Nobel Peace Prize 2025: María Corina Machado

Even if Venezuela goes to hell even deeper, she still deserves the prize for what she has already done!

The way she, and her team, managed to convince venezuelans that the election mattered, and to prepare to gather the evidence of the elections under constant threats from the government, that we all knew they were going to steal, and do it entirely peacefully, was an extremely impressive achievement on its own.

What an impressive act of coordination from MCM

:standing-ovation:

The Venezuelan regime makes money from oil. They do not need to involve the population to generate most of the GDP. To them, spending resources to have a healthy and happy populace is just a waste of money that would otherwise go to the rulers of the regime. The CGP "Rules for rulers" explains how this happens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

They stay in power with the help of a paramilitary group of bullies that intimidates people: colectivos. The Venezuelan colectivos are based on the Cuban CDR (committee for the defense of the revolution). And there are other elements of the Cuban "model" of staying in power that has "worked" for 66 years, that Venezuelan regime has adopted. And the CDR resembles the Nazi Sturmabteilung in their modus operandi.

So in the end what's holding the regime together is all violence, all the way down.

The history lesson is that when the most of the GDP generation doesn't need without the help of the population, the result is a regime. Scalable and cost efficient AGI will do the same to countries that do not make most of their GDP from extracting natural resources because once the citizen is not needed for wealth generation, territorial control, etc., their political representation goes away.

> The history lesson is that when the most of the GDP generation doesn't need without the help of the population, the result is a regime. Scalable and cost efficient AGI will do the same to countries that do not make most of their GDP from extracting natural resources because once the citizen is not needed for wealth generation, territorial control, etc., their political representation goes away.

That's a great insight

Doesn't Norway bring that conclusion in doubt? The state gets massive revenue from oil as well as oil-financed investments, but is still very much a democracy.[0]

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/democracy-index-eiu?tab=t...