So, um, even more people voted to limit executive power than Chavez would like to admit. Why would this require an update to the post?

http://www.newsweek.com/id/74230

Most of Latin America’s leaders breathed a sigh of relief earlier this week, after Venezuelan voters rejected President Hugo Chávez’s constitutional amendment referendum. In private they were undoubtedly relieved that Chávez lost, and in public they expressed delight that he accepted defeat and did not steal the election. But by midweek enough information had emerged to conclude that Chávez did, in fact, try to overturn the results. As reported in El Nacional, and confirmed to me by an intelligence source, the Venezuelan military high command virtually threatened him with a coup d’état if he insisted on doing so. Finally, after a late-night phone call from Raúl Isaías Baduel, a budding opposition leader and former Chávez comrade in arms, the president conceded—but with one condition: he demanded his margin of defeat be reduced to a bare minimum in official tallies, so he could save face and appear as a magnanimous democrat in the eyes of the world.

Duh. You don’t like the comparison of a people’s vote against authoritarianism in Venezuela vs. elected representatives’s's’s's’ votes for it here. Okay, so what? Apart from Christian I don’t think anyone here finds Chavez inspirational in his approach to authoritarianism, and neither does anyone here – including you I think – find Bush inspirational.

Is Venezuela a place where bad stuff happens? Sure. Is the US a place where lots of people want bad stuff to happen? Sure. I just don’t get why you’ve got your undies in a bunch about comparing the one to the other. Should activities in America only be compared to activities in Canada?

Righteous Bubba said, December 5, 2007 at 0:05
“I didn’t say he was endorsing Chavez. I said he was a fkn retard for choosing to compare them to the US in the terms he did.”

Why?

No, sorry. The concept I’ve floated there is far too complicated to be explained on just one webpage. First we’d have to find the top of the page, then the post you already replied to, which you seemed to have no trouble understanding the first time around. It’ll take ages to pretend we need to go through, and then we’ll have to keep trying to make it look convincing.

There’s an extra-judicial war on right now. Venezuela’s problems are small potatos.

Except if you’re Venezuela. In, say, a comparison with the US where these issues were the comparison. I dunno where we would find that happening though, of course that’s just a hypothetical.
Boy, these open threads are great aren’t they.

Smut Clyde said, December 4, 2007 at 21:34

Clearly i do think there’s a difference, since I’m happy to argue with your initial claim, whereas the 2004 recall business is outside my ken.

Well no, the prior referendum where those voting against Chevez were deemed terrorists appears to be exactly what you are talking about…

The claims of malfeasance in the referendum per se came up a couple of weeks ago …some Conservative party hack fronted up and accused Chavez of tracing the details of anyone who voted wrongly. When the ‘evidence’ turned out to be forgeries provided by anti-Chavez lobbyists, there was more back-pedalling than you would get from an entire circus of unicycling clowns.

If this referendum happened this week and a couple of weeks ago someone was referring to Chavez of tracing the details of those who voted against him, which of the two could this have been a reference to ?
The one that already happened where he did do this and his officials are happy to confirm that? Or the one that hadn’t happened yet?

Either way, why would anyone need a new accusation to suggest the same guy would be doing the same thing he did last time. I would have thought that would be the assumption until there was an accusation anything different was going to happen.

I guess when Karl Rove gets assigned to the GOP nominee’s campaign we’ll have to wait until any new accusations of Rove-being-Rove turn out to be true. It’s not like you could assume he’d be doing the same thing he did in 2004, just because he’s the same guy and 3 years is 3 years.

Likewise it’s probably best to wait until after the election to see if issues with caging lists, voting machine failures, vote tampering, etc all turn out the same they did last time. I mean it’ll have been FOUR years since that last happened. Let’s not jump to conclusions…. based on the conclusions we’ve already seen before.

Why?

The country competing well in the extra-judicial killings olympics.

There’s an extra-judicial war on right now. Venezuela’s problems are small potatos.

Righteous Bubba said, December 4, 2007 at 17:14
“My, what an excellent choice for SN!’s compare and contrast example of respect for due process.”

If you read the post above you’ll understand that it is not an endorsement of Hugo Chavez and cheers the result of a vote against his power grab.

I didn’t say he was endorsing Chavez.
I said he was a fkn retard for choosing to compare them to the US in the terms he did.

The claims of malfeasance in the referendum per se came up a couple of weeks ago in UK politics, when Ken Livingstone [Mayor of London] was negotiating with Venezualan delegates. IIRC, some Conservative party hack fronted up and accused Chavez of tracing the details of anyone who voted wrongly. When the ‘evidence’ turned out to be forgeries provided by anti-Chavez lobbyists, there was more back-pedalling than you would get from an entire circus of unicycling clowns.

But since you have clarified that you are not talking about those claims, we have nothing to argue about. I’m not here to defend Chavez, and if you check my earlier comments in this thread, you will see that I’m an equal-opportunity mocker.

I don’t think you do. I don’t think anyone else here does either.

The Tascón List, later rechristened the Maisanta list, was a database that contained the personal information of people who signed the recall referendum petition. This list was used to discriminate against people in terms of government jobs and contracts. The use of the fingerprint machines during the referendum itself helped lead to rumors within the Venezuelan opposition that the vote was not secret and that people who voted to remove Chávez from office would be subject to the same discriminatory treatment. The CNE (National Elections Council) at the time and subsequent ones did very little to dispel this rumor, as it helped fuel opposition abstention in later elections, especially the 2005 National Assembly vote, which they boycotted completely.

One of the challenges the opposition faced coming into Sunday’s vote was overcoming this fear among many antichavistas that the vote would not be secret.

If you read the post above you’ll understand that it is not an endorsement of Hugo Chavez and cheers the result of a vote against his power grab.

My, what an excellent choice for SN!’s compare and contrast example of respect for due process. The country competing well in the extra-judicial killings olympics.

Sheesh, the place is getting serious.

Marx was a brilliant and gifted economist, but as a designer of social structures his Aspberger’s got the better of him. Mind doesn’t trump gonads in most human beings.

You think there’s a difference whether the blacklist of democracy-participants was taken from the referendum itself or the petition that was necessary to initiate the referendum ?

I don’t think you do. I don’t think anyone else here does either.

all those voting against the government’s wishes got their personal details from the referendum pulled and were punished for it

.
Now you’re talking about a petition. Sorry, I can’t help you there.

And if someone comes up with support for the claim that referendum voters were being tracked down and punished for the wrong vote, I’ll go looking in the English blogs where the claim was traced to its source and comprehensively ridiculed.

Will you now ?
Well I was referring to what happened in the recall referendum in 2004, when Chavez went on TV to declare that he was seeking the names of everyone who signed the petition against him (the prerequistite for the referendum), subsequently got that from the electoral office and those people on the list who worked for the state didn’t anymore.

This punishment was actually pretty heartily defended by the government, so good luck with that debunking pal.

Several government officials (including Roger Capella, Minister of Health and Social Development, and Iris Varela, member of the National Assembly) confirmed that “those who signed against President Chávez would be fired because they are committing an act of terrorism”.

Chop chop.

That’s an assumption; not a given. It’s just as possible that the Revolution actually delayed reforms, causing the elites to view liberalism not as a doctrine for enlightened rule, but a threat to their very lives and to civilization as a whole (through viewing the Revolutionary wars and Reign of Terror, before reverting back to royalty under Napoleon)

To support this, note Pugachev’s Rebellion, and the relative interest of Catherine II of Russia to liberal reforms before and after.

And if someone comes up with support for the claim that referendum voters were being tracked down and punished for the wrong vote, I’ll go looking in the English blogs where the claim was traced to its source and comprehensively ridiculed.

It’s true that such faith is necessary at points and I am no expert on conditions on the ground in Venezuela, but I tend to favour skepticism in the face of power grabs rather than “full endorsement”.

Nor is Zizek an expert on Venezuela, but once one convinces oneself that a certain distant case corroborates one’s theoretical paradigm and one become invested in its fulfillment, on the ground contradictions tend to be ignored or rationalized away.

Nifty. It’s nice that some countries believe in limiting executive power. Now compare that with things like this:

“The Senate joined the House in embracing President Bush’s view that the battle against terrorism justifies the imposition of extraordinary limits on defendants’ traditional rights in the courtroom.

Why would you compare a referendum to that?
Surely this is a much closer match…..

Venezuela: Disturbing Plan to Suspend Due Process
Chávez Supporters Seek to Suspend Rights in Emergencies
A constitutional amendment proposed by a pro-government committee in Venezuela’s National Assembly would allow the suspension of due process protections, Human Rights Watch said today.
October 16, 2007