The Nixon White House plotted to assassinate a journalist
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
This is what everyone tells themselves when they flip on their own morals, or "it's for the greater good" with the trolley problem.
The ends do, sometimes, justify the means -- as best we can understand the ends and the means. And Richard Nixon was just a violent asshole, using the thinnest pretext of "the greater good" for his own short-term and selfish purposes.
All I can hope for, morally, is for people do at least try not to be deliberately cruel to each other. Even that seems too much to ask a lot of the time.
And that’s key - if people can’t have consistency, a system of government never can.
Therefore all governments have a nonzero chance of “evil” and should be, at all levels, distrusted and where appropriate, dismantled.
There's this concept called "emergence" that doesn't agree with that reasoning.
> In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence occurs when an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own, properties or behaviors that emerge only when the parts interact in a wider whole.
It's sort of a corollary[1] to the Fallacy of Composition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_composition
[1] There's probably a better word here; emergence isn't necessarily true given the fallacy of composition.
1. The prohibition War on Drugs had nothing to do with public health, it was a cynical plot by the Nixon admin to attack its perceived enemies, African-Americans and leftist hippies, using the establishment and media. Ehrlichman admitted it in 1994 on tape.
https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/
2. The ideological cause of the Nixon admin was recreated by Roger Ailes in the vehicle of Fox News. It largely accomplished its goals of radicalizing millions of Americans towards their warped views and permitted the denigration and exploitation of women employees along the way. I would wager most nursing homes play Fox News constantly and their inhabitants, both worker and housed tend to lean that way. It's inexplicable how many poor whites believe/d Nixon and Trump were their saviors.
3. Nixon's alma mater's newspaper at Whittier College found an old listening device https://rense.com/general20/whi.htm
4. The assassination of Fred Hampton in 1969 by the Cook County's State Attorney, state police, Chicago police, and the FBI (J. Edgar era). Surely, POTUS Nixon signed-off on it. https://chicago.suntimes.com/2021/1/24/22244731/new-fbi-reco...
5. The first episode of the Nixon interviews drew a 45 share, the highest in history for a political documentary which still stands. The interviews has its own play and a movie, both named Frost/Nixon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_interviews
Reagan. My mother, born in 1961, adores him for some reason. I was born in 1979. Hell, my father has a room of trinkets to/about him.
I’m a leftist. Reminding them he was an evil man and his wife was a wack-a-doo is.. fun.
Why do you feel the need to do this? Does it provide you some personal validation that lets you sleep better at night? That you "bested" your parents?
I think your issue is deeper than politics. Militant atheists get the same kicks "besting" Christians. It's not a healthy way to go about living.
Perhaps instead of judging based on limited information, you should first look at your own circumstances and mind your own.
Edit: There is a teen-juvenile tendency of some people to annoy their parents. Those who grew up realize their parents were just people, not mythological, one-dimensional figures. At the age of majority, an inconvenient modern truth is familial relations become optional as opposed to required because survival assistance usually ends unless there's a failure to launch. Wise parents should aim to promote self-reliance, 360-degree honesty, considerateness, courage, BS-detecting critical thinking, and confidence as much as possible.
First, get help. Liking a political candidate does not make you unhinged and violent.
> Perhaps instead of judging based on limited information, you should first look at your own circumstances and mind your own.
It's a public forum, sorry I ruffled feathers identifying a problem child that somehow made it to adulthood. I mean, their parents must've done something right. Except for the part where they raised an ingrate that judges them entirely on their affinity to a particularly, extremely popular nationally, candidate.
> Wise parents should aim to promote self-reliance, 360-degree honesty, considerateness, courage, BS-detecting critical thinking, and confidence as much as possible.
Indeed, the person's parent's failed in one aspect. They raised a person who is so high huffing their own, admittedly leftist, farts they cannot even drop the veil for a minute to enjoy the likely little time they have left with the people they've known their whole life. It's pathetic. I say that because there is no word in the English language with more power that I know. It's beyond pathetic. The "dangerous, violent" person is the poster. I am sure you could say the wrong thing to them at a bar (perhaps "trump did some good") and get yourself into a knife fight. I've ran into these people before. They're better off siloed in a room with padding on the walls than out on the street. Perhaps with a hit reel from 2008-2012 Obama speeches playing repeat. If unhinged leftists were capable of anything California wouldn't be having a mass exodus and the streets wouldn't smell like excrement. And yes, they do. I travel there weekly.
Second - “fun” because it is. They are both close in age with me, and we have great rapport with this stuff. Heck, the three Chomsky books my dad bought me last month say plenty.
Third: Reagan was a fucking terrible president and if I didn’t focus most of my history on how evil Kissinger was, I’d have more to write about ole Ronnie.
'78 myself, social democratic Marxist now having been lied-to early by the billionaire con artists of the libertarians, disappointed by elitist suits of the neoliberal (Clintons), and utopian anarcho-syndicalists. My father was always a Murican Trumpists waiting for his day to open carry and strut the flag behind a Ford pickup. It's sad to say my mother has/had vacillating views, is a terrible judge of character, and was/is easily influenced by anyone around.
Here's my rant no one cares about for the year:
The answer isn't burn everything down, blame migrants, or irrational exuberance over Obama; it's look in the mirror and compare how the rest of the world does things better. American exceptionalism and triumphalism is a resting-on-laurels prescription for a has-been recounting their high school glory days to another junky in the alley with a needle in their arm.
"Defund the police", "stop and frisk", "trickledown economics", and "Big gubberment bad" are all stupid ideas. That there are QAnon-adherents, big coal DINOs, LGBT-washed DINO corporate phonies, CV liars, and worse representing The People, taking a salary from them, acting as tools of billionaires, and sitting in the same building as Greg Casar or Ro Khanna is shameful and disrespectful. It's clear to anyone not a moron that neither US political party can deliver anything substantial except more handouts to billionaires. Bernie Sanders was Henry A. Wallace'd because he was too weak, too nice, and let Clinton steal WV even though she completely lost every county. The only way is for millions of people to (nonviolently, obviously) take over Washington and convince those who support this corrupt corrupt regime to press the reset button. SCOTUS is completely in the tank for the Republicans and will deliver them cake on a silver platter for years. Again, Obama was weak and went over to the side of the corporatist neoliberals. Campaign finance reform is a pipe dream because too many politicians enjoy the benefits of lobbyists' and billionaires' cash and do their bidding. The US isn't a democracy (or a representative republic), it's a kleptocratic plutocracy. The middle-lower classes should be extremely motivated and organized to change the situation as tens of trillions of wealth were transferred (stolen) from them over the past 50 years, but no, Jan 9th was the Tea Party's "winning lottery ticket", an orgasm of disorganized, misdirected violence like that drunk, conspiracy theory-spouting uncle in most families. Voting in such a system legitimizes it when effort is better spent figuring out how to wrest control of it: 1. crowdfund billions to buy leverage to clean it up. 2. ten million people marching in DC. 3. (Maybe your idea here.)
If you don't want power to go to the rich, TV celebrities, or elect a populist fascist, then limited time sortition "jury duty" by competent civil administrator candidates as the Athenians did is possibly the only way to divvy out most roles. Until then, enjoy manufactured popularity contests.
https://www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/Gilens%20homepage%20mater...
PS: Care homes are the most likely hotbeds of neofascist tendencies.
I think we have seen a lot of that in the last 30 years or so, for sure.
"Defund the police" is an incredibly stupid name given to a collection of ideas, some of which are genuinely great ideas.
One example is that police are being asked to insert themselves into situations where they are not trained or prepared, all because we simply don't have any other agency to contact.
We could instead create community services where mental healthcare professionals and social workers can be dispatched to deal with situations like people in the middle of a mental healthcare crisis, welfare checks, or even literal children throwing tantrums, instead of sending armed police officers who don't know what they're doing. Police and EMS can be dispatched as well if the situation is dangerous, or people are injured, but most of the time they won't be needed at all.
Since police departments won't be dealing with those issues anymore it frees up a lot of their time and resources so money can be diverted from police budgets to fund these new community services without impacting the ability of police to deal with criminals, and police can now focus their attention on actual police work without being distracted by non-law enforcement tasks.
That way the people still get the help they need and police spend less time shooting autistic people, or pepper-spraying 9 year old girls.
"If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning"
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/07/he-was-...
Did they ever tell a lie, or embellish their stories for dramatic effect? In this case, it appears so, because the stories are inconsistent.
The Washington Post article claims the idea came from Charles Colson, who contacted Hunt and proposed assassinating Anderson by using an untraceable poison, like LSD. After that, they brought Liddy in the conspiracy.
But Washington Post also links to [3], where we learn that Liddy considered Anderson a "fit target for killing", not because Anderson was a pain in Nixon's neck, but because he doxxed some American spy who lost his life because of that.
True or not, Liddy says he also planned to kill Hunt himself.
To which Hunt states that Liddy was "a posturer with doubtful credentials as a killer " (one wonders if that was in comparison with his own "credentials") and "suggested he (Liddy) was mentally unbalanced".
What a mess... I'll take anything these guys say with a big grain of salt.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Howard_Hunt
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._Gordon_Liddy
[3] http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg%20Subject%20Index%20...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Orlando_Letel...
https://www.warhistoryonline.com/cold-war/richard-nixon-nort...
It's a good, plausible story. But it's not terrifically sourced [1].
[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/north-korea-richard-nixon-...
Seriously, though: several of the Trump campaign's architects (Paul Manafort, Roger Stone) got their start in the Nixon administration.
Nixon for life apparently. Stone has a tattoo of Nixon on his back.
"Poisoned with LSD?"
Howard E. Hunt (the source of this) was a CIA officer with quite a checkered past including leading the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and involvement in Watergate.
I'm not sure I'd take these stories at face value.