It astounds me that purists still push this narrative despite all evidence to the country over decades of computing.
It is better for the vast majority of people that they don't have root access to their PC or phone or tablet because they are unequipped to securely manage that AND it has basically zero upside for them. They can't manage updates. They install random programs from the Internet to get smiley faces in Outlook.
This may offend your sensibilities. Sorry. But you're living in a fantasy land if you still hold onto this narrative, particularly without explaining to ordinary people how this will practically benefit them beyond theoretical platitudes about "freedom".
If it's mandated that banking apps must not run in a user-controlled environment for the sake of security, users should have the right to refuse such "protection" by signing a piece of paperwork at the banks office.
The lesson here is that people have an unrealistic view of how complex it is to write correct and safe multithreaded code on multi-core, multi-thread, assymmetric core, out-of-order processors. This is no shade to kernel developers. Rather, I direct this at people who seem to you can just create a thread pool in C++ and solve all your concurrency problems.
One criticism of Rust (and, no, I'm not saying "rewrite it in Rust", to be clear) is that the borrow checker can be hard to use whereas many C++ engineers (in particular, for some reason) seem to argue that it's easier to write in C++. I have two things to say about that:
1. It's not easier in C++. Nothing is. C++ simply allows you to make mistakes without telling you. GEtting things correct in C++ is just as difficult as any other language if not more so due to the language complexity; and
2. The Rust borrow checker isn't hard or difficult to use. What you're doing is hard and difficult to do correctly.
This is I favor cooperative multitasking and using battle-tested concurrency abstractions whenever possible. For example the cooperative async-await of Hack and the model of a single thread responding to a request then discarding everything in PHP/Hack is virtually ideal (IMHO) for serving Web traffic.
I remember reading about Google's work on various C++ tooling including valgrind and that they exposed concurrency bugs in their own code that had lain dormant for up to a decade. That's Google with thousands of engineers and some very talented engineers at that.
> The Rust borrow checker isn't hard or difficult to use. What you're doing is hard and difficult to do correctly.
There are entire classes of structures that no, aren't hard to do properly, but the borrow checker makes artificially hard due to design limitations that are known to be sub-optimal.
No, two-directional linked lists and partially editable data structures aren't inherently hard. It's a Rust limitation that a piece of code can't take enough ownership of them to edit they safely.
> The implementations of sort in Rust are filled with unsafe.
Strictly speaking, the mere presence of `unsafe` says nothing on its own about whether "it" is easier in C++. Not only does `unsafe` on its own say nothing about the "difficulty" of the code it contains, but that is just one factor of one side of a comparison - very much insufficient for a complete conclusion.
Furthermore, "just" writing a sorting algorithm is pretty straightforwards both in Rust and C++; it's the more interesting properties that tend to make for equally interesting implementations, and one would need to procure Rust and C++ implementations with equivalent properties, preferably from the same author(s), for a proper comparison.
Past research has shown that Rust's current sorting algorithms have different properties than C++ implementations from the time (e.g., the "X safety" results in [0]), so if nothing substantial has changed since then there's going to be some work to do for a proper comparison.
> Also, the Linux kernel developers turned off strict aliasing in the C compilers they use, because they found strict aliasing too difficult.
I'm not sure "they found strict aliasing too difficult" is an entirely correct characterization? From this rather (in)famous email from Linus [0]:
The fact is, using a union to do type punning is the traditional AND
STANDARD way to do type punning in gcc. In fact, it is the
*documented* way to do it for gcc, when you are a f*cking moron and
use "-fstrict-aliasing" and need to undo the braindamage that that
piece of garbage C standard imposes.
[snip]
This is why we use -fwrapv, -fno-strict-aliasing etc. The standard
simply is not *important*, when it is in direct conflict with reality
and reliable code generation.
The *fact* is that gcc documents type punning through unions as the
"right way". You may disagree with that, but putting some theoretical
standards language over the *explicit* and long-time documentation of
the main compiler we use is pure and utter bullshit.
> In Australia we've treated the family home as an investment
That's true of most of the Western world, unfortunately.
> a primary mechanism for wealth creation
I don't disagree but this needs to be correctly framed publicly as simply stealing from the next generation because that's what it is.
> Tax incentives
For anyone unfamiliar, Australia has a system called negative gearing. In the mid-2010s the then Labor party proposed scrapping it and lost the election. It really is the third rail of Australian politics. This is a shame because it needs to be scrapped.
It allows you to deduct losses on property against your ordinary income. So if you have a mortgage payment of $3000/month but only earn $2000/month in rent then your income is reduced by $1000/month. That's waht drives a lot of small investors to essentially speculate on property.
The US actually has a better system than this, which is that if you earn over a certain income level, you cannot deduct passive losses (like the above situation) against ordinary income. That would be better but still not enough.
So many upper income Australians essentially end up just hoarding property. They'll call it "investment properties" but really it's speculation. Historically, property was treated as an income producing asset, not a speculative capitals gains asset.
Oh and capital gains on non-primary residences should be like 70%. If you want to stop rampant speculation, that's how you do it.
> Tangent: how should we approach changing the housing mix in a city like Perth where 95% of new homes are large four-bedroom detached houses?
Perth like every Australian city is an urban planning disaster. It's just endless sprawl up and down the coast and inland to the hills. A generation or two ago it was a quarter acre block. Those days are long gone unless you're wealthy or you're 50km+ from the city (less if you go east).
So it's a car-dependent soulless hellhole. I say this as someone who knows Perth well. So even now if you build higher-density housing along transit routes, as they're doing, you still need a car (or 4) to go anywhere but work. And high land values make infrastructure projects incredibly expensive. Like imagine trying to build the Perth to Mandurah train line now instead of 30+ years ago when it was actually built. I guess they could utilize the Freeway they already had but what about the fremantle or Midland lines?
What you should do as you build out is reserve space for future infrastructure. AFAIK no Australian city, especially Perth, has never done. So Guildford Road or Great Eastern Highway should really be a freeway. Same with Albany Highway.
In 2024 Western Australia did really relax ADU (granny flat) development rules. The rules used to be really strict. Now you can basically always build one with normal building approval if you meet the minimum lot size requirements (generally 450sqm, sometimes as low as 350sqm, depending on the council).
Single family home zoning is really cancer to any decently sized city.
Anyway, the truth is, I'm not sure it can be fixed now. Big infrastructure projects are prohibitively expensive even with tools like eminent domain. We need to look at why it's so expensive to build apartments.
I think the only thing you can do now is for the government to become a significant suplier of housing to increase supply and stabilize rents.
Good points, thoughtfully made. As a resident of Perth, I (largely) endorse that description.
So much of the wealth of our middle- and upper-class is dependent on property ownership and rent-seeking, it's depressing. That population essentially needs to vote against their own self-interest to help improve housing affordability, so it's hard to see that ever happening. The best I could foresee is a government forecasting a stepped reduction of relevant tax benefits over time (e.g. in three years negative gearing gets reduced by half, then half again the following year, etc.) and then future governments honouring that commitment. As you pointed out though, it's a surefire way for any Australian political party to shoot themselves in the face.
I sometimes wonder how strong the demand needs to get for more-affordable housing before the market responds enough to matter. State and local govt could likely have a role in unlocking infill developments and increasing the allowed densities, but I'm not plugged into the planning system. I also strongly agree that state government should be more proactive as a housing supplier (in conjunction with private industry).
Lots of the issues would be "solved" by adequate supply of new dwelling units (which is a way of driving the prices down). There's really no other way of solving the "X people lived here, now 1.4X do, but dwelling units have only increased 1.2 times."
In the past this effect was localized and when housing prices went insane, it was usually in a city, or a region, not a whole country. And high prices would encourage development in the cheaper areas, and people would move "out there".
So there are (at least) six important aspects to the housing crisis.
1. Politically, this issue is a winner and it's crazy that the Democratic Party has refused to bang the drum on this, basically because it potentially upsets corporate donors. They have instead ceded this poopulist political ground to the Republican Party. The Democratic Party does not want to win elections and this should never have been more obvious than the 2024 presidential election;
2. Hoarding housing is state-sanctioned violence. You need housing to live. Housing affordability is the number one factor in homelessness [1]. That then subjects people to violence and danger that we, as a society, are allowing to happen. There is no reason that the wealthiest country on Earth can't provide a roof over the head of every man, woman and child within our borders;
3. The private sector will never solve the housing crisis because solving the housing crisis involves devaluing, definancializing and decommodifying housing. Wealthy people and large corporations who own a lot of real estate won't on their devalue their holdings. Things like Ezra Klein's Abundance claptrap are simply putting a Democratic bow on Reagan era trickle down economics and deregulation. This requires state action. That means the state needs to build significant amounts of housing to provide to people to regulate the housing market. The poster child for this policy is Vienna, Austria;
4. Voters have fooled themselves into thinking that increasing house prices are good for them. They're not. They're bad in virtually every way. There are people who bought a house for $100k in 1990 where that house is now worth $2M. Are you $1.9M richer? No. Because if you sell it what happens? You have to buy another house. And if every other equivalent house costs $2M you still only own one housing unit's worth of wealth;
5. Increasing house prices are simply stealing from the next generation and suppressing wages. Why suppressing wages? Because if you're laden with debt, you'll be a complaint little worker bee. You need that paycheck to not be homeless. You are in effect a debt-slave, particularly combined with student and possibly medical debt; and
6. The next wave of antitrust action will involve the use of AI as a means for market collusion and manipulation. A great and relevant example is RealPage [2]. If all the landlords use the same software and that software is designed to algorithmically increase rents, then that's market collusion. Honestly, dynamic pricing in general needs to be banned.
> There are people who bought a house for $100k in 1990 where that house is now worth $2M. Are you $1.9M richer? No.
This is often repeated but not 100% correct.
You are in fact richer, and you can leverage this $2m in equity to take on debt and buy more houses. This is what has been happening here in Australia, and it's a major factor in the continued rise in prices.
When you've done this, hung on a handful of years and all of your houses have gone up 20-50%, you can cash out for a very nice sum indeed. AFAICT this is now a pretty mainstream middle-class retirement plan in this country, and it's terrible because, as you point out -
> Increasing house prices are simply stealing from the next generation
The money is coming from people, usually younger people, who are funding the insane market with ever larger mortgages and staying in rental properties longer, both of which benefit the equity-holder.
In the US you can often buy houses with no money down.
Also, if you're taking the equity out of your $2M house, how are you servicing that debt?
My point is that it's an awful lot easier to buy 6 $100k houses than it is to buy 6 $2M houses and if houses weren't speculative assets, maybe we wouldn't get those buyers driving up prices.
> In the US you can often buy houses with no money down.
Presumably you can't just walk up to a bank and say "I'd like finance to buy 10 houses please!" with no collateral beyond the houses you're purchasing?
Here you usually need a 10% deposit. If you already own a house you can borrow against equity. The bank considers multiple houses as a single portfolio to calculate loan to value ratio (LVR), and will take tenants rents into account on affordability. A quick worked example based on local figures (average first home price $700k, average home price $1m):
New market entrant looking for a $700k house: Needs $70k in cash for deposit plus $28k stamp duty, takes $630k loan and now has a 90% LVR and 70k equity.
Existing homeowner with $1m house, bought at $300k some years ago and now has $100k left on their mortgage: Has $900k equity. Takes an interest-only loan against equity for the full $728k on the same 700k house. Total property worth $1.7m, 48% LVR qualifying for a lower interest rate and paying much less per month as they have taken the loan interest-only. Didn't have to save up a single cent to cover deposit or stamp duty. Still has $872k in equity on the two properties so does it again three more times. Buys a total of four investment properties, still comes in under 80% LVR.
If the market goes up another 25%, the new entrant is sitting on $245k equity.
The landlord's IPs are now worth 3.5 million on total debts of 3 million, at which point they can sell four houses, clear all their debts including their original mortgage and pocket $500k (and while capital gains tax is chargeable on sale of investment properties, it's heavily discounted compared to other assets). Or they can use this new equity to buy more houses.
> if you're taking the equity out of your $2M house, how are you servicing that debt?
Rent. There's also a rental crisis going on over here. Rents are really high and can pretty easily cover investor mortgages. There's lots of people who would have been able to buy few years back but can't scrape together the finance to do so now that prices have gone up, who are forced to keep renting. So the investor crush creates its own client base!
Plus if you do end up making a loss on mortgage payments, property upkeep etc, the government allows you to offset that against your all-sources income for tax purposes, potentially reducing that loss by 45% if you're a higher rate earner.
> My point is that it's an awful lot easier to buy 6 $100k houses than it is to buy 6 $2M houses, if houses weren't speculative assets, maybe we wouldn't get those buyers driving up prices.
It kinda isn't in Australia. The market rising makes it much easier to access more debt and leverage that into more houses.
But I very much agree that housing shouldn't be a speculative asset and this market is broken. The government should be putting in place disincentives, not discounts and offsets. Unfortunately established homeowners now see this as a normal way of 'getting ahead' and I know multiple people who are effectively playing monopoly like this.
I hate it. Even though in theory I could go out and buy four or five houses next week if I wanted to. But with the rising cost of living and general bleak economic outlook everyone is continually fed, and the seeming impossibility of 'winning' for the average person, I'm not surprised people do it.
Owning your family home through an LLC, depending on your state, is often a bad idea.
There are generous protections in most states for your personal home that you lose if it's owned by an LLC. This includes things like a homestead exemption in bankruptcy protection.
In Florida, for example, there are better options to keep yourself anonymous. Florida has something called a land trust [1].
I feel like mortgage lenders should legitimately wonder why they’re lending to an LLC or a trust rather than an individual. I’m not sure there’s a good answer.
This article reads like propaganda to keep the worker bees slaving away until they die. But I have a few things to say about this and Sergey Brin in particular.
In the early days, many considered Sergey Brin to be the soul or the conscience of Google. He was reportedly the driving force in Google originally pulling out of China rather than capitulating to the censorship regime [1]. This was also after the apparent state-sponsored hack of Google in China [2] so perhaps the motivations were mixed? I don't know.
But Sergey I think is a good example of someone for whom his creation outgrew him. I'm reminded of an old Jeff Atwood blog post where he quoted Accidental Empires [3]. Sergey was a commando. By 2010 Google needed an army. Now? Police.
GoogleX has Sergey's playground but if you look at the track record, possibly the only success I think is Waymo. Glass (mentioned in the article) was not a success and his affair with a subordinate also destroyed his marriage [4].
To me it felt like Sergey was drifting many years before he stepped away. His stepping away felt more like formalizing something that had already happened.
I'm not a billionaire. Not even close. Honestly, I think I'm glad about that because it seems like despite being surrounded with unimaginable wealth, many such people end up isolated and rudderless, desperately dsearching for meaning and connection. Or maybe that's just cope (from me).
The article mentions Gates and how he keeps busy with his philanthropy. Well, there's another piece of common ground between Gates and Brin: Jeffrey Epstein [5]. That's not intended as an implicit or explicit accusation of child predation by Gates or Brin or even of either having knowledge of such malfeasance, to be clear.
But even with a fraction of the DoJ's documents disclosed as well as from the Epstein estate, we can begin to paint a macabre picture of the connections between rich and powerful people that for some reason always seem to have Jeffrey Epstein at their nexus and that means something though we don't really know what.
Has Sergey had a substantial impact on Gemini? Will he? I have no idea. I do wonder if someone worth $100 billion really has the perspective and drive to move something like this. Google has a deep bench of talent and one thing Google is very good at is optimizing code that runs at scale by making their own networking, servers, racks, data centers, data center operating system (ie Borg) and code and efficiency is going to be a huge deal in the LLM space for the foreseeable future.
He's in the files - including photos - and is named by a victim as being present at a "party". It doesn't necessarily mean he did anything untoward but he did fly to the island and attend an event.
Not everyone, just the nounces, like Gates and Brin here. Do you take their defence? Seems like you do. Why would anyone with solid moral values jump to the defence of nounces?
No it is a real question. You have access to EVERYTHING material & service related this world can offer. Why do you also need to torture children and completely ruin their lives?
My interest in literature lies at the intersection with politics and society.
I resonate with the principle that art asks questions. In decades and centuries past, art was particularly important to the masses to question society at a time when that was often forbidden, forcing the use of metaphors. Literature, plays, opera and so on.
So a result of this is that as a general rule conservative political movements cannot produce art because they don't want people to ask questions. They want to give them answers that they take unquestionably in a similar way to how religious dogma is propagated.
So you see how fascist movements, most notably the Third Reich, have treated art and have sought "objective" beauty in an acceptable aesthetic and have denounced actual art as degenerate, even subversive, leading to such terms as "cultural Bolshevism".
So I see the Great Gatsby as questioning the very society of the Roaring Twenties where you might otherwise see it more superficially as simply depicting that era. It's historically noteworthy that it was released in 1925, well before the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that was (IMHO) the inevitable consequence of an era of great inequality where wealth was accumulated, even then, through financialization. Lest we forget Nick was a bond salesman.
And on top of this system we have Tom and Daisy who are essentially parasitic, who float through life with no regard for the consequences of their actions, who produce and give back nothing in spite of their wealth and status. Other, most notably Gatsby himself, pay the price for their reckless disregard.
I first read the Great Gatsby before the dot-com bust but it seems like you can draw many parallels with the post-GFC tech boom. This is why, for me at least, the Great Gatsby is inherently anti-capitalist.
Which Venezuelans? I ask because this exact same argument was used to justify the many failed assassination attempts, the Bay of Pigs debacle and sanctions on Cuba where many Cuban Americans were anti-Castro.
Now that might've been true but consider the source: many Cubans in America fled when Batista was ousted or in response to that. A famous example of that is Rafael Cruz, the father of Senator Ted Cruz. Ted Cruz famously said he hates communism because his father was tortured... by Batista [1]. And it's a failure in journalism that he wasn't challenged and lambasted for this idiotic take.
There are a lot of Venezuealsn in the US who justifiably fled the chaos there. But why was it chaotic? The US will try and tell you it's because of Maduro. But what about the sanctions? As a reminder, sanctions are a nice way of starving "we're goign to starve you and deny you medicine in the hopes you do what we want to the administration we can't otherwise topple".
Also, the US doesn't actually care about any of the crimes they accuse Maduro of. This is the same country who deposed Allende and installed Pinochet into Chile, who was a brutal dictator. That too was about resources. Oh and let's not forget Iran, who had their democratically elected government deposed to install yet another brutal dicator, the Shah, in 1953, again for oil. Or the United Fruit Company in Guatemala. The list goes on. This happens so much there's a Wikipedia page on it [2].
So, for anyone who celebates this (and I mean this generally, not at the commenter I'm responding to), you will see no benefit for this. A few billionaires will get richer, probably. The US was probably pour countless billions into supporting some puppet, probably Machado but we'll see. And I would be surprised if the lives of Venezuelans gets any better.
And if the lives of Venezuelans does actually get better, it's probably by lifting sanctions and you should be asking why we were starving them in the first place.
As a reminder, the US knows the effects of sanctions. When confronted by a report on sanctions killing 500,000 Iraqi children in 1996, then UN Ambassador and later Secretary of State responded [3]:
> “We have heard that half a million [Iraqi] children have died. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima,” asked Stahl, “And, you know, is the price worth it?”
> “I think that is a very hard choice,” Albright answered, “but the price, we think, the price is worth it.”
All which are currently in foreign countries and are free to express their voices without fear of prosecution. I live in spain with my venezuelan girlfriend, and everybody here from her venezuelan bubble is celebrating and cheering - hoping this is a first step towards freedom. You can turn on your TV to "rtve Telediaro", it is a spanish 24h news channel where they also show venezuelan expats getting together and celebrating from within spain. Other cities in latin america are the same, just watch some news channels from the spanish-speaking world.
They were probably also cheering in the streets in the US, if they weren't afraid of ICE deportations.
Because that worked out so well for the people of Chile (under Pinochet). And Libya (post-Gaddafi). And Iran (1953 onwards). And Iraq (post-Saddam).
Whatever your (valid) criticisms of Maduro, it's important to remember that:
1. The US was intentionally starving Venezuela through sanctions. If conditions improve because the sanctions now get removed, it's not because Maduro is gone. It's because Venezuela's oppressor (the US) just stopped opressing (as much).
Let me put it this way. If I take all your people and put them into a ghetto in Warsaw and build a giant fence around it, letting nothing in or out. And I then decide to let food in once you've given me all your valuables or given up some leader and you now have something to eat, I'm still not the good guy because I later let food in after looting your people and I'm still responsible for starving you in the first place.
2. 20+ years ago the US would lie and say they're doing this to spread democracy and that the people would welcome them as liberators. This was the exact script for Afghanistan and Iraq. Even though it was all about oil they'd never say that. Now they don't even pretend. Trump has outright said that it's about oil and they're going to govern until a suitable puppet is put in place, who will let Western companies loot Venezuela's natural resources.
So good luck with the coming brutal dictatorship and kleptocracy your girlfriend and her countrymen are now celebrating.
In the 90s I had a professor from Ukraine for a math class. He grew up during Stalin and Khrushchev and worked during the Brezhnev years. At a party a group of us decried Pinochet. His response, “What is the big deal. So he killed 10,000 people. In Ukraine we would gladly kill 10,000 people to have their economy.”
I'm a Venezuelan in the USA and I think what happened is an absolutely illegal travesty. Trump and his acolytes are nothing better than criminal thugs and this needs to be fought and protested.
Are you suggesting Maduro should be restored to power in Venezuela? Would that be good or bad for Venezuelan's (regardless of what happens with oil or anything else). Would you be willing to live in Venezuela under Maduro?
Its too late for that now. America has created a mess and will now be responsible for cleaning up that mess (or eschewing responsibility when things don't go as easily as Trump thinks they will, which is probably more likely). There is already a huge power vacuum that is going to be filled with chaos, it is too late to just bring Maduro back since the damage has already been done.
It's important to note only the top of the pyramid was removed here - not the entire government. Most everything will continue as usual for quite some time, or forever.
Just like removing the President of the United States wouldn't mean the country descends into chaos.
It does send a very clear message to whoever becomes the top of the pyramid next, however.
> Just like removing the President of the United States wouldn't mean the country descends into chaos.
Oh, it would definitely. There would be a power vacuum, people would wonder if the remaining government would obey the constitution or ignore it, etc...before Trump I would have said the process would have been resolved smoothly, now I have no idea.
Removing the head of a government doesn't break the government, but it definitely creates chaos before the top is filled. If the government has transitioned into a top-down autocracy, the chaos is even worse, as government agencies would have lost their ability to act independently over time. At that point, various factions start shooting at each other to try and take control of the country (aka a civil war). Throw in one or two foreign militaries in the background and there is even more reasons to start shooting.
> before Trump I would have said the process would have been resolved smoothly, now I have no idea.
Kind of absurd to say this. Even with Jan 6. - things still ran like they were supposed to, and will continue doing so. The government is huge and filled with millions of people. It would take an unprecedented level of coordination to not do what is supposed to happen.
Venezuela has a VP, and a rightfully elected President (not Maduro). I guess we'll see what happens there. The US has committed to maintaining order during the transition - so it seems unlikely to devolve into a civil war as anyone initiating such a thing would have to contend with the US military.
Time will tell... regardless - it seems clear as day Venezuelans will be better off without Maduro. The amount of money that is about to flow into Venezuela will be stunning. Yes, oil companies will swoop in, but the money spent there will rebuild a failed economy, provide untold numbers of jobs for Venezuelans, and lead to a more prosperous nation over time - like it was before Chavez/Maduro.
are you Venezuelan? did you know the country had like a 70-90% deep poverty rate before Chavez? Guess who the oil profits used to go to? Guess what Chavez lowered that poverty rate to before oil prices crashed?
Venezuela was on edge even before Trump did this, do you think they are going to be able to hold it together while the US military is demanding to take control and the people are anxious? Time will tell, but I bet this will wind up like every other case of American regime change in the last 30 years.
> Oh and let's not forget Iran, who had their democratically elected government deposed to install yet another brutal dicator, the Shah, in 1953, again for oil.
It was about the Soviet Union. The British convinced the US that Mosaddegh was going to align himself with the Soviet-proxy communist party (Tudeh) to stay in power. The British, on the other hand, did it because Iran had nationalized British oil fields. The US' oil interests were in Saudi Arabia.
Also the way people describe this is rather twisted. The Shah was not installed by the US. The Shah had been in power since 1941. He was installed by the British, same as his father. The coup replaced Mosaddegh with Fazlollah Zahedi, not the Shah.
Moreover, Mosaddegh's government was not remotely democratically elected. There's a rather in-depth State department memo from the era that describes how those "elections" worked in Iran which made clear that the people voting had little to do with who won. Elections were full of ballot stuffing, bribery and just outright manipulation by pretty much everyone - the Shah, Mosaddegh, Tudeh, foreign governments, etc. [1]
Plus, Mosaddegh had halted Parliamentary election counting early to prevent more opposition from getting elected risking his majority (his party controlled the more urban areas of Iran which finished "counting" earlier). He began ruling with emergency powers and jailing his opposition. That led to mass resignations in Parliament - to the point where they couldn't even form a quorum. Mosaddegh then dissolved Parliament and granted himself full dictatorial powers and ruled by decree after another sham election where 10% of the population "voted."
And it's at this point that the coup happened. The Shah, using his power under Iran's constitution, wrote a letter dismissing Mosaddegh. He was replaced with Fazlollah Zahedi and the Shah started to take a far more active role in government.
Mosaddeq sought fairer royalties for oil from what is now BP but what was then the AIOC after decades of tension and a decrease in Iran's royalties (with increasing British revenues) in the 1940s, ultimately culminating in the nationalization of AIOC in 1951 [1].
Relations deteriorated. Britain isolated Iran through sanctions and oil embargoes. The US sided with Britain but initially rebuffed attempts at a coup, I believe initially under Truman but Eisenhower was also initially reluctant.
Britain did argue that nationalization of oil and other British interests in Iran was Soviet-led and made an argument to Eisenhower's SEcretary of State that a coup was in the interests of fighting communism, something the administration was likely more receptive to given the Truman doctrine and "containment". The Korean War was ongoing at the time.
So did Britain argue this was to fight commmunism? Yes. Was it really? No. It was about Britain's oil interests and colonial ambition. It was no more about fighting communism than invading Iraq in 2003 was about spreading democracy.
Fears of the USSR played a much bigger role in the 1979 Revolution where the US got their then ally, Saddam Hussein, to release the Ayatollah Khomenei from prison to try and make Iran fundamentalist rather than falling into the Soviet sphere of influence.
As for any election abnormalities, nobody cares about that. Like, at all. It's undeniable that Mossadeq was immensely popular in the early 1950s for his stance that Iranian oil should benefit Iranians, first and foremost, rather than a colonial power.
> So did Britain argue this was to fight commmunism? Yes. Was it really? No. It was about Britain's oil interests and colonial ambition. It was no more about fighting communism than invading Iraq in 2003 was about spreading democracy.
More than one party was involved. They had different reasons for their involvement.
The United States' reason was to fight against communism (read: the Soviet Union). As quite a few internal memos make clear, the US did not particularly care about Britain's oil issues and wished to stay out of it. Rather, the US was almost single minded about it's fight against the Soviets. Britain used that to manipulate the US into getting involved.
> As for any election abnormalities, nobody cares about that.
If no one cared about it, people would stop stressing he was "democratically elected."
> It's undeniable that Mossadeq was immensely popular in the early 1950s for his stance that Iranian oil should benefit Iranians
And he was incredibly unpopular by 1953 as he was blamed for the deterioration of the economy caused by the British refusal to ship Iranian oil and he went full autocrat.
Indeed, had Mosaddegh remained popular, the Shah never would have agreed to go through with the coup. After all, he had seen what had happened after Mosaddegh resigned in 1952.
Tell that to the Chileans who endured Pinochet, Iranians who endured the Shah and the Ayatollah and likewise for Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Guatemala, etc.
All a puppet would've done was be a brutal dictator who suppressed and disappeared anyone who resisted while enabling Western companies to loot the natural resources and the local populace would see no benefit from that at all.
You might say that Cubans would be better off if Castro had been deposed. Is that because you'd expect the sanctions to be removed? If so, the problem is the sanctions. You're basically saying "you would've been better off if you let me install a puppet dictator and loot your natural resources because then at least I would've stopped intentionally starving you".
And if you can't see the problem with that statement, well, I'm not sure what to say.
The current Iranian regime is a direct result of US involvement in Iran. We are largely responsible for it, for two reasons:
1. By overthrowing a democratic government in the first place to make the Shah a dictator, creating the seeds of revolution; and
2. When it becamne clear that Iran was "lost" (to the West) and fearing a takeover by the Communists and Iran falling into the Soviet sphere of influence, the US got Saddam Hussein, our then-puppet in Iraq who we used to stoke a war for a decade killing more than a million people as an aside, to release the Ayatollah Khomenei from prison in the hopes that the Islamic fundamentalists rather than the communists would win the revolution.
He was imprisoned in Iran, then went to Turkey and from there to Iraq iirc, but it is long ago, so I suspect the GP meant after he was arrested by the Shah.
As far as one can reasonably know something it’s clear that Maduro was not the fairly elected president. Chavez and Maduro were disastrous for Venezuela and millions now have hope for a better future.
Your perception about Iran in 1953 is badly wrong.
Guessing it’s what he said in 2002? But the Tablet EIC made these remarks last week. Not really equivalent, although you’re entitled to your media choices.
A referendum to dissolve parliament and give the prime minister power to make law was submitted to voters, and it passed with 99 per cent approval, 2,043,300 votes to 1300 votes against.[83] According to historian Mark Gasiorowski, "There were separate polling stations for yes and no votes, producing sharp criticism of Mosaddeq" and that the "controversial referendum...gave the CIA's precoup propaganda campaign to show up Mosaddeq as an anti-democratic dictator an easy target".[84]
A person has to be very gullible to believe 99% of the vote went one way in a fair election involving 2+ million people.
The one part of this I will agree with is that US foreign policy is uniparty.
The disastrous War on Terror spanned 4 presidential administrations, 2 Democrat and 2 Republican. Middle East policy differences between the two parties are somewhere between superficial and nonexistent.
Even something like Ukraine where you might say Republicans and Democrats differ isn't true. Had Trump been in office when Russia invaded Ukraine, the two parties would simply be in each other's seats.
This is 100% the case when it comes to China too. Oh, and when it comes to Taiwan (and Hong Kong), official US policy is the so-called One China policy [1].
As for US manufacturing, it's dead. Because capitalists killed it by moving it to China to increase profits and (under Regan, in particular) to destroy unions and the labor movement [2].
As for China and IP, US companies did this to themselves knowingly to increase short-term profits and to break unions and suppress wages. At no point will I accept the framing that a Chinese person, a Mexican, an Indian or a person from [developing country of choice] stole someone's job. No, a capital owner made a choice to take your job and give it to someone else so he or she could become slightly richer.
I'm not sure how immigration factors into China concerns.
It is better for the vast majority of people that they don't have root access to their PC or phone or tablet because they are unequipped to securely manage that AND it has basically zero upside for them. They can't manage updates. They install random programs from the Internet to get smiley faces in Outlook.
This may offend your sensibilities. Sorry. But you're living in a fantasy land if you still hold onto this narrative, particularly without explaining to ordinary people how this will practically benefit them beyond theoretical platitudes about "freedom".
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