
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Truga posted:Yes? What are you trying to achieve here? I'm trying to expand on the argument "we can't know for certain if things in VZ have been bad because of propaganda". I'm saying yes, we can. We can know when things are terrible in countries even if they have corrupt authoritarian regimes and even if its clouded with propaganda on both sides. We can be certain people were starving in VZ far before 2018. Just like we could know the same about dire conditions in NK.
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Aug 17, 2019 19:18
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Homeless Friend posted:No doubt about it. Also, is it flat out impossible for you to even entertain such ideas that the politics Chaves had was flawed or that Maduro is a horrible leader, thus responsible for the problems in Venezuela?
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Aug 17, 2019 20:27
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Noshtane posted:If we look at Venezuela today, how much of Venezuelas problems are you willing to blame on Maduro? if we look at your post, how much of it is a deflecting non sequitur (all of it)
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Aug 17, 2019 20:44
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536 posted:We can be certain people were starving in VZ far before 2018. Just like we could know the same about dire conditions in NK. yes. i'm not as much of a hardliner as condiv, though i sure as hell get his position. what we can't be certain though is how much of that is due to the ~international pressures~ of the imperialist powers, and yet some people in the thread want more is north korea hosed? yes, yes it is. would it be less hosed if it wasn't under all the embargos? yes, yes it would be. i'm sure kim would be in a worse spot and his people would be in a better spot if they weren't being poo poo on by most of the world. i'm pretty sure the same is true for venezuela too. greece and iraq also both ended up being strictly worse off in *every single loving way* after getting the blessing of western fixing. so why, pray tell, are we still arguing about this?
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Aug 17, 2019 21:08
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Noshtane posted:That brings us back to the old question; Why would Bachelet, a victim of US backed terror, work for the CIA? I don't know about all that, the question was whether it was propaganda. Truth, factuality or what have you related to the information isn't important to that question. Fact is it's funded and it serves an ideology. The second question, sure I can entertain those ideas. I could also entertain them in the opposite direction. Would it be even worse were they not there? What is the oppositions positions and how do they propose to rectify said problems? I would never go so far to say they hold sole responsibility though since that would be granting then a degree of power they simply don't have.
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Aug 17, 2019 22:12
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Too many pages for me to go read all of them and I haven't been here since the start. What I can see in the last few is that if media is accurate on what is going on or not in Vz. There is this awsome youtuber, sadly its in spanish only since he is from Mexico. That made a visit to Vz and recorded most of what he could. Its a good series of videos. If you can understand somewhat spanish go look at it. Will leave a link here as referral, but try to look for the first one, in that same playlist if you are interested. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLwSyZSnaRU
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Aug 17, 2019 22:39
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Noshtane posted:That brings us back to the old question; Why would Bachelet, a victim of US backed terror, work for the CIA? She doesn't need to work directly for them. Soft power is about influence networks and selective information reporting to create required conditions, in this case to shape things towards the justification for military force. This isn't about Maduro being good, or Chavez for that matter (though the fact of his popularity is something that some posters seem to discount as a falsehood despite the obvious historical record on this), this is about the current international alignment for his removal and that being stymied by ineffective and unorganized opposition on the ground, which will play out one of 2 ways; foreign powers continue to turn the screws on Venezuela until it all collapses, not having created the crisis but sure as hell ensuring it continues, or them getting impatient and fomenting another civil war with international involvement, as they've done repeatedly in tye last 70 years all over the world. The fallout from the former is bad for Venezuelans, the later is worse, and bad for everyone in the region, and just generally a poo poo idea that would still no doubt enrich a lot of military contractors and profiteers. The solution I and others here propose is lifting of sanctions and aide, and non-interference. This is interpreted as propping up Maduro, and in a sense it is, but that's because as was clearly shown by the failure of the opposition to push for his ouster, Maduro is not precarious enough yet that he will simply fall, and his removal under current circumstances will be a civil war. As stated, this is bad, in general, for everyone, but especially for Venezuelans. This is not about the morality of the Maduro government. It's about the scenario that causes the least harm to the region and the people. Frankly I think the US is fundamentally unable to support the kind of networks and solidarity building needed to actually flip a government the way they want. They think it's all rhetoric and a few days of marching, a completely foolish understanding of power born of liberal individualism. The needed tactics are far too similar to communist and socialist logic of communal support, so they simply never attempt them and hope their military superiority will help tilt the scales, forgetting the last 20 years of demonstrable limitations to that power that have been given example all accross the middle east. Things are bad. That doesn't mean something must done, and it doesn't mean that those who do want to 'do something' are acting in a way to help the situation for the people affected. Ron Paul Atreides fucked around with this message at 22:50 on Aug 17, 2019 |
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Aug 17, 2019 22:46
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Ron Paul Atreides posted:She doesn't need to work directly for them. Soft power is about influence networks and selective information reporting to create required conditions, in this case to shape things towards the justification for military force. Smdh at all who don't access the hyperuranion to get their stats.
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Aug 17, 2019 23:24
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MikeStmria posted:Too many pages for me to go read all of them and I haven't been here since the start. What I can see in the last few is that if media is accurate on what is going on or not in Vz. Huh, that's a cool video, thanks for posting some actual content to this thread. The supermarket actually looked a lot better than I would have expected. I'm also a big fan of going to grocery stores / corner stores / whatever whenever I travel somewhere, and I've seen a lot of grocery stores that looked just like that. It seemed like they had everything except rice and -- oddly -- flour. Even eggs and "lactose drink". I mean I know the main problem in Venezuela is that everything is too expensive for the huge portion of the population that makes minimum wage, but I figured this would have had bigger knock-on effects, even for what looked like a typical middle class areas like where that was filmed. Instead it looks like if you have a relative abroad who can send you a hundred bucks a month or whatever, you can feed a family of four just fine without any particular hassle? Or whatever $1m bolivars was in USD when he filmed it. Although that was also published more than 2 years ago, so maybe it's worse now. I think my most surreal grocery store visit was in Havana, where the electronics shop that was part of the store was selling $10,000 65'' OLED TVs and brand-new iPhones and Samsung Galaxies, inside a larger grocery store that was full of entire aisles of like one brand of cooking oil, the next aisle with one brand of rice, etc. Eggs for example were absolutely impossible to buy in Cuba, I went to probably 10 supermarkets and corner stores and was never able to get a single one. I guess that's why Nitza Villapol was so important to Cuban cuisine.
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Aug 17, 2019 23:54
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MikeStmria posted:Too many pages for me to go read all of them and I haven't been here since the start. What I can see in the last few is that if media is accurate on what is going on or not in Vz. Pretty much this.The video is old, and there are older ones similar to this. Shortages aren't primarily the result of sanctions, but rather just economic policies such as strict price controls. Aisles won't be stocked if food is sold at a loss.
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Aug 18, 2019 01:02
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Ron Paul Atreides posted:She doesn't need to work directly for them. Soft power is about influence networks and selective information reporting to create required conditions, in this case to shape things towards the justification for military force. This is a good post.
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Aug 18, 2019 01:09
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BigFactory posted:This is a good post. I'm actually humbled by this assesment from you, thank you.
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Aug 18, 2019 01:14
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Ron Paul Atreides posted:I'm actually humbled by this assesment from you, thank you. Everyone here wants peace and prosperity.
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Aug 18, 2019 01:19
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Realistically, the crisis in Venezuela is going to outlive Michael Bolton's career, whether from a change in administrations or the current administration's habit of hemorrhaging staff carries on, although whatever the next person to head American policy on Venezuela will be like is hard to say.
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Aug 18, 2019 01:35
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Saladman posted:I think my most surreal grocery store visit was in Havana, where the electronics shop that was part of the store was selling $10,000 65'' OLED TVs and brand-new iPhones and Samsung Galaxies, inside a larger grocery store that was full of entire aisles of like one brand of cooking oil, the next aisle with one brand of rice, etc. Eggs for example were absolutely impossible to buy in Cuba, I went to probably 10 supermarkets and corner stores and was never able to get a single one. I guess that's why Nitza Villapol was so important to Cuban cuisine. in Cuba you'd probly have more luck asking old guys playing dominoes on the street if they could hook you up. . . score some eggs off an old lady w/ a few hens scratching about a vacant lot SlothfulCobra posted:Realistically, the crisis in Venezuela is going to outlive Michael Bolton's career, whether from a change in administrations or the current administration's habit of hemorrhaging staff carries on, although whatever the next person to head American policy on Venezuela will be like is hard to say. michael bolton's career will live forever in the hearts of all his fans. . . neither trump nor Maduro will outlast the enduring beauty of his 1991 rendition of When a Man Loves a Woman. . .
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Aug 18, 2019 02:20
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Truga posted:yes. i'm not as much of a hardliner as condiv, though i sure as hell get his position. I personally know Venezuelans refugees and I've seen the situation deteriorating for many years. Is not really a debate, it was bad, very very bad, before US sanctions. Hell, back when Chavez was in power and peruvians were travelling TO Venezuela to work because there was loads of money there, even lefty types here were worried because Chavez was running a dictablanda, a soft autocracy, and we know one because we've lived one with Fujimori in the 90s. The writing was on the wall with the overreach of executive power, corruption and dependancy on oil money. He have over half a million venezuelan refugees in my city, most of them being exploited or begging in the streets, most of them came before US sanctions, it's really loving bad
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Aug 18, 2019 06:50
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Pacho posted:I personally know Venezuelans refugees and I've seen the situation deteriorating for many years. Is not really a debate, it was bad, very very bad, before US sanctions. Hell, back when Chavez was in power and peruvians were travelling TO Venezuela to work because there was loads of money there, even lefty types here were worried because Chavez was running a dictablanda, a soft autocracy, and we know one because we've lived one with Fujimori in the 90s. The writing was on the wall with the overreach of executive power, corruption and dependancy on oil money. He have over half a million venezuelan refugees in my city, most of them being exploited or begging in the streets, most of them came before US sanctions, it's really loving bad This is what I’ve been saying all along. Expats are just looking to survive, they’re not bougie plantation owners, they’re not agents of the empire, they’re people driven to desperation by an uncaring, corrupt, violent and inept government. They do not deserve the vitriol and denial they get from posters here, and their suffering shouldn’t be made light of. It’s just extremely distasteful to suggest that millions are lying about the state of their country, or that they are in some sort of vacation, or that they do not care about their countrymen because they’re safe now. Nobody wants anyone to die, they want all of this to end so they can go back to their normal lives.
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Aug 18, 2019 13:56
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Venezuela got a $10 billion dollar loan from known good country Russia for fighter jets. Now it can't pay them back. https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/venezuela-got-loan-10-billion-russia-pay-fighter-jets-it-cant-pay-it-back-73746 Its almost as good as the earlier story about how of the 30 or so fighter jets VZ has, they only have like 8 qualified pilots in country left.
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Aug 18, 2019 14:21
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i support the holy lion of caracas
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Aug 18, 2019 14:34
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A major root problem here is that virtually any evidence not coming from Maduro's proxies is dismissed as "CIA propaganda". This is starting to resemble "fake news" as an arbitrary way to dismiss contradictory evidence. Want to talk about anything other than the US is bad, using anything other than people invited on TeleSUR press junkets? waves hands well, how can we really know anything with all this propaganda flying around? Meanwhile, there's literally a list of media sources in the OP and the thread was started by a set of posters from and in Venezuela. The thread goes back to 2015 and actively discusses and expresses the world before the current sanctions systems. The information needed is all right there. The dissonance required to sustain this state of free-floating selectively directed doubt is painful to witness.
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Aug 18, 2019 15:45
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Oh my god dude you're going to post "READ THE OP" again??? You're a loving cartoon.
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Aug 18, 2019 17:13
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What's actually objectionable about it?
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Aug 18, 2019 17:27
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Discendo Vox posted:A major root problem here is that virtually any evidence not coming from Maduro's proxies is dismissed as "CIA propaganda". This is starting to resemble "fake news" as an arbitrary way to dismiss contradictory evidence. Want to talk about anything other than the US is bad, using anything other than people invited on TeleSUR press junkets? waves hands well, how can we really know anything with all this propaganda flying around? The list of media sources in the OP actively notes that each and every one of them has a bias, guesses at what that bias is, and makes clear that none of them should be considered an impartial source. You're the only one trying to pretend there's some magic source of unbiased absolute truth here.
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Aug 18, 2019 17:41
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Main Paineframe posted:The list of media sources in the OP actively notes that each and every one of them has a bias, guesses at what that bias is, and makes clear that none of them should be considered an impartial source. You're the only one trying to pretend there's some magic source of unbiased absolute truth here. No poo poo all sources are biased. Somehow it's still possible to make inferences about reality. Again, the problem is the conflation of bias and propaganda, and the use of that conflation to apply selectively directed doubt. The "there's so much propaganda, how can we ever know?", applied, with remarkable consistency, only to sources critical of Maduro or recording the regime's abuses, including actual Venezuelan goons. Amnesty International is, remarkably, not in the OP under the heading "CIA propaganda, how are we to know what was happening in the distant mist-shrouded days of 2015". The second post is an exhaustive accounting of the elections of that period, with linked sources, from a Venezuelan. There is really no excuse for pretending that even the barest facts of what happened are ambiguous. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 17:50 on Aug 18, 2019 |
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Aug 18, 2019 17:45
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Discendo Vox posted:No poo poo all sources are biased. Somehow it's still possible to make inferences about reality. Again, the problem is the conflation of bias and propaganda, and the use of that conflation to apply selectively directed doubt. The "there's so much propaganda, how can we ever know?", applied, with remarkable consistency, only to sources critical of Maduro or recording the regime's abuses, including actual Venezuelan goons. Amnesty International is, remarkably, not in the OP under the heading "CIA propaganda, how are we to know what was happening in the distant mist-shrouded days of 2015". The second post is an exhaustive accounting of the elections of that period, with linked sources, from a Venezuelan. There is really no excuse for pretending that even the barest facts of what happened are ambiguous. I believe the reality of scarcity. I believe the pivot toward more authoritarian rule by Maduro and the military as the situation worsens. I am skeptical of the sudden escalation of violence by the military, the claims of merciless attacks on indigenous groups and extrajudicial killings, as one poster called it, going 'full Pinochet'. I am skeptical because after the failure of Guaido and his subsequent fleeing, and given the history of the Venezuelan military, I find that kind of change in their tactics and applications of force towards their own to be unlikely, but somehow exactly when international will for intervention fizzles out over the scarcity and starvation, reports emerge to paint an escalation. There were many claims of this kind of thing in Syria, in Iraq, in many places that all turned out to be false in the aftermath of invasion. Coming from reputable sources, sources that in other situations could be relied upon but in those situation were laundering fabrications from vested parties and presenting them as fact. This all feels like another run up to a new war. Something that, in thr current international climate, is insane, but the US is insane right now, and I wouldn't discount the possibility they mean it and are preparing for it right now.
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Aug 18, 2019 19:05
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trump talks a big game. but he is in fact extremely squeamish and isolationist and cowardly when it comes to taking any concrete foreign policy initiative. it's not even clear that the state department is sufficiently staffed these days to develop hypothetical plans for a complex US interventionary strategy in the region.
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Aug 18, 2019 19:30
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Ron Paul Atreides posted:I believe the reality of scarcity. I believe the pivot toward more authoritarian rule by Maduro and the military as the situation worsens. I am skeptical of the sudden escalation of violence by the military, the claims of merciless attacks on indigenous groups and extrajudicial killings, as one poster called it, going 'full Pinochet'. I am skeptical because after the failure of Guaido and his subsequent fleeing, and given the history of the Venezuelan military, I find that kind of change in their tactics and applications of force towards their own to be unlikely, but somehow exactly when international will for intervention fizzles out over the scarcity and starvation, reports emerge to paint an escalation. There were many claims of this kind of thing in Syria, in Iraq, in many places that all turned out to be false in the aftermath of invasion. Coming from reputable sources, sources that in other situations could be relied upon but in those situation were laundering fabrications from vested parties and presenting them as fact. To be fair, he is referring to more so the scarcity, ruined economy, and growing authoritarianism in Venezuela than anything else. I've been posting in this thread and the previous one's for almost ten years now, and these issues have existed from day one. Things just gradually got worse and worse until Maduro came into power to which things went into a free fall. The overton window on people accepting scarcity, corruption, and anti-democratic policies has been twenty years in the making.
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Aug 18, 2019 19:51
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Discendo Vox posted:A major root problem here is that virtually any evidence not coming from Maduro's proxies is dismissed as "CIA propaganda". This is starting to resemble "fake news" as an arbitrary way to dismiss contradictory evidence. That shouldn't be surprising because the critique is indeed applicable to say the NYT or any large news org. You can just change out some terms, for example: Ron Paul Atreides posted:In no way does that negate their many ties to the U.S. Govt and their very convenient laundering of US actions when needed. A mix of reporting helps that in fact, creates the sense that all their reports are credible. A tune that happens alot with high profile news orgs.
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Aug 18, 2019 20:08
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I'm not really a great cheerleader of the sanctions and I'm fairly strictly against US involvement, but there's a decent number of elements of the Venezuela crisis which are the product of expansive corruption and incompetence protected by autocracy that it becomes fundamentally necessary for maduro to depend on blaming outside forces. The PSUV cannot survive ownership of the country's situation and must export blame on a daily basis. The extent of the crisis is so livid that you in most cases you just can't take ownership of it, or say "we will try to do better." You can only be doing nothing wrong and doing the best you can against evil outside forces which are definitely not you or your party. Maduro, in well over 90 percent of situations where he is even forced to admit something is at issue (rather than just claiming the problem doesn't exist, like when he claimed there was no hunger in Venezuela at all), can't say anything other than "this was terrorist agitation by my illegitimate opposition" or "this is the united states doing this to us right now, wow, it's amazing I'm doing as awesome as I am against such odds." Venezuela is hardly the first country demonstrating a situation like this, and many other examples of what Venezuela is going through now demonstrated that the autocrats in charge were ultimately successful in fleecing the country dry and preserving their power all the way throughout a partial or complete collapse of the nation no matter the incompetence and corruption involved, so there's plenty of precedent for that maduro/the PSUV will be easily able to continue this until the nation has been stripped to economic bedrock and thoroughly collapsed in a way which this generation won't live to see recovered from. There's not a lot of options involving non-catastrophic transfer of power away from people who fundamentally rule as a criminal mob for their own enrichment, and they get a lot of protection from the Uninterrupteds and Caps Locks of the world who are always, always ready and on hand to ceaselessly cheerlead for the correct autocrats.
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Aug 18, 2019 20:09
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