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It’s official: Venezuela is a dictatorship

washingtonpost.com

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Re: It’s official: Venezuela is a dictatorship

#61

Post by ced »

tptacek wrote: post #33
narrator wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now you guys get to see what Chile would have turned into if it hadn't been for a certain general. Maybe after 50 years of poverty, famine and secret police your country will get back to where it started.

You're being vague here, so I can't be sure what you're implying, but if you're suggesting that Pinochet was a positive thing for Chile, that's a nightmarish thing for anyone to sign their name to. What am I missing?

I've met some reasonable, leftist-leaning people who lived through the coup, and who told me that "Something had to be done" because the country was in a state of crisis. Of course, the crisis was manufactured, Pinochet committed crimes against humanity, etc. etc.

Pinochet won a referendum in 1980 to stay in power. It may have been manipulated, but judging by the number of people I've met longing for the days of Pinochet, I wouldn't be surprised if he had a true majority supporting him. People told me variants of "He kept the trains running on time".

Re: It’s official: Venezuela is a dictatorship

#63

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

RandyRanderson wrote: post #46

I wonder which has the higher correlation to instability: 1 formOfGovernmentX - ie democracy, socialism, dictatorship, etc 2 On america's shit list ?

Someone(s) down-voted you, but I think you have a point.

In 10 years we'll probably find out that the CIA orchestrated this whole fiasco. I mean, that's pretty much the story of, like, every thing that ever goes wrong in every country. Or near enough. I don't mean to sound hyperbolic, but yeah c'mon.

Re: It’s official: Venezuela is a dictatorship

#64

Post by MichailP »

MichailP wrote: post #21

Totally unrelated rant follows. I wonder how a world without main stream media would look like... Would it be a better place? So much negativity, hidden agenda, pay for play, etc. is present, that one would probably be better off staying uninformed, than reading articles with God knows what agenda.

What triggered the downvotes? Pay for play phrase? It is popular these days...

Re: It’s official: Venezuela is a dictatorship

#65

Post by andrenth »

tptacek wrote: post #33
narrator wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now you guys get to see what Chile would have turned into if it hadn't been for a certain general. Maybe after 50 years of poverty, famine and secret police your country will get back to where it started.

You're being vague here, so I can't be sure what you're implying, but if you're suggesting that Pinochet was a positive thing for Chile, that's a nightmarish thing for anyone to sign their name to. What am I missing?

You're missing the alternative, which is what Allende was implementing in Chile: expropriation of private property (both farm and industry), hyperinflation, severe devaluation of currency, release of convicted guerrilla terrorists... the list goes on. In other words, what happened in Venezuela.

Re: It’s official: Venezuela is a dictatorship

#66

Post by jimmywanger »

tptacek wrote: post #50
jimmywanger wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a fundamental discord between property rights and democracy. See https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FC0ZB2/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?... . It speaks a lot about market dominant ethnic minorities. The Chinese and the Jews are the target of a lot of these attacks. If you're filipino, and ethnic filipino, it's easy for a populist government to incite economic confiscation and persecution of the ethnic group that tends…

There's also an even clearer historical tension between property rights and right-wing authoritarian dictatorships, so I'm not sure how much we can learn from your observation.

> There's also an even clearer historical tension between property rights and right-wing authoritarian dictatorships

This is true. However right-wing authoritarian dictatorships aren't usually ideologically driven, and don't pretend that what they're doing is just "for the good of the people".

Most left wing ideological governments usually go down the bitter road to the end, and do things for political rather than financial purposes. They usually end in either a referendum or revolt when all the money goes away and there are no other exits. That's what Venezuela is doing right now.

And it's also quite interesting that your response is "Oh yeah? Well the right wing does it too." What's your point?

Maybe it does, and they should be strung up by the thumbs as well. We're talking about left-wing governments who believe in central control of methods of production.

Re: It’s official: Venezuela is a dictatorship

#67

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

0xcde4c3db wrote: post #12

As is too often the case, the "it's official" in the headline really means "it's not actually official, but this makes the headline more provocative". The article goes on to describe the remaining fig leaf of a supposedly independent judiciary.

Aren't most dictatorships usually called "The Peoples Democratic Something or Other". I mean, does any dictatorship say "Constitutional Dictatorship" on their official letter-head.

Like, North Korea even calls itself "Democratic People's Republic of Korea".

Re: It’s official: Venezuela is a dictatorship

#68

Post by asimuvPR »

robk wrote: post #19
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #5

Venezuela'a foreign exchange reserves stand at less than $12 billion [1]. They pay over 15% of that this month to bond holders [2]. This makes no sense until one considers that the bond holders might be regime insiders. Venezuela is a state structured to maximise the transfer of wealth from the many to the few. Shockingly, as recently as 2004 Venezuela boasted fair elections [3]. The degree to which Venezuelans are t…

When a democracy transitions to a dictatorship in a decade how do you not hood the electorate responsible? They made the choices continually to allow this.

Thats a frequent opinion that sounds sensible. But when you put some thought into it, you realize that a lot of the electorate are poor uneducated people who did not know better.

Re: It’s official: Venezuela is a dictatorship

#69

Post by DominikR »

robotresearcher wrote: post #57
DominikR wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The United States was an extremely wealthy country with exceptional freedom up until the Great Depression. And this was only a short episode in US history.

Sure. The US had been rich since about 1850, and was broke like everyone else for a short time in the 1930s. But the grandparent said this kind of disaster is 'only possible with socialism', which the Great Depression proves is not true by counterexample.

The big difference here is that in Capitalism you have boom and bust cycles where on average people still get more wealthy over time while in Socialism you'll always and without exception end up in abject poverty - and what's even worse than poverty - an authoritarian government that will attempt to control and regulate every aspect of its citizens lives including persecution of wrong thoughts.

Re: It’s official: Venezuela is a dictatorship

#70

Post by topspin »

tptacek wrote: post #39
jimmywanger wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Difference is, right wing governments seem to recover much more easily than left wing ones. Chile, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, they all had people who got "disappeared" but all their citizens are currently fed, which means it's fairly possible to switch out of that mindset somehow. The only left wing country I can think of that led its economy to recovery is China. Other than that, Venezuela, DPRK, Argentina, and…

This is just sophistry. The true problem with the parent comment is not that it's unaware of the right wing's role in political violence, but that it's seizing on a word ("socialism") that it doesn't bother to define --- and the word means different things in practically every place it's used.

"and the word means different things in practically every place it's used"

It was once used enthusiastically by the Great and the Good to describe Venezuela. Venezuelan leaders still use it freely to describe their policy.

Recently though, the intelligentsia has become reluctant to attribute Venezuela as Socialist, leaving the matter conspicuously ambiguous with much discussion of oil prices mumble mumble. Thankfully our thought leaders have come to the rescue and solved this problem by declaring Venezuela a Dictatorship, so we no longer need to step around the precious S word.

Whew.

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