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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

#161

Post by pavlov »

coliveira wrote: post #159
pavlov wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone who has a medical condition in Venezuela probably dislikes this "reordering of economic forces" too. There are nearly no pharmaceuticals. Operating rooms can't function. One in three patients in hospitals end up dead according to the government's own statistics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_Venezuela#2010s This isn't what socialism is supposed to look like. As for the rich: the old rich certain…

Most people in Venezuela never had access to pharmaceuticals. And, while any difficulties in health care are deplorable, lack of medical resources is the norm on third world countries. So it is difficult to assess how much of this was due to the regime policies or to the bad shape of the economy. The problem in doing this assessment is that all coverage of Venezuela is ideologically tainted. Any perceived problem in…

Venezuela's closest ideological match Cuba does a much better job of providing healthcare for its citizens, and Cuba doesn't have any oil wealth. Wouldn't that indicate that the problem is with Venezuela's regime specifically?

The GDP has tripled, yet the average citizen's health and purchasing power are worse in the same time period. Where is the money? What kind of socialism are they building when even poor stagnating Cuba manages to look like a positive example?

Re: It’s official: Venezuela is a dictatorship

#162

Post by NotSammyHagar »

gozur88 wrote: post #141
g8oz wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which of the various conspiracy theories about her have you swallowed?

Probably the ones backed up by hard evidence like the Podesta dump and videos. But who should we believe, anyway, you or our lyin' eyes?

Sorry, you'll have to explain what you mean instead of referring to dark mysterious stories that we don't know.

Re: It’s official: Venezuela is a dictatorship

#163

Post by narrator »

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?

Is there anything that the Maduro government could do that would make you say, "I wish a right wing coup like the one that happened in Chile had happened instead"?

There are, after all, a lot of communist revolutions that turned into complete bloodbaths once the ruling party consolidated its power.

Re: It’s official: Venezuela is a dictatorship

#164

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

Re: It’s official: Venezuela is a dictatorship

#165

Post by gozur88 »

NotSammyHagar wrote: post #162
gozur88 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably the ones backed up by hard evidence like the Podesta dump and videos. But who should we believe, anyway, you or our lyin' eyes?

Sorry, you'll have to explain what you mean instead of referring to dark mysterious stories that we don't know.

Why am I not surprised? The only way you couldn't know about the Podesta emails is if you really, really, really didn't want to know.

Re: It’s official: Venezuela is a dictatorship

#166

Post by atmosx »

jknoepfler wrote: post #155
tptacek wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get that. I just don't understand how that informs our response to the situation. Both Brexit and Syria are terrible situations.

Brexit is inconvenient; Syria is a humanitarian catastrophe. There are several orders of magnitude of difference.

Plus Brexit was achieved by the most democratic of processes, Syria's government was overthrown from a foreign country, because someone else had all good contracts - how are the two comparable eludes me.

Re: It’s official: Venezuela is a dictatorship

#167

Post by [deleted] »

jknoepfler wrote: post #155
tptacek wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get that. I just don't understand how that informs our response to the situation. Both Brexit and Syria are terrible situations.

Brexit is inconvenient; Syria is a humanitarian catastrophe. There are several orders of magnitude of difference.

[deleted]

Re: It’s official: Venezuela is a dictatorship

#168

Post by jwdunne »

jimmywanger wrote: post #86
paulddraper wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> right-wing authoritarian dictatorships aren't usually ideologically driven, don't pretend that what they're doing is just "for the good of the people WTF? Hitler definitely said he did what he did for the good of the German people (okay. not the Jewish people or handicapped people, but the people that mattered)

Also, Hitler was a national socialist.

Means nothing when he purged all the people who wanted the socialism part.

Fascism does not mean much when it comes to spectrum and can be compared to anything as long as the dictator's mood was right. It essence it believed in the strength of one man to take the nation forward.

For Nazism, you will see a mishmash of economic policy that slants a little towards the right economically as compared to Mussolini's fascism that leaned a little towards the left - he was part of the socialism movement before obvious disgruntlement.

It's not useful to compare against something defined by the whims of one man.

Re: It’s official: Venezuela is a dictatorship

#169

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

SomeStupidPoint wrote: post #80
jackcosgrove wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Liberty and equality are at loggerheads. Liberty is the animating principle of the modern right, and equality is the animating principle of the modern left.

I'm not sure I agree. I'd probably phrase it as the US leftwing and rightwing have different importances placed on different kinds of libterties a person can have and different notions of equality. Gun rights, for the left, are an issue of liberty; while abortion, for the right, is a matter of equality. Too often in American politics, we pretend that what are orthogonal axes are different choices in a dilemma. Here I…

You've probably seen this, but for those who haven't George Lakoff give's this a fairly good treatment in this[1] on 'Moral Politics'.

By 'this' I mean the idea that the Left and the Right have different experiences of what is moral.

My issue with politics is that I think we need to extricate it from morality. Like we have separation of Church and State a la Secular Society, we need amoral politics.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5f9R9MtkpqM

Re: It’s official: Venezuela is a dictatorship

#170

Post by atmosx »

tptacek wrote: post #26
andrenth wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like "Dude and the whole leftist intellectual elite are wrong on the Internet, will never acknowledge being wrong and will be wrong again the next time the same thing happens. News at 11."

How seriously am I supposed to take someone who implies that the leader of a "leftist intellectual elite" (whatever that is) is Michael Moore ?

I think Chomsky is more appropriate, although the leader? I don't know...

There is a raise of leftists (at least in speech because in substance from Sanders to Corbyn there so much "left", rather a mild "right")

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