Comment by unionjack22

Because the oil seems to be the main discussion topic, it is fair to assume that there are no fair elections or own decision power anytime soon.

Just like how the US installed a dictator in Iraq?

Laughs in Pinochet

Yugoslavia in the sense that the cultures were at an unlivable state with eachother without significant autonomy. Bad from an economic perspective as the resulting nations are weaker than what a unified yugoslavia would have been today when one looks at gdp projections.

Worth remembering that Russia experienced three revolutions in the beginning of the 20th century: in winter of 1905, turning it into a constitutional monarchy at least de jure; in spring of 1917, turning that into a parliamentary republic; and in autumn of 1917, turning the parts that did not secede into a dictatorship that shortly became embroiled in a civil war. The Bolsheviks later did an impressive job of erasing the memory of the third being essentially a military coup against the second, despite their very name originating in (remarkably petty) name-calling in the parliament.

That's a very bad example, as ordinary Russians lived MUCH better lives under the USSR than they did under the Czars, at least at that time. The Czarist empire was still mostly a feudal state, and most peasants lived with no education and no money, barely scraping by. Standards of living, while still much, much lower than what was achieved in Western Europe, were still much better than what came before.

Now, can we imagine a world where the Czar was replaced with a Western-style democracy, where the Russian population would have ended up much better than they did? It's possible, sure - but there are no guarantees.

Well, who could've anticipated red plague to grip a whole country?

There’s still a selection bias involved, just as there is with Cubans in Florida.

Those that leave are mainly the ones with means and/or the ones who feel strongest about it.

The set of people that left their country is not random, and certainly statistically biased.

That's not what they said. They said people who left are inherently biased, because they had to leave, which makes perfect sense.

To me it seems like an obvious oversight that they didn’t acknowledge the irony of mentioning on this board not to read this board’s posts.

They could’ve actually done what they stated, talked about the people, instead of just a meta-criticism of HN, which is probably the #1 type of comment on threads on HN already.

And yes I’ll acknowledge this is a meta criticism of a meta criticism.

The US spend years building the UN and the system of international law and it benefits a lot from it. The US is like 4% of the world population and 2% of the area, but dominates pretty much anything you care to measure. It is really not in US interest to overthrow the current system. Its wild that the main threat to international order is coming from the US. Not just this latests development, but the talk of annexing Canada and Greenland, the undermining WTO and WHO etc. Read Hobbes, even the strong do not benefit from “jungle law”.

The point is we should be adult enough in 2026 to have an international order that we can draw a line between our modern behavior and what we did in the bronze age.

If you think this kind of caveman-era diplomacy is the future And want humans to be a multi-planetary species then lol, good luck.

It's also rather telling that nobody in Caracas seems to have really tried to stop the US from doing this, it doesn't take all that much to shoot down at least one helicopter.

You'd expect them to have air defenses on high alert 24/7 prepared to immediately respond to any US actions.

If Americans delete Italy they will be the Pariah of the world for a very long time

> Americans can delete Italy.

Boy, Americans really do have an overinflated sense of their power.

I don't know either but I've spotted two comments in this thread that pretty much argued for that. Multiply that by the US population ratio vs HN size and it could really add up.

> Part of the value of a US passport is knowing (and everyone else knowing) that the government will go to incredible lengths to get you back.)

Is this even the case anymore?

The government has shown to turn a blind eye when natural disasters affect states that voted majority voted for the other party. Their own citizens.

If you were stuck overseas but are an outspoken Democrat, I would not count on your government to get you home.

> Trump’s base has largely been isolationist.

Given the Jan 6th insurrection attempt (which made trump ineligible for office) I think a clear eyed spectator thinking deeply about the US political situation would find that his base will think whatever he tells them to think

The point is we say "well some people don't think much of their elected leader in X, so that justifies us destroying their cities, overthrowing their government and killing hundreds of thousands of people there!"

Alright, is this the global rule now? Where's the cutoff? Trump is getting 41%, is that low enough? Who gets to overthrow Washington? My vote is the Swedes, they seem pretty nice.

> We did a two decade, trillions of dollars revenge tour for like 2700 people dying.

Then what is the expected scale of a revenge tour for 48,422 fentanyl overdose deaths in 2024 and 76,282 in 2023?

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/releases/20250514.html

You say you'd disapprove a violent action. But when it actually happens? I've seen explicit support for Luigi from many otherwise apolitical and non-violent people.

I’d be upset and disapprove, but I wouldn’t ask them to bring him back.

The only country I could imagine doing this is North Korea, because, while we would carpet bomb them, they can delete Seoul from the map with traditional artillery that we can’t stop.

But I don’t think that their leaders are actually suicidal. They’ve played their hand pretty well over the years, for their own survival and enrichment (no pun intended.)

There is no such thing as a military response to the USA.

To put this in perspective, Ukraine before Russian invasion had already lost 11 million people, that left the country because it was ruled by oligarchs and mobsters. 11 millions over 52 millions makes it a gran total of 21% of the population. Making it the fourth worse demographic decline in the world. Does it mean Russia was right?

"Bomb San Francisco"

Where does that come from? I've seen this verbatim in a few places. Let me guess, the s o c i a l m e d i a?

You're not really saying anything, in fact, just bashing everyone else's opinion.

And note that we can look at history and see that, sometimes, people's honest opinions about their own country and what is best for it happen to be wrong. Libyans were extremely happy when Gaddafi was killed - and now they're living in much worse conditions than when he was alive. Many Afghans welcomed the US toppling of the brutal taliban regime, and now after twenty years of brutal war, the taliban are back in power as if nothing happened.

It would be absolutely wonderful if the same fate doesn't happen to Venezuela. I sincerely wish and hope that they will have a provisional government which quickly organizes free and fair elections and that a much better leader is elected who can start reversing the damage Maduro did. I don't think this is particularly likely to happen, sadly, looking at the history and track-record of violent regime change by foreign powers. This observation remains true regardless of what the people of Venezuela think and hope, sadly.

This is abusing the concept of lived experience (which by the way is an ivory tower privileged term)

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Lol, saying the invading countries is bad is Russian propaganda, ok buddy.

Russia would be very happy to install a puppet regime in Ukraine, as long as they had some certainty this regime would be stable and subservient to their interests. We know for a fact that they don't care about necessarily invading other countries as long as those countries are subservient: they are not planning to annex Belarus, nor did they have any real problems with Ukraine as long as it was led by their preferred leaders and it was not making any overtures to NATO or the EU.

The exact same thing will happen in Venezuela: the USA will be happy with any leader that they have confidence will represent US interests, stop doing any business with Russia or Iran, and that they think will last. If instead another member of Maduro's party looks likely to win power, either now or in the near future, they will certainly not allow that to happen, even if it were to happen as a result of free elections.

Overthrowing government (and installing puppet government) is considered an unlimited objective.

This is what Russians would presumably also do if able.

So your point doesn't stand

Yes and as a corollary, it has nothing to do with Venezuela having the largest oil reserves of any country.

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There's no such thing as a comment "disappearing without leaving traces" on HN, except in rare cases when an author asks us explicitly to delete their post and we do. Other than that, the most that happens is that a comment gets killed (a.k.a. marked as [dead]), and anyone who wants to can see those comments in their, er, glory by turning on 'showdead' in their profile. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.

We don't moderate this place to promote (or demote) any particular political agenda, let alone try to "shape" public opinion, something which sounds even more boring than soulless. As long as you're implying secret sinister processes taking place here, I think you should include some specific links so readers can make up their own minds.