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."
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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_131...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.
'The claim that [insert political force here] is able to claim legitimacy only through hypocrisy is one of the oldest in politics,' and it sounds like something from Noam Chomsky's playbook too.
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].
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.
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.
> 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.
I once started a "so, what how do YOU earn a living?" on r/hailcorporate, where people complain about blatant corporate influences. Most of them work in marketing/advertising. Myself included.
It's not so black and white, of course- I do sincerely believe that I'm trying to be a force for good- and that's probably what a lot of politicians genuinely believe, too.
RE: Google, I think it's totally okay to be an advertising machine if you build something like search. As long as search itself is not compromised. In which case we (speaking for the non-techies here) would still have to suck our thumbs until something better came along.
Mmm.. I disagree with the assertion (both yours and the link to the other comment) that advertising is evil.
There are types of advertising that are evil (that which is extremely manipulative or false/misleading), but suggesting that showing me a picture of a specific brand of hamburger, telling me why it's awesome, and suggesting that I buy one, is somehow morally wrong, doesn't even pass the laugh test.
Extremely manipulative or false/misleading advertising is extremely evil. Slightly manipulative or false/misleading advertising is slightly evil. 99% of advertising isn't about the product itself as much as about how you will feel or be perceived if only you buy it. Even the web is full of that, there isn't a day where not a landing page gets posted on HN which is full of fluff instead of simply factually describing what the product does, not to mention how it compares to the 500 other products that do the exact same thing. Advertising, for the most part, is designed to route around the informed decision making process, and trying to associate the product with other things, instead of a detailed description of it. That you suggest that makes up the minority of advertising, or that there is a honest, factual way to "suggest" someone buy a burger, is what's laughable to me.
Compare such stuff to, say, the description of a table in a catalogue; material, dimensions, a photo of it without a person in it = "kbye, and thx for not wasting my time or trying to push nonsense into my brain". Anything beyond that is evil in my books, and evil being subjective, you don't really get to decide about that either. I can explain why I consider it evil, I just did, and just saying "nope" is not sufficient to convince me otherwise.
Users, given the choice between paying for things and being inundated with ads, overwhelmingly choose the ads. I don't get it either, but advertising isn't some conspiracy, it's giving the people what they want. Ambitious social reform programs have left enough literal and metaphorical bodies in their wake that I want none of that.
Your linked argument that advertising makes things more expensive doesn't work out; ultimately businesses need to create awareness of their products and there's a zero-sum game for attention to be won. These costs will be borne by the purchasers of products no matter what you do. As technological progress makes design, manufacturing and distribution cheaper but advertising no more cost effective, there's a sort of Amdahl's law pushing advertising's share of costs up.
That said, advertising and advertising-supported products sound like an incredibly dreary thing to work on, so I'll continue letting someone else do the "stuff for which users are not willing to pay" thing.
> 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?
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.
In other words, you do believe might makes right, or at least there's no point in doing right if you can't do it for very long.
I am not so cynical. But neither am I naive. I believe (as possibly you may also) right is right, and it is not defined by winning (but you feel right is pointless unless without wining). Right is not defined as the ultimate outcome of geopolitical darwinism. But I also believe in self-fullfining prophesies. The world ultimately reflects us. We get the world we deserve.
Imagine if the United States unwaveringly played by the same rules internationally as it must domestically, per our Constitution. Rather than gaining power by leveraging the corruption and self-interest of foreign politicians, we'd gain influence by winning hearts and minds, and push the world by example rather than at the end of a bayonet. Idealistic? Perhaps. But it is a fallacy that idealism contradicts realism.
The literal definition of "cynicism" is "the belief that people are generally selfish and dishonest." I do not believe myself to be a cynic, nor do I think my viewpoint requires any cynicism. I would instead say it's empiricist. You can't look at the facts, the history of the world as we know it, and conclude that there is a stable equilibrium where nations cooperate peacefully without anyone making them do so.
Your point about "playing by rules" suffers from a basic conceptual problem. The very concept of "rules" is meaningless without someone to enforce them. Otherwise, it totally rational to break the rules. In such circumstances, the party that doesn't break the rules usually doesn't win, so the system rapidly degenerates into nobody following the rules.
> You can't look at the facts, the history of the world as we know it, and conclude that there is a stable equilibrium where nations cooperate peacefully without anyone making them do so.
You also can't look at the facts and conclude that there isn't - you can only conclude that there hasn't yet been such an equilibrium. We have been running more or less democratic systems of governments more or less successfully for some number of years now, but there was a point in time before that where you could have said "you can't look at the facts, the history of the world as we know it, and conclude that democratic systems of governments can be successful". Making conclusions about the future based on the past doesn't work, all you can do is hypothesize.
I suppose you probably meant that the odds of a stable peaceful equilibrium seem very low based on historical evidence, and I'm just being pedantic.
Not in an absolute sense. Whether it is rational depends entirely on what you value. It may be rational for some people to resort to cannibalism to survive if stranded and starving to death, and absolutely not for others.
> conclude that there is a stable equilibrium where nations cooperate peacefully without anyone making them do so.
> The literal definition of "cynicism" is the belief that people are generally selfish and dishonest.
This is debatable. Roman hegemony has created 400 years of peace whereas US has been involved in wars since WW2.
I am not a us citizen but I don't have a problem with US trying to improve the life condition of its own citizens first (everybody does it). However, believing that US is completely fair to the rest of the world is too naive. The article actually identify several unfair behaviors: [...] A double standard on torture, a near indifference to casualties among non-American civilians, the gross expansion of the surveillance [...].
Rome did create 400 years of peace, but it did so by outright conquering a vast swath of the known world and creating vassal states. And it's not like it didn't protect that peace through war: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Romana ("The Legions patrolled the borders with success, and though there were still many foreign wars, the internal empire was free from major invasion, piracy, or social disorder on any grand scale.").
> However, believing that US is completely fair to the rest of the world is too naive
Sure, but asserting that the U.S. is the most benevolent hegemony in history does not require believing that the U.S. is "completely fair to the rest of the world."
"by far the most benevolent hegemon in the history of the world" - I dunno....Great Britain/the commonwealth did a few good things. Pax Romana wasn't too bad. The mongols were pretty benevolent and accommodating.
>"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?
The realist in me appreciates this point, but the parts of me which are more hopeful think that this idea is the last justification available to people who are unwilling to investigate alternatives. Even if you accept that in nature there is only power: the ability to do, there are many ways to exercise that power. What if that power came from a legitimate belief that the people in the world who aren't US citizens are equally as important? American hegemony does prevent potential worse situations, but that's not its purpose. It's to protect Americans and money.
The US is certainly not benevolent, even if it were "the most benevolent in history".
How exactly do you attribute peace in Europe to American hegemony? How do you at the same time ignore the conflict and oppression that is certainly the result of American hegemony in other parts of the world?
I don't see the connection. What does spamming our diplomatic contacts with RIAA propaganda do for us? Look at the Wikileaks diplomatic cables. They are full of "spam diplomacy." You are imagining a trade-off where none exists.
"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?"
The US is not limiting itself to keeping Russia and China in check, and that is the problem. Hardly anyone would claim that the US should abandon Taiwan to its fate. Yet at the same time, why is the US military being used to expand the reach of US businesses? Why are we in the business of support cruel dictators, and even overthrowing democratic governments in favor of dictatorships? Why continue the embargo on Cuba? Why do we ignore the UN when it suits us, then use the fact that a country ignores the UN as a pretense to attack it?
The answer is that we shouldn't be doing these things, but that the 50 years that have elapsed since the peak of the Cold War, in which both the Soviets and the US had influential voices espousing preemptive nuclear strikes, is in world-historical context the blink of an eye, and it's going to take time and effort for us to shake off the strategies and positioning we (often foolishly) adopted to win that war.
Except for the UN thing. While I agree that the UN is used (on all sides) as a fig leaf, we haven't waited for countries to disobey the UN as an excuse to attack them, but rather used the UN fig leaf as part of a justification for wars that had already been decided on. In the case of Iraq II, that was a grave mistake on our part, but the mistake has little to do with respect for the UN. The UN is simultaneously important and undeserving of much respect.
All corruption begins with the corruption of language.
The rule of law? The rule of whose law? Democracy? Does that mean the right to vote for politicians who will continuously invent new laws and further restrict your freedom?
But then again, it is "free trade", that is the biggest joke. Does that mean: "free", as long as you don't trade in bitcoins?
The hypocrisy is that the US claims to be noble, morally superior and fighting for justice when that just isn't the case.
The US isn't looking out for anyone else interests except its own. International order is incidental to its objectives : Any positive outcome cannot be attributed to moral behavior.
> If the cost of maintaining that power is some hypocrisy...
Don't be stupid. The cost of maintaining "that power" is not hypocrisy, even though the article implies that it is. The cost is better represented by $700 billion per year in military spending (plus the $50 billion in foreign aid), and the only reason why this is sufficient is that the system is indeed "legitimated by liberal ideas" (if it was say Islamic law that had to be maintained, the costs would be much higher). Hypocrisy detracts from the acceptance of these ideas, and increases the cost of maintaining the system.
> then I say: there is nothing wrong with hypocrisy.
The article directly addresses your point: "This system needs the lubricating oil of hypocrisy to keep its gears turning. To ensure that the world order continues to be seen as legitimate, U.S. officials must regularly promote and claim fealty to its core liberal principles; the United States cannot impose its hegemony through force alone."
The U.S. "claim[ing] fealty to its core liberal principles" is a necessary part of keeping the world order running smoothly. Thus hypocrisy decreases the cost of maintaining the world order, because the alternative would be to give up on espousing those liberal principles.
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.
First i want to make clear when i say USA i'm talking about US government and US politicians, not it's people or the US "nation".
> is the US for or against Islamic extremism?
USA is neither for or against something , USA has interests. If islamic extremists could be manipulated easily , they would be USA's best friends. The truth is they use to be,during the cold war. USA "won" the cold war in Afghanistan by helping the Mujahideen. USA used to back Saddam Hussein , heck , USA used to sell weapons to Iran too. USA has no problem with dictatorships as long as it serves US interests(south america). And it still supports the Saudi regime , which is not very democratic to say the least.
The issue is , you cant act that way abroad and not damage things at home on the long run. That's happening now, all these NSA programs would have been shut down (officialy) if they were exposed 30 years ago. Now most politicians think it's for USA's own good.
IMHO Ben Laden and his crazy folks, won their war against USA somehow. They did not weaken USA with the attack, USA did weaken itself with its response, and exposed itself as hypocrite and not exceptional.
9/11 should have made core US principles stronger , it weakened them. Remember after 9/11 99% of the nations on the earth were behind USA, even most middle eastern countries. Is it still the case today?
Still i dont believe in USA downfall. As a nation, USA has something no other nation has ,the capacity to re-invent itself over and over. That's what will save them, not it's politicians.
> USA is neither for or against something , USA has interests
Sure, but his point and the point of the author was that they have been hypocritical about it, and making people believe that they are for certain things, such as democracy, and so on. They were very convenient excuses to start attacking other countries.
Now they say they are "against terror", while causing themselves terror to many others in Middle East, and creating situations that instead of making US safe, they put it in more danger with their actions.
So their points are that the leaking age, is the age where such hypocrisy will have very short lifespan.
> IMHO Ben Laden and his crazy folks, won their war against USA somehow. They did not weaken USA with the attack, USA did weaken itself with its response, and exposed itself as hypocrite and not exceptional.
> 9/11 should have made core US principles stronger , it weakened them.
I used to walk off the airplane, there to visit my grandmother, and immediately find her there waiting for me at the gate.
Thank god children don't have to go through that anymore.
The last time my little sister (then 8) came to visit me, she had been escorted through the airport by a stewardess. Who made some trouble about relinquishing her to me, despite the fact that I had been greeted with "Michael!" and a big hug, because I hadn't thought to bring photo ID.
Osama bin Laden's war aim, which he himself stated, was to get US soldiers out of Saudi Arabia. He's dead, and there are still US soldiers in Saudi Arabia. I'd say he lost.
What happened in the US after 9/11 was wrong, but to claim it as a victory for bin Laden is incoherent. Bin Laden never cared what conditions in the US were like.
For the establishment, when it comes to secular vs. theocratic regimes, the the key factor is not whether the regime is secular/theocratic or really any other type. The key factor is how is this or that regime going to help get cheap energy into the US's hands. They can talk a good game about promoting secular democratic governments in the world, and they have to talk that game, because it's the only quasilegitimate game they can talk, but it's often a lot easier to buy oil from a dictator. If the dictator doesn't want to play ball, they can campaign for regime change, in the name of democracy.
That quote appeared as a translation on an Iranian news site. Given that the Iranian government controls the media in Iran, it was reasonable to take the translation at face value.
So they got six years of mileage out of this lie, I guess it was time to kill it after six years, right? Not really. Let me see if any news outlet has drudged it up this month. Yes, Businessweek/AP did...
'When the conference was first held in 2005, Ahmadinejad made his infamous remark that Israel should be "wiped off the map."'
So here it is eight years later and the major news outlets are still printing this lie as factual news. Even after it was authoritatively debunked by the Washington Post two years ago.
Yeah, I don't know why they don't just use Khamenei's quote when trying to establish the Iranian government's antagonistic standpoint with regards to Israel. Especially considering that the Ayatollah is the real power in Iran and the cancer analogy is much more visceral.
Still don't see how this is evidence of propaganda in light of the myriad legitimate quotes are out there that are equal in meaning. Poor journalism, perhaps.
Part of the problem here is a matter of conflating people and government.
"Death to America" =/= "Death to Americans"
The better translation is "Regime change in America" -- they want a "better" (in their eyes) gov't in America, and an end to the obnoxious (in their eyes) American foreign policy. (Obviously, chanting does not automatically grant such. But whatever.)
And that works the other way around. "We support regime change in Tehran" translates into "Death to Iran". Iranians understand this. Americans do not.
When an Iranian official says "We believe that the unjust Israeli gov't will eventually fall, and only be a memory in the history books", they may mean exactly that. "Somehow" that gets translated into "Kill all the Jews" in certain Western media.
Of course, "kill all the Jews" is provably wrong, because there are tens of thousands of Jews still living in Iran. (The number has been declining, but the rump of a once thriving populous still endures.) If the Iranian gov't actually believed killing Jews was a positive thing in the eyes of Allah, they could rack up tens of thousands of bonus points in short order. They do not. Their quarrel is with the existing governments of Israel and America, not with the people in general.
I have to object to the negative depiction of "theocratic country". The Law is essentially a list of forbidden behaviours, with optionally sanctions for engaging in them anyway. The idea that the only one who is allowed to extend this list with new forbidden behaviours, is someone who may not even exist, has become an attractive proposition again. In my impression, the alternative, that is, letting the politicians and their servants manage this list, has now become seriously discredited. Such politically-controlled alternative is simply a guarantee for an incessant and continuous assault on our freedoms. So, yes, according to the theocratic alternative, the one who has the right to further restrict our freedom may not even exist. That is indeed how I like it too.
> So, yes, according to the theocratic alternative, the one who has the right to further restrict our freedom may not even exist.
Except in every theocracy, this isn't how it works. The people who have the right to further restrict your freedom damn well do exist, and will kill you if you say they don't have that right.
"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.
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.
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.
"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."
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?
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.
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.
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...
"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?
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.
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.
"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 ??
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.
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