MudMan

For the record, I’m not American and I live in a country that has non-democratic regimes well within living memory.

You don’t come across to me as particularly savvy, or as some form of a realist compared to the cushy liberal democracy children. You come across as deeply confusing cynicism with political insight for online brownie points.

Do with that assessment what you will.

I guess it’s a lot easier to “look at history” a certain way if you make up the history.

I have too much to do today to deliberate the specifics of your historical fan fiction, man. You do you.

It depends on what “crap” is involved specifically and your use case, I suppose.

I think it’s worth calling out that Win11 does indeed look extremely different depending on what settings you pick. Even out of the box my Win11 does not look like the mess a lot of the online advocacy likes to show. I’m guessing a bunch of the settings are saved to the MS account (which is again something people insist on considering anathema but I’ve used since before it was cool to hate it for several unrelated reasons).

Win11 has some quirks (where is my vertical dock, MS, it’s been years), some inexplicable technical flaws (how is your indexing so bad, MS, and why is the online search-enabled start menu so slow but the multisearch bar instant) and it is occassionally annoying to have to keep up with poorly communicated new features I don’t care about (what’s new screens, MS, they exist for a reason), but it’s mostly just… you know, Windows.

I’ll say this, if all my system partitions exploded today and I had to reinstall everything I’d definitely have an easier time getting back to where I was from scratch on my Windows devices/drives than on my Linux ones.

Semi-genuine question, had you heard of Venezuela before today?

Like, in your view, had the successive US leaders just decided to ignore Maduro (and Chávez before him) for the past 25 years out of… what? Not having noticed they had a ton of oil? Venezuela nationalized their oil in the 70s, pivoted to China in the 00s. They stole the election while Biden was still in office. Chávez changed the Constitution when Clinton was in office, FFS.

Apparently Trump’s key differentiating attribute now is efficiency, because it seems in your broad strokes, the-rest-is-noise worldview the Dems were just about to throw a sack over Maduro’s head, they had just been procrastinating about it for a decade or two.

This is, sincerely, a profoundly stupid conversation we’re having. They really do let people just say things on the Internet.

No, that’s not a remotely acceptable representation of what happened today, of the policies and strategies at play or the history of the situation. At all.

Does the US have a history of intervening in foreign regimes? Sure. For access to natural resources? Definitely. Except in Latin America the Monroe doctrine had been phased out since the Cold War, and whatever version of it got implemented as the “War on Terror” in the Middle East was patently a disaster and very much a contentious issue that was not widely bipartisan in the first place.

This is a “neocolonial legacy” spanning all political sides in the same way France suddenly deciding to invade Vietnam in 2026 would be a continuation of a colonial legacy. Which is to say only in the most superficial, entirely ahistorical reading possible.

Which is, incidentally, why Maduro was currently in power when he very likely had stolen the election, was actively disputed and actively hostile to every party in the US political spectrum. Not because the US was setting up a coup, but because they were… not doing that despite some pressure, internally and externally, to do so.

And in turn it’s presumably why Trump is out there saying he has no intention to give the country over to Machado and nobody knows what the fuck is going on.

So no, the outcome wouldn’t be the same, the process wouldn’t be the same. The geopolitical view underpinning the situation wouldn’t have been the same (in that this is bucking a trend that started in what? the 80s?) and it’s not all part of the same, bipartisan approach to geopolitics. If you squint any harder to make it seem that way you may pop out an eyeball.

I had no particular desier to see Maduro remain in power indefinitely, but holy hell is the notion of looking at the Trump blitzkrieg play out and go “Harris would have been doing the same, just nicer” a massive, epoch-defining missing of the point. It’d be funny if it wasn’t horrifying.

See, unlike people willing to retroactively support their preferred choices I am making zero assumptions about what’s going to happen.

What Trump says is going to happen and what happens don’t necessarily line up, and there is zero indication that under a different US regime the outcome would be anywhere close to Maduro being deposed. That ship seemed to have very thoroughly sailed at the time of the election.

And certainly, CERTAINLY not this way. Not by kidnapping Maduro by force and hoping that somehow the internal opposition groups are spooked enough to put forward zero resistance to an opposition government as a US puppet. Even if that is nominally implemented at any point, that’s a whole bunch of new ships that need sailing.

So no, not at all the same, not at all an outcome you would have expected from a dem government and not at all something consistent with US geopolitical stances in the past what? thirty, forty years?

The one thing I’ve learned today is that cosplay online leftists will say pretty much anything and that I’m pretty sure any even vaguely left of center leader in the Americas is currently re-reading their emergency protocols. Including those in Canada. And certainly in Greenland.

I fully believe that you can write fan fiction for evil dems that will take you to whatever arbitrary ending this situation happens to have.

It’s a prodigious stretch to argue that “the outcome is the same” at this point, though. Especially since there is every justification for a solution without Maduro in power that isn’t an illegitimate coup. Because… you know, Maduro did not have legitimacy in the first pace, arguably.

But hey, who cares about details like what was actually happening or what people actually said or did, right? If you squint hard enough it all blurs together sufficiently to keep posting simplistic crap online.

The argument from authority doesn’t make the point more or less valid.

If anything, bringing the quote over out of context shows how chillingly unserious it is:

Faced off against a nihilistic, endlessly cruel manifestation of conservatism, and somehow managed to make it close.

Well, where was the left? Where in the ballot was El-Akkad? Where were the righteousy outraged when something could have been done other than comfortable in their outrage and abdicating responsibility?

Being on the right side of the argument and having no power to enact the right decision is equivalent to not being right at all. And yes, once all other possibilities are boiled down to two, you have to pick one. If you do not, then you picked the one that won.

And that may not be the best way to do it, but until such time as Omar and you have successfully revolted and implemented a superior alternative, that’s how it works. And work it did. So not Palestine is seriously considered as a potential location for a strip mall and Nicolás Maduro is presumably sitting on some CIA dark site somewhere because holy crap, dumbest dystopia.

Anyway, whatever. Not worth going back and forth on this. The blame adjudication is useless and, more to the point, entirely up to me. You can tell Omar I blame him, too, if he ever signs your moral justification pamphlet for fascism.

You do know it.

Be honest for a second.

You know.

FWIW, I don’t think it’d be a particularly unpopular opinion to support an intervention of some kind after the presidential election went the way it went. There are still plenty of people out there disingenuously pretending this is that.

But this is obviously not that. This is absolute insanity.

You said it, not me.

Yes, the lesser of two evil is still evil. And that’s the one you vote for, or want the locals to vote for, because we’re not running on Hannah Barbera levels of cartoon logic.

I swear, burn down the Internet. It was all a mistake.

They demonstrably do not, on account of one of the two just having, and I can’t believe I have to keep typing this out, just kidnapped the president of Venezuela and his wife.

I am pretty sure that’s not some bipartisan policy. That’s the ending of a Metal Gear sequel.

That’s the lesson, isn’t it? People just say things online, and the things need to get entirely dissociated from basic reality before it starts showing that they’re just things people say on the Internet.

Screw under-16s. Social media should be banned altogether.

No, it’s not, that’s not how that works. If one side is ideologically unpalatable and the other side is a gaggle of crazy fascists it’s perfectly valid to propose that one of the two sides is better than the other. Especially if you don’t have as much of a vested interest in domestic reform.

That’s an absurdly childish stance.

Who is “you”? I’m not American.

But there are differences between both US political parties, and given the choice, any non-American should absolutely be hoping the actively fascist party loses, obviously.

The notion that they’re both equivalent is so farcical it didn’t hold up to any scrutiny at the time when it mattered, and anybody that pushed that notion then is now partially responsible for this whole mess.

Man, save me from cosplayers playing at revolution online.

It’s embarrassing, you know? Like watching your little child try to act like you and accidentally exposing all your garbage.

Ah, we’ve moved on to the “maybe they wouldn’t have done this batshit crazy thing, but they would have done other things that are bad, so they’re the same”.

Except, obviously, a good way of telling that two things aren’t the same is that they’re different. Also, in cased you missed it, Trump bombed Nigeria on Christmas day. So this isn’t an “or” thing, this is an “and” thing.

No faction in the US represents my interests, on account of my not being American.

But man, if I have to choose which faction is more likely to, say, roll up with tanks into Greenland, annex Canada or, and I can’t repeat this enough, bomb Caracas and kidnap Nicolás Maduro and his goddamn wife, I am pretty sure there is a single correct answer.

Well, let’s see who is in charge in Venezuela by next week, if anybody, and then we can talk about that. It’s one thing to… and again, holy shit, kidnap the sitting president and his wife, and another to enact a regime change without all-out violence.

Anyone who says they know what happens next is probably lying. Trump very much included.

You… think the differentiating element there is domestic vs foreign policy? That’s the objection you…

… you know what? I rest my case.

Yes, you weirdo.

In what universe would Harris bomb Venezuela and kidnap Nicolás Maduro and his wife? Are you nuts?

At some point the people just doubling down on this train of thought just make me reassess how warped and delusional the argument was during the actual election. I guess when you have the luxury of a hypothetical you can just go forever. Trump will pass a law requiring him to rub his bare ass onto every single female politician and these guys will be going “do you really not think Harris would have her hairy asshole pushed onto people as well?”

We live in the dumbest dystopia.