[bdk3clash]

This thread has caused me to add Venezuela to this list of things that are impossible to discuss rationally in a public forum. It's apparently like abortion, Israel and Palestine, and racism--people seem to have too much emotionally and intellectually invested in looking at the situation in a certain way to be objective, but they hold these assumptions on such a fundamental level that they're essentially not open to scrutiny.

I used to try to focus threads that discussed Venezuela and Chavez's government onto boring stuff like facts and numbers and the like, but I don't think it matters. Do a search if you care--all of this stuff has been discussed here before, by a lot of the same posters. I've post a lot of links in these threads if you want to dig a little further.