7.7 million people have left the country since Maduro came to power, the largest refugee crisis in the Americas. Polls show that in a free and fair election, Maduro would have struggled to stay in the double digits. Colectivos actively worked to interrupt the opposition’s recent primary election via armed disruption of voting. Whatever that book is basing its research on, Maduro simply no longer represents the vast majority of Venezuelans and the Venezuelan diaspora.

I wonder what changed in the last 8 years.

The video shows easily hundreds, and it’s clear there is a larger crowd behind them.

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There’s a reason that countries started agreeing on a set of laws of war, and it wasn’t the goodness of their hearts. It means if your own soldiers get captured by an enemy working under the same rules, they should ideally be treated with at least a minimal standard of care. But every incident like this or Abu Ghraib weakens those protections and norms.

Sometimes it feels like certain parts of humanity just didn’t really learn all the lessons that they should have from the Holocaust about dehumanizing people.

I haven’t, but I have heard of it. I think parts of Lapce are based on some Zed algorithms.

Oh? Do you know details on how it’s going to work? All I can find is the BRICS Pay site with a very high level overview. They’re talking a big game, but as of now all that seems to be public is just talk.

Mission Accomplished!

There are lots of details left to hammer out. This is like an announcement that there will be a committee to commission a study to hire a contractor to change a light bulb. The process will likely take a while and may not complete at all.

Does COSMIC’s design suck or is it in pre-alpha?

Lapce, an IDE written in Rust. It’s nice and light compared to most IDE’s, so I use it a bit on my aging laptop from 2015. However, it doesn’t have the extension ecosystem or polish of my favored IDE, VS Code.

Just take the dive into fish. It used to have a lot of problems with incompatibilities, but that’s been less of a problem lately.

I haven’t found nushell to be that great as a day-to-day shell simply because it integrates poorly with other Linux commands. But when it comes to data manipulation, it is simply amazing. I’m currently (slowly) working on a plugin to query LDAP. The ldapsearch command uses the LDIF format, which is hard to parse reliably. Producing nushell data structures that don’t need fragile parsing would be a boon.

No, they were harassing them just for being friendly with the West. Exiting the Russian sphere of influence, not joining NATO, was the cardinal sin.

Did you miss the bit where Russia kept harassing Georgia? It was going to invade sooner or later. Russia likes its former imperial conquests to be kept under its thumb.

The August 2008 invasion of Georgia was just the culmination of years of Russian provocations towards Georgia. Georgia’s leaders knew Russia was itching for a fight. As for Ukraine, many Ukrainians realized that if they ever adopted a more pro-Western stance then Russia would invade. I’ve heard one account of Ukrainians fighting in the Georgia-Russia War because “we’re next.”

They could have waited or tried to make a deal with the new government. They did neither and immediately invaded without making an attempt at an arrangement.

Why did Russia invade Georgia?

Are you trying to get me to say NATO? Because that conflict far predates NATO involvement.

Bullshit. Crimea was invaded mere days after the change of power in 2014, far before anyone of note was seriously talking about Ukraine joining NATO. Support for separatists elsewhere soon followed. It was about Russia exerting a “sphere of influence” that it felt entitled to. The Russian leadership can’t seem to get that countries are joining NATO because of Russian imperialism, past and present.

I’m going to say the same thing that I said about the Polish incident. That incident only happened because Russia chose to attack Ukraine in an area directly bordering on another country. Izmail is also right across the border. I’ll wait on more dependable sources for an investigation, and I’m certainly not agitating for an escalation on NATO’s side. At the same time, if Russia’s bombing campaign ultimately results in foreseeable casualties outside of the country, I put the blame on Russia. Ukraine has the right to defend itself.

Mostly FOSS locally, but I rely on some proprietary software where there are gaps in the FOSS ecosystem.

If you look at Hillary’s broader statements, she has always favored universal single-payer healthcare. She worked her ass off to get a plan passed in 1994, and she was relentlessly attacked for it.

The last time Democrats got successful movement on healthcare was March 2010 with a filibuster proof Democratic majority in the Senate, a majority in the House, and a popular new president in the White House. Even then, only a relatively tepid compromise bill was passed, with even the “public option” stripped out (thanks Joe Lieberman).

Will conditions change in the future? Quite possibly, especially as our health care becomes increasingly unaffordable. Maybe it’s not so helpful to have senior politicians telling voters something is impossible and potentially affecting the Overton Window. But Hillary’s warning, that Bernie Sanders’ plan hadn’t a chance of getting passed, was a good reality check.