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Things Not Going Well in Venezuela, 2.0


PittsburghTiger

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  On 2/24/2019 at 6:12 PM, PittsburghTiger said:

Yeah, don’t really care what you think.

it is nice to see Castro’s grandson all over Miami, and Spain flashing his fabulous wealth all over the Internet. Grandpa Fidel was worth, what, about $2,000,000,000?

Another good Commie.

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Authoritarian rulers use their power to enrich themselves?

Get out! Since when?

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  On 2/24/2019 at 2:27 AM, Crusher said:

Tell what industries in  the USA are completely owned by the Government? Even the Military vendors are separate from the government. When Venezuela took control of Citgo and controlled that company it was the death  nail for them.

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PDVSA has owned citgo in its entirety since 1990.  PDVSA has been around since 1976.

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  On 2/24/2019 at 2:44 PM, Enchubben said:
Sure when you can actually get the appointment. Sometimes it can take months to see a doctor if at all. Then there’s the actual healthcare that’s received: there is a reason why the good Canadian educated doctors move to the US ($$$).  I suppose the pope flies to Canada when he needs medical attention right?  

 

I’ve demonstrated a number of times, and it’s worth repeating, that an American is about 6x as likely to go to another country for care as a Canadian is to come to the United States. The two biggest factors are cost and wait times. And this is only anecdotal, but as I write this I am 2 months into a 4 month waiting list to get my daughter into a pediatric rheumatologist to figure out just what the hell is wrong, despite the fact that she’s managing pain and slowly losing mobility, I have the best insurance money can buy, plenty of cash, and I live a half mile from the best children’s hospital with the highest concentration of specialists within 200 miles. Going to Houston would save me a week. Dallas Boston, NY, LA, Chicago. Same deal. I would happily go to Toronto if that had been an option, because I understand we would have only had to wait about two months.

 

Ever watch your middle school aged daughter go from dancing at a company level 3 hours a day to walking around like an elderly woman while you work the phones to no avail? Tell me more about wait times, chump.

 

 

 

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  On 2/24/2019 at 3:55 PM, texastough said:
My wife, a surgeon, says that Canada does two things well in its health care system. One, it covers preventative medicine way more than we do, and that saves lots of costs downstream. Second, they stop care much sooner for terminal illness, which saves a TON of $. On the flip side, they do not cover catastrophic events/diagnoses. There are Canadians who have curable illness but the treatment is expensive, and they are hosed.

The biggest difference is actually the cost of administration. By most estimates they spend less than half of what we do on paperwork and other non-care costs.
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  On 2/24/2019 at 2:44 PM, Enchubben said:

Sure when you can actually get the appointment. Sometimes it can take months to see a doctor if at all. Then there’s the actual healthcare that’s received: there is a reason why the good Canadian educated doctors move to the US ($$$). 

I suppose the pope flies to Canada when he needs medical attention right?

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I heard that if you actually pay you go to super hospitals, or you know regular hospitals here in America.

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  On 2/24/2019 at 7:30 PM, Bozo_Casanova said:

I’ve demonstrated a number of times, and it’s worth repeating, that an American is about 6x as likely to go to another country for care as a Canadian is to come to the United States. The two biggest factors are cost and wait times. And this is only anecdotal, but as I write this I am 2 months into a 4 month waiting list to get my daughter into a pediatric rheumatologist to figure out just what the hell is wrong, despite the fact that she’s managing pain and slowly losing mobility, I have the best insurance money can buy, plenty of cash, and I live a half mile from the best children’s hospital with the highest concentration of specialists within 200 miles. Going to Houston would save me a week. Dallas Boston, NY, LA, Chicago. Same deal. I would happily go to Toronto if that had been an option, because I understand we would have only had to wait about two months.

 

Ever watch your middle school aged daughter go from dancing at a company level 3 hours a day to walking around like an elderly woman while you work the phones to no avail? Tell me more about wait times, chump.

 

 

 

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My grandmother passed away waiting on treatment in Canada for months that never came. Maybe we can agree that disease and illness is awful.

Differences aside hope your daughter gets the treatment she needs.

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  On 2/24/2019 at 7:44 PM, bad_teammate said:

Hey guys this healthcare discussion is cool and everything, but right now our nation's leaders are actively trying to foment a civil war in South America that will leads to tens of thousands of dead people and an even worse political situation.

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AKA, business as usual for Empire America.

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  On 2/24/2019 at 8:04 PM, Onboard 2.0 said:
Well his comments following that made some sense about how gov't healthcare systems seem to operate. Basic care is good, more complex procedures take time to get arranged, bad shit and yer fucked.

That’s how our system operates, too. Bad shit is bad shit the world around. Somehow everyone else in the 1st world pays a lot less and has better outcomes.

We need to stop lying to ourselves about the reality of our system, the most expensive and least cost-effective system in the world. It’s the very best at producing mountains of paperwork and giving you two more weeks of semi-conscious indignity under round the clock fluorescent lights when it’s too late to make a difference. Not the best at much else.

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I'm looking through as many sources as I can here, and here's the best I can figure it...

- Right-wing opposition (with support from US-led international alliance) organizes a couple of trucks with humanitarian aid
- Trucks are sent via a closed bridge on the Columbia/Venezuela border
- Right-wing opposition on the Columbia side fill up and throw molotovs everywhere
- Trucks catch on fire on the Columbian side
- Venezuelan troops are said to have set the trucks on fire with tear gas canisters (which... how?)
- Video actually shows the right-wing opposition on the Columbian side setting the trucks on fire with the molotovs (which actually makes sense)

 

Edited by bad_teammate
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  On 2/24/2019 at 2:44 PM, Enchubben said:

Sure when you can actually get the appointment. Sometimes it can take months to see a doctor if at all. Then there’s the actual healthcare that’s received: there is a reason why the good Canadian educated doctors move to the US ($$$). 

I suppose the pope flies to Canada when he needs medical attention right?

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100% correct. My uncle came to Houston to get treated at the Texas Heart Institute because he would have been risk for another heart attack based on the wait time to get treated on Canada.

Edited by Iconoclast Texan
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  On 2/25/2019 at 1:56 AM, David Dennison said:

The horror!

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Yes, the horror of having a loved one wait and possibly get worse or die waiting to get treated which doesn’t happen now if you have private health insurance will be something Republicans like me will bring up constantly to prevent single payer from ever happening.

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  On 2/25/2019 at 2:32 AM, Iconoclast Texan said:

Yes, the horror of having a loved one wait and possibly get worse or die waiting to get treated which doesn’t happen now if you have private health insurance will be something Republicans like me will bring up constantly to prevent single payer from ever happening.

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And you are eventually going to lose that argument. It's just a matter of time. 

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  On 2/24/2019 at 12:51 AM, Iconoclast Texan said:
I care about starving people. Ethiopians in the 80s and Venezuelans now. You can now wax poetic about no one understanding what socialism really is except for you. 

Ethiopia had a financial issue not a lack of food. There is a Harvard graduate native to the country trying to lead that change as of a few years ago. Including setting up an exchange and a system of credit which was largely unheard of there. I cannot recall her name.
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  On 2/25/2019 at 3:49 AM, bad_teammate said:
If you care about the starvation of Venezuelans...
1) Remove the economic sanctions that worsen their financial situation
2) Work through the UN and regional allies to encourage dialogue towards free and fair elections (monitored by the UN)
 

You realize your point 2 is just Charlie Brown teacher noises, right? I mean, laughably so.

For someone who says “fuck talking to nazis, we should punch them” (I kinda like this take, by the way), your sudden love for dialogue when dealing with authoritarian jackholes is interesting.
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  On 2/25/2019 at 3:54 AM, Brisketexan said:

You realize your point 2 is just Charlie Brown teacher noises, right? I mean, laughably so.

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No, it's not laughable. The UN election monitoring team does a better job of free and fair elections than our hodge podge bullshit system does. If you want laugh, look at the system that put Donald Trump in the White House and Brian Kemp in the Georgia governor's chair.

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For someone who says “fuck talking to nazis, we should punch them” (I kinda like this take, by the way), your sudden love for dialogue when dealing with authoritarian jackholes is interesting.

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"Maduro is a Nazi!" - Definitely not a neo-con interventionist thirsty for more brown people blood to spill on the altar of American exceptionalism

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  On 2/25/2019 at 2:32 AM, Iconoclast Texan said:

Yes, the horror of having a loved one wait and possibly get worse or die waiting to get treated which doesn’t happen now if you have private health insurance will be something Republicans like me will bring up constantly to prevent single payer from ever happening.

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Meh.  It doesn’t happen if you have Medicare either.  Single payer is coming.  And it can work if done properly.  

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Pat Tillman's brother:

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I’m not a war correspondent, and I don’t have a Ph.D. in political science. But I have seen these conflicts firsthand, and I have felt the effects. Like many in this country, I have lost family members and friends in both Iraq and Afghanistan. I don’t want anyone else to have to experience that. Unfortunately, the inertia over regime change in Venezuela bears a striking resemblance to what happened in the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

As one of the soldiers who illegally invaded Iraq, this scares me. I know an illegal coup/invasion when I see one. I knew it before being deployed to Iraq, but it became even more clear as we wandered around Baghdad looking for weapons of mass destruction that did not exist.

As was the case in Iraq, there are no legal or moral grounds to intervene in the affairs of Venezuela and no international laws to support such an intervention. There is nothing in the Constitution that sanctions meddling in the elections of a foreign country, and nothing in the Venezuelan constitution that legitimizes self-appointed presidents. Venezuela is not a threat. Venezuela is not firing missiles at the United States, attacking our allies or invading the U.S. with troops.

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https://www.truthdig.com/articles/a-call-to-halt-an-illegal-invasion-of-venezuela/

Tillmans are good people.

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  On 2/24/2019 at 8:43 PM, bad_teammate said:

- Venezuelan troops are said to have set the trucks on fire with tear gas canisters (which... how?

 

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If they're anything like what we use, you can definitely start a fire with tear gas canisters. Hell, you could start a fire with smoke grenades. When you pop either one, the fuse starts burning, and some of the fire shoots outward. They'd use both on us, constantly, to simulate gas attacks (horrible training technique, because you can't see the stuff that really messes you up.) A walk through the woods next to any Army base will turn up old canisters next to burnt-up pine straw.

Not to say that it had to be tear gas canisters that started the fires, but I'd definitely be pissed off if some goober started rolling canisters near machinery full of gasoline and oil.

Phun Phact: Tear Gas isn't a gas. CS grenades and canisters work by burning and suspending a powder in the air. If you stay outside of the visible cloud, you'll get a Chinese Mustard brain-burn. Go inside the cloud, you gonna have 3-foot-long boogers hanging out of your face. Personally, I'm more afraid of the colored smoke grenades-- no telling what toxic crap is burning in those.

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  On 2/25/2019 at 4:06 AM, bad_teammate said:

No, it's not laughable. The UN election monitoring team does a better job of free and fair elections than our hodge podge bullshit system does. If you want laugh, look at the system that put Donald Trump in the White House and Brian Kemp in the Georgia governor's chair.

"Maduro is a Nazi!" - Definitely not a neo-con interventionist thirsty for more brown people blood to spill on the altar of American exceptionalism

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Straw man -- I didn't say that the UN election monitoring team doesn't do a good job.  The predicate is that they have to be INVITED/ALLOWED in.  That's a big one here.  Asking authoritarians to stop being all authoritarian, and hold free and fair elections under international monitoring....well, that's as fucking pointless as asking nazis not to be all nazi-ish.

THAT'S the comparison.  He's an anti-democratic authoritarian (and you've already read my take on the fact that the differences between "socialist" authoritarians and "fascist" authoritarians are not particularly important -- they each create a privileged ruling class that loots the country's wealth for themselves, they quash dissent and any effort at democratic reform, etc. etc.).  Asking anti-democratic authoritarians to PLEASE be democratic and fair, PRETTY PLEASE is laughable.  Just like asking nazis to be nice is laughable.

I remain curious why you think that punching anti-democratic tools is cool, except when you don't.

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I wanted the humanitarian aid to get through to the starving people of Venezuela on Saturday. Unfortunately, most of it didn’t as Maduro and his thugs lit the food and medicine on fire. The silver lining is that videos of it went viral further strengthening President Guaidó and the opposition as the sole, legitimate government serving the people of their country. 

The arguments that the Fozz, bad teammate and hpslugga make against intervention are further shown to be devoid of any compassion or morality. Thankfully, the Venezuelan opposition is ready to accept international military intervention to rid themselves of the Chavista cancer. NATO bombed Yugoslavia to stop the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and achieved those objectives and had international support doing so. No one other than Iran, Cuba and Russia (fuck all of the govt’s of those countries) will oppose limited air strikes to help the opposition cause. The article mentions some lip service that a few countries like Chile have voiced some concerns about intervention. That’s just necessary lip service to assuage concerns about any imperialist motives. President Guaidó is showing incredible leadership and talent at such a young age.

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  On 2/25/2019 at 3:00 PM, Brisketexan said:

The predicate is that they have to be INVITED/ALLOWED in.  That's a big one here.  Asking authoritarians to stop being all authoritarian, and hold free and fair elections under international monitoring....well, that's as fucking pointless as asking nazis not to be all nazi-ish.

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It's a far more peaceful and likely far more successful route than military intervention or kicking off a civil war with false flags.

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I remain curious why you think that punching anti-democratic tools is cool, except when you don't.

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"Well if non-Nazi American citizens punching neo-Nazi American citizens is cool, then why are you against foreign military invasions? GET OWNED WITH LOGIC, LIB!" is one of the dumbest counter-arguments I have ever seen.

I am against foreign intervention intended to spark violence. I would be against the same if directed from outside the US into the US, even if it was aimed at people I didn't like.

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  On 2/25/2019 at 3:41 PM, bad_teammate said:

It's a far more peaceful and likely far more successful route than military intervention or kicking off a civil war with false flags.

"Well if non-Nazi American citizens punching neo-Nazi American citizens is cool, then why are you against foreign military invasions? GET OWNED WITH LOGIC, LIB!" is one of the dumbest counter-arguments I have ever seen.

I am against foreign intervention intended to spark violence. I would be against the same if directed from outside the US into the US, even if it was aimed at people I didn't like.

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Again, straw man.  If you can cite one post by me -- even one -- where I suggest an American military invasion/action, then you can keep your post up.  Otherwise, you are fucking lying.  

And even better, you keep saying that the negotiations with despots are "likely far more successful."  Support for that conclusion?  Evidence?  ANYTHING?  You keep saying over and over and over that negotiation with despots will bear fruit, as if repeating it will make it true.....what is your basis and support for that conclusion?

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