Fidel Castro, former Cuban president, is dead at 90

I remember reading somewhere that the cold war was more of a “gentleman’s agreement”, because after all, the winner would be the first to trade in the majority of their nukes for much more cost-effective anti-missiles.

[insert relevant The Dark Knight quote here]

That’s a much better name! Especially considering that so much of WWW is fought on the internet.

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That’s the “beauty” of it. How do you prop up all your post WWII war infrastructure and contractors, when your enemy is “weakening”? Find a perpetual enemy.

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Castro was a big guy… wait wrong one

[quote=“TailOfTruth, post:14, topic:90138, full:true”]
However we must ask, why did Castro become a version of the thing he fought so hard against? A oppressor of the people he fought so hard for? Because of us. Because of the United States of America.[/quote]

Well, also because of the hard-to-shake caudillismo political culture of Latin America. A truly dedicated Marxist doesn’t decide to tap his schmoe brother as his successor, and a leader dedicated to freedom doesn’t turn his country into a prison for unwilling citizens. That attitude would have contributed to a similar authoritarian outcome even if the U.S. and the USSR hadn’t made their own contributions.

Thanks for a very good, nuanced assessment of the man.

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Why not declare war upon ignorance itself? No matter how much you know, there is always still more. The War Against Bullshit would keep us busy for a long time.

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There’s nothing stopping brutal dictatorships from being republics. Presidents don’t need to be elected (That’s not my personal recommendation though).

North Korea appears to be a theocratic monarchy though.

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You can’t fight it with bombs and tanks. That cuts down on the bottom line.

(Ultra cynical view. Now back to the regular topic…)

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“The management regrets that it will not be showing a feature film this evening - as it eats into the profits.”

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You must have missed the episode where the Bradys visit Havana. Wackiness ensued as usual. Of course you could argue that trick photography allowed Henderson to play both Carol and Fidel in the same scenes.

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Yes, but now we’ve got Cold War II going on with Putin. It looks like China has the same frenemy status that Russia does. There’s also any conflict we’ve got with any Muslim nation that has oil*, and even though these should all be different in subtle nuanced ways we’ve basically lumped these into just one giant war. By the way, this war is highly asymmetrical in ways we’ve never seen before, but the generals leading us into it are still fighting the Soviets in their minds, and still thinking in terms of nation states. We’ve screwed the pooch enough with the middle east without having to worry about this frenemy bullshit in Russia and China.

*did I say that out loud?

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Did Castro ever dance with the devil in the pale moonlight?

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Well, also because of the hard-to-shake caudillismo political culture of Latin America.

I couldn’t speak for the whole of Latin America but the last time the world saw this in action was not in a Latin American country but in the US.

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It’s the same one where Carol selfishly insists on using ration stamps to buy a sewing machine instead of the more sensible thing of getting a rowboat and, with luck, getting the whole family – and Alice and Sam (assuming he doesn’t rat them out) – out of there to Florida.

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Yes, it’s definitely a contagious disease not limited to the tropics. Charles Pierce’s favourite nickname for him is El Caudillo de Mar-A-Lago.

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Here’s a documentary on Manic Street Preachers concert in Cuba in 2001 (the first western rock band to perform there since the revolution), including the band meeting Fidel.

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Well Putin seems to be eulogizing Castro fondly so I guess america’s ‘alt right’ will have to follow suit.

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If they focus on him being socially authoritarian, I’m sure they’ll find lots to like. Then again, I hear that he mellowed out in his older years (relatively, I mean. He was still an authoritarian.)

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You missed the word necropocy right? As in: officially still run by the fist Kim who is now dead.

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