- Completely dishonest answer. Sanctions decimated Venezuela's ability to maintain its oil infrastructure. Everything, from machined parts, to the various chemicals needed, everything, was affected.
It just took a few years for the sanctions to bite, as the Venezuelans conserved & used stockpiles.
Again, a completely dishonest take. Speaks volumes, when most defenders of todays criminality keep spouting arguments to this effect.
- In this scenario, why should Venezuelans fighting against US occupiers be labeled as "proxies" for anyone.
Even if they are aided by others, they would still be fighting for THEIR freedom, in THEIR land.
(distinguishing the good guys from the baddies becomes easier, when you strip away the fluff)
- Dude, theres not much point in arguing that. You see this kind of 5th column in the aftermath of most popular revolutions, from Iran to Chavez in Venezuela. A whole horde of folks who were part of the previous elites (or more likely, their functionaries) who decamp en masse to the US, where they proceed to spout unhinged propaganda ad infinitum.
A tell tale is how they tend to completely overlook (to the point of pretending it isnt happening) the role of economic sanctions, blockades & other forms of coercive pressure on the economies of those countries. Instead, putting it all down to local actions by local actors.
There won't be much mention of any of the social improvements & economic uplift which Chavez in particular was able to do, before the external economic pressures became overbearing.
When you can control the narrative on both sides of the equation to this extent, kidnapping the leader of a sovereign (until today) country seems almost normal.
Jeffery Sachs summed it up best a couple of hours ago. The US is not even pretending to be a constitutionally-governed state any more, and this is just 1 sign of that.
- Hmm, you've got the gift-giving (it is the season, after all) backwards. We all saw Gianni Infantino stand by the desk, while HE gave a gift (a tasteful gold trophy, not a grubby little envelope) to the aforementioned representative of the oppressive regime.
To, in your words, whitewash that country's human rights abuses ...
- There are many which could fit your description. Tiny core, puppy linux varients (voidpup, with the void pkg manager, is pretty nice), etc.
However, I think the nicest put together ones are fatdog64 & porteus.
fatdog64 is built from scratch (basically, "Beyond Linux From Scratch"), but uses a lot of slackware tooling & ethos, so its quite compatible with slack pkgs & slackbuilds. If you dive deeper, its actually got a lovely cohesive design, behind the minimalistic gui which IMHO does it a huge disservice.
Eg: it has scripts to run containerised or UML'ised versions of itself, from within itself. Down to optionally having a nested X session with full gui.
Porteus (or the more bleeding edge Porteux variant) has more conventional look & feel out of the box.
Both Fatdog & Porteus(x) have much more flexible initrd systems than tiny core/puppy, where you can copy configs in from a static location (rather like alpine's overlay tarball), or bind mount stuff in. Critically, this is all before the main rootfs goes live, so you can affect how various disks & services are handled on a machine-by-machine basis, if needed.
(plus they're not restricted to the root-only approach which puppy needlessly adheres to religiously)
Plus, these were the original IMMUTABLE distro's, long before that was adopted by some distro-giants.
In other words, with a little thought, you have TONS of flexibility. Including the scenario you mentioned.
To get a flavour, have a quick look over
- [the fatdog faq](https://distro.ibiblio.org/fatdog/web/faqs/faq.html)
- [this old blog post] (https://www.lightofdawn.org/wiki/wiki.cgi/FatdogIsVersatile)
PS: to install either, it can be as simple as setting up a bootloader (which IMHO ought to be a distro agnostic task anyway), and copying over ... 2 files (by default, fatdog shoves its main rootfs squashfs module INSIDE the initrd). With porteus, you will have a fully setup xfce, cinnamon or gnome (yes) setup with ... 4 files.
- Look, we can all acknowledge that there were, and are, many Americans who wish for this to be true. But at no point in America's history did that "many" ever constitute a majority. Or even close to it.
Which is why, from its very inception, the US has employed mass genocide at home, invasions & regime changes in the America's, then post-slavery apartheid at home, with invasions & regime changes in the rest of the world.
That's not anti-American rhetoric. That's just historical fact.
So, commingled with those facts, where does "law, love & fair play" come in. If you're honest, THAT was the propaganda. And the above realities, that was the truth.
The America of today IS the America it has always been. Its just that the propaganda mask can't be reattached with more duct tape. America started by geniciding non-whites at home, and rounding up & dragging non-whites TO America, in chains.
Now it's genociding non-whites abroad (primarily the Middle East), and rounding up & dragging non-whites FROM America, in chains.
When you focus on the common threads throughout American history, and strip away the fluff, you realise ... that's the real America (which still has the largest slave labour force in the world, through indentured workforces via its prison system).
- I understand what you're saying. But, I don't have any "liberal assumptions". The Gaza Holocaust has demonstrated that there really is no such thing as international law, because there's no enforcement against certain parties, because they are deemed too powerful to touch (US empire, essentially).
Note, that's not the world I like to see. It's just the world we have.
But pointing out the outright hypocrisy of certain parties actions, vis a vis international law, natural law, or even "what if we flipped the tables?", is always worthwhile (I hope). Even if it's just shouting into the wind
- Well, we're all aware that the term "gunboat diplomacy" has been in use for centuries.
The Barbary Wars was an interesting case of how multiple naval forces were engaging in piracy etc against each other. Barbary vessels in the Med. British against US shipping (that, and press ganging sailors, was one of the public reason for the 1812 war). And, funnily enough, American privateers doing exactly the same thing to the British colonial shipping in the Caribbean (piracy plus press ganging)
In this current scenario, the only real connection would be that the US are the pirates.
- Just off the top of my head:
- these boats are not in American waters. They are in their own, or neighbouring countries waters, and are being attacked by vessels whose home waters are 1000s of km's away
- they are not being interdicted (which is illegal kidnapping anyway, see above). They are just being killed. Plain and simple.
To put your argument back to you. Latin American countries who are combating narcotics trading armed paramilitarys, who are mostly getting their arms from US supply chains. So, for example, Mexico is entitled to go into US waters, and "interdict" American-owned boats with US citizens on board? Without any kind of warrant from even the Mexican courts, much less US courts?
Or, scratch that. Mexico just sinks them.
Should be ok, right?
- Well, to continue that timeline. "Big Tech" freezes their version to the last gpl'ed version, and each commences their own (non-trivial effort) to make their own version (assuming the last gpl'ed version was not feature-complete for all their future uses).
And of course, they won't share with each other. So another driver would be fear of a slight competitive disadvantage vs other-big-tech-monstrosity having a better version.
Now, in this scenario, some tech CEO, somewhere has this brilliant bright spark.
"Hey, instead of dumping all these manhours & resources into DIYing it, with no guarantee that we still won't be left behind - why don't we just throw 100k at the original oss project. We'll milk the publicity, and ... we won't have to do the work, and ... my competitors won't be able to use it"
I quite like this scenario.
- That's one thing which ruby unfortunately did not adopt from Smalltalk. In Smalltalk (at least, in the dialects I'm familiar with), the "method categories" metadata is used to signal that we're adding new methods (or overwriting existing ones) to classes that are outside the scope of this package (ie: classes you didn't create as part of your app).
That way, it's easy to trace, forwards (from package to all the methods it introduces) & backwards (from method to package), who introduced a method, where, and why.
Other than that, I think a lot of this aversion to "ruby magic" is a bit overblown. The ability to cleanly remold any part of the system with minimal friction, to suit the app you're building right now - that's a KEY part of what makes it special.
Its like all these polemics warning wannabe lispers away from using macros. Lisp, Smalltalk, and ruby, all give you very powerful shotguns to express your creative ideas. If you can't stop blowing your own foot off, then pick a different language with a different paradigm.
- If you're in public denial about the FBI not being the righteous force for "peace, justice & the american way (whatever the heck that is)", despite the copious publically available evidence & reporting (by independent journalists) to the contrary, then ... no, you really don't want to know.
(all this, over what was mostly a tongue in cheek response anyway ...)
- If you read the chain of posts I directly responded to, then there's nothing vague about what I said. Here, I'll help you out:
That chain was in response to:
So in that context, there's nothing "vague" about my somewhat tongue-in-cheek response. Neither, you'll find, is there any attempt by me to say that one SHOULDNT stop the FBI from doing anything bad.>> We can not allow the FBI to work for Evil here > Historically speaking I can't see this as even being in the top 100 evil things the FBI has done. Perhaps, but we can't change the past: we can only fight against what is happening in the present to try to get a better future.The pushback, by other chap & me, is about quantifying this particular misdeed as "evil", showing a remarkable lack of acknowledgement about the many, many, many other things the FBI has done (from its inception as a personal blackmailing operation by Hoover against US politicians - ring any bells?) and is doing, which are far, far worse than this "bad thing".
- Interesting. Shows how aware they were of these 2025 criticisms, way back in the 80s (which shows how much of an oversimplification these criticisms are of the real situation).
You probably already know about this, but in case you didn't, there is 1 project which adds modules to cuis Smalltalk:
- Hmm, well I don't know exactly when Monticello was first developed, but it was certainly in heavy use by the early 2000s. How is that "meh" when compared to ... cvs & subversion?
I don't know much about the systems used in commercial smalltalks of the 90s, but I'm sure they weren't "meh" either (others more knowledgeable than me about them can chime in).
image-centric development is seductive (I'm guilty). But the main issue isn't "we don't know what code got put where, and by whom". There were sophisticated tools available almost from the get go for that.
Its more a problem of dependencies not being pruned, because someone, somewhere wants to use it. So lots of stuff remained in the "blessed" image (I'm only referring to squeak here) which really ought not to have been in the standard distribution. And because it was there, some other unrelated project further down the line used a class here, a class there.
So when you later realise it needed to be pruned, it wasn't that easy.
But nevertheless, it was still done. Witness cuis.
In other words, it was a cultural problem, not a tooling problem. It's not that squeak had too few ways of persisting & distributing code - it had too many.
IMHO, the main problem was never the image, or lack of tools. It was lack of modularisation. All classes existed in the same global namespace. A clean implementation of modules early on would have been nice.
- Except that's not really what happened. You're ignoring the range of in-image tools which kept track if who did what, where. From versioning of individual methods, to full blown distributed version control systems, which predated git.
Not to sound harsh or gatekeep, but folks who keep repeating the canard that "The Smalltalk image resulted from the developer just banging on the system", mostly never used smalltalk in the first place.
Give the original smalltalk devs some credit for knowing how to track code development over time.
- Adding to what you said. Squeak was a clean open source reimplementation (by the devs who did the original Smalltalk-80), so it's real history starts from there (ie: the 90s, not the 70s)
One thing to keep in mind is that smalltalks all have the same ability to save & load code to & from disk, just as any other programming environment. But, they also have the option of just using the image to persist, and iterate on that.
Squeak overdid that aspect of it, such that over time, it became hard to prune older side projects & and it just became increasingly bloated. Both Pharo & Cuis forked from squeak at about the same time.
Pharo images are fully bootstrapped from a seed.
Cuis is not quite there yet, but cuis from its inception went on a ruthless simplification drive (the number of classes in the system was reduced by about 500% !), so that it's base is effectively a "seed", and the rest of a cuis image is built up by importing projects (from disk & git) on demand.
But yeah, curating a set of images over time is remarkably enticing & friction free. Even in cuis, I find I have to force myself to keep flushing changes to my own packages.
Its not that the tools to use files are limited. In cuis, they're not. You can work on multiple different things WITHIN THE SAME IMAGE (changes to some builtins, a couple of your own projects, etc), and the system will keep track of what belongs where. So a couple of mouse clucks will fileout the relevant code to the relevant changesets & packages.
And yet - just banging on the same image is just ... fun, easy, enticing.
- Hmm, and the outright deceitful and insidious nature of the post I was responding to? Where someone twists the facts in their very first sentence to hide the fact that the victims of that slaughter were themselves Muslim - just to justify an Islamophobic tirade for the remainder of their post ...
what do you call that? And how exactly does one counter such obvious lies of omission, without using the word "lying"?
"Sorry dear chap, but I believe you are intentionally hiding key facts here,namely the identity of the victims themselves"?
And btw, where was the flamebait? My 2nd paragraph is as close to a precise summary of what's actually happening as you can get, without hiding the identities of anyone involved.
- Strongly disagree. THE ENTIRE ETHOS of Smalltalk & Ruby is to leave things up to the object you're communicating with, rather than the call/send site.
Sure, you may not like that mindset, in which case, smalltalk/ruby are ABSOLUTELY not for you. You want something else.
Which is totally fine. Part of the reason behind the Cambrian-explosion of higher level programming paradigms since the 1960's is precisely because there are multiple ways to skin a cat, and different ways resonate with different folks.
- Really? To each their own, but honestly, I found smalltalks way of chaining things to be one of the most elegant parts of what is admittedly a syntactically-simple language (the old "fits on a postcard" thing).
With Smalltalk, with regard to return values or chaining, you get to have your cake and eat it too.
Your methods CAN return sensible values which don't necessarily have to be the original object. BUT, if you just want to chain a bunch of sends TO A PARTICULAR OBJECT, you can use ;, and chain the sends together without requiring that each intermediate method returns the original object.
That combined with the fact that chaining sends requires no special syntax. You just write them out as a single sentence (that's what it feels like), and you can format it across multiple lines however you wish. There's no syntax requirements getting in the way.
Just finish the whole thing with a dot. Again, just like a regular sentence.
And if you find precedence or readibility becoming confusing, then just put stuff in parens to make certain portions clearer. There's absolutely no harm in doing do, even if in your particular use case the normal precedence rules would have sufficed anyway.
Smalltalk complex method chaining; again (as mentioned previously) reads like English.
A "proxy" is someone who primarily serves someone elses interests first. Their own interests are subservient to that (if they come in at all).
Venezuelans who may end up fighting for Venezuelan freedom to rule themselves as a soveriegn free nation, with the right to fully benefit from THEIR own natural resources, are NOT proxies of anyone. Regardless of who helps them.
When you're a closet imperialist who thinks nothing of stealing other peoples land, resources, dignity & even lives, then everyone opposing you starts to look like a terrorist, an insurgent or a proxy.
The issue isn't them. Its you.