That vendepatria hasn't stood up to any authoritarianism; all she's done is buddy up with other authoritarians to try to obtain power. Her giving her Peace Prize to Trump might be one of the most humiliating things she could have done.
I don't put much weight on guilt by association. She's led public protests against the Maduro regime and had to go into hiding to escape imprisonment. She's advocated for free and fair elections, rule of law, separation of powers, civil liberties, decentralization, private property, and competitive markets. Can you explain how those actions and ideas are authoritarian?
These are just typical talking points of opposition. Many a politician has completely reversed course once they’re in power themself, so judging an opposition politician trying to obtain power on that is pretty stupid for students of history. They don’t typically call for foreign invasion though, and don’t tend to get a Nobel Peace Prize for that.
Oh and don’t get me started on what historically passed as “free and fair elections, rule of law, separation of powers, civil liberties, decentralization, private property, and competitive markets” for puppets ruling South and Central America.
> advocated for free and fair elections, rule of law, separation of powers, civil liberties, decentralization, private property, and competitive markets.
China - authoritarian communist dictatorship, killing its own protesting students, concentration camps imprisoning 1M+ Muslims, forced sterilisation, forced labour, organised re-education of its own population, every company an arm of the intelligence agencies (by law), social credit system, biological weapons production (Wuhan), institutionalised IP theft from other countries
Russia - the most corrupt major dictatorship in Europe, military invasions of its peaceful neighbours, hybrid warfare against European countries, nerve agent assassination of political rivals both within and outside Russia. Indiscriminate killing of civilians in Ukraine with no remorse.
US - a constitutional democracy that has alternated leadership in the last decade in the same familiar way it always has. Attacked Iranian regime assets because Iran threatened it with nuclear weapons and fired hundreds of ballistic missiles at US ally Israel (a pluralist democracy that should be defended IMO). Widespread support for the US intervention from ordinary Iranians who has been oppressed by their Islamist dictator for decades; Removed a ruthless dictator in Venezuela due to massive human rights abuses and state narco trafficking, widespread US support from ordinary Venezuelans who have been oppressed by their dictator.
I don’t see all of the US actions as favorably as that description, I think a lot of recent actions are especially egregious and the US has a history of doing pretty terrible things.
But the scale really is completely different. I think the US is still overall good, and we do still have real elections, limits on government power, and genuine turnover in government where power can shift.
And even as the US govt is trying to scare people away from protesting and they’re building a corporate-government surveillance state, personal freedoms are still very high compared to China and Russia.
The US is unfortunately in the fortunate position of being the worlds active super power. This puts them in a bit of an "IT dept dilemma", where when things are going smoothly they are invisible, and when things are falling apart, it's their fault.
Migrate to a new mail server that is 30% faster? Ah, thats nice.
Migrate to a new mail server and things go awry? Fire that entire fucking department they are seriously incompetent and only ever fuck things up.
What the hell? Just this week Russia has killed tens of civilians by bombing apartment buildings and passenger buses, for no reason, just because they can.
For 26 years the US and its minions have been fighting the racist war on terror and tens of millions of human beings have suffered for it.
Russia has a long, long way to go when it comes to catching up with the criminal behaviors of we in the West - which is to say, of course Russias wars are criminal too - but ours are far more heinous, by a far greater order of magnitude and indeed only provide cover for lesser states such as Russia to behave exactly the same way.
After all, we have been getting away with bombing apartment buildings, passenger buses, and indeed far too many other objects to describe, also .. ‘for no reason’ .. but at far, far greater orders of magnitude.
I’m not excusing Russia - it has a long, long way to go to catch up with the magnitude of the crimes of the USA, but it will only face justice once the US has done so. The USA sure isn’t in any position to bring real justice to the world.
Always thought this rule is hilarious because the fact that such comparisons are so overwhelmingly common that they needed to address it with this bitchy little rule (adding one link to an example per word is a classic tell that an internet moderator is spending their highly compensated moderation time Extremely Mad lol).
However, rather than understand the obvious explanation for it, that reddit and HN's karma systems encourage performative comment behavior with people trying to be epic for the peanut gallery, they make the boneheaded decision to just assume it's an "illusion". It's like Dunning-Krueger but for their theory of mind and general emotional intelligence, with the cause being obvious enough that I don't feel I need to name it.
>I joke that using Python on your modern 2020s CPU upgrades it to a Pentium 4 from 2004 running code compiled with C. And the 2004 version might still be faster.
It really doesn't for a lot of the things that matter, and people should seriously ignore your opinions if you're making these kind of fatuous jokes. Any serious person should understand what CPU bound tasks are vs what IO bound ones are. Python is used for the latter, with some C/C++/Rust bindings for the former. You are ignorant and tedious. When should I actually give a fuck? is the question that you types that build nothing never manage to answer. If you can improve some significant metric by 50x by moving away from Python, you should be fired for having been stupid enough to choose the wrong tool for the job.
> Any serious person should understand what CPU bound tasks are vs what IO bound ones are.
This is a decision fork only when you are stuck using a slow language. I don't have to do this --- at all --- when using C/Java and so many other languages.
Using Python as glue and writing extensions in C/Rust is a choice. But I'd rather write everything in C23 by that point. Or move to a faster language if syntax/aesthetics is an issue.
Further, you often do not have a choice on what platform you get to work with. Someone might have built an expensive-to-replace website using PHP. And then you have to build HipHop to speed it up.
To give another simple example, Israel has managed to pollute the mods of r/worldnews enough to make it a singularly active cheerleader of the genocide until the last year or two.
As an example, I am well aware of how strict r/worldnews is moderated on IvP topics, so I am extra careful to be factual rather than simply making comments based on more general thoughts, like I do for other areas.
I have responded to some comments in the past by responding by quoting legal cases, news links I sourced my comment from, or from subject experts.
It doesn't matter how accurate or factually proven the comment is. If it's even slightly critical, it'll end up with votes of anywhere from -10 to -50 from all the down votes.
For other people's comments, anything negative that hasn't been down voted into oblivion will always have the "cross" icon next to them, meaning it's listed as "controversial", which is when it has a large number of down votes, plus up votes to balance it out.
I was banned from there this summer after posting something relatively innocuous asking whether Palestine had a right to defend itself. At least, I assume that's why I was banned, they never actually gave a reason.
The opposite is also true. There are many subs that posting anything positive about Israel will get you banned on that sub and all subs that moderator moderates which is insane.
Where's the problem? r/worldnews is pretty Zionist in nature, and anime_titties, workreform plus way too many other "leftist" subreddits are anywhere from somewhat neutral over "Israel bad" to outright glorifying Hamas.
Don't want to engage with Zionists, go to anime_titties, don't want to engage with Qatari propaganda, go to worldnews.
I'd rather ask myself how Qatar managed to wiggle its way into pretty much every university and many left-wing and "progressive" parties that now openly support Hamas.
Israel has been allied with our nations ever since it was founded, the Qataris and other oil sheiks were a bunch of warlords and nomads a century ago.
There is a single moderator for most of the big italian subreddits and he bans anyone that says "genocide bad". He also bans anyone who points this out.
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