hornytoad
Interesting so many people on hn seem to be jumping on this.
So I went back to his oldest blog entries to see what his general stance is and if his judgements merit consideration or are slanted, which can be better be judged with years of hindsight, judge for yourself:
"To my mind Chávez’ hold on reality is so tenuous that he really does think that six million people poured onto the streets on April 13th to demand his return. And with a narcissist leader who’s that cut-off from reality, political miscalculation is the order of the day."
He was hugely popular then, and stayed that way until his death, if polls, which actually have received praise from international observers, are an indication. Chavez not only had the absolute majority behind him, they actually supported him.
Just compare Venezuela's voter turnout with that in your own country. Wikipedia says about Venezuela's 2012 election:
"The elections showed a historically high turnout, above 80% of the electorate, in a country where voting is not mandatory"
50 million on food stamps in "the richest country", while "poorer" countries fare much better - you should have some voters here. The only problem - you need gazillions to make it to the TV screens so that you end up being electable. There goes your democracy.
However, donating to "charities" is just not gonna do it. I'm not talking about details like "don't give 'em fish, give 'em a fishing rod".
Rather, considering that we, at a minimum the so-called "West", have been and are still collectively robbing other countries and regions blind, all that we individuals are able to give back is way less than that. Just have a look at Indonesia now and in the last couple of decades, or check what most African countries export vs. what they import to see it is still ongoing. Lately, at least most of South America is finally getting out of the morass. But not due to charities from the West, rather due to their standing up against Western capitalist interest.
So after understanding that we - as a society, and everyone living in it benefits from society - are not really philantrophic by giving a little back having taken a lot.
Our time and money needs to go where we think we can change this system. A big task, but just giving to some charity is not gonna cut it.
Dream on. You'll never donate. How pathetic. Who do you expect is able to give except Gates and Soros?
Sniffing the POST request that emacs/w3m sends:
Content-length: 38
I get the feeling news.ycombinator expects the more common form "Content-Length" (capitalized l), but according to the HTTP 1.1 spec: "Field names are case-insensitive." (see http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-4.2)
So my request is to fix that to adhere to the HTTP spec, thus allowing us poor emacs-w3m users to login as well.