4 ms·

> “brutal despots” comment you’ll need to provide a bit more context Read some history before having such strong opinions then. That 'context' comment is insul

> “brutal despots” comment you’ll need to provide a bit more context Read some history before having such strong opinions then. That 'context' comment is insulting to hundreds of thousands of people who were disappeared or outright buried alive by US backed regimes during that period.

InitialLastName 4y ago
If you want to contribute more positively, you can do so by educating us on the regimes that were backed specifically by the Carter Administration. Nobody is denying that the US has had a habit of supporting brutal dictators (especially as a knee-jerk response to the presence of a USSR-backed opposition), but as far as I can tell the Carter admin was less eager to do so than its peers. Also, if you can show me a large country that got through the 20th century without backing (or being) a brutal dictatorship, I'd be very appreciative.
- unity1001 4y ago
  > by educating us on the regimes No. This is HackerNews. Not some random forum. The education and intelligence levels in this forum are supposed to be much higher. Even in most far-right nationalist American forums people stopped making such knee-jerk retorts that 'require education'. From FOIA requests to those countries making their documents public, there isn't anything left to debate, discuss, leave aside 'not know about'. If someone educated and intelligent is making such utterly ignorant sounding commentary about this in such a forum, at this point it cant be ignorance, it definitely cant be lack of intelligence, it can only be bad faith. And there is no reasoning with bad faith - like how your last sentence demonstrates.
huitzitziltzin 4y ago
If saying I’d like more context and that I could buy OP’s claim makes me guilty of having strong and ‘insulting’ opinions… then IDK yeah I guess I do? FWIW I’ve read a lot of history of US interventions in Asia, Africa and Central and South America. I have an opinion about most presidents in that regard - as I noted support by US presidents for murderous dictators is pretty common! I don’t have a strong opinion about carter on that front which is why I asked for more. So far in this thread I’ve seen East Timor mentioned. Do you have anything else to offer?
- dventimi 4y ago
  Evidently, he provided military aid to the junta in El Salvador at the beginning of that country's civil war: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1981/01/14/carter-decides-to-resume-military-aid-to-el-salvador/16084fe6-8174-49dc-be5f-a5a147566f96/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1981/01/14/c...

InitialLastName 4y ago

If you want to contribute more positively, you can do so by educating us on the regimes that were backed specifically by the Carter Administration. Nobody is denying that the US has had a habit of supporting brutal dictators (especially as a knee-jerk response to the presence of a USSR-backed opposition), but as far as I can tell the Carter admin was less eager to do so than its peers. Also, if you can show me a large country that got through the 20th century without backing (or being) a brutal dictatorship, I'd be very appreciative.

unity1001 4y ago
> by educating us on the regimes No. This is HackerNews. Not some random forum. The education and intelligence levels in this forum are supposed to be much higher. Even in most far-right nationalist American forums people stopped making such knee-jerk retorts that 'require education'. From FOIA requests to those countries making their documents public, there isn't anything left to debate, discuss, leave aside 'not know about'. If someone educated and intelligent is making such utterly ignorant sounding commentary about this in such a forum, at this point it cant be ignorance, it definitely cant be lack of intelligence, it can only be bad faith. And there is no reasoning with bad faith - like how your last sentence demonstrates.

huitzitziltzin 4y ago

If saying I’d like more context and that I could buy OP’s claim makes me guilty of having strong and ‘insulting’ opinions… then IDK yeah I guess I do? FWIW I’ve read a lot of history of US interventions in Asia, Africa and Central and South America. I have an opinion about most presidents in that regard - as I noted support by US presidents for murderous dictators is pretty common! I don’t have a strong opinion about carter on that front which is why I asked for more. So far in this thread I’ve seen East Timor mentioned. Do you have anything else to offer?

dventimi 4y ago
Evidently, he provided military aid to the junta in El Salvador at the beginning of that country's civil war: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1981/01/14/carter-decides-to-resume-military-aid-to-el-salvador/16084fe6-8174-49dc-be5f-a5a147566f96/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1981/01/14/c...