Posted by: FLATCH
Seems to me you spend a lot of time focusing on the negative and never the positive. Sure Canada may have some skeletons in the closet but I don’t think anywhere near the number that permanent members do.
Unless of course he is talking about Cuba, Russia, Venezuela, or Ghaddafi.
Posted by: tungsten
Posted by: FLATCH
How can I even take that seriously? Moral standing.
Well... a bunch of stuff including the standard link to his favourite website
So a professor that nobody has ever heard of has sent a paper defending Cuba to the UN?
To be honest I don't think Cuba is terrible and the embargo was juvenile, but Cuba was also never a boy scout. The country has done a very admirable job of providing for its people, even during the embargo and I think other countries can learn from them, but you always seem so eager to ignore heavy-handedness on open society when it is by people you admire. Their record on freedom of speech and freedom of the press is terrible. That is how authoritarians keep control. Castro didn't rule as long as he did by letting people think what they want. Neither did Chavez or Maduro.
These are actual Cuban laws:
A provision regarding contempt for authority (desacato) penalizes anyone who "threatens, libels or slanders, defames, affronts (injuria) or in any other way insults (ultraje) or offends, with the spoken word or in writing, the dignity or decorum of an authority, public functionary, or his agents or auxiliaries." Penalties are from three months to one year in prison, plus a fine. If the person demonstrates contempt for the President of the Council of the State, the President of the National Assembly of Popular Power, the members of the Council of the State or the Council of Ministers, or the Deputies of the National Assembly of the Popular Power, the penalty is from one to three years in prison.[6]
Anyone who "publicly defames, denigrates, or scorns the Republic's institutions, the political, mass, or social organizations of the country, or the heroes or martyrs of the nation" is subject to from three months to one year in prison. This sweeping provision potentially outlaws mere expressions of dissatisfaction or disagreement with government policies or practices.[6]
Clandestine printing is a crime against public order and anyone who "produces, disseminates, or directs the circulation of publications without indicating the printer or the place where it was printed, or without following the established rules for the identification of the author or origin, or reproduces, stores, or transports" such publications, can be sentenced to from three months to one year in prison.
You trash my sources, but I don't even read what you type when start out with an ad hominem attack on the author.
Posted by: tungsten
You trash my sources, but I don't even read what you type when start out with an ad hominem attack on the author.
LOL, ya right. You read it and can't come up with anything to say because in the thousands of posts you have never been able to say one critical word about your socialist heroes. I would love to comb through your many ad hominems to expose your hypocrisy but I have much better things to do. Besides, he is virtually unknown (excluding maybe his family) so I don't think to say that nobody has heard of him is an ad hominem. Hyperbole at worst. Now that he is part of the Cooterpunch team though the sky is the limit. ;)
Posted by: chupacabra
in the thousands of posts you have never been able to say one critical word about your socialist heroes.
At least I have heros....
https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2016/11/28/Thinking-About-Fidel/
Castro survived the end of the Soviet bloc, as he survived all the CIA assassination attempts and state-terror attacks on his country. He played a few practical jokes on his enemies, like emptying his prisons of hard-core criminals in 1981 and allowing them to “escape” to the freedom of the U.S.
Most importantly, he survived to the great old age of 90, seeing off one American president after another. Dictatorship is not a job for the faint of heart, but it’s not a job for dummies either. Fidel Castro was a classic Latin American cacique, a macho Big Guy with a hairy face. He could have been a pet S.O.B. like the Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua, but the CIA would have taken him out as soon as he became inconvenient.
Instead he outsmarted and outlived the other S.O.B.s and the American suits as well, not to mention their commanders in chief. His political insights and skills were greater than theirs. He took power in 1959 in a country of six million, now 11 million, and for all his failures he showed Cuba could punch far above its weight.
Cuban troops fought against apartheid South Africa, in a war we should have fought. Cuban doctors, trained for free, spotted Haiti’s first cholera cases and kept the outbreak from being still worse. Other Cuban doctors are working across Latin America where no other health care is available. Cuba’s child mortality rate is lower than America’s.
Millions of young Cubans think their country is repressive, and it is. But if U.S.-sponsored governments had ruled them since 1959, most of those young Cubans would be illiterates (or dead), and their rulers would be sending death squads to deal with them if they got out of line.
In the eyes of the dictator-tolerant U.S., Castro’s real crime was failure to kowtow. That made him a dangerous example to other American client states, from Mexico to Chile. He showed you could make a poor country literate and healthy, even if not rich.
Yes, he suppressed his dissenters — just as the Americans routinely suppress dissenters all over the hemisphere. To the average poor Latin American, a good local school and medical clinic were worth it — plus the pleasure of seeing Fidel piss off the gringos for half a century.
https://consortiumnews.com/2016/12/06/extracting-castro-from-the-demonization/
I know a few people from Cuba. If you like living in terrible poverty, an allowance of a chicken a month, and fighting proxy wars in Central America and Africa, it's a great place to call home. Otherwise it's a shithole dictatorial and poor regime (and brutally poor after the fall of the USSR).
I know, I know, their lives were sooooooo much better under Batista.
So here's an article, written by a Canadian... https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/05/27/canadas-seat-at-the-un-security-council-may-be-coveted-but-is-far-from-a-sure-bet/ ...that breaks down the nuts 'n bolts of the the Security Council vote. May be the African nations that give Canada a swift kick in the bullocks. lol...
Even the Star gets in on the action w/a poll..... https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/thebigdebate/2020/05/19/the-big-debate-does-canada-deserve-a-un-security-council-seat.html
Here's an American hero.... https://youtu.be/jlP9x-5pwsM
In the 1930s when Huey Long was Louisiana’s senator and governor, he explicitly reached out to impoverished white people.
As the Encyclopedia Britannica notes, “Always the champion of poor whites, he effected a free-textbook law, launched a massive and very useful program of road and bridge building, expanded state university facilities, and erected a state hospital where free treatment for all was intended. He was opposed to excessive privileges for the rich, and he financed his improvements with increased inheritance and income taxes as well as a severance tax on oil…”
Long’s “every man a king” stump speech was particularly intolerable to Louisiana’s wealthy oligarchs, opening as it did with the line, “Is that a right of life, when the young children of this country are being reared into a sphere in which more is owned by 12 men than it is by 120 million people?”
Posted by: switch
I know a few people from Cuba. If you like living in terrible poverty, an allowance of a chicken a month, and fighting proxy wars in Central America and Africa, it's a great place to call home. Otherwise it's a shithole dictatorial and poor regime (and brutally poor after the fall of the USSR).
Tungsten nailed it. Just remind them about how terrible Batista was back before they born and how that makes it all better. /s
they have food, they have education, they have healthcare, google longevity Cubans live as long as Americans its been the same and has been for years
in Havana i felt safe walking anywhere and the people are nice, I could stand on the malecon and look north to where just 100 miles away is the most fucked up country in the world,
I encourage anyone to go before the embargo gets lifted and America fucks it all up
Posted by: tungsten
Posted by: chupacabra
in the thousands of posts you have never been able to say one critical word about your socialist heroes.
At least I have heros....
https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2016/11/28/Thinking-About-Fidel/
I have heroes too, but I can criticize them, especially if they are world leaders or politicians. It is dangerous to put leaders on a pedastal.
One of my heroes is Winston Churchill, but he was a hero for the time and had many faults. He was a racist and a drunk for example, but he was the man for that time in the war and he was heroic. Castro was a great man and I admired many of his qualities, but he had terrible qualities as well and I think like Churchill he fullfilled his heroic duty when his people needed him most, then he clung to power because his ego demanded it and he hitched their wagon to the USSR mainly to leep the American bogeyman alive and well. It is hard to maintain authoritarian leadership without a Goldstein.
IMO, Chavez was no Castro, and Maduro is no Chavez.
Does anyone else see a similarity with Trudoh?
Posted by: aShogunNamedMarcus
Does anyone else see a similarity with Trudoh?
It is almost hard to not see it.
Posted by: FLATCH
Posted by: tungsten
Cuba's the only country with enough moral standing to fill the seat.
How can I even take that seriously? Moral standing. What generation are you from?
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/06/04/leading-by-example-cuba-in-the-covid-19-pandemic/
Posted by: tungsten
Posted by: FLATCH
Posted by: tungsten
Cuba's the only country with enough moral standing to fill the seat.
How can I even take that seriously? Moral standing. What generation are you from?
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/06/04/leading-by-example-cuba-in-the-covid-19-pandemic/
Not bad for an island country with a population of 11 million. Not exactly an international hub. Once international travel was banned it would have been much easier to control. That said they jumped all over it quickly and have controlled it. Speaking of control, their population is probably very accustomed to that.
Probably A good thing they don’t have to worry about any American tourists.
Ooooooooooo..feel the outrage! Embrace it.....
The record is clear. Our rivals for the Security Council seats are more responsible international citizens.
For progressive Canadians the message is simple: Better than the USA is not good enough.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/06/12/canada-isnt-right-choice-un-security-council
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