> Frank Snepp’s Decent Interval: An Insider’s Account of Saigon’s Indecent End Told by the CIA’s Chief Strategy Analyst in Vietnam, which was published in late 1977.
> At the very least Snepp had written the definitive history of the final days of the American imperium—in Vietnam anyway—in a gripping, page-turning style. The rooftop escape defined so much about the blundering American experience in Vietnam, and Snepp was the only witness to the tawdry retreat who wrote it all down as if a modern-day Xenophon, on the payroll of the CIA, retreating from the Asian wars.
> In 1981, the CIA had dragged him into the Supreme Court, to block his earnings from the book and to teach other agents in the field that there were costs associated with tell-all books about the failings within agency. I remember being shocked that Snepp lost his appeal to the Supreme Court and that he had been forced to pay $300,000 in book royalties to his former CIA handlers.
Hopefully on topic: a good English language book on the CIA origin story is “The Devil’s Chessboard” that was a fascinating read. While most of my reading is technical and science fiction, I also really enjoy reading history. It is difficult to understand the world ‘in real time’ but looking back into history more things make sense.
In a democracy, it is important to really understand history, what we got right and what we got wrong. If we want a better world, we need to learn from history.
On the shorter side, there is a very good article from the New Yorker which was published last October for the 75th birthday of the CIA entitled "Has the C.I.A. done more harm than good?" [1]
The journalist is clearly verging on the side of more harm.
To 95% of the mankind (cant believe i have to keep repeating this here, but folks here clearly think in US-only style often, regardless of their IQ, without realizing that what goes around comes around, without exception), CIA has definitely been a net loss and/or force of adding evil and fucking up entire vast regoins for generations, to exploit them easily later. There are so many stories out there, verified, even from their own people with some core moral values, its ming-boggling and definitely easier to just ignore to avoid depression.
Maybe some good is currently being done on Ukraine, but that would be just because russian top management is a pile of amoral dictatorial shit that is actually more stupid and more aggressive (which is always a very dangerous mix, especially with all those natural resources needed everywhere) than everybody thought. But thats just to subvert and bleed an old adversary for future power games, not some altruism. Real help would be much quicker to deliver and definitely possible, now its just as fast that Ukraine side doesnt collapse from lack of armaments and russians bleed people and resources for as long as possible.
>It is difficult to understand the world ‘in real time’ but looking back into history more things make sense.
Gotta be careful with this though, as when it comes to reading history, it really depends on what sources you are reading. The old saying "history is written by the winners" which leads to the opposing side's views being suppressed if not outright omitted. So hopefully, when it comes to "real time" views or historical views, the sources are from more than one viewpoint and are more than one.
This is largely why the academic study of history has become historiography, the study of how history is written, and by whom, and understood in which contexts. Academic history books, from university presses, are usually pretty different than the pop-history books or books aimed at general audiences for a similar topic. They are much more skeptical and questioning of narrative and are usually very willing to bring up counter-arguments or competing claims.
A really good example, one of my favorite academic history books, is When Champagne Became French by Kolleen Guy [1]. It's really more a history of how the story of champagne was integrated into the ongoing narrative of French national history and identity, and how this integration obscured the sometimes violent disagreements over the identity of champagne and who ultimately "owned" it.
And, historical accounts can be revised both to correct issues and to spread false narratives[1]. So, when and not just by whom a history was written, and the context the writer was operating in is important too e.g., sources of funding.
[1] "[NELA in the United States] recruited academics to rewrite textbooks with pro-market, anti-government messages and pressured schools and libraries to adopt these rewritten textbooks. They funded academics to create new programs in high schools, colleges, and universities..."
random linkable source that quotes the book:
"The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market" by Naomi Oreskes (professor of the history of science at Harvard University)
There isn't much need to suppress novels anymore. People no longer have sufficient attention span to even finish a 5 minute video and need to be fed bite-sized shorts. No need to kill the producer, consumers have been killed.
The role of censorship that the government used to have has shifted to companies like Visa, Mastercard, Amazon, etc. If you try and sell a spicy enough book, they will make sure nobody reads it, and the government can be completely "hands-off".
They can fail to process the customer's payment, remove your book from the marketplace, and ban your account. If you try to build your own marketplace, you won't be able to use any major payment processors.
Modern dissidents are building alternatives, but still there are roadblocks. All this to say, books are still very much being suppressed.
Refuting adopted positions on complex issues usually requires more than the five minutes allotted either in video programming format or in the conditioned mind you describe. Concision reinforces the conventional narrative as explained in this 5 minute video https://youtu.be/xIbfl7OQ0y4.
EDIT: I posted this as a joke, but the video is very interesting. Chomsky says that a need for concision favors conventional thoughts, because needing concision means you can only say things that don't need elaboration (ie only things everyone already agrees with).
This, plus: reading one book in a year can absolutely be done in less than 5 minutes of reading a day. I've seen books written exactly for this consumption pattern: very short, 1-3 page long chapters, with half being a recap of relevant chapters that came before.
Not to mention, "at least 1 book a year" is so peculiar a cut-off point that it sounds like it's deliberately constructed to obscure something. For example (possibly, I'm just guessing), the fact that choosing "at least 10 books a year" would see it going from "more than half" to "less than 5%"...
There are plentiful sources, which might not agree on the data that they have. Actually investigating that might take more effort than most people are willing to put in, few would care enough to sit down for the better part of the day and go through numerous studies.
> Book reading remains a popular pastime, with the most recent data showing that three quarters of all adults had read at least one book in any format in the past year.
> Almost half of the respondents haven’t read any books in over a year: 48.5%
> According to the Pew Research Center, about 64% of American adults say they have read a book in the past 12 months. This is a similar share to the previous year, and is consistent with the findings from 2020.
> The National Endowment for the Arts released a report in 2015 that showed literary reading among Americans had declined significantly over the previous 20 years. In 1992, 56% of Americans had read at least one work of literature in the previous year. By 2014, that number had fallen to 46%.
> The NEA report also found that literary reading was more common among older adults than younger ones. In 2014, 53% of adults age 65 and older reported reading literature, compared with just 36% of adults ages 18-24.
> Roughly a quarter of American adults (23%) say they haven’t read a book in whole or in part in the past year, whether in print, electronic or audio form, according to a Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults conducted Jan. 25-Feb. 8, 2021.
> The percentage of Americans adults who read at least one book of fiction or nonfiction in the previous 12 months (outside of work or school requirements) fell to the lowest level on record in 2017 (Indicator V-04a). In 1992, 61% of Americans had read a book for pleasure during the previous year, but by 2017 less than 53% had done so.
> Americans say they read an average of 12.6 books during the past year, a smaller number than Gallup has measured in any prior survey dating back to 1990. U.S. adults are reading roughly two or three fewer books per year than they did between 2001 and 2016.
So I guess there's a decline of sorts, but the exact figures vary a bit, probably depending on the particular polls and their audiences, the risks of self reporting biases and so on. That said, people are still definitely readings books, for the most part. Of course, some also include stuff like audiobooks, which is also an interesting format. I don't think that verifying everything is very easy, though, since a meta study that explores the methodology and so on might be more useful for that, rather than just taking everything at face value.
I would still unironically enjoy a SummarizeGoogleGPT or something, to not have to dig through various articles, each with a different layout and formatting.
I heard that over half of people in the US read at least one book per year, is that true?
I am not sure of the most current statistics, but according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in 2019, about 74% of American adults said they had read at least one book in the previous year. This means that a majority of people in the US do indeed read at least one book per year, which is positive news for lovers of literature. It's worth noting, however, that the definition of a "book" in this context includes e-books and audiobooks in addition to print books, so it's possible that some of those respondents did not read a print book specifically.
How many have read a non-fiction book? Watch the stats plummet to nearly nothing. Non-fiction is where you get in depth information and historical context for current events. Half the country is unread and easily mislead.
The article writes about this new translation, linking to from the side, which I've overlooked at first, believing it's an ad, irrelevant to the article:
"a scholar, literary critic, and editor of Latin American literature. From 1969 to 1985" .. "a professor of Latin American contemporary literature at Yale University".
For those thinking this is some sort of banned book, it's not. Asturias won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1967. This book is almost definitely available in your language in your nearest book store. And it's a great book, exhilarating and expertly written.
It's still interesting that the CIA _tried_ to suppress it (and news to me!), but it certainly didn't work.
> But its 1946 debut reflected a delay of more than a decade by the country’s real dictators, who disrupted the novel’s genesis and sent its author into exile. And in this act of suppression, Asturias’s censors and exilers were aided by the US, specifically the CIA.
From Wikipedia: the CIA was founded September 18, 1947.
How did the CIA "specifically" helped delay the publication of this book from 1936 to 1946 if it didn't even exist in that time frame ?
The official formation of the CIA was also only a formality, it essentially already existed in its components and other forms, e.g., the OSS. You can’t get so fixated on the official title, it’s the underlying people and their motivations that are the thing. It’s why people have such a hard time understanding and believing the “deep state” and why it hates even being called that because it identifies them.
What the worst people hate the most is being identified and named and associated with their nefarious actions. It’s why they like “classifying” to keep their evil deeds covered and hidden behind an vail of authority. It is how a minority of evil people control the majority of the world, often while claiming to be the good guys.
“deep state” is insanely vague. Does it mean the part of the government that has lots of secrets it fights tooth and nail to make sure is never revealed and even potentially engages in illegal acts? Or does it mean bureaucracy?
From what I’ve heard most people complaining about the “deep state” they always seem to express their complaint about the bounds of normal bureaucracy and less about secret/covert/illegal activities.
prior to appx 2016, it meant the intelligence apparatus and the constellation of orgs and ngo's around it; after that it meant the unelected permanent bureaucracy that persists across administrations
One thing I would add to the accurate description that responded to you, is that it is by its very nature very amorphous and evasive. It’s not really all that unique or special, it is the same entropy that the tech community is far more aware of than the government/politics community is. The reason for that difference is that there is immediate benefit that comes from the deconstruction and corruption of structure in government/politics, which is generally not only not the case in tech but the opposite is true.
There are no benefits or advantages I can think of that come from sloppiness and deconstruction. In politics/government there are not only immediate but ever growing benefits from corruption and reconstruction of the processes and structures that come to the people at the top and the apparatchiks/aristocracy/bureaucracy they bring along as bolster and shielding.
People call it different things, but what is clearly emerging in all western societies simultaneously is not at all what the ruling class claims, but rather the authoritarian default that the American Revolution in particular has been a thorn in the eye of for a few centuries now. It is why these duplicitous forces have been attacking and undermining the Constitution of the USA for so long, because it is the only document/philosophy in history that has determined the limits the people place on government rather than government determining the limits on the people.
In many ways, the US Constitution was the only real revolution in human history, one that turns the power dynamic on its head. That is being destroyed right now and I guarantee when (if?) that dam breaks, it will be far worse for the rest of humanity than America. The world takes for granted that everything we enjoy is a function of the US Constitution that is being destroyed right now.
It may all end super well for the elevated privileged classes in this community in particular, but at best it will end horribly for most everyone else. Another possibility is that it all goes sideways as things are wont to and many here end up a head shorter.
> because it is the only document/philosophy in history that has determined the limits the people place on government rather than government determining the limits on the people
What would you like to call it? That's the only logical response to that complaint. The deep state has a meaning. It's a useful meaning. And the term is used based on that meaning by many political scientist and historians.
The deep state is simply unelected governmental authority. And it's specifically useful because of the mainstream tendency to inaccurately attribute more power to elected authority than it really has.
And this inaccuracy often has to do with industrial bias, as the deep state is beholden to industry before any public good. The CIA, for example, was established very specifically to support US industry and support global economic ambitions.
Those people are not elected and collectively have a great deal more power than most of those we elect. So we have a name for that.
You can choose another name if you wish. But we already have one we use.
I've heard it first hand from a former head of a national agency of another country, say "the C... became a monster" due to the concentration of power it had/has.
Maybe people have a hard time with the “deep state” because every claim is so unfalsifiable. It’s the new “wake up sheeple”.
Presumably 1000s of executive appointments and senior civil servants across generations of administrations all collectively conspire on odd Tuesdays and think exactly alike like all complex organizations do.
Reductionism provides all truth, the world is black and white.
> It’s why they like “classifying” to keep their evil deeds covered and hidden behind an vail of authority.
I found classified docs pretty boring. Most of them remained classified because the information presented had limited distribution, which could identify sources. I never worked at the CIA though, so maybe you're right, the entire CIA is just a Ton Clancy novel.
Not making a judgment on the JFK assassination, but I'm sure that one would be interesting and still has not been fully declassified.
one very odd thing is that they brought Allen Dulles in to investigate after he had been fired by JFK, and ended up running a decent portion of the investigation out of his home.
It's not me that is fixated on the name, it is the article that goes out of its way to assign responsibility "specifically" to the CIA - it's right in the title and in the first paragraph!
And this produce what is objectively an historical howler right at the start. As the other commenter said, maybe it's just sloppy editing. But seems pretty click baity to me.
> And this produce what is objectively an historical howler right at the start.
What howler? You quote it ascribing actions to the Guatemalan dictatorship in the 1930s which is accurate. Then you claim the piece says the CIA was active in the 1930s, which it does not say anywhere.
Reminds me of "Behold a Pale Horse" which was suppressed domestically by the CIA, for what reason I have no idea as it is obviously outlandish. The version that was finally published is missing 37 pages from the original, I believe you can find a version with those pages on Library Genesis.
I highly recommend "Inside the Company: CIA Diary" by Philip Agee. Agee, a former South American CIA Station Chief, lost heart in the CIA after witnessing years of similar abuses by the U.S.
What discredits a piece should be its accuracy, not its political leaning.
That the CIA was not created till 1947, as already pointed out by serallak, will, not stop me from adding the novel to my reading list.
What saddens is the willingness of the community to defend inaccuracy when they agree with the underlying point the inaccuracy is supporting. The author of the article could have said US Intelligence Assets, and forgone the clickbait of CIA. Putting SEO requirements ahead of factual accuracy, particularly when the fact is so easily fact checked, is not how the world gets changed for the better.
> Since the CIA did not, in fact, exist, any claims of what the CIA tried to do are self-evidently false, and need no more rebuttal than the date the CIA came into being.
This is false. The CIA didn't exist when the book was written, but its suppression activities of the author and its book by the CIA and its front started after the CIA was funded, and the article gives dates.
> Since the CIA did not, in fact, exist, any claims of what the CIA tried to do are self-evidently false, and need no more rebuttal than the date the CIA came into being.
The CIA did not exist prior to its establishment in 1947, to use your nomenclature. So what is false? Everything it says the CIA did from 1947 to the 1960s is true.
It claims the suppression was “specifically” by the CIA, and the first example of this suppression by the CIA it gives is the publication delay, ascribed to actions of a group, which it ties into the thesis by saying was later identified as a CIA front group.
> But its 1946 debut reflected a delay of more than a decade by the country’s real dictators, who disrupted the novel’s genesis and sent its author into exile. And in this act of suppression, Asturias’s censors and exilers were aided by the US, specifically the CIA.
I think it's clumsily worded. There was suppression of the novel and the author was exiled (the novel was self-published in Mexico in 1946, out of the author's own pockets). Guatemala's dictatorship was behind this and the US helped them. But the international discrediting of the author was orchestrated by the CIA through a front, and this took place many years after.
So "this" suppression that the CIA aided is not just 1946 -- that's poorly worded -- but in the ensuing years, after the CIA was already formed.
No, in context "this suppression" is clearly referring to the disruption of the novel's genesis and the sending of its author into exile performed by the dictators in that period prior to 1946. The dictators are the censors and exilers being referenced in the next sentence.
It would have been easy to say that those actions were part of a broader suppression, or even just aiding in suppression with no qualifier, but specifying "this" makes it unambiguous that they are still talking about the same thing.
I think if you take the full article as context, where they mention specific incidents in the 50's onwards, the context is not the period prior to 1946. I think it's just this specific paragraph that's clumsily worded.
No, it is very clear even with the full context that at this point in the article they are referring to the delay of the book being published. The very next sentence states that there were multiple such examples of suppression over his career, indicating that "this act" was a specific one in a sequence of many.
The act is the act of suppression, which they were involved in. They did not participate in the delay portion of the suppression, nor does it say they did.
It's not "the act" it's "this act" which they were not involved in. The article says they were involved in the delay, which is innaccurate. They may not have meant to say that, but that's what it says.
> But its 1946 debut reflected a delay of more than a decade by the country’s real dictators, who disrupted the novel’s genesis and sent its author into exile. And in this act of suppression, Asturias’s censors and exilers were aided by the US, specifically the CIA.
It's in the first paragraph. Emphasis mine. How could the CIA have aided foreign dictators prior to its existence?
The first sentence blames the delay on the dictator of Guatemala, quite explicitly. Then in the next sentence it says the CIA aided in the suppression of the novel, which it did.
The text never days the CIA delayed the novel, it says the CIA aided in suppressing the novel. The CCF didn't even exist until the 1950s.
> The fact that the group specifically identified as the actual vehicle of suppression was “later” (date unspecified, but presumably after the CIA existed) revealed to have been operating as a CIA front doesn't mean that what they did before the CIA existed was on behalf of time travellers from the future when there was a CIA.
It's not clear that you mean by "the group" but CCF, Cuaderno, PEN and Mondo Nuevo were all founded after the CIA.
> Since the CIA did not, in fact, exist, any claims of what the CIA tried to do are self-evidently false, and need no more rebuttal than the date the CIA came into being.
This is a farcical argument. You seem to struggle with the concept that an organization can work to suppress something that already existed when the organization was formed.
There are specific claims that are made about the steps that groups led by CIA operatives took to suppress the book and author. All of these events happened AFTER the CIA was founded.
You either lack basic reading comprehension / logic or are trolling.
The title is correct: the CIA spent a significant amount of money to suppress the book. That the CIA was founded shortly after the book was published doesn't make that impossible.
If this book interests you, here are a couple additional books to add to your reading list with similar subject matter:
Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala
- Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer
Las venas abiertas de América Latina
- Eduardo Galeano
The English translation is titled, Open Veins of Latin America
(Isabel Allende said she carried a copy of Galeano's book with her as she fled the 1973 US backed coup that overthrew the democratic government in Chile and installed the brutal far-right murderous dictator Pinochet)
A magazine that was funded by a non-profit that was partially influenced by CIA officials wrote a bad review. There is not a lot of evidence that either a fortune was spent, or the goal of the CIA was over suppression of the book.
What do you dispute? I don't know if running dozens of literary magazines for decades costs more or less than launching dozens of cruise missiles, but it's still a "fortune" in terms of money being thrown around in literary criticism circles.
They did not fund the literary magazine, they just exerted influence on who was the editor.
They did not do it to suppress a single book.
A bad review is not the same as suppression in any way.
So every piece of the headline is wrong. This book achieved widespread success and notoriety in every part of the world after it was published and the book was not really on the CIA's radar at all.
> They did not fund the literary magazine, they just exerted influence on who was the editor.
I'm not an expert on this topic but I think that this is incorrect
> The Congress for Cultural Freedom is widely considered one of the CIA’s more daring and effective Cold War covert operations. It published literary and political journals such as Encounter, hosted dozens of conferences bringing together some of the most eminent Western thinkers, and even did what it could to help intellectuals behind the Iron Curtain[1]
> A bad review is not the same as suppression in any way.
Receiving negative reviews from critics sponsored by the CIA is not the same as having publication of your book blocked by a CIA backed dictatorship, experiencing one after the other could warrant the use of such a term.
I've been thinking a lot about these kind of scenarios lately:
Autocratic regime holds power over a territory with a long history of violent instability. The regime is guilty of corruption, nepotism, human rights violations, suppressing dissidents, etc. This is I think a requirement for it to hold power given the conditions. If the regime collapses even greater violence and general horrible stuff happens. There are plenty of examples in recent history. The Arab Spring comes to mind.
You have some leverage on the situation. You have reliable information about the bad stuff the regime is doing and you are a member of the press, a public figure, whatever. What do you do? What is the right thing to do?
And one step further and closer to the scenario in the article: suppressing the release of that information to protect the fragile stability and prevent a possible greater evil. Is that necessarily a bad thing?
In this scenario, the CIA is not protecting against greater evil for the people of the country. They are just protecting the interests of the US. Now, the CIA's mission is to protect the US interests, there is nothing wrong. However, the means they use to do so may have something wrong with that. Installing and protecting dictators that are favorable to the US is unethical. Also the CIA does not furter "American values" in these interventions, for instance when suppressing weak democracies with strong dictators (Think Chile's Pinochet).
This kind of intervention can easily go wrong, and will often do go wrong (Chile's case was but one example, the Guatemalan novel discusses another).
To play devils advocate, I would posit that so-called "American values" don't actually matter much to real Americans (source: red-blooded American here). What matters is living in comfort, and wielding fiscal power.
When you speak of our "values" then you start sounding like the propaganda that quite frankly, American's are tired of hearing about. We aren't all one-trick ponies here, just like any other place, we have a wide diversity of skills, talents, and values.
You're criticizing someone's use of the term "American values" when they both put scare quotes around it and said that the CIA was not interested in them. You're ignoring the actual comment and replying to the term "American values" in isolation with a response you've probably given many times before.
> You're ignoring the actual comment and replying to the term "American values" in isolation with a response you've probably given many times before.
It is fair to respond to an isolated point within an argument. If an argument contains a point that cannot withstand scrutiny, then the argument is unsound.
Furthermore, you should be ashamed of yourself for saying "with a response you've probably given many times before."
Such an accusation is easily verifiable if it were true. To make such a claim without even looking is immature and disrespectful.
The iraq war was based on lies and financial interest. Do you really want to pretend, Saddam was the primary goal? And that nation building was accomplished, sir!
And gaddafi was toppled over french/sarcozy interest.
One who doesn't know history is doomed to repeat it. Post hoc justification of own atrocities is exactly the sort of cognitive failure that patriotic delusion (and thus the future of such) can cause.
The loss of Gaddafi basically put the slave markets into overdrive, destroyed the power grids and water infrastructure, and generally did far more harm than good. Compared to other dictators that the US put in place, Gaddafi was far from the worst.
Allende WON the election. Whatever percentage he had, surely it was more than what Pinochet had. And he always said that his government would be a socialist one (which is what in US people would call communist). There were no lies involved.
What right US have to support mass tortures, and genocide (Indonesia) to impose an economical system that people in other countries did not want to follow? And what right do you have to advocate this?
Those are certainly important questions and the answer i like is probably USA shouldn’t meddle in other countries concerns. But I think it is true that at least some of the often listed examples of USA supposedly interfering in democracies are not quite black and white.
This is essentially a version of the colonialist argument - the natives are brutal, uncivilised, and unable to govern themselves properly. So even though our methods are sometimes violent and result in significant death and suffering, we are reluctantly compelled to exercise our civilising influence on this unfortunate situation.
It's just rhetoric. What's really going on is the "civilising" empire is plundering the smaller nation of resources, and is quite happy to act through local despots, dictators, and torturers to further that - until they stop being useful.
Even in democratic countries you have a milder version of this: the most successful politicians are usually those that can get the backing of the political class. Acting against the interests of the political class means you're without the bureaucratic apparatus that would have allowed you to make meaningful and lasting change.
There really does seem to be an "optimal amount of corruption" in absolutely any sufficiently complex society.
That there is optimal corruption, in a static system, makes sense to me.
Changing the system for the better (I.e. start requiring US Supreme Court justices to actually avoid conflicts of interest, or forbid coordinated out of state money for state’s senate races) could incrementally reduce the corruption stable point.
—
What strikes me as a missed opportunity, is that democracies haven’t institutionalized a response to the inevitability of corruption. Despite most sources of corruption being out in the open.
Scientists don’t reinvent all the math for thermodynamics every time they stumble on some new context with disorder.
But currently, eliminating corruption is systemically difficult to change because of the corruption! There is no Constitutional responsibility to respond to it.
“Eliminating corruption”, including power centralization (which both requires, incentivizes and enables more corruption) should be right up there with “passing laws”, “implementing laws”, and “interpreting laws”, as an ongoing Constitutionally organized effort.
So many things, including the effectively two-party system that drives so much partisanship, are a result of corruption and the door left open for power centralizations like single party rule. (Seat limits on parties would completely upend that dynamic.)
Corruption is a pretty fuzzy concept, and most people aren't very good to handle gray areas. I think it's an issue of there not being incentives for any successful group to keep corruption as primary topic in the Overton window, since it's equivalent to marking yourself as an outsider to the political class.
From time to time you'd have waves of populism that can be ridden, and outsiders can get in power, but those never really last.
In my Eastern-European backwards nation that's affected by endemic corruption I was actually thinking of founding at one point a suicide-party, that is basically unelectable but who's main purpose would be to bring the necessary ideas in the Overton window, so that the successful parties at least have to address them.
It's definitely not an easy problem, as most of those that actually understand social processes and can do something have mostly become wealthy and indifferent to the greater good.
Suicide party sounds like a great idea. However, there is a danger. If population is polarized (like US-style) and this new party will seem to be taking a side, party's image would be ruined for people who take the other side. That creates a risk that ideas you bring will immediately look bad for people on the other side because these ideas come from your party i.e. their opponent. But maybe it's not important, as long as ideas are now being discussed.
I was born in a country so corrupt and backwards that such a party would not make a difference.
I think most of the response needed to suppress bad behaviour is cultural and peer pressure. Rules and regulations just externalise that problem into an administrative function. People can demonstrate compliance without having to worry about the actual purpose of the rule. And that technical compliance can be used to protect them from any consequences.
Yes, there will always be power mongers and corrupt individuals. So why have a system of rules & regulation?
Why have a democracy, a constitution, laws?
Because separation of powers, regular mandated elections, and other rules that make power harder to centralize, reduce the chance of autocracy from nearly 100% to something much lower.
And debugging that system when obvious in-the-open systematic corruption occurs also has great impact.
I.e. the bill of rights, equal rights amendments, etc
Rules & regulations are a program running on squishy human “hardware”, of course, but fixing clear bugs makes a difference.
—
Which is why my question isn’t whether fixing government system flaws is worth doing, but whether there is a way to make that activity more regular, more incentivized, more likely.
For instance, the simple rule of requiring elections on a calendar makes elections much much likely.
Maybe some rules that ensured party dominance resulted in an extended period of party handicap would do it? Less incentives and outright necessity for corruption when it isn’t going to extend your hold on power anyway.
I am sure that if a country was writing a new constitution, they could learn something from all the different corrupt vs. less corrupt behaviors of existing democracies.
Surely the best constitution isn’t a solved problem, and constitution innovation hasn’t run into some final optimization limit.
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Stockholm syndrome might reduce our awareness of these opportunities, but they exist, despite the difficulty implementing even simple reforms today.
That makes asking how reforms that reduce corruption, and power consolidation, could be made more likely even more important.
Citizen assemblies (juries)? Sortition? Modest, obvious reforms like passing For The People Act (HB1)?
(I'm very interested in the idea that there might be an optimum level of corruption. Counter intuitive and makes me uncomfortable; so it's probably meritorious.)
One could argue that.
I know an Egyptian that had to leave after critique of previous and current regime but now has some appreciation for the current one whilst still acknowledging it's terrible authoritarianism.
Similarly I'm very close Saudi that recognizes how democracy protests were brutally suppressed with beheadings but considers them to have had no chance of success whilst also recognizing the presence of fundamentalists types that led to the grand mosque seizure and it's subsequent effects on the country and is thus somewhat of a monarchist despite supporting democracy in Europe.
I imagine there's similar situations all over the world from Armenian views on Russian influence in the light of Azerbaijani threat to Africans choosing between resource extractors.
However those are locals seeing local nuance and not foreign interventionists with something to gain and I'd say the CIA has a horrid track record when it comes to choosing the lesser evil (Perhaps born from a cold war time when allowing non alignment and the like was sadly not considered an option.) to the point where you're better of looking at the interests they represent in a given scenario than any plainly stated claims about goodwill or lesser evils.
A small group of dictators and their affiliates holds power in a small country with abundant natural resources, which a foreign entity harvests at relatively low costs - only having to pay and protect the dictatorship, while the vast majority of the population lives in squalor and poverty, only having access to low-wage menial labor.
Democratization of the economy would entail vast economic losses for the foreign power, due to a steep rise in the cost of the raw materials (see Arab oil crisis), or the conversion of the country to an industrial power that doesn't export raw materials or agricultural produce, but instead manufactured goods, causing it to become a global power (see China).
In this scenario, the role of the CIA is to sabotage all economic and political development in the country - much as the British throne and its affiliated Crown Corporations attempted to do in the American colonies for the 100 years preceding the American Revolution. When people say, "the USA acts as an economic imperialist in Latin and South America", this is the kind of thing they're talking about.
This tradeoff makes much more sense from the outsider’s perspective.
Living in a stable democracy comes with a certain set of values and preferences. One of those is predictability. When stuff runs smoothly , interest rates are low and you can plan your life ten years in advance.
Now from insider’s perspective it’s a different type of a question. It’s increasing the risk of the violent things happening to you in near future vs long term benefits for your children. People value stability much less when they are on the receiving side of the status quo.
Yes, it really is a bad thing. All dictatorships suck except for a narrow class of people favored by or directly benefiting from the regime. Period. Any other view is either cope or Orientalism (“maybe democracy doesn’t work for X people”).
Sometimes it takes the subjects of a dictatorship multiple generations to realize that dictatorships suck, especially if they are partisans and their dictator is a “hero” fighting their boogeyman (secular dictator fighting religious boogeyman, religious dictator fighting secular boogeyman, chauvinist dictator pretending to fight some other country like in 1984 but really the biggest enemy is him, a minority dictator pretending to protect the minorities as an excuse for carpet bombing and torturing members of the majority to hold onto power, etc…).
Keep in mind that for long lasting dictatorships, half the population or more was raised on their propaganda. They’re literally brainwashed, and the dictator ensures that no one becomes independently successful enough to challenge their authority, so people often have nothing better to do that sit around, smoke, and talk about the regime’s enemies as if they’re the proximate threat. So don’t blindly accept when someone from a country with a dictatorship says their dictatorship is good. Trust me, you have it beyond good in America , you truly have no idea how bad a bad government is.
> All dictatorships suck except for a narrow class of people favored by or directly benefiting from the regime
And even they can fall out of favor and become victims in an instant. You only need to say the wrong thing or have someone report that you said the wrong thing (whether or not you did) and the party's over.
> If the regime collapses even greater violence and general horrible stuff happens.
There might be violence, but in general you can't know this. And in the end you end up arguing against democracy itself; the opposition cannot be allowed to win, even if they have the votes, because of the risk of rioting by pro-regime supporters. And in order to suppress them winning, you have to commit more crimes.
Bad/good is a subjective matter, but I would say it is a mistake to prioritize lesser evil over long term effects and sustainable solutions. You can get away with anything in the lesser evil mindset.
IMO information doesn't have the impact most people think it does. It seems to play much more of a role in shaping long-term views rather than driving immediate short-term responses. One would have expected the Snowden revelations to trigger a monumental response. They did not, and so a cynic might say people mostly didn't care. But that also seems wrong. Rather it seems to have played (and is playing) a significant role in shaping people's views of the world over the long-term. Instead of driving people to do some radical action, it instead drove things like a great anti-establishment type sentiment, and more people to acknowledge the role of realpolitik in the world.
Things like the Arab Spring weren't really driven by information such as by well organized Western trained individuals organizing efforts to overthrow their governments. Those groups were largely just waiting for some event to use as a justification for a planned action. And in any large country those events will inevitably happen. This [1] article from the times is quite amusing. In a nutshell, 'No we didn't fund them to start protests, we simply recruited people who despised their government, and trained them in organization, networking, and other forms of advocacy. And then we made sure the protests that did happen received 24/7 positive coverage. But really we played no role whatsoever in these completely organic movements.'
So the point I'd make with this is that information itself is something that should be free. Because it shapes views. Where things get dodgy is in 'inorganic' organizing and promotion. Inorganic is always tough to define both because we live in a global world, and because behind any revolution there are always genuine and real grievances. But I think everybody can agree that the Romanian people overthrowing Ceaușescu after he called everybody into a square for a propaganda rally was completely organic [2], and the CIA overthrowing Iran over oil in 1953 was completely inorganic [3]. Lots of things are going to fall in between those two extremes, but the more foreign involvement (and propaganda), the less organic something is.
But information? Information wants to, and should, be free.
Really nice insight:
> So the point I'd make with this is that information itself is something that should be free. Because it shapes views. Where things get dodgy is in 'inorganic' organizing and promotion.
It is this that I would like journalists and even states to protect the people against. Not censor but a nice little banner like Youtube and Twitter saying this media comes from <something> and is part of a campaign. In that banner then publish the analysis and criteria used.
Youtube does it for in-video advertising so the logic exists even in the commercial space. I find it plausible it would be valuable in the virtual agora.
The US employs the largest psyop operations investment in the world, why would you trust the government to manage info authenticity and integrity for the public?
I can see the allure of a parental figure where the state makes sure its citizens are protected from bad stuff but I think you’ve got it backwards, it’s the state itself which is not only bad but has all the power and leverage for that badness to materialize itself. Unfortunately it’s not so simple when you want to give all the power to a group to wield over you, you’ll find they’re more interested in that power than protecting you with it even if they’re peformative about it
This is propaganda and you don't even know it... People get silenced in the US every day because they have a different opinions on current events, for example the US proxy war with Russia.
I always noticed when certain amount of decades pass it's okay to say certain things, like "Allende was assassinated by the CIA", but back then you'd get persecuted to even mention that.
Yes, when it doesn't matter you can say whatever you want, god bless the USA... Because of opinions like yours is that America is the empire who gets the "Okay" to be the police of the world, and it's terrible at that.
Ukraine had seen proxy war just for a few months in spring/summer 2014, until Russia moved in its regular troops to save its sponsored para-militaries in Donbas. Right now it's a war of invaded nation against invader nation, non conspiracist mr refused_cov_vax.
Yeah, as a Ukrainian, this triggers me well, good job.
I think that it is good that you feel being silenced.
The world in which a person who have absolutely zero idea what he is talking about will feel cheered, is a very scary to me. Until then, there is hope.
A better question to ask, is why has the "2nd most powerful military" on earth failing to capture a city <=300km from their own borders? and with there current rate of advancement will take all of Ukraine in ~30/40 years.
i wouldnt call russias military anywhere near "2nd most powerful", very very far from it.
but the reason is simply, russia isnt out to destroy ukraine as a mortal enemy, as such, there are huge limitations to what can be done, and ukraine has some advantages here. if russia wanted to, they could simply bomb ukraine to pieces, all over ukraine, if they wanted to. They clearly done
> but the reason is simply, russia isnt out to destroy ukraine as a mortal enemy, as such, there are huge limitations to what can be done, and ukraine has some advantages here. if russia wanted to, they could simply bomb ukraine to pieces, all over ukraine, if they wanted to. They clearly done
Have you seen what Bakhmut looks like?. Russia is totally out to wipe Ukraine off the map that is their entire intention just like how Grozny looked after the Russians rolled through.
The difference is they are wholly incapable of implementing what they want to do.
i am not denying what bakhmut looks like, but are you suggesting they couldnt simply megabomb all major ukranian cities without any regard for what happens?
I dont buy your motives for what russia is doing. Also, supposing you are in a war, REGARLDESS of reasons, good or bad, what would you suggest happen when there is an active conflict? Now sure, you can say(and im not arguing that this would be wrong): "russia can just not invade ukraine", and then there would be no destruction at all. Thats true, but suppose the decision has been made, as it has, even if you dont intend to destroy for the sake of destruction, things are gonna be destroyed in a conflict, would you not agree?
now I for one would prefer the money the state steals from me does not go to fund that destruction. I do not like to be partly funding a proxy war with russia.
> i am not denying what bakhmut looks like, but are you suggesting they couldnt simply megabomb all major ukranian cities without any regard for what happens?
Pretty much, Bakhmut is mostly due to artillery then anything else, I dont think they have enough missiles to reduce all cities in Ukraine to anything like that with missiles outside of using nukes, which instantly ends the Russian federation as a country itself.
> I dont buy your motives for what russia is doing. Also, supposing you are in a war, REGARLDESS of reasons, good or bad, what would you suggest happen when there is an active conflict? Now sure, you can say(and im not arguing that this would be wrong): "russia can just not invade ukraine", and then there would be no destruction at all. Thats true, but suppose the decision has been made, as it has, even if you dont intend to destroy for the sake of destruction, things are gonna be destroyed in a conflict, would you not agree?
You could not target civilian infrastructure on purpose, something that Russia continually does.
Why else would Russia lob missiles designed by the Soviet Union to take out aircraft carriers at malls in Kyiv?.
You could try your best not imitate the Nazis during WW2 when they where blitzing the British, but Russia seems incapable of rising above anything.
> now I for one would prefer the money the state steals from me does not go to fund that destruction. I do not like to be partly funding a proxy war with russia.
It's not funding its destruction, its funding its protection, this war would have happened regardless.
This war is not a proxy war but an imperialist war of conquest by Russia, the only thing stopping Russia from raping and torturing more Ukrainian men, women and children is the aid from the west.
This is before we get to the fact that aid to Ukraine currently makes up less then 10% of the American yearly military budget and most stuff they are getting is either getting phased out our old enough that it may be expiring.
Can you think of something better your tax dollars could go towards, you know instead of protecting foreign men, women and children from being raped, tortured and murdered by a imperialist country trying to conquer them?.
> People get silenced in the US every day because they have a different opinions on current events, for example the US proxy war with Russia.
Uh, sorry what? It was Russia that decided to invade a sovereign country for annexation. Not the other way around.
And of course everyone is free to disagree with your take. You are not being "silenced" or "canceled", you are being told your opinion is completely contrary to facts.
Both things can be true. Yes, Russia is 100% responsible for this war, and yes, the US (and others) are fighting a proxy war through Ukraine in good old cold war style.
I am not trying to argue with you or change your mind, but I will write a few reasons why I see the term proxy war often used by pro-Putin commenters to push a narrative. Not saying you are. Using the term proxy war:
1. Makes it sound as if the USA is the cause of this war (they are in a proxy war) instead of an attack on Ukraine, and Ukraine seeking help from allies. As if the USA were driving the whole thing.
2. It perpetuates a cold war approach and vocabulary, making Russia look like the superpower it was (and is not anymore).
3. The cold war way of talking about it, additionally, makes it look like there are two sides, two alternatives, which are equally valid and justified.
Because of these reasons, I say there is a narrative, and do not consider the term neutral. I personally avoid the term proxy war because of the connotations above.
> It perpetuates a cold war approach and vocabulary, making Russia look like the superpower it was (and is not anymore).
It isn't the "superpower" status of Russia that makes this a cold war, but the "nuclear power" status. It is precisely a proxy war because you have two nuclear powers that are explicitly avoiding direct conflict due to the risk of nuclear war.
However, One might argue that the true cold war is between the USA and China and that both Ukraine and Russia are proxies.
> The cold war way of talking about it, additionally, makes it look like there are two sides, two alternatives, which are equally valid and justified.
In what way? "Cold war" absolutely doesn't have any connotation of moral equivalence between the two sides.
This is the sort of weird absolutism and rejection of nuance that is a hallmark of propaganda. It is absolutely possible to assign culpability to certain actions taken by the US without even remotely asserting that both sides are equally culpable for the war in Ukraine.
It is possible to think that containing an expansionist nuclear power without triggering a nuclear war is hard and requires a walking a fine line while also thinking that there are powerful forces inside the US that stand to gain a lot by encouraging and then prolonging this conflict.
Part of the power of narratives is that they become an easy way to group and dismiss dissent without engaging with any of the specific concerns expressed in that dissent.
Are the allies of Ukraine supposed to look away at the first time since the OG 1933-45 Nazis that someone tries to re-draw borders and annex countries using war?!
What Russia did was a complete and utter shart on the international rule of law.
Propaganda’s working very well if you actually believe this is the first war since WWII to redraw land borders. And I’m not even counting the invade-and-install-a-puppet kind of wars.
> Propaganda’s working very well if you actually believe this is the first war since WWII to redraw land borders.
I was talking about annexation wars. Not about countries fighting for independence / collapse aftermaths (like the former Yugoslavian countries or the Vietnam war).
But yes, you're correct, I forgot about the first Iraq war where Iraq tried to annex Kuwait and the US (and others) responded under UNSC authorization. And I completely ignored Africa, because honestly I don't have much knowledge about these and to be frank they aren't really relevant.
The annexations, and proxy wars in Africa weren't relevant?
I'm struggling a little to reconcile your two statements, that you simultaneously don't have much knowledge about the situation, but seemingly enough to decide that the deaths of thousands/millions of people in proxy wars is irrelevant to the discussion.
Whatever goes on in Africa hasn't concerned Western politicians at all for decades, it was not relevant for policy discussions anywhere - not even the worldwide Kony 2012 campaign had a real measurable effect. That only began to change with the rise of al-Quaeda and Islamic State-linked terrorists, but even that didn't warrant more attention than throwing some bombs.
Nowadays, China and Russia's Wagner group have essentially carte blanche to do whatever the fuck they want in Africa. The US didn't care before, they sure won't care in the future, and us Europeans are way too disjoint (and busy with Ukraine) to go and clean up the place, not to mention our very own very shady history with Africa complicating matters even more. All we're realistically gonna do is make even more people attempting to flee from that hellhole drown in the Mediterranean or die in Libyan concentration camps.
Sad to say it, but there's nothing we can do to help the people in Africa, no matter how much they'd deserve having actual, sustainable help instead of their agriculture and textile industries getting destroyed by Western "donations".
I have some sympathy for contrarians, not because of their accuracy but because they are the canary in the mine for freedom of speech. Wrong statements also give the opportunity for argument and thus replacement of dogma with reasoning.
I upvoted you above, and I believe your opinion on the proxy war is valid. Victimizing yourself though means that you are unable to stand by your arguments and are just poisoning the well for others who can. Having a different opinion requires effort and often disparagement.
> More propaganda, listen to the other side... oh well it's banned everywhere.
This is just low effort.
Can you please provide some examples of “the other side” that have been banned? I’m not in the US, but a country tightly aligned with the US, and I am able to access rt.com just fine.
I also don't live in the west, rather the global south, in a not so allied country.
When in Europe and in the US. You'll get something like this on twitter, and obviously you cannot access the site either:
@ActualidadRT's account has been withheld in Portugal, Finland, Sweden, Ireland, Slovenia, Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Italy, Malta, Germany, Greece, Romania, Netherlands, Bulgaria, Austria, Luxembourg, Latvia, United Kingdom, Denmark, Lithuania, Croatia, Estonia, Cyprus, France, Spain, Belgium in response to a legal demand. https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/tweet-withhel...
> More propaganda, listen to the other side... oh well it's banned everywhere.
What are you talking about this, is literally false, I see pro Russian narratives everywhere, including here, you guys don't get banned despite how despicable the views you hold are.
Support Russias genocidal, torturous, raping war in Ukraine all you want, but don't shout about being banned when you get shouted down by facts.
Yes Russia did invade Ukraine, but wouldn't the US invade Canada if Russia had organized a coup there to get rid of Trudeau then put a Russian puppet there? Of course the US would... Or would you argue that the 2014 Ukrainian coup wasn't supported by the US?
The thing we never mention is how agressive Nato (the US since it has military bases in Turkey for example, while Turkey doesn't have military bases in the US) has been at pushing its borders towards Russia.
In the end we can call this whatever we want, the facts are clear, if Zelensky had resigned less Ukrainians would have died, and the only ones profiting from this are the US, you can't fight a country like Russia, they have 7000 nukes, it's like thinking Mike Tyson is losing against you because he's too nice to punch you in the face... eventually he will.
The arguments used today are the same as ever (we're freeing the Vietnamese, the Iraqis, etc.), if you look at it as it really is, less dead people is better than more dead people, eventually Ukraine will be destroyed and the US will not even help to rebuild it, if you think they will then look at Iraq.
> you can't fight a country like Russia, they have 7000 nukes, it's like thinking Mike Tyson is losing against you because he's too nice to punch you in the face... eventually he will.
Russia likes to rattle there nuclear sabre about everything regarding Ukraine (and beyond) because that is all Russia is capable of doing with there nuclear weapons without causing the quick, fast and hard collapse of there entire country.
7,000 nukes doesn't make a country win a war instantly, Russia lost in the first Chechen war even with all there nukes, they lost in Afghanistan with all the nukes, the US lost in a whole number of wars (Vietnam, Afghanistan, etc) whilst having shit loads of nukes.
Russia is throwing everything they have at Ukraine including mad max inspired franken vehicles and T-54 tanks, to pretend they are fighting with one hand behind their back is disingenuous.
It may look like Russia is fighting with one hand behind their back, but the reality is, that this is all Russia has.
> The arguments used today are the same as ever (we're freeing the Vietnamese, the Iraqis, etc.), if you look at it as it really is, less dead people is better than more dead people, eventually Ukraine will be destroyed and the US will not even help to rebuild it, if you think they will then look at Iraq.
The only one who has the power to decide the number of dead people is Russia, when Russia leaves the killing stops, until then the Ukrainians have to kill Russians until enough die and they decide to go home.
> Or would you argue that the 2014 Ukrainian coup wasn't supported by the US?
Yanukovich fled the country all on his own, after police didn't back his government any more following months of massive protests. These protests in turn came from Yanukovich not signing an agreement with the EU that was already ratified by the parliament.
> the facts are clear, if Zelensky had resigned less Ukrainians would have died
Lol. Just look on Butcha and all the other places where Russian troops massacred the local population, or where they eradicated everything Ukrainian, from street signs to library books. There would have been no freedom under Russian rule.
> you can't fight a country like Russia
Of course one can fight a country like Russia. They lost 100.000 units fighting over Bakhmut in the last months and made absolutely zero progress in their war.
> they have 7000 nukes, it's like thinking Mike Tyson is losing against you because he's too nice to punch you in the face... eventually he will.
That assumes two things: first, that the nuclear weapons and their launch systems actually work - the sorry state of the ordinary Russian troops makes me seriously question just how much of the rest of their military has gone downhill. The second thing is, it assumes Putin is completely lost in madness. China and the US have it made very clear behind the doors that using anything nuclear is something Putin does not want to do, and in exchange the US and Ukraine's other allies have placed the condition on all major arms deliveries that these are not to be used to attack targets in Russia. Seems to have worked out pretty well so far.
>> you can't fight a country like Russia, they have 7000 nukes
That's why people join NATO: Access to nuclear firepower. NATO serves as a list of countries that cannot be invaded, because they have bent at the knee to US hegemony, and thus the US is (at least convincingly postured as) willing to use its world-ending nuclear arsenal to defend them.
That's the post-WWII world order: sovereignty belongs to those with the power to wipe out any other country on Earth. You can either be a nuclear power, join in on one's protection scheme, or pray you stay irrelevant enough to not get conquered.
What you're misconstruing as "NATO's aggressive expansion" is countries scrambling to get the US's protection, because the alternative is Russian occupation. NATO was founded specifically to counter Russia's aggressive expansionism.
> This is propaganda and you don't even know it... People get silenced in the US every day because they have a different opinions on current events, for example the US proxy war with Russia.
The irony of your blatantly false statements is that half of what people express on the war in Ukraine here would cause them to end up in jail in Russia, but the opposite views don't cause you to end up in jail in the west.
First they freeze your assets, and only then if you're foolish enough to subject yourself to the due process, you might end up in jail.
There's an handful of people from the west who went to Donbass to report the situation. They are (of course?) mostly supportive of Russia, so you shouldn't delude yourself in thinking that they are unbiased... but they have regularly been threatened with prosecution if/when they'll return, example:
I feel like you're trying to poke holes in other people's arguments, and not really engaging with an open mind.
The straightforward answer is: you don't need a warrant to risk ending up in jail.
I'm not a German jurist, but I believe that warrants are used if there's a risk that a suspect would commit violent crimes or alternatively if prosecution found someone guilty in absentia. For Alina Lipp, the prosecution just started.
It's not the only case, btw. Another famous case is Steven's Dozinger. I think that Legaleagle's video is quite evenhanded and yet entertaining in explaining his situation:
My point is that being silenced in such ways in the west is more likely than people think. Dissenting speech gets granted a lot of leeway, but that's only until it has few chances to influence people.
As soon as dissent can actually threaten the establishment, that's when you start to see a reaction against it.
Of course, in wartime little leeway will be granted for dissent.
> Four US citizens charged with working for Russia spy agency to interfere with elections
Wow talking about stretching for a story, ill accept that Steven's Dozinger is not a good look but to have to lower yourself to saying being jailed for espionage is being silenced is such a stretch im surprised you even brought it up, it weakens your argument more then including it strengthens it.
You can have a free press even without secret services that spy on its citizens and the world, spread fake news, topple governments, torture and assassinate people without being held accountable.
Don't forget about the Marshall plan or the massive amounts of technical advancements due to the US or the billions of people lifted out of poverty due to the US secured global order.
The US has been an imperfect superpower but objectively the most benevolent.
Realistically, what would be a better alternative to US hegemony?
I'm sorry, but that does not absolve anything. The US's humanitarian engagement is 100% a ploy to increase trade and/or military installations abroad. What's more, even in the outlier organizations like the Red Cross or the Peace Corps, they are forced to cowtow to the political agendas of the region. For example, PC cannot promote birth-control in a lot of impoverished areas of South America due to Catholicism. This illustrates quite plainly that despite the best intentions of their members, these organizations are political power plays, not acts of benevolence.
> The US has been an imperfect superpower but objectively the most benevolent.
I'm sure the south americans that get a golpe every time they try to have a democratic elections disagree.
Possibly also the afghan women that had equal rights during communism might feel that USA wasn't very benevolent.
I've also met refugees who had to leave their country because of USA bombing them (for made up chemical weapons). They also don't see the USA as benevolent.
I think it's better to frame it in a advantageous/disadvantageous for me situation.
Clearly USA is advantageous for you (and me!) but I wouldn't presume it is for the majority of people.
I live in a former eastern bloc country and I think that. That doesn't mean I think the US hasn't committed crimes of its own. I wouldn't live in the US either due to its social issues. But between the US or Russia, I'd choose the US any day.
Russia's been in the wrong not just right now but for centuries.
If you have ever used "GPT" (I guess they meant "ChatGPT") you know that's not true, the grammar and it's way too colloquial / lazy for it to be generated by it
Yes, if it's regarding some unimportant foreign entity or just general inconsequential political banter.
Find a controversial topic (covid, January 6th protest, anything non-mainstream lgbt, ukraine, etc.), you get "censored" (in one way or another) in most social networks.
Actually have some real info? You get Epsteined. Or well, the Assange treatment just for reporting it.
But yeah, you can scream "Fuck <that politician>" at the wall, all you like, that's true.
There's a lot of differences. For example, NATO doesn't force countries to join, and doesn't invade countries if they want to leave or join another alliance. See France.
In fact - previous instance of russian CIS - Warsaw Pact - was unique among military alliances in the fact that it only invaded its members (Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan). It was a prison not a military alliance.
And in current CIS Russia sent army to Belarus to pacify million-strong protests against faked elections in 2020. And recently did the same in Kazakhstan.
The west isn't innocent. But it is infinitely better than the authoritarian alternative China, Russia, Iran and North Korea offer.
> For example, NATO doesn't force countries to join, and doesn't invade countries if they want to leave or join another alliance. See France.
France never actually left NATO the organisation – they just withdrew from NATO's military command structure (1966), only to later rejoin it (2009). No country has ever sought to leave NATO the organisation. There is a clear procedure for doing so (Article 13), but no member has ever invoked it.
Interestingly, Article 13 actually says that prior to 1969, none of the members are allowed to leave. I doubt the US would have invaded any of them if they'd broken that clause though.
They're fundamentally different wars in their motivation as well.
The US invaded foolishly invaded Iraq and Afghanistan with the ultimate end goal of destroying evil power structures Sadam/Taliban and trying to establish liberal institutions. No one was trying to destroy local cultures or languages.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine, just like WW2 Germany's, has the end goal of genociding Ukrainian culture and subjugating the Ukrainian people
Ah yes, the ultimate goal of the Iraq war was to liberate the Iraqi citizens from the evil Baathist regime stockpiling WMDs and totally not protecting American oil interests and destabilizing a competitor to our friends in the Gulf.
Snowden would be a better example I think, as Assange just published everything classified he could get his hands on.
So there were also bits of wrongdoings here and there, but they seemed more random and the "collateral murder" as the shining example way overblown and missrepresented (as unprovoked murder of journalists, when they were in fact covering insurgents, who were engaged in combat in that area)
I'm not sure if you read the link you posted but I would consider the following wrongdoings:
>The leaked cables revealed that diplomats of the U.S. and Britain eavesdropped on Secretary General Kofi Annan in the weeks before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, in apparent violation of international treaties prohibiting spying at the UN.[27][28] The intelligence information the diplomats were ordered to gather included biometric information, passwords, and personal encryption keys used in private and commercial networks for official communications.[28][29] It also included Internet and intranet usernames, e-mail addresses, web site URLs useful for identification, credit card numbers, frequent flier account numbers, and work schedules.[28][30][31] The targeted human intelligence was requested in a process known as the National Humint Collection Directive, and was aimed at foreign diplomats of US allies as well.[31] WikiLeaks released the cable on 28 November 2010.
and yet, the CIA, like its equivalents in all other countries, runs completely out of control.
I will happily let you call me names, if i can somehow fool you into simply letting me do WHATEVER i want.
a sitting US democratic senator even went so far as go on national TV and say "the intelligence community has six ways from sunday to get back at you".
Sorry for the offtopicness but could you please remove "All of my posts are GPT-generated" from your profile? Based on your comments I assume it's not true (but rather some kind of witticism). But it's having the effect of trolling the threads - e.g. the sibling comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36055724, and I think I've seen similar cases elsewhere.
> Frank Snepp’s Decent Interval: An Insider’s Account of Saigon’s Indecent End Told by the CIA’s Chief Strategy Analyst in Vietnam, which was published in late 1977.
> At the very least Snepp had written the definitive history of the final days of the American imperium—in Vietnam anyway—in a gripping, page-turning style. The rooftop escape defined so much about the blundering American experience in Vietnam, and Snepp was the only witness to the tawdry retreat who wrote it all down as if a modern-day Xenophon, on the payroll of the CIA, retreating from the Asian wars.
> In 1981, the CIA had dragged him into the Supreme Court, to block his earnings from the book and to teach other agents in the field that there were costs associated with tell-all books about the failings within agency. I remember being shocked that Snepp lost his appeal to the Supreme Court and that he had been forced to pay $300,000 in book royalties to his former CIA handlers.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/04/09/why-vietnam-still-ma...