Here's a trick I've learnt to get an authentic view of events like these, a nice way to parse through the keyboard warrior and ivory tower voices and noise is to hear what Venezuelans, the millions of Venezuelan migrants, and the citizens of neighboring countries who've had to reckon with the legacy of Chavez think about this. You can extend this to anything really with good results.
No valuable insight will be gleaned from chat boards and reddit in the immediate aftermath of these sorts of events.
I've been traveling South America including Colombia, Peru, Chile, and Brazil. There are no good guys anywhere. A lot of the low wage labor come from Venezuela, and in the case of southern Brazil, Cuba. In Lima, Peru it is impossible to take an Uber without having to hear about how much a shit Maduro is. The crisis has strongly affected all countries in South America and if the Venezuelans are able return home and democratically elect a new regime it will be better for everybody.
Yeah. Exactly. There have been many regime changes in the last few centuries. It’s hard to think of more than a handful that were actually objectively better. It’s even harder to think of any where the US was involved in the overthrow and installation of the replacement, and it went well. The Marshall plan was good. Any others?
Yugoslavia in the sense that the cultures were at an unlivable state with eachother without significant autonomy. Bad from an economic perspective as the resulting nations are weaker than what a unified yugoslavia would have been today when one looks at gdp projections.
Are you from the region? Yugoslavia has been a far richer and developed country than any of its successor states for a long time, and I hardly think most locals would see the cost of human lives and untold destruction the war brought to settle some incomprehensible ethnic conflict as a good trade.
Worth remembering that Russia experienced three revolutions in the beginning of the 20th century: in winter of 1905, turning it into a constitutional monarchy at least de jure; in spring of 1917, turning that into a parliamentary republic; and in autumn of 1917, turning the parts that did not secede into a dictatorship that shortly became embroiled in a civil war. The Bolsheviks later did an impressive job of erasing the memory of the third being essentially a military coup against the second, despite their very name originating in (remarkably petty) name-calling in the parliament.
By the time the October revolution came, the Provisional Government had lost most of its popular support by choosing to continue WWI though.
Anyway, the main point is that as nice as getting rid of a dictator sounds, the consequences can be much worse than the dictatorship itself, at least in the short term (which can last for a decade or more…).
I sincerely wish the best to Venezuelans, but previous US toppling of terrible dictatorships don't have a stellar record to say the least.
Living in a country stuck in a decade of counterinsurgency warfare doesn't feel particularly great, and I'm sure the Iraqis or Afghans would agree.
> [T]he Provisional Government had lost most of its popular support by choosing to continue WWI
Whereas the Bolsheviks took very little time to effectively surrender to Germany and its allies only half a year before Germany itself surrendered to the former allies of Russia. (Thus freeing up the returning army to wage several years of civil war amongst various parts of itself.) Every option sucked here, much like in every other case during WWI.
And yes, it’s absolutely true that little good usually comes from violently overthrowing a dictator. The best results are obtained from the dictator peacefully resigning after a promise of amnesty for them and their inner circle, however crass and unfair that sounds. Generally speaking, it’s not very helpful to put people in power before a choice of either losing everything or attempting to maintain their hold on that power by whatever means necessary: it’s going to be the second one every time.
That's a very bad example, as ordinary Russians lived MUCH better lives under the USSR than they did under the Czars, at least at that time. The Czarist empire was still mostly a feudal state, and most peasants lived with no education and no money, barely scraping by. Standards of living, while still much, much lower than what was achieved in Western Europe, were still much better than what came before.
Now, can we imagine a world where the Czar was replaced with a Western-style democracy, where the Russian population would have ended up much better than they did? It's possible, sure - but there are no guarantees.
> For one, immigrants are not representative of their country, they are so biased that they left.
That's close to 20% of their population. And the most relevant factor deciding if people fled or not was whether they could reach another country before Maduro closed the borders.
To me it seems like an obvious oversight that they didn’t acknowledge the irony of mentioning on this board not to read this board’s posts.
They could’ve actually done what they stated, talked about the people, instead of just a meta-criticism of HN, which is probably the #1 type of comment on threads on HN already.
And yes I’ll acknowledge this is a meta criticism of a meta criticism.
True, but it is like saying that to know China you have to ask the nationalists in Taiwan. Or that to understand Italian resistance you have to ask the millions of people in Italy that supported fascism.
It’s not a one-way street on principle. Italy could go do whatever it wanted. It’s a one-way street in capabilities to take action.
There isn’t anything stopping Italy, the sovereign state, from doing anything it thinks it could do. What is stopping it from bombing San Francisco (besides it not making sense whatsoever) would be that the US would physically stop the Italian Air Force and navy.
The US spend years building the UN and the system of international law and it benefits a lot from it. The US is like 4% of the world population and 2% of the area, but dominates pretty much anything you care to measure. It is really not in US interest to overthrow the current system. Its wild that the main threat to international order is coming from the US. Not just this latests development, but the talk of annexing Canada and Greenland, the undermining WTO and WHO etc. Read Hobbes, even the strong do not benefit from “jungle law”.
People who drive policy believe it has already collapsed; now it’s just about asserting control over the resources that will let US(or them personally) thrive in an isolationist, post-AGI world.
The lunatic fringe has long seen global institutions as arms of a shadowy conspiracy to destroy national sovereignty and impose a world government. Far from being instruments for exerting US control, they’re seen as holding us down.
It’s just like vaccines. Why would a country deliberately weaken and sicken its population by discouraging the most effective medical interventions ever devised? Because the nuts have take over and conspiracy theories have gone mainstream.
The point is we should be adult enough in 2026 to have an international order that we can draw a line between our modern behavior and what we did in the bronze age.
If you think this kind of caveman-era diplomacy is the future And want humans to be a multi-planetary species then lol, good luck.
This word is doing a lot of lifting here. You are essentially saying "the world should be better" without even a hint of suggestion of what a minority of countries could do to achieve it (in the presence of adversarial, nuclear states)
Let's say someone is sick and they want to roll around in dog shit to cure themselves. I can say that's a bad idea and not be a doctor with a clinical diagnosis. That's a valid position.
Unilaterally bombing a country, overthrowing its government and installing a puppet leader to capture its oil reserves can be called a bad idea.
I don't need to have a fellowship at Georgetown or some sophisticated alternative.
Some things are obvious: stabbing your eye is a bad idea. no ophthalmology degree required.
It's also rather telling that nobody in Caracas seems to have really tried to stop the US from doing this, it doesn't take all that much to shoot down at least one helicopter.
You'd expect them to have air defenses on high alert 24/7 prepared to immediately respond to any US actions.
Much of this stuff is incredibly easy to hide, hard to imagine that. Surely you'd want to have MANPADS distributed widely in preparation for a possible US strike too.
No not really. Actual leftists (as opposed to authoritarians who have seized the language) have a tendency to cede power gracefully.
Look at Dilma Rousseff who stepped down without much of a fight. Mujica, Allende, Morales, the left wing is really bad at holding on to power because they give into perceptions and affectations of mass sentiment regardless of their authenticity or accuracy.
Hundreds of billions in support, massively increased defense spending, and hefty sanctions are obviously nothing..
Also much more people have been to Italy,or at least know the country and it's culture compared to Ukraine. So the Fallout in Public Opinion would be way worse. China would also be salivating at an Opportunity to isolate the US, and that would be one presented on a silver platter
China doesn't like them, Russia doesn't like them, the EU would immediately pass sanctions as it is its own territory, who else is really left? Canada and Mexico?
> Countries would be scrambling to team with the USA IMO. You see the same happen for obvious "bad actors" now.
I honestly don't see that happening. Yes, there are Hungary and Poland, but if Italy - currently a US ally - got wiped off the map for some lame reason, why would or should anyone trust their alliance with the US?
Non-EU European countries also have mixed feelings about the US (and the West in general). See Serbia for example.
> Also, I think America can make it on its own, no help. And still be a powerhouse. You don't have to agree.
Yes, I'll disagree. We once had the whole making-it-on-our-own story in many countries in Eastern Europe. There were numerous shortages of even the most basic household items like fabric softeners and coffee. Many of those countries even had some trade between each other (Comecon) but it wasn't enough and that was 50+ years ago when we weren't dependent on China for electronics and every other piece of plastic out there.
The world is now more globalized and codependent than ever. You don't have to agree with me either.
Public opinion is dead, what matters is policy makers opinion on controlling financial interests in the West, and what the CCP politbureau thinks. One is a mongrel divisive semi-hereditary plutocracy, the other is a reimagined empire that clearly has a long game going. I don't think anyone cares for the public at large, at least to the extent the public doesn't get any wild ideas like having an opinion and expressing it with a pitchfork.
Yes, you're right. It just that the comparison with Ukraine (invaded for no rational reason) + 'wiping out' made me think sejje was making a stronger (?) hypothetical.
I think we're have strayed too far from the point of ´might makes right' is bad, actually. GP very clearly chose Italy as an example because it's less polemic than the obvious option with a enormous manufacturing base and nukes.
To be clear, if we are talking about a salt-the-earth level conventional bombing for pure annexation / genocide of a EU nation the French would:
1. Remind the US via diplomatic means that they have nuclear subs and the will to use them.
2. If ignored, select some non-mainland territory (PR or Hawaii) and make a ultimatum. Mention that if the US does not desist they will wipe it, but will not launch attacks on the continental US.
3. Repeat 2 until they stop or escalate.
The French would absolutely do this, the thing you propose is so beyond the pale (even now) that the only conclusion is that the French would be next.
Absolutely. Submarine launched and with 10000km range it doesn’t even have to be in open seas. Now France would get obliterated too in response but we’re talking a scenario where the US has already « deleted » Italy so the game theory leans fatalistic
Pariahship only really matter if you care. Look at both India and China. For the past 80 years countries cared about being pariahs because there was only one real country: the United States of America. Today, there are a handful of truly sovereign countries (America, China, India, Russia, Ukraine, Iran, North Korea) who will actually defend themselves without resorting to nominal allies .
In the normal state of human affairs, being a pariah doesn't matter as long as your goals get done
It limits both sides involved in a conflict from using nuclear weapons first.
As history has clearly shown, it doesn't do much to prevent conventional wars, especially involving third parties.
I don't think anyone in power truly believes that France would actually use nuclear weapons to protect Italy during a conventional war against a nuclear power when France itself isn't in danger - let alone in a war Italy started. That's a no-win scenario for France.
Italy isn't a third party. They're both EU states. French nuclear doctrine is specifically the only one with nuclear first strikes as response to conventional threats.
If push comes to shove, I believe France is incredibly unlikely to actually attack the US with nuclear weapons regardless of what happens to Italy.
Doctrines and policies are meaningless under pressure. Would France risk global nuclear armageddon and the near-extinction of humanity for Italy? Almost certainly not, regardless of what their "doctrine" says.
They are a third party. The EU isn't a country, it's an association and it's clear that solitary between member countries only goes so far.
We saw what happened when France triggered the mutual defense clause in the EU charter after the terrorist attacked. Even when they all but begged other EU states to help them, they were rebuffed.
There's little reason to believe France would behave any differently if the roles had been reversed in the especially if there was any real risk to themselves if they got involved.
I don’t know how many Americans actually approve of this. The left will hate it. Trump’s base has largely been isolationist.
Obviously if someone like Italy bombed us we would invade and beat the shit out of them. We did a two decade, trillions of dollars revenge tour for like 2700 people dying.
(I’m not advocating for any of this but US policy is pretty consistent. Part of the value of a US passport is knowing (and everyone else knowing) that the government will go to incredible lengths to get you back.)
I don't know either but I've spotted two comments in this thread that pretty much argued for that. Multiply that by the US population ratio vs HN size and it could really add up.
Given the Jan 6th insurrection attempt (which made trump ineligible for office) I think a clear eyed spectator thinking deeply about the US political situation would find that his base will think whatever he tells them to think
The point is we say "well some people don't think much of their elected leader in X, so that justifies us destroying their cities, overthrowing their government and killing hundreds of thousands of people there!"
Alright, is this the global rule now? Where's the cutoff? Trump is getting 41%, is that low enough? Who gets to overthrow Washington? My vote is the Swedes, they seem pretty nice.
The US isn’t too progressive about addiction. The culture tends to blame it on the individual vs. the environmental causes (including over prescription of opioids) that lead to it.
We’ve pressured China to crack down on fentanyl and its precursors, which they have to some extent, but there isn’t someone to invade, really, to stop it.
Can you truly not see the fundamental difference here? Taking drugs is voluntary and the risk of drugs being laced is known by effectively everyone. Comparing THAT to people getting incinerated in their office place is nothing short of daft and insulting.
Beyond the other replies to your 'point', fent has nothing to do with Venezuela⁰. It's pretty obvious if you think about it for 5 seconds, it's a dense synthetic opioid. Is there incredible chemistry knowhow in the quite far off Venezuela? No. It makes as much sense as making meth on the Peruvian jungle.
The precursors are made in legal-ish Chinese and Indian labs and shipped to the US and Mexico (y'know close where the users are). It's finished state-side or in Mexico where the DEA has less power. In fact one of the routes is:
China Lab -> Conventional Post -> Porch of a clueless gringo with a new 'online job'-> Smuggled to Mexico -> Mexican Lab -> Smuggled to the USA -> Distribution
You say you'd disapprove a violent action. But when it actually happens? I've seen explicit support for Luigi from many otherwise apolitical and non-violent people.
Because they see what the insurance exec was doing through his job as itself being violence, as it resulted in many deaths.
They view Luigi's alleged actions as self-defense/ defense of others, i.e. morally justified.
I wouldn't personally morally disagree with someone Luigi'ing Maduro or the other guy mentioned according to that same standard, but in this situation and the knock-on hypotheticals of government intervention, this is not an individual using personal force according to their beliefs, these are governments (which have no moral rights, just the assertion/ imposition of authority by violence) expropriating them for political purposes. So not defense of others.
That's quite different. Luigi killed the banker. You're thinking of Thomas Crooks. I don't think I've seen too many Crooks fanboys.
And even then, there's a difference between that and say if it was a sniper squadron working for say, let's pick the Azerbaijan military or any other organized state force.
Anyone can already bomb the United States, and I think most people here in the US just don't imagine it happening here, no matter how much we invite a military response.
The only country I could imagine doing this is North Korea, because, while we would carpet bomb them, they can delete Seoul from the map with traditional artillery that we can’t stop.
But I don’t think that their leaders are actually suicidal. They’ve played their hand pretty well over the years, for their own survival and enrichment (no pun intended.)
Your way of life got destroyed by a guy in a cave half the world away, and then a dictator of a small country finished the job with some propaganda and some cash to grease the right palms. A response can be quite effective even if it isn't by men in uniform.
It's not "my" way of life. I'm not american. I'm just saying that it's a basic geopolitical fact that anyone who's actually foolish enough to declare war on the USA is going to get killed.
Military response means men in uniform battling for their country. Terrorism is not a military response, it's one of several ways to cope with the enemy's superior military forces. They can't overtly bomb america back to the stone age, so they resort to tradecraft and clandestine operations.
It actually works, which is why governments pull all the stops when it comes to fighting terrorists. Even this plays into their ideological objective of forcing america to compromise on its founding principles, thereby corrupting it from within.
> I'm just saying that it's a basic geopolitical fact that anyone who's actually foolish enough to declare war on the USA is going to get killed.
That's mostly true. But a bunch of Saudi's got away with it and are still getting away with it.
> They can't overtly bomb america back to the stone age, so they resort to tradecraft and clandestine operations.
> It actually works, which is why governments pull all the stops when it comes to fighting terrorists. Even this plays into their ideological objective of forcing america to compromise on its founding principles, thereby corrupting it from within.
Precisely. So now try to imagine what the effect would be if the USA started to engage in wars on the American continent. You reap what you sow and if you're the biggest bully on the block that isn't going to be any use if you can't protect your backside.
All this talk of invading Greenland, Canada, Mexico, Cuba and I probably missed some is going to backfire spectacularly, and in many ways it already does.
On the world stage I see everything on display that we try to teach our children to avoid. Lying, bullying, law breaking, it's all in our faces. And the real problem is that it is supported and even celebrated on television, in print, and socia media.
To put this in perspective, Ukraine before Russian invasion had already lost 11 million people, that left the country because it was ruled by oligarchs and mobsters. 11 millions over 52 millions makes it a gran total of 21% of the population. Making it the fourth worse demographic decline in the world. Does it mean Russia was right?
If you have some hard numbers supporting how much Americans don't like Trump and how shit is their life under Trump, then ..maybe? (Also, why the USA, why not start with North Korea, Venezuela etc first.)
We kinda have the obligation to ensure that Earth is not a practical hell for many people.
"Bomb San Francisco" can mean many things, and it is ultimately a Trolley Problem[0], but the answer is not a simple no.
About the stupidest thing I’ve ever read here. Why does a US perspective not matter when the fucking US conducted the strike? If Russia decides trump stole the election in 2024 you’d just sit back and let them take over?
You simply can’t. Just enjoy the show. Sorry, last 5 years have been a complete destruction of common sense and logic, just focus on something else to remain sane.
Yeah this is just flawed. Even people close to what is happening can be ignorant/brainwashed or (and even more likely) have ulterior motives. Venezuela doesn't exactly come across as a sophisticated nation.
We have an ongoing war in Europe because one President tried to remove the President of another country. You can perform all sorts of mental gymnastics to justify military actions, and depending on who you ask you will always get the answers you want.
I'm not arguing the point you're making. I'm saying that these discussions on these sorts of things on chat boards populated by privileged western nerds and conspicuous progressives have little merit and are merely a reflection of biases/ego of the privileged western nerd when put up against the lived experiences of people in Venezuela and neighboring states.
You're not really saying anything, in fact, just bashing everyone else's opinion.
And note that we can look at history and see that, sometimes, people's honest opinions about their own country and what is best for it happen to be wrong. Libyans were extremely happy when Gaddafi was killed - and now they're living in much worse conditions than when he was alive. Many Afghans welcomed the US toppling of the brutal taliban regime, and now after twenty years of brutal war, the taliban are back in power as if nothing happened.
It would be absolutely wonderful if the same fate doesn't happen to Venezuela. I sincerely wish and hope that they will have a provisional government which quickly organizes free and fair elections and that a much better leader is elected who can start reversing the damage Maduro did. I don't think this is particularly likely to happen, sadly, looking at the history and track-record of violent regime change by foreign powers. This observation remains true regardless of what the people of Venezuela think and hope, sadly.
That is not a reason why there is a war. The Ukrainian war is an existential one, a continuation of multiple acts of genocide performed by russians for centuries.
That is a big difference between war in Ukraine and war in Iraq or Venezuela.
Russia has unlimited objectives: destroy Ukrainian identity and sovereignty. Annex the country.
While USA has limited objectives, like to overthrow the government.
Russia would be very happy to install a puppet regime in Ukraine, as long as they had some certainty this regime would be stable and subservient to their interests. We know for a fact that they don't care about necessarily invading other countries as long as those countries are subservient: they are not planning to annex Belarus, nor did they have any real problems with Ukraine as long as it was led by their preferred leaders and it was not making any overtures to NATO or the EU.
The exact same thing will happen in Venezuela: the USA will be happy with any leader that they have confidence will represent US interests, stop doing any business with Russia or Iran, and that they think will last. If instead another member of Maduro's party looks likely to win power, either now or in the near future, they will certainly not allow that to happen, even if it were to happen as a result of free elections.
Yes, they did, and there was no attempt to annex Ukraine before that regime fell, I said as much in my comment.
Note that this is not in any way an attempt to justify Russia's actions, quite the contrary. I'm using the comparison to Russia's obviously horrible actions in Ukraine to condemn the USA's equally horrible actions in Venezuela.
In the 90s, the status of Crimea was an internal dispute in the newly-formed Ukrainian state. The status of Crimea as a part of the new Ukrainian state at this time was not yet settled in any way. The territory only became firmly a part of Ukraine in 1995.
The 2003 dispute over the island of Tuzla - whose status had not been clearly settled during the independence of Ukraine from the USSR - was settled diplomatically. If you call this occasion an "attempt to annex Ukraine", then we could equally say that "Romania attempted to annex Ukraine" when the countries had several rounds of negotiation and arbitration for control of Snake Island in the Black Sea.
The only reason Russia has been reluctant to formally annex territories it broke away from other countries until 2022 was minimizing economic damage to itself. They knew how sensitive the western countries were to forceful changes of the world map, and felt no need to inflict economic sanctions on themselves for a mere symbolic act of annexing a territory they already fully controlled.
Once that Rubicon was crossed (sanctions were in place and there was nothing to lose), they annexed the four regions of Ukraine that they partially controlled.
>> Russia stood by while everything Russian, including the Russian language which is the native language of millions of Ukrainians, was facing many restrictions
You think Ukrainians shouldn't decide which language to use? Also russian is native for millions of Ukrainians due to ethnic cleansing done by russians for centuries.
Well behaved governments will provide national minorities with everything they need to feel at home. Bilingual street signs, schools in minority's native language, churches, radio and TV broadcasts in minority's native language etc.
Any government who denies this to their national minorities should be promptly replaced as this kind of disrespect to other peoples' culture, religion and national identity inevitably leads to bad outcomes.
Information that is known to be wrong is still useful. The immediate talking points on both sides reveal quite a bit if you can read between the lines. Everyone is lying but the lies themselves are revealing.
There's no such thing as a comment "disappearing without leaving traces" on HN, except in rare cases when an author asks us explicitly to delete their post and we do. Other than that, the most that happens is that a comment gets killed (a.k.a. marked as [dead]), and anyone who wants to can see those comments in their, er, glory by turning on 'showdead' in their profile. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
We don't moderate this place to promote (or demote) any particular political agenda, let alone try to "shape" public opinion, something which sounds even more boring than soulless. As long as you're implying secret sinister processes taking place here, I think you should include some specific links so readers can make up their own minds.
No valuable insight will be gleaned from chat boards and reddit in the immediate aftermath of these sorts of events.