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Fidel Castro has died

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Re: Fidel Castro has died

#691

Post by sspiff »

marknutter wrote: post #684
andrepd wrote: post #656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obama didn't murder thousands? Yet I hear good things about him. FDR? Any US president basically? The people responsible for staging coups abroad to replace democratically elected leaders, install sympathetic dictators and overall fuck up life in a region for 50 years? Yet I hear good things about them too. Why can't the same be applied to Fidel? He committed atrocities and he did good for the country. And indeed muc…

FDR and Obama murdered thousands of their own citizens? Jeeze, I need to brush up on my history...

Which nation a person belongs to does not decide his or her worth.

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#692

Post by ommunist »

varjag wrote: post #654
IslaDeEncanta wrote: post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you know that if you try to overthrow the government of the United States you'll be arrested? Crazy stuff.

Did you know that people can overthrow the government of the United States every 4 years? They actually did a couple weeks ago, and noone had to die or go to prison.

They cannot. The US is not a direct democracy Swiss style

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#693

Post by School-Cotton »

berntb wrote: post #561
School-Cotton wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument doesn't prove violence is cultural. Maybe Scandinavia is peaceful now because most of the people with violent genes left. You're descended from the guys who stayed, not from the ones who left to colonize Iceland, Greenland, Britain, Normandy, etc.

You really think it became peaceful ca 1100? :-) Please read some history. It was no better, it was just not internationally infamous clan societies for a while. Then we had violent national states (check e.g. Polish deluge or the 30 year war).

Fair point :). I guess I need to learn more about Scandinavian history. Any books you can recommend?

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#694

Post by raverbashing »

kuschku wrote: post #634
raverbashing wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is naive As even you said, Cuba was not supposed to have Windows copies, but I'm sure they had Iran theoretically couldn't have access to Boeing parts (and this was a stricter embargo), but they had There's always a way of solving things. Most of Cuban problems were caused by themselves, not the embargo.

> There's always a way of solving things. Except, not really. You can’t put any app using any encryption technology up on the Google Play Store or the iOS App Store, if you also distribute anything to Cuba. For the first you need to get an approval from the US DoD, which requires that you never interact with Cuba.

Yes, but you don't sell it directly to Cuba, you sell it to $COUNTRY which might eventually sell it to Cuba (and you don't even know about it)

It's not you selling to Cuba, it's Cuba buying through intermediates.

(Of course if you really want you can sell things directly to Cuba, but you need to find a way of disguising it)

You're (or, were) also forbidden from bringing Cuban cigars to the US, but if you arrive from a flight from Panama with a box of unmarked cigars nobody is going to do anything.

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#695

Post by ommunist »

MarkMc wrote: post #539
Lordarminius wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its too late to edit my prior post so I'll just stick these Castro quotes in here: " They talk about the failure of socialism, but where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia and Latin America?" " ...I began a revolution with 82 men. If I had to do it again, I do it with 10 or 15 and absolute faith. It does not matter how small you are if you have faith and a plan of action." Fidel Castro 1926 - 2016

> ... where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia and Latin America? When Castro asked that question in 1991, around 60% of people in East Asia were living in extreme poverty. Today it is 3.5% [1]. The change is mostly due to China switching from a socialist to capitalist economy. [1] http://www.vox.com/world/2016/10/2/13123980/extreme-poverty-...

Funny diagram in your source. They compare 1990 dollar with 2013 dollar directly without reference to purchasing power, adjusted to local market indexes. Classy example of propaganda. But you know, people over here generally can understand what they read.

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#696

Post by ommunist »

GunboatDiplomat wrote: post #420
Lordarminius wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its too late to edit my prior post so I'll just stick these Castro quotes in here: " They talk about the failure of socialism, but where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia and Latin America?" " ...I began a revolution with 82 men. If I had to do it again, I do it with 10 or 15 and absolute faith. It does not matter how small you are if you have faith and a plan of action." Fidel Castro 1926 - 2016

Where is the success of capitalism? It's in the rapidly falling global extreme poverty rate, soon to be below 10% for the first time in human history. It's in the cell phone networks blanketing Africa and Asia, giving people access to easy communication and banking. It's in the rapidly rising standards of living throughout Asia and Africa and parts of Latin America not under the communist thumb. Capitalism is the gre…

You should've seen socialism in 1952. That force was far greater than any capitalism today. And it will return.

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#697

Post by uf »

burke wrote: post #590
uf wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 'benevolent dictator' is a nice oxymoron, but that's it. For a good and stable dictatorship you really want to control all three powers. What good is a dictator if I can sue him and his clique? What does 'genuine good intentions' even mean? Whose intentions? His, yours? Mine, or the ones from the guy next door? Who decides what good intentions are?

So you're saying it's a logical impossibility for a dictator to act in the best interest of the people? Does some switch flip where all of a sudden they have no free will? Don't get me wrong, I think the circumstances that lead to a dictator becoming a dictator make it very unlikely, but to call it impossible just seems crazy to me.

Can we agree, that there's no one 'best interest for the people'? That there's a multitude of different opinions and interests that may be good to some and bad for others, that can be 'good' and still mutually exclusive?

I assume the benevolent dictator would be someone, who allows different opinion, and who allows his policy to be changed by his people. And if they want to be governed by someone else, he would step down, have his own power limited or stripped. That wouldn't be a dictator then.

And you'd still have to deal with his administration which has it's own momentum. The 'benevolent dictator' could simply be replaced (killed) by his own clique with someone more in line with their interests.

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#698

Post by iiiggglll »

csomar wrote: post #324
iiiggglll wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He believed in freedom > I detest the hypocrisy I see in many (not all) western commentators. A counterexample: this photo was taken in NYC after the most recent US presidential election: http://i.imgur.com/DcVbqAm.jpg It's a picture of someone standing in front of Trump Tower holding a sign that says "You're not my president. Fuck you." Can you imagine someone getting away with that in Castro's Cuba?

Do you have palpable proof that holding such a sign in Cuba will lead you to trouble? I'm genuinely asking. Not from the US and just today found out (by curiosity) where Cuba is.

It's likely that the Castro regime's defenders will dismiss any sources I provide as "western propaganda", but these are a good place to start:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Cuba#Contempor...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Cuba

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2016/03/six-fact...

I do not know about a specific instance of someone holding up a sign like the one in the photo I linked to, but I also sincerely doubt anyone in their right mind would attempt such a thing.

The closest recent example I can find is someone painting the names of the Castro brothers on a pair of pigs and being thrown in prison for it (in 2015):

http://www.newsweek.com/cuban-protest-artist-el-sexto-you-ha...

Far worse things happened during the early days of the revolution. I was going to link them but I changed my mind because I don't want to weaken my point. Freedom of speech is far stronger in a place like the US than in a place like Castro's Cuba.

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#699

Post by berntb »

School-Cotton wrote: post #693
berntb wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really think it became peaceful ca 1100? :-) Please read some history. It was no better, it was just not internationally infamous clan societies for a while. Then we had violent national states (check e.g. Polish deluge or the 30 year war).

Fair point :). I guess I need to learn more about Scandinavian history. Any books you can recommend?

For Scandinavian history, only in Swedish. :-)

But I think the same pattern is found everywhere. Most cultures were much more violent in the past. I think Pinker wrote a book about the phenomenon, he is good (I haven't read that but others).

(Let me note that reading about the Polish deluge was one of the shocks of my life, the Swedish school system really didn't mention much about the Polish side of it. I guess the Germans are the only ones that ever took any form of responsibility for historical atrocities.)

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#700

Post by laura2013 »

hisham_hm wrote: post #657
tehwebguy wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could you possibly assume that no children in Cuba sleep on the streets?

I know it's mindboggling, but really there aren't. This is one thing that Westerners typically don't get about the Communist-bloc countries, or don't seem to care. Whereas in average the standard of living was always much higher in Capitalist countries, if you looked at the Eastern European Communist bloc for example, there's no extreme poverty, because the state takes care of that (and it's an extremely important th…

Most Cubans live in very poor conditions with no means to improve their lives because of low wages and high cost of living (by Cuban standards, tourists will find it cheap so that should show you how little money they make). Also, government oppression against those who speak up is a great deterrent to changing the current socio/economic situation. You talk about levels of education like a grandiose achievement, it is, but to what end? there are many Cuban doctors that cannot feed their families with their state provided salaries and have to resort to illegal means. or defect to other countries where their education is not valued and have to start from near zero. homelessness in Cuba is not reported because it goes against the image the government wants to portray. so the statement "Millions of children will sleep on the streets tonight. None of them is Cuban." is only supported by the state-ran media and it's very inaccurate.
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