[Kednicma]

It's a missing link in our modern sci-fi dystopia. This sort of tooling is how the drones know where to fly to hunt down the intentional community of rebels trying to take down the oppressive systems. The fact that we are using this tooling for ethnofascist tracking of undesirable people is not accidental, but is basically the intended use of the tooling as designed.

What's interesting to me is that this work was funded by a non-profit and under the guise of humanitarianism. They went in through the front door and got legitimacy and funding.

[jessaustin]

Lots of "humanitarian" work in Colombia are CIA-funded fronts for anti-socialist and anti-indigenous violence. For example, see the "aid convoy" that Maduro supposedly burned. In general many nonprofits don't care to look too closely at their donors. Lots of money is floating around, searching for a way to oppose Venezuelan democracy. Colombian ruling elites are eager to cash in on the gravy train, and the disdain they feel toward the poor and indigenous of Venezuela is actually less than that they display toward those groups in their own nation.

[shadowprofile77]

Be that as it may in terms of secretive support for anti-government efforts against a government that the U.S doesn't like for assorted political and often hypocritical reasons, you're deluded if you think the monstrous Maduro Regime is in any sense a good guy in the situation that Venezuela is going through. Opposing it is hardly opposing democracy, given that this government itself is grossly anti-democratic and repressive whenever it feels threatened.

[Kednicma]

Of course; there are no good people, anywhere, at all; good is a fiction that we tell each other in order to justify our atrocities.

In this particular instance, it can be the case that all of the Colombian, Venezuelan, and American governments are committing crimes against humanity.

[shadowprofile77]

This kind of whataboutism does nothing good for anyone who appreciates honest debate. It only helps further cement dishonest arguments. Yes, the U.S has its hands full of cloak and dagger blood from who knows how many regime changes it's been complicit in or a direct cause of (not to mention the deaths caused by its direct invasions), and Colombia has a long, sordid history of human rights abuses by all sides.

Despite these things, both of those countries are internally, practically far better places to live in than Venezuela for both economic reasons and in terms of individual/political freedom. Venezuela is all the opposite in so many more ways. What's more, it is distinctly a repressive state that does not at all allow free elections and whose executive government branch does everything possible, legally or not, to rig all state structures for its own perpetuation. Meanwhile, this same government's economic mismanagement has achieved catastrophic, humanitarian disaster depths of damage.

More basically, whatever the sins of the U.S or Colombia or whichever other country you pick, not one of them excuses any aspect of what the Chavez/Maduro governments have done to their own country.