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Part of the argument about the US (and aligned nations/interests) contributing to Venezuela's situation is not related to sanctions, but rather to the Saudis deliberating causing oil prices to drop, which hurts nations like Iran or Venezuela that the US has an antagonistic relationship with. This also has a direct connection to food shortages, for obvious reasons (relying heavily on food imports funded by oil revenues). Obviously this can be at least partially chalked up to allowing such a vulnerability to exist in the first place (through reliance on oil revenue), but there's still a meaningful difference between a country making the mistake of leaving itself vulnerable to such price manipulation and some sort of completely self-caused problem. And when people bring up the flaw of relying heavily on oil revenue, it kind of begs the question of what the alternative should have been. Seeking revenue through attracting outside investment is very much a poison pill that doesn't exactly lead to good outcomes most of the time for a country like Venezuela. themrguy posted:I just have friends there and the ‘heh, let me tell you how it really is, sheeple” dipshits are annoying enough as it is. If I was actually from Venezula or had family there I’d be loving furious at their arrogant asses. If US leftists are even on the radar of things that come to mind when you think of "causes of bad foreign policy," you have a pretty distorted perception of reality. One useful thought exercise might be to try and articulate what the actual outcome is that you're concerned about occurring as a result of the "US leftists" in question. What good thing do you want to happen that they might stop from happening? Or what bad thing do you think might happen because of them? Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 06:59 on Jan 24, 2019 |
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Jan 24, 2019 06:55
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GoLambo posted:At the very least it's extremely easy to imagine Libya Two Electric Boogaloo. Yeah, this is what I consider the most realistic scenario that is somewhat plausible, though I imagine things wouldn't quite reach Libya levels of badness (it'd probably "just" devolve into your typical "developing nation being ruthlessly exploited by private Western corporations" situation, after the initial loss of life from bombings, etc).
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Feb 8, 2019 00:35
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Jose posted:What the gently caress is wrong with your brain lmao It's easy to understand, even if it's obviously wrong. The logic is basically "anti-American people who are also dumb exist; ergo everyone with anti-imperialist opinions who I disagree with is the same as those people (since this allows their opinions to be easily dismissed)."
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Feb 15, 2019 21:51
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Typo posted:Exactly it's like Trump appointing Gorsuch/Kavanugh to SCOTUS, under rule of law if they were to rule arrest of opposition politicians legal than it is legal and constitutional, too bad liberals can't follow their own logic about so-called independent judiciary! The legal arguments all exist just to avoid actually having to argue why they think the opposition would be better than Maduro and fix the nation's problems. In reality you could use the same logic to justify regime change in virtually any country, since you'll always be able to find corruption/illegal behavior. Another country could argue for promoting regime change in the US on the basis of Trump's actions, for example. And the Maduro government is actually not exactly high on the list of countries guilty of varying degrees of corruption/atrocities. The only reasonable argument for anyone to make supporting removing Maduro from power in favor of the opposition would involve explaining why they believe Guaido/the opposition would be better and fix the country's problems. Unfortunately, Guaido is bad, so it's difficult to make this argument. The only real plausible argument that Guaido being in power would improve Venezuela's situation is "if he isn't in power the US will further sanction the country, killing/harming countless more people" (though "he's better because the US is metaphorically holding the country at gunpoint" doesn't exactly sound good as an argument). Because if you ignore that, the rest of the situation is very predictable - Guaido will just allow US/foreign interests to profit from Venezuelan resources, and things would likely improve for the upper/upper-middle classes and became significantly worse for the poor as social programs are dismantled. As has happened in other countries with pro-Western governments. The kind of depressing thing is that even if this happens, we'll likely still receive a narrative implying that things are much better, since the sort of English-speaking voices we'll hear in the US are the kind of people who actually would benefit from the kind of policy folks like Guaido support - people with enough money to afford the goods/services that would become more available without price controls (and who never needed the government services implemented under Chavez to begin with).
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Mar 11, 2019 22:01
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Gervasius posted:e: too personal. sorry It's strange to see posts like this that use logic that explicitly could be used to support literally every single harmful regime change that has ever occurred. It turns out that if your standards for supporting regime change are "the current leader is corrupt" you can conveniently argue in favor of regime change for pretty much every single country on the planet. I'm sure you would argue "but things are literally as bad as they can possibly be!" but there is no actual reliable evidence this is the case* (and the fact that violence against the government - and from the government - has been as comparatively low as it has implies that it isn't literally a "people starving to death en masse" situation). It is actually entirely possibly for things to be considerably worse. Like along the lines of actual death squads, etc. Maduro's government is pretty far from as bad as an "authoritarian regime" can get. In the case of Guaido specifically, the guy would end up supporting austerity measures and policies that "open the country to foreign investment." That is why he has the support of the US; it is pretty much always what US-supported leaders do. In other words he'd just make it easier for foreign corporations to siphon wealth from the country in the same way they do the rest of the global south. It should raise a red flag that Guaido offers no actual solutions to the issues that lead to Venezuela's current crisis, and "Maduro and other government officials stealing money" is really drat low on the list of those issues. The only thing that could even potentially be considered a sorta-solution is eliminating price controls, and that wouldn't help the poor. The one thing that is absolutely indefensible, regardless of one's feelings about opposition groups, is support for foreign intervention, including sanctions. If you want the Venezuelan opposition to succeed, fine - but the US (and other nations) should have no part in it. * I think this is probably the biggest thing that makes communication on this topic impossible. There is no source of information about the broader situation that isn't propaganda, but one side of this argument is basically taking US and opposition propaganda at face value, and there's not really much anyone can do if that's the case (since they're basically operating in a different reality). The extent to our knowledge of the situation is basically "things are some degree of bad" and information about what individual protests and violence end up occurring (which is really comparatively little, at least given the "people starving to death in the streets and drinking sewage en masse" narrative). But broader statistics and what have you are not reliable, and I think this is difficult for many people who are used to reliable (or at least semi-reliable) information always being one Google search away to comprehend. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 07:51 on Apr 20, 2019 |
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Apr 20, 2019 07:49
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Corky Romanovsky posted:Sounds like we really don't have good data on CLAP and it is worthless to speculate on the program itself. Similar with claims of mismanagement, particularly without acknowledging the circumstances, both external and internal. This isn't some dril tweet where maduro is pulling levers for "economy", "agriculture", etc. Yeah - also, most of the sort of corruption people mention the Maduro government being guilty of is not particularly unusual for global south nations, and generally represents a tiny fraction of wealth lost for the people in those nations. Acting like it's relevant to severity of the crisis is pretty much nonsense; it's just brought up to try and sell a narrative of "Maduro directly causing his people to starve" (because the "directly causing" part is necessary to their argument that replacing him with anyone can only be an improvement, even if the person in question is someone like Guaido). Similarly, people repeatedly talk about "gross mismanagement," carrying the implication that some hypothetical "competent" government would have averted the current situation (largely because this implication is necessary to their argument, since they need to argue that Maduro needs to go but don't have any real solutions to offer themselves). But it's hard to really get much specifics on this from the people arguing this point. The closest thing is probably blaming price controls, and while that may have some truth to it it's not like removing price controls by itself would be much of a solution. And I'm very hesitant to blindly trust this sort of point, since it's difficult to quantify the net impact of the US exacerbating the situation (both directly and indirectly, through making Venezuela more of a pariah state through its hostility towards it, though I wouldn't be surprised at all to learn years later that the US actually did more that we're aware of right now). So while it's not possible to lay significant blame for the status quo at the feet of the US, it's also not possible to articulate a clear argument of how the Maduro administration directly caused it (and a replacement would fix it).
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May 24, 2019 02:49
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Squalid posted:I don’t understand the purpose of that argument, since I don’t know if anybody actually believes corruption as defined by that UN agency is a larger volume of illicit cash flows than tax evasion or w/e the gently caress. It's repeatedly brought up with the implication that it is the cause of the plight of poorer countries (like in this case Venezuela). It also limits the definition of an inherently broad term ("corruption") to things that, conveniently, aren't common in nations like the US (even if net unethical wealth extraction is at least as high in total). In the process it enables the government (or NGOs or whatever)to easily form arguments about how (insert county)'s leadership needs to be replaced because they're so corrupt and causing their country's plight through their corruption. AFancyQuestionMark posted:I have a hard time believing that the majority of the wealth funneled through tax havens originated in impoverished countries. This is aside from the fact that any tax evasion scheme on such a massive scale has to be directly or indirectly aided by government officials at some level, which would make this a clear and particularly striking example of government corruption. The podcast people were referencing earlier explains all of this in detail. This article also discusses it: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2017/jan/14/aid-in-reverse-how-poor-countries-develop-rich-countries Basically the main culprit is the World Trade Organization (and obviously the governments of powerful countries like the US, who push for these policies), which requires customs officials to accept invoiced prices at face value (so even if they see something that is clearly "off" they can't do anything about it).
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May 25, 2019 02:24
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BigFactory posted:There were 4 million Afghanis in school in 2002, all boys. Today there are 8 million Afghanis in school and half of them are girls. The taliban was pretty terrible. The point is that merely asserting that something is bad in a country is not in any way an argument in favor of either military intervention or sanctions.
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Aug 24, 2019 02:33
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Giggle Goose posted:It is a serious question to a serious problem. Without international pressure, what pathway do you see that would lead towards the restoration of Venezuelan democracy? When it comes to the global south, the US (and the West in general) are not good, well-meaning actors. It is quite literally no different than wanting Russia to intervene and pressure Venezuela (and one could pretty easily make the argument that it's actually worse, given the US's own history). The US (and literally every other powerful/wealthy nation) are not good guys with positive intentions towards Venezuela or any other country in the global south. There is no "good country with Venezuela's best interests at heart" that even exists to do this hypothetical benevolent intervention. Also, you can construct this same argument about virtually every poorer country on the planet, most of which have considerably worse records regarding democratic processes than Venezuela. Pointing out bad things about a country is not, and never has been, a justification for foreign intervention replacing a country's government/leadership. And perhaps most importantly, Venezuelans don't want the US to intervene and replace the government. Disapproval towards Maduro is not synonymous with wanting him to be replaced by foreign countries. Venomous posted:Statements that everyone itt can unequivocally agree with: Mostly, except for most of #1. "Is starving his people" implies that the starving is some active process that he could just stop doing, and Venezuela is not particularly remarkable in terms of antidemocratic behavior. Maduro did not come to power and then steal all the food, or whatever language like that seems to imply. There is a huge difference between "not solving an economic problem that results in starvation" and "directly causing starvation" (namely that the former means that any given replacement isn't preferable unless they actually have a solution to the problem, while the latter implies that almost anyone would be better by default). It's not surprising that language like this is used, though; the idea that Maduro/the PSUV are stealing all the food and directly causing people to starve is kinda necessary to justify any sort of foreign intervention. A realistic evaluation of the situation would require alternatives to provide their own solutions that would help the Venezuelan people. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 18:03 on Aug 28, 2019 |
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Aug 28, 2019 17:54
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fnox posted:It gets way more offensive when you see the same people being completely unwilling to talk about the military’s horrendous and racist treatment of indigenous peoples, including massacres like the one at Santa Elena de Uairen. Tons of border communities, which unsurprisingly are mostly comprised of indigenous tribes, have been forcibly relocated by the military, sometimes having entire villages put into military control. None of these things are justification for US sanctions or military intervention, and Venezuela has rational cause to be suspicious of US-sourced aid. While I actually sympathize somewhat with the desire to "do something," the US is not in a position to be a reliable source of aid. It is a hostile actor as far as most of the global south is concerned. The only thing the US could reasonably do to improve the situation is to maybe offer material aid through a trustworthy third party or no-strings-attached financial aid, but the US will not have leadership acting in good faith at any point in the foreseeable future (unless Bernie Sanders is elected president, I suppose, though even then the government would still probably be filled with the sort of people who are hostile towards the interests of the global south). Basically, if aid is to be desired from anyone, the US does not make sense as the place to seek it. Sometimes there are no obvious answers. There probably isn't a way to remove Maduro with the aid of external forces (either economic or military) that wouldn't just cause more harm. And anyone who really cares about the country and its people should be focusing their efforts on opposing sanctions and military intervention (which the majority of Venezuelans actually living in Venezuela also oppose), instead of getting angry at the minority of people on the left who oppose those things. Anyone who is more annoyed with the left than they are the mainstream Democratic and Republican politicians and organizations who support economic/military intervention needs to take a step back and think long and hard about their motivations and priorities.
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Aug 30, 2019 05:22
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