The US invaded and seized Guantanamo Bay in 1898. What was the cause for that?
It's a standard American imperial idea. The US seizure and continual occupation of Guantanamo Bay is "legal". Cubans reclaiming what Americans stole in other parts of Cuba is "illegal".
It's quite a joke. The US invading and seizing sugar plantations from 1898 to 1959 is legal, the American thieves being driven out is "illegal" and "without any compensation".
This sort of imperial hubris is why Arabian patriots have been flying planes into the Pentagon.
You've been using HN primarily for ideological battle. It's normal to comment occasionally on a politicized topic, but using the site primarily for this is crossing the line that the guidelines draw: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. There are lots of reasons why we draw the line there, but what it boils down to is that we can't both have a site for intellectual curiosity—the mandate of this place—and also have ideological warfare. The one destroys the other, regardless of which ideology you favor. Flamewar comments like the one you just posted are an excellent illustration of this.
If you'd please review the site rules and use this place as intended from now on, we'd appreciate it.
Cuba pointed missiles at the US because the US was openly gearing up for one of its many invasions of Cuba, shortly after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. The Soviets put nukes there because the US put nuclear missiles into Turkey.
The US government has declared they want to destroy the US. It has been the US interfering in Iran, not vice versa.
The US banned Nobel Prize winner
Linus Pauling from leaving the US, only giving him one shortly before his second Nobel prize to avoid international embarrassment.
Playwright and former Marilyn Monroe husband Arthur Miller was denied a passport, blocking him from seeing the Crucible open in London.
Civil rights icon Paul Robeson was denied a passport, explicitly to deny him the opportunity to talk about the state of national oppression of those of African descent in the US.
Also NY Post reporter William Withy Jr., Corliss Lamont, Howard Fast, Rockwell Kent...
In more recent days one can not drive a car in the US without a license, travel a plane without one, take an Amtrak train without one or ride a Greyhound bus without one. The US absolutely exercises control over where its citizens can go, many of these restrictions are new.
You don't need a license to travel Amtrak. In many cases you don't even need a ticket when boarding the train. I routinely buy mine after it has left the station.
Hell no, I love the low friction travel. But I haven't been asked for an ID on Amtrak since the mid 2000s when they still served booze on that line. On the line I use most frequently they never ask for an ID. And a ticket for tomorrow works for today. Almost nothing nothing in that faq is adhered to on my experience.
What you're talking about used to be discussed a lot. You can go to Wikipedia, or elsewhere, and read about relations of production, alienation, the expropriation of surplus labor time and what have you.
In the past, those who work organized around these issues, discussed them and had a common philosophy and so forth.
Those benefiting from your labor broke up or supplanted these organizations and now have control of the discourse. Many workers feel as you do, but the ones who benefit from exploiting you have been fairly successful from isolating you from the many who feel as you do.
I would suggest reading about the subject, then seeking out and dipping your toe in local organizations which deal with such things.
There have been times when I received more than a fair share of the value that I created, because I was well paid, but the company wasn't profitable. Oddly, I felt more alienated then, because I felt like what I did didn't matter (at least not enough to make us profitable).
You're correct, China had a long history of famines prior to the communist party coming to power in 1949. Shortly after they took power, and achieved stability in Korea, they began to set the stage to end this from happening again.
Would you please not post ideological battle comments to HN? This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. The problem isn't your views, it's that this sort of thing leads to flamewars that take over discussion completely if we let it.
The idea on HN is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do.
Go to Wikipedia and read about the 1960s in the US - Freedom Riders (whites and blacks sitting next to one another on a bus) almost being beaten to death, buses burned, riots on school integration, dogs and firehoses turned on black children, people registering black voters murdered, 4 little girls murdered at a black church by the Klan, civil rights workers and leaders beaten and jailed and murdered and on and on.
Look to the USA currently - before US football games are played the team must stand and salute the USA and the controversies around that, the Black Lives Matter movement and the politician and media hatred of the concept of black lives mattering - which means police killing blacks for no reason. Or the rage against tearing down Confederate statues with inscriptions praising white supremacy like the one in New Orleans. The anti-blacks murdered someone who wanted the Confederate statue in Charlottesville taken down last year - in fact hundreds of Nazis and Klansmen and other far right groups marched there, and the state government and judiciary has blocked the city government from tearing down the statue. Dylan Roof hated blacks and walked into a church murdering blacks.
And on and on. The former African nation enslaved in the US is still an oppressed nation in the US, along with Puerto Ricans, Hawaiians and such.
Africans being represented at Harvard at a level proportional to their population in the US is an anomaly in the existing oppression of Africans on the US, and all this hubbub is an attempt to correct that.
> There is zero commitment from the major nuclear powers for an eventual complete denuclearization
The nuclear powers agreed as part of the 1970 treaty on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, particularly article 6, that they would pursue a complete nuclear disarmament. Of course, they have not fulfilled their obligations over the past half century and non-nuclear powers have complained about this, and the International Court of Justice agreed with them in 1996. A UN resolution in 1999 condemned the US for restarting a nuclear race - only the US, Israel, Albania and Micronesia voted against it. Bush withdrew from the ABM treaty in 2002. The US has been in a nuclear arms race since then.
This is the crux of the Iran issue. Look at what country borders Iran to the east. What has the US done there in the past few years? Now look at what country borders Iran to the west. What has the US done there in the past few years?
I say this as an Israeli who has genuine concern for my children's well being. Iran has legitimate nuclear ambitions. The chain leading up to those ambitions is difficult for some people to admit, and the direction that those ambitions are pushing Iran may very well harm my family. But I don't blame the Iranians themselves for the position that they are in.
My Iranian wife (lived there until well into adulthood) had to live several years in Germany until she understood that Israel was a democracy with civil liberties and rule of law and had a real reason to fear the Iranians. She recognized that she had been under propaganda for so long that she subconsciously believed that Israel was Satan and had to learn the real threat was the other way round.
Stupid thing is. As long as the US still positions itself as nuclear force and world police there will always be other states that try to hold against this force.
Even personally I feel saver knowing other countries are able to defend them self, making it less likely to end up as collateral damage for the US democratisation process.
I once read the New York Times from 1917 to 1922 on microfilm, guided somewhat by an index. Every article was about how the government of "Mr. Lenine and Mr. Trotzky" was on the verge of collapse. It gave a very false picture - well, the Times still gives a false picture of Russia today.
If you have access to microfilm, instructive is an article from June 23, 1918 titled "Lenine ready to resign". Of course this was another false story - although he was shot two months later which caused an illness in him that caused him to slowly withdraw until his death five years after.
But there are many stories of this type. Ultimately, however, dominant communist power in Russia ended because Russian communists themselves decided to hold Multi-Party elections (to be even more tangential - some think Lenin would have had a coalition government of Bolsheviks and left socialist revolutionaries if he had not been shot and retired to Gorki).
The Times's highly inaccurate coverage of the Russian Revolution was an inspiration for Walter Lippmann's commentary on improving media accuracy, in the first decades of the 20th century:
The analysis shows how seriously misleading was the Times by its reliance on the offical purveyors of information. It indicates that statements of fact emanating from governments and the circles around governments cannot be taken as judgements of fact by an independent press. They indicate opinion, they are controlled by special purpose, and they are not trustworthy news.
Even more problematic than official sources, the authors continue, are the semi-official anyomous reports often relied upon.
All the more reason to shun official Information Ministers and Spokesmen, press briefings, and the like.
The quote comes from "A Test of the News", the researchers were Walter Lippman and Charles Merz, the publication The New Republic, and the date, August 4, 1920.
You don't need microfilm to read the NY Times; the entire archive is available on their website.
> I once read the New York Times from 1917 to 1922 on microfilm
You read ~1800 newspapers from 100 years ago?
Anyway, can you provide a basis that substantiates any claim in the parent? I don't mean one link to one article, which tells us nothing about an overall trend. Ironically, there is nothing like HN for unsubstantiated claims about Russia like the parent, which are ceaseless.
> You don't need microfilm to read the NY Times; the entire archive is available on their website.
This was not the case when I did this thirty years ago.
> You read ~1800 newspapers from 100 years ago?
I concur with your observation that if you stop reading that sentence after the first few words, it makes less sense than if you read the whole sentence.
> Anyway, can you provide a basis that substantiates any claim in the parent?
I already did.
> I don't mean one link to one article
August 13, 1918 NY Times front page - article headline "Red leaders flee, reach Kronstadt, entire Bolshevist government escaping from Moscow". Of course history shows us that the Bolshevist government did not collapse in August 1918.
> there is nothing like HN for unsubstantiated claims about Russia like the parent, which are ceaseless
I have received ceaseless upvotes for my comments on the lies the Times has told about Russia over the past century, and I wish to thank the товарищи who gave them to me - from wherever they are in the world.
> August 13, 1918 NY Times front page - article headline "Red leaders flee, reach Kronstadt, entire Bolshevist government escaping from Moscow". Of course history shows us that the Bolshevist government did not collapse in August 1918.
That doesn't establish anything in the original claim. First, the quote says the government left Moscow; it didn't say the government collapsed permanently. Similarly, saying De Gaulle fled France doesn't say that France's free government had collapsed permanently. It would have been false to say Mao and the Chinese Communists didn't flee to northwest China (the Long March); should the newspaper have reported that they were in Beijing? Are you saying the Bolshevik government didn't leave Moscow? Can you provide a basis for that? Second, it's just one headline and you had claimed a trend that lasted for years; one headline, even if mistaken, is not a sign of bias; nobody would say that newspapers are perfect and errors happen for many reasons. Finally, it's from a century ago; I don't see what it says about anything current; does the Russian government of 100 years ago tell us about the current organization? Does IBM of 100 years ago tell us how the current organization functions?
Instructive is the smear campaign against SMTP Creator and IANA head Jon Postel by anonymous "senior government officials" in the months before his death. It was a classic government smear campaign, against someone who did so much, for such low pay, to get the Internet working. He was repaid by the government hounding him in the months before his death. Thankfully John Gilmore held up the torch on all the shady deals going on after he died, even though not much was done.
> Unions prevent those businesses from being able to maintain competitive pricing in global markets due to labor costs, so those obligations eventually put the company out of business or force it to move operations - normally out of sheer survival since other companies in the space will be doing the same.
Well this is false on a number of levels but is a common argument - "if you're the one doing all the work and creating all the wealth, don't organize with the other workers to keep more of the wealth you create, or the soi distant 'job
creator' heirs expropriating your surplus labor time might send you into poverty".
Of course no one ever tells the heirs who expropriate profits from these companies that they should shirk in fear in organizing together for their class interests.
You make a number of discordant points. If we are in an economic system, the fourth one in the past few millennia, where "the growth phase is over", then clearly it is also the beginning of the end of the fourth economic system, and the birth of the fifth system which was born in the Paris Commune is coming.
Pensions are dying as are other old age moneys - it is under attack, and organized workers are what keeps it alive.
Companies don't have a problem with competitive pricing. They have a problem with below-desired profits. The business press says this. See the recent (non-union) Facebook drop.
"Out of business or move"...GM was organized in 1936. Larry Page's grandfather helped do that. In fact Page has held up the weapon his grandfather carried during a strike. The grandfather then made enough to send his son to college. And the son's son formed Google. Maybe GM profits fell at some point, but the family had already moved on.
Compare to the completely unregulated textile mills in the Carolinas. No unions, yet the plants still closed down and left the country. Low paid grandchildren with no college education now see the big employer in town shutter up and they are out of luck.
Thanks, I would prefer the former case.
As far as understanding international capital flows and cycles, Karl Marx spoke about that a century and as half ago and spoke about overproduction, recessions, falling profits, continuing income inequality etc. Not in a liberal social democrat way, but in a way that showed the system would eventually self-destruct as feudalism in Europe had, or how the Roman Empire and it's slave latifundias did, or as hunter-gatherer bands had on the face of the agricultural Sumerian slave empires.
The contradictions and self-destructiveness Marx pointed out are still happening - one example being the 1999 Glass-Steagall bank deregulation followed 9 years later by the "too big to fail" taxpayer TARP bailout.
It's not hypocrisy - it's contradiction. It's cognitive dissonance which will eventually rent things apart - which has been renting things apart.
As a worker creating wealth, I'll take my own council and organize together with my fellow workers as opposed to prostrating myself before the parasitical heirs expropriating my surplus labor time for scraps of food.
Linear thinking cannot bridge the gap in the complex, nonlinear world we live in.
There is a time for unions and there is a time for leaving a broken system. The ocean is bigger than textile mills in the Carolinas and there are more factors involved. Expand your perspectives and it won't seem discordant.
Would you say a broken arm is a symptom of lung cancer?
There is always an area that is growing while another is declining, not in a zero-sum manner but in a progressive way that increases quality of life across the board.
There is a trend in motion toward the marginal cost of production approaching zero, making physical things effectively worthless compared to the creative effort involved.
Humanity is fallible, and those who study history are doomed to watch those who have not repeat it.
It's a standard American imperial idea. The US seizure and continual occupation of Guantanamo Bay is "legal". Cubans reclaiming what Americans stole in other parts of Cuba is "illegal".
It's quite a joke. The US invading and seizing sugar plantations from 1898 to 1959 is legal, the American thieves being driven out is "illegal" and "without any compensation".
This sort of imperial hubris is why Arabian patriots have been flying planes into the Pentagon.