Thursday, January 18, 2007 - 6:32 am
Guys,
I found this article this morning and wanted everyone's opinion.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16658323/
Should we allow Chavez and more importantly Iran to start censoring their people without some sort of sanction? Since we are so dependent on oil, can Venezuela and Iran keep pushing our buttons without any penalty at this point?
Thursday, January 18, 2007 - 9:10 am
Sanctions??? China has permanent Most Favored Nation trading status and they have had this sort of censorship for decades. Just about everything we buy now is made in China, plus they now hold billions of dollars of US debt. Should we put sanctions on Iran or Venezuela while we do nothing for doing the same thing?
Andrew
Thursday, January 18, 2007 - 11:35 am
Oh,
I agree with you on China... But I feel we need to start reigning this in before it gets to be a problem. We can't be isolationists, yet we can't allow too much of a line to these hard liners.
On another note, speaking of China. If we would have spent the last 30 years developing clean fuels like we should have, I think costs would have been low enough so this second industrial revolution doesn't kill us with respect to global warming.
Thursday, January 18, 2007 - 12:27 pm
Given the current political situation, I don't think that there will be any sanctions or that it is reasonable to expect sanctions. The reasoning against sanctions is that there are many other countries in the world where "community"/"public" government-managed media outlets either have a monopoly on broadcasting, or where commercial broadcasters are allowed to exist but with very strict restrictions on what can and cannot be aired. An example of the latter is Nepal, where commercial broadcasters are not allowed to do news broadcasts, thereby creating a broadcast news monopoly for their state-run broadcaster.
If this were the 1970s, I think that there would be very strict sanctions and possibly an attempt to topple Hugo Chavez's regime. The difference is that back then, the attempts of any government in the Western hemisphere to go in a "socialistic" direction would have been seen as an attempt to create a sattelite state for the Soviet Union.
