Support right wing militarism in the fight against communism, then
Support the soviet union in the fight against Hitler, then
Support the overthrow of the gov. in Iran in the fight against the USSR, then
Support Bin Laden in the fight against the USSR in Afghanistan, then
Support Saddam Hussein in the fight against islamist Iran, then
Support Saudi Arabia in the fight against Saddam Hussein (pissing of Bin Laden), then
Get attacked on 9/11, then
Fight the war in Iraq, then
Fuck up Iraq so bad we have to fund Sunni extremist groups linked to Al Qaeda to keep the peace
Works great.
He might be a clown, but he’s not a dictator. (Yet.)
Do you think consideration for our feelings would stop a foreign government from meddling in our politics? Ivory tower idealism and Sunday school moralizing have no place in politics except as happy talk used to bamboozle the rubes.
Oh, yeah, the UN. Now, there’s an accurate, impartial source of information. :rolleyes:
Bullshit. He’s just another commie thug. Always has been.
I’m certainly no fan of Chavez, but neither am I a fan of a political opposition that refuses to take their lumps in an election. They can’t protest the election results if they didn’t participate, and neither can you.
I have no interest in living in your neofascist dystopia. Morality DOES matter. And it DOES affect how people and nations behave regard of self destructive attempts to pretend otherwise. Yes, the leaders of other nations are actual human beings who on occasion are capable of holding scruples. And yes, even if that particular leader isn’t unless the are incompetent they realize that the feelings of of people are important because offending those feelings can result in retaliation.
Chavez has Sean Penn’s personal seal of approval and the election was certified by Jimmy Carter so I don’t see how it could possible be in disarray.
That things would deteriorate was predicted years ago with ice cream logic.
This story crops up in different forms over, and over again. Leftist leader takes over country. Western leftists sing his praises, and talk about how this time, the socialist revolution will be proven out, the workers and the common man will have it ever so much better, and the robber barons will get their comeuppance.
Then things start to go wrong. Shortages develop. The economy tanks. The people grow restless. The leader starts scapegoating the rich, or the media, or the Jews, or the Americans, or the black marketeers (black markets always spring up when the economy is grossly mismanaged - and they’re always demonized). Western socialists parrot the leader’s complaints.
Then things get worse. People are arrested. Businesses confiscated. A few rich ‘profiteers’ are arrested or lynched. Food shortages, inflation… The economy starts coming apart. The people who know how to do make and grow things flee the country. Political cronies take over. The standard of living plummets, and the economy collapses.
At that point, the socialists in the West declare that the once-great leader was a false prophet, a betrayer of the socialist revolution. The collapse was the fault of the leader’s personal failings and his abandonment of true socialist principles, and not the fault of a lousy political system that concentrates power and takes decision-making out of the hands of people who know what they’re doing and suppresses the information needed to make good choices.
But the NEXT one! Boy, that will be the revolution that will show everyone how it’s done.
And history repeats itself - again.
Tell me, Sam, is a leftist revolution ever justified, and necessary? From the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego, were there ever any nations tyrannized by ruthless oligarchies? If you were citizen of a country ruled by a Samoza, a Trujillo, Uguarte, Batista, that lavished what riches the nation possessed on the privileged few, what would you do?
Would you say to yourself, well, all these things are doomed to fail, there is no hope of a redistribution of power and wealth from the hands of the few to the many, we’ll only get fooled again. Better to simply suffer and die, as all hope is folly?
For more than a hundred years, minimum, America has approved, fostered and been complicit in some of the most brutal oligarchies to disgrace our species. We did it in the name of stability, we favored stability over the principles that we loudly declaim to be sacred.
If Chavez is as bad as it gets, we’ll be getting off easy.
- Putting people against the wall and shooting them kills people.
- Starvation, poor medical care, etc. kills people too.
- All evil tyrants do #1.
- Socialist evil tyrants also cause #2.
- All socialist leaders become evil tyrants.
- Not all capitalist leaders become evil tyrants.
In the great balance, I’d rather a coup by a capitalist than a socialist for whatever country I lived in.
We all still remember the millions who were killed after that tyrant Mitterand was finished with France.
Or that vicious Ghandi fellow…
Frankly it seems impossible to get any good information about the situation in Venezuela. All sources I can find are either hysterically and rabidly against Chavez and willing to say anything to smear and critisize him. Or they show the taint of hero worship and fanaticism in their willingness to defend any and all things Chavez. My guess is that neither of those two sides is right, and by saying so I of course belong to the “enemy side” no matter which side you’re on.
Actually, I think I have to take that back. I graphed out the three items, like so:
Economic freedom is the X-axis with righter being more free, the Y-axis is the percentile of arable land. The color is based on the UN’s “under-five mortality rate” with blue being good, red being bad, and green in-between. There may be an ever-so-slight link between arable land and mortality, but not enough to be worth considering. Overwhelmingly, it’s economic freedom that determines infant mortality.
Note that since data clustered towards 0 arable land and towards 0 infant mortality, I took the logarithm of the number to compute the graph so that there would be a more noticeable gradient. I can supply source and tabular data if anyone wants it.
Being Keynesian is not being Marxist, unless you listen to the rhetoric of Rush Limbaugh.
And so do plenty of capitalist evil tyrants. They are often profitable.
All “socialist leaders” become evil tyrants? Really? I must have missed Canada’s transition into a brutal mass murdering tyranny.
An attitude that led to an immense amount of death and suffering at the hands of America during the Cold War. To the victims good American backed rape, torture and murder was indistinguishable from evil Soviet backed rape, torture and murder.
Being Keynesian is not being Marxist, unless you listen to the rhetoric of Rush Limbaugh.
Seeing as how I made this point (#3, which you quoted), I’m not seeing why you feel it necessary to point it out back to me?
Being socialist doesn’t make you Marxist, either.
Because I’m pointing out the actual historical result of your attitude.
And being a socialist per se is not the same as being a tyrant, nor does it magically lead to tyranny. Your logic gets pretty faulty around #5 on your progression, though even #4 is pretty dodgy since a leader (or “evil tyrant”) does not have to be socialist to directly or indirectly cause starvation and a breakdown in medical care.
Another rube thoroughly bamboozled.