Venezuela

I can't find anything about Maduro willing to give up power during that phone call, you have a link?

It comes from this Atlantic article and predates the phone call
https://archive.is/uUMfx

Maduro would be open to a managed exit if the United States provides amnesty for him and his top lieutenants, lifts its bounties, and facilitates a comfortable exile, people who have dealings with the Caracas regime say. “If there is enough pressure, and if there is enough candy in the dish,” the person who speaks to officials in both countries said, “everything is on the table with Maduro.”

Cheers, thanks for that

“everything is on the table with Maduro.”

I wonder if the same can be said for Trump. Our military buildup seems pretty excessive just to bring Maduro to the table.

What is the good thing Trump has an opportunity to do?

I find your thoughts on this conflict interesting. Because if you didn't know anything about the conflict I am guessing you would side with the "anti-Imperialist" narrative and be pro Maduro. But it seems you know enough to realize the anti-Imperalists are worse than the Imperialists.

Anyways, I suspect this is probably the case most of the time. I think you would have a hard time finding a true peasant revolt that didn't make everything worse for everyone. Leftist revolutions seem to be one of those things that sound good on paper, but disaster in application.

If Maduro just publicly kissed trump's ass, trump would leave him alone.

I follow a very popular "right wing edge lord" type account on Twitter who tweets about Venezuela some. He says the real dynamic is indigenous peasants versus European elites, where Chavez/Maduro basically are the leaders of a peasant revolt that predictably made everything worse. Because they basically got rid of all the competent, meritocratic people who made the country function, and replaced them with corrupt sycophants who robbed the country blind for their own gain.

Seems to be how most peasant revolts work out in practice. And whether they are left or right doesn't seem to really matter. Our institutions are much more robust than Venezuela, but there are aspects of this in the ongoing Trump revolution.

Yes. But Venezuela would have the same problems.

The point is that Luckbox seems to know enough about this topic to realize the people he would normally reflexively support are worse than the people he ideologically opposes.

Of course the difference is he assumes this is the exception to the rule; and I would argue this is actually the rule in action.

I'm not a fan of Maduro at all but Venezuela certainly aren't a threat to America and that's the bottom line.

As I said earlier in the thread, the documentary The Revolution will not be televised had a huge influence on me when I was younger and I'd still very much recommend it to anyone. And I believe that Chavez at least had good intentions for the people of Venezuela but of course you can't just print your way to prosperity and hyperinflation wrecked the country. And it didn't hurt the rich because the rich don't keep their money in Bolivars they keep it in dollars or other assets-- it hurt the poorest of the population who are living hand to mouth.

I've still never been to Venezuela but because there is now this huge diaspora you find Venezuelans everywhere in South America, and none of them support Maduro, and my thoughts now come from talking to them. Fortunately now the economy has improved some because it's dollarized but it'll take Western investment to get their oil industry back to where it had previously been.

its pretty great and you see the same patterns all the time today

I mean if you talk to diaspora peoples that escapes most of the other left wing revolutions, you would invariably get the same response.

Good luck finding a suitably aged diaspora Argentinian, Iranian, Chinese, Russian, South African, etc. who has anything good to say about the regime that took over.

As I have said numerous times before, one can read a couple George Orwell books and it will give a pretty good 40,000 foot view description of how any left wing revolution is going to work out, even if you want to be extremely charitable and ascribe initial well meaning motives.

Except the people I know are from most segments of society-- not necessarily the professional class but that's just more of sorts of people I meet but there are plenty of poor Venezuelans in Colombia. I'm not sure if the tent encampments still exist but I've seen plenty of those as well.

Ironically the last Venezuelan girl I met was likely the most well-off and educated one-- she worked for a company based out of Miami, spoke English well, and still lived in Caracas she was just on vacation in Colombia.

One of my friends said his dad who is still in Venezuela supports the regime though so they do exist. He believes the idea that everything would be great under Chavez/Maduro if not for western interference/US sanctions etc. And that definitely can't help.

Yes. Obviously there is some selection effects going on, that diaspora population are going to be more disaffected with the regime they left. And it is probably true that Western sanctions cant help.

But again, basic principles of evolutionary psychology at the individual and group level would predict populist leftist authoritarian regimes would quickly become corrupted and dysfunctional. And empirical results more or less support such predictions. Which leads me to believe there is a lot of truth there.

But who knows, maybe just confirmation bias on my part.

Authoritarianism is to corruption what excrement is too flies. What "direction" it takes on the political scale is largely irrelevant.

It only looks good to some people because authoritarians make it dangerous and illegal to state that it isn't good. This is very effective. Myths and lies authoritarian regimes spread about themselves often persist even after they collapse, often for decades or even centuries.

Once you look beneath the bullshit facades, you'll just find idiocy, corruption and laziness that waddle along incompetently, but nobody speaks up because either you're in on the con or you're afraid to be found out. Meanwhile, supporters take the lack of complete collapse as evidence things are going swimmingly, failing to realize just how much effort it takes to ruin a country completely.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/world...

Latest NYT article on Maduro/Venezuela

gotta love the NY War Crimes

Um... something may just be happening in that neck of the woods...

Caracas attacked

Maduro captured

Lol

Even by trump’s obscene standards, kidnapping a foreign leader is something else

Well he sounds impartial and rational...

I was going to say that, by the worst possible way, the most unethical, disregarding the rule of law, Trump did the right thing and it's very unlikely anyone in Venezuela or Latin America (that's not Maduro's ally or a hard leftist), will cry for Maduro.

But after thinking that, I remembered that the only thing Trump really did was kidnap Maduro and his wife. His government is still there and unless they colluded with the US or Trump has plans to remove everyone somehow or Maduro will be kept locked for ransom, ransom being everyone stepping down, then by all means, Maduro's vice and ministers might be even worse than him, who knows.

Dems are just mad they didnt get to do it