Goodness me where oh where could that anti US bias come from? Couldn't be the illegal bombing of Cambodia and Laos during the Vietnam War, couldn't be arming the Guatamalans who carried out the silent Holocaust, couldn't be arming the Turks while they were slaughtering Kurds, couldn't be the illegal invasion of Iraq, killing up to a million people, and torturing others without due process, ultimately leading to violent blowback from Islamic extremists in Europe in the form of terrorist attacks. Couldn't be providing billions of dollars in weapons for Israel to carry out its genocide, likely leading to even more blowback across the globe. No, surely it's because they're _ungrateful_.
At least there's a figleaf. The 20th Century could have been the German Century, or the Soviet Century. For all America's sins, most people did well living in the American Century.
Not the Kurds though. Or the Mayans. Or the Chileans. Or Cuba. Iran got screwed pretty hard. And Iraq too for that matter. Afghanistan. East Timor, and Indonesia too. Oof and the Palestinians really got the short end of the stick. Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos. But yeah I concede your point, the small minority of people living in the Imperial core did pretty ok.
I'm sure the folks who were tortured in Abu Ghraib were very happy that their toruturers bore no swastika. And I'm sure the Iraqi children who lost their entire families felt very blessed that the people who killed them were in fact the good guys. And the 130000 Mayans killed in the silent Holocaust? Well, imagine the added humiliation of knowing your killers were armed by Nazis. Phew, dodged that (metaphorical) bullet!
This debate could continue forever since there's no single measure by which one can quantify how evil a nation is.
I will leave our audience to consider the 20th Century and decide for themselves how America compared to Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Apartheid South Africa, the USSR, Maoist China, Spain under Franco, Imperial Japan... etc.
"In their moral justification, the argument of the lesser evil has played a prominent role. If you are confronted with two evils, the argument runs, it is your duty to opt for the lesser one, whereas it is irresponsible to refuse to choose altogether. Its weakness has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget quickly that they chose evil."
Crazy how well this Hannah Arendt quote applies to both you and mid 20th century Germans.
Ok, from what you say, I get the sense that the applicability of the quote is non-obvious. I'll paraphrase the quote: "people who choose the lesser of two evils, forget that they chose evil".
In our conversation, we are essentially choosing between two parties:
- The nazis, or the communists, or whatever. Let's call them the baddies.
- America. The good guys!
I personally believe (and you do not have to agree with this, I realize that this is subjective) that murdering children and committing genocide is evil. The nazis committed a genocide, and so they are evil. Let's say the holodomor was a genocide, so the communists are evil too. Conclusion: the baddies are evil. It is also a fact that in the past 75 years or so, America has gone around the globe murdering children, and committing genocides. This is not up for debate. This is a fact. I have listed the examples countless times in this thread, I will not do so again. Conclusion: the good guys are also evil (if you believe murdering children is bad, which again, totally up to you).
In saying "but the nazis were worse!" in response to American murdering a million Koreans, you are effectively choosing the lesser evil (the nazis killed 6 million jews, 30 million Russians, in a fairly short timespan, whereas the US has killed about 12 million over the decades, the nazis are worse). And in saying that we did pretty well in the American century, you are dismissing the genocides, the murders, the torture that the US is responsible for. You're forgetting that the US is also evil. When you say we did alright under American hegemony, you are completely dismissing the suffering, overexploitation, destabilization, and violence that the US has meted out on the global South.
Our thread doesn't exist in a vacuum, it exists in the Chomsky-fied world of the 21st Century. This is a world in which quite a few people really do defend the regimes I mentioned, as though there were no difference between totalitarianism and a liberal democracy.
Note that I made a point of defending America in the 20th Century, not the 21st.
Because, at the moment, America has an authoritarian leader.
And I wonder if people who obsess on America's bad side, even know the difference!
Considering the last HN thread I commented on was full of comments in support of the anti-American yet horrifying Iranian regime, I don't have much hope.
I'm talking about the 20th century as well. The silent holocaust was in the 80s, east Timor extended from the 70s to the 90s, the highway of death and the gulf war was in the 90s, the invasion of Vietnam and the illegal bombing of Cambodia and Laos was in the 60s, the mass killings in Indonesia were in the 60s, arming the Mujahideen (ultimately leading to 9/11) was in the 80s, bombing Korea, killing 20% of its population was in the 50s, the overthrow of the democratically elecred Allende leading to the reign of Pinochet, the terror they've inflicted on Cuba by Poisoning crops and the sanctions, the coup in Iran, the assassination of Lumumba, and so on, and so forth. On the whole, America has absolutely terrorized the world. And yes, that has been quite nice for the beneficiaries of this reign of terror, but to say the world did well in the American century is just wrong.
And regarding the support for Iran, it's possible to be supportive of a party you're otherwise critical of. Sure, the Iranian regime executes gay people, but do you think Israel's bombs and famine somehow make an exception for gay people? One side is worse, and it's the one that's been committing an ethnic cleansing for 77 years.
I'm tempted to take apart that list of American evils, one by one, because in the cases with which I am familiar, it is Chomsky-level reductive, but that would take a few pages of writing. Again, there is a problem with this sort of discussion:
This debate could continue forever since there's no single measure by which one can quantify how evil a nation is.
I wrestled over what I'm about to say, because it's condescending, but: it's one thing to read about the past, and it's another to live through it.
So many things feel real to me that might not if I were younger.
I grew up... surrounded by adults who lived through WWII, ...hoping for tens of millions suffering under Apartheid to be free, ...hoping for the Wall to come down and free hundreds of millions from Soviet oppression (not for ideological reasons, but because it was at North Korean levels), ...rooting for the Chinese protest movement to win. And so much more.
Thankfully, for the first half of my life, the world kept inching toward progress (and what I would give for young people to live through the 1990s!).
Then we had 9/11, and America embraced its worst side. That America is the only America young people know. That's a shame, because many of them now, politically, are sprinting straight towards the propeller-blades.
And the European countries that did get their noses into Iraq (Poland, UK) were mostly doing so to curry favour with the Americans. And the ones who didn't were famously lambasted and attacked (huge anti-French sentiment, "freedom fries", all that garbage.)
1. No they didn't, and that's not controversial. Even the most cursory Google search can dispell you of this notion.
2. "The world is messy" does not excuse countless war crimes. Imagine a lawyer in the Nuremberg trials saying "well sure the defendant sent children to the gas chamber, but your honor, have you considered that the world is a messy place?"
No I won't because I never said they did. But there's plenty of war crimes to point to though. Surely you've seen the picture of the girl on fire because of napalm. You've seen the torture of innocent civilians in the Iraq war. You know about the use of cluster bombs in Iraq. You know they cut off the water to Fallujah. You know of the highway of death. You know they've made close to a million people homeless in Cambodia and Laos, countries that weren't even involved in the war. You know about the illegal invasion of Iraq. You know about the excess mortality of 500,000 children after the gulf war. You know about the mass killing of nearly a million people in Indonesia in the sixties perpetrated by troops trained in, armed by, and supplied with kill lists by America. You know of the troops that killed 160,000 Guatamalans, armed by America, and described by Reagan as great humanitarians. You've seen Gaza.
These are all war crimes, and they are war crimes because they knowingly and actively target civilians. And honestly, at the end of the day it doesn't matter much to me whether you kill a kid by shoving them into a gas chamber or by shooting them, or by dropping bombs or napalm on preschools, because either way you've murdered a child.
I am also wondering about this, and in case you have a chef's knife in your kitchen, I would also like to hear if you have any comment on how that may be abused.
Every knife can bypass stabproof vests with enough force, but that's beside the point. The knife is designed to bypass skin and flesh, hence the potential for abuse. You go down that path and you end up with the insane knife laws Western Europe has where just carrying a swiss army knife with you can be illegal. They do practically nothing for knife crime (as shown by knife crime statistics), but they sure create a lot of busywork for the police to show up on their performance reports.
By the way, you ever go to the gym? What do you need all those muscles for? Maybe to be able to stab through stabproof vests?
I'm not entirely sure what your parent post is referring to, but I know the UK government has been going after anti-genocide folks to such an extent that a group of four UN rapporteurs sent them a letter about it. Details and some more context can be found here:
if this refers to how often i post in bursts, i have wicked insomnia. I really should remove my credentials from the HN app on my phone. if this is what you meant, you're the first person to call me out!
Taxes, maybe? Buy a fork for 1750, have it appraised by a friend to be worth much more than that, donate your million dollar fork to a museum to write it off.
It's because Lynch was an avid coffee drinker so it's a cute thing to buy, lots of people have enough money to spend thousands of dollars on a cute thing.
This is the auction setting the market value, no one is going to appraise the junk at 100x what it last sold for at auction
It’s not just David Lynch’s own coffee drinking. Making coffee (“there was a fish in the percolator!”) and drinking coffee was one of the most memorable aspects of the original Twin Peaks TV series.
One simile I've heard describing the situation where fancy autocomplete can no longer keep track of its patches is that you'll be sloshing back and forth between bugs. I thought it was quite poetic.
At what point would AI necessitate UBI? I'm assuming your idea here is, roughly speaking, that at some point, AI will displace a large section of the work force, rendering them homeless and unable to feed themselves, and that to prevent this, UBI would become necessary. But don't we already have homeless folks? Haven't we already been through technological revolutions putting people out on the streets? If this historical precedent is anything to go by, the politically dominant class is perfectly content with people going homeless on account of not being able to find a job. Seems to me that the classical solutions of pumping drugs into the streets, immobilizing the downtrodden, and straight up slavery through the prison system, are much more likely to happen than UBI
Or they make money the way B2B companies do; which seems like companies just shifting money around on the upper layers without it ever really reaching the hands of lower classes.
But the thing is that there's other ways of dealing with discontent in the working class. Sure, UBI is one of them, but there are less pleasant solutions (just do slavery, or have a well paid class of kapos, or sow internal strife by pushing an "it's the Jews/Muslims/trans folks" narrative with the media that you own), and history shows that the politically dominant class is mighty partial to that kind of solution.
EDIT: Maybe I'm too cynical, but as far as I can see the last time serious improvements to the material conditions of the working class were made was when the soviets were still around, and the threat of a worker's revolution still seemed somewhat realistic. I think the politically dominant class has become quite adept at suppressing that kind of thing, and UBI does not seem to be part of their preferred playbook.
Having seen Destiny's loose grasp on facts during the Lex Friedman hosted debate with Benny Morris, Norman Finkelstein, and Mouin Rabbani, I'm gonna go ahead and consider a fan-sourced wiki bearing his name as unreliable.
> He even interviewed a known terrorist on his show
This is incorrect. The kid you're referring to is not a member of the Houthi tribe, and there's no evidence he's a terrorist aside from him saying some angry stuff on social media (and what teenage boy hasn't, especially one living right next to a country committing genocide). I'm sorry but that's just not enough to call someone a terrorist, and calling him one anyway is pretty shitty. Words have meaning, please try to treat them as such.
> one living right next to a country committing genocide)...Words have meaning, please try to treat them as such
Are yoiu refering to Israel? If so, Yemen and the Houthis are not close to being ‘next to’ Israel - it’s about the same distance as Paris to Istanbul (approx. 2000km).
Yeah sorry, I was being quite unclear, especially considering that Israel is committing a genocide too.
To expand slightly on the point: look at what teenagers from very comfortable, peace-ridden, rich western nations are saying online. Some of it is quite normal and unproblematic, but some of it is unhinged/uneducated (take for example 4chan). My point was that having had a genocide committed against you (or if you don't like that term for what SA did; a military invasion) as a teenager is probably gonna make your comments lean a bit more to the unhinged/uneducated side. I think that's normal and expected.
