https://youtu.be/C5QGzYFjVaU?si=09nRUo_ddUd5H3D7
The Daily Show segment on comparing them.
Despite all of that this admin is using the exact same rhetoric while needing to redefine a drug, that largely is imported from places other than Venezuela, to make it a "weapon of mass destruction" in order to do it all over again.
Old-school UN-led "police action" as in Korea is one thing, at least there's a somewhat universal institution making judgements on which countries need to be "saved" under a consistent legal framework, but that's such a slippery slope too.
The US does not have the authority to make such decisions and definitely does not have a good track record of them. It's just vigilantism at a large scale, at best. Even when being charitable about intent, the US did do some things in legitimate good faith, at least partially, the results are always catastrophic. There's been no instance of actually positive outcomes for the local population, it has always destroyed the country for decades to come and set the stage for significantly worse regimes.
My point is that history has shown that such action is extremely counterproductive if you actually care about doing good for people under such regimes, particularly when the decision is made impulsively by a single country with a biased perspective and no consistent system or criteria to make sure it's a smart thing to do.
Anyone that supports such action is using inconsistent moralistic arguments to justify blatant power grabs. It may be well intentioned, but you are just making yourself feel good by fighting the bad guys, while doing even more harm to innocent people and making it all worse in the long-run. Very American indeed.
And frankly, right now, the US is not exactly in a position to be a judge of what is moral in the first place.
Read my comment back as well! I am saying this is neither a moral nor legal matter. So I am not using a moralistic argument.
I don’t think the Iraq war was to establish democracy, it was to get rid of a dictator hostile to the US at a time when after 9/11, the US decided to it would not tolerate further aggressions. But a byproduct of that policy has been the establishment of a democracy and historically the US considered that democracies as natural allies and therefore the more the better.
If you want to do good, fine, but make sure you are smart about it and actually achieve that aim. The US has shown that its not good at this, regardless of intentions, they should just refrain from action until they get their shit together.
Yes FIFA as in the football/soccer league.
there is a third option.
(You may also want to look into the US' track record for installing dictators throughout the Americas. It's not great.)
And you've inferred this from my comment how exactly?
The part that's relevant to what you said in your post is the second half of mine.
Or maybe the US should start with instituting regime change in its allies in the Persian Gulf?
Fortunately most countries think it's a US internal matter for the US people to sort out.
> 90% comments are about Ukraine and US
:^)))
Come and see.[0] Watch desperate mother whose son was grabbed on the street and "busified"[1]. She later died in the ER after the stroke she suffered.
Just found some random telegram channel for you which apparently collects the videos of Ukrainian forced mobilization[2]. The channel's admins sarcastically call them "volunteers" which I find despicable, but just watch the videos. Some of the videos have logos of popular Ukrainian telegram channels, you can find them there.
[0] https://t.me/ASupersharij/42745
US military-industrial complex (aka the republicans in power but not only) will try and force any way US will spend trillions on military equipment again and again, thats glaringly obvious to literally whole world and not something new or secretly done behind many curtains.
If US would actually want to have an image (and not just self-image) of somebody standing up to tyranny and genocide and protecting the weak and just, they would support Ukraine and not backstab it frequently as they do. Thats a fine litmus paper for this in current times, don't need anything else. The fact that enemy there is a mortal enemy of US itself and all principles US holds (held?) dear like freedom, democracy, capitalism or right to self-determination is just the proverbial cherry on the top of the cake. No amount of words can bullshit around this simple fact.
Also in the process US is losing its by far biggest and strongest ally in whole world on all existential, moral and societal levels - Europe. An army of expert spies and hackers wouldn't be able to achieve in decades what current potus achieved in less than a year.
Ok. Then the question is "If the US really goes full isolationsist and packs it home, who takes the power vaccum?"
> China ain't doing no ground invasion for oil
I didn't say that "China handling it" is about invading anything. I also didn't say anything that the US is justified in invading Venezuela. I am just wondering that if those saying "the US shouldn't do anything" understand that someone will do something, even if this something is stupid, counterproductive or plain evil.
The difference is oil, and Trump's also very petty and Maduro has told him to pound sand.
> Oil is unconvincing since it took years before production recovered, so that clearly wasn’t the priority.
Haliburton, Exxon, Chevron, etc... made a ton of money rebuilding the infrastructure and continue to make money on the oil reserves.
The US also destroyed the country in the process and caused more deaths than Saddam.
So Qatar (which mostly exports natural gas anyways), Saudi Arabia, etc. can just dump oil at a cheaper price to make it unprofitable to extract and refine Venezuelan oil.
US decision makers salivating over war/oil/whatever def don't take that into account, but it really doesn't matter either.
Have you considered that they are doing this because of humans right and .. /s who are we kidding this is Qatar we are talking about.
My only explanation of this, is that the collapse of the "order-based" system affects countries like Qatar disproportionately as part of their existence hangs on the respect of that order.
https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/venezuela/crude-oil-ex...
My intuition seeing this is that the lack of openness of Venezuelian economy made it impossible to recover from the crude oil price drop circa 2014, because of a lack of access to capital and new tech (and probably corruption). Also, if you want to nationalizes, you better have a plan like Norway had, and Venezuela didn't. If your goal is only profit, better let a private company take care of it, that's the thing they're good for.
Venezuela was in a deep economic crisis for a very long time before Chavez was elected. The then ruling elite were pretty happy living in a bubble, extracting oil, selling to the west, embezzling the proceeds and ignoring most of the population.
The reason I say, the root cause is racism and classism, is because they totally underestimated the power of the people to overthrow their corrupt regime.
> The reason I say, the root cause is racism and classism, is because they totally underestimated the power of the people to overthrow their corrupt regime.
There was no 'regime', there was a democracy with corruption problems but that was still functional. Nor it was 'overthrown', a populist was elected due to disenchantment and the populist dismantle the state institutions and turn it into an oligarchy ran by his circle.
OK.
> but that was still functional
Clearly not, because Chavez was elected despite having attempted a coup d'etat previously. Clearly not, because the coup d'etat against Chavez failed because the population was overwhelming supporting him.
> populist dismantle the state institutions and turn it into an oligarchy ran by his circle
Which was necessary because previously it was an oligarchy ran by an opposing circle, which lost favor with the people.
> It was never about classism or racism
It's classism, partly fueled by racism, which causes the ruling elite in Latin America to have such disdain for the rest of the population, that they believe they can take control of the country and govern it as if they were some kind of aristocracy, and completely ignore those beneath them, because they aren't of the right class, are not white enough, and don't have enough wealth, to be taken into consideration.
Most of EU (and UK) is on (or near) recession right now, except for some southern EU countries which are doing surprisingly well, although relative to a long period of hardship after the 2008 crisis. It's not an acute recession, but there's no clear way out of this stagnation on the horizon, and the people are really starting to feel the squeeze.
Of course, the root cause of this is much deeper, the Russia situation was just the spark. EU industry has been complacent for decades, believing that while less competitive on costs and scale we still had the technological edge, which ironically led to severe underinvestment in R&D. And giving up on nuclear is backfiring badly too.
I do think the (shrinking) majority still believes that the (limited) actions against Russia were worthwhile, since they are not threatening sovereignty in general, they are threatening EU's territorial integrity at our doorstep. It is unacceptable, and while it is a heavy price, not retaliating would have much more catastrophic consequences.
But cutting off trade with US over Venezuela? Forget about it, EU's dependency on US is orders of magnitude higher than it was with Russia, it would be absolutely deadly to the EU economy.
What does it even mean?
> Checks registration date and comments
Ah, right, another Russian bot.
The only way for Venezuela to survive is to play dirty and be cunning/resourceful just like their Ukrainian counterparts fighting for their life.
You are trying very hard to make the situations sound similar, but they are not.
Ukraine is a democracy, Venezuela is not.
The scope of the attacks are entirely different. Still doesn't justify what Trump is doing, of course.
Both also do it to distract from domestic problems with their regimes.
Make no mistake, the EU is not "fine" with the war in the sense that they will express diplomatic criticism of the US when Trump finally starts his idiotic (and narcissistic, and corrupt, but I already said "Trump") war. They are "fine" with it in the sense that they won't self-implode their collective political careers and perhaps the EU itself by sanctioning the US and destroying the economy of the entire EU for fucking Maduro. Doing that would be idiocy.
It is?
It’s one of the reasons why the ruling class of the empire loves immigration, it means those people can be used to conquer their home country. That applies to Ethiopians as much as Chinese and Indians, they are tools. It’s more complicated than that, but that’s the gist; immigrants and refugees are tools, just like how slaves are/were tools to the ruling class for other purposes. Today the ruling class puts their tools through education and gives them resources and opportunities and even funds them to make them heads of “NGOs” above and beyond their own people; so that those immigrants can become agents of the empire’s ruling class, to expand the empire into their home countries.
It’s quite an ingenious and diabolical manipulation, but that’s why the ruling class of the empire rules you.
Btw, I know this for a fact. I’ve been in the conversations about these kinds of matters. You didn’t think we support immigration out of the goodness of our heart, did you? It’s so easy to manipulate the peasants, especially when they personally have things to gain.