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Re:Venezuela's capital hit by explosions, smoke seen by plufz on Saturday January 03, 2026 @09:21AM (#46476987)
Maduro is obviously authoritarian. But if the US want to make the world a more democratic place by going to war I could think of a long list of countries they could attack before Venezuela.
Re:Venezuela's capital hit by explosions, smoke seen by watwut on Saturday January 03, 2026 @09:47AM (#46477263)
US does not want to make world democratic. It is actively and systematically trying to weaken democracies and ally itself with autoritarians

Right now, us is ruled by literally fascist party and promoting the same elsewhere.

Re:Venezuela's capital hit by explosions, smoke seen by LtdJorge on Saturday January 03, 2026 @09:55AM (#46477359)
That "literally" is doing a very heavy lifting
Re:Venezuela's capital hit by explosions, smoke seen by anon84873628 on Saturday January 03, 2026 @10:16AM (#46477615)
Umm, yeah, just go look at Vance's statements about European politics. Literally.
Re:Venezuela's capital hit by explosions, smoke seen by 0xDEAFBEAD on Sunday January 04, 2026 @12:14AM (#46485157)
Here are some actual statements from Vance:

>Now, I was struck that a former European commissioner went on television recently and sounded delighted that the Romanian government had just annulled an entire election. He warned that if things don't go to plan, the very same thing could happen in Germany too.

>Now, these cavalier statements are shocking to American ears. For years, we've been told that everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values.

>Everything from our Ukraine policy to digital censorship is billed as a defense of democracy, but when we see European courts canceling elections and senior officials threatening to cancel others, we ought to ask whether we're holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard. And I say "ourselves" because I fundamentally believe that we are on the same team. We must do more than talk about democratic values. We must live them.

>Now, within living memory of many of you in this room, the Cold War positioned defenders of democracy against much more tyrannical forces on this continent. And consider the side in that fight that censored dissidents, that closed churches, that canceled elections. Were they the good guys? Certainly not, and thank God they lost the Cold War.

>They lost because they neither valued nor respected all of the extraordinary blessings of liberty, the freedom to surprise, to make mistakes, to invent, to build.

>As it turns out, you can't mandate innovation or creativity, just as you can't force people what to think, what to feel, or what to believe. And we believe those things are certainly connected.

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-the-vice-p...

You are more than welcome to disagree with him, but it's hardly literal fascism advocacy.

Re:Venezuela's capital hit by explosions, smoke seen by watwut on Sunday January 04, 2026 @05:52AM (#46486838)
Veeeery selective choices, arent there? The cancelled Romanian elections he talks about were cancelled and rerun for a good reasons. This was literally defending democracy against meddling.

The churches were not closed by some hostile state forces. People stopped being christians out of their own choices.

> We must do more than talk about democratic values.

This is dishonest to the maximum. Vance does not believe in democracy. Not in the USA and not in the Europe. He is trying to dismantle it and replace it with authoritarian fascism. He does not care about laws either, he cares about making his own thugs unreachable by law.

Re:Venezuela's capital hit by explosions, smoke seen by 0xDEAFBEAD on Sunday January 04, 2026 @09:57PM (#46494841)
There's nothing Vance said in the speech which was literal defense of fascism, as alleged. It's a case of two competing narratives of what "democracy" means.
Re:Venezuela's capital hit by explosions, smoke seen by somenameforme on Monday January 05, 2026 @12:05PM (#46501457)
It turns out that the [Romanian] campaign for Georgescu wasn't funded by Russia. It was funded by a member of the same ruling coalition whose judges cancelled the vote. [1] They launched a PR campaign that horribly backfired as they were skirting bounds of campaign law, so they couldn't actively name a candidate. The influencers followed their script, but didn't exactly have the same candidate in mind. It's like an equal but opposite of Bud Light hiring Dylan Mulvaney for PR.

Imagine in Hungary if a sort of pro-establishment (NATO/EU/Ukraine/etc) type won, and then they cancelled the election, banned this candidate, and reran it after making some mostly unprovable (and ultimately false) claims of foreign meddling. Can you imagine how you would feel about this? Can you imagine how the unelected EU bureaucrats would act, or what they would be calling it? For people on the other side of the political aisle, you just had an act carried out that would more than justify all the rather hyperbolic rhetoric you're using about the US. And when it's reality, and not just rhetoric, this ends up shaping the views of people for decades.

[1] - https://www.politico.eu/article/investigation-ties-romanian-...

Re:Venezuela's capital hit by explosions, smoke seen by immibis on Saturday January 03, 2026 @09:57AM (#46477382)
No, it's not.
Re:Venezuela's capital hit by explosions, smoke seen by watwut on Saturday January 03, 2026 @10:53AM (#46478037)
I used literally, because current US goverment fits the definition, supports European fascist parties both with money and with words.

If you look at what Miller, Vance, Hegsberg and the rest of them say and do, you find a huge amount of fascist rhetorics.

Re:Venezuela's capital hit by explosions, smoke seen by hairofadog on Sunday January 04, 2026 @06:52PM (#46493689)
Agree. It drives me nuts that people can't see this happening. It's as plain as day.
Re:Venezuela's capital hit by explosions, smoke seen by LtdJorge on Tuesday January 13, 2026 @06:18AM (#46599570)
To me, the current UK administration, silencing "bad things" and telling you which opinions are right and which are wrong is closer to fascism than the US administration.