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TROIKA CURES GREEK posted:Did they? Or did Carter just really drop the ball on that one. Unfortunately, we're due for at least five years of "because Jimmy Carter has cancer/is dead no one is allowed to discuss his abiding love of every sort of dictator that led him to do things like certify a Venezuelan election from a hotel in Caracas without being allowed to visit polling places or examine pre-election abuses of the voting rolls." Maduro has come out stridently against EU or UN monitoring of the next election. I don't know how the few clowns at Jacobin and Salon who still support him can square "the last election was free because Jimmy Carter said so" with "no one will be allowed to monitor the upcoming election" -- either token international monitoring guarantees a free election or it doesn't. But rational thought isn't really the goal of these people. At this point, with the government actively engaging in ethnic cleansing and moving to the "kill the enemy within" stage of fascism, it's fairly obvious that they are willing and able to do something as comparatively benign as rig a vote. These people aren't going to give up their grip on Venezuela until Maduro has a bullet in his head and his body in four different roadside gutters, and the same for his inner circle. It's gonna get ugly because they have cut off all democratic means of change and given the opposition no choice.
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Aug 26, 2015 11:13
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NPR did a 90-second story on the evictions this morning. It accepted as fact the notion that "smugglers" are causing the economic problems in Venezuela, and included a token "but some crazy people think bulldozing houses and genociding an ethnic group is bad!" one-line tag. This is more evidence that English-language media generally don't care about Venezuela at all and are too lazy to dig past the official line when they do, contra the insistence of the diehards that there is some CNN-based conspiracy to destabilize the regime.
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Aug 26, 2015 14:11
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beer_war posted:Real criminals fight back, you see. I think it's more than that (though this is certainly part of it) and would like Chuck Boone to comment on the following aspects of what seems to be the situation: *Criminals are an integral part of the PSUV coalition. The notion that people with the "right" politics can loot/kidnap targets with the "wrong" politics at will in a direct way, and the government will turn a blind eye to it, has always implicitly been part of the Chavist economic program. *The police have been "purged" on multiple occasions. The current force is indistinguishable from "the people among the PSUV supporters who are most enthusiastic about going into a war zone and killing people" and the current violence is basically gang warfare between those criminals who are on the police force and those who aren't. *Any serious action about the crime problem requires admitting that there is a crime problem, and that in year 17 of PSUV rule the fact that Venezuela is the second-deadliest country in the Western Hemisphere can't be blamed on anyone but the government that created these conditions. All crackdowns are reminders that there are no other meaningful actors in Venezuela. *An unstable society in which people are afraid to leave their homes at night can more easily be controlled and manipulated. Rumors about what goes on at street level can spin out of control among those who aren't prepared to find out for themselves, and people won't know what to believe. This could all be a setup for cancelling the elections because of the "threat to democracy posed by widespread public disorder" or the "safety of people in line to vote." *There is no benefit to cracking down on "criminals" as a class, because criminals are defined by their actions and may cease being criminals. A totalitarian regime must always target "Jews," "kulaks," "Colombians," etc. -- someone who is guilty by virtue of their birth and remains perpetually so until gassed. This is fascism 101. By deciding that "Colombians" are the problem the government both assigns blame for its inability to control crime to the evil parasite class within and makes it look like they are taking action.
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Aug 26, 2015 16:04
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It seems obvious that who is a "Colombian" will be determined much like the Dominican Republic's government determined who was a "Haitian" last month -- if a government official wants your land, or hasn't met his quota of deportations yet, then suddenly you start looking very Haitian and of course everyone nods their heads like they have any idea what that means. This is how such things always are. Who is a "kulak" in 1930, who is a Jew in 1934? As many people as necessary for the logic of fascism to work itself through.
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Aug 26, 2015 17:54
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Regarde Aduck posted:This is all western governments. While it's true it's also very broad. The overton window of the globe moved right with the 2008 economic crash. Consider what major Western nation isn't a hotbed of traditionalism? And the great migrant crisis of 2015 means most of Europe is now ready to kill every brown person that looks at them funny. It's actually not true that "all western govermments" are demolishing the homes of ethnic minorities and imprisoning members of the opposition party but thanks for playing
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Aug 26, 2015 20:08
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The need to constantly find a new born group to demonize and persecute is a characteristic of totalitarianism, which I'm shorthanding as "fascism" because whether the economic characteristics of the Venezuelan regime are more like the USSR or Nazi Germany is the wrong question to be asking.
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Aug 26, 2015 20:35
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This is where Chavez's ideologically incoherent alliances with every anti-U.S. dictator on Earth pay off -- the U.N. is just a forum for third-world crackpots to vent conspiracy theories while the U.S. and Israel veto everything. Colombia isn't going to get in the door with either side.
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Sep 1, 2015 02:52
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Jack of Hearts posted:No sympathy or fondness for the Venezuelan government, but somehow even less for the Colombian political order, which is predicated on murdering those who dissent. Anyone trying to confuse the issue by equating Colombian economic refugees in Venezuela with "the Colombian political order" is, in fact, acting out of fondness for the Venezuelan government. I bet you cry all over your Z Magazine archive when you realize this poo poo isn't working anymore, not even on leftists.
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Sep 3, 2015 01:54
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Hugoon Chavez posted:edit: the biggest hypocrisy I keep seeing is whenever people accuse the media. If they're talking poo poo about Venezuela's government then obviously they are right winged puppets trying to brainwash the masses. Oh, but when Chavez closes a TV channel because it decided to interrupt his national address to show as people were being murdered in the streets while protesting him, well that's just peachy. Their explanation for this is that the murders were literally a CIA false flag operation, and that by showing news that a coup was going on the stations were active participants in the coup, and as for the part where the president punishes people for crimes by decree instead of them being charged and given a trial, well, they usually don't even bother addressing that portion of the issue. It's essentially 9/11 truther levels of conspiracy-upon-conspiracy and handwaving.
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Sep 3, 2015 17:04
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Yes, it's entirely about "gently caress YOU DAD" levels of anti-U.S. kneejerking. They will pick "oh snap" style rhetoric against Washington over actual policies every time. Chavez allied with Iran, which massacred leftists in the 80s -- the syndrome is shared by their idol.
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Sep 3, 2015 18:13
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Just stopping in to note the obvious fact that a country where anyone who appears able to defeat the ruling party in an election is suddenly put in prison on nonsense charges is not in fact a democracy, and anyone claiming Venezuela is a democracy is a propagandist for the regime. Challenging low-level ignorance is an important part of getting the facts out there, especially in English-language forums such as this one where people are not going to know anything about Venezuela unless they seek it out. American media coverage is extremely scanty and generally the product of lazy reporters regurgitating something they read elsewhere without any skepticism.
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Sep 4, 2015 22:36
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Of course, as soon as I brought that up, a NYTimes piece was published and went to the top of Google News: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2015/09/04/world/americas/ap-lt-venezuela-opposition-leader-.html Seems to at least get at some of the issues with the trial, though of course much more could be said. Also glosses over the real situation with shortages of essential goods -- a "recession" is what happened in the U.S. in 2009 when a lot of people lost their jobs, people who have jobs or access to government benefits not being able to eat because there is no food is something else entirely.
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Sep 4, 2015 23:07
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Adventure Pigeon posted:My understanding is that a lot of it was due to the nationalizations and replacing large numbers of professionals with people who had the correct political beliefs. Chavez fired half of the oil workers in 2003 to punish them for going on strike, which was an acceptable socialist move because something something CIA George Bush Noam Chomsky something. I'm guessing the replacements were not as qualified.
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Sep 7, 2015 20:29
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I think that people who have concern about civil liberties are seeing that leftist governments in Venezuela, Ecuador, Brazil, and Bolivia are much more inclined towards totalitarianism and less "democratic socialist" than the rosy-eyed propaganda of the mid-00s would have us believe. Similarly, the rule of law as opposed to the arbitrary dictates of the political class is important. How to pursue a particular economic policy without abandoning these tenets is for those who believe in that policy to figure out.
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Sep 10, 2015 04:23
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A PSUV gang showed up and murdered a Lopez supporter outside the courthouse: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2015/09/10/world/americas/ap-lt-venezuela-opposition-leader.html This is a total breakdown of civilization.
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Sep 10, 2015 23:14
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Chuck Boone posted:In that video, what's most shocking to me is what the man is yelling through the loudspeaker: " "Out with the fascists! Out with the traitors! Out with those who sympathize with imperialism! This is Chavista territory, it is peaceful territory! We will not allow you to try to destabilize [inaudible] with your violent actions!" The pro-government crowd was literally beating people with sticks, and we are peaceful, and this is a peaceful territory, and we will not tolerate your violent actions here. Stop resisting! Stop resisting! Venezuela is a hundred Fergusons a year, with leftists actually supporting the police. Unbelievable.
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Sep 11, 2015 02:33
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Chuck Boone posted:It's also really interesting that Leopoldo and the students are probably about to be sentenced to prison for allegedly calling for a demonstration that led to deaths hours after PSUV superstar Jacqueline Faria called for a demonstration that led to a death. It's the same logic as the dipshit Salon readers in this thread -- when we murder you it's just good policy, if you fight back it's a death squad. Kill Maduro and the entire cabinet and mount their heads on a pole outside Miraflores.
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Sep 11, 2015 02:40
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It's true that open warfare is not something to be instituted lightly. At the same time, we are 17 years into a government that has worked tirelessly to eliminate all possibilities for peaceful change, from rigging elections to imprisoning dissidents to destroying civil society organizations. I think that the opposition should do two things: 1) Commit to targeted assassinations of legitimate targets (high-ranking PSUV figures) and forswear any and all violence against civilians or ordinary voters. 2) Allow for one last chance for change, the December elections. PSUV is currently polling 18%. There is no way they can win a legitimate election. They should be given one final chance to relinquish power to the democratic majority in a peaceful way (or rather, their rank and file supporters should be given one last chance to pressure Maduro and Cabello to do so, since the leaders will fight until the last man rather than give up power on their own). If the December elections end with a mysterious tripling of PSUV support from the exit polls to the official results, then a militant resistance -- incorporating everyone from the democratic socialists to the conservatives and with a firm commitment to restoring constitutional democracy as soon as possible -- must be formed.
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Sep 11, 2015 02:48
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themrguy posted:Fox and friends will do literally, exactly that. Direct cash aid to the poor is far superior to government controlling grocery distribution, though, for a lot of reasons including exactly what we saw in Venezuela -- it's too complex to centrally plan and it becomes a political cudgel. Any government that wants so much power as to determine which shops get shipments of peppers this week is the same kind that is going to decide which opinions put you in prison. People have been saying since 1998 that you can look to Norway or Canada or even the $74 billion the U.S. spends on SNAP benefits as a far superior way to help the worst-off. It's just not necessary to implement Soviet-style totalitarianism to "help the poor" and the Chavista rallying cry has always been "nuh uh it is." And, now we have it -- would you rather live in Venezuela or a democratic socialist country in Europe?
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Sep 11, 2015 08:22
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NLJP posted:I'm not sure saying pol pot, Stalin and Mao would straight up have him 'taken care' of for his views is the slam dunk argument you're looking for here. This doesn't mean he's not an idiot but come on dude. Every American campus slacktivist thinks he would be a commissar or official anime appraiser after the revolution. They don't realize that they would be shot for being bourgeois decadent intellectuals after refusing to report to the coal mines. Anything that throws some reality at the people cheering on Venezuela's suffering from afar in between their 12-hour Xbox Live sessions is good. This is the new Latin American colonalism -- instead of being dehumanized into a continent of banana exporters by the American military, they are now dehumanized into a continent of leftist rhetoric exporters by the American Tumblr class. It's still the same "you must all suffer in perpetuity for my enjoyment" attitude.
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Sep 11, 2015 11:45
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Phlegmish posted:The region is under effective control of Guyana, right? Is there anything Venezuela could realistically do to press its claim? I imagine that if they tried to invade, there would be a strong international reaction. The international community can't even do anything about Russia annexing a European country. No one is going to do anything about a border dispute between two unimportant Latin American countries. Maduro may eventually realize that if he wants to retire to a villa in Nice with his billions of looted Swiss bank account dollars, the perfect pretext will be a negotiated end to a U.S. intervention. Then we can get another 100 years of Allende-type apologism claiming everything was going great until the CIA interfered, too. But I honestly don't know what he could possibly do to provoke anyone outside South America giving a poo poo other than launch some sort of terrorist attack on the U.S. There just isn't anything that PSUV can do to the Venezuelan people, or Colombia or Guyana, that matters to the first-tier world powers.
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Sep 23, 2015 20:22
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Nintendo Kid posted:If Venezuela threatened to develop nuclear weapons, the US could unilaterally impose crippling sanctions by refusing to ship refined Venezuelan oil back to them. U.S. oil refineries are privately owned, so this would be moving heaven and Earth to make happen, especially since Kerry has signaled a "warming of relations" with Venezuela and no one in U.S. politics right now has made Maduro's behavior an issue even a little bit. It would have to ramp up from someone who matters saying this is our problem, all the way to authorization of shutting down an industry. It's still more likely than a military intervention, though.
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Sep 24, 2015 15:08
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I'm saying that we don't remember that Allende had already destroyed human rights, civil society, and the economy in Chile, precisely because of what came after and how much longer-lasting and worse it was. Creating a situation where a left-wing government allows no opposition but armed revolution will eventually lead to armed right-wing revolution. Pinochet was one of the best things that ever happened to U.S. armchair Marxists, because he is why the failures of Allende don't get discussed. It's in the interests of everyone who doesn't want to see Venezuela turned into a battleground between violent left- and right- wing factions to work to restore democracy and civil liberties in Venezuela. There is only one outcome for a totalitarian society.
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Sep 24, 2015 21:10
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López had an op-ed published in the NYT today. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/25/opinion/even-in-jail-i-will-fight-for-a-free-venezuela.html?smid=tw-share There's been a noticeable uptick in American mainstream media coverage of Venezuela over the last few weeks, to a level not seen since at least the 2013 presidential election. I'm not sure why.
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Sep 25, 2015 17:56
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An interesting data point: an NPR article about another topic entirely refers to Venezuela as an "authoritarian country" simply in passing, as an established fact even among the left-leaning NPR audience. http://www.npr.org/2015/10/05/445989338/univisions-jorge-ramos-discusses-journalism-and-that-donald-trump-press-conferen
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Oct 7, 2015 10:07
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-Troika- posted:Does anyone seriously believe that the PSUV will in any way allow a fair election? Any canidate that might pose a serious threat will be barred from running, and if anyone looks like they'll win anyways they'll be arrested on trumped up charges, or the PSUV will blatantly steal the election. I don't think anyone but the most delusional diehards (Salon and leftwards) thinks the elections can be legitimate given what's happened already. Viable opposition candidates are imprisoned or disqualified and armed paramilitaries intimidate voters at the stations. We could parse out the sort of gentle fudging that is inherent in making voting stations much more accessible in pro-government areas, or wonder about who controls the tabulation machines, but why bother? What we already know is more than enough to say that Venezuela is no longer a democracy.
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Oct 8, 2015 19:02
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Communism isn't about helping the poor any more than fascism is about helping the nation. It's just a veneer over wanting to dominate and kill people for psychological reasons. Venezuela's government and especially Venezuela's foreign supporters are the best demonstration of that fact.
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Oct 13, 2015 13:24
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They actually enjoy the fact that Venezuela's government is more interested in trolling the U.S. State Department than keeping the country from burning down -- the whole point is gently caress-you-dadism. Some European social democracy just quietly running a functional welfare state doesn't let them take their SHOCKING AND EXTREME "it's actually good when left-wing governments imprison political dissidents" troll positions. To them, other countries exist solely to feed their Internet personas.
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Oct 13, 2015 14:51
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lemonslol posted:Do the baseball teams get paid in U.S dollars? I was watching the leones play, and they have U.S players on their teams. Does anyone know how much they are making? I can't speak to the Venezuelan side, but here's some baseball info from an American fan: The Venezeulan and Dominican winter leagues are the two most prestigious. Anyone active on an MLB roster probably is playing winter ball more to stay in shape and competitive for a roster spot than for the money. Conversely, people in the minors don't make very much and will feel the pain if they are paid in worthless currency. This year, there were 63 Venezuelan-born players active in MLB throughout the season, and 139 total Venezuelans with Major League experience active at some level of professional baseball in North America. For both figures, Venezuela is the second-most common place of birth for players after the U.S. For better or for worse, baseball players are the most visible cultural export of Venezuela to the U.S. As the situation continues to deteriorate, you will probably see more of them apply for U.S. citizenship, and possibly complications in moving players in and out of the country. It will get sports fans to take notice, at least.
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Oct 13, 2015 21:56
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In addition to its many other horrors, the Chavez regime is nakedly anti-Semitic and is driving Jews out of the country: http://www.aish.com/jw/s/The-Jews-of-Venezuela.html I don't know if that has anything to do with the reason "Israel" made it onto the word salad list of Bad Things. To a certain kind of low-info leftist, words like "Zionist" are just invectives to use for any bad thing -- he could have just as easily accused the opposition of being controlled by Monsanto or rape culture or any other word from the list of "new ways to say Bad Thing."
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Oct 18, 2015 21:49
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NLJP posted:He said Israel not Jews. He's still laughable but come on, let's not do the whole 'any criticism of israel is racist (i.e anti-semitic)' thing here. 1) Invoking the mysterious Israel/Zionist boogeyman as being behind world events that in actuality have nothing to do with Israel, such as the destruction of Venezuela's society by the PSUV, is often an extension of anti-Semitic conspiracy theory thinking. 2) The Chavez-sponsored mob that painted swastikas on the ruins of the synagogue they looted was not "criticizing Israel." Handwaving the actual persecution of Jews as "criticism of Israel" is in fact anti-Semitic. Anti-Semitism is a real problem in Venezuela today. Many minorities (Jews, Colombians, homosexuals, non-socialists) have found themselves scapegoated in turn by the authoritarian regime of Venezuela, as is the nature of authoritarian regimes. The point is not whether "criticism of Israel" is valid, the point is why Israel is being discussed in the context of Venezuela at all. The answer is because the hardline leftists defending Venezuela have no reasonable argument and are just throwing out an incoherent list of Bad Things that they think people with left-leaning sympathies in general might latch on to.
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Oct 18, 2015 22:55
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Chuck Boone posted:. In Venezuela, there is no opposition: only counter-revolution This is what I've been saying in this thread -- when the government makes such statements as the above, violence is inevitable. They have no one but themselves to blame when they prohibit the concept of peaceful/democratic opposition itself. Laphroaig posted:Chavez's legacy is successfully raising the living standards of many of the very poorest in the country. However, that rise has come at many real costs to the fabric of Venezuelan society - crime, corruption, cronyism, the destruction of industry and enterprise, etc. These are both inseparable parts of the history of the PSUV. For what it's worth, Venezuela currently ranks last, or ahead of only Haiti and El Salvador, on every quality of life metric for Western Hemisphere countries. Chavez came to office at a time when worldwide standards of living were about to skyrocket, and essentially held Venezuela back from fully participating in a global trend. If Venezuela had improved since 1998 as much as Peru, Colombia, Panama, etc the situation would be far better. The fact that it was almost impossible not to have your life get better from 1998-2008 and the oil boom disguised how harmful Chavismo really was. Now we're seeing it.
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Oct 19, 2015 16:51
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Chuck Boone posted:My grandmother doesn't usually tell us how bad things are down there, but I know from keeping up with this on a daily basis that she must be really struggling. Sometimes I get really emotional when I see videos of people lining up for hours or fighting for scraps at supermarkets and I think about my grandmother having to do that. Remember -- this is the way communists think your grandmother ought to live. If you disagree you are a racist who should be imprisoned.
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Oct 21, 2015 16:04
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Phlegmish posted:It's the first time I've seen that. You know a poll is biased, you publish it anyway, and then you mention that the poll is biased. At least they're honest about their dishonesty. This poll is all Jimmy Carter will need to certify the fairness of PSUV's 68 to 32 percent victory in the December elections.
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Oct 26, 2015 20:14
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JohnGalt posted:So how bad is the impending humanitarian crisis going to be if the government cannot import food? The evil capitalist U.S. will give them food, just like we kept the Soviet population from starving for decades. There won't be mass starvation but hopefully there will be a popular uprising resulting in the death of all communists.
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Nov 2, 2015 02:52
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Nckdictator posted:Today I learned Danny Glover eagerly supports the Maduro government. It's a small thing, but disappointing. Venezuela exists for the sake of millionaire leftists in English-speaking countries to preach the virtues of a regime they would never choose to live under themselves.
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Nov 6, 2015 13:50
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Given that Venezuela is an authoritarian narcostate in league with terrorists and every dictatorship on the planet, I sure hope that the Obama administration is doing everything it can to gather intelligence on its state institutions and protect the free world from its influence. I am glad to see these reports of the U.S. government doing exactly what it ought to be doing. The sort of birther conspiracy theorists who expect otherwise will be sorely disappointed.
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Nov 20, 2015 22:31
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I can't believe the guy is actually telling people who can't buy basic proteins or toilet paper that they might not have enough computers if they don't stay the course. This sort of out of touch canned rhetoric can only make people angrier at the regime.
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Nov 25, 2015 02:55
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Azran posted:My university's student council's newspaper mentioned yesterday's attack as a false flag operation by the unified right. "No matter what, the revolution must keep going; otherwise Venezuela would be back to colonial times under an unpatriotic government" This is what leftists in Western countries were like during the height of the Soviet period -- there are no purges, there is no gulag, any day now my band of English grad students will rule this excuse for a society, etc.
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Nov 27, 2015 05:15
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El Hefe posted:The current government will never leave power peacefully because they know the minute the opposition gains power they are all going to be tried for all their human rights violations, drug trafficking and blatant corruption. Execute the PSUV inner circle & force every socialist who has posted in a Venezuela thread in D&D since 1998 to watch, IMO.
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Nov 27, 2015 05:16
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