The evidence might still indicate that they've committed a crime, but there might not be enough of it.
This is not a "shades of grey" issue. Either a crime was committed or not. If there is sufficient evidence to support a criminal conviction then a crime was committed. Anything short of that constitutes "not a crime."
You're getting into a very dangerous area when you want to classify people as "criminal but without sufficient evidence to support the claim." This is a nation of laws, not a mob. How would you respond if someone called you a criminal in a public forum with intent of destroying your character or livelihood but lacked evidence to support it? I doubt you'd like anyone entertaining the idea that you were a criminal despite there being insufficient evidence.
The lesson here is never allow fudging just because it takes down someone you don't like The gun can easily point the other way, and it's inevitable that sooner or later someone who does not share your views will do exactly that. If you don't want it done to you, don't do it to someone else.
Planetary Defense Officer! Tell me this isn't the coolest job title in all of human history! Imagine chatting at a bar. "What do you do for a living? Neurosurgeon? Rocket Scientist?" and you reply "No baby...Planetary Defense Officer. Y'know this Earth thing? Yeah, I defend that."
Why not start somewhere? Nuclear and renewables are existing technology. Building more of them is an engineering problem. More doing, less talking.
There's this funny thing called "cost" which you seem to ignore. I'd be the first one to champion a return to building nuclear plants and, if and when their costs become competitive enough, renewables. However, environmental groups come out of the woodwork anytime anyone proposes building a nuclear plant anywhere. It takes billions of dollars and roughly a decade to get even one plant approved and built, largely because of stuff like this.
So, how about less protesting and obstructing and more doing?
It sounds like you are saying that I should forfeit that because I should share in an obscure sense of collective guilt (per capita).
Intentionally or otherwise, you've revealed the core motivation of the "climate change" movement: to destroy anyone who is more prosperous than they are. As you noted, reducing the CO2 emissions of "rich" (and by that they mean "Western") nations will not solve the problem. It will, however, put them at great economic disadvantage compared to everyone who isn't "rich" (i.e. "Western). It's no accident the vast majority of climate change enthusiasts are also very much anti-capitalist and anti-Western in their ideologies.
So, the end result will be similar CO2 emissions once non-Western countries grow prosperous due to the self-inflicted injuries of, say, the United States. Their emission levels will go up since they'll not be bound by petty treaties and limits. Once they achieve economic ascendancy, there's very little incentive for them to reduce their emissions, especially since almost none of said countries tolerate the vocal "professional protester" crowd we are forced to tolerate in the West. So you end up kicking the can down the road a couple of decades, only now you have heavy-handed communist and socialist governments calling the shots for the entire world. Sounds like a worker's paradise, eh?
Make no mistake, this *is* the end goal. It's not about "saving the planet." It's about taking First World nations down a peg so everyone else can take over.
They will be facing an unprecedented liability over this due to the choices they made for the purpose of putting profits over human lives.
One thing you are neglecting is pressure airlines put on Boeing to make the MAX in such a way as they wouldn't have to certify pilots on a different type. There are substantial costs to airlines for such training.
If it can be proven FB was responsible for a breach then you'd have a case. However, FB has not been implicated in any such breach.
Again, it seems like you're more interested in dispensing summary punishment than seeking any kind of actual legal remedy for suspected crimes. We used to have groups just like that in the US several decades ago. They were called "lynch mobs" and justice was the last thing on their mind. Is that really what you want to return to? Is that your idea of how guilt and innocence should be determined?
zuckerberg and his buddies at fakebook should be put in a federal prison for collecting and selling other people's personal information and facebook utterly destroyed
At the risk of provoking a hornet's nest, what Federal laws has Zuckerberg violated? The answer, of course, is none. While it may feel very satisfying to propose throwing him in jail, in a country where the rule of law prevails someone must actually be convicted of a crime before the State can punish them. Are you advocating for a government that arbitrarily imprisons people that have broken no laws? What a frightening proposition.
Likewise, "utterly destroying" Facebook is not the job of the government. You, the consumer, have that power right now if you and enough similarly-thinking individuals work in concert. An article appeared yesterday showing millions of people are abandoning FB, all (gasp!) without government telling them to! Shocking, I know, that people can exercise individual choice without being ordered about by an all-powerful government, but it happens.
You might want to consider the consequences of having a government that can do whatever it wants, whenever it wants, to whoever it wants.
After all, no company has ever failed big based on fraud when men were in charge.
So your motto is "go with the women, they're just as bad as the men"? That's a helluva thing to use as a yardstick. If you're going to excuse bad behavior by women by saying they're no worse than the men, why bother making the distinction between genders at all anymore?
It is due to the fact that the minority has a hard time defending their rights against the majority.
And yet the entire premise of "shut them down" is that a majority of people dislike what FB is doing! So, again, I ask why people turn to the government as this miraculous solver of all ills?
Or, for the sake of argument, let us assume there isn't a majority out there that dislikes what FB is doing. Should a minority of citizens be allowed to persuade government of the entire populace that a service should be "shut down" simply because the minority party doesn't like it? Is that the kind of government we want? Has anyone stopped to consider the consequences of what could happen under such a system?
Do you know how many websites now REQUIRE Facebook logins?
None, so far as I'm aware, that you're required to patronize. If you don't like the tie in with FB, don't give these sites your business. They will either change their policies or wither and die.
Why is it people are so oblivious to the power they have to affect change without requiring The Almighty Hand Of Government to step in and regulate everything? Is it just lazy thinking?
While I share your frustration in how cavalier FB is with this stuff, your call to "just shut 'em down" begs the question. What USA law have they violated that would merit shutdown? The USA has a government of laws. It is not a dictatorship where private businesses can be shut down on a whim. What a frightening proposition, that you can violate no laws and be shut down regardless due to public opinion.
Again, I will emphatically state I find FB's conduct reprehensible. But the government should only get involved when things are illegal. Reprehensible stuff is handled by customers when they stop giving business to companies they dislike. You do not want to give the government -- any government -- the right to arbitrarily kill a business just because they do something unpopular.
Where there are cameras, there are always microphones, listening in on private business conversations. Insider trading worth billions.
This presumes you have a means to record, transcribe, read, evaluate, and summarize "conversations" in an extremely noisy environment spread across thousands of planes and perhaps millions of passengers a day. No matter how much "insider trading" info you might gather, the costs of such a system would greatly eclipse it.
Further, do people really have these conversations on commercial jets in the first place? Most of the time I see people keeping to themselves, not jabbering away. And executives with the crucial info aren't on commercial flights anyway; they're on business jets.
True but it ignores the larger question of why FB is in the business of censoring something that amounts to a "thought crime." I can see any business censoring actual threats and such but when it slides into censoring specific ideologies -- even ones as loathsome as Nazism -- one begins to wonder who they will target next.
I'm a WW2 history buff and I've queried Goebbels, Mengele, and so forth to learn more about the crimes they committed. Our public education system does a hideously inadequate job at this, and learning more about how these people came to power can (hopefully) help future generations not make the same mistakes. Censoring it is counterproductive. It makes martyrs out of these fools and prevents regular folks from learning from the past.
Why only focus on bringing these materials back to Earth? Better to compare costs with what it would take to loft that mass out of Earth's gravity well. It's not economically feasible to bring some of this stuff back to Earth but it's eminently feasible to use it in space since there are no launch costs. It's already there.
Yes, I know, the infrastructure for space-based construction isn't in place, would take a long time to establish, and would be enormously expensive. However, such costs would, in the long run, be far cheaper than lofting it all out of Earth's gravity well. More to the point, once equipment exceeds a certain size, it's not practical to consider launching it at all; it must be constructed in orbit.
Also, the iron will most likely be more useful in space anyway.
This. People are overlooking facts like there are many asteroidal materials we don't need to ship to Earth but would be immensely valuable in space-based construction. Precious metals and the like might be useful to transport to earth but things like iron, aluminium, silicon, etc. would make space-based construction feasible. The cost of lifting all that crap out of a gravity well like Earth is what keeps us Earth-bound.
I'm not discounting the vast cost of setting up orbital refineries and construction yards but such things will be necessary if we ever expect to spread beyond Earth in any meaningful way.
If you're not going to bother to read up on two millennia of discord between Arabs and Jews then there's really no point in pursuing this point with you. You have no idea what you're talking about and no interest in remediating your ignorance.
So, you believe a country being a "hellhole" is reason enough for the US to invade?
Wow! If you can make leaps like that you should try out for the Olympics. You'd set gold medal records for sure. Typical liberal. Since you can't argue with facts and logic, you're reduced to strawmen. What's next, ad hominem attacks? That's usually where your type goes when they're losing the argument.
Don't tell that to AOC, her hordes of supporters, or the fawning media who adore her. Never mind that her "democratic socialism" is no different in practice than the socialism we've seen play out in Stalinist Russia, or Maoist China, or Castro's Cuba, or Kim's North Korea, or Maduro's Venezuela, or [insert failed state with starving, rioting people here]. No this is New Socialism and it's going to work out Just Fine this time because she says so!
Funny how everyone who's ever experienced the heavy hand of socialism is running screaming in terror from it to liberal democratic capitalist nations. You'd think if socialism worked it'd be the other way around, right?
Socialism cannot work without control. Control of markets. Control of social behavior. Control of the media. Control, control, control. It's forcing people do behave in ways contrary to their natural instincts, that being the desire for individual prosperity not group prosperity. That control requires an oppressive, authoritarian government with absurd amounts of power over the populace. That kind of power attracts corruption, cronyism, and cult-of-personality "leaders" who inevitably run the whole train off a cliff. History has shown this is the case every time it's been tried. That doesn't stop leftists everywhere from dreaming that it'll still work if only the right people are in charge. They're oblivious to the fact that the "right people" frequently aren't the angels they proclaim to be, and even if they are they eventually grow old, die, and must be replaced with others who may not share their altruism or competence.
What's truly frightening is when Ocassio-Cortez says things which sound like they came word-for-word out of the mouths of Chavez, Maduro, Castro, Mao, and Stalin. She wants the very things which decimated and continue to decimate the countries where socialism was implemented. She may call it "democratic socialism" but it's the same thing in practice and requires the same huge accumulation of government power to achieve. That power will be abused. Cronyism and corruption will come with it. History has shown that time and time again. For all its faults, inequalities, and harshness, capitalism has brought the world more prosperity and happiness than any other form of government ever conceived by man. For anyone to advocate abandoning it for something that has uniformly failed everywhere it's been tried is madness.
it is owned and controlled by capitalist oligarchs just like in the US.
The oligarchs you speak of have power and wealth because they're working hand-in-hand with the Maduro government. Anyone who dissents is removed so logically all that remain are those who have everything to gain by keeping Maduro in power. At this point there is no difference between an oligarch-run media and one de facto controlled by Maduro.
conservative shows that dominate the News Talk radio format
Oh, leftist talk radio has been tried in many markets. Remember "Air America"? No? That's because it went bust. No, it didn't go bust because Fox sent a team of ninjas to decapitate everyone. It failed because it could not compete.
Talk news is not a good format for leftists because the format encourages and relies on critical thought. Further, it encourages people to call in and challenge the host in a test of logic. Air America failed because it was basically shrill leftists telling everyone what to think and lambasting them if they didn't agree. Conservative radio doesn't do this and has thrived on debate.
Come to think of it, leftists as a whole seem to be quite shrill on avoiding debate of any kind, either by protesting campus speakers, threatening broadcasters, or trying to use the power of government to regulate airwaves. You'd think an ideology confident in its principles would welcome debate, but leftists don't. It's dogma or nothing, apparently. Speaks volumes about the logic of leftist ideology.
You mean the media that got Trump elected? That "democratic left"? The media that has put a Republican majority in our local, state and federal governments for 20 years now?
That would be "the voters" doing what you describe. Perhaps, just perhaps, people voted for Trump because they liked what he had to say, not because Fox beamed gamma rays into their craniums using alien probes at Area 51. I know it might hurt your ego, but you have to consider that, despite the bovine conclusions of you and your self-selected group of leftists, by and large America is and always has been a mostly conservative nation. Leftists like yourself are the squeaky wheels. You make a lot of noise and feel very self-important. You get a disproportionate amount of press because of this but that doesn't translate into electoral victories. Hence losing state, federal, and local elections on a massive scale in the last decade or so.
It's not a grand conspiracy. You're just wrong, that's all. You're not the center of the universe despite what you've been raised and educated to believe. Get used to it.
You have all these left leaning networks and you bitch about ONE right leaning network in Fox News?
They don't like people upsetting the echo chamber of leftist media outlets. If we can't have state-controlled media where all the talking heads say the same thing in the same way at the same time then the next best thing is a uniformly leftist media. Alas, Fox News will not follow the guidebook. Hence they must be demonized even when those doing the demonizing can't point out where Fox is wrong or inaccurate in their reporting. Apparently it's enough to just dislike what they're reporting, scream "racist" or "sexist" or whatever, and claim victory. All this from the "tolerant" left.
Pretty sure the Arabs and Jews have been hating and killing each other for a lot longer than the US has even existed. The only difference is oil. Without it, the ME would still be a barren wasteland but nobody would care.
there wouldn't be refugees from Central America
Yes, because all those Central American countries had thriving economies, stable governments, and prosperous societies before the US came along! Oh, wait, no...they've been hellholes for a lot longer than the US has been around.
North Korea might have electricity and enough food
Funny how South Korea, which has pretty much the same resources, land area, and so forth as North Korea, is thriving and prosperous while the North starves. Yeah, can't blame the crushing hardline cult-of-personality Kim government for that, can we? Nah, that can't possibly have anything to do with it. Gotta blame the US even when it makes no sense at all. It's so fashionable these days.
The further to the left a society goes, the more totalitarian it gets.
Which, when you think about it, is the natural outcome of pushing socialism. At its heart, socialism is the antithesis of human nature. Humans as a group are not altruistic. The average human is concerned about what's in it for them, not whether it benefits some nebulous "other" or society as a whole. It doesn't mean humans are evil. It's the natural instinct for a species to focus on individual survival and that's been bred into us over millions of years. Socialism tells you the individual must sacrifice for the group. People won't do that voluntarily. Capitalism entices people with a risk/reward structure which encourages the individual to work hard for a reward; the benefit to society is a side-effect.
Since people by and large won't do this voluntarily without a defined individual reward -- which is the case under socialism -- they must be coerced into doing it. That requires socialist governments to amass power and repeatedly wield it in every corner of society. It's forcing a round peg into a square hole and will not work for long. It's caused massive suffering everywhere it's been tried with the suffering being in direct proportion to how hard it's been pushed.
The sad part is socialism looks so appealing on paper. Couple that with the apparent lack of awareness of history and you have whole swaths of well-to-do societies clamoring for it. Meanwhile everyone that's ever been under the heel of a socialist government is running away from the concept.
Slashdot Mirror
The evidence might still indicate that they've committed a crime, but there might not be enough of it.
This is not a "shades of grey" issue. Either a crime was committed or not. If there is sufficient evidence to support a criminal conviction then a crime was committed. Anything short of that constitutes "not a crime."
You're getting into a very dangerous area when you want to classify people as "criminal but without sufficient evidence to support the claim." This is a nation of laws, not a mob. How would you respond if someone called you a criminal in a public forum with intent of destroying your character or livelihood but lacked evidence to support it? I doubt you'd like anyone entertaining the idea that you were a criminal despite there being insufficient evidence.
The lesson here is never allow fudging just because it takes down someone you don't like The gun can easily point the other way, and it's inevitable that sooner or later someone who does not share your views will do exactly that. If you don't want it done to you, don't do it to someone else.
Planetary Defense Officer! Tell me this isn't the coolest job title in all of human history! Imagine chatting at a bar. "What do you do for a living? Neurosurgeon? Rocket Scientist?" and you reply "No baby...Planetary Defense Officer. Y'know this Earth thing? Yeah, I defend that."
Why not start somewhere? Nuclear and renewables are existing technology. Building more of them is an engineering problem. More doing, less talking.
There's this funny thing called "cost" which you seem to ignore. I'd be the first one to champion a return to building nuclear plants and, if and when their costs become competitive enough, renewables. However, environmental groups come out of the woodwork anytime anyone proposes building a nuclear plant anywhere. It takes billions of dollars and roughly a decade to get even one plant approved and built, largely because of stuff like this.
So, how about less protesting and obstructing and more doing?
It sounds like you are saying that I should forfeit that because I should share in an obscure sense of collective guilt (per capita).
Intentionally or otherwise, you've revealed the core motivation of the "climate change" movement: to destroy anyone who is more prosperous than they are. As you noted, reducing the CO2 emissions of "rich" (and by that they mean "Western") nations will not solve the problem. It will, however, put them at great economic disadvantage compared to everyone who isn't "rich" (i.e. "Western). It's no accident the vast majority of climate change enthusiasts are also very much anti-capitalist and anti-Western in their ideologies.
So, the end result will be similar CO2 emissions once non-Western countries grow prosperous due to the self-inflicted injuries of, say, the United States. Their emission levels will go up since they'll not be bound by petty treaties and limits. Once they achieve economic ascendancy, there's very little incentive for them to reduce their emissions, especially since almost none of said countries tolerate the vocal "professional protester" crowd we are forced to tolerate in the West. So you end up kicking the can down the road a couple of decades, only now you have heavy-handed communist and socialist governments calling the shots for the entire world. Sounds like a worker's paradise, eh?
Make no mistake, this *is* the end goal. It's not about "saving the planet." It's about taking First World nations down a peg so everyone else can take over.
They will be facing an unprecedented liability over this due to the choices they made for the purpose of putting profits over human lives.
One thing you are neglecting is pressure airlines put on Boeing to make the MAX in such a way as they wouldn't have to certify pilots on a different type. There are substantial costs to airlines for such training.
If it can be proven FB was responsible for a breach then you'd have a case. However, FB has not been implicated in any such breach.
Again, it seems like you're more interested in dispensing summary punishment than seeking any kind of actual legal remedy for suspected crimes. We used to have groups just like that in the US several decades ago. They were called "lynch mobs" and justice was the last thing on their mind. Is that really what you want to return to? Is that your idea of how guilt and innocence should be determined?
zuckerberg and his buddies at fakebook should be put in a federal prison for collecting and selling other people's personal information and facebook utterly destroyed
At the risk of provoking a hornet's nest, what Federal laws has Zuckerberg violated? The answer, of course, is none. While it may feel very satisfying to propose throwing him in jail, in a country where the rule of law prevails someone must actually be convicted of a crime before the State can punish them. Are you advocating for a government that arbitrarily imprisons people that have broken no laws? What a frightening proposition.
Likewise, "utterly destroying" Facebook is not the job of the government. You, the consumer, have that power right now if you and enough similarly-thinking individuals work in concert. An article appeared yesterday showing millions of people are abandoning FB, all (gasp!) without government telling them to! Shocking, I know, that people can exercise individual choice without being ordered about by an all-powerful government, but it happens.
You might want to consider the consequences of having a government that can do whatever it wants, whenever it wants, to whoever it wants.
After all, no company has ever failed big based on fraud when men were in charge.
So your motto is "go with the women, they're just as bad as the men"? That's a helluva thing to use as a yardstick. If you're going to excuse bad behavior by women by saying they're no worse than the men, why bother making the distinction between genders at all anymore?
It is due to the fact that the minority has a hard time defending their rights against the majority.
And yet the entire premise of "shut them down" is that a majority of people dislike what FB is doing! So, again, I ask why people turn to the government as this miraculous solver of all ills?
Or, for the sake of argument, let us assume there isn't a majority out there that dislikes what FB is doing. Should a minority of citizens be allowed to persuade government of the entire populace that a service should be "shut down" simply because the minority party doesn't like it? Is that the kind of government we want? Has anyone stopped to consider the consequences of what could happen under such a system?
Do you know how many websites now REQUIRE Facebook logins?
None, so far as I'm aware, that you're required to patronize. If you don't like the tie in with FB, don't give these sites your business. They will either change their policies or wither and die.
Why is it people are so oblivious to the power they have to affect change without requiring The Almighty Hand Of Government to step in and regulate everything? Is it just lazy thinking?
While I share your frustration in how cavalier FB is with this stuff, your call to "just shut 'em down" begs the question. What USA law have they violated that would merit shutdown? The USA has a government of laws. It is not a dictatorship where private businesses can be shut down on a whim. What a frightening proposition, that you can violate no laws and be shut down regardless due to public opinion.
Again, I will emphatically state I find FB's conduct reprehensible. But the government should only get involved when things are illegal. Reprehensible stuff is handled by customers when they stop giving business to companies they dislike. You do not want to give the government -- any government -- the right to arbitrarily kill a business just because they do something unpopular.
Where there are cameras, there are always microphones, listening in on private business conversations. Insider trading worth billions.
This presumes you have a means to record, transcribe, read, evaluate, and summarize "conversations" in an extremely noisy environment spread across thousands of planes and perhaps millions of passengers a day. No matter how much "insider trading" info you might gather, the costs of such a system would greatly eclipse it.
Further, do people really have these conversations on commercial jets in the first place? Most of the time I see people keeping to themselves, not jabbering away. And executives with the crucial info aren't on commercial flights anyway; they're on business jets.
So yeah, your idea isn't plausible.
True but it ignores the larger question of why FB is in the business of censoring something that amounts to a "thought crime." I can see any business censoring actual threats and such but when it slides into censoring specific ideologies -- even ones as loathsome as Nazism -- one begins to wonder who they will target next.
I'm a WW2 history buff and I've queried Goebbels, Mengele, and so forth to learn more about the crimes they committed. Our public education system does a hideously inadequate job at this, and learning more about how these people came to power can (hopefully) help future generations not make the same mistakes. Censoring it is counterproductive. It makes martyrs out of these fools and prevents regular folks from learning from the past.
Why only focus on bringing these materials back to Earth? Better to compare costs with what it would take to loft that mass out of Earth's gravity well. It's not economically feasible to bring some of this stuff back to Earth but it's eminently feasible to use it in space since there are no launch costs. It's already there.
Yes, I know, the infrastructure for space-based construction isn't in place, would take a long time to establish, and would be enormously expensive. However, such costs would, in the long run, be far cheaper than lofting it all out of Earth's gravity well. More to the point, once equipment exceeds a certain size, it's not practical to consider launching it at all; it must be constructed in orbit.
Also, the iron will most likely be more useful in space anyway.
This. People are overlooking facts like there are many asteroidal materials we don't need to ship to Earth but would be immensely valuable in space-based construction. Precious metals and the like might be useful to transport to earth but things like iron, aluminium, silicon, etc. would make space-based construction feasible. The cost of lifting all that crap out of a gravity well like Earth is what keeps us Earth-bound.
I'm not discounting the vast cost of setting up orbital refineries and construction yards but such things will be necessary if we ever expect to spread beyond Earth in any meaningful way.
It's probably not a bad idea to have one of the worse offenders actively involved in trying to find a solution.
You say that as if anyone sent by Sudan would actually care about finding a solution.
Surprisingly, not.
If you're not going to bother to read up on two millennia of discord between Arabs and Jews then there's really no point in pursuing this point with you. You have no idea what you're talking about and no interest in remediating your ignorance.
So, you believe a country being a "hellhole" is reason enough for the US to invade?
Wow! If you can make leaps like that you should try out for the Olympics. You'd set gold medal records for sure. Typical liberal. Since you can't argue with facts and logic, you're reduced to strawmen. What's next, ad hominem attacks? That's usually where your type goes when they're losing the argument.
That trick never works. Never.
Don't tell that to AOC, her hordes of supporters, or the fawning media who adore her. Never mind that her "democratic socialism" is no different in practice than the socialism we've seen play out in Stalinist Russia, or Maoist China, or Castro's Cuba, or Kim's North Korea, or Maduro's Venezuela, or [insert failed state with starving, rioting people here]. No this is New Socialism and it's going to work out Just Fine this time because she says so!
Funny how everyone who's ever experienced the heavy hand of socialism is running screaming in terror from it to liberal democratic capitalist nations. You'd think if socialism worked it'd be the other way around, right?
Socialism cannot work without control. Control of markets. Control of social behavior. Control of the media. Control, control, control. It's forcing people do behave in ways contrary to their natural instincts, that being the desire for individual prosperity not group prosperity. That control requires an oppressive, authoritarian government with absurd amounts of power over the populace. That kind of power attracts corruption, cronyism, and cult-of-personality "leaders" who inevitably run the whole train off a cliff. History has shown this is the case every time it's been tried. That doesn't stop leftists everywhere from dreaming that it'll still work if only the right people are in charge. They're oblivious to the fact that the "right people" frequently aren't the angels they proclaim to be, and even if they are they eventually grow old, die, and must be replaced with others who may not share their altruism or competence.
What's truly frightening is when Ocassio-Cortez says things which sound like they came word-for-word out of the mouths of Chavez, Maduro, Castro, Mao, and Stalin. She wants the very things which decimated and continue to decimate the countries where socialism was implemented. She may call it "democratic socialism" but it's the same thing in practice and requires the same huge accumulation of government power to achieve. That power will be abused. Cronyism and corruption will come with it. History has shown that time and time again. For all its faults, inequalities, and harshness, capitalism has brought the world more prosperity and happiness than any other form of government ever conceived by man. For anyone to advocate abandoning it for something that has uniformly failed everywhere it's been tried is madness.
it is owned and controlled by capitalist oligarchs just like in the US.
The oligarchs you speak of have power and wealth because they're working hand-in-hand with the Maduro government. Anyone who dissents is removed so logically all that remain are those who have everything to gain by keeping Maduro in power. At this point there is no difference between an oligarch-run media and one de facto controlled by Maduro.
conservative shows that dominate the News Talk radio format
Oh, leftist talk radio has been tried in many markets. Remember "Air America"? No? That's because it went bust. No, it didn't go bust because Fox sent a team of ninjas to decapitate everyone. It failed because it could not compete.
Talk news is not a good format for leftists because the format encourages and relies on critical thought. Further, it encourages people to call in and challenge the host in a test of logic. Air America failed because it was basically shrill leftists telling everyone what to think and lambasting them if they didn't agree. Conservative radio doesn't do this and has thrived on debate.
Come to think of it, leftists as a whole seem to be quite shrill on avoiding debate of any kind, either by protesting campus speakers, threatening broadcasters, or trying to use the power of government to regulate airwaves. You'd think an ideology confident in its principles would welcome debate, but leftists don't. It's dogma or nothing, apparently. Speaks volumes about the logic of leftist ideology.
You mean the media that got Trump elected? That "democratic left"?
The media that has put a Republican majority in our local, state and federal governments for 20 years now?
That would be "the voters" doing what you describe. Perhaps, just perhaps, people voted for Trump because they liked what he had to say, not because Fox beamed gamma rays into their craniums using alien probes at Area 51. I know it might hurt your ego, but you have to consider that, despite the bovine conclusions of you and your self-selected group of leftists, by and large America is and always has been a mostly conservative nation. Leftists like yourself are the squeaky wheels. You make a lot of noise and feel very self-important. You get a disproportionate amount of press because of this but that doesn't translate into electoral victories. Hence losing state, federal, and local elections on a massive scale in the last decade or so.
It's not a grand conspiracy. You're just wrong, that's all. You're not the center of the universe despite what you've been raised and educated to believe. Get used to it.
You have all these left leaning networks and you bitch about ONE right leaning network in Fox News?
They don't like people upsetting the echo chamber of leftist media outlets. If we can't have state-controlled media where all the talking heads say the same thing in the same way at the same time then the next best thing is a uniformly leftist media. Alas, Fox News will not follow the guidebook. Hence they must be demonized even when those doing the demonizing can't point out where Fox is wrong or inaccurate in their reporting. Apparently it's enough to just dislike what they're reporting, scream "racist" or "sexist" or whatever, and claim victory. All this from the "tolerant" left.
Orwell would be so proud of them.
the Middle East might not be a wasteland
Pretty sure the Arabs and Jews have been hating and killing each other for a lot longer than the US has even existed. The only difference is oil. Without it, the ME would still be a barren wasteland but nobody would care.
there wouldn't be refugees from Central America
Yes, because all those Central American countries had thriving economies, stable governments, and prosperous societies before the US came along! Oh, wait, no...they've been hellholes for a lot longer than the US has been around.
North Korea might have electricity and enough food
Funny how South Korea, which has pretty much the same resources, land area, and so forth as North Korea, is thriving and prosperous while the North starves. Yeah, can't blame the crushing hardline cult-of-personality Kim government for that, can we? Nah, that can't possibly have anything to do with it. Gotta blame the US even when it makes no sense at all. It's so fashionable these days.
The further to the left a society goes, the more totalitarian it gets.
Which, when you think about it, is the natural outcome of pushing socialism. At its heart, socialism is the antithesis of human nature. Humans as a group are not altruistic. The average human is concerned about what's in it for them, not whether it benefits some nebulous "other" or society as a whole. It doesn't mean humans are evil. It's the natural instinct for a species to focus on individual survival and that's been bred into us over millions of years. Socialism tells you the individual must sacrifice for the group. People won't do that voluntarily. Capitalism entices people with a risk/reward structure which encourages the individual to work hard for a reward; the benefit to society is a side-effect.
Since people by and large won't do this voluntarily without a defined individual reward -- which is the case under socialism -- they must be coerced into doing it. That requires socialist governments to amass power and repeatedly wield it in every corner of society. It's forcing a round peg into a square hole and will not work for long. It's caused massive suffering everywhere it's been tried with the suffering being in direct proportion to how hard it's been pushed.
The sad part is socialism looks so appealing on paper. Couple that with the apparent lack of awareness of history and you have whole swaths of well-to-do societies clamoring for it. Meanwhile everyone that's ever been under the heel of a socialist government is running away from the concept.