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At this point, are we really surprised at the way some people who perceive themselves as above the law (apply this to any political or commercial leaders you se

by blunte 8y ago

At this point, are we really surprised at the way some people who perceive themselves as above the law (apply this to any political or commercial leaders you see fit) will behave? We have passed a turning point at which previously reprehensible behaviors have become tolerated. And as an English speaker living in the Netherlands has come to learn, some of us have an ingrained inclination to avoid directly calling out what to most people would be an obvious problem (to avoid potentially offending). Putin's Russia kills people. It imprisons people. It poisons people. It cheats, it steals (from masses of poor people). It lies in the face of the world (bare chested). For some reason we now tolerate this without calling it for what it is. And now we have an American government that has for so long not only avoided calling it out but instead has celebrated non-virtues while avoiding contagious fatal flaws that we forget how wrong for civilization the behavior is. Not only that, but we've begun to celebrate the virtues of dictators - not benevolent ones (if they exist), but previously-OBVIOUS horrible self-serving ones. So, trying to shut the rant down, it's all quite f-d up. We should not only not be surprised, we should be up in arms. Ironically, the people who should be up in arms are the ones who wisely have realized that arming the civilians is a net-negative. But at least in the US, the right to bear arms is exactly to undo situations like the one we are clearly headed toward.

WillPostForFood 8y ago
The US most definitely called out Putin for the assassinations in the UK, and had a stronger response than most of Europe. Italy, Estonia, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Romania and Finland also expelled between one and three diplomats each. President Donald Trump on Monday ordered the expulsion of 60 Russian diplomats the US identified as intelligence agents and the closure of the Russian consulate in Seattle https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/26/politics/us-expel-russian-diplomats/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/26/politics/us-expel-russian-dip...
- blunte 8y ago
  Meanwhile, US-legal sanctions against Russia have simply not been enacted by the Trump administration. Unless you're willfully living under a rock, you must admit that it strongly appears that Trump is beholden to Russia in the same way that a middleman is under the thumb of his mob boss. Based on the available financial evidence (the countless companies and countless financial failures and defaulted loans), it's quite plausible that Trump owes some wealthy Russians a lot of money. His house of cards is built on OPM. Really there's no point debating this. Those who cannot see this are either extremely young and naive, or they are wilfully ignorant. I don't care what political figure it is on what side... thinking people can observe behaviors and identify patterns that illustrate (highly) likely back stories. Trump has a LOT of back stories. You need only to research his US endeavors to see that he has never, at least until becoming President, built a successful business on his own. Now, of course, he has the benefit of the perceived promise of his customers having access to him (a la Mar a Lago, for example).
  - WillPostForFood 8y ago
    Honestly, I feel the exact same way about your position. What could be tougher than this: U.S. Forces Killed More Than 200 Russian Fighters in Syria Attack https://www.thedailybeast.com/report-us-forces-killed-more-than-200-russian-fighters-in-syria-attack https://www.thedailybeast.com/report-us-forces-killed-more-t... And there are sanctions: Trump administration slaps more sanctions on Russia after Skripal poisonings https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/08/politics/us-state-department-russia-sanctions/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/08/politics/us-state-department-...
    - blunte 8y ago
      That is just the military industrial complex spending public money. Russia is doing the same thing. The loss of lives is clearly irrelevant to the leaders of the two countries.
      - WillPostForFood 8y ago
        You said, "US-legal sanctions against Russia have simply not been enacted by the Trump administration". I just showed you, from a neutral source, that they had been enacted. It is plausible that Trump owes some wealthy Russians a lot of money, but on the other hand, there is zero actual evidence that it is true. Lot's of things are plausible. It is plausible you are a Russian agent planting propaganda to undermine faith in the government, but there is zero evidence of it being true, so I wouldn't go around claiming it.
        spac 8y ago
        There is actually quite a bit of evidence that Russians ran propaganda to destabilize the country. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/us/politics/russians-indicted-mueller-election-interference.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/us/politics/russians-indi...
        boomboomsubban 8y ago
BadassFractal 8y ago
Still a pretty good upgrade from the large scale horrors that were happening in that country 70 years ago. But lots of work to do still. Silver linings.
- blunte 8y ago
  Measuring against 70 years is reasonable when considering humanity as a whole. But within a human lifespan, 10-30 years of trending really matters. In the US, quite honestly, the trend has been negative since the mid 1960s. That's not ideal for those of us in the prime of our lives now. If you look at the US trends in the late 50s, it was far better than the trends in the 90s, 2000s, and beyond.
  - crazygringo 8y ago
    Sure, rent is more expensive and income inequality is worse... But I certainly wouldn't trade my life currently for the 1960's in a second -- going tremendously backwards with civil rights and LGBTQ attitudes, the Vietnam War debacle, no internet, missing out on five decades of health care advances and new treatments, vastly safer cars, I could go on and on and on... Really not sure what trend you're talking about. If you say the "trend" has been negative since the 1960's, you're saying things are worse today than the 1960's... and I just fail to see how that's true except in very specific areas like student debt or healthcare spending, but certainly not overall.
    - BadassFractal 8y ago
      Steve Pinker comes to mind.
      - _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
        What in particular? His Whig history of the world?
    - _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
      I would say there's a negative trend from the beginning of the 80s. Yes, there has been some amount of progress in civil rights (though it's been very slow) and inevitably there will be technological/medical advances, but the economic position of all but the rich is significantly worse than in, say, the mid-70s.
yesenadam 8y ago
(I don't know anything about this story but..) we've begun to celebrate the virtues of dictators It's not a new thing at all. For a lot of the 20th C the US was doing precisely that. Fighting democracy and supporting dictators. There are dozens of countries where that happened. The accounts are depressing, horrifying. Which, yes, has happened with such regularity that you could say the US kills people. It imprisons people. It poisons people. It cheats, it steals (from masses of poor people). It lies in the face of the world (bare chested). One quick way to get some sense of the reality is to look at the voting in the United Nations, (GA and SC). I did that once for votes in the 80s and 90s. Typically, there's a vote on something that almost every country in the world thinks is a good idea, except for 1 or 2 of the worst dictatorships...and the USA. It's quite amazing to see that in 'black and white'. Nothing like the God-Is-On-Our-Side picture painted on the US news TV shows.
throwaway080383 8y ago
I don't know what America you're living in, but I'm not sure I know a single person on either end of the political spectrum who doesn't view Russia as extremely corrupt. Some will say "we are just as bad", to which I disagree, but no one is out there claiming Putin is a paragon of virtue.
- gcb0 8y ago
  heh. literally the comment under you own comment is someone defending him as being better than a few years ago.
  - k__ 8y ago
    I also know a few people who say Putin is a normal elected politician. But they also say, all refugees fleeing because of money, not because of war...
- andyburke 8y ago
  Not sure if you've seen these trends: https://news.gallup.com/poll/237137/republicans-positive-relations-russia.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/237137/republicans-positive-rel...
cloakandswagger 8y ago
For a while I shared the mentality that Russia was unequivocally bad and the anti-thesis of all Western values of freedom. It was like common knowledge to me. But with every breathless proclamation like yours of Russia as a cartoon villain I started to have doubts. It seemed like everything was suddenly Russia's fault--they were the absolute root of all evil in the world. Anyone who disagreed was obviously a Russian bot. The last straw for me was when Theresa May declared, without any doubt, that the Russian state had attempted to assassinate two British citizens using nerve agents (10 days after the fact, before the conclusion of any investigation and without any concrete evidence to implicate Russia). This Russia-phobia is dangerous. We have made a bogeyman and a scapegoat out of a desperate, nuclear-equipped nation that less than 30 years ago had its federation, economy and national identity shattered. I'm afraid that this delusion won't stop until a full on conflict breaks out which should be a much scarier prospect than yet-another-evil-dictatorship.
- mc32 8y ago
  I think you both have valid points. Russia is not always a good global citizen. It’s had a history of ignoring protocol if it got in their way. They have had cheerleaders when they were Soviet, they have a few chearleaders now (ME, for example). But we, in the West, and countries aligned with the West, fail to understand their motives. Like China, they have internal motives that while they look like they are strategizing against the West in particular, at times it’s just due to internal issues. Russia didn’t anex Crimea to poke the West. They took it because not having it exposed them militarily (as well as domestically made them looked weak). For all his faults, Kissinger understands those things better than most public figures in their public speaking (are willing to admit, at least).
  - freeflight 8y ago
    > But we, in the West anc countries aligned with the West fail to understand their motives. It's dangerous to assume this only holds true for one side, imho it's much more likely all the involved players think like that and act accordingly. Case in point: Many Russian people also don't understand "Western motives" and they actually feel backstabbed due to cultural differences leading to, rather massive, geopolitical misunderstandings like that whole "No NATO Eastward Expansion" promise during German reunification talks. [0] While Russians think "A word is a word", most Western responses to this pretty much boil down to a lawyered "nothing was ever ratified" response, which might be formally correct but is the diplomatic equivalent of flipping somebody off you just scammed. There are so many barriers at work here, not just in terms of language, but also the cultural context, also ain't helping that pretty much everybody is running communication and information interference, so finding common ground is actively fought against. [0]http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nato-s-eastward-expansion-did-the-west-break-its-promise-to-moscow-a-663315.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nato-s-eastward-ex...
nikolay 8y ago
Yeah, in America you make up sex scandals - much less bloody and way more effective these days. Anyway, America is not better - it's just more polished and sophisticated at these kinds of things.
- cloakandswagger 8y ago
  Remember when Julian Assange had rape charges magically materialize against him the same month that Wikileaks released US diplomatic cables? Less messy than poisoning I suppose.
  - nikolay 8y ago
    In America, you don't have to prove these allegations.
sergiotapia 8y ago
I was a cheesemaker!
kadendogthing 8y ago
You're being down voted on HN. Not surprising. No doubt the comment thread will do their best to academically miss the point and spiral the conversation into nothing but empty rhetoric and logical labyrinths. >Ironically, the people who should be up in arms are the ones who wisely have realized that arming the civilians is a net-negative. I've worded this differently. Turns out the people that claimed they would fight the government are actually the one's who would support the government becoming a haven for sycophants and tyrants in the first place. Turns out that the American populace is actually pretty toxic and not all that exceptional. We could be. We can be. It's just going to take a lot of self-reflection and growing up. When people tell you who they are, believe them. As Americans not enough of us cared to vote, and enough of us didn't care enough to push out the literal human garbage fire that is Trump.

by blunte 8y ago

WillPostForFood 8y ago

The US most definitely called out Putin for the assassinations in the UK, and had a stronger response than most of Europe. Italy, Estonia, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Romania and Finland also expelled between one and three diplomats each. President Donald Trump on Monday ordered the expulsion of 60 Russian diplomats the US identified as intelligence agents and the closure of the Russian consulate in Seattle https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/26/politics/us-expel-russian-diplomats/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/26/politics/us-expel-russian-dip...

blunte 8y ago
Meanwhile, US-legal sanctions against Russia have simply not been enacted by the Trump administration. Unless you're willfully living under a rock, you must admit that it strongly appears that Trump is beholden to Russia in the same way that a middleman is under the thumb of his mob boss. Based on the available financial evidence (the countless companies and countless financial failures and defaulted loans), it's quite plausible that Trump owes some wealthy Russians a lot of money. His house of cards is built on OPM. Really there's no point debating this. Those who cannot see this are either extremely young and naive, or they are wilfully ignorant. I don't care what political figure it is on what side... thinking people can observe behaviors and identify patterns that illustrate (highly) likely back stories. Trump has a LOT of back stories. You need only to research his US endeavors to see that he has never, at least until becoming President, built a successful business on his own. Now, of course, he has the benefit of the perceived promise of his customers having access to him (a la Mar a Lago, for example).
- WillPostForFood 8y ago
  Honestly, I feel the exact same way about your position. What could be tougher than this: U.S. Forces Killed More Than 200 Russian Fighters in Syria Attack https://www.thedailybeast.com/report-us-forces-killed-more-than-200-russian-fighters-in-syria-attack https://www.thedailybeast.com/report-us-forces-killed-more-t... And there are sanctions: Trump administration slaps more sanctions on Russia after Skripal poisonings https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/08/politics/us-state-department-russia-sanctions/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/08/politics/us-state-department-...
  - blunte 8y ago
    That is just the military industrial complex spending public money. Russia is doing the same thing. The loss of lives is clearly irrelevant to the leaders of the two countries.
    - WillPostForFood 8y ago
      You said, "US-legal sanctions against Russia have simply not been enacted by the Trump administration". I just showed you, from a neutral source, that they had been enacted. It is plausible that Trump owes some wealthy Russians a lot of money, but on the other hand, there is zero actual evidence that it is true. Lot's of things are plausible. It is plausible you are a Russian agent planting propaganda to undermine faith in the government, but there is zero evidence of it being true, so I wouldn't go around claiming it.
      - spac 8y ago
        There is actually quite a bit of evidence that Russians ran propaganda to destabilize the country. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/us/politics/russians-indicted-mueller-election-interference.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/us/politics/russians-indi...
        boomboomsubban 8y ago

BadassFractal 8y ago

Still a pretty good upgrade from the large scale horrors that were happening in that country 70 years ago. But lots of work to do still. Silver linings.

blunte 8y ago
Measuring against 70 years is reasonable when considering humanity as a whole. But within a human lifespan, 10-30 years of trending really matters. In the US, quite honestly, the trend has been negative since the mid 1960s. That's not ideal for those of us in the prime of our lives now. If you look at the US trends in the late 50s, it was far better than the trends in the 90s, 2000s, and beyond.
- crazygringo 8y ago
  Sure, rent is more expensive and income inequality is worse... But I certainly wouldn't trade my life currently for the 1960's in a second -- going tremendously backwards with civil rights and LGBTQ attitudes, the Vietnam War debacle, no internet, missing out on five decades of health care advances and new treatments, vastly safer cars, I could go on and on and on... Really not sure what trend you're talking about. If you say the "trend" has been negative since the 1960's, you're saying things are worse today than the 1960's... and I just fail to see how that's true except in very specific areas like student debt or healthcare spending, but certainly not overall.
  - BadassFractal 8y ago
    Steve Pinker comes to mind.
    - _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
      What in particular? His Whig history of the world?
  - _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
    I would say there's a negative trend from the beginning of the 80s. Yes, there has been some amount of progress in civil rights (though it's been very slow) and inevitably there will be technological/medical advances, but the economic position of all but the rich is significantly worse than in, say, the mid-70s.

yesenadam 8y ago

(I don't know anything about this story but..) we've begun to celebrate the virtues of dictators It's not a new thing at all. For a lot of the 20th C the US was doing precisely that. Fighting democracy and supporting dictators. There are dozens of countries where that happened. The accounts are depressing, horrifying. Which, yes, has happened with such regularity that you could say the US kills people. It imprisons people. It poisons people. It cheats, it steals (from masses of poor people). It lies in the face of the world (bare chested). One quick way to get some sense of the reality is to look at the voting in the United Nations, (GA and SC). I did that once for votes in the 80s and 90s. Typically, there's a vote on something that almost every country in the world thinks is a good idea, except for 1 or 2 of the worst dictatorships...and the USA. It's quite amazing to see that in 'black and white'. Nothing like the God-Is-On-Our-Side picture painted on the US news TV shows.

throwaway080383 8y ago

I don't know what America you're living in, but I'm not sure I know a single person on either end of the political spectrum who doesn't view Russia as extremely corrupt. Some will say "we are just as bad", to which I disagree, but no one is out there claiming Putin is a paragon of virtue.

gcb0 8y ago
heh. literally the comment under you own comment is someone defending him as being better than a few years ago.
- k__ 8y ago
  I also know a few people who say Putin is a normal elected politician. But they also say, all refugees fleeing because of money, not because of war...
andyburke 8y ago
Not sure if you've seen these trends: https://news.gallup.com/poll/237137/republicans-positive-relations-russia.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/237137/republicans-positive-rel...

cloakandswagger 8y ago

For a while I shared the mentality that Russia was unequivocally bad and the anti-thesis of all Western values of freedom. It was like common knowledge to me. But with every breathless proclamation like yours of Russia as a cartoon villain I started to have doubts. It seemed like everything was suddenly Russia's fault--they were the absolute root of all evil in the world. Anyone who disagreed was obviously a Russian bot. The last straw for me was when Theresa May declared, without any doubt, that the Russian state had attempted to assassinate two British citizens using nerve agents (10 days after the fact, before the conclusion of any investigation and without any concrete evidence to implicate Russia). This Russia-phobia is dangerous. We have made a bogeyman and a scapegoat out of a desperate, nuclear-equipped nation that less than 30 years ago had its federation, economy and national identity shattered. I'm afraid that this delusion won't stop until a full on conflict breaks out which should be a much scarier prospect than yet-another-evil-dictatorship.

mc32 8y ago
I think you both have valid points. Russia is not always a good global citizen. It’s had a history of ignoring protocol if it got in their way. They have had cheerleaders when they were Soviet, they have a few chearleaders now (ME, for example). But we, in the West, and countries aligned with the West, fail to understand their motives. Like China, they have internal motives that while they look like they are strategizing against the West in particular, at times it’s just due to internal issues. Russia didn’t anex Crimea to poke the West. They took it because not having it exposed them militarily (as well as domestically made them looked weak). For all his faults, Kissinger understands those things better than most public figures in their public speaking (are willing to admit, at least).
- freeflight 8y ago
  > But we, in the West anc countries aligned with the West fail to understand their motives. It's dangerous to assume this only holds true for one side, imho it's much more likely all the involved players think like that and act accordingly. Case in point: Many Russian people also don't understand "Western motives" and they actually feel backstabbed due to cultural differences leading to, rather massive, geopolitical misunderstandings like that whole "No NATO Eastward Expansion" promise during German reunification talks. [0] While Russians think "A word is a word", most Western responses to this pretty much boil down to a lawyered "nothing was ever ratified" response, which might be formally correct but is the diplomatic equivalent of flipping somebody off you just scammed. There are so many barriers at work here, not just in terms of language, but also the cultural context, also ain't helping that pretty much everybody is running communication and information interference, so finding common ground is actively fought against. [0]http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nato-s-eastward-expansion-did-the-west-break-its-promise-to-moscow-a-663315.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nato-s-eastward-ex...

nikolay 8y ago

Yeah, in America you make up sex scandals - much less bloody and way more effective these days. Anyway, America is not better - it's just more polished and sophisticated at these kinds of things.

cloakandswagger 8y ago
Remember when Julian Assange had rape charges magically materialize against him the same month that Wikileaks released US diplomatic cables? Less messy than poisoning I suppose.
- nikolay 8y ago
  In America, you don't have to prove these allegations.

sergiotapia 8y ago

I was a cheesemaker!

kadendogthing 8y ago

You're being down voted on HN. Not surprising. No doubt the comment thread will do their best to academically miss the point and spiral the conversation into nothing but empty rhetoric and logical labyrinths. >Ironically, the people who should be up in arms are the ones who wisely have realized that arming the civilians is a net-negative. I've worded this differently. Turns out the people that claimed they would fight the government are actually the one's who would support the government becoming a haven for sycophants and tyrants in the first place. Turns out that the American populace is actually pretty toxic and not all that exceptional. We could be. We can be. It's just going to take a lot of self-reflection and growing up. When people tell you who they are, believe them. As Americans not enough of us cared to vote, and enough of us didn't care enough to push out the literal human garbage fire that is Trump.