That doesn’t follow.

No, no. It’s more nuanced than that. They were opinions that were different from my own.

I started paying attention to him when he got sick. He seemed very reasonable about most things, and extremely insightful about many things. I certainly don’t think he deserved the posthumous label “crazy person.”

I read his one of his books in the 90s, in which he talked about how he believed in magic (specifically a rather hardline interpretation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_attraction_(New_Thought... via 'quantum' magic). He's been fairly out there for a while.

Idk about the law of attraction, but I can say one thing for sure: if you don't believe in the law of attraction it will never come true

What book was that? All his books published prior to the 2000s were Dilbert compilations, so you might have the wrong date or the wrong person.

The Dilbert Future (1997), apparently (ref https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Scott_Adams#Adams_knows_The_Se...)

I started paying attention to him in the 90s and he was already crazy then. The only difference is that he was the fun kind of crazy, talking nonsense about quantum mechanics and such, rather than the disturbing racist crazy he became later on.

> think that white people are under attack

Yes, they think that.

> and that white people need to re-establish dominance. To them, equality is a threat

No. When a specific group is singled out and attacked, whether they’re white, black, or brown, man or woman, that can not be a basis for equality.

Of course now we are getting into the persecution fetish. The entire premise of white people in America facing any kind of race-based setback is laughable.

Diversity initiatives are often racist or regressive, in which case they should be mocked, and he wasn’t in the wrong for doing so.

Why can’t Microsoft employees learn on the job? When I joined a (non-Microsoft) BigTech company, I was expected to learn C++ and internal libraries and tools within a couple months while working on newbie projects. The company recouped that investment many times over.

There is a lot of idiocy/stubbornness among middle managers. I worked for a large consulting firm for a few years and would see hiring managers pass by candidates with good aptitude whom they could’ve trained in 4-6 weeks. Instead, they had the position open for several months waiting for someone who knew the exact technologies they were using and still didn’t find anyone in some cases. Seemed to me that the middle managers need more tolerance for non-billable time. But when everyone is incentivized to meet quarterly goals, this is what you get.

My thoughts as well. And it's not like we're talking about taking random people off the street and teaching them to program, it's just a UI framework. And the stuff people are talking about in here isn't IDEs or CAD suites, it's like... the calculator app and the start menu. What kind of devs is MSFT hiring and paying $200k a year that can't learn a UI framework?

That can work if you're not expecting to be fired on a whim in one of those 20k+ layoffs when suddenly you have a skill no one seeks while you have not grown in the other area the market wants.

There are still plenty of C++ jobs available.

Tahoe broke trackpad scrolling in Safari on my 2023 MBP. Other users have been experiencing and reporting the issue for months. Apple still hasn’t fixed it in any of its updates or addressed it. Pretty bad.

Everyone wants to live in the most powerful nation of the globe. Nobody wants to acknowledge what it takes to be the most powerful nation in the world.

I do not acknowledge that. If you want to make an argument that overthrowing a dictator is always wrong on principle, go ahead. But I will not accept this as axiomatic.

Claiming this could “destabilize” the country suggests that the country is stable. It’s not.

You mention the 30+ million people who live there, under the dictatorship, but ignore the 8+ million who have fled the country in recent years and the instability that has unleashed on country and the entire region.

> We have the capacity to evaluate whether overthrowing a dictator is good or bad on its own terms.

The US has claimed the capacity to make this evaluation before, repeatedly, and has been wrong in ways that killed hundreds of thousands of people. Maybe we're not the ones who should be deciding this unilaterally.

"Oh, but this time is different", you might say. "Maduro is an unambiguous dictator who stole an election, caused 7 million refugees, and was already under indictment. This isn't like Iraq, where we invented WMDs."

The justification was "real and documented" for Libya too (Gaddafi was about to massacre Benghazi, remember?). The result: Libya was rated as the Fragile State Index's "most-worsened" country for the 2010s decade, with ISIS using the country as a hub to coordinate regional violence and Libya becoming the main exit point for migrants trying to get to Europe. The intervention may have also made nuclear nonproliferation harder, since Gaddafi had already given up his nuclear program and then been overthrown anyway. Iran and North Korea both noted that "the Libyan crisis is teaching the international community a grave lesson".

The issue isn't whether Maduro is bad; he obviously is. It's whether US military intervention produces better outcomes than the alternative. I honestly hope it does this time. I truly hope it's a case of "a broken clock is right twice a day". But am I holding my breath? Absolutely not.

Thanks, this is a more convincing argument than insisting that we must respect the sovereignty of a unelected dictator.

No serious person actually argued the category error of respecting the sovereignty of a dictator but rather respecting the autonomy of a a nation and a people. And the empirical historic reasons are WHY this principle/heuristic ought to be followed, even if those did not articulate that.

It's a litmus test for conservative value systems since anyone who paid attention in high school social studies and history should have at least passing familiarity with the arguments.

Claiming we must honor the autonomy of people who have had their autonomy stripped away by a dictator is just as silly as saying we need to respect the sovereignty of the dictator himself.

I'm not sure why we're debating this as if the people had a say in this at all. This was clearly an operation led by Trump and the military, planned for months in secret, and carried out in a single day. There were no debates in congress or the senate. There was no vote to the people.

All we can do is try to figure out what the short, medium and long term conesquences of this might be, and consider how to pressure the government to limit the power of the executive branch to do things like this without oversight in the future.

People want to determine if the inportant events surrounding them are bad or good, even if they don't have a say in them. Perhaps it's even a way to cope with the lack of influence we have.

But I do like the idea of imagining how to limit the executive branch. Spitball here - we use sortition, and permission to use force of any kind has to go through a council of say, ten, randomly chosen, representative citizens.

Sure you removed the "bad dictator". Gratz! Will you now leave Venezuelan oil alone ? I am guessing not. The U.S. oil companies effectively become the new dictator behind the scenes, at-least until people realize they are being merrily looted and rise up.

Respectfully, offering asylum to Venezuelan people and choosing to invade Venezuela and remove their dictator are nearly orthogonal. The USA could instead choose not to provide asylum to these people in the future, and accept the reality that for the millions it already has, it has made its bed so to speak.

One is a matter of internal policy, the other is a matter of international law and order. One the USA had complete and total control over for decades, the other is a delicate and precarious matter which requires significant planning, oversight, congressional approval, and international engagement.

> Why? Those are two completely different things.

These are different things, yes, but the problem is exactly that: the same methods and justification will be applied in either case, despite deserving totally different treatment. I believe this is the consequence of permitting brazen realpolitik principles into government.

> The USA could instead choose not to provide asylum to these people in the future, and accept the reality that for the millions it already has, it has made its bed so to speak

And who decided that? American citizens certainly did not. Biden’s de facto open border policy was very unpopular with most American citizens, and all but guaranteed the reelection of Donald Trump. Besides that, only 60% of the Venezuelans who fled into the United States did so as asylum seekers. It’s estimated there are another ~500,000 here illegally. Who made that bed?

And this ignores the 7+ million people that other countries had to absorb. So even if the US secured its border and stopped providing asylum, we’re ignoring the actual human suffering of the millions of people who were compelled to flee from their lives and homes and families.

So it’s better to ignore the cause and let the problem continue indefinitely out of deference to international bureaucracy? Sorry, we are not Europe.

I'm not convinced that invasion solves or even addresses the problem you're describing. It could actually make it worse through causing unrest and destabilization, which is evidently a risk according to past American interventions.

There is more than just one person behind Venezuela's misfortune. The external pressure to undermine the country has been immense and shouldn't be discounted. As always, not black and white.

> Who gets to decide that this is good, but removing the dictator behind this is bad?

The sovereign governments who agree to take in refugees. It's not a complicated answer. They get to decide what happens within their sovereignty.

It’s not a complicated answer, it’s just an arbitrary answer.

Did the citizens of those countries agree to take in the asylum seekers? What alternative would you suggest when 8 million people flee across the border? In the U.S., there are an estimated 600,000 Venezuelan asylum seekers, and another 400,000 to 500,000 undocumented immigrants. Who in America decided that was good? Was it Americans citizens? No, the Biden administration decided that unilaterally when they stripped the border patrol of the power to do its job. But he’s gone, his disastrous policies led to Trump regaining power, and who gets to decide what’s good now? And weren’t Maduro’s actions, which led 8 million Venezuelans to flee to neighboring countries, not directly impacting those other countries (if not encroaching on their own sovereignty)? If so, how did you get to decide that “sovereignty” gives a dictator impunity to act free of consequences?

The answer to every one of your questions is:

the word is "sovereignty", not "democracy". dont confuse "is" with "ought". this discussion is about legality, not ethics.

It is usually those who never experienced dictatorship complaining

And it's usually those who have never experienced the aftermath of US intervention defending it. Ask Iraqis how they feel about the intervention that killed hundreds of thousands and created ISIS. Ask Libyans enjoying their open-air slave markets. [1]

The people who lived through US regime change have plenty of complaints. We just don't center their voices when it's inconvenient.

1. https://humantraffickingsearch.org/resource/the-open-slave-m...

You should speak to a resident of Libya. The days of Gadaffi are now considered the golden days of paradise.

Or the Vietnamese refugees who fleed on boats 50 years ago. I grew up listening to radio with Vietnamese announcements towards the boats every morning. Sadly Americans abondoned them, they lost their home country and were left behind.