Completely dishonest answer. Sanctions decimated Venezuela's ability to maintain its oil infrastructure. Everything, from machined parts, to the various chemicals needed, everything, was affected.
It just took a few years for the sanctions to bite, as the Venezuelans conserved & used stockpiles.
Again, a completely dishonest take. Speaks volumes, when most defenders of todays criminality keep spouting arguments to this effect.
Venezuelan oil production was cratering years before the first oil sanctions because they replaced everybody who knew how to drill oil with loyalists. I didn’t realize this was debatable.
A "proxy" is someone who primarily serves someone elses interests first. Their own interests are subservient to that (if they come in at all).
Venezuelans who may end up fighting for Venezuelan freedom to rule themselves as a soveriegn free nation, with the right to fully benefit from THEIR own natural resources, are NOT proxies of anyone. Regardless of who helps them.
When you're a closet imperialist who thinks nothing of stealing other peoples land, resources, dignity & even lives, then everyone opposing you starts to look like a terrorist, an insurgent or a proxy.
Dude, theres not much point in arguing that. You see this kind of 5th column in the aftermath of most popular revolutions, from Iran to Chavez in Venezuela. A whole horde of folks who were part of the previous elites (or more likely, their functionaries) who decamp en masse to the US, where they proceed to spout unhinged propaganda ad infinitum.
A tell tale is how they tend to completely overlook (to the point of pretending it isnt happening) the role of economic sanctions, blockades & other forms of coercive pressure on the economies of those countries. Instead, putting it all down to local actions by local actors.
There won't be much mention of any of the social improvements & economic uplift which Chavez in particular was able to do, before the external economic pressures became overbearing.
When you can control the narrative on both sides of the equation to this extent, kidnapping the leader of a sovereign (until today) country seems almost normal.
Jeffery Sachs summed it up best a couple of hours ago. The US is not even pretending to be a constitutionally-governed state any more, and this is just 1 sign of that.
I think I kind of understand why the Soviets were able to industrialize that fast and win an existential war against the mighty Wehrmacht.
The so called purges from late 20s to to the 30s were Stalin eliminating these 5th columnists.
The Soviets had a lot of Western assistance with industrializing. Ford in particular played a huge role in the Gorky factories.
The Wehrmacht lost because numbers kind of matter in war. When you look at the natural resources Russia had, the population disparity between Russia and Germany, and the size of territory the Germans attempted to conquer, it really wasn't a close contest at all.
Stalin's purges had absolutely nothing with removing any "5th Column." The White Movement was thoroughly defeated by 1921 as were the Mensheviks etc. Stalin purged his officer class because he was supremely paranoid. And while he killed many of the officers, many were sent to the gulags and recalled to service after the German invasion in 1941.
The entire concept of a 5th column is just fear-mongering by most countries who faced defeat due to their incompetence. And the term was used by countries to impose draconian controls and oppression.
Hmm, you've got the gift-giving (it is the season, after all) backwards. We all saw Gianni Infantino stand by the desk, while HE gave a gift (a tasteful gold trophy, not a grubby little envelope) to the aforementioned representative of the oppressive regime.
To, in your words, whitewash that country's human rights abuses ...
There are many which could fit your description. Tiny core, puppy linux varients (voidpup, with the void pkg manager, is pretty nice), etc.
However, I think the nicest put together ones are fatdog64 & porteus.
fatdog64 is built from scratch (basically, "Beyond Linux From Scratch"), but uses a lot of slackware tooling & ethos, so its quite compatible with slack pkgs & slackbuilds. If you dive deeper, its actually got a lovely cohesive design, behind the minimalistic gui which IMHO does it a huge disservice.
Eg: it has scripts to run containerised or UML'ised versions of itself, from within itself. Down to optionally having a nested X session with full gui.
Porteus (or the more bleeding edge Porteux variant) has more conventional look & feel out of the box.
Both Fatdog & Porteus(x) have much more flexible initrd systems than tiny core/puppy, where you can copy configs in from a static location (rather like alpine's overlay tarball), or bind mount stuff in. Critically, this is all before the main rootfs goes live, so you can affect how various disks & services are handled on a machine-by-machine basis, if needed.
(plus they're not restricted to the root-only approach which puppy needlessly adheres to religiously)
Plus, these were the original IMMUTABLE distro's, long before that was adopted by some distro-giants.
In other words, with a little thought, you have TONS of flexibility. Including the scenario you mentioned.
PS: to install either, it can be as simple as setting up a bootloader (which IMHO ought to be a distro agnostic task anyway), and copying over ... 2 files (by default, fatdog shoves its main rootfs squashfs module INSIDE the initrd). With porteus, you will have a fully setup xfce, cinnamon or gnome (yes) setup with ... 4 files.
The unique problem here is that while many of these are designed to run nicely from USB drive, I don't get the impression that many will let you remove the USB drive after boot.
FatDog talks about running from a RAM layer, which is cool. But I believe even this is still a RW layer atop the underlying root which needs to remain mounted.
Nope, puppy (all variants), fatdog, and porteus (all variants, including porteux & nemesis - which is arch based) can all boot in a mode where you can unplug/unmount the storage device from which it booted.
Look, we can all acknowledge that there were, and are, many Americans who wish for this to be true. But at no point in America's history did that "many" ever constitute a majority. Or even close to it.
Which is why, from its very inception, the US has employed mass genocide at home, invasions & regime changes in the America's, then post-slavery apartheid at home, with invasions & regime changes in the rest of the world.
That's not anti-American rhetoric. That's just historical fact.
So, commingled with those facts, where does "law, love & fair play" come in. If you're honest, THAT was the propaganda. And the above realities, that was the truth.
The America of today IS the America it has always been. Its just that the propaganda mask can't be reattached with more duct tape. America started by geniciding non-whites at home, and rounding up & dragging non-whites TO America, in chains.
Now it's genociding non-whites abroad (primarily the Middle East), and rounding up & dragging non-whites FROM America, in chains.
When you focus on the common threads throughout American history, and strip away the fluff, you realise ... that's the real America (which still has the largest slave labour force in the world, through indentured workforces via its prison system).
I'm not even sure it was never a majority. I'm not even sure it's not a majority now. It's more that the system is not set up to be good, even if the majority wants it to be.
So far Iran looks like the aggressive nation (who also funded Hamas and all acts of terror in the middle east instead of investing in drinking water infrastructure) thats going down, with the love of god, after 50 years since its revolution. Israel seems more resilient at the moment, only responding to savagery from Gazans. Remember October 7th and the hostages that could've ended it so much time ago
What do you mean by "could have ended it"? Hamas wanted to make a deal to release the hostages since October 10th in return for Israel releasing the 5,200 Palestinian prisoners. The entire point of the hostages was to exchange them. Israel is the one that didn't want to make a deal. That's why there were so many protests within Israel to "return the hostages". Those protests weren't about continuing the war, they were about pushing Netanyahu to end it and make a deal
- these boats are not in American waters. They are in their own, or neighbouring countries waters, and are being attacked by vessels whose home waters are 1000s of km's away
- they are not being interdicted (which is illegal kidnapping anyway, see above). They are just being killed. Plain and simple.
To put your argument back to you. Latin American countries who are combating narcotics trading armed paramilitarys, who are mostly getting their arms from US supply chains. So, for example, Mexico is entitled to go into US waters, and "interdict" American-owned boats with US citizens on board? Without any kind of warrant from even the Mexican courts, much less US courts?
Your worldview is built on top of the assumptions of liberalism: international law, sovereignty determined by institutions like the UN, etc.
The people who support this are not liberals when it comes to international affairs, even if they might be (but often are not) liberals at home. They know that they're violating international law. But they don't care because they do not value international law as it is currently constructed. They see it as an unjust imposition, made up by a bunch of lawyers and diplomats, that prevents them from securing their own interests.
The trouble for these people is that politics has not been openly this way since the cold war because the position is untenable. A group that gets its power by pushing the doomsday clock is ultimately dependent on some counter force putting seconds back.
I understand what you're saying. But, I don't have any "liberal assumptions". The Gaza Holocaust has demonstrated that there really is no such thing as international law, because there's no enforcement against certain parties, because they are deemed too powerful to touch (US empire, essentially).
Note, that's not the world I like to see. It's just the world we have.
But pointing out the outright hypocrisy of certain parties actions, vis a vis international law, natural law, or even "what if we flipped the tables?", is always worthwhile (I hope). Even if it's just shouting into the wind
There was only one Holocaust, the Shoah. Even if the Gaza events qualified as a genocide, a label that can be applied to many such events throughout time and place, that is still not a Holocaust.
I mean it's not nearly comparable to the Holocaust either in means or scale or intent or cause or any other dimension, and I reject these rhetorical games that try to get something labelled a certain way to achieve a persuasion outcome.
It’s a frequently met claim right now that the USA killing foreigners that its president deems adversaries on their boats is something unprecedented and beyond the pale, lacking necessary authorization like criminal charges and trials or declaration of war. But one of the very first foreign actions the USA did as a nascent country, still very high on all the eighteenth-century concepts of rights that inspired the American Revolution and Constitution, was send a naval force to kill a bunch of Barbary pirates with charges filed, no trial, and no formal declaration of war by Congress.
Well, we're all aware that the term "gunboat diplomacy" has been in use for centuries.
The Barbary Wars was an interesting case of how multiple naval forces were engaging in piracy etc against each other. Barbary vessels in the Med. British against US shipping (that, and press ganging sailors, was one of the public reason for the 1812 war). And, funnily enough, American privateers doing exactly the same thing to the British colonial shipping in the Caribbean (piracy plus press ganging)
In this current scenario, the only real connection would be that the US are the pirates.
Well, to continue that timeline. "Big Tech" freezes their version to the last gpl'ed version, and each commences their own (non-trivial effort) to make their own version (assuming the last gpl'ed version was not feature-complete for all their future uses).
And of course, they won't share with each other. So another driver would be fear of a slight competitive disadvantage vs other-big-tech-monstrosity having a better version.
Now, in this scenario, some tech CEO, somewhere has this brilliant bright spark.
"Hey, instead of dumping all these manhours & resources into DIYing it, with no guarantee that we still won't be left behind - why don't we just throw 100k at the original oss project. We'll milk the publicity, and ... we won't have to do the work, and ... my competitors won't be able to use it"
That's one thing which ruby unfortunately did not adopt from Smalltalk. In Smalltalk (at least, in the dialects I'm familiar with), the "method categories" metadata is used to signal that we're adding new methods (or overwriting existing ones) to classes that are outside the scope of this package (ie: classes you didn't create as part of your app).
That way, it's easy to trace, forwards (from package to all the methods it introduces) & backwards (from method to package), who introduced a method, where, and why.
Other than that, I think a lot of this aversion to "ruby magic" is a bit overblown. The ability to cleanly remold any part of the system with minimal friction, to suit the app you're building right now - that's a KEY part of what makes it special.
Its like all these polemics warning wannabe lispers away from using macros. Lisp, Smalltalk, and ruby, all give you very powerful shotguns to express your creative ideas. If you can't stop blowing your own foot off, then pick a different language with a different paradigm.
> That's one thing which ruby unfortunately did not adopt from Smalltalk. In Smalltalk (at least, in the dialects I'm familiar with), the "method categories" metadata is used to signal that we're adding new methods (or overwriting existing ones) to classes that are outside the scope of this package (ie: classes you didn't create as part of your app).
> That way, it's easy to trace, forwards (from package to all the methods it introduces) & backwards (from method to package), who introduced a method, where, and why.
Doesn't Method#source_location in Ruby provide a mechanism for this?
Though, in modern (>3.x) Ruby, its probably better to avoid monkey-patching unless you need to override behavior exposed to consumers that aren't opting in, and just use Refinements that consumers can opt-in to using.
I can. It is, of course, those who worked on the project before me, that expressed their all-too-human over-confidence in their own abilities and judgement.
And then we would spend-a-weekend to rip-out the changes they'd made to Smalltalk system classes, that conflicted with the version upgrade.
(Something about the narcissism of small differences.)
It just took a few years for the sanctions to bite, as the Venezuelans conserved & used stockpiles.
Again, a completely dishonest take. Speaks volumes, when most defenders of todays criminality keep spouting arguments to this effect.
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