One week, the administration declared that eggs would now be sold for no more than 30 cents a carton. The next week, eggs had disappeared from supermarkets, and still have not come back.
Hannah Dreier on Venezuela’s end-stage socialism:
In the early days, the shortages seemed almost whimsical. My Venezuelan friends were used to going on Miami shopping sprees. When I made trips home, they asked me to bring back perfume, leather jackets, iPhones and condoms. I usually took two near-empty suitcases to carry back the requests, plus food and toiletries for myself. As the crisis deepened, the requests became harder to fill, and traced the outlines of darker personal dramas: Medication for heart failure. Paediatric epilepsy drugs. Pills to trigger an abortion. Gas masks.
And things were still somehow getting worse. The first time I saw people line up outside the bakery near my apartment, I stopped to take photos. How crazy: A literal bread line. Then true hunger crept into where I lived. People started digging through the trash at all hours, pulling out vegetable peelings and soggy pizza crusts and eating them on the spot. That seemed like rock bottom. Until my local bakery started organising lines each morning, not to buy bread, but to eat trash.
And from a safe distance, our betters speak.
Current Doonesbury reruns . . .
17/7/31
17/8/1
17/8/2
17/8/3
One-upmanship among the delusional continues apace…
So Ray Stevens was something of a prophet then…
Pinochet is Batman on a very, very bad day.
So he was the Punisher then.
I once commented that I’d read that Pinochet killed fewer people during his entire reign than Castro had during his first year in power. I was promptly chided that I should not have a “calculus of evil”. I still think I’d rather have lived in Pinochet’s Chile than Castro’s Cuba.
So all this talk of Pinochet had me review his wiki-documented history. Interesting that the word “murder” shows up, based on how the page is today, 16 times. All in reference to Pinochet and his government. Soooo….flipping over to El Presidente Fidel Castro’s wiki, the word “murder” appears exactly three times. Once in a quote from Fidel saying that he was “executing murderers” who deserved it. Once when Marco Rubio was quoted as calling him such. And once in the footnotes in the title of a book referencing murder in the Caribbean.
The word “torture” appears 17 times on Pinochet’s wiki. The first half dozen I looked at were all in reference to the use of torture by Pinochet’s government. On Fidel’s page, the word “torture” appears exactly five times. All in reference to the use of torture by governments preceding Fidel’s.
Go figure.
Torture for extraction of information- torture. Torture for the giggles by the Castros, draining people of all their blood while alive – merely a bit of innocent whimsy.
“Pinochet represents the id of someone with total and unremitting sanity, unrestrained by conscience”
No conscience? Can you substantiate that? There have been many who had a conscience and who did terrible things that that would have preferred not to do but which they did because they knew the alternatives wwe worse.
I recall someone condemning the generals who planned the Dieppe raid knowing that they were probably sending men to their deaths because they needed to learn more about conducting an amphibious landing in France.
I wouldn’t necessarily contend that he had no conscience, merely that his certainty of what to do and how was not obviously bounded by one. No “but I can’t do it that way” quailing.
Conscience could be a liability – interesting topic of argument.
“No ‘but I can’t do it that way’ quailing.”
But we don’t really know what his thoughts were before he decided to do what he did.
And why would a decision to refrain from staging a coup be evidence that he was bounded by a conscience while a decision to stage a coup would be evidence of the opposite? One can make an excellent argument that if one understands the consequences of a Stalinist seizure of power, then one’s conscience would demand that one take all necessary steps to prevent that from happening.
Interesting comparison. One time playing Bane in an online rpg, I had him go back and take over Santa Prisca. Pinochet was who I modeled him on.
Soooo….flipping over to El Presidente Fidel Castro’s wiki, . . . On Fidel’s page, the word “torture” appears exactly five times. All in reference to the use of torture by governments preceding Fidel’s.
Go figure.
. . . Torture for the giggles by the Castros, draining people of all their blood while alive – . . .
Hmmm. So the authoritative source—stop snickering, you—doesn’t mention something about draining blood which does seem a rather suspiciously extreme story to claim of Castro, et al.
Therefore; A very easy bit of Googlemancy, does seem to turn up some certainly documentable sources.
Following that, one does note that the Website Of Record does rely entirely on volunteer contributors and editors, such as someone noticing some fact or another is missing from an article.
Perhaps if should someone feel the slightest bit bored sometime, there does appear to be a very handy project that someone can so helpfully contribute to.
I recall someone condemning the generals who planned the Dieppe raid knowing that they were probably sending men to their deaths because they needed to learn more about conducting an amphibious landing in France.
A fictional note, but also given Ephemeraren’t . . .
Oh, and in parallel, my two favorite Star Trek episodes just happen to be In The Pale Moonlight and Thine Own Self.
Perhaps if should someone feel the slightest bit bored sometime, there does appear to be a very handy project that someone can so helpfully contribute to.
Yeah, I get your point. But been there done that. Hal, I am not ignorant of the fact that Wiki gets its info from contributors. But do you really think not ONE SIGNLE PERSON who has viewed Castro’s wiki page has thought to contribute such? My point, if I must spell it out, is the general culture, including the information and historical culture, is decidedly, absurdly shifted far to the left. What I didn’t state, but will now, is that the more we pay people to sit on their asses and do nothing, the more time some of them have that eventually gravitates to seizing intellectual territory. Language territory. Not that I disagree that we should dive in there and fight it out but I have other work to do, unlike the leftist clowns who seem to be in control of these things. Given that you seem to enjoy pointing such inaccuracies out, why don’t you give it a try and let us know how it goes?
I have made maybe a dozen Wikipedia contributions in my life. Mostly benign, non-political things such as the effectiveness of the bazooka in the Pacific in WW2, the odd baseball or rock and roll tid bit. One of my two ventures into wikiing even remotely political facts was upon observing that the Pol Pot entry mentioned his having been a student at a French engineering school, EFR. When clicking over to EFR I noticed they had a “Notable Alumni” section that did not mention him. My OCD required that I add him. Well that kicked off an interesting debate. We went round and round for a bit with the argument that such was just an urban legend or such told to each other by students. It finally seems to have settled on “attended but failed his exams”. A similar debate has raged on Ted Bundy’s page regarding “cause of death” oscillating from “homicide” (I think at one time it did read “murder”) to “execution by electrocution” as it stands (temporarily of course) now.
And to cut the inevitable argument off at he pass, of course Wiki is a poor source of historical accuracy. In most cases. But it has to a significant extent become the document of record for the vast majority of people. Wrong as that may be, the culture is what it is.
The regime in Cuba is itself well aware of Wikipedia’s existence.
On a side note, a few years ago I ran across an article regarding evidence that most of those Pinochet was alleged to have “disappeared” may have in fact disappeared themselves. In other words, they fled the country they would have turned, or would have been used to turn (as useful idiots) into the next Cuba.
Pinochet was a political equivalent of a Patton or a Sherman. He knew the followers of Marx viewed their struggle as a (holy) war, and he treated it as a war.
Doesn’t the situation in Venezuela prove that the United States did the right thing when they tried to stop the marxist/socialist/communist revolutions in the Americas during the Cold War? Now, I happen to believe that the Latin American countries should have been allowed to ruin their nations by turning them into communist hellholes, but I can’t help thinking that maybe the Americans were onto something…
Pinochet may be the only 20th century dictator who left his country in better shape than when he found it.
Ataturk.
Lee Kwan Yew.
There would also be many people who would argue the case for Admiral Horthy, Anwar Sadat and Chiang Kai Shek (for Taiwan). I can imagine people arguing that Suharto, Józef Piłsudski, etc did more harm than good, albeit they also had large downsides.
None of these men were full on dictators, but then neither was Pinochet. Most kept their killing to direct enemies — as they didn’t have to deal with the ridiculous concept of “class enemies”. The best didn’t even have to kill anyone much.
Nor did they have to jail and harrass “wreckers” since their economies were successful. In fact, if you run the country well, most people will barely even consider you a dictator, and hence you can pretend to be a Prime Minister like Lee Kwan Yew or Mahathir Mohamad.
Speaking of Lee Kuan Yew, there’s a funny story I heard about him, which may or may not be true, but certainly sounds like the sort of thing he might do, concerning one of the alleged means by which he maintained his semi-dictatorial one-party rule for several decades.
Consider the following: if an opposition party were growing strong enough to challenge Lee’s rule, then it is practically a tautology that such a party would contain many politicians and have a lot of money flowing around.
And as the cynics will tell us, it is a trivial piece of political arithmetic that if you put a lot of politicians in a room with a lot of money, the result will be corruption.
So whenever an opposition party started looking like a threat, Lee would simply have the police send some investigators to check for corruption, and they’d find some.
And what I find wonderful about this routine is that it superficially has the form of “arrest political dissidents”, but here on entirely legitimate causes rather than trumped-up excuses from some tinpot dictator.
“Pinochet should be praised for one thing : he left without a bloody war.”
Merely a bloody “peace”.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/chile-dictatorship-victim-toll-bumped-to-40-018-1.998542