State Department Fails to Vet or Monitor Military Aid to Egypt | Hacker News Reader

State Department Fails to Vet or Monitor Military Aid to Egypt

theintercept.com

This was on HN front page with 13 points but tagged as [Flagged]. I clicked "vouch" because while I'm not a huge fan of The Intercept (some of what they write is great, at other times it feels like they'll write anything that makes the US look bad) this article feels like something that's fine to have on HN, even if it's not something I'll upvote myself.

Would anyone who flagged it explain the reason?

> Would anyone who flagged it explain the reason?

Haven't flagged it myself, but I guess OPs user name "13375p33dp0573r" might have triggered some people's auto-spamfilters...

Leet Speed Poster????

> some of what they write is great, at other times it feels like they'll write anything that makes the US look bad

It's called being critical. A journalist job isn't to make the govt (any govt) look good. There are a bunch of publications dedicated to do PR for the USG so you're in luck.

I think you mis-understand me (I think my fault for not being clearer), I'm neither saying the USG doesn't deserve criticism nor that I don't want to read it. I love that The Intercept exists and think alot of their work is fantastic.

A journalist being critical isn't automatically a good thing, it's only good if they are being critical with reason. I'm not saying "if you write against the USG you should balance it by writing good pieces about them", either. Just sometimes I've read pieces from The Intercept that felt like scraping the bottom of the barrel looking for reasons to criticise the USG rather than finding good reasons and then writing about them.

Just because you feel that way doesn't mean that it isn't worth reporting on but I guess that would be a matter of opinion.

Regardless of US involvement, this article is strange: it's written as is Morsi's government was actually democratic and didn't commit human rights violations, and Muslim brotherhood was some kind of a peaceful democratic coalition. I have no love for current Egyptian military government or their methods, but such a typical dictatorship is still better than a radical theocracy.

During Morsi's presidency, people protested and mocked the government in the media without fearing for their lives.

You may not like the Muslim Brotherhood, but they are far more tolerant of dissent than military dictatorships.

Morsi was democratically elected.

So? A lot of dictators get democratically elected while publicly expressing their negative views on the concept of democracy itself.

It's really not. Propping up dictators and helping them to exterminate the secular opposition is what creates theocracies. Iran was not better under the Shah.

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