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[Reelya]

This is the last time I'll bump it, but the defense council (called the security council in some articles) that Maduro asked to be convened a couple of days ago has now demanded the Supreme Court to reverse their decision. This comes after Maduro also urging the SC to reverse the ruling:

http://www.euronews.com/2017/04/01/venezuela-defence-council-opposes-supreme-court

Venezuela’s Defence Council has called on the Supreme Court to review a controversial decision to annul the opposition-led Congress.

The Council as a body is there to advise the government on matters relating to security and the constitution. It brings together officials from a range of sectors, including the Army, the law, government ministers and other politicians.

https://www.afp.com/en/news/23/venezuelas-maduro-review-court-power-grab

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro announced early Saturday the country's Supreme Court would review controversial new rulings which had stripped the country's opposition-controlled legislature of power.

Maduro made the announcement in a brief televised address just after midnight Saturday, hours ahead of planned mass anti-government protests and after his own attorney general broke ranks to condemn the court rulings.

So what's the timeline here? the "coup" ruling came late Wednesday, on thursday Maduro was clearly already planning this security/defense council meeting, the meeting was on Friday, and by early Saturday morning both Maduro and the council are calling on the Supreme Court to reverse their decision. The National Assembly people were supposed to be at that meeting but they boycotted, so the meeting went ahead and Maduro & Co are now pressuring the Supreme Court to drop the ruling on their own.

What sort of "coup" do you have where you start backtracking less than 48 hours later because they people you are having the coup against refused to discuss the matter?

Another point is that the whole time Maduro has been repeatedly asking for discussions with the Assembly people on this matter since his first statement about it on thursday, but at every point they've refused to enter into a dialogue. So Maduro is now overturning the SC's decision on his own.

[Teneb]

To change the topic a bit, Paraguay's congress is on fire. Literally. Well, was.

The reason being that a vote passed allowing for the president, Horacio Cartes, to be re-elected. Reelection was forbidden in Paraguay because it had led to a brutal dictatorship that only ended in 1989. This charming fellow was inaugurated as president after the previous was impeached (which caused an uproar in the political/trade bloc and almost got Paraguay kicked out of it), and is particularly morally conservative.

During protests, the leader of Paraguay's Liberal Youth was killed by a shot to the head. The Ponte da Amizade (Friendship Bridge (as if)) was blocked by protesters.

Some photos.

[Reelya]

BTW BBC and nytimes are both running stories now saying that Venezuela's Supreme Court has dropped the power grab. Mind you, that nytimes story is about the shortest thing they've ever written about Venezuela. It's designed to be a tiny story buried near the back, now let's never mention the story again ...

~~~

The Paraguay story is also a good litmus test on how the international media frames stories based on who's in power. You've got a secret vote in the Senate which implemented a constitutional amendment removing term limits on the President, and you've got opposition groups calling it a coup and conducting protests. So it's a similar type of story to Venezuela.

So how is BBC covering this? Are they screaming about the coup and an attack on democracy? Of course not!

BBC is taking the "out of control violent protestors" angle for Paraguay:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/search?q=paraguay

Not one of the headlines tells you why they're angry, just angry people burnin' stuff, no specific reason ...

But check this out:

Opposition activist Rodrigo Quintana, 25, was killed by a rubber bullet fired by police when they stormed the offices of the opposition Liberal party, party leader Efrain Alegre told Efe news agency.

"The police barged in, threw people face down to the ground," according to Mr Alegre, who was also hurt. "They came in aggressively, breaking the doors, it was savagery."

So this dead guy wasn't killed while protesting, he was killed when the cops stormed the office of a rival political party to the government. Yet we're still not framing this as a problem for democracy.

The cops don't actually barge into rival political headquarters shooting guns in Venezuela, but the media is giving Paraguay a free pass here and framing the headlines as being the protestors fault? Really?

[Teneb]

The cops don't actually barge into rival political headquarters shooting guns in Venezuela, but the media is giving Paraguay a free pass here and framing the headlines as being the protestors fault? Really?

My guess is that no one likes Paraguay.

I'm only partially being sarcastic, by the way.

[Reelya]

There's also the fact that the party pulling off this abolition of term limits in Paraguay are in fact the same party that ran the military dictatorship from 1954-1989, then kept getting elected from 1989-2008.

In 2008 they somehow lost an election, but managed to backstab the new president in 2012 and put one of their own people back in, a right-wing tobacco plantation owner. Now, they've conducted secret votes to overturn the constitution so he can keep being re-elected.

And, according to the actual quotes in one of the BBC stories, it was clear the death was because the cops used the chaos as cover to physically storm opposition HQ while firing guns. Cops who clearly still have institutional loyalties to the party that's held the country in an iron grip for 60 years.

The BBC doesn't think that any of this is relevant backstory you need to know to understand the issues here, you just need to know the protestors are crazy fuckers who want to burn everything.

[Sergarr]

That's because Paraguay isn't host to the cancer that is socialism. They get a pass, because we know that, eventually, they'll return to the right, correct path of capitalism and democracy.

[Teneb]

That's because Paraguay isn't host to the cancer that is socialism. They get a pass, because we know that, eventually, they'll return to the right, correct path of capitalism and democracy.

Tone it down. I know that your country had a bad history with assholes using communism/socialism as an excuse to be totalitarian, but capitalism isn't all rainbows and sunshine either. Because while you were having your communist dictatorship, my country had a far-right, US-backed military dictatorship, as did pretty much every country in this continent.

Communism/Socialism is about as bad as Capitalism. Which is to say, they are both very pretty on paper and extremely abusable (is this even a word?) in practice.

[TheBiggerFish]

I believe that was sarcasm.

[Teneb]

I believe that was sarcasm.

Nah, he's posted stuff like this over various threads.

[Sergarr]

That's because Paraguay isn't host to the cancer that is socialism. They get a pass, because we know that, eventually, they'll return to the right, correct path of capitalism and democracy.

Tone it down. I know that your country had a bad history with assholes using communism/socialism as an excuse to be totalitarian, but capitalism isn't all rainbows and sunshine either. Because while you were having your communist dictatorship, my country had a far-right, US-backed military dictatorship, as did pretty much every country in this continent.

Communism/Socialism is about as bad as Capitalism. Which is to say, they are both very pretty on paper and extremely abusable (is this even a word?) in practice.

...you must be joking. Equalizing socialism with capitalism?! Socialism has killed several dozen million people through famines! Socialism was so bad that it was maintained almost solely through the force of arms - everyone sane fucking ran towards capitalism the moment USSR has stopped actively suppressing movements for freedom and sovereignty!

How can you look at all that and say "oh but they're actually both just as shitty"? The most obvious counter-argument here is that, unlike with capitalism, there is no "nice" variant of socialism, it's all complete shit.

You don't want your country to suffer for decades under the oppressive Red jackboot? Then don't choose socialism. Ever. Please.

[Reelya]

Depends what you're measuring. What about life expectancy?



Russia was way behind, but almost completely caught up to France and the USA during the 1950s. It tanked after 1990, but is rising again, but not like the postwar period.

China meanwhile are still basically commies and their life expectancy is rocketing past Russia's now. Also note other Asian nations on the list which are strongly lagging in life expectancy and are not in any way socialists.

Also consider infant mortality rates.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_mortality_rate#List_by_the_World_Health_Organization

Good ol' capitalist India has an infanty mortality rate of 30 / 1000 live births, whereas evil communist China has an infant mortality rate of 12 / 1000 live births.

India does not have a National health insurance or universal health care system for all its citizens which has allowed the private sector to become the dominant healthcare provider in the country.

So good one India! You kill an extra 18 babies per 1000 births compared to China, by leaving it to the "magic of capitalism"! That's 1.8% of everyone born in India killed unnecessarily in the name of capitalism.

Just counting against the 1.34 billion people alive in India right now, they're missing 25 extra million siblings who died as babies due to having a private health system. And of course that doesn't count the missing siblings of other people who have been born there since the end of WWII, at which point China and Japan developed socialized healthcare and India did not. The total extra infant death toll for capitalism in India since WWII is around 100 million avoidable deaths.

And that's not even counting any other cause of mortality, all of which are higher in India than asian countries with socialized medicine. Indians lose 10 years off their lives on Average compared to the Chinese. If you calculate the death toll in terms of years of life lost, they lose 1/7th of their entire lives to the joys of capiltalism.

[redwallzyl]

interesting how china's life expectancy just vanishes. wonder why that was, no data maybe.

[Reelya]

Lack of data and political fragmentation combined. There kind of needs to be someone to collect the data, which implies a stable government.

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.DYN.MORT
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_mortality_rate
Edited with better data. I'd heard that India's private health system could be blamed for a lot of deaths but I never actually figured out the numbers before. The gap is indeed huge. 4.8% of Indians die before their 5th birthday compared to only 1.1% of Chinese. The Chinese have reduce infant mortality by a factor of 11 since 1950, whereas India only reduced it by a factor of 4.

The difference is socialized medicine vs India's for-profit healthcare system. Assuming India should have reduced infant deaths by the same factor as China to be equal, they should have a current under-5 death rate of about 1.6%. That would be roughly an equal improvement to China, based on where they started from.

So for every currently living Indian there are a missing 3.2% of the population who are their dead siblings killed by the capitalist medical system, who would be alive if India kept pace with China. That's 42 million people, and it doesn't count missing siblings of already-dead people, missing children they would have had, nor does it take into account that Indians only live 65 years to Chinese 75 years, when in fact, up to the 1950s, it was Indians who lived longer. Every Indian is missing 1/7th of their lives compared to the Chinese - this figure takes infant mortality into account however. Since everyone dies eventually, the only relative measure that makes sense is to measure how many lifetimes worth of time have been lost in one system vs the other. Since each Indian has lost 1/7th of their lifespan compared to China, that's about 200 million extra lost lifetimes worth of living for the current 1.4 billion Indian people because India's healthcare didn't improve as rapidly as China.

I've read figures from years ago estimating that capitalist deprivations killed 100 million Indians unnecessarily, and just crunching the infant mortality rates and lower life expectancy data backs that up.

Lives lost unnecessarily from India's shitty capilalist healthcare system post-WWII is the biggest genocide in history.

[Sergarr]

Depends what you're measuring. What about life expectancy?



Russia was way behind, but almost completely caught up to France and the USA during the 1950s. It tanked after 1990, but is rising again, but not like the postwar period.

By "almost caught up" you mean "barely reached within the region of 5 years and then started to fall off again"? And, speaking of fast rising, look at capitalist France in post-war period. Now that's fast.

China meanwhile are still basically commies and their life expectancy is rocketing past Russia's now. Also note other Asian nations on the list which are strongly lagging in life expectancy and are not in any way socialists.

And by "basically commies" you mean "economically almost entirely capitalist", right. Historically, when they were economically socialist, their life expectancy was in the gutter. As seen on this very graph. This graph is also omitting quite a few of the Asian capitalist countries with long life expectancy, such as South Korea, Japan and Singapore. As for the others, I've heard that their problems are mostly due to massive corruption - an issue that plagues even capitalist nations. Though, in socialism it would've been definitely worse.

Also consider infant mortality rates.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_mortality_rate#List_by_the_World_Health_Organization

Good ol' capitalist India has an infanty mortality rate of 30 / 1000 live births, whereas evil communist China has an infant mortality rate of 12 / 1000 live births.

India does not have a National health insurance or universal health care system for all its citizens which has allowed the private sector to become the dominant healthcare provider in the country.

So good one India! You kill an extra 18 babies per 1000 births compared to China, by leaving it to the "magic of capitalism"! That's 1.8% of everyone born in India killed unnecessarily in the name of capitalism.

Just counting against the 1.34 billion people alive in India right now, they're missing 25 extra million siblings who died as babies due to having a private health system. And of course that doesn't count the missing siblings of other people who have been born there since the end of WWII, at which point China and Japan developed socialized healthcare and India did not. The total extra infant death toll for capitalism in India since WWII is around 100 million avoidable deaths.

And that's not even counting any other cause of mortality, all of which are higher in India than asian countries with socialized medicine. Indians lose 10 years off their lives on Average compared to the Chinese. If you calculate the death toll in terms of years of life lost, they lose 1/7th of their entire lives to the joys of capiltalism.

China isn't communist in the part that matters here - economically, they're very much capitalist.

Lack of data and political fragmentation combined. There kind of needs to be someone to collect the data, which implies a stable government.

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.DYN.MORT
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_mortality_rate
Edited with better data. I'd heard that India's private health system could be blamed for a lot of deaths but I never actually figured out the numbers before. The gap is indeed huge. 4.8% of Indians die before their 5th birthday compared to only 1.1% of Chinese. The Chinese have reduce infant mortality by a factor of 11 since 1950, whereas India only reduced it by a factor of 4.

The difference is socialized medicine vs India's for-profit healthcare system. Assuming India should have reduced infant deaths by the same factor as China to be equal, they should have a current under-5 death rate of about 1.6%. That would be roughly an equal improvement to China, based on where they started from.

So for every currently living Indian there are a missing 3.2% of the population who are their dead siblings killed by the capitalist medical system, who would be alive if India kept pace with China. That's 42 million people, and it doesn't count missing siblings of already-dead people, missing children they would have had, nor does it take into account that Indians only live 65 years to Chinese 75 years, when in fact, up to the 1950s, it was Indians who lived longer. Every Indian is missing 1/7th of their lives compared to the Chinese - this figure takes infant mortality into account however. Since everyone dies eventually, the only relative measure that makes sense is to measure how many lifetimes worth of time have been lost in one system vs the other. Since each Indian has lost 1/7th of their lifespan compared to China, that's about 200 million extra lost lifetimes worth of living for the current 1.4 billion Indian people because India's healthcare didn't improve as rapidly as China.

I've read figures from years ago estimating that capitalist deprivations killed 100 million Indians unnecessarily, and just crunching the infant mortality rates and lower life expectancy data backs that up.

Lives lost unnecessarily from India's shitty capilalist healthcare system post-WWII is the biggest genocide in history.

Again, what you call as "socialized medicine" is actually capitalist medicine, as it's economically more effective than the "for-profit alternative". What you should be blaming here is corruption that influences things towards being more profitable for the local parts that are directing this corruption, rather than for the economy as a whole.

Same deal as with USA and Europe, really - USA is just simply more corrupt. Corruption is the issue here, not that "it's more capitalist". And it's not an issue that can be fixed by going socialist - in fact, it's far more likely to make the issue worse, much worse, because socialism naturally attracts the worst kind of corrupt individuals to the positions of power. Which is yet another reason why it's a failed ideology that should never again be implemented in another country.

Never again!

[smjjames]

USA is more corrupt than Europe (and Russia IS an European country, like it or not)? Look who's talking, Sergarr.... pfft.

Don't mistake partianship for corruption though. The Republicans are terrible in general however, so, there's that.