Venezuela Is Falling Apart | Hacker News Reader

Venezuela Is Falling Apart

theatlantic.com

13 pointsvinnyglennon10 comments

Moises Naim, who wrote this article, is a notable Venezuelan dissident (and was a finance minister before Hugo Chavez took over).

I'm just about to start his most recent book, "The End of Power," which is about how hard it is to establish and maintain political control as technology decentralizes. It's not going to be the kind of book Maduro (the Venezuelan president) is going to read, but seems pretty sure to be the playbook of how that regime will end.

https://www.amazon.com/The-End-Power-Boardrooms-Battlefields...

This was written in May. Apparently the situation has gotten exponentially worse.

It went from "Hey I hear Venezuela is really beautiful and the people are friendly. Maybe I should go visit, my dollar will go a long way there, and they'll be happy for foreign currency" to "Holy crap the State Department can't even guarantee that they'll be able to get me home if thing go really badly."(https://twitter.com/OSACState/status/809519262150918145?ref_...)

It's such a shame. At this point the government and military are already all-in on repression. If they allowed democratic change at all, there will be a lot of bodies hanging from lampposts. So they just keep on trying to stay in power any way they can.

At this point the only thing I can see changing the situation is either a full scale uprising/civil war, or one of Venezula's neighbors will come in and "help out" with keeping the peace by installing troops and a puppet government. I don't see any path where the people who currently have power would relinguish it voluntarily or let the people prosecute them for misdeeds.

What will be the tipping point?

Historically it seems that when the population feels it has less to lose by throwing out the government than it does by keeping it. Then it just needs someone with a bit of charisma to emerge to pull it together.

Peron, Fidel, Mao, Langton, Lenin, Adams, Etc. Generally one person who says "I'm not going to take this crap any more" and unites the people behind him to make big changes. Sometimes you get the Magna Carta and sometimes you get Hitler.

Waiting for the paid puppets to deny the truth about how fucking hard is to live in Venezuela.

This article uses the wrong label "socialism" when it's more like the past century's communism. There's a world of difference between Social Security from which Ayn Rand benefitted and top-down mismanaged resources / disastrous policies. Conflating the two only perpetuates libertarian mythologies which promulgate "rugged individualism" and phobia of providing common services which benefit communities, like firefighters, highways, radio frequency allocation and child toy safety standards.

Every time socialism fails, there is someone saying "oh that was not socialism"...

You need to explain what you mean by the term "socialism." The classical definition is when the means of production are owned and controlled by society, either the state or workers collectives. More recently the term has been used by some to refer to social democracy, and even New Deal style liberalism which are considerably different economic systems. So which definition do you mean? And perhaps you could present some arguments, and at least one link, in support of the idea that it can work well.

What he means is that his retarded system collaped again but it's ok and he wants to try again because it wasn't real "socialism"

https://pics.onsizzle.com/when-your-retarded-system-collapse...

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