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The point isn't really to have a believable case. The point is to use legal system to ruin one person to scare any people from running similar actions against

The point isn't really to have a believable case. The point is to use legal system to ruin one person to scare any people from running similar actions against US government. US is loosing more and more of its standing when it comes to "spreading" democracy. You can't go and try to preach democratic values to, say, Belarus, and then do exactly the same in your own country. Principles aren't really principles if they are being tossed aside when they become uncomfortable.

bamboozled 5y ago
It’s funny, when it comes to something like, vaccines, we’re supposed to trust “government institutions”. Then I wake up to this and I wonder, why should I t trust the government ?
- lmilcin 5y ago
  When it comes to vaccines, you don't necessarily have to trust government institutions. If you are normal, adult, educated person you don't need to "trust" the government for everything. You should hopefully be able to think for yourself and be able to evaluate when the story checks out and where it doesn't. Trust knowledge that has been gathered over decades, statistics and research that has been gathered by many research institutions (unless you can claim all of them are in collusion). Vaccines do work and we desperately need everybody to get vaccinated. Every country that has implemented vaccinations vigorously has seen immediate, large drop in cases. People who are going to hospital at the moment are almost exclusively unvaccinated. A person or institution or government that shows it is not trustworthy in one area undermines itself in other areas and so it is understandable that it may sow confusion. But you should still have ability to think for yourself and use it to make rational decisons.
  - version_five 5y ago
    There are two separate ideas here. Believing in the concept of a vaccine as an effective disease prevention mechanism, and believing the current narrative that all demographics need a covid vaccine, the risk reward calculus always shows it does more good than harm, etc (I'm not trying to faithfully summarize, but more make the point that there is a distinct and political covid vaccine push that's not the same as just saying a vaccine works) I personally had to suspend my mistrust of the government in order to decide it was worth getting vaccinated. A good rule of thumb is that the more someone tries to push you to do something, the more you should question their motives. And governments that have mismanaged and lied about everything else they do, like you say, have no reason to be trusted on this one thing, even if its generally popular. So it's not surprising that people who do believe that vaccines work (which is really not up for debate) may not agree with the putative urgency of getting this vaccine. Should just add that I don't really think there is anything we can do about this mistrust this time around. You get credibility by acting like you have people's interests in mind, and like you know what you're doing, so it would take a long spell of that before folks have any real reason to take what we are told at face value.
    - lmilcin 5y ago
      > A good rule of thumb is that the more someone tries to push you to do something, the more you should question their motives. It is a rule of thumb. Not a universal law. I hope you are not questioning the motives for having traffic rules. Or motives of your wife asking you to avoid a particularly dangerous place when coming back from work.
      - version_five 5y ago
        > traffic rules I think you're probably trying for one of those moral relativism fallacies (why don't we just go around killing people?) but you actually picked a ridiculously easy target that supports my point. How many instances are there of speed limits being set to create speed traps rather than to actually promote safety? Or set based on oil embargoes in the 70s and just left there? Or rules based on nimbyism and not wanting traffic in certain neighborhoods? Or lights timed to catch people at red light cams. This is all off the top of my head, I'm sure I could go on, but we should definitely be skeptical that many traffic rules are made "for our safety" and not for some other agenda, good point!
        PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
        > How many instances are there of speed limits being set to create speed traps rather than to actually promote safety? I don't know. How many are there?
        washadjeffmad 5y ago
        Anywhere they don't use lane width for flow control, of imagine.
        PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
        Consider US58 as it crosses a substantial chunk of Kansas. It passes through many very small towns with a (frequently defunct) retail "strip" that lasts less than a mile. The speed limit typically drops from 65 mph to 35 or even 25 mph while passing through these towns. Are you suggesting that the fact that neither the towns nor Kansas has altered the lane width in these locations proves that these speed limit changes are nothing but speed traps?
  - christophilus 5y ago
    Vaccines that have been through clinical trials and approved by the FDA generally work. I’m fully vaccinated, but you have to admit that there’s a difference between the COVID vaccine and other vaccines— not just in terms of development and deployment speed, but also in terms of underlying technology, at least in some cases. Skepticism is a reasonable default stance for most things, emergency measures included.
    - lmilcin 5y ago
      Everything in life is a tradeoff. If you remember, vaccines were developed under enormous pressure and every day of delay meant literally tens of thousands of people dying across the world. So the uncertainties about these vaccines must be weighted against the situation in which they came to be. Fortunately, the doubt against vaccines seems to be largely unfounded and it is easily evidenced by drops in death rates in all countries that implemented vaccinations.
      - __blockcipher__ 5y ago
        > Fortunately, the doubt against vaccines seems to be largely unfounded and it is easily evidenced by drops in death rates in all countries that implemented vaccinations. Wrong on both counts. First of all viral epidemics follow a natural progression. Saying that a drop in [COVID] death rates following vaccine rollout proves their efficacy/safety is like saying that a week of heavy rains after doing a rain dance proves the rain dance did it. This same mistake has been made in associative studies looking at mask mandates, where many shoddy papers were released that showed a drop in mask-mandate counties while neglecting to account for the fact that cases were dropping everywhere. Monica Gandhi (an HIV researcher whose pro-masking papers have been of consistently poor quality yet are fairly widely cited because they produce the “correct” result) published a study to this effect that she and her team had to later retract because cases later went up. They were just measuring the normal viral epidemic curve and convincing themselves, without real evidence, that it must have been the masks. As to the other point, the efficacy of the vaccines is real but quite limited. The recent data coming out of Israel especially was something like 33% case reduction, but a much better reduction in hospitalization/death (80-90%). That to me demonstrates that the party line position of “the vaccines are amazingly effective” is simply not true. They’re great for reducing personal risk - although I’d note the Guillain-Barré syndrome, myocarditis, and strokes are pretty concerning - but they don’t do much for slowing the spread. Now frankly we never should have been trying to slow the spread of SARS-2 in the general population - it was always destined to be an endemic respiratory virus, and a mild one at that for most healthy people - but I’m just making the point because the whole narrative has been that we had to lock down “until the vaccine” to save people from getting infected when increasingly it’s looking like everyone has to face the virus one way or another. So go out and get vaccinated if you want better odds against SARS-2 while taking on some risk from possible side effects of making your cells express a bunch of artificial spike protein throughout your body for a few days, but don’t kid yourself into thinking that any concerns about either the safety or efficacy of the vaccines is baseless.
  - blooalien 5y ago
    > "You should hopefully be able to think for yourself and be able to evaluate when the story checks out and where it doesn't." When I was a child, this sort of thinking was taught in grade-school and considered to be an important component of becoming an adult. Ah, how I long for "the good ol' days".
    - crummy 5y ago
      How did they teach it? What class was that in? (Guess it was before my time.)
      - jessaustin 5y ago
        If I had fifty teachers during my time in public school I'd be surprised if five of them would have been smart enough to teach such a course. None of those taught grade school.
  - h_anna_h 5y ago
    You might not need to trust government institutions in order to be convinced that vaccines in general are effective, you do however need to trust them in order to verify that a specific vaccine is effective and safe. Especially for new vaccines for which we do not have as much data gathered. In addition, the genetic material for the vaccines not being open source (and commonly being patented) stops smaller research labs and individuals from examining them by themselves. Not to mention that even if the vaccine was open source there would still be possible supply-chain attacks, would you for example trust the Chinese government to not secretly conduct experiments on the Uighurs by giving them a modified vaccine? It's not as if human experimentation even in "modern democratic countries" is unheard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentation_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentatio.... Considering that I would not blame minorities (whether racial, religious, or political, especially in countries that have been historically oppressive of them) if they decided to avoid the vaccine. > You should hopefully be able to think for yourself and be able to evaluate when the story checks out and where it doesn't. > But you should still have ability to think for yourself and use it to make rational decisons. Some people ended up distrusting vaccines (whether in general or specific) after following this process. It is not a truth-finding panacea.
- 13415 5y ago
  Using your brain to differentiate between completely unrelated topics helps.
- craftinator 5y ago
  If "trusting the government" is the reason you are taking a vaccine, you don't know enough about history, current events, or medicine. Any government, as a whole, is stupid and slow. But even stupid institutions can get things right when they are obvious enough. When they do, it doesn't mean you should start trusting them. Simple understandings of biology and medicine should inform you that taking a vaccine to the worst pandemic in living memory is the right course of action.
  - bamboozled 5y ago
    So I’m just supposed to “make assumptions” and “hunches” to workout if I should take medicine ? I really don’t know why I’m paying taxes half the time.
    - craftinator 5y ago
      As far as I'm concerned, no one is supposed to do anything. You do what you decide is best. Hunches and assumptions sound like a bad way to decide on such an important course of action. Instead, if I were you, I'd do a combination of research and choosing someone to listen to that you think is both trustworthy and has spent a long time learning about vaccines. Maybe someone who's got a PhD in molecular biology and has written extensively on the subject. Do your own research, and trust that person to understand the things that would take too long for you to learn, then make your choice. I would never let the government do my thinking for me, for free or for pay. They aren't good at it.
      - bamboozled 5y ago
        It's interesting to think that people can be created in 2021. Faces, voices, videos can all be generated. If you're not in the field, it's pretty hard to know who to trust or what is real.
        craftinator 5y ago
        Yes, false media can be generated, much like 100 years ago when you could sign a fake signature or misquote someone in a newspaper. No idea is new, just new applications of the idea. Luckily, we all have brains, and can use them to understand things from first principles. Listening to other people thoughts about what you should be doing is generally stupid. They aren't you, and they have themselves to look after. Also, no freaking idea why you tangented from vaccines, to taxes, to fake media generation, but unless you pick a topic we are done here.
- api 5y ago
  You don’t need to trust the government. You can do your own research by starting with some biology textbooks and then progressing to immunology, the history of medical science, etc. Then you can read a bunch of papers on mRNA vaccines and learn exactly how they work. There is a ton of international clinical data available too, which at least means you don’t have to trust just one government. Note that nowhere did I mention YouTube videos, celebrities, or talk radio blowhards.
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  There are thousands of scientists working on this stuff all over the world. Most of them seem to be on board with the vaccines. You don’t have to trust the government. Just watch what scientists are saying. Considering that these scientists are spread out all over the world it’s hard to imagine that there is a world wide conspiracy to control what all these scientists are saying.
  - bamboozled 5y ago
    So now we’re just supposed to work off hunches? See, this is why we’re still in this shit situation. It’s pretty hard for Joe Bloggs to workout who you trust in 2021. We’re lied to all the time by politicians and government, then when they want us to comply, we’re just supposed to go along with it? I’m not arguing against the fact that getting the vaccine is probably the right path to take. I am arguing that if governments want people’s trust, they need to earn it, doing this to Assange is doing the opposite and does things like prolonging the pandemic, it fuels mistrust.
    - whakim 5y ago
      I think you've fundamentally missed GP's point which is that when governments lie, they do it because they're self-interested. When a politician tells you something that isn't true, they're lying to make themself seem better or to make their opponents seem worse. (Or, to take an example of "the government" lying to you, when the NSA says they aren't collecting certain data about US citizens, their motivation for lying is avoiding the public outcry should their actions be revealed). What's the motivation behind a global cabal of governments, scientists, independent regulators and drug companies all lying to us about vaccines?
      - bamboozled 5y ago
        I'd love to actually know how many truly independent scientists work on "looking into these things". Does anyone have a quantifiable number. I'm again, not doubting what you're saying, but I hear a lot of "thousands of scientists are vetting the medicine etc". Are they really ? I think about this with open source software too, I run Linux, but I do actually wonder sometimes how much "vetting" is really going on.
- greenbamboo 5y ago
  Well incentives matter. The government has its incentives, so do drug makers, so do fda members and so do you. Always consider how incentives impact information you receive. Medical textbooks have optimal incentives if you are trying to learn. Media, government and drug makers maybe not.
cartoonworld 5y ago
Given the thousands of US Mil installations all across the globe, foreign intervention and police actions, geopolitical intrigue, etc it is unfortunately looking more and more like a Pax Romana -- a troubling sign, depending on your perspective.
- TaylorAlexander 5y ago
  Yes even going back to Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt rewrote his drafts of his speech to obscure the fact that the Philippines, a major site of the attack, was also a US colony. "How to Hide an Empire", Daniel Immerwahr https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaKOOqXDnqA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaKOOqXDnqA
  - cartoonworld 5y ago
    Interesting, thanks. I just read this post on Popehat[0] recounting an event while Ken White was working for an LA federal judge back in the day. He was brought to a ceremony conducted by Judge Ronald S.W. Lew where numerous, VERY elderly Filipino WW2 veterans were granted US Citizenship. This was promised to them in addition to veteran's benefits by FDR in exchange for recruitment into the war effort, and after the war quietly swept under the rug by the congress. [0] - https://www.popehat.com/2020/07/04/the-fourth-of-july-rerun/ https://www.popehat.com/2020/07/04/the-fourth-of-july-rerun/
  - hadlock 5y ago
    I was really surprised to find out, as an american, standing with feet on the ground in Manila, near age 30, having grown up in the US and gone to public schools, that the Philippines had been a US Territory off and on, on par with Puerto Rico, for about 50 years starting around 1898. There's even a big obelisk in the center of Union Square in San Francisco commemorating this event, it turns out. None of this was ever covered in public schools. I realize there's a lot of history to cover and kids can only absorb so much, but when people talk about "only focusing on europe and the middle east" it's good to have a couple of concrete examples. The Philippines actually has a larger english speaking population than the UK. Anyways, it always seemed that the Philippines got conveniently swept under the rug when discussing things like WW2 and American Imperialism.
deleted 5y ago
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fungiblecog 5y ago
Indeed the whole point of principles is that you keep them when it isn't to your immediate benefit. That's why "Corporate Values" are so empty. They get tossed as soon as they conflict with the profit motive. Google's "don't be evil" being the classic example.
- lmilcin 5y ago
  It is a universal law, known and understood subconsciously in many different ways. Here in Poland we have a saying "you get to know a real friend in bad (times)" (Prawdziwego przyjaciela poznaje się w biedzie). When you feel the values or friendship will not stand the test you will not invest yourself in it and it becomes empty words. Just as democratic values that are set aside when it doesn't exactly align with profit or power goals. People will not stand for something they believe to just be empty words and that's why things like Assange case are so damaging to democracy.
  - justicezyx 5y ago
    Chinese has the same saying as "you get to know a real friend in bad (times)" "患难见真情" It's interesting when something almost identical appear in different cultures.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      And in the US "a friend in need is a friend indeed".
      - Wildgoose 5y ago
        And the UK also, although I think you need commas to make the meaning clear: A friend, in need, is a friend indeed.
    - nyokodo 5y ago
      Also the english term "fair-weather friend" for friends who aren't around when times are difficult.
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
>The point is to use legal system to ruin one person to scare any people from running similar actions against US government. Source please?
- lmilcin 5y ago
  Would you like me to find a link where US Government officially admits to pressuring foreign countries and abusing justice system to prevent people from publishing materials showing US Government wrongdoing?
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
    Unlikely but that doesn't make your claim true. Tangentially- what do you think about whistleblower protections where you are protected by law for reporting govt wrongdoing?
    - lmilcin 5y ago
      They are as good as separation between judicial and executive branches. When your judicial branch does what executive wants then there is no protection
    - salawat 5y ago
      Those are all fine and good when you're an employee. When you're not affiliated directly with the United States at all, and we're a means to an end though is where the consternation comes in, and where the U.S. really gave themselves a black eye with Assange.
      - 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
        I was getting at the fact that these two things don't square. The US govt provides whistle blower protection but the parent also claims the US abuses the justice system to: >prevent people from publishing materials showing US Government wrongdoing? So the US govt provides whistle blower protections but it is also abusing the justice dept? The govt publishes materials all the time that makes it look bad: https://www.gao.gov/ https://www.gao.gov/
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MomoXenosaga 5y ago
Yeah justice is kinda meaningless when you've been locked up for 10 years. Don't fuck with America she doesn't forget and never forgives.
wutbrodo 5y ago
> US is loosing more and more of its standing when it comes to "spreading" democracy. You can't go and try to preach democratic values to, say, Belarus, and then do exactly the same in your own country. Is there any indication that stuff like this happens _more_ than in the past? Or have the world's standards just risen?
- avs733 5y ago
  Or access to information increased? Or I’ve gotten older and more sour on this type of stuff? Honestly I feel like the change has been, for me, more awareness and less attachement to the narrative forced down my throat. I also don’t believe it to be (as a native US citizen) a US thing. I see it in a huge swing in many countries towards authoritarianism in many ways and towards many goals. It isn’t so much a left or right thing (although I believe it to be more right leaning) but just a greater willingness to use power structures to control others.
- lmilcin 5y ago
  > Is there any indication that stuff like this happens _more_ than in the past? Or have the world's standards just risen? Oh, so it is fine to sin against democracy as long as you are not sinning more than in the past?
  - wutbrodo 5y ago
    There's a nifty feature on HN called "scrolling up" that allows you to read the parents of the comments you reply to. It's good for workflows you might find useful like "understanding the discussion" and "not looking like an idiot". In this case, it'd reveal that the premise of my question is the parent comment's claim of a _decline_ in the US's reputation as a "spreader of democracy". hth EDIT: Holy christ, you are the parent commenter. How is it even possible that you forgot what your previous comment in the thread was saying??
- pedalpete 5y ago
  It doesn't matter if it is happening more or less. The goal is to always be improving. Values is about what you believe in and strive for, and when you don't reach the standards you set for yourself, you figure out why, and adjust to be inline with your beliefs and goals.
throwawaycities 5y ago
It is often worse than just hypocrisy. If the US hasn’t hand picked a foreign regime and someone wins the democratic election which the US doesn’t agree with the US can just label them a terrorist organization if it is deemed politically necessary. I am no fan of the Taliban or Hammas - and US probably correctly labeled them terrorist organizations - but it must also be acknowledge they are also “political parties” that have won democratic elections.
- einpoklum 5y ago
  ... but that would mean acknowledging the non-dichotomy between states and terrorist organizations. States carry out the most terror, but they (mostly) get a free pass. The US (and many other world states) would not want to undermine this situation and make their own actions legitimate targets of the question: "Is this a form of terror?".
Trias11 5y ago
"... The point is to use legal system to ruin one person to scare any people from running similar actions ..." +100
lettergram 5y ago
There’s a large (the vast majority), who think what is happening to Assange is a travesty. Many of those same people don’t do anything about it. They still vote the same exact way they have for 15-20 years, they don’t get active and write anyone, etc. The real travesty about Assange is that he’s not even a US citizen. He tried to reach out to the state department to redact sections and they refused to respond. Then they go after him for publishing what some other person leaked. Not only that, but the leaker had a publicly funded transition and a short prison sentence. Assange is charged and has endured much worse. My principles (and many others) still stand. But our “deep state” doesn’t represent the majority.
- mioasndo 5y ago
  > There’s a large (the vast majority), who think what is happening to Assange is a travesty. Not sure that's true, go to reddit for example, and you'll see the majority are already brainwashed into thinking Assange is a Russian asset. US mainstream media is working on it overtime.
  - freeflight 5y ago
    And Reddit is usually on the more "enlightened" end on such topics, at least used to be. Ask some random person on the street about Assange and the best they can come up with is probably something about fleeing from the Swedish police for rape, something Russian agent, maybe something about how he treats his cat horribly or doesn't clean his toilet properly. The Five Eyed propaganda machine [0] was very effective in smearing him, and even Snowden, among the general public in these past years. [0] https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/ https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/
  - deleted 5y ago
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  - fettucini 5y ago
    I don't give a rat's ass whether Assange is a Russian asset or not: trying to drag him to the USA and prosecute him is criminal behavior, both in the USA and in most other countries. What a political clusterfuck it is for the USA to be pursuing Assange today! The situation underscores how sick, twisted and psychopathic are his American pursuers.
r7d77euheydu 5y ago
I'm not really sure how to feel about this sort of criticism because you could apply it to basically any court case. The goal for any defendant/prosecutor isn't to have a believable case it's to have a legally sufficient one.
beebmam 5y ago
I'm genuinely curious: what does US democracy have to do with Assange? Like I'm deeply sympathetic to what has happened to Assange. But I don't see how it has anything to do with democracy, given that he's not a US citizen, and US law rarely applies to non-US citizens outside of US borders.
- belorn 5y ago
  A functional legal system is one of the qualifier for being a democracy. Without a working legal system you can't have a functional society. Without society you can't have a democracy. When a nations legal system is manufacturing false evidence, the target of that become irrelevant. A legal system can't manufacturing false evidence, against anyone, and still be trusted.
  - lmilcin 5y ago
    > A functional legal system is one of the qualifier for being a democracy. While it is true (that you need a functioning legal system), it is also worth mentioning that a lot of regimes have excellently efficient legal systems and judicial branch that put any democratic system to shame. The issue is what regulations you put in, how independent the judicial branch is and whether it is corrupt or not.
BLKNSLVR 5y ago
My theory is that the progressive loss of the US' soft power is fueling the growth of emerging internal extremist groups. This topic being another shard of the US' soft-power armour lost. The more it appears that the US reached and maintains it's global superpower status with force, coercion, underhanded tactics, and other abhorrent behaviors that contravene the Geneva Convention (which are handily side-stepped by conducting these behaviors in countries that don't adhere to such laws), it only works to justify extremists groups to use whatever means they consider necessary to achieve their own manifest destiny. In that context, almost anything becomes justified - which is nightmare fuel for the moderate middle majority.
- zmix 5y ago
  > In that context, almost anything becomes justified - which is nightmare fuel for the moderate middle majority. So, if they are a majority, why don't their values dominate?
  - BLKNSLVR 5y ago
    They do dominate, quietly. Because: 1: Moderate doesn't sell eyeballs and clicks, so extremism gets the attention, which is what it wants because it will attract more of the "curious disillusioned" for potential indoctrination 2: Until unknown critical mass of perceived-threat-paranoia, there's no need to publicise / protest / soapbox one's moderate-ness because it can be relatively assumed. ie. I don't need to explain that I'm not one of those nutjobs. If you're asking "why don't their values dominate" on a foreign policy level, well, I'm unqualified to answer that, except to say that realpolitik is far removed from most citizens' day to day lives (the conundrum semi-explored by A Few Good Men seems appropriate to mention here).
Iv 5y ago
The turning point regarding the US' stance on democracy and human rights has been, IMO, GW Bush's withdrawal from the International Criminal Court. There we were, in a world where USSR had collapsed, China not risen yet, with a USA as the uncontested dominant power. It has the unique chance in history to steer the world in one direction or the other. Building international legal standards, multi-lateral cooperation, ensuring that whoever had the most power at one point would be limited by the world community, was something within US reach, and was a realistic hope. As a bonus, the first thing the community would work on would be tackling the climate change, as it was an obvious field where every country of planet earth had a common interest. Instead, because of a few hundred "miscounted" votes in Florida, the US president was a zealous anti-intellectual evangelist, who decided that US interests trumps human rights, that denying climate change was a respectable political stance, and instead of spending a mountain of dollars on research, energy transition, diseases eradication, social net improvements, he spent it on invading 2 countries despite experts warning that it would not solve any problem.
- paulddraper 5y ago
  > International Criminal Court Really? Do you really think any international body would hold Saudi Arabia, China to account? He who holds the purse, makes the rules. And they hold a pretty big purse.
  - avmich 5y ago
    Eventually, yes, of course. The America will just benefit again being a leader.
  - rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
    The EU + USA together hold a much bigger purse so...
    - raxxorrax 5y ago
      The EU? The father or Ursula von der Leyen did a false flag against some imprisoned RAF members. They bombed a prison and tried to blame it on the inmates and accomplices. The US is a special needs kid regarding human rights if you take a look at Guantanamo. So what should I expect about the integrity of justice here?
nyokodo 5y ago
> US is loosing more and more of its standing when it comes to "spreading" democracy. The US was only ever seen as a spreader of democracy in contrast to the Soviet Union/Fascist Europe/European Empires. And it was, but no one knowledgable of the US thought it was an unmitigated assessment! You can definitely compare the US favorably to China in regards to democracy and freedom but no one should be fooled that we don't have perpetual work to make a more perfect union.
loxs 5y ago
There is nothing out of line here. Democracy is not "morality" - it's purely a means by which the majority enforces its decisions onto the minority. In fact democracy is one of the "best" ways for achieving "group irresponsibility" and allows us to do atrocious things with no-one in particular to blame afterwards.
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  Democracy's list of atrocities is still very small compared to any other form of governance.
  - loxs 5y ago
    Depending on how low you put your bar for what passes for "democracy", I would very much disagree. Countries like Nazi Germany, USSR, North Korea etc all had/have elections. Of course, you can argue that this does not qualify for a democracy, but then one can argue that neither did the "bad" monarchies in history qualify for proper "monarchies". To me democracy is also the failed form of it, you cannot just pretend that democracy is that part which you like. And also, you have to consider what better things it prevents us from having. Also, you cannot compare things out of their historical context. Of course democracy is not very bad when we have food and iphones, but you don't have to look very far (North Korea, Venezuela, Africa - you will be surprised how "good" democracy some of these countries have, yet they do not prosper) to see what happens when we don't have them. One good book on the topic is "Democracy: The God That Failed" by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. It goes into massive amount of details and is not a pleasant read. Still, probably the best book in existence, for someone to understand what is wrong with our world.
    - raxxorrax 5y ago
      If you argue North Korea to be a democracy, that is a whole different vocabulary, not changing any bar. In that case you are correct I guess. On the contrary I think Hoppes criticism falls apart at empirical evidence like the cases you mentioned and his ideas of freedom will inevitably result in feudalism, not even a monarchy because the ruler would lack legitimacy and would face constant challenges. Monarchs as government can only exist if constituents can live completely removed from state influence. But that isn't possible in the world of today.

bamboozled 5y ago

It’s funny, when it comes to something like, vaccines, we’re supposed to trust “government institutions”. Then I wake up to this and I wonder, why should I t trust the government ?

lmilcin 5y ago
When it comes to vaccines, you don't necessarily have to trust government institutions. If you are normal, adult, educated person you don't need to "trust" the government for everything. You should hopefully be able to think for yourself and be able to evaluate when the story checks out and where it doesn't. Trust knowledge that has been gathered over decades, statistics and research that has been gathered by many research institutions (unless you can claim all of them are in collusion). Vaccines do work and we desperately need everybody to get vaccinated. Every country that has implemented vaccinations vigorously has seen immediate, large drop in cases. People who are going to hospital at the moment are almost exclusively unvaccinated. A person or institution or government that shows it is not trustworthy in one area undermines itself in other areas and so it is understandable that it may sow confusion. But you should still have ability to think for yourself and use it to make rational decisons.
- version_five 5y ago
  There are two separate ideas here. Believing in the concept of a vaccine as an effective disease prevention mechanism, and believing the current narrative that all demographics need a covid vaccine, the risk reward calculus always shows it does more good than harm, etc (I'm not trying to faithfully summarize, but more make the point that there is a distinct and political covid vaccine push that's not the same as just saying a vaccine works) I personally had to suspend my mistrust of the government in order to decide it was worth getting vaccinated. A good rule of thumb is that the more someone tries to push you to do something, the more you should question their motives. And governments that have mismanaged and lied about everything else they do, like you say, have no reason to be trusted on this one thing, even if its generally popular. So it's not surprising that people who do believe that vaccines work (which is really not up for debate) may not agree with the putative urgency of getting this vaccine. Should just add that I don't really think there is anything we can do about this mistrust this time around. You get credibility by acting like you have people's interests in mind, and like you know what you're doing, so it would take a long spell of that before folks have any real reason to take what we are told at face value.
  - lmilcin 5y ago
    > A good rule of thumb is that the more someone tries to push you to do something, the more you should question their motives. It is a rule of thumb. Not a universal law. I hope you are not questioning the motives for having traffic rules. Or motives of your wife asking you to avoid a particularly dangerous place when coming back from work.
    - version_five 5y ago
      > traffic rules I think you're probably trying for one of those moral relativism fallacies (why don't we just go around killing people?) but you actually picked a ridiculously easy target that supports my point. How many instances are there of speed limits being set to create speed traps rather than to actually promote safety? Or set based on oil embargoes in the 70s and just left there? Or rules based on nimbyism and not wanting traffic in certain neighborhoods? Or lights timed to catch people at red light cams. This is all off the top of my head, I'm sure I could go on, but we should definitely be skeptical that many traffic rules are made "for our safety" and not for some other agenda, good point!
      - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
        > How many instances are there of speed limits being set to create speed traps rather than to actually promote safety? I don't know. How many are there?
        washadjeffmad 5y ago
        Anywhere they don't use lane width for flow control, of imagine.
        PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
        Consider US58 as it crosses a substantial chunk of Kansas. It passes through many very small towns with a (frequently defunct) retail "strip" that lasts less than a mile. The speed limit typically drops from 65 mph to 35 or even 25 mph while passing through these towns. Are you suggesting that the fact that neither the towns nor Kansas has altered the lane width in these locations proves that these speed limit changes are nothing but speed traps?
- christophilus 5y ago
  Vaccines that have been through clinical trials and approved by the FDA generally work. I’m fully vaccinated, but you have to admit that there’s a difference between the COVID vaccine and other vaccines— not just in terms of development and deployment speed, but also in terms of underlying technology, at least in some cases. Skepticism is a reasonable default stance for most things, emergency measures included.
  - lmilcin 5y ago
    Everything in life is a tradeoff. If you remember, vaccines were developed under enormous pressure and every day of delay meant literally tens of thousands of people dying across the world. So the uncertainties about these vaccines must be weighted against the situation in which they came to be. Fortunately, the doubt against vaccines seems to be largely unfounded and it is easily evidenced by drops in death rates in all countries that implemented vaccinations.
    - __blockcipher__ 5y ago
      > Fortunately, the doubt against vaccines seems to be largely unfounded and it is easily evidenced by drops in death rates in all countries that implemented vaccinations. Wrong on both counts. First of all viral epidemics follow a natural progression. Saying that a drop in [COVID] death rates following vaccine rollout proves their efficacy/safety is like saying that a week of heavy rains after doing a rain dance proves the rain dance did it. This same mistake has been made in associative studies looking at mask mandates, where many shoddy papers were released that showed a drop in mask-mandate counties while neglecting to account for the fact that cases were dropping everywhere. Monica Gandhi (an HIV researcher whose pro-masking papers have been of consistently poor quality yet are fairly widely cited because they produce the “correct” result) published a study to this effect that she and her team had to later retract because cases later went up. They were just measuring the normal viral epidemic curve and convincing themselves, without real evidence, that it must have been the masks. As to the other point, the efficacy of the vaccines is real but quite limited. The recent data coming out of Israel especially was something like 33% case reduction, but a much better reduction in hospitalization/death (80-90%). That to me demonstrates that the party line position of “the vaccines are amazingly effective” is simply not true. They’re great for reducing personal risk - although I’d note the Guillain-Barré syndrome, myocarditis, and strokes are pretty concerning - but they don’t do much for slowing the spread. Now frankly we never should have been trying to slow the spread of SARS-2 in the general population - it was always destined to be an endemic respiratory virus, and a mild one at that for most healthy people - but I’m just making the point because the whole narrative has been that we had to lock down “until the vaccine” to save people from getting infected when increasingly it’s looking like everyone has to face the virus one way or another. So go out and get vaccinated if you want better odds against SARS-2 while taking on some risk from possible side effects of making your cells express a bunch of artificial spike protein throughout your body for a few days, but don’t kid yourself into thinking that any concerns about either the safety or efficacy of the vaccines is baseless.
- blooalien 5y ago
  > "You should hopefully be able to think for yourself and be able to evaluate when the story checks out and where it doesn't." When I was a child, this sort of thinking was taught in grade-school and considered to be an important component of becoming an adult. Ah, how I long for "the good ol' days".
  - crummy 5y ago
    How did they teach it? What class was that in? (Guess it was before my time.)
    - jessaustin 5y ago
      If I had fifty teachers during my time in public school I'd be surprised if five of them would have been smart enough to teach such a course. None of those taught grade school.
- h_anna_h 5y ago
  You might not need to trust government institutions in order to be convinced that vaccines in general are effective, you do however need to trust them in order to verify that a specific vaccine is effective and safe. Especially for new vaccines for which we do not have as much data gathered. In addition, the genetic material for the vaccines not being open source (and commonly being patented) stops smaller research labs and individuals from examining them by themselves. Not to mention that even if the vaccine was open source there would still be possible supply-chain attacks, would you for example trust the Chinese government to not secretly conduct experiments on the Uighurs by giving them a modified vaccine? It's not as if human experimentation even in "modern democratic countries" is unheard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentation_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentatio.... Considering that I would not blame minorities (whether racial, religious, or political, especially in countries that have been historically oppressive of them) if they decided to avoid the vaccine. > You should hopefully be able to think for yourself and be able to evaluate when the story checks out and where it doesn't. > But you should still have ability to think for yourself and use it to make rational decisons. Some people ended up distrusting vaccines (whether in general or specific) after following this process. It is not a truth-finding panacea.
13415 5y ago
Using your brain to differentiate between completely unrelated topics helps.
craftinator 5y ago
If "trusting the government" is the reason you are taking a vaccine, you don't know enough about history, current events, or medicine. Any government, as a whole, is stupid and slow. But even stupid institutions can get things right when they are obvious enough. When they do, it doesn't mean you should start trusting them. Simple understandings of biology and medicine should inform you that taking a vaccine to the worst pandemic in living memory is the right course of action.
- bamboozled 5y ago
  So I’m just supposed to “make assumptions” and “hunches” to workout if I should take medicine ? I really don’t know why I’m paying taxes half the time.
  - craftinator 5y ago
    As far as I'm concerned, no one is supposed to do anything. You do what you decide is best. Hunches and assumptions sound like a bad way to decide on such an important course of action. Instead, if I were you, I'd do a combination of research and choosing someone to listen to that you think is both trustworthy and has spent a long time learning about vaccines. Maybe someone who's got a PhD in molecular biology and has written extensively on the subject. Do your own research, and trust that person to understand the things that would take too long for you to learn, then make your choice. I would never let the government do my thinking for me, for free or for pay. They aren't good at it.
    - bamboozled 5y ago
      It's interesting to think that people can be created in 2021. Faces, voices, videos can all be generated. If you're not in the field, it's pretty hard to know who to trust or what is real.
      - craftinator 5y ago
        Yes, false media can be generated, much like 100 years ago when you could sign a fake signature or misquote someone in a newspaper. No idea is new, just new applications of the idea. Luckily, we all have brains, and can use them to understand things from first principles. Listening to other people thoughts about what you should be doing is generally stupid. They aren't you, and they have themselves to look after. Also, no freaking idea why you tangented from vaccines, to taxes, to fake media generation, but unless you pick a topic we are done here.
api 5y ago
You don’t need to trust the government. You can do your own research by starting with some biology textbooks and then progressing to immunology, the history of medical science, etc. Then you can read a bunch of papers on mRNA vaccines and learn exactly how they work. There is a ton of international clinical data available too, which at least means you don’t have to trust just one government. Note that nowhere did I mention YouTube videos, celebrities, or talk radio blowhards.
spaetzleesser 5y ago
There are thousands of scientists working on this stuff all over the world. Most of them seem to be on board with the vaccines. You don’t have to trust the government. Just watch what scientists are saying. Considering that these scientists are spread out all over the world it’s hard to imagine that there is a world wide conspiracy to control what all these scientists are saying.
- bamboozled 5y ago
  So now we’re just supposed to work off hunches? See, this is why we’re still in this shit situation. It’s pretty hard for Joe Bloggs to workout who you trust in 2021. We’re lied to all the time by politicians and government, then when they want us to comply, we’re just supposed to go along with it? I’m not arguing against the fact that getting the vaccine is probably the right path to take. I am arguing that if governments want people’s trust, they need to earn it, doing this to Assange is doing the opposite and does things like prolonging the pandemic, it fuels mistrust.
  - whakim 5y ago
    I think you've fundamentally missed GP's point which is that when governments lie, they do it because they're self-interested. When a politician tells you something that isn't true, they're lying to make themself seem better or to make their opponents seem worse. (Or, to take an example of "the government" lying to you, when the NSA says they aren't collecting certain data about US citizens, their motivation for lying is avoiding the public outcry should their actions be revealed). What's the motivation behind a global cabal of governments, scientists, independent regulators and drug companies all lying to us about vaccines?
    - bamboozled 5y ago
      I'd love to actually know how many truly independent scientists work on "looking into these things". Does anyone have a quantifiable number. I'm again, not doubting what you're saying, but I hear a lot of "thousands of scientists are vetting the medicine etc". Are they really ? I think about this with open source software too, I run Linux, but I do actually wonder sometimes how much "vetting" is really going on.
greenbamboo 5y ago
Well incentives matter. The government has its incentives, so do drug makers, so do fda members and so do you. Always consider how incentives impact information you receive. Medical textbooks have optimal incentives if you are trying to learn. Media, government and drug makers maybe not.

cartoonworld 5y ago

Given the thousands of US Mil installations all across the globe, foreign intervention and police actions, geopolitical intrigue, etc it is unfortunately looking more and more like a Pax Romana -- a troubling sign, depending on your perspective.

TaylorAlexander 5y ago
Yes even going back to Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt rewrote his drafts of his speech to obscure the fact that the Philippines, a major site of the attack, was also a US colony. "How to Hide an Empire", Daniel Immerwahr https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaKOOqXDnqA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaKOOqXDnqA
- cartoonworld 5y ago
  Interesting, thanks. I just read this post on Popehat[0] recounting an event while Ken White was working for an LA federal judge back in the day. He was brought to a ceremony conducted by Judge Ronald S.W. Lew where numerous, VERY elderly Filipino WW2 veterans were granted US Citizenship. This was promised to them in addition to veteran's benefits by FDR in exchange for recruitment into the war effort, and after the war quietly swept under the rug by the congress. [0] - https://www.popehat.com/2020/07/04/the-fourth-of-july-rerun/ https://www.popehat.com/2020/07/04/the-fourth-of-july-rerun/
- hadlock 5y ago
  I was really surprised to find out, as an american, standing with feet on the ground in Manila, near age 30, having grown up in the US and gone to public schools, that the Philippines had been a US Territory off and on, on par with Puerto Rico, for about 50 years starting around 1898. There's even a big obelisk in the center of Union Square in San Francisco commemorating this event, it turns out. None of this was ever covered in public schools. I realize there's a lot of history to cover and kids can only absorb so much, but when people talk about "only focusing on europe and the middle east" it's good to have a couple of concrete examples. The Philippines actually has a larger english speaking population than the UK. Anyways, it always seemed that the Philippines got conveniently swept under the rug when discussing things like WW2 and American Imperialism.

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fungiblecog 5y ago

Indeed the whole point of principles is that you keep them when it isn't to your immediate benefit. That's why "Corporate Values" are so empty. They get tossed as soon as they conflict with the profit motive. Google's "don't be evil" being the classic example.

lmilcin 5y ago
It is a universal law, known and understood subconsciously in many different ways. Here in Poland we have a saying "you get to know a real friend in bad (times)" (Prawdziwego przyjaciela poznaje się w biedzie). When you feel the values or friendship will not stand the test you will not invest yourself in it and it becomes empty words. Just as democratic values that are set aside when it doesn't exactly align with profit or power goals. People will not stand for something they believe to just be empty words and that's why things like Assange case are so damaging to democracy.
- justicezyx 5y ago
  Chinese has the same saying as "you get to know a real friend in bad (times)" "患难见真情" It's interesting when something almost identical appear in different cultures.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    And in the US "a friend in need is a friend indeed".
    - Wildgoose 5y ago
      And the UK also, although I think you need commas to make the meaning clear: A friend, in need, is a friend indeed.
  - nyokodo 5y ago
    Also the english term "fair-weather friend" for friends who aren't around when times are difficult.

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago

>The point is to use legal system to ruin one person to scare any people from running similar actions against US government. Source please?

lmilcin 5y ago
Would you like me to find a link where US Government officially admits to pressuring foreign countries and abusing justice system to prevent people from publishing materials showing US Government wrongdoing?
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
  Unlikely but that doesn't make your claim true. Tangentially- what do you think about whistleblower protections where you are protected by law for reporting govt wrongdoing?
  - lmilcin 5y ago
    They are as good as separation between judicial and executive branches. When your judicial branch does what executive wants then there is no protection
  - salawat 5y ago
    Those are all fine and good when you're an employee. When you're not affiliated directly with the United States at all, and we're a means to an end though is where the consternation comes in, and where the U.S. really gave themselves a black eye with Assange.
    - 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
      I was getting at the fact that these two things don't square. The US govt provides whistle blower protection but the parent also claims the US abuses the justice system to: >prevent people from publishing materials showing US Government wrongdoing? So the US govt provides whistle blower protections but it is also abusing the justice dept? The govt publishes materials all the time that makes it look bad: https://www.gao.gov/ https://www.gao.gov/

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MomoXenosaga 5y ago

Yeah justice is kinda meaningless when you've been locked up for 10 years. Don't fuck with America she doesn't forget and never forgives.

wutbrodo 5y ago

> US is loosing more and more of its standing when it comes to "spreading" democracy. You can't go and try to preach democratic values to, say, Belarus, and then do exactly the same in your own country. Is there any indication that stuff like this happens _more_ than in the past? Or have the world's standards just risen?

avs733 5y ago
Or access to information increased? Or I’ve gotten older and more sour on this type of stuff? Honestly I feel like the change has been, for me, more awareness and less attachement to the narrative forced down my throat. I also don’t believe it to be (as a native US citizen) a US thing. I see it in a huge swing in many countries towards authoritarianism in many ways and towards many goals. It isn’t so much a left or right thing (although I believe it to be more right leaning) but just a greater willingness to use power structures to control others.
lmilcin 5y ago
> Is there any indication that stuff like this happens _more_ than in the past? Or have the world's standards just risen? Oh, so it is fine to sin against democracy as long as you are not sinning more than in the past?
- wutbrodo 5y ago
  There's a nifty feature on HN called "scrolling up" that allows you to read the parents of the comments you reply to. It's good for workflows you might find useful like "understanding the discussion" and "not looking like an idiot". In this case, it'd reveal that the premise of my question is the parent comment's claim of a _decline_ in the US's reputation as a "spreader of democracy". hth EDIT: Holy christ, you are the parent commenter. How is it even possible that you forgot what your previous comment in the thread was saying??
pedalpete 5y ago
It doesn't matter if it is happening more or less. The goal is to always be improving. Values is about what you believe in and strive for, and when you don't reach the standards you set for yourself, you figure out why, and adjust to be inline with your beliefs and goals.

throwawaycities 5y ago

It is often worse than just hypocrisy. If the US hasn’t hand picked a foreign regime and someone wins the democratic election which the US doesn’t agree with the US can just label them a terrorist organization if it is deemed politically necessary. I am no fan of the Taliban or Hammas - and US probably correctly labeled them terrorist organizations - but it must also be acknowledge they are also “political parties” that have won democratic elections.

einpoklum 5y ago
... but that would mean acknowledging the non-dichotomy between states and terrorist organizations. States carry out the most terror, but they (mostly) get a free pass. The US (and many other world states) would not want to undermine this situation and make their own actions legitimate targets of the question: "Is this a form of terror?".

Trias11 5y ago

"... The point is to use legal system to ruin one person to scare any people from running similar actions ..." +100

lettergram 5y ago

There’s a large (the vast majority), who think what is happening to Assange is a travesty. Many of those same people don’t do anything about it. They still vote the same exact way they have for 15-20 years, they don’t get active and write anyone, etc. The real travesty about Assange is that he’s not even a US citizen. He tried to reach out to the state department to redact sections and they refused to respond. Then they go after him for publishing what some other person leaked. Not only that, but the leaker had a publicly funded transition and a short prison sentence. Assange is charged and has endured much worse. My principles (and many others) still stand. But our “deep state” doesn’t represent the majority.

mioasndo 5y ago
> There’s a large (the vast majority), who think what is happening to Assange is a travesty. Not sure that's true, go to reddit for example, and you'll see the majority are already brainwashed into thinking Assange is a Russian asset. US mainstream media is working on it overtime.
- freeflight 5y ago
  And Reddit is usually on the more "enlightened" end on such topics, at least used to be. Ask some random person on the street about Assange and the best they can come up with is probably something about fleeing from the Swedish police for rape, something Russian agent, maybe something about how he treats his cat horribly or doesn't clean his toilet properly. The Five Eyed propaganda machine [0] was very effective in smearing him, and even Snowden, among the general public in these past years. [0] https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/ https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/
- deleted 5y ago
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- fettucini 5y ago
  I don't give a rat's ass whether Assange is a Russian asset or not: trying to drag him to the USA and prosecute him is criminal behavior, both in the USA and in most other countries. What a political clusterfuck it is for the USA to be pursuing Assange today! The situation underscores how sick, twisted and psychopathic are his American pursuers.

r7d77euheydu 5y ago

I'm not really sure how to feel about this sort of criticism because you could apply it to basically any court case. The goal for any defendant/prosecutor isn't to have a believable case it's to have a legally sufficient one.

beebmam 5y ago

I'm genuinely curious: what does US democracy have to do with Assange? Like I'm deeply sympathetic to what has happened to Assange. But I don't see how it has anything to do with democracy, given that he's not a US citizen, and US law rarely applies to non-US citizens outside of US borders.

belorn 5y ago
A functional legal system is one of the qualifier for being a democracy. Without a working legal system you can't have a functional society. Without society you can't have a democracy. When a nations legal system is manufacturing false evidence, the target of that become irrelevant. A legal system can't manufacturing false evidence, against anyone, and still be trusted.
- lmilcin 5y ago
  > A functional legal system is one of the qualifier for being a democracy. While it is true (that you need a functioning legal system), it is also worth mentioning that a lot of regimes have excellently efficient legal systems and judicial branch that put any democratic system to shame. The issue is what regulations you put in, how independent the judicial branch is and whether it is corrupt or not.

BLKNSLVR 5y ago

My theory is that the progressive loss of the US' soft power is fueling the growth of emerging internal extremist groups. This topic being another shard of the US' soft-power armour lost. The more it appears that the US reached and maintains it's global superpower status with force, coercion, underhanded tactics, and other abhorrent behaviors that contravene the Geneva Convention (which are handily side-stepped by conducting these behaviors in countries that don't adhere to such laws), it only works to justify extremists groups to use whatever means they consider necessary to achieve their own manifest destiny. In that context, almost anything becomes justified - which is nightmare fuel for the moderate middle majority.

zmix 5y ago
> In that context, almost anything becomes justified - which is nightmare fuel for the moderate middle majority. So, if they are a majority, why don't their values dominate?
- BLKNSLVR 5y ago
  They do dominate, quietly. Because: 1: Moderate doesn't sell eyeballs and clicks, so extremism gets the attention, which is what it wants because it will attract more of the "curious disillusioned" for potential indoctrination 2: Until unknown critical mass of perceived-threat-paranoia, there's no need to publicise / protest / soapbox one's moderate-ness because it can be relatively assumed. ie. I don't need to explain that I'm not one of those nutjobs. If you're asking "why don't their values dominate" on a foreign policy level, well, I'm unqualified to answer that, except to say that realpolitik is far removed from most citizens' day to day lives (the conundrum semi-explored by A Few Good Men seems appropriate to mention here).

Iv 5y ago

The turning point regarding the US' stance on democracy and human rights has been, IMO, GW Bush's withdrawal from the International Criminal Court. There we were, in a world where USSR had collapsed, China not risen yet, with a USA as the uncontested dominant power. It has the unique chance in history to steer the world in one direction or the other. Building international legal standards, multi-lateral cooperation, ensuring that whoever had the most power at one point would be limited by the world community, was something within US reach, and was a realistic hope. As a bonus, the first thing the community would work on would be tackling the climate change, as it was an obvious field where every country of planet earth had a common interest. Instead, because of a few hundred "miscounted" votes in Florida, the US president was a zealous anti-intellectual evangelist, who decided that US interests trumps human rights, that denying climate change was a respectable political stance, and instead of spending a mountain of dollars on research, energy transition, diseases eradication, social net improvements, he spent it on invading 2 countries despite experts warning that it would not solve any problem.

paulddraper 5y ago
> International Criminal Court Really? Do you really think any international body would hold Saudi Arabia, China to account? He who holds the purse, makes the rules. And they hold a pretty big purse.
- avmich 5y ago
  Eventually, yes, of course. The America will just benefit again being a leader.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
  The EU + USA together hold a much bigger purse so...
  - raxxorrax 5y ago
    The EU? The father or Ursula von der Leyen did a false flag against some imprisoned RAF members. They bombed a prison and tried to blame it on the inmates and accomplices. The US is a special needs kid regarding human rights if you take a look at Guantanamo. So what should I expect about the integrity of justice here?

nyokodo 5y ago

> US is loosing more and more of its standing when it comes to "spreading" democracy. The US was only ever seen as a spreader of democracy in contrast to the Soviet Union/Fascist Europe/European Empires. And it was, but no one knowledgable of the US thought it was an unmitigated assessment! You can definitely compare the US favorably to China in regards to democracy and freedom but no one should be fooled that we don't have perpetual work to make a more perfect union.

loxs 5y ago

There is nothing out of line here. Democracy is not "morality" - it's purely a means by which the majority enforces its decisions onto the minority. In fact democracy is one of the "best" ways for achieving "group irresponsibility" and allows us to do atrocious things with no-one in particular to blame afterwards.

raxxorrax 5y ago
Democracy's list of atrocities is still very small compared to any other form of governance.
- loxs 5y ago
  Depending on how low you put your bar for what passes for "democracy", I would very much disagree. Countries like Nazi Germany, USSR, North Korea etc all had/have elections. Of course, you can argue that this does not qualify for a democracy, but then one can argue that neither did the "bad" monarchies in history qualify for proper "monarchies". To me democracy is also the failed form of it, you cannot just pretend that democracy is that part which you like. And also, you have to consider what better things it prevents us from having. Also, you cannot compare things out of their historical context. Of course democracy is not very bad when we have food and iphones, but you don't have to look very far (North Korea, Venezuela, Africa - you will be surprised how "good" democracy some of these countries have, yet they do not prosper) to see what happens when we don't have them. One good book on the topic is "Democracy: The God That Failed" by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. It goes into massive amount of details and is not a pleasant read. Still, probably the best book in existence, for someone to understand what is wrong with our world.
  - raxxorrax 5y ago
    If you argue North Korea to be a democracy, that is a whole different vocabulary, not changing any bar. In that case you are correct I guess. On the contrary I think Hoppes criticism falls apart at empirical evidence like the cases you mentioned and his ideas of freedom will inevitably result in feudalism, not even a monarchy because the ruler would lack legitimacy and would face constant challenges. Monarchs as government can only exist if constituents can live completely removed from state influence. But that isn't possible in the world of today.