Venezuela and the Chavez Legacy

You joke but that's how they think, you can see it with socialist Rosa Luxemburge fanboys whining about how the Social Democrats killed her.

You can get the weird fact of having a socialist apologist vs someone who's a stereotypical borderline libetarian...and is weirdly better in social issues than everyone else.

Going to be blunt. I wonder why basically social justice is "leftist". Going with that, Stalin himself is center-left, centrist or even right wing. It literally means that a leftist can't be a bigot.

The irony with white socialism as a term is that, well...Our White people usually tend to be better on social issues sans racism. More gender equality, more LGTB tolerance usually means Whiter.

Edited by KazuyaProta on Feb 7th 2019 at 4:51:56 AM

...I am somewhat aware of Rosa Luxemburg and her legacy *points to the flag beside the avatar*

Note that I said fanboy. Rosa is fine, her fanboys that martyr worship her are annoying.

Whiter usually means more cosmopolitan, while darker usually means rural. So the white as social conservative shorthand doesn't work for social issues as easily as in the US.

A notification from Reuters showed me this

"Exclusive: U.S. in direct contact with Venezuelan military, urging defections - source" - http://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-politics-military-exclusive/exclusive-u-s-in-direct-contact-with-venezuelan-military-urging-defections-source-idUSKCN1PX22L

Well, that's dangerous. Defections are good, but any sort of hand the US might have in the military is cause for concern.

Speaking of arms smuggling...

Basically, what happened was that Steffan Watkins, a Canadian member of the 'open-source journalism' community who helped Elliott 'Brown Moses' Higgins investigate Ghouta and MH17, found that a plane flying out of Miami was behaving very strangely. It was being operated by the American aviation equivalent of a shell company, and suddenly started logging dozens of flights to Colombia and Venezuela, pretty much going back and forth 24/7. He's got a long Twitter thread on what he found here.

Venezuelan authorities acted on this, and found firearms and military radios on board. As another open-source journalist points out here, this was a small shipment of off-the-shelf American commercial pistols and semi-auto rifles that are popular among local gangs as status symbols, but are slightly less effective as military weapons and would be somewhat inconvenient to source ammunition for locally (though not impossible - the American gun industry has a broad reach). Taken individually, it could be seen as a drug cartel rewarding its officers with shiny toys, but the sheer volume of flights makes it part of a much stranger pattern. Even if each flight only had nineteen rifles on board, they were logging 40 flights (or 760 guns) a month, and we have no guarantee that AR-15s were the heaviest weapons they were hauling. It's also very odd that someone would run a major smuggling operation out of an airport as big and heavily scrutinised as Miami International.

Either a local drug cartel is gearing up for something huge, or Abrams is back to his old tricks.

Edited by Iaculus on Feb 8th 2019 at 9:00:35 AM

Another interesting development - apparently, a number of people at the company smuggling these weapons did work for the CIA, including rendition flights.

I swear to god, if our Government single handedly proves every other Leftist panicking about a Coup right...

It is still less a coup and more opportunistic assholes.

It does, however, lay an uncomfortable amount of ground for a coup... before or after Maduro gets removed. The US seems to have been doing a lot of outreach to the Venezuelan military, and it's an open question how personally ambitious the officers they've been talking to are.

I still don't think a coup is particularly likely to succeed against Maduro; too many of the military decisionmakers personally benefit from the current kletocratic regime for a General's coup to be likely, and there's a very high risk of failure with a coup lead from lower down in the ranks; either complete failure or worse the sort of not-quite failure that could lay the groundworks for a civil war and/or lead to direct US military intervention.

Edited by CaptainCapsase on Feb 9th 2019 at 9:16:52 AM

I was considering the chance of a coup after Maduro's removal, though. Guaidó doesn't seem to have a deep personal base, he's just a guy who isn't Maduro, and with Abrams and the CIA in play, there's a non-zero chance he gets Morsi'd.

Even if the government is doing shady stuff those leftists would still be wrong, let's not forget that they're calling Guaidó the coup. i.e the elected official who has widespread public support who is opposing a sham election.

Just because the US was possibly trying to support a different coup (and that's still a maybe) doesn't mean their concerns or condemnations were in any way reasonable.

Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Feb 9th 2019 at 10:01:14 AM

We know that those are two different things, but I'm not sure that the general public will see the distinction. Hell, I'm not sure the other Leftists will see the distinction either. To them, it will be the USA subverting the government of Venezuela one way or another.

I pray that they are not Right for the Wrong Reasons.

Sure, I definitely agree with that.

Hopefully, they won't fuck this up.

It is the Trump administration. Fucking up is their thing.

Yeah, there is the risk of trump fucking up or if things goes well, this being held a is acomplishment

Never has a truer word been spoken. Heck, I wouldn't trust any of them to grind or brew coffee beans by themselves.

Yeah, that's why I said "they" instead of the Trump administration. Because it felt less ridiculous.

x6

Same. Either way it's going to bolster the Maduro apologists, who don't realize one or more of the opposition can be wrong without the thing they are opposing being good.

The Pemones Indigenous actually managed to let the humanitarian aid inside the country in the South from Brazil. I think they pressured our military with actual bows. Wow, that would have been awesome to see.

Honestly what I think this thread... Actually this entire forum... Has way too much of is people who immediately leap to the conclusion that everyone who points out that there are bad actors in the opposition (or that too much of a government's failing is laid at the feet of the head of state rather than those under him) is an apologist for a leftist dictator.

I'd second this. People are too trigger happy on this forum with the word "apologist". And often uncivil as well.

It's hard to respond to that kind of vague and generalistic 'criticism', I mean beyond saying "nuh uh" there aren't actually any examples to contest.