The Venezuelan Curse
1/16/20261 hr 10 min
For the past year, there's been a steady drumbeat of headlines about Venezuela. Now the US has invaded, arrested its president, and installed itself in charge. To understand how we got here, we talked to Venezuelan historian Alejandro Velasco, who grew up there and has spent years trying to understand why a country with so much promise has proven so difficult to govern. The Many Faces of Chavismo - Alejandro Velasco Hard Fork with Casey Newton and Kevin Roose To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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First 90 secondsPJ Vogt· Host0:00
Hello. Uh, before we begin this week, an update. The very strange experiment we started last episode, where along with our friends at The Hard Fork podcast, we decided to try to help build the Fediverse. Basically, we made a small social media website that is not particularly algorithmic, not run by tech moguls, unless you count us, that we called the Forkiverse. The Forkiverse has taken off with, frankly, much more energy [chuckles] than I expected, and if you wanna hear about what's been going on, the micro scandals, the Russian disinformation campaign, the users we've had to ban, we covered it all on today, Friday's, episode of The Hard Fork podcast, which I will include a link to in our show notes. Okay, some quick ads, then this week's story. [upbeat music] One of the well-documented problems with life on Earth right now, mentioned ad nauseam on this very podcast, is that it's very hard to answer the question of what any of us should be paying attention to. The internet, the news, offers so many competing stories, most of them highly emotionally charged, deeply complicated.