6 ms·

Here's hoping for a Butlerian Jihad... or, you know, just introducing privacy legislation that make specific outcomes, not methods, illegal – in the same way th

• baybal2 6y ago
  Spot on, America, and West such, wouldn't have a reason to worry in the first place if it managed to maintain the integrity of the Western bloc after the cold war. By letting its foreign policy wonder into grey area by playing overtures with regimes of all kind without any reservations, it allowed for norms, and boundaries to be blurred, and resolve of its camp blunted. What is happening now, is that the whole Western camp have descended into whataboutism with relation to what rogue regime each bloc member is playing ball with, without no authority left in the bloc "clean enough" to police it. What rogue regimes made to the West in the last 20 years, is nothing, but a gang initiation in reverse. First they lured the West into playing their dirty games, and when Western countries thoroughly dirtied their hands, then come and say "your hands are as dirty as mine, what's the point fighting now?"
  • runawaybottle 6y ago
    Not saying it’s a perfect book, but that’s roughly Ian Bremmer’s thesis: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/159184620X?psc=1&ref=ppx_pop_mob_b_asin_title https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/159184620X?psc=1&ref=ppx_pop_...
  • eivarv 6y ago
    ... and the West slipping into borderline crypto-authoritarianism itself with mass-surveillance and so on - encroaching on citizens' rights while excusing themselves with being the good guys, and only protecting the population against the usual suspects of bad actors.
    • blaser-waffle 6y ago
      Bollocks. "The West" is not one place, and the "crpyto-authoritarianism" is a lame attempt to generalize. There is no comparison between Russia / China and Western Europe or the US. Make no mistake, I think that facebook and social media have chilling effects on discourse and are, on the whole, very negative, but I can still get on any forum and call my national leader a clown (aka Xi = Winnie the Poo) and not risk going to jail.
      • eivarv 6y ago
        Whataboutism. Mass-surveillance (including bulk collection of metadata) is an authoritarian move, which more and more western countries are guilty of. I'm not making a comparison – I'm simply arguing against something.
  • new2628 6y ago
    That integrity of the West during and before the cold war included some nasty moves as well (Vietnam to name one). In fact, I find your thesis jingoism at its best.
  • canjobear 6y ago
    What is the evidence that US foreign policy decreased in integrity after the Cold War? There was plenty of dirty stuff during the Cold War too.
    • baybal2 6y ago
      The critical difference was that when the West was engaging with rogue elements, they stayed rogue elements, not "strategic partners," and trade deal members.
      • lavrov 6y ago
        What do you think happened in El Salvador, Chile, Argentina, Iran, Indonesia, Nicaragua, Honduras, etc
        • baybal2 6y ago
          USA has since disposed of their pawns in Chile, Argentina, and did not oppose them being taken out in Indonesia, and Salvador.
          • blaser-waffle 6y ago
            That's because they stopped being useful in pushing back against global communism. Chile, for example, ditched Pinochet but kept the liberal US style economy. And Argentina is kept in line via WHO loans and regular scourging through economic means.
  • tsimionescu 6y ago
    > First they lured the West into playing their dirty games, and when Western countries thoroughly dirtied their hands, then come and say "your hands are as dirty as mine, what's the point fighting now?" I am very curious when exactly you imagine a period where "The West"'s hands weren't dirty. Both before and after WW2 ended, for example, many European nations still had colonial empires where unspeakable atrocities were happening under their direct rule (not as abhorrent as the Holocaust, but still extraordinarily disgusting). In the period that followed, "the West", just as much as Russia and China, immediately started supporting favorable dictators wherever there was some conflict - like the military anti-communist dictatorship in Greece with Allied backing, and many far-right regimes in South America and Asia. During this same time, gay people were legally persecuted across "the West" just as much as elsewhere (though, oddly enough, with a short reprieve in early communist Russia - before WW2, before Stalin) - including, famously, war heroes like Alan Turing. Lynchings were still happening in the USA. In fact, the USA at this time had a system of first class and second class citizens with explicitly racist laws. And in the years that followed, while civil rights movements grew in power in Europe and the US (with strong opposition from the government, for a very long time), "the West" only escalated its fight against democracy in the rest of the world - either by supporting brutal dictatorships established by others (Indonesia, South Vietnam, a lot of South America, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, even in communist bloc countries such as Romania), or by orchestrating their own coups to install loyal dictators in place of elected leaders (with initial success in Iran or Nicaragua, or ending in failure in Cuba, North Vietnam). Other European countries supported horrible regimes in their former colonies, usually supporting white or loyalist people against revolutionary or "brown" people - such as Swiss, UK and US support of the apartheid state in South Africa in the 1980s.
• AniseAbyss 6y ago
  The US economy is at the mercy of the tech industry. How does that saying go? "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it". Thank you Google.
• mac01021 6y ago
  What specific outcomes should, in your view, be illegal?
  • eivarv 6y ago
    People being profiled and surveilled, for instance.