I missed you ❤️

😢😢😢

Hahaha 😂

Picture of a fairly standard European street. One way. Cars parked on both sides and room for two cars abreast in the travel lane. Photo from Google street view. It's a sunny day but the street is shaded.

Exact same street photographed by me. Now it has been transformed to a pedestrian street. There are tables and chairs and people walking and biking. There are no more cars. Also a sunny day.

Cars create dead space in cities. Brussels is learning it’s better to fill that space with life.

Bagus sekali 🇮🇩 ☀️

Gwent on!

It’s a criticism of Chavez and his failures, mixed with the inherent fragility of petrostates (especially those that are authoritarian).

And ultimately a criticism of your original post. Which has been shown to be weak in its evidence.

I’ll do you one better: of the eight years before financial sanctions, five were negative gdp. That’s not growing gdp. 😂

Congratulations! Many areas for improvement in the relationship and level of interaction. I’m particularly excited to see what can be done in the AI and defense fields.

It would appear that the facts you’re sharing about the economy in your chart is that it was struggling for many years…before financial sanctions at scale kicked in late 2017.

What is your actual point? It seems to have changed.

I never said Petrostates can’t be stable economies.

But as you certainly know, they can be stable and quite fragile/corrupt/extractive from average citizens. Stability doesn’t mean “good for average citizen”…

…On the economic front, Chávez utterly failed to wean Venezuela from oil dependency, with the percentage of government export revenues derived from oil increasing from 67 percent in 1998 to 96 percent in 2016.”

…trade union autonomy and inhibited judicial autonomy, one of the most notable and ominous ways Chávez eroded representative democracy.”

“Under Chávez’s watch, corruption skyrocketed, with the state losing hundreds of billions of dollars due to mismanagement of its currency policy. Chávez deepened the influence of the military within the state, and he frequently sought to channel and control popular power. Chávez interfered with …

Did I say peak? I meant “not in keeping with Bluesky norms”

Name calling is peak Bluesky behavior. Looks like I hit your blind spot. Chavez as your intellectual master is your call.

If you are arguing that Chavez is immaterial to Venezuelan horrors and instability then it will be hard to have a productive discussion.

(For others reading I invite you to analyze more seriously than this).

Venezuelan economy failed due to poor and corrupt governance. Not these other factors (although sanctions definitely reduced the viability of an oil economy for elite extraction). But it sounds like you are unwilling to be critical of Chavez and his supplicants?

@japantimes.co.jp

This is great progress but sadly still way behind what modern democracies should be demonstrating to the World 🌍

Thank you for your kind explanation.

Rhetorical absolutism is always worth challenging.

How angry are you with Venezuelan autocrats and their terrible treatment of their own citizens? Sanctions as you likely know are not the root cause of Venezuelan peoples’ suffering…

😳. If you have specific examples to back your claims please share mate!

The first part…

You should be a NYTimes pitchbot. This is part of why were *not* at war in many of these locales

LoL no we don’t

We are abnormal by design

No. This is a bad take mate

It’s okay to not immediately understand this number of 140. The Secretary doesn’t make that clear, sadly. Most of this number (apx 100) is a few army personnel at US embassies conducting security cooperation, not with rifles but with notepads and email accounts.

Those would not be Army personnel…😉🇺🇸