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[Iduno]

Putting bounties on heads of state is usually bad practice indeed, conventions about diplomatic immunity etc.
Must be said that there are few countries left in the world that recognize Maduro as president of Venezuela.

What even sparked putting bounties on the Venezuelan heads of state?

According to US minister of Justice, William Barr, 'Maduro has turned his country into a criminal organistation, using it's airforce bases to smuggle cocaine into the US'.

Yeah, and you want to know who set them up for that? The United States, in the 80's.

[Naturegirl1999]

Venezuela continues to commit the horrid crime of not being a puppet state of the US. Personally, I think they should get a crash nuclear program as soon as possible, unlike Iran they don't have much else to deter US aggression.

what? This implies there are puppet states already? American his1tory never mentioned the US having puppet states, I wonder what else wasn’t taught

[SalmonGod]

Venezuela continues to commit the horrid crime of not being a puppet state of the US. Personally, I think they should get a crash nuclear program as soon as possible, unlike Iran they don't have much else to deter US aggression.

what? This implies there are puppet states already? American his1tory never mentioned the US having puppet states, I wonder what else wasn’t taught

I have a feeling you're not being sarcastic?

[Naturegirl1999]

Venezuela continues to commit the horrid crime of not being a puppet state of the US. Personally, I think they should get a crash nuclear program as soon as possible, unlike Iran they don't have much else to deter US aggression.

what? This implies there are puppet states already? American his1tory never mentioned the US having puppet states, I wonder what else wasn’t taught

I have a feeling you're not being sarcastic?

correct. From the way you said it, and thst the US doesn’t have bounties on other world leaders, it sounded to me like it implied thst the US has puppet states. I am a US citizen, so we learn thst the Soviets had puppet states, that the Nazi Germans had puppet states, but we don’t learn if our country had or still has puppet states

[Doomblade187]

Now, I do hate Maduro. Terrible dood, totalitarian and such. I also very much dislike our trend of supporting pro-US governments at the cost of human rights. (Iran, Iraq, are common examples)

Edit: Basically, two things can be true, and this is a case where the leader is both anti-human rights and anti-US, and the US putting a bounty on a foreign leaders head is WTF level shady.

[Frumple]

I mean, we got our hand so far up the sauds ass you can see tiny US flag patterned fingernails inside their leadership's mouths when they talk, just as a sort of representative example. There's others I can't be arsed to remember. Plenty of places are heavily dependent on U.S. whims to the point puppet state isn't exactly out of line, and we've murdered (directly or otherwise) heads of state or whatev' and replaced them with our personal tinpot dictators, like... repeatedly... over the course of our history. There's not a perfect dance tune to the puppeteering mostly because we're A) kinda' inept chucklefucks with more power than sense and B) don't actually give a damn about what they do so long as the money et al is flowing in.

Our history courses don't tend to teach much about that stuff until college at best, though. The general state of U.S. history education is nearly as memetically bad as the state of our geography education.

[misko27]

The US now has the most COVID-19 cases of any country, standing at 81,321.

[SalmonGod]

Venezuela continues to commit the horrid crime of not being a puppet state of the US. Personally, I think they should get a crash nuclear program as soon as possible, unlike Iran they don't have much else to deter US aggression.

what? This implies there are puppet states already? American his1tory never mentioned the US having puppet states, I wonder what else wasn’t taught

I have a feeling you're not being sarcastic?

correct. From the way you said it, and thst the US doesn’t have bounties on other world leaders, it sounded to me like it implied thst the US has puppet states. I am a US citizen, so we learn thst the Soviets had puppet states, that the Nazi Germans had puppet states, but we don’t learn if our country had or still has puppet states

The short answer is it's complicated.  We have been engaging in puppet statery for a long time, but not *typically* as directly as your other examples.  But we have probably engaged in more of it than those examples ever did.  The complicating factors are that the issue is muddied by the issue not always being a product of actions by the USA as a state, but rather that the USA is the seat of power for most of the world's global corporate powers who as an overall combined structure are nearly inseparable in essence from the national power structure of the USA.  That and a lot of stuff being done through the USA's intelligence agencies, who have sorta done their own thing with global impunity for much of their history, without much respect for paper trails.

The USA has basically terrorized South America regularly since the end of WW2.  We've been involved in militarily or economically forcing regime change and fomenting terminal instability of almost every nation of that continent. 

I'll just leave you with Operation Condor and Confessions of an Economic Hit Man as mere starting points.  Go down the rabbit hole.

[Naturegirl1999]

Wow...No wonder others tries see the USA as evil

[Max™]

The US fucking with central/south america started way before WW2, we don't talk about it for some reason these days but we've been busily cultivating compliant governments down south since Teddy was running around. Shit, we once held Cuba and the Phillipines and these were a thing though I don't recall much talk about them in school: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars but after we stopped directly dicking around in the nearer southern countries we set to work further south.

As for reelection, it seems comforting that someone who clearly looks up to authoritarian strongmen has turned out to be a complete fuckup. The full economic and human effects of the pandemic will be much easier to see by the time of the election, and rather than using this ready made opportunity to seize more power and authority for himself, we were handed a wonderful quote to run nonstop.

"I don't take any responsibility at all." ~Wannabe-Authoritarian Weakboy Donald J. Trump

[bloop_bleep]

I was lucky to learn about at least some of the US's imperialist shenanigans (e.g., Nicaragua, Guatemala, Phillipines) in middle school. The public school system at large is pretty goddamn broken in the US, though.

[Iduno]

I was lucky to learn about at least some of the US's imperialist shenanigans (e.g., Nicaragua, Guatemala, Phillipines) in middle school. The public school system at large is pretty goddamn broken in the US, though.

Texas has enough power to change the textbooks, which is why children are now taught that Nixon did nothing wrong and McCarthy was justified.

[wierd]

CA also has such power, which is why we get inundated under a lot of social engineering too.


What really needs to happen, is both states need their hands out of that cookie jar, and an academic consortium with international members needs to define what's in the books- Say, you need to have a good impact score and have contributed to human knowledge in a meaningful capacity to contribute to the curriculum.  People that are going to be harder to buy off for "Jesus want this!!!" reasons.

[bloop_bleep]

CA also has such power, which is why we get inundated under a lot of social engineering too.


What really needs to happen, is both states need their hands out of that cookie jar, and an academic consortium with international members needs to define what's in the books- Say, you need to have a good impact score and have contributed to human knowledge in a meaningful capacity to contribute to the curriculum.  People that are going to be harder to buy off for "Jesus want this!!!" reasons.

There's no way I want supposedly "independent" "academic researchers" sent from authoritarian regimes like Russia or China to be influencing school curricula in America. China is known to have tremendous influence on international organizations, which we've already seen recently with the WHO. We need a national standard, at most, not an international one.

[wierd]

The problem with a national standard is that then the curriculum gets hijacked by nationalists.

See also, problem with McCarthyism, Trumpism, et al.


If you want to exclude bad actors from the international consortium, by all means.  But increasing the size of the pool of shriekers makes it harder for them to get a specific local agenda into the curriculum.