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Venezuela Is Blocking Access To the Tor Network (theverge.com)
An Access Now report finds that Venezuela has blocked all access to the Tor network. "The latest block includes both direct connections to the network and connections over bridge relays, which had escaped many previous Tor blocks," reports The Verge. From the report: According to network metrics, Tor access in Venezuela had recently spiked in response to recent web blocks placed on local news outlets. Unlike previous blocks, the latest restrictions could not be circumvented by using a censorship-resistant DNS server like those provided by Google and CloudFlare. For many Venezuelans, Tor seems to have been the only way left to access the restricted content. "This is the latest escalation in Venezuela's internet censorship efforts, as it blocks higher-profile sites with more sophisticated methods," said Andres Azpurua of Venezuela Inteligente, in a statement provided through Access. "This is one of their boldest internet censorship actions yet."
If you can't blend in, you're no damn good! This also reaffirms the necessity of accessing the Wide Area Network without an ISP
Isn't Tor supposed to be still uncrackable? And if not, can't the resistance use the Telegram app, which so far has held up against the Iranian religious police?
You're a moron for conflating the two either way though.
Now that the population has no guns to fight back, a socialist retaining power, and propaganda allowed to flourish and not subjected to ridicule...let the executions begin.
Another moron. Please stay off the interstate highways, moron, because that is socialism. And don't be drinking any clean water either. Yep, socialism. I guess you weren't educated, so we can't ask for that investment in you back. Pity.
Compared to Syria's, Venezuela's is not worse.
China is providing all the network hardware to Venezuela for deep packet inspection (among other things) in exchange for no-bid infrastructure projects. That's how they're getting this done.
These "projects" are just the government handing them money for work that never gets done. It's an escape path for the elite once the shit really hits the fan but until then their primary focus is exfiltrating enough resources from Venezuela to maintain their lifestyle.
They shipped these devices to Venezuela about 10 years ago and it's taken the inept government this long to put them in.
It's rumored that they "funded" these infrastructure projects to the tune of $100m but exact numbers are impossible to get as the constituent assembly has ruled that all government contracts are state secrets.
Just admit Communism and Socialism just don't work.
Why? Because of people using the facade of a concept to advance their own interests? Believe it or not, this is also true of Democracy, Religion, Medicine, and yes, even Capitalism.
Unless you are the Dictator then it works GREAT
And this is not true of everything else where one can have authoritarian rule?
So far, your argument seems to be rather low quality.
That's what Orwell's Animal Farm was about.
I got my public education, and my leaded water, in Flint, MI. Internet arguments: they work bitches!
....we thought the Internet (sic) interpreted censorship as damage, and routed around it? My, how times have changed.
Finding God in a Dog
This is why I run a tor relay node. Everytime I hear about something like this, it reminds me that tor is used by people in countries like this to bypass censorship.
OK, I really run it because of the EFF's tor challenge where I got a free T-shirt, but that's the reason I've kept it running after the challenge was over.
Another moron. Please stay off the interstate highways, moron, because that is socialism. And don't be drinking any clean water either. Yep, socialism. I guess you weren't educated, so we can't ask for that investment in you back. Pity.
Actually they have a point. Socialism and communism simply cannot work on humans. Bees or ants aren't trying to get ahead, possibly because their sexuality doesn't work like ours so they don't have to.
In the real human world, we want it better for ourselves, and we'll improve ourselves and our abilities if it helps us to get ahead.
Try to force us work general labor on a farm or in a factory for our entire lives for terribly pay, and you'll see how that works out.
There's no ultra-right-wing dictators out there who censor and do horrific things to their people?
people who say that are the same crowd how think bitcoin's going to take down the international banking system. You don't fix oppression by working around it. You treat the root cause, which is poverty that allows desperate people to be organized into violent mobs.
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No they don't. The queens own everything they can, and will fight viciously to defend it .. or to get more from some other queen. They do not have any sort of social contract with the others.
If you're talking about within a colony.. no, that's still not communism. That's a family. They are not in competition with one another, because they're all trying to perpetuate and spread the queen's genes.
(Sorry to get all sciency on you, but that's a risk at sites like this one.)
except maybe on a very, very small scale. I wish I could stop having to say this but Mao and Stalin were _not_ communists. They were fascists who happened to borrow Marx's books for rhetoric.
Socialism works just fine. Just ask Norway, Germany, France and Canada. But if you're entire country's basic systems fall apart and the rest of the world decides to punish you with sanctions for no particular reason (besides maybe not liking your system of economics) then no amount of socialism can save you.
Let me put it this way, does the American Great Depression mean Capitalism is a failure?
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Socialism works just fine. From the military, to the police and firefighters who stand ready to protect many of us and our homes, to the highway system, public libraries, USPS, public schools, courts and prisons, the EPA/FDC/FDC/CDC, insurance of all kinds. And even the much maligned Social Security and Medicare are amazing in the benefit they provide to a large population who would be indigent or dead without it (as a society we've chosen not to let our elders live out their lives that way).
Which ones of these do or will you rely on? (you rugged individualist, you)
What's your definition of an ultra right wing dictator?
"In the real human world, we want it better for ourselves, and we'll improve ourselves and our abilities if it helps us to get ahead."
Capitalism is just as problematic as communism and socialism.
Anyway, Venezuela is a democracy.
You can block VPN. You can block Tor. But the Resilient Internet Protocol (ResIP) over a HTTPS transport combined with Remoted API Server is a full technology stack that can be used to neatly circumvent any firewall in BOTH directions with countless avenues for deployment.
Yeah! It is well known that Communism is the declared enemy of Socialism. See National Socialism and how those people felt about commies.
Venezuela is as democratic as Germany was back when the Socialist German Worker's party won by a landslide back in the early 1930s.
The only problem with capitalism is that dumb people are going to tend to be poor. In the case of socialist worker's paradises it just happens everyone (except the plutocracy that eventually develops around the party) is about as equally poor.
But fear not! Capitalism itself provides a solution: if you're poor don't have children. That means less poor people to educate, more resources per poor child, and better wages as the work poor people do becomes more valuable because there's less poor people.
Your comment is a non-sequitor.
Socialism...
a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.
Socialism is about how people and their governments choose to run society as a whole... NOT an interconnected collection of networks, computers, or devices.
Take this article itself for example... is Venezula blocking TOR really a product of "socialism" or is it a product of a dictator taking advantage of a nation full of socialists? There really is a difference!
for the most party society has zero say over how the internet works... just just have a say on where they go on it. You do not get to vote, or tell businesses how they must operate either. You can call up a senator and give them ideas, but that is not really socialism. The moment a small group of people decide the rules Socialism has failed... which means by that virtue a Government "always composed of by a small group of people" cannot be socialist ever. Socialism in actual practice is utopian and much closer to libertarian or anarchy, and I think we all know how well that works based on human history.
A small group of people always want to control the majority and they will do, say, or try to get you to believe in any "ism" they can dream up to get you to go along with it.
Only a true direct democracy has the possibility of being an actual socialist society, and given the number of people on the internet with some serious Dunning-Kruger psychosis going on... well we all know that would be a fast failure!
"Why? Because of people using the facade of a concept to advance their own interests?"
It's not because you fight capitalism's abuses that you become a socialist.
Saudi Arabia and Kuwait for example.
"Venezuela is as democratic as Germany was back when the Socialist German Worker's party won by a landslide back in the early 1930s."
Just because the party you don't like gets elected doesn't mean the system isn't a democratic one.
I will admit that pure capitalism and socialism don't work. A blend of them seems to work the best, though.
I don't respond to AC's.
While I am not fond of Internet blocking, my understanding is that Venezuela must try to fend fierce psyops attacks from the CIA, that this is one of the tools available.
Remember when Obama declared Venezuela a national security threat? If the CIA does its job correctly, it must be trying to destroy Venezuela state since that time.
Another Bernie Bro dumbass. You don't even know what socialism is. But watch Venezuela for examples of your future.
Ummmmm. Have you looked at Ontario finances? We're on the verge of going broke to the same extent as Greece.
"Who would have thunk punishing success and rewarding failure doesn't work?"
Socialism doesn't imply that.
---
Capitalism: an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.
Odd, I thought "real socialism hasn't been tried"? You were holding them up as an example of success not very long ago, you know.
You guys argue like too much of a good thing can't be bad. Yes, public infrastructure is great, but a more complete oil-based socialism with no regard for fiscal prudence (i.e. an answer to 'what happens to public benefits when oil prices change?') turns out to be bad. Who could've predicted that? Oh, Norway. They invested their money, funny that.
Funny how giving governments unfettered power doesn't work out well.
"But watch Venezuela for examples of your future."
No one wants to be the target of US attacks, military or economic?
>Try to force us work general labor on a farm or in a factory for our entire lives for terribly pay, and you'll see how that works out.
Uhh are we still talking about communism/socialism here? Pretty sure that's happening anyway with capitalism, except being forced to an extra step is added, you become homeless instead.
I seriously doubt that access to the entire set of hidden bridge nodes has been blocked. These nodes are not advertised, and I am assuming that they do not appear in the public consensus documents.
The distribution points of the bridge node IP addresses were likely blocked. If and when Tor users find new bridge nodes by some means or other, they will be able to access the network again.
"Have you looked at Ontario finances? We're on the verge of going broke to the same extent as Greece."
Greece has a debt to GDP ration around 180%, and Ontario's is around 40% ?
Communism and socialism work. Just not on humans. Bees and ants do communism fine. Humans have that thing, "thought", that tends to mess with any dogma that it comes in contact with.
Socialism has been seen to work fine at the scale of "tribe" or "village". If you know everyone personally, and everyone can shame slackers, sharing can work OK. People still have an incentive to work hard, too, as everyone knows who's helping out. Probably not ideal, but it has worked for some.
It's the same reason charity works far better from a church or mutual aid society: people have a strong social incentive to stop needing that charity ASAP unless they're seriously disabled.
But all of that collapses as soon as it becomes impersonal. Then it becomes a system to be gamed, and the best at gaming it end up in charge and massively screwing everyone else.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Late-stage socialism strikes again. Venezuela has run out of other people's money.
Thanks for the propaganda. Nice to know Fox & Friends is on /.
The roads are free for all to use
There is no Magic Road Fairy making free roads, and in fact many governments have public roads maintained and built by government employees.
It's not because you fight capitalism's abuses that you become a socialist.
Depends on the person, as already noted, this is applicable to religion, abolitionists, prohibitionists, doctors, and more.
Communism and socialism fail with humans just the same as capitalism and pretty much any pure 'ism'.
Power accumulates. Checks and balances can slow this, but if there isn't an active effort to deconstruct the accumulation, then all you are doing is slowing the process and the process tends to result in rapid deconstruction of the accumulated power via revolution (whether bloody or not) and the replacement of the old with something that differs only in detail. A kind of boom and bust cycle that only looks like progress.
In the 'real world' people and societies are motivated by a mix of selfishness and altruism; co-operation and competition. Some lean hard one way, some the other. A mix of both, with a dynamic equilibrium seems to produce the most stable forms of government/organisation that results in the best outcomes for the most people.
Socialism and communism can and do work with humans - when it's limited to areas where this is suitable and useful (like infrastructure and utilities or services) and where it's kept in check with regulation or even limited competition. Capitalism works with humans in much the same way - with regulation and oversight, limitations to protect society and by not allowing it in areas where monopolies are harmful or extracting a profit reduces the overall benefit to society. Some communism doesn't scale past the family/neighbourhood. Same with capitalism. Some is only useful at larger scales, but again, needs to be regulated, monitored and kept in check.
Observing that communism/socialism fails is trivial. _Everything_ fails.
The issue here is internet censorship and Tor's inability to work discretely. "Socialism" is a dead cat. Now that's all you people will discuss.
No problem with that. Unfortunately, Capitalism does not work either. Or in actual fact, having one or a group of morons with big egos and small skill running a country does not work.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The roads are free for all to use
There is no Magic Road Fairy making free roads, and in fact many governments have public roads maintained and built by government employees.
But there is a Magic Health Care Fairy, right?
And a Magic College Tuition Fairy to boot!
Agreed. Trump is truly a Whigger.
"Have you looked at Ontario finances? We're on the verge of going broke to the same extent as Greece."
Greece has a debt to GDP ration around 180%, and Ontario's is around 40% ?
Ontario is a province and as such doesn't take most of the tax revenues while Greece is a country and as such its national government takes a much larger share of the taxes paid by its citizens. California at its worst point (which only lasted about a year) had about $50B in debt which is a debt to GDP ratio of around 5% which is bad for a US state. So its apples and oranges comparing Greece to Ontario. Certainly any province or state (or other sub-national government) shouldn't have more than about a 10% debt to GDP ratio and that's being very generous (it should probably be about half of that). So Ontario being 40% is certainly quite worrisome.
The real problem with a debt of that size is that you won't possibly be able to pay it back over the duration of the bonds so it will be rolled over. And since the debt to GDP ratio is sky high, those interest rates will be high which causes the debt to be harder to pay off. This causes a vicious cycle of larger debt and higher rates leading to default. This is a bad deal and the World Bank and WTO are often and rightly criticized for trapping poorer countries in this same cycle but in those cases it was the lenders suggesting the loans in the first place. In the case of Ontario (and Greece), they did it to themselves.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
Try telling the Pilgrims. They used socialism at first but almost died. When they tried the free market approach they flourished.
Well, dictatorship is the necessary result of socialism. Democracies muddle along adequately in many capitalistic societies.
they were a third world hell hole until the price of oil spiked. Normally when that happens (a commodity becomes extremely valuable) nothing changes. A violent dictator takes it all for themselves. See the Congo and "Blood Diamonds" for a good example of what usually happens.
What made Venezuela so unique is Hugo Chavez. Instead of killing everyone in his way to claim the oil money for himself he used to it buy his way into the people's hearts, and in the process make the country a first world nation almost overnight.
They needed more time. Corruption was bound to happen. It's like a poor person winning the lottery. They don't know how to manage it. If they can hold onto enough of it for a few generations it becomes a dynasty. But right now it looks like Venezuela just didn't have enough time. Again, if the international community wasn't shitting all over them with sanctions (I suspect at the behest of the ultra rich, who don't like the idea of socialism spreading and biting into their status as God-Kings over mankind) then they might have pulled themselves up.
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If you're not doing anything wrong you shouldn't have anything to hide. I wonder what the government is trying to hide?
Socialism hasn't actually been implemented, communism has. You're a moron for not distinguishing them, and not any kind of "expert" or "scholar" for doing so deliberately.
Even at the village level it fails. For example, the hippy communes that started up in the 60s rarely made it to the 70s. They all eventually died out. The few people who did the work got tired of trying to get the slackers off their lazy asses and either left or became slackers themselves. Eventually no one was left to do any work.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Yeah! It is well known that Communism is the declared enemy of Socialism. See National Socialism and how those people felt about commies.
Just as German Socialist politician Julius Leber how the Nazi's felt about Socialists.
Firstly the NSDAP was 'socialist' in the same way the that the Democratic Republic of Korea is 'democratic.' Don't be fooled by branding.
OK, it's not exactly that simple: there was the Strasserian tendency within the NSDAP which could be described as 'socialist', and certainly as 'anti-capitalist.' But remember Hitler personally objected to the inclusion of 'Sozialistische' in the name NSDAP, when the DAP re-branded. At that time, of course, Drexler not Hitler was the head of the party, so Hitler just had to work with the name he got. And it is also true the early DAP and NSDAP policy documents contained socialist-like and anti-capitalist points. However, all that changed once Hitler took over the party, and despite the 'S' being maintained, the party quickly became avowedly anti-Socialist, as Ernst Röhm, among others, was to discover to his peril.
Hitler also became a huge supporter of the giant German corporations, who of all the institutions of German society, were the only significant ones to escape Gleichschaltung (whereas 'Socialism' means, in the first instance, the socialisation of the "means of production"). Unlike the current Venezuelan regime, he knew better than to kill the proverbial goose. To call the Hitler-led NSDAP "Socialist" is simply wrong.
Secondly, far from Communism being the "declared enemy of Socialism," note that Communist Parties, where they have come to power, have generally set up "Socialist Republics." You may recall the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics centred around Russia, which was, throughout much of the C20th, a not insignificant state run by a nominally 'Communist' party. Why?
Because according to Marxist theory, Socialism was the transitional state required for the accomplishment of Communism. Thus a Capitalist revolution (from Feudalism) was necessary to establish modern productive forces and create both the wealth necessary to enable Socialism and the Communism to be born, and also to create the industrial working class, who would be humanity's saviour.
Socialism, for which Marx described the distribution of wealth as "to each according to their contribution," was supposed to be a state run by this working class (the 'universal' class, for owning nothing they did not have the interest in out competing any other concern, as capitalists were doomed to do), which was to pave the way for Communism, where humanity reached a social adulthood where the apparatus of the 'State' was no longer necessary, and the state simply faded away. The distribution in this stateless Communist society was instead to be "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs" (ie. FOSS extended to all goods and services in society). And note needs also includes that which allows people to express their ability, so, to stretch out the FOSS conceit: society would see to it that software developers are supplied with hardware concomitant to their requirements as well as an lmitless supply of Mountain Dew and Krispy Kreme Doughnuts (or Peoples Dew and Peoples Doughnuts as they would then be called ;).
In any case, I'm not entirely convinced Venezuela is on this ineluctable road to paradise.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
Thank you for your reasoned reply. I particularly like the use of 'moron'. Very classy.
My first sentence makes it clear that I'm generalising about all systems. Making a distinction between communism and socialism may be useful in a different context, but here it's pure pedantry.
That 'socialism has never been implemented' is a form of the 'no true scotsman' fallacy. Meaningful observations can be made from attempts to implement socialism, from elements of other forms of government that have had strong socialist elements and from limited implementations of socialism either in terms of scale or scope.
Your 'argument' uses the 'true socialism has never been implemented' phrase which is usually used to dismiss a criticism of socialism. You apparently lack the ability to do more than ape the form and deliver an ad-hominem in passing. You've managed to pack name calling, an ad-hominem and a criticism of tone into one sentence. That's the bottom three in terms of Paul Grahams hierarchy of disagreement. An impressive performance.
How about you make a contribution to the discussion and criticise the idea I expressed, or offer one of your own?
Actually they have a point. Socialism and communism simply cannot work on humans. Bees or ants aren't trying to get ahead, possibly because their sexuality doesn't work like ours so they don't have to.
In the real human world, we want it better for ourselves, and we'll improve ourselves and our abilities if it helps us to get ahead.
You idiots have never raised bees. Workers will kill foreign queens and foreign workers. None of that touchy feely open borders and welcome all asylum seekers shit. And you do not want to be a male bee, a drone. The drones are unceremoniously kicked out of the hive at the onset of winter and left to die. (fun fact: the drone's only job during his entire life is to have sex and he dies in the act when his junk literally explodes) When the hive gets crowded, the workers raise new queens and the hive will swarm. Any extra queens left after the hive has reached a proper population will be killed by the workers.
To make matters worse, the owner of the means of production (me) steals the honey from the workers leaving them only enough to survive the winter. Bees are fascinating, but it's hardly a workers' paradise of the Marxist Utopia variety. Poor fuckers are simple sharecroppers and they don't even realize it.
This is why I run a tor relay node. Everytime I hear about something like this, it reminds me that tor is used by people in countries like this to bypass censorship.
OK, I really run it because of the EFF's tor challenge where I got a free T-shirt, but that's the reason I've kept it running after the challenge was over.
People inside China desperately need your help !
Are you willing to help them?
North Korea is a Democracy is says so in the name and people vote every 4 to 5 years
ftfy
"My first sentence makes it clear that I'm generalising about all systems." = Useless, agreed.
Unfortunately, Capitalism does not work either.
How do you suppose that the United States became the richest and most powerful country on earth? I'd say that it's worked very well for the Americans.
Somebody bust Maduras face ? Smash neekaps and fingers too ... Trotsky bitch needs never again to write or walk.
At the end of the day thereâ(TM)s not much difference between socialism and communism.
You millennials sure are stupid to think otherwise.
Communism and socialism fail with humans just the same as capitalism and pretty much any pure 'ism'.
It should however, be noted that whilst Communism has been tried and failed, a pure capitalist state has never even gotten of the ground.
There was an effort to create a "Galts Gulch" in Chile around 2010 but none of the Libertarian business geniuses who invested in it could manage to get that it was a scam... Most of them are now trying to get their money back from a developing nation that doesn't have a functioning justice system.
But your point stands, any extremist government is ultimately doomed to fail. They require people to be too rational, to all have the same wants, the same needs, to produce the same output, to all believe in the same thing. Despite being very much diametrically opposed philosophies, Nazism and Stalinism shared one aspect in common because they had to, authoritarianism. The only way the state could maintain power was via brutal suppression of opposition because people believed in different things, had different wants and needs and lets face it, aren't rational.
Almost all successful countries are mixed economy democracies because for all their flaws, this is the only system we have that works. It works because its flexible enough to be robust in a world of irrational, different people.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Socialism has been seen to work fine at the scale of "tribe" or "village".
Though it never produced things like antibiotics, refrigeration, or steam engines. And at the tribal/village level, it only ever "works" when there is a strong authoritative figure who can brandish the threat of violence if someone isn't pulling their weight, and that person (and inevitably that person's sub-tribe) always end up living more equally than others. You know, for the good of everyone else. Same old story.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
In other words, it annoys you that he's correct, so all you've got is some lazy ad hominem and snark in an effort to distract from the reality you're trying to wish away.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Observing that communism/socialism fails is trivial. _Everything_ fails.
Yet, strangely, we have toilet paper and they don't.
But there is a Magic Health Care Fairy, right?
Nope! That's why people were complaining that they had to pay, pay, for healthcare, resenting the indignity of it.
And a Magic College Tuition Fairy to boot!
Nope! That's why so many complain about the costs of tuition. But this goes beyond college, of course.
You may want to look into the history of public education.
Venezuela enacted a massive gun ban several years ago. I see Slashdot articles how crime is a bare fraction of what it used to be before the blanket ban on non police/military ownership. Maybe they are doing some things right, as they don't have school shootings like in the US?
And by not having guns the people of Venezuela were completely powerless against their government, thatâ(TM)s why theyâ(TM)re communist today in every aspect except the name.
LOL except all the countries you list aren't socialist, they just have more government services than the U.S. and less freedoms.
What US freedoms do you refer too? Getting harassed for jaywalking? Open container laws? Drinking age 21? Treasure chests of software patents? Getting choked to death by the police? Zoning laws that say this square mile is residential only, no shops to make it livable? Getting raided by the police or SWAT like Israelis do to Palestinians?
Please educate me on those great "freedoms" I'm missing.
Yeah, ree-al socialism hasn't been tried yet.
"Has been seen to work" is not the same as "always works". However, social pressure is much more effective than threat of violence for most people in most situations. The exceptions - people who are truly psychopathic or sociopath - are pretty rare. Even then, the threat historically seems to have been ejection from the tribe, not violence.
You can't really rule by threat of violence in small communal living situations anyhow - you have to sleep sometime. Other apes seem to have similar tribal situations - e.g. chimpanzees are quite violent in general, but leaders who try to rule by force get killed off pretty quick.
But of course, those kind of social enforcement mechanisms only work because they're actually social - people you spend time with every day. Impersonal socialism simply has no such mechanism to make it work, so there's only violence available.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Late-stage socialism strikes again. Venezuela has run out of other people's money.
Thanks for the propaganda. Nice to know Fox & Friends is on /.
Let me tell you, as a latino, living in latin america, getting to know lots of venezuelans who fled their country because they need to, you know, EAT. I'm not a fox sock puppet or anything, byr if you ask a mayority of people in south america, or in Chile, in particular (my country), you'll see people is not fond around here of the likes of chavez or maduro, because mony of us here know what's to live in a dictatorship. Pinochet in my Chile, Videla in argentina, some other fuckers in the rest of the continent. And most of us don't appreciate sock puppet governments installed by the powerful country of the moment, doesn't matterif it's the US or China or whatever
Now, that one of the welthiest countries in the region has his whole population living like bums except for maduro or chavez's family, who gets richer by the second... you don't need to be a right winger to detest something like that, let alone a republican wingnut.
The toilet paper, flour and peteol thing is a result of multinational companies trying to make life difficult for the average person in order to force the government out, because they want to be able to charge in US dollars instead of Bolivars. It's eerily similar to the precursors of the downfall of the Argentinian economy. Get paid in local currency, exchange it to USD for transactions, but receive local currency.
Nothing to do with socialism, everything to do with capitalism.
Wow. You just blamed Venezuela's failures on Capitalism. BTW you left out the influence of the illuminati. Be sure to get that one in next time.
I agree.
I think I was reacting to another comment and posted here be mistake.
Seems like the i2p protocols for anonymous peer-to-peer web + networking would be the next logical step if a routing framework like TOR can be blocked.
Just my two cents.
It's amazing what happens to any country that decides the challenge the financial hegemony. If Venezuela was standing at the edge of the precipice, our betters would be sure to give them the extra push that's needed.
At the very least, now they can point to the mangled corpse and righteously proclaim "See? This is why our way is best!"
Huh, I hadn't heard that one before.
It emerges pretty clearly even just from the narrative in Chapter 1 of the Manifesto,:
The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part. ... The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground ... But with the development of industry the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalised, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. ... What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers.
So if you assume that late-stage capitalism degrades from frontier entrepreneurship to what is essentially market feudalism where a small handful of companies control sectors of the economy and have walled themselves in with sufficient barriers to entry and regulatory capture, then is it fair to assume that Marx would argue we need a revolution to simply go BACK to captialism? Or would he argue that the wealth is there, so captialism has done it's job, so choo-choo it's socialism time?
Nice question. I'm not. by any means, a scholar of Marx, but I've read a little, so I'll attempt to field it.
Firstly, if you will allow me this platitude, Marx was a man of his time, responding to the world as he found it, so we cannot really know what \ he would have argued had he seen contemporary conditions. He clearly did advocate revolution towards capitalism where it didn't exist! So for example, and this would/does upset our contemporary 'post-colonialist,' he wrote in support of French colonialism in Nth Africa as being an advance over what he saw as the theocratic tribalism of the Barbary coast. (Sorry, I can't recall the reference, I believe it was in a letter he wrote someone). He also, in communication with Russian radicals, dismissed the idea the Russia could stage a Socialist revolution (which led Lenin to revise Marx with his theory of 'Imperialism,' thus Marxism-Leninism), arguing that it was really mainly the US and England who were near enough advanced to accomplish this.
But more directly to your question. I think though we need to be careful of the use of "market feudalism" here. By 'feudalism' we (historians, lawyers and probably Marx) would usually understand, as a kind of idealised model, the social arrangement where land is parcelled out by a superior Lord to his vassal Lords (eg. King -> Baron -> Lords), but otherwise that land is inalienable (cannot be bought or sold) and where the resident population (serfs) are bound to that land, unable simply to leave it (though escape routes like becoming a soldier existed in practice). Similarly in the towns (burghs), the burghers are constrained almost by birth to follow certain vocations, which are tightly restricted in size etc by the guild system (the spillage ending up in monasteries). For (non-aristocratic) women, of course, social position would be even more restricted.
Marx' insight was that each stage of economic development (which then created a particular kind of society and person), at first represented an advance of productive capacity over the previous, but that eventually the very aspects which originally recommended a system because "fetters on production" and thus change would ensue. If you like check out the
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
Public roads are not socialism. Socialism is government control of the means of production. They were even built by private companies.
Maybe strictly speaking that's true, but it is a form of "soft" socialism!
Who paid those private companies? It was the government, and they paid them with taxes they stole from you and me! I know people don't like paying tolls, but think about this: it's only a step from free public roads to free public education and then to free public health complete with death panels. And once you let the government decide whose gonna live and die its a very short road to Auswitz!
Public roads? No thanks!
Be sure to cut immediately your Internet access, so not to get corrupted by this propaganda!
Not convinced? Well, that is the topic of the day, isnt it?
As of today (June 28, 2018 1630 gmt-4) TOR is working for me in TAILS 3.6 on a Vbox VM
Yes, not the most secure configuration, but I am busy with a few things rigth now, no BW to Torrent 3.8, and not rich to have multiple machines.
Every Time I torrent the latest version of TAILS, I take the time to fire up the VM, and connect to TOR, just to practice.
TOR and TAILS, not being the most user-friendly things to set up, give me grief each time I change version. Maybe that'spart of the problem that the other guys reported...
The other part is that the guys at CANTV (the government main ISP) have been conducting "internet censorship" experiments for weeks now (DNS blocks, HTTP filtering, DoS,). Highly uncoordinated, and semi-random... but Still....
Also, and this is anecdotic: Ping times to 8.8.8.8 have gone (at least for me) from a reasonable 90ms to a woping 150ms. Wonder what is being done with my packets those extra 60ms. Will ask some contacts (I was technical trainer for cloud computing to some of those guys, and have my fair share of contacts in Vz Telecoms Companies)
Having said that, for the time being, a change of DNS and a VPN is a the moment enough to evade most blocks (Unless you are a high value target).
Anyway, just to say that TOR is back to normal (if it ever was out).
PS: Not anon coward, because my position is widely known, here and elsewhere (and in meatspace too), no point in hiding it now.
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
Those paper napkins on the shelf right next to toilet paper work well. They're nice and soft. Toilet paper is a deliberately targeted product.
This is the most intelligent and succinct comment on Slashdot I’ve ever read. If I had mod points, I’d give em to you, but instead you’ll have to settle for this compliment, and that I’m copying this into my “slashdot wisdom” note in Google Keep. :)