The Economist is a literal propaganda paper of UK oligarchs. It provides no actual source for its claims, and it relies on people simply accepting such statements because they fit with their preconceptions. https://www.sott.net/article/331691-Dont-believe-the-propaganda-Venezuelans-support-for-Maduro-increasing
Meanwhile, it’s pretty weird how the Economist fails to mention the fact that UK literally stole Venezuela’s gold reserves that were in British banks after they didn’t like the outcome of the election. That’s the rules based world order you support in action right there. But you keep on pretending it’s all Maduro’s failings because engaging with reality is evidently uncomfortable for you.
I’m curious, are you genuinely ignorant of what US has been doing in Venezuela long before Maudro?
Here’s a little primer you might want to read. Then go read the book I linked in the previous comment and learn at least a smidgen of history of what your regime has been up to, and how it translates into the horrors people of Latin America experience today.
Venezuelans are fleeing the conditions that US sanctions created. The whole region has been destabilized by your murderous regime, and now its putting people who are fleeing the conditions your fascist government created are being put into concentration camps.
Anybody who actually wants to know why Latin America is the way it is today need to read Killing Hope to understand the kinds of crimes against humanity US regime has been committing there.
Absolute clown shit
However, let us be clear on what Russia’s draft resolution was, and what it was not. It was an attempt to discredit the work of ongoing national investigations and prejudice any conclusions they reach that do not comport to Russia’s predetermined and political narrative. It was not an attempt to seek the truth.
How can an investigation that leaves Russia, the major stakeholder, out be considered in any way credible?
The competent national investigations by Sweden, Denmark, and Germany are proceeding in a comprehensive, transparent, and impartial manner. As many Council members have said, they must first be allowed to conclude. That is why we did not support this draft resolution and voted to abstain today.
This is a flat out lie because German MPs have complained in the parliament that the opposite is the case. Even the politicians in these countries aren’t allowed to see the results of the “investigation”. Calling that transparent is a lie.
We must ask why, despite having failed to make its case to the Council, Russia still chose to bring this resolution to a vote. It is difficult to accept Russia’s posturing that it only seeks an impartial, independent investigation.
What we really must ask is why the west is opposed to having a transparent investigation of the sabotage that includes all stakeholders.
Let it be clear for the record that the first draft of Russia’s resolution clearly implicated the United States, based on mischaracterizations of statements made by U.S. officials. The first draft criticized the investigations of other UN Member States.
Doing a transparent UN investigation sure would be a great way to demonstrate that Russia’s implication of the US is false. Weird that US doesn’t want to do that.
Over the course of many rounds of consultations, Russia failed to provide any credible new information to justify a UN investigation at this time.
The fact that Russia is shut out of the current “investigation” seems like a pretty credible reason for justifying a UN investigation to me.
Last I checked, Russian economy is doing better than pretty much any western economy right now. Of course, if the goal of the sanctions was to destroy Europe’s industry and to make it dependent on US, then the sanctions worked spectacularly.
- https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/Issues/2023/01/31/world-economic-outlook-update-january-2023
- https://www.bbc.com/news/business-64708832
- https://archive.ph/4GfnF
- https://news.sky.com/story/uk-economy-to-fare-worse-than-any-other-country-in-developed-world-this-year-imf-forecasts-12799201
- https://www.newsweek.com/russias-economy-forecast-outperform-us-within-two-years-1777788
Agreed, there is a higher barrier to entry for the fediverse at the moment. I do imagine this will get more polish as the fediverse gets more popular. We’re seeing this happening with Linux where it’s becoming a lot more accessible over the past few years even though it’s still only around 3% of overall OS market.
So far, it seems like a lot of fairly large instances are doing well with the donation model. Only a small percentage of users have to contribute to pay for the hosting costs. Again, this worked the same way with the old internet as well. I don’t think the outcome of the fediverse being commercialized is inevitable or even likely.
I expect to see growth of non profit social networking where people run servers as a hobby without a monetary incentive. This is what we saw happening a lot at the dawn of the internet with people running BBS boards, IRC channels, and small personal sites. I think platforms like Lemmy and Mastodon capture some of the same appeal and a lot of people are starting become disillusioned with profit driven models. We’ll see how things develop I guess.
I absolutely agree, we can see how the internet completely changed once it started becoming commercialized. We got to the point where most people just visit a handful of websites like Reddit and Facebook. That said, I’m very optimistic about the emergence of the fediverse because it brings back the way the internet was meant to function. While the fediverse is still tiny, it is steadily growing, and it provides a serious alternative to corporate internet.
The promise of the internet would help people see different views and then we’d come to find common truths sort of the way scientific consensus works. Instead, what we got are echo chambers where people are only exposed to opinions that they agree with. I suspect that corporate ownership of media platforms plays a big role in that. Pretty much every corporate platform uses some sort of an opaque algorithm to decide what content people see, and these algorithms are designed to maximize engagement. So, people end up seeing what they want to see.
It’s even more insidious than that. Majority of the population needs recurring income to operate. This includes private individuals and businesses. When the crash happens and people aren’t able to sustain a level of income to service their costs then lots of people become insolvent and are forced to sell off their assets for pennies on the dollar. This is great news for billionaires who can then swoop in and buy up everybody’s assets on the cheap. This is why crashes always lead to further wealth concentration.
The same Vietnam that has excellent relations with China you mean, and where China is currently building infrastructure?
It’s really instructive to contrast the approach that China and the west take to democracy. Western system is basically a talent show where the political candidate that can sell the best story to the public gets elected.
Yet, it’s a fallacy to think that politicians are somehow qualified to make decisions about economics, infrastructure, and a myriad other topics they legislate on. A politician doesn’t know any more about topics such as civil planning than any other citizen.
One of the core problems with the western political system is that it conflates identifying what the problems are with how to solve these problems. It makes sense to vote on the former but not on the latter. Most problems we face are complex and require expert knowledge and understanding to solve effectively. It makes little sense to vote on how to solve these problems or have politicians decide this. However, this doesn’t preclude having a democratic process since it’s easy for people to identify problems when they affect them. This is the kind of populism we need where regular people are able to drive the political process in their favor.
Going back to the example of civil planning, let’s take city traffic as an example. Everyone knows that Toronto has unacceptable traffic congestion. This is a problem everyone can agree on existing. There are many ways to approach this problem. Toronto can build more subways, expand the highway system, add more buses, put in LRT lines, etc. Knowing which solution or combination of thereof is correct is a hard problem. Unless you’re a civil engineer then you’re unlikely to know what is the best approach for tackling the problem effectively regardless of whether you’re a truck driver or the political elite.
Yet, western politicians propose platforms that drum up this solution or that, and then the voters expected to vote on that using their layman understanding of the problem. This is clearly not an effective way to run things.
A much better system is to democratically identify the problems by having people vote on what they perceive to be their most pressing issues. Once public feedback is collected then issues can be ranked by priority, and expert groups can be created to come up with potential solutions to these problems.
Chinese approach allows to have democratic input on what problems should be addressed while leveraging experts in the field to actually solve these problems effectively.
Finally, there needs to be long term commitment to implementing the solutions. This is another area where the western system fails as the new government can reverse initiatives of the previous government. Once again, Chinese system, where there is a stable government, facilitates such long term commitments.
Where’s the poll buddy, also why do you keep lying when you know full well the west seized the assets that Venezuela legally owns and put sanctions on the country. At least lie about something more believable.