The point is to use legal system to ruin one person to scare any people from running similar actions against US government.
US is loosing more and more of its standing when it comes to "spreading" democracy. You can't go and try to preach democratic values to, say, Belarus, and then do exactly the same in your own country.
Principles aren't really principles if they are being tossed aside when they become uncomfortable.
There we were, in a world where USSR had collapsed, China not risen yet, with a USA as the uncontested dominant power. It has the unique chance in history to steer the world in one direction or the other.
Building international legal standards, multi-lateral cooperation, ensuring that whoever had the most power at one point would be limited by the world community, was something within US reach, and was a realistic hope. As a bonus, the first thing the community would work on would be tackling the climate change, as it was an obvious field where every country of planet earth had a common interest.
Instead, because of a few hundred "miscounted" votes in Florida, the US president was a zealous anti-intellectual evangelist, who decided that US interests trumps human rights, that denying climate change was a respectable political stance, and instead of spending a mountain of dollars on research, energy transition, diseases eradication, social net improvements, he spent it on invading 2 countries despite experts warning that it would not solve any problem.
A lot of countries that converted to democracy did this because their populations looked up to US and wanted to have better lief.
You also put pressure on other countries when they claim are democratic but fail to do this in practice (which is the case of Belarus or Poland where I live).
US does this actively and frequently in many forms, by voicing "concerns" or putting embargoes on countries that break their own rules.
Obviously, that pressure is much less effective when you do same things you try to pressure other countries to not do.
Case in point, a system that does not care about rights of their inhabitants is usually much more effective at running large scale projects. For example, China just deciding to shut down everybody in their houses in Wuhan and shoot if you don't comply. And just like that they got their pandemic under control.
> One of the reasons strongmen rise to power in third world countries is as a reaction to imperialism
No, they rise because they can.
And not just in third world countries. Germany was definitely not a third world country when it allowed Hitler to rise and start a global war. What about Putin?
We see these guys mostly in third world countries now mainly because without democracy it is difficult to keep up with democracies without some special situation (like Saudi Arabia being gifted with huge oil reserves).
In non-democracies normal people have trouble preserving their wealth over long periods of time. You need to be "in favours" of the ruling entity to be wealthy and the wealth vanishes if you fall out of it.
Democracies are on the other hand, by definition, people ruling themselves, and this should in theory mean a lot of focus is on personal security and freedom. This should mean it is safer to conduct business over long periods of time, accumulate wealth and generally contribute to GDP.
I am the first one to be vocal of US imperialism, but you can't deny that it is US influence that caused several modern countries to be democratic.
But I feel after the 1960's the US has slowly lost that ideal, and the visionary leaders (Woodrow Wilson, Roosevelt or Eisenhower) are no longer anywhere to be found (whether the electorate don't tolerate or desire them I'm not sure).
Both the Japanese and Korean antidemocratic moves took place in that pre 1960 era for example.
Really?
Do you really think any international body would hold Saudi Arabia, China to account?
He who holds the purse, makes the rules. And they hold a pretty big purse.
Of course China and KSA would never join. And that would give other countries a clear and objective criterion to apply sanctions and international pressure.
Instead, judging what sanction a country deserves is an arbitrary exercise of executive power.
North Korea, China, KSA, are easy cases, but what do you know of Moldova? Of Hungary? Of Malaysia? Knowing that a country is held to some international standards judged independently would be a huge progress for human rights globally.
ps. What most people mean when they say "democracy" is "IMF conditionalities", et similar.
People have been used to so many cynicism that they have forgotten that countries doing the good thing is a possibility.
It never was. If we want to talk about the powerful being held to account by the international community, realise that at some point that means canvassing the idea of invading China/India/the United States/Europe when they get out of line. That isn't an option. That would potentially reduce big chunks of the world to sand and anything less can't constrain the powerful. WWII alone levelled an entire continent, and that was with primitive weaponry compared to what is available now.
Trade sanctions aren't effective at changing behaviour and it isn't obvious if they would do more good or more harm if deployed against a superpower. Note that most superpowers' economic problems were due to internal not external policy.
That's why "Corporate Values" are so empty. They get tossed as soon as they conflict with the profit motive. Google's "don't be evil" being the classic example.
Here in Poland we have a saying "you get to know a real friend in bad (times)" (Prawdziwego przyjaciela poznaje się w biedzie).
When you feel the values or friendship will not stand the test you will not invest yourself in it and it becomes empty words.
Just as democratic values that are set aside when it doesn't exactly align with profit or power goals.
People will not stand for something they believe to just be empty words and that's why things like Assange case are so damaging to democracy.
It's interesting when something almost identical appear in different cultures.
I think this is the closest to "absolute moral truths". People discover these because these are not some arbitrary rules, the are actually absolute, universal laws.
People understand subconsciously, for example, than a person that does good for no reason expresses higher form of being good that a person that does good in exchange for some kind of benefit.
It doesn't mean that mutually beneficial relations are not good, the society is basically built on spoken or unspoken contracts.
But we understand that a person that does good altruistically, not expecting any benefit for it, is much more likely to be trustworthy in all situation. And a person that does good expecting benefits may (not must, just may) turn on you when they stop seeing benefits.
And I think the same goes for countries.
When we see US performing their foreign relations game but only ever putting their weight when we can later find they were expecting some kind of benefit, and almost never for countries that have nothing to offer, it becomes transparent to us that US is basically much less likely to be trustworthy than if it did its actions based on principles.
A friend, in need, is a friend indeed.
> Einen guten Freund erkennt man in der Not (A good friend is recognized in times of need).
Edit: Formatting
Many of those same people don’t do anything about it. They still vote the same exact way they have for 15-20 years, they don’t get active and write anyone, etc.
The real travesty about Assange is that he’s not even a US citizen. He tried to reach out to the state department to redact sections and they refused to respond. Then they go after him for publishing what some other person leaked. Not only that, but the leaker had a publicly funded transition and a short prison sentence. Assange is charged and has endured much worse.
My principles (and many others) still stand. But our “deep state” doesn’t represent the majority.
Not sure that's true, go to reddit for example, and you'll see the majority are already brainwashed into thinking Assange is a Russian asset. US mainstream media is working on it overtime.
Ask some random person on the street about Assange and the best they can come up with is probably something about fleeing from the Swedish police for rape, something Russian agent, maybe something about how he treats his cat horribly or doesn't clean his toilet properly.
The Five Eyed propaganda machine [0] was very effective in smearing him, and even Snowden, among the general public in these past years.
First they banned many communities and users who was right leaning or even moderate in the past two years.
Then you just have an echo chamber plus propaganda and bots are everywhere.
Finally, Reddit is the whole world, not the US. Many of the US specific boards were more right leaning and have been banned.
If that is your excuse to compromise on freedom of expression, than you don't support it in the first place. Just be honest with it then.
What you've done there is pure partisanship: defining "the other side" by the worst among them while ignoring the behavior of the worst among your own side.
To be frank, I think we have a one party state with a global military dictatorship.
I had this motto in mind after I once witnessed how political decisions were made within one of the youth organizations of one of the two mainstream parties here in Germany and was disgusted by it.
> The parliament is the theater, which is performed, so that the citizen believes to live in a democracy. While the actual power is exercised elsewhere.
1. Be active in campaigns to boycott the vote. This can be presented both as a permanent stance against the regime in the US, or against the two-party duopoly; but it can also be presented as "I am withholding my vote from party X because it currently has unacceptable positions on issue Y - and I would like them to be punished by losing elections and know that they lost because of Y". If your choice is the deeper/more permanent one, you would likely to try invest effort in non-party organizational forms such as local popular committees, labor unions, protest movements etc.
2. You could join and support one of the existing third parties. Currently, the most viable seem to be: The Green Party, the Libertarian Party, and the recent initiative of the People's Party. The last one is new and is of particular interest, as the other two have been beset by internal trouble for many years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movement_for_a_People%27s_Part...
That’s what elected trump btw... a populist movement effectively trying to take over the Republican Party.
In my opinion, it’s also why the corporate media then attacked him (who btw I think is an idiot and don’t support)
I think it becomes more and more obvious by the day you’re correct. I honestly didn’t see it this way until some of the stuff in 2021.
Case in point So... 12 / 18 people in the michigan plot to capture the governor and stormed the court house were feds (FBI agents or informants directed by FBI).
From the buzzfeed news article...
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kenbensinger/michigan-k...
> Panic rising, Dan slipped away from the group for a moment and spoke into the recording device he was carrying, which he knew was being monitored live by his FBI handlers. The Watchmen, he said, were preparing to breach the Capitol. The agents couldn’t speak back to him, but he hoped they could at least warn the police about what was coming.
> Then something surprising happened. The Michigan State Police stood down and let the protesters — including those in full tactical gear — enter the building unopposed. They could even bring their guns, so long as they submitted to a temperature check for COVID-19.
Media goes wild and blames Trump few weeks pre-election. In reality, the documents filed in court make it look like the fbi entrapped people (remains to be seen in court).
It seems impossible to fix this (or even improve the situation) with voting. Both parties seem to be in agreement on how they would treat Assange. They only differ on unrelated hot button issues.
Is there any indication that stuff like this happens _more_ than in the past? Or have the world's standards just risen?
Or I’ve gotten older and more sour on this type of stuff?
Honestly I feel like the change has been, for me, more awareness and less attachement to the narrative forced down my throat. I also don’t believe it to be (as a native US citizen) a US thing. I see it in a huge swing in many countries towards authoritarianism in many ways and towards many goals. It isn’t so much a left or right thing (although I believe it to be more right leaning) but just a greater willingness to use power structures to control others.
Kaiser Wilhelm II took power after Bismark, and abdicated at the end of the first war. Wilhelm died in 1941.
Bismarck unified Germany in the latter 1800's as a constitutional federation with suffrage and elected legislatures, I don't know the fine details except it was some form of confederation and is considered a constitutional monarchy with elected legislature.
Technically both Belarus and Russia area also democratic countries. Both countries have this written in their constitutions.
Values is about what you believe in and strive for, and when you don't reach the standards you set for yourself, you figure out why, and adjust to be inline with your beliefs and goals.
These two statements seem to be at odds. In order to know if we're improving, we have to know if the behavior is becoming more frequent or less.
I'm not sure what you think "mattering" means, but I was responding to a comment that said "the US is loosing[sic] more and more of its standing". I'm not sure why you're so convinced that the relative decline of the US's reputation shouldn't be talked about, but it's pretty bizarre behavior to insert yourself into a conversation about it and assert so.
Oh, so it is fine to sin against democracy as long as you are not sinning more than in the past?
This topic being another shard of the US' soft-power armour lost.
The more it appears that the US reached and maintains it's global superpower status with force, coercion, underhanded tactics, and other abhorrent behaviors that contravene the Geneva Convention (which are handily side-stepped by conducting these behaviors in countries that don't adhere to such laws), it only works to justify extremists groups to use whatever means they consider necessary to achieve their own manifest destiny.
In that context, almost anything becomes justified - which is nightmare fuel for the moderate middle majority.
So, if they are a majority, why don't their values dominate?
1: Moderate doesn't sell eyeballs and clicks, so extremism gets the attention, which is what it wants because it will attract more of the "curious disillusioned" for potential indoctrination
2: Until unknown critical mass of perceived-threat-paranoia, there's no need to publicise / protest / soapbox one's moderate-ness because it can be relatively assumed. ie. I don't need to explain that I'm not one of those nutjobs.
If you're asking "why don't their values dominate" on a foreign policy level, well, I'm unqualified to answer that, except to say that realpolitik is far removed from most citizens' day to day lives (the conundrum semi-explored by A Few Good Men seems appropriate to mention here).
I am no fan of the Taliban or Hammas - and US probably correctly labeled them terrorist organizations - but it must also be acknowledge they are also “political parties” that have won democratic elections.
"How to Hide an Empire", Daniel Immerwahr
None of this was ever covered in public schools. I realize there's a lot of history to cover and kids can only absorb so much, but when people talk about "only focusing on europe and the middle east" it's good to have a couple of concrete examples. The Philippines actually has a larger english speaking population than the UK. Anyways, it always seemed that the Philippines got conveniently swept under the rug when discussing things like WW2 and American Imperialism.
Can you document this? I'm a southern California resident, and I keep hearing stuff like this from people online, but I know no local examples of this at all.
This is…. Reprehensible
Equal opportunity is a universal value that everyone can agree to strive for.
Equalized outcomes is a dystopian nightmare (equity).
The move to blur the lines between these two concepts is disturbing.
“ Equal opportunity is a universal value that everyone can agree to strive for.
Equalized outcomes is a dystopian nightmare (equity).”
Typically the state legislatures dictate what is in the curriculum broadly, sometimes extra specifically, and the administrators and teachers create their lessons to satisfy the legislation.
How does the teacher's union suppress subject matters in the history department?
It's very hard to get elected in this state without a teachers' union endorsement.
It's also hard to get elected without people voting for you, or funding for political campaigns.
But all his podcasts are phenomenal
I just read this post on Popehat[0] recounting an event while Ken White was working for an LA federal judge back in the day. He was brought to a ceremony conducted by Judge Ronald S.W. Lew where numerous, VERY elderly Filipino WW2 veterans were granted US Citizenship. This was promised to them in addition to veteran's benefits by FDR in exchange for recruitment into the war effort, and after the war quietly swept under the rug by the congress.
[0] - https://www.popehat.com/2020/07/04/the-fourth-of-july-rerun/
There are only 750-800 US military installations around the world. Most of these are small. This number has been reduced by about 1000 since the peak in the 1980s (cold war era). The majority of large installations are in the US.
There are 326 bases in the US. https://militarybase.net/u-s-military-bases/ (see the CSV list at the bottom). The US has a total of 50 states and 6 protectorates (Guam, Puerto Rico, etc...). There's no where near 80 bases per state unless you count National Guard Armories (parking lots with a gym in most cases) and recruiting offices. The US has a big military, yes, but not that big.
In retrospect, you are a bit right here. Pardon the bike shedding, but maybe that is not a precise definition due to the vagaries of what "military", "base" and "installation" means. Does room 641a count? I'm not sure. The US Military has its own very special definition, but the general public would know its own.
Under this expanded rubric, National Guard, Coast Guard and Reservist armories would definitely count, CIA black sites[0] would certainly qualify as well (and they are not in your list to be sure), in addition to listening posts, air fields, possibly also foreign naval supply points if they meet some of those continually manned criteria (and hell, why not? Its in the spirit of this thing, we'll just consider them 3/5ths an installation for the purposes of statistics), some forward operating bases if they are continually manned and resupplied for, lets just hand-wave 11 months. Also, private contractors are definitely in this if they have their own separate facilities and especially if they conduct military operations such as "security forces" in Iraq. Now that I'm thinking about it, air craft carriers should be included as well if they are on deployment ... I know, I know, thats pretty rare.
But you are right if you point out that this isn't a precise measure, that it changes continually, and that I don't actually know how many there are--it could easily be tens of thousands! Just scale the definition until it feels most comfortable for you.
That is the real point, anyhow.
[0] - https://prisonphotography.org/2010/03/30/extraordinary-rendi...
"only" was used because the op said "thousands".
Don't fuck with America she doesn't forget and never forgives.
The US was only ever seen as a spreader of democracy in contrast to the Soviet Union/Fascist Europe/European Empires. And it was, but no one knowledgable of the US thought it was an unmitigated assessment! You can definitely compare the US favorably to China in regards to democracy and freedom but no one should be fooled that we don't have perpetual work to make a more perfect union.
+100
To me democracy is also the failed form of it, you cannot just pretend that democracy is that part which you like. And also, you have to consider what better things it prevents us from having. Also, you cannot compare things out of their historical context. Of course democracy is not very bad when we have food and iphones, but you don't have to look very far (North Korea, Venezuela, Africa - you will be surprised how "good" democracy some of these countries have, yet they do not prosper) to see what happens when we don't have them.
One good book on the topic is "Democracy: The God That Failed" by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. It goes into massive amount of details and is not a pleasant read. Still, probably the best book in existence, for someone to understand what is wrong with our world.
On the contrary I think Hoppes criticism falls apart at empirical evidence like the cases you mentioned and his ideas of freedom will inevitably result in feudalism, not even a monarchy because the ruler would lack legitimacy and would face constant challenges. Monarchs as government can only exist if constituents can live completely removed from state influence. But that isn't possible in the world of today.
"Having an election" does not make it a democracy. The people choose who rules makes it a democracy.
Like I'm deeply sympathetic to what has happened to Assange. But I don't see how it has anything to do with democracy, given that he's not a US citizen, and US law rarely applies to non-US citizens outside of US borders.
When a nations legal system is manufacturing false evidence, the target of that become irrelevant. A legal system can't manufacturing false evidence, against anyone, and still be trusted.
While it is true (that you need a functioning legal system), it is also worth mentioning that a lot of regimes have excellently efficient legal systems and judicial branch that put any democratic system to shame.
The issue is what regulations you put in, how independent the judicial branch is and whether it is corrupt or not.
Source please?
Tangentially- what do you think about whistleblower protections where you are protected by law for reporting govt wrongdoing?
>prevent people from publishing materials showing US Government wrongdoing?
So the US govt provides whistle blower protections but it is also abusing the justice dept? The govt publishes materials all the time that makes it look bad:
People like Assange aren't whistleblowers, so those protections don't apply to them.
The US Govt publishes embarrassing information almost daily. The issue is more complicated than this forum leads on but its clear to me which side of the issue you all fall on judging by all my downvotes.
When your judicial branch does what executive wants then there is no protection
https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/wochenende/interview-un-sond...
As per the article, prison has three functions: punish, deter, and reform the prisoner. In regards to the deter function: any attempt to imprison a person can be viewed as an attempt to "ruin them" (through loss of freedom and through the scarlet letter of a felony conviction) in order to "scare... people from running similar actions."
The question in this case is: why is the U.S. trying so hard to extradite Assange? If it is because they don't want a repeat of wikileaks, then the grandparent statement is very reasonable. And I suppose another reference would be the U.S. relationship with whistleblowers. I don't have the energy to do the research myself, but I too have heard they come down on whistleblowers like a ton of bricks. But maybe someone else can supply that reference.