Venezuela
Is Venezuela lost for decades? Is it going to become a full blown pariah state? The opposition leader Guido seems like a
Replace "liberals" and "left" with "conservatives " and "right" and you might have a better argument.
Conservatives and the right operate much closer to the rest of humanity than liberals/left do*. Which is why liberals outperform conservatives, at least until they self sabotage.
*I will be endlessly fascinated how the progressive left is so enamored with political Islam, which is basically everything they dislike about Conservative Western culture on steroids. American Indians similar phenomenon. Culturally, American Indians were extremely patriarchal, right wing, and frankly brutal. There is a reason the stereotype of the savage Indian warrior pillaging, slaughtering, raping and scalping. Because there was much truth to it (tribes varied of course and this wasn't universal). Yet the left is so enamored with "indigineous" peoples without really internalizing this.
Yeah the Injuns were the real villains here...
Seems like we're pretty good at raping pillaging and slaughtering. And genociding.
American Indians similar phenomenon. Culturally, American Indians were extremely patriarchal, right wing, and frankly brutal.
I was talking about this recently in another thread. They weren't right wing, they were tribal. Strongly connected to their blood and their soil if that sounds remotely familiar. Sacred mythic narratives about the destiny of their people. Fanatical we vs them polarization.
All these things work great in a tribal setting. When you try to bring them into a modern multicultural Democracy it's pure poison.
Seeing this type of thing in terms of a right/left paradigm is an absolutely poverty stricken thought process.
It is unfortunate the native Americans were imperfect victims of colonial genocide.
"All the "Savage" civilizations that "rape pillage and scalp" are right wing" probably doesn't get the point across that you want
I remember arguing with Luciom that ALL significant policy gains that lifted America up were liberal. The evidence is beyond overwhelming as we have most of history to gaze apon
Conservatives and the right operate much closer to the rest of humanity than liberals/left do*. Which is why liberals outperform conservatives, at least until they self sabotage.*I will be endlessly fascinated how the progressive left is so enamored with political Islam, which is basically everything they dislike about Conservative Western culture on steroids. American Indian
at the risk of sounding like i'm excusing all the terrible things we did - i'm not - what we did was disgusting and attrocious
it makes sense under the lens of looking at the reality of early settler life and indeed just how likely it was that if you ran into natives and weren't in a large and well armed group - it was highly unlikely to end well for you
the genuine history is that there's not a single settlement in all of colonial new england that was never attacked or raided by indigenous tribes
let that sink in, if you family tree chose a town and never moved - some relatives in your past were attacked by natives at least once
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Am...
just look at that list - king philips war is also the deadliest war in american history if you look at it from the perspective of percentage of overall population - where over half the 100 settlements in new england were under siege by natives - where settlers remained hunkered down in their fortified block houses for months at a time watching their farms and mills burn through the gun slits
there's good reason why so many towns are called fort x in america - because the only place safe enough to live was where the military had setup a protective base
we think of early american life as living in log cabins - that's afterall how they show it in movies
but they lived in these
these were blockhouses, there'd be a few in each village for them to retreat to when they were raided
even so, most homes built were called "garrison houses" because while they looked like a regular house, they were still highly defensible
without excusing their actions, you can still at least sympathize with their motivations
its weird you are going to bat for violent illegal immigrants but ok
The best book about the part of America I live in, the Ohio Valley, is The Frontiersmen by Alan Eckert. It's mostly about a guy named Simon Kenton, who we have a county and a bunch of other **** named after. Also guys like Simon Girty and Daniel Boone.
One time, the natives had captured Kenton and were taking him on a tour of their towns and in each town they'd make him run a gauntlet. Men, women, and children would hit him with sticks or whatever while he ran past. Gauntlet.
So after a multi city tour of this, weeks, he saw escape potential somehow and jumped over the line of folks and ran off into the night.
There's a guy in the book who had survived scalping and they stapled leather over his head. The natives, BTW learned that abuse from the settlers, colonists were paid for bringing scalps. Or ears.
Actually now that I think of it the guy who got scalped was Hugh Glass from The Revenant. Talk about a badass. He was scalped by the bear.
Clearly there are empirical examples where US worked with authoritarian regimes where it was determined it was in its interests to do so. But generally there was a belief that modernization and free markets being introduced into the Third World would lead to liberal democratization. And this isn't generally what happened. And I dont think there is much optimism the Third Wor
I'd have to disagree. I think they did these things against the backdrop of the cold war due to being paranoid about the spread of Communism and USSR influence. I don't think they put much thought into anything else.
Clearly there are empirical examples where US worked with authoritarian regimes where it was determined it was in its interests to do so. But generally there was a belief that modernization and free markets being introduced into the Third World would lead to liberal democratization. And this isn't generally what happened. And I dont think there is much optimism the Third Wor
“This isn’t generally what happened” narrative is just false, supported by the successes now being taken for granted.
If you go into history on large events, wars, conflicts, revolutions and so forth you'll find few heroes and even fewer moral victories. Generally those things are found in our biases and beliefs about those events, rather than in the events themselves. What you will typically find in spades are victims.
Say we take the second world war. We could see it as an heroic effort that stopped a genocidal fascist from toppling Europe, but among the allied countries you had brutal dictatorships, colonial empires, a segregated nation and plenty of other fine examples of less than stellar moral pedigrees. Not to mention that we left plenty of dictators to run things and kill their people as long as they were polite about it. Of course, this isn't a comfortable way to look at history or large events, because instead of simple moral choices, you're quickly looking at shades of gray so dark that "good / bad" is no longer sufficient. Everything becomes a trolley problem ramped up to eleven.
Then people go into this trap of "since I support this outcome, I have to support that actor" or "since he supports that outcome, he must support that actor", which I find to both a naive and childish approach to history. I think your ideology should be your own. In the case where a person's ideology perfectly matches that of a nation, party or movement, I find that it is because that person has made supporting that nation, party or movement their entire political and ideological identity.
