Idk man, if my country was ruled by a dictator who faked elections I would be very happy to see some outsiders removing him. Kidnapping (and hopefully jailing for a long time) anyone who is in power by cheating the election is a big moral win in my book.

Awesome. I think we should also extend that to leaders who have increasingly overwhelming evidence that they planned to and intended to overturn elections (just because they failed isn't an excuse, attempted murder is still a crime)...

Amazing to see so many people spelling out their rationalization in such simple terms.

Do you have any evidence of the election being faked? Other than the US says so?

Extensive polling shows this, yes.

Maduro is not popular. Go find the nearest Venezuelan and ask them what they think about the situation if you want to learn more.

Extensive polling also showed Hillary Clinton crushing Donald Trump in the 2016 US election. Polls have been wrong before. I'm asking for evidence not anecdotes.

Ok if you are just going to ignore all evidence or facts you could have just said that.

It you have an opinion, just say it. You don't have to pretend like you care about what other people are saying or what facts or evidence they have.

You can just be honest from the start that you don't agree with them and don't care what they have to say or show.

I have not ignored any evidence. I've discounted vague allegations made without presenting any proof. If you care about facts then you should ask yourself why you are so sure Maduro faked the election when you haven't seen any evidence.

> I have not ignored any evidence

We both know you are. You'll immediately dismiss anything people bring up no matter what it is and then follow up with another fake question.

You simply dont care what other people have to say. Which is fine. But stop phrasing it as a question. Just make your opinion known, say you disagree and think they are wrong and you don't care what they have to say, and leave it at that.

But the whole Q/A thing? Where you phrase a dismissal as a question pretending like you care about the answer? Its boring. Played out. Predictable.

I promise you that you'll be much happier with yourself if you just say your opinions with the full force of your true convictions instead of playing faux debate games with others.

You might even be able to convince some people, if you stop phrasing your opinions as fake questions. The fake Socratic method just gets annoying after a while, once people see through it.

tl,dr; You have no facts to support your belief and now you're mad I called it out.

Oh I very much have a lot of facts. I'm just not going to waste my time writing a multi paragraph response when we both know that you don't care what the answer is.

Feel free to go ask ChatGPT for some answers if you like though.

You can just say that you don't care. It's fine. Lots of people don't care about other people's opinions.

Many of the polls were looking at popular votes, not the electoral college which Clinton did win.

Not really, though? Most polls going almost as fat back as September were within the margin of error.

Clinton won the popular vote by 2% and she was on average 3-4% ahead in the polls..

In fact she she got more votes than predicted in early November since 3rd party candidates significantly underperformed relative to what they were polling.

I mean look up why recent Nobel Prize winner got the prize. It's not just US saying so.

In other words, no, you don't?

International observers concluded the election didn't meet standards of international election and those were already heavily filtered.

It seems the only evidence you would accept is written testimony signed by Maduro himself. I don't think it's a reasonable standard though.

If we accepted your standards we would be helping dictators stay in power. This is not reasonable way of thinking imo.

Is this a trustworthy source?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd1d10453zno

> The US secretary of state has said there was "overwhelming evidence" Venezuela's opposition won the recent presidential election.

As I wrote, "the US says so" is not evidence.

Have a closer look at the article. I read it after posting here.

Argentine Foreign Minister Diana Mondino shared Mr Blinken's view, writing in a post on X, formerly Twitter: "We can all confirm, without a doubt, that the legitimate winner and President-elect is Edmundo González."

Ecuador, Uruguay, Costa Rica and Peru have also recognised Mr González as the president-elect...

[Machado] claimed her party's candidate, Mr Gonzalez, won by a landslide and Ms Machado said she could prove this because she had receipts from more than 80% of polling stations.

Ms Machado appealed for help, saying it was now up to the international community to decide whether to tolerate what she called an illegitimate government.

I gather that the Nobel Prize does not convey a tendency for honesty.

"[Machado] claimed her party's candidate, Mr Gonzalez, won by a landslide and Ms Machado said she could prove this because she had receipts from more than 80% of polling stations."

Yes, the opposition claimed that it had proof. However, it has not allowed any independent third parties to verify said proof. That she won a peace prize is inconsequential. They gave one to Henry Kissinger too.

None of it is proof, but all of it is evidence. Given that you have provided zero evidence to the contrary, the balance of evidence seems clear.

And even if we accept that, the US has declared effectively that the US takeover, while removing the supposed false winner, will also not restore the actual winner that called for help, but that the US will run the country directly, while seizing its oil resources (contrast with the 1990 invasion of Panama, where we also deposed and arrested a leader we accused of illegally holding power, and charged him with US crimes, but openly stated and followed through on intent to restore the government we described as having won, and did not declare that we would run the country or seize its resources, and did not, in fact, do that.)

> cannot apply consequentialism when the outcome is unknown

Can you not substitute the mean expected outcome where the factual outcome is not yet known?

If you have the data, are extremely careful and build a coalition, maybe. This admin has done none of that and the answer if asked will be “eat shit”. Blows my fucking mind that there are apologists for this.

Not when you're claming the moral high ground and all you have is guesswork.

Recklessness is immoral, and look how the discourse normalizes it so cleverly.