So, there's apparently some kind of conflict developing in Venezuela. Conservatives have been busy crowing about it all morning.
Me? I'm just thinking "Damn, I hope those people in the crowd made it out okay." But ya know, it looks like at the least that APC clipped a few people in the crowd.
Like, seriously, what the fuck is even wrong with these people, by which of course I mean the American conservatives, not the Venezuelans. As I understand it, two guys, Nicholas Maduro and Juan Guaido, each legitimately believe themselves to be President of Venezuela. Maduro, an autocrat, won an obviously-rigged election last year...and is wildly unpopular due to bad policies, refusal to diversify the country's economy and, for that matter, neglect of the oil infrastructure on which it currently depends. Juan Guaido, far from being some kind of conservative ideal, is a centrist Democratic Socialist...so, somewhere between a Latin American equivalent to Barack Obama and maybe Bernie Sanders. Nobody's going to sweep away socialism here, maybe refine it some or strike a balance between capitalism and the needs of the many, as democratic socialists usually try to do, but nobody's "Ending socialism."
And this Juan Guaido guy is supposedly some kind of right-wing ideal? I'm not buying this. Hell, I'm not even renting it.
This, yet again, isn't about actual ideology or policy. It's about "winning." It's about fear of people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and fear, not so much of socialism...but that somebody other than conservative white people will get any. As with our own domestic Trump bullshit...these idiots will maybe figure out what they actually want after they gloat about "winning" for a couple of weeks and make insufferable fools of themselves all over the internet. I've noted that actual professionals are either still pretty quiet or cautioning against buying into the right-wing narrative on this.
These fucking people have had it out for the current Venezuelan government since Chavez was in power...as if much would change under a guy who is legitimately the interim President under their Constitutional system?
Sound familiar? Oh, wait...
The response by this NICU nurse is worth the read.
As I've said before, this shit does not happen. The entire business stems from a willful misquote of something Ralph Northam said regarding pallative care of an infant that was not going to survive due to medical conditions. It's a lie. There is nobody executing babies in the United States of America.
I'm going to ask this again, for the people in the back. Yeah, you in the red hat; How exactly do you think lying rectifies injustice?
This bullshit is going to get somebody killed, probably the wrong person, and for stupid reasons.
Likewise, How exactly does crowing about a nation's internal conflict, that fundamentally stems from food insecurity and incompetent government policies, help even one damned thing?
People are dying down there, and I'm pretty sure those people standing up against the Maduro government...and by extension its Chinese and Russian allies...don't give a damn about your ideology. They just want to have food on the table. No, everything in the world is not about you.
I didn't see very many of these people who are crowing about guns and freedom and an end to socialism having one damned thing to say about that shooting.
In point of fact, the collapse of and infighting within the NRA seemed to grab more headlines, but okay, whatever.
The fact is, all these conservative culture warriors don't give a fuck about justice, they don't give a fuck about people being killed for no reason. It's actually kind of hard to see what they do care about...except of course their adoring worship of Donald Trump.
Speaking of topics like Communism and Socialism, veneration of Joseph Stalin is increasing again in Russia...and being pushed by the State...and I don't see very many conservatives even having one damn thing to say about that, either. Actually, most of the ones who are are the Never Trump conservatives. No one else seems to care. These Nazis don't give a damn that Stalin fought Nazis, they only care about their idea of an archetype of a "strong leader." They'll edit out all the inconvenient parts later.
Actually, I don't think a lot of these people either in America or Russia even know what Stalin stood for. You bet your ass Vladimir Putin does though, KGB officers were required to study that shit. Sword and Shield of the Party, you bet.
They don't care what he stood for. It's the cruelty, stupid.
They don't care what Juan Guaido or Nicholas Maduro stand for. It's the idea of some kind of proxy conflict that will, in the end, fail as it always does to banish their American opposition to some kind of mythical outer darkness...that's what they want.
There aren't going to be American boots on the ground in Venezuela...there don't have to be. This is, yet again, another proxy conflict between the US and its allies on one side, and China and Russia on the other...and likely a chance to sell some guns and wank off to the idea of people being killed for something something gazpacho.
But ya know, fundamentally both Communism and Socialism in Latin America...are generally equated with resistance to tyranny (or at least to American economic and political dominance which were often enforced by basically fascist dictators installed by American coups...dictators who I remind you are actually venerated by the alt-Right Nazis today. So yeah, I think we need to be careful with this whole Venezuela thing, and I don't think it's a choice.
I'll admit, I wasn't terribly aware of a lot of this stuff as a younger man...not besides what I'd seen on various news programs, PBS shows, and stuff like that. In 1998 I bought a cheap copy of Che Guevara's book The Motorcycle Diaries at Borders book store in Traverse City, MI for around $10 and change. I was curious. I should add that I was both a conservative and a Republican at the time.
The book is the story of Che and a friend going on a trip across South America from Argentina to Peru, to volunteer to provide medical assistance at a leper colony in Peru. I read it, and mostly forgot about it as my liberal social worker Mom claimed the book as soon as I was done with it and it's still on her bookshelf. But, to a great extent, in describing a formative experience for Senor Guevara the book makes an excellent case for and serves as a manifesto concerning his later beliefs. Years later I read a chapter in Max Boot's book Invisible Armies about Che and how those early experiences influenced his fighting alongside Fidel Castro in Cuba and subsequent efforts to promote Communism and Socialism around the world later on...a quest that eventually killed him.
Max Boot is a conservative, yet his perspective on Che was pretty favorable. Ya know, sometimes it comes down to smart people just take note of this stuff, and the reasons for it. Sometimes it's best to leave the political bullshit outside the door and just be concerned with the human aspect.
Oh a whim, I bought The Motorcycle Diaries again last week, this time for $5 in E-Book format on Amazon, for my Kindle app. A more faceless form of capitalism than Che would ever have imagined, I'm sure, but they carry his book.
Capitalism isn't all good, or all bad. It's what we do with it that matters. Likewise Socialism is not inherently good or evil, but rather it's what we do with it that's important.
And that's the part these jingoistic morons can never seem to remember.
I'm almost afraid to ask what a manifesto for the politics of the anti-socialist crowd on Twitter might be called, just sayin.'
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