I don't know enough about the situation to guess if their comment about China is 100% accurate or complete nonsense, but if it is the case then I'm against that and against many of the things the US has done to/in other countries over the past century. I'm not American, but even Americans are allowed to have views that don't align with how their country's political leaders have acted over the years.
Because I'm right. It's not that hard to extrapolate what people think. It's hard for the "rationalist" crowd to understand but not everyone is arguing in good faith, and humans tend to regurgitate the last opinion they heard from a person they like.
Of course, there's a small amount of time I'll be wrong, and I'm happy to apologize and have a proper discussion when that happens.
He said about 1,000,000 chileans had to perish to fulfill the revolutionary dream or something alone those lines.
The belief that Chilean government will magically transform an industry is borderline delusion. The government of Canada has spent billions just on it's payroll system that still does not work, and they're looking for 'alternatives' aka 'it failed'.
Usually it's better to provide incentives, co-investment financing, better trade regs, transparency, rule of law etc..
If as one person note they want to 'go up the value chain' - they could do that with more aggressive pricing measures such as tax on raw material export, and co-investment for refineries etc.. Those things can 'work' to the extend the government has credibility, which can only be developed over time.
Chile was building early some feedback-based information systems like what modern corporations use. They may have worked or failed, but we will never know because the US government indirectly promoted and financed a military coup that installed an actual murderer totalitarian regime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_intervention_in_...
(Again, is does not excuse overthrowing/murdering him or the US involvement in that).
Nor do we have almost any evidence of the opposite, since the US obliterated most experiments in anything other than plunder capitalism.
I also contest that non-communist governments stay democratic for long. The US, for example, is barely a democracy in a meaningful sense, and is increasingly moving in plutocratic, fascist directions.
2. Both of those things are common practice for the US
3. The US is moving toward fascism because of fascists. The mask is off at this point, it's not even a question of whether or not there's fascism in American politics. (Honorable mention: We can thank Russia for funding and promoting fascism in the US in order to divide us, though. Russia sure does suck for democracy.)
Allende (fyi backed by the Soviets) got 30% of the vote and tried to overthrow the government through constitutional coup (Edit: not really a coup, but a de facto coup by completely ignoring the Judiciary and near super-majority in Congress against him, and by using military and other tactics) and to socialize / take control over vast parts of the economy which completely crashed the system.
And so the result was Pinochet, which is bad, but not nearly as bad as otherwise, but that's what happens as a result.
I don't suggest that what's happening in Chile is the same thing, but it obviously has echoes.
Chile of Allende may actually have had a chance to avoid that destiny had not it been for US actively destroying their economy; they were for once trying modern social and economic projects based on scientific models that might have made a difference, but that was thrown away with the dictatorship.
Democracy exists precisely to protect minorities, not to have aa 50%+1 majority mob rule.
Allende and the other Communist/Anarchists (often Soviet backed) are among the worst people in history, causing mass death and harm on a scale never seen before under the guise of their deluded egos, and it continues to this day.
Allende would have created something akin to Venezuela or Cuba, thankfully he was thwarted, unfortunately, it came at a cost.
I'll bite. What evidence do you have that Allendale was a totalitarian and "tried to tale over the whole game".
Given that we know that Pinochet ended 4 decades of democratic rule to establish a totalitarian regime that lasted two decades, seems like you would need to have pretty conclusive evidence to justify supporting the decision.
He then went on a rampage to socialize large swaths of the economy (without a mandate mind you aka no real popular support) and then crashed the economy. Limiting emigration, arbitrarily crushing strikes as he saw fit, the usual stuff.
He lost congressional support and began to rule by decree, and then began to avoid both congressional and judiciary acts.
Just a typical tin pot dictator with socialist/utopian aspirations, assured that his bullshit vision was better for the country - even if they didn't want it.
And then they ended him. It has echoes of the socialist/communist takeover in Spain, resulting in Franco.
Seems to have happened a few times in the 20th century.
Pinochet was authoritarian, not totalitarian.
This kind of split vote was actually very typical in Chile at that time. The tradition was that congress would pick whomever had the highest popular vote. While I would agree that this isn't a strong basis for a mandate, it also doesn't indicate that Allende has unusually low popular support.
> a military general supporting the notion of non-intervention in politics to tilt favour was 'mysteriously killed' paving the way for Allende's ascension
Your description of this seems inaccurate. My understanding is that General Schneider was against the military taking a stand in politics by opposing Allende. Schneider was killed resisting a kidnapping attempt (allegedly by those who opposed Allende) which galvanized public disapproval against the military trying to oppose Allende's election in the Congressional runoff.
You seem to be suggesting that the kidnapping was a false flag operation by Allende or his supporters to achieve that result? Do you have evidence to support this?
> He then went on a rampage to socialize large swaths of the economy (without a mandate mind you aka no real popular support)
The nationalization amendment was passed by the Chilean Congress. Some of the nationalization did have some popular support, at least initially.
> and then crashed the economy
It's hard to give full credit to Allende for this. The US cut off support to Chile, price of Chile's main export, copper, tanked and Chile already had pretty bad levels of inflation. It seems quite likely that Chile was headed for an economic crash without Allende, though he may well have made it worse.
> Limiting emigration, arbitrarily crushing strikes as he saw fit, the usual stuff.
Yes, he did a number of things I would not support. That doesn't mean that supporting a coup to terminate 4 decades of democratic rule was justified.
> Pinochet was authoritarian, not totalitarian.
I really struggle to see how you are justifying applying the label to one but not the other. The degree to which opposing parties were suppressed under Pinochet far exceeds the measures taken under Allende.
This kind of split vote was actually very typical in Chile at that time. The tradition was that congress would pick whomever had the highest popular vote. While I would agree that this isn't a strong basis for a mandate, it also doesn't indicate that Allende has unusually low popular support. Indeed, his was not the lowest popular vote to result in presidency.
> a military general supporting the notion of non-intervention in politics to tilt favour was 'mysteriously killed' paving the way for Allende's ascension
Your description of this seems inaccurate. My understanding is that General Schneider was against the military taking a stand in politics by opposing Allende. Schneider was killed resisting a kidnapping attempt (allegedly by those who opposed Allende) which galvanized public disapproval against the military trying to oppose Allende's election in the Congressional runoff.
You seem to be suggesting that the kidnapping was a false flag operation by Allende or his supporters to achieve that result? Do you have evidence to support this?
> He then went on a rampage to socialize large swaths of the economy (without a mandate mind you aka no real popular support)
The nationalization amendment was passed by the Chilean Congress. Some of the nationalization did have some popular support, at least initially.
> and then crashed the economy
It's hard to give full credit to Allende for this. The US cut off support to Chile, price of Chile's main export, copper, tanked and Chile already had pretty bad levels of inflation. It seems quite likely that Chile was headed for an economic crash without Allende, though he may well have made it worse.
> Limiting emigration, arbitrarily crushing strikes as he saw fit, the usual stuff.
Yes, he did a number of things I would not support. That doesn't mean that supporting a coup to terminate 4 decades of democratic rule was justified.
> Pinochet was authoritarian, not totalitarian.
I really struggle to see how you are justifying applying the label to one but not the other. The degree to which opposing parties were suppressed under Pinochet far exceeds the measures taken under Allende.
> It has echoes of the socialist/communist takeover in Spain, resulting in Franco.
By "takeover" you mean the 1936 election where the left won power?
It's similar in that it was a military coup against a democratic leftist government that resulted in decades of authoritarian military rule. There are major differences in that Spain was a pretty young democracy and the coup lead to a civil war before the authoritarian regime began.
"The degree to which opposing parties were suppressed under Pinochet far exceeds the measures taken under Allende."
That's like saying if Stalin didn't kill people directly, it'd have been 'all good'.
The 'widespread interventions' by these Communist tin pots is 'very destructive' to people's lives and they touch everyone. That is the measure of oppression, not the number of 'protesters that got arrested'.
Pinochet was about as bad as 'early Putin', and many other turds that we deal with today. It was 'acutely' bad for the socialist usurpers who imprisoned, but it wasn't a horrible state for most others, and that matters a lot.
Pinochet was a pendulum swing as a direct result of a clear and unambiguous Soviet-supported takeover, that doesn't justify much of his actions but it certainly explains it.
"By "takeover" you mean the 1936 election where the left won power?"
I mean the left in 1930's Spain were agitating murderous thugs using every means to take over the country, including rigging elections (including 1936), voter intimidation and suppression, rigging ballots, violence/murder etc. and that Franco was a reaction to that. In that story, the Communists/Anarchists are absolutely the violent instigators (and inspiration for Orwell's writings) and definitely without material popular support for their revolutionary terms (obviously some support but not the kind of supermajority you need to socialize everything). And so, the pendulum swings.
And that's not even the only analogy, there are a handful of those in the 20th century.
Pinochet wasn't a pendulum swing, he took power via a coup and refused to pass it back to the democratic process. He murdered thousands and tortured even more.
> That's like saying if Stalin didn't kill people directly, it'd have been 'all good'.
It isn't at all like that, but we've already established your weak relationship with the truth
So that makes it ok to install dictator and kill and imprison people. So much love for human rights. I guess you can validate any atrocity using this fucked up logic.
This is pretty trivial to see if you look at the relative costs compared to the economic benefits the US secures - all US adventurism is a total loss in pure economic terms. You’d never do it if it was about money.
CITATION BADLY NEEDED.
The Korean war cost something like 20-30 billion/year in today's dollars [1]. That's just the military expenditure, not counting lost income from alternative uses of manpower and material, veteran care etc.
The bill for the Vietnam war was $120 billion. [2]
Iraq: $1.1 trillion. [3]
Afghanistan: $2.3 trillion. [4]
Can you even think of something hypothetically worth stealing from any of those places which could even just come close to covering the costs?
The only remotely plausible candidate I can come up with is Iraqi oil. At the time it was indeed a common refrain from the usual suspects that the US was only there to grab the oil. But that's not what happened. Iraq's 2005 constitution made it clear that Iraq's oil belongs to the Iraqis, who have since adopted a fee system under which oil companies get a few bucks per barrel (something between $1.6 and $6), and the rest goes to Iraq. [5]
For reference, a barrel currently trades at around $75. Iraq made more than $115 billion on that arrangement during 2022. [6] Even if you generously assumed that oil companies got 10% of that, and that it was all profit, and that they are all American (not even remotely true [7]) it would take a century just to recoup the cost of the Iraqi war.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1344315/us-military-expe...
[2] https://theveteransmuseum.org/visit/exhibits/vietnam/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War
[4] https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2021/human-and-b...
[5] https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=45a8132e-8291...
[6] https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20230103-iraq-oil-reve...
[7] https://www.aa.com.tr/en/energy/oil/mesopotamian-exodus-why-...
Yes, they did.
> The war itself achieves the states political goals, the spending props up the economy.
It props up the economy less then alternative spending of the same ampunt with a higher domestic velocity.
> It pays for itself
It may be a net benefit considering the value of the war aims against the opportunity cost, but that doesn’t change that it has a cost, it just means that (in the right value system) the cost is justified.
Your argument of efficiency is inherently flawed. It implies that war is good as long as it's cost effective, which isn't true.
Yes, they do.
> they invest.
Even if all government spending was investment, investment is just spending in the expectation of future return.
> It's not like there were trillions of dollars sitting around waiting to be spent.
It is literally exactly like that.
> The real tragedy of war is not that trillions were spent
True, that's not the real tragedy of war.
But that's because spending money isn’t tragedy (though the opportunity cost of the choice of how to spend it can be), not because government spending is not-spending, so the trillions spent on war are not-spent.
> Your argument of efficiency is inherently flawed. It implies that war is good as long as it's cost effective, which isn't true.
I thought the context was clear that I was referring to utilitarian justification, whether it is good is a differebt story, sure.