8 ms·

The End of Hypocrisy

131 points by markmassie 13y ago

jfmercer 13y ago
I wish HN contributors were more careful with their link titles. The actual article title, "End Hypocrisy with Leaks," is altogether different, and inestimably more reasonable, than the absurdly titled "The End of Hypocrisy."
- herbig 13y ago
  From the linked page: "Foreign Affairs, November-December 2013 The End of Hypocrisy" Published: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/140155/henry-farrell-and-martha-finnemore/the-end-of-hypocrisy http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/140155/henry-farrell-...
- jrajav 13y ago
  "The End of Hypocrisy" is the actual title of the article, as you can see a few lines down in the linked post and wherever it is published elsewhere: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/140155/henry-farrell-and-martha-finnemore/the-end-of-hypocrisy http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/140155/henry-farrell-... "End Hypocrisy with Leaks" is in fact the editorial title of this Cryptome site.
  - 001sky 13y ago
    The FA Title is (actually): The End of Hypocrisy: American Foreign Policy in the Age of Leaks You can't discount the context of the subheading in a written/paper published title. IMHO. I don't think this is pedantic, as the linked article made it fit (which is why HN guidelines say you should try not to editorialize).
- knappador 13y ago
  Right. "The End of Hypocrisy" sounds pretty pretentious and hypocritical in itself. I'm all against banana republicanism and 40,000 other things sovereign states and corporations do, but to be the "End," the author would have to be swinging around some very impressive voodoo.
diego_moita 13y ago
> most U.S. politicians do not recognize just how two-faced their country is. > Hypocrisy is central to Washington’s soft power -- its ability to get other countries > to accept the legitimacy of its actions -- yet few Americans appreciate its role. > Liberals tend to believe that other countries cooperate with the United States because > American ideals are attractive and the U.S.-led international system is fair. Realists > may be more cynical, yet if they think about Washington’s hypocrisy at all, they > consider it irrelevant. This is just astonishingly brilliant. It is exactly the perception of the rest of the world but I never saw it so bluntly articulated in the American media.
- kamjam 13y ago
  Liberals tend to believe that other countries cooperate with the United States because American ideals are attractive and the U.S.-led international system is fair. I just watched The Four Horsemen on Youtube. It's pretty interesting, although nothing eye opening, but good to see it in one package (so to speak). The economic model to screw over everyone else to advance itself should have made it more than obvious everything you ever suspected was true. Now that more and more of these suspicions are being confirmed the US is on the back foot. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fbvquHSPJU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fbvquHSPJU
- notahacker 13y ago
  I'm not sure about that. The claim that [insert political force here] is able to claim legitimacy only through hypocrisy is one of the oldest in politics, and the article does little to sustain the questionable assertion that most US politicians don't recognize the power game they're playing. It also misses the obvious corollary: other countries' hypocrisy is key to their willingness to accept US soft power when it generally aligns with their interests. (And yes, they're being just as hypocritical when they do selectively draw attention to America's hypocrisy) The article's claims that pre-Snowden "Chinese officials, although well aware that the Americans were acting hypocritically, avoided calling them out directly" are easily falsified by a quick search of Xinhua http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/2010-01/24/c_13148512.htm http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/2010-01/24/c_131... http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/2011-04/10/c_13822179.htm http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/2011-04/10/c_138... There's nothing remotely novel about other countries' willingness to assert that the US is hypocritical (particularly when on the defensive) and nothing to suggest they won't continue to maintain the relationship despite the "shock revelations" of the last few years, which, if anything, are rather less surprising and compelling than the "shock revelations" of the generations before. If half a century of coup d'etats sponsored by American spooks can't dent the prestige of America's push for "global democracy", it's hardly going to be dented by hard evidence that American spooks also spy. Just because Snowden woke up some of those so uninterested in politics they find claims of US hypocrisy novel doesn't mean the rest of the world was asleep.
eevilspock 13y ago
In our society many of us subconsciously or sometimes consciously turn down the volume of our own conscience, because we'd rather not come face to face with our hypocrisy, our complicity with banal and not so banal evil [1], because we don't want to give up the benefits. In the Internet tech community, its ultimate manifestation is how we pretend we do not earn our livelihoods from advertising, something most of us deep down know to be evil [2]. [1] The Banality of Systemic Evil, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/the-banality-of-systemic-evil/ http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/the-banality... [2] No free lunch, no free web, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6624666 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6624666
- swombat 13y ago
  None of the businesses that I have run have ever made money by advertising...
  - eevilspock 13y ago
    Excellent. I was of course using the royal "we". I don't work for an ad-supported product either. Anymore at least. I quit. Still, even with my hardcore stance against it, I take advantage of many "free" ad supported products rather than supporting businesses by paying directly. Perhaps you are better than I.
    - icebraining 13y ago
      As long as you don't buy stuff based on ads, and unless the product benefits from network effects, you are just making ad-supported products less profitable by using them, and hence contributing to their demise - either the ads are pay-per-click, and then you are just raising its costs without providing returns, or they're pay-per-view and then you're making the ads less valuable for advertisers (and hence less profitable for the service). It's the people clicking on the ads that are keeping them alive.
- hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
  > In the Internet tech community, it's ultimate manifestation is how we pretend we do not earn our livelihoods from advertising, something most of us deep down know to be evil [2]. Thank you for calling out this one. I've been harshly criticized in the past for pointing out Google, which is beloved amongst geeks, is ultimately an advertising machine, and the reason they push many positive/geeky initiatives is because they have total consciousness of that ("Don't be Evil") and don't want to lose their talent pool.
niels_olson 13y ago
> Although the current administration has curtailed some of the abuses of its predecessors, it still has a long way to go. That sentence is how history will judge 2013.
rayiner 13y ago
> That’s because most of the world today lives within an order that the United States built, one that is both underwritten by U.S. power and legitimated by liberal ideas. American commitments to the rule of law, democracy, and free trade are embedded in the multilateral institutions that the country helped establish after World War II, including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, and later the World Trade Organization. Gee, all of this sounds pretty good! But as the author acknowledges, this is all "underwritten by U.S. power." I couldn't have put it better myself. If the cost of maintaining that power is some hypocrisy, then I say: there is nothing wrong with hypocrisy. The article reaches the core issue but has trouble grappling with it. Would any other approach be better than the one the U.S. is currently taking? Would it be beneficial to the developing nations of the world for the U.S. to abdicate its hegemony, leaving a power vacuum for Russia or China? Or would it instead be better for the U.S. to stop with the hipocrisy, and be clear about its naked intentions to maintain its power? Would the existing multilateral order survive that revelation? Or is the current, if hypocritical, state of affairs the best: for the U.S. to foster the current international order while acting behind the scenes to maintain the power that "underwrites" that order?
- eevilspock 13y ago
  So you believe might makes right? Or that right doesn't matter, so long as you are on the side of and can benefit from might?
  - rayiner 13y ago
    What justifies American hegemony is not the mere fact that the U.S. has the power to impose itself as a hegemon. What justifies it is the fact that it is by far the most benevolent hegemon in the history of the world. "Right" and "wrong" have no place in international politics. Nations exist, among themselves, in the state of nature, and in nature there is only power: the ability to do. It is irrelevant whether it is "right" for a nation to impose itself as hegemon. It is inevitable that some national will. The only topic of discussion is: would you like some other hegemon better than the one we have? We are not the first generation outside of history. You cannot look at say Western Europe and see the decades of peace and cooperation in that region, after centuries of bloody violence, and conclude that it's because modern Europeans are better and more noble people than the ones that lived just a few generations before. No, the world that exists, where France doesn't bulk up its military in response to Germany doing the same, exists because of American hegemony. That is what justifies the exercise of American power.
firstOrder 13y ago
I think there is another element in this and that is a form of self-deception. Obviously the US establishment tries to put a good propaganda face of some of its seamier actions. It can, and I think does, reach the point where there becomes too great a cognitive dissonance, and people begin to fool themselves and their own intellectual community with their own lies. For example - is the US for or against Islamic extremism? Is it for or against a more secular society in the Middle East and Muslim countries? Most people here, or college-educated NPR or Fox News listeners I know think it is against it, and that the US wants to promote a more secular, moderate form of Islam around the world, as do allies like Israel. The problem is that all evidence over the preceding decades is against this. The US and England threw out the secular, democratic Mossadegh in Iran in the 1950s, and then the CIA helped the Shah's Savak jail or kill off anyone in the country supporting a return to a secular democracy. Almost unbelievable nowadays, Israel supported, including financially, the rise of Hamas and Hezbollah against what it saw as the more existential threats of the PFLP and the PLO. What has the US been doing in the past few years? Supporting the most theocratic countries such as Saudi Arabia, where as it has been in the news lately, there are crackdowns on women who want to drive cars. The remains of the secular, pan-Arabist, Nasserite parties have been what the US has attacked in recent years - Iraq and Libya. Obama recently made the call for more intervention in the secular, Nasserite government of Syria and , surprisingly, some mainstream opinion noted he would in some fashion be supporting Al-Qaeda - which is true. Which is yet another case - the US supported the overthrow of the secular, socialist Afghanistan in order to put into power the mujahideen forces which later became Al Qaeda. All of the historical evidence, from World War II until recent months shows the US opposes secular governments in these countries and supports Islamic fundamentalists and radicals. Yet for some reason, not only does US propaganda say the opposite, not only do Fox News watching blue collar Americans believe this, even NPR or Fox News listening college educated Americans believe this. College-educated Arabs know what the truth is, but somehow the reality hasn't penetrated the US. Usually propaganda is just shading the truth, but for the Arab world, the news just openly lies. I watch talking head shows where they still say that Ahmadinejad said "Israel should be wiped off the map". I've heard this repeated for years over and over and over. It's just not true, a look at his remarks in Persian said he absolutely, certainly never said the word map, and even the rest of the translation is somewhat shaded. It's too good a lie to be bothered going into that, so this lie, which is now widely known to be a lie, is still endlessly repeated on in the US news media.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
chum 13y ago
"programmers who are good at crafting defenses for their own systems know how to penetrate other people’s computers, too" This is not strictly true. There is a big difference between identifying/exploiting bugs in software and defending a network from attack. Within the context of government spending, this is the difference between funding reverse engineering/binary analysis/buying 0days and funding the training of systems administrators.
- nraynaud 13y ago
  at the micro level, it's true that those activities are different, but in the big picture, they are so close, and those people are interacting so much with each other. There is also the big offense/defense hypocrisy, like buying guns and missiles to protect people (instead of armors and bunkers), and mixing offense and defense to make some behavior more publicly acceptable.
saraid216 13y ago
Why is hypocrisy a bad thing? Entirely serious question, since it's the basis of the entire article.
- visakanv 13y ago
  Exposed hypocrisy undermines legitimacy & authority, which in turn leads to a loss of power and influence, which means the beginning of the Post-American world.
- D_Alex 13y ago
  From Wikipedia: "Hypocrisy is the state of falsely claiming to possess virtuous characteristics that one lacks. Hypocrisy involves the deception of others and is thus a kind of lie." And lies are basically bad.
  - saraid216 13y ago
    > And lies are basically bad. Are all forms of deception bad? If so, then okay. If not, then what forms of deception are bad, and what forms are not, and which class does hypocrisy belong in and why?
christopherryan 13y ago
GOSPEL ARTIST POSES NUDE! Evon Latrail is the author of a children's book "When Mommy Went to Heaven". She wrote/recorded a few songs; "Lord Bless My Enemies. And, even has a song entitled, "Can't You See (Abortion Is Murder). She went Pro-life after having a abortion! Really???? Now here is a photo of her posing in chocolate as a "Swamp Girl". The word Hypocrite is floating around somewhere. This story has made front page news in the local paper. Go to Google or YouTube and search, Evon Latrail.
zcarter 13y ago
What we are seeing now is the end, not of hypocrisy, but of credibility. The prediction that institutions founded in a limited information environment (and their extant policies specifically) will simply continue in an unlimited information environment by simply changing rhetoric, are exactly that: predictions. That is to say, if a hypothetical swindler cannot profitably swindle when the veracity of her lies are easily checked. The article proposes that our imaginary trickster need simply start telling the truth to continue prospering.
jheriko 13y ago
America is young, and this is no special time in history either... As a non-expert I was/am unsurprised by the content of these leaks whose 'revelations' in the broad sense are mere common sense - but more surprised that they happen at all. Are Americans so discontented? Apparently so...
eriksank 13y ago
"Liberals tend to believe that other countries cooperate with the United States because American ideals are attractive." In the ongoing debate between politically-controlled versus theocratically-controlled law, the majority of the world population finds the "American" ideal (rather French-revolutionary, no?) of politically-controlled law not particularly attractive at all. The system amounts to asking the population to vote every few years for politicians who will invent new laws. The question then becomes: How many new laws do we need before all our needs for new laws are finally and entirely satisfied? The theocratically-controlled alternative on its side says: The only one who can create new laws and further restrict your freedom, may not even exist. So, my question becomes: What exactly would be wrong with that?
- saraid216 13y ago
  Yeah, that line confused me too. I've actually never heard anyone make the claim that people cooperate with the United States because our ideals are attractive. I've heard that immigrants immigrate here because of that, and I've heard patriotism justified by this, and I've heard that our culture is seductive, but I've never heard that governments find our ideals attractive or anything remotely like it.
malandrew 13y ago
Great analysis both from the original post and commenters. Given everything that has been said I get the feeling that the most expedient way to promote democracy and freedom in your country if you have oil is to very clearly align with the US until you come to power and accomplish your original goals. The question or not is whether you can be candid/honest about such a policy of realpolitik with your fellow countrymen while you work towards building a democratic system. If you were an iranian revolutionary that wants democratic change, you could probably go further and craft a foreign policy that plays to equally to the interests of the US, China and Russia, while crafting a democratic domestic policy.
lenkite 13y ago
"signed a formal deal affirming India’s right to civilian nuclear energy despite its having flouted the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty by acquiring nuclear weapons." How can India be said to have _flouted_ this treaty when India had never signed it ??
jvdh 13y ago
This article is being hypocritical in itself. The main reason that the US is losing face is not because it can't maintain the hypocritical position it had before. The main reason is that most of the revealed behaviour of the NSA is either illegal or entirely unethical. This goes far beyond hypocrisy. > It may attempt, as the former head of U.S. counterintelligence Joel Brenner has urged, to draw distinctions between China’s allegedly unacceptable hacking, aimed at stealing commercial secrets, and its own perfectly legitimate hacking of military or other security-related targets. How is hacking another country to steal military or security related secrets ever "perfectly legitimate"? It may appear to be so from the US side, but it is never going to be legitimate from the other side. And I'm sure that the UN (which has been founded by many countries, not just the US) has something to say about this as well.
frank_boyd 13y ago
The hypocrisy elephant in the room: "NEVER FORGET" but "NEVER REMEMBER" (that 9/11 was the result of the US (CIA) recruiting and playing Osama bin Laden).

131 points by markmassie 13y ago

I wish HN contributors were more careful with their link titles. The actual article title, "End Hypocrisy with Leaks," is altogether different, and inestimably more reasonable, than the absurdly titled "The End of Hypocrisy."

herbig 13y ago
From the linked page: "Foreign Affairs, November-December 2013 The End of Hypocrisy" Published: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/140155/henry-farrell-and-martha-finnemore/the-end-of-hypocrisy http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/140155/henry-farrell-...
jrajav 13y ago
"The End of Hypocrisy" is the actual title of the article, as you can see a few lines down in the linked post and wherever it is published elsewhere: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/140155/henry-farrell-and-martha-finnemore/the-end-of-hypocrisy http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/140155/henry-farrell-... "End Hypocrisy with Leaks" is in fact the editorial title of this Cryptome site.
- 001sky 13y ago
  The FA Title is (actually): The End of Hypocrisy: American Foreign Policy in the Age of Leaks You can't discount the context of the subheading in a written/paper published title. IMHO. I don't think this is pedantic, as the linked article made it fit (which is why HN guidelines say you should try not to editorialize).
knappador 13y ago
Right. "The End of Hypocrisy" sounds pretty pretentious and hypocritical in itself. I'm all against banana republicanism and 40,000 other things sovereign states and corporations do, but to be the "End," the author would have to be swinging around some very impressive voodoo.

diego_moita 13y ago

> most U.S. politicians do not recognize just how two-faced their country is. > Hypocrisy is central to Washington’s soft power -- its ability to get other countries > to accept the legitimacy of its actions -- yet few Americans appreciate its role. > Liberals tend to believe that other countries cooperate with the United States because > American ideals are attractive and the U.S.-led international system is fair. Realists > may be more cynical, yet if they think about Washington’s hypocrisy at all, they > consider it irrelevant. This is just astonishingly brilliant. It is exactly the perception of the rest of the world but I never saw it so bluntly articulated in the American media.

kamjam 13y ago
Liberals tend to believe that other countries cooperate with the United States because American ideals are attractive and the U.S.-led international system is fair. I just watched The Four Horsemen on Youtube. It's pretty interesting, although nothing eye opening, but good to see it in one package (so to speak). The economic model to screw over everyone else to advance itself should have made it more than obvious everything you ever suspected was true. Now that more and more of these suspicions are being confirmed the US is on the back foot. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fbvquHSPJU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fbvquHSPJU
notahacker 13y ago
I'm not sure about that. The claim that [insert political force here] is able to claim legitimacy only through hypocrisy is one of the oldest in politics, and the article does little to sustain the questionable assertion that most US politicians don't recognize the power game they're playing. It also misses the obvious corollary: other countries' hypocrisy is key to their willingness to accept US soft power when it generally aligns with their interests. (And yes, they're being just as hypocritical when they do selectively draw attention to America's hypocrisy) The article's claims that pre-Snowden "Chinese officials, although well aware that the Americans were acting hypocritically, avoided calling them out directly" are easily falsified by a quick search of Xinhua http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/2010-01/24/c_13148512.htm http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/2010-01/24/c_131... http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/2011-04/10/c_13822179.htm http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/2011-04/10/c_138... There's nothing remotely novel about other countries' willingness to assert that the US is hypocritical (particularly when on the defensive) and nothing to suggest they won't continue to maintain the relationship despite the "shock revelations" of the last few years, which, if anything, are rather less surprising and compelling than the "shock revelations" of the generations before. If half a century of coup d'etats sponsored by American spooks can't dent the prestige of America's push for "global democracy", it's hardly going to be dented by hard evidence that American spooks also spy. Just because Snowden woke up some of those so uninterested in politics they find claims of US hypocrisy novel doesn't mean the rest of the world was asleep.

eevilspock 13y ago

In our society many of us subconsciously or sometimes consciously turn down the volume of our own conscience, because we'd rather not come face to face with our hypocrisy, our complicity with banal and not so banal evil [1], because we don't want to give up the benefits. In the Internet tech community, its ultimate manifestation is how we pretend we do not earn our livelihoods from advertising, something most of us deep down know to be evil [2]. [1] The Banality of Systemic Evil, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/the-banality-of-systemic-evil/ http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/the-banality... [2] No free lunch, no free web, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6624666 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6624666

swombat 13y ago
None of the businesses that I have run have ever made money by advertising...
- eevilspock 13y ago
  Excellent. I was of course using the royal "we". I don't work for an ad-supported product either. Anymore at least. I quit. Still, even with my hardcore stance against it, I take advantage of many "free" ad supported products rather than supporting businesses by paying directly. Perhaps you are better than I.
  - icebraining 13y ago
    As long as you don't buy stuff based on ads, and unless the product benefits from network effects, you are just making ad-supported products less profitable by using them, and hence contributing to their demise - either the ads are pay-per-click, and then you are just raising its costs without providing returns, or they're pay-per-view and then you're making the ads less valuable for advertisers (and hence less profitable for the service). It's the people clicking on the ads that are keeping them alive.
hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
> In the Internet tech community, it's ultimate manifestation is how we pretend we do not earn our livelihoods from advertising, something most of us deep down know to be evil [2]. Thank you for calling out this one. I've been harshly criticized in the past for pointing out Google, which is beloved amongst geeks, is ultimately an advertising machine, and the reason they push many positive/geeky initiatives is because they have total consciousness of that ("Don't be Evil") and don't want to lose their talent pool.

niels_olson 13y ago

> Although the current administration has curtailed some of the abuses of its predecessors, it still has a long way to go. That sentence is how history will judge 2013.

rayiner 13y ago

> That’s because most of the world today lives within an order that the United States built, one that is both underwritten by U.S. power and legitimated by liberal ideas. American commitments to the rule of law, democracy, and free trade are embedded in the multilateral institutions that the country helped establish after World War II, including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, and later the World Trade Organization. Gee, all of this sounds pretty good! But as the author acknowledges, this is all "underwritten by U.S. power." I couldn't have put it better myself. If the cost of maintaining that power is some hypocrisy, then I say: there is nothing wrong with hypocrisy. The article reaches the core issue but has trouble grappling with it. Would any other approach be better than the one the U.S. is currently taking? Would it be beneficial to the developing nations of the world for the U.S. to abdicate its hegemony, leaving a power vacuum for Russia or China? Or would it instead be better for the U.S. to stop with the hipocrisy, and be clear about its naked intentions to maintain its power? Would the existing multilateral order survive that revelation? Or is the current, if hypocritical, state of affairs the best: for the U.S. to foster the current international order while acting behind the scenes to maintain the power that "underwrites" that order?

eevilspock 13y ago
So you believe might makes right? Or that right doesn't matter, so long as you are on the side of and can benefit from might?
- rayiner 13y ago
  What justifies American hegemony is not the mere fact that the U.S. has the power to impose itself as a hegemon. What justifies it is the fact that it is by far the most benevolent hegemon in the history of the world. "Right" and "wrong" have no place in international politics. Nations exist, among themselves, in the state of nature, and in nature there is only power: the ability to do. It is irrelevant whether it is "right" for a nation to impose itself as hegemon. It is inevitable that some national will. The only topic of discussion is: would you like some other hegemon better than the one we have? We are not the first generation outside of history. You cannot look at say Western Europe and see the decades of peace and cooperation in that region, after centuries of bloody violence, and conclude that it's because modern Europeans are better and more noble people than the ones that lived just a few generations before. No, the world that exists, where France doesn't bulk up its military in response to Germany doing the same, exists because of American hegemony. That is what justifies the exercise of American power.

firstOrder 13y ago

I think there is another element in this and that is a form of self-deception. Obviously the US establishment tries to put a good propaganda face of some of its seamier actions. It can, and I think does, reach the point where there becomes too great a cognitive dissonance, and people begin to fool themselves and their own intellectual community with their own lies. For example - is the US for or against Islamic extremism? Is it for or against a more secular society in the Middle East and Muslim countries? Most people here, or college-educated NPR or Fox News listeners I know think it is against it, and that the US wants to promote a more secular, moderate form of Islam around the world, as do allies like Israel. The problem is that all evidence over the preceding decades is against this. The US and England threw out the secular, democratic Mossadegh in Iran in the 1950s, and then the CIA helped the Shah's Savak jail or kill off anyone in the country supporting a return to a secular democracy. Almost unbelievable nowadays, Israel supported, including financially, the rise of Hamas and Hezbollah against what it saw as the more existential threats of the PFLP and the PLO. What has the US been doing in the past few years? Supporting the most theocratic countries such as Saudi Arabia, where as it has been in the news lately, there are crackdowns on women who want to drive cars. The remains of the secular, pan-Arabist, Nasserite parties have been what the US has attacked in recent years - Iraq and Libya. Obama recently made the call for more intervention in the secular, Nasserite government of Syria and , surprisingly, some mainstream opinion noted he would in some fashion be supporting Al-Qaeda - which is true. Which is yet another case - the US supported the overthrow of the secular, socialist Afghanistan in order to put into power the mujahideen forces which later became Al Qaeda. All of the historical evidence, from World War II until recent months shows the US opposes secular governments in these countries and supports Islamic fundamentalists and radicals. Yet for some reason, not only does US propaganda say the opposite, not only do Fox News watching blue collar Americans believe this, even NPR or Fox News listening college educated Americans believe this. College-educated Arabs know what the truth is, but somehow the reality hasn't penetrated the US. Usually propaganda is just shading the truth, but for the Arab world, the news just openly lies. I watch talking head shows where they still say that Ahmadinejad said "Israel should be wiped off the map". I've heard this repeated for years over and over and over. It's just not true, a look at his remarks in Persian said he absolutely, certainly never said the word map, and even the rest of the translation is somewhat shaded. It's too good a lie to be bothered going into that, so this lie, which is now widely known to be a lie, is still endlessly repeated on in the US news media.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

chum 13y ago

"programmers who are good at crafting defenses for their own systems know how to penetrate other people’s computers, too" This is not strictly true. There is a big difference between identifying/exploiting bugs in software and defending a network from attack. Within the context of government spending, this is the difference between funding reverse engineering/binary analysis/buying 0days and funding the training of systems administrators.

nraynaud 13y ago
at the micro level, it's true that those activities are different, but in the big picture, they are so close, and those people are interacting so much with each other. There is also the big offense/defense hypocrisy, like buying guns and missiles to protect people (instead of armors and bunkers), and mixing offense and defense to make some behavior more publicly acceptable.

saraid216 13y ago

Why is hypocrisy a bad thing? Entirely serious question, since it's the basis of the entire article.

visakanv 13y ago
Exposed hypocrisy undermines legitimacy & authority, which in turn leads to a loss of power and influence, which means the beginning of the Post-American world.
D_Alex 13y ago
From Wikipedia: "Hypocrisy is the state of falsely claiming to possess virtuous characteristics that one lacks. Hypocrisy involves the deception of others and is thus a kind of lie." And lies are basically bad.
- saraid216 13y ago
  > And lies are basically bad. Are all forms of deception bad? If so, then okay. If not, then what forms of deception are bad, and what forms are not, and which class does hypocrisy belong in and why?

christopherryan 13y ago

GOSPEL ARTIST POSES NUDE! Evon Latrail is the author of a children's book "When Mommy Went to Heaven". She wrote/recorded a few songs; "Lord Bless My Enemies. And, even has a song entitled, "Can't You See (Abortion Is Murder). She went Pro-life after having a abortion! Really???? Now here is a photo of her posing in chocolate as a "Swamp Girl". The word Hypocrite is floating around somewhere. This story has made front page news in the local paper. Go to Google or YouTube and search, Evon Latrail.

zcarter 13y ago

What we are seeing now is the end, not of hypocrisy, but of credibility. The prediction that institutions founded in a limited information environment (and their extant policies specifically) will simply continue in an unlimited information environment by simply changing rhetoric, are exactly that: predictions. That is to say, if a hypothetical swindler cannot profitably swindle when the veracity of her lies are easily checked. The article proposes that our imaginary trickster need simply start telling the truth to continue prospering.

jheriko 13y ago

America is young, and this is no special time in history either... As a non-expert I was/am unsurprised by the content of these leaks whose 'revelations' in the broad sense are mere common sense - but more surprised that they happen at all. Are Americans so discontented? Apparently so...

eriksank 13y ago

"Liberals tend to believe that other countries cooperate with the United States because American ideals are attractive." In the ongoing debate between politically-controlled versus theocratically-controlled law, the majority of the world population finds the "American" ideal (rather French-revolutionary, no?) of politically-controlled law not particularly attractive at all. The system amounts to asking the population to vote every few years for politicians who will invent new laws. The question then becomes: How many new laws do we need before all our needs for new laws are finally and entirely satisfied? The theocratically-controlled alternative on its side says: The only one who can create new laws and further restrict your freedom, may not even exist. So, my question becomes: What exactly would be wrong with that?

saraid216 13y ago
Yeah, that line confused me too. I've actually never heard anyone make the claim that people cooperate with the United States because our ideals are attractive. I've heard that immigrants immigrate here because of that, and I've heard patriotism justified by this, and I've heard that our culture is seductive, but I've never heard that governments find our ideals attractive or anything remotely like it.

malandrew 13y ago

Great analysis both from the original post and commenters. Given everything that has been said I get the feeling that the most expedient way to promote democracy and freedom in your country if you have oil is to very clearly align with the US until you come to power and accomplish your original goals. The question or not is whether you can be candid/honest about such a policy of realpolitik with your fellow countrymen while you work towards building a democratic system. If you were an iranian revolutionary that wants democratic change, you could probably go further and craft a foreign policy that plays to equally to the interests of the US, China and Russia, while crafting a democratic domestic policy.

lenkite 13y ago

"signed a formal deal affirming India’s right to civilian nuclear energy despite its having flouted the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty by acquiring nuclear weapons." How can India be said to have _flouted_ this treaty when India had never signed it ??

jvdh 13y ago

This article is being hypocritical in itself. The main reason that the US is losing face is not because it can't maintain the hypocritical position it had before. The main reason is that most of the revealed behaviour of the NSA is either illegal or entirely unethical. This goes far beyond hypocrisy. > It may attempt, as the former head of U.S. counterintelligence Joel Brenner has urged, to draw distinctions between China’s allegedly unacceptable hacking, aimed at stealing commercial secrets, and its own perfectly legitimate hacking of military or other security-related targets. How is hacking another country to steal military or security related secrets ever "perfectly legitimate"? It may appear to be so from the US side, but it is never going to be legitimate from the other side. And I'm sure that the UN (which has been founded by many countries, not just the US) has something to say about this as well.

frank_boyd 13y ago

The hypocrisy elephant in the room: "NEVER FORGET" but "NEVER REMEMBER" (that 9/11 was the result of the US (CIA) recruiting and playing Osama bin Laden).