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Comment by jammygit | Hacker News Reader

> Throughout eight years of civil war, Syrians who tied their fortunes to the changing whims of American policy have been systematically arrested, killed, and driven from the country.

> First it was protesters chanting for democracy—many took encouragement from Barack Obama’s statement in the summer of 2011 that the country’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, should step down. But the U.S. government looked on as protesters were killed or disappeared into the regime’s teeming prisons.

It’s as though the US government is on a mission to prove they should not be trusted. I hope most can get out of there somehow, this is very unfortunate

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> It’s as though the US government is on a mission to prove they should not be trusted.

I would consider that mission solidly accomplished at this point.

I can't imagine why I would place a lot of trust in any government. It takes a special kind of cunning, controlling person to even want to be a politician. Let alone become successful enough to attain a high position in a government. So I don't trust any government really. All I can do is guess which politician's incentives could be the most aligned with mine.

Seriously, does anyone in the US or outside the US, in government or outside of government, anywhere in the world trust the US government? I seriously doubt it.

Yes, of course people usually trust the US government. We do so every time we get on a plane, keep money in USD, or run Windows, MacOS, etc.

That doesn't mean the US was flawless before Trump. It had its flaws, just like any other government. But generally, they were trusted in scenarios like above, but also, for example, by diplomats to at least try to keep their word even across administrations, or by travellers not to be asked for bribes at the border.

People have become rather cynical and won't believe me, but still it is worth mentioning: before Trump, politicians, including the presidents, almost never lied. On occasion, they would try but fail to make good on a promise. Or they would err, or go to great lengths to avoid answering a question.

But actual lying, as in saying something wrong and repeating it even after it was pointed out to be wrong? It barely ever happened.

> Yes, of course people usually trust the US government. We do so every time we get on a plane, keep money in USD, or run Windows, MacOS, etc.

Trust isn't binary, nor does it exist on a single dimension. I might use the products and services of US companies, I might conditionally trust the judgement of some US government bodies, but there's always a heavy set of caveats.

I wouldn't trust a drug that had been approved by the FDA until it had also been approved by the European Medicines Agency. I would trust a NIST standard for metrology, but I certainly wouldn't trust a NIST standard for cryptography. I wouldn't ever allow a European customer's data to be stored in the US, or to transit US networks in plaintext. I trust US-made hardware and software about as much as Chinese-made hardware and software, which is to say I assume it's heavily backdoored. I haven't ever trusted the words of a US administration, red or blue; I do broadly trust that Merkel or Macron will mostly keep their word and mostly honour international law.

How about "I did not have sexual relations with that woman."

Or Watergate.

Because things always go super well when we act as the world police. Knock out Assad, ISIS takes over. Help out a rebel group, they later radicalize and declare the west their enemy. Seriously, I think after several failed attempts to establish "peace" in a region and the insane amount spent on military operations mortgaged against our children, you'd realize that's not possible and cut our losses. Why does it have to be the US? Can't the EU step up if it's such a tragedy. If UNICEF is involved the rest of the EU can send troops if they truly feel they need to be there.

You have a very short memory, the cognitive dissonance is beyond me unless you also supported the invasion of Iraq too? The indefinite nature of that should be a point that this can go on forever and it will. If we're going to stop being the world police, we have to actually stop getting involved and back away as we've been doing slowly over the past decade. This isn't a big surprise.

It is not so simple, these are proxy wars. We already saw Russia take over part of Ukraine, and Putin is hungry for more.

I mean, with everything that's happened since Snowden, it more or less started with ordinary US citizens losing trust in them before it carried over via other circumstances to nations like Syria. The root cause is elsewhere; what's happened in Syria is merely symptomatic.

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