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Comment by trabant00 | Hacker News Reader

I've been thinking a lot about these kind of scenarios lately:

Autocratic regime holds power over a territory with a long history of violent instability. The regime is guilty of corruption, nepotism, human rights violations, suppressing dissidents, etc. This is I think a requirement for it to hold power given the conditions. If the regime collapses even greater violence and general horrible stuff happens. There are plenty of examples in recent history. The Arab Spring comes to mind.

You have some leverage on the situation. You have reliable information about the bad stuff the regime is doing and you are a member of the press, a public figure, whatever. What do you do? What is the right thing to do?

And one step further and closer to the scenario in the article: suppressing the release of that information to protect the fragile stability and prevent a possible greater evil. Is that necessarily a bad thing?

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In this scenario, the CIA is not protecting against greater evil for the people of the country. They are just protecting the interests of the US. Now, the CIA's mission is to protect the US interests, there is nothing wrong. However, the means they use to do so may have something wrong with that. Installing and protecting dictators that are favorable to the US is unethical. Also the CIA does not furter "American values" in these interventions, for instance when suppressing weak democracies with strong dictators (Think Chile's Pinochet). This kind of intervention can easily go wrong, and will often do go wrong (Chile's case was but one example, the Guatemalan novel discusses another).

uh,,, gaddafi, saddam come to the top of my mind.

The iraq war was based on lies and financial interest. Do you really want to pretend, Saddam was the primary goal? And that nation building was accomplished, sir!

And gaddafi was toppled over french/sarcozy interest.

One who doesn't know history is doomed to repeat it. Post hoc justification of own atrocities is exactly the sort of cognitive failure that patriotic delusion (and thus the future of such) can cause.

Plus neither Iraq nor Libya ended up well. So they are examples of what not to inflict upon a country.

The loss of Gaddafi basically put the slave markets into overdrive, destroyed the power grids and water infrastructure, and generally did far more harm than good. Compared to other dictators that the US put in place, Gaddafi was far from the worst.

To play devils advocate, I would posit that so-called "American values" don't actually matter much to real Americans (source: red-blooded American here). What matters is living in comfort, and wielding fiscal power.

When you speak of our "values" then you start sounding like the propaganda that quite frankly, American's are tired of hearing about. We aren't all one-trick ponies here, just like any other place, we have a wide diversity of skills, talents, and values.

I mean, I care about values. But you’re right most people don’t and only care about short term comfort and safety.

It’s a big problem and the only solutions I’ve come across are inherently unpopular.

You're criticizing someone's use of the term "American values" when they both put scare quotes around it and said that the CIA was not interested in them. You're ignoring the actual comment and replying to the term "American values" in isolation with a response you've probably given many times before.

> You're ignoring the actual comment and replying to the term "American values" in isolation with a response you've probably given many times before.

It is fair to respond to an isolated point within an argument. If an argument contains a point that cannot withstand scrutiny, then the argument is unsound.

Furthermore, you should be ashamed of yourself for saying "with a response you've probably given many times before."

Such an accusation is easily verifiable if it were true. To make such a claim without even looking is immature and disrespectful.

"Possible" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

This is essentially a version of the colonialist argument - the natives are brutal, uncivilised, and unable to govern themselves properly. So even though our methods are sometimes violent and result in significant death and suffering, we are reluctantly compelled to exercise our civilising influence on this unfortunate situation.

It's just rhetoric. What's really going on is the "civilising" empire is plundering the smaller nation of resources, and is quite happy to act through local despots, dictators, and torturers to further that - until they stop being useful.

Even in democratic countries you have a milder version of this: the most successful politicians are usually those that can get the backing of the political class. Acting against the interests of the political class means you're without the bureaucratic apparatus that would have allowed you to make meaningful and lasting change.

There really does seem to be an "optimal amount of corruption" in absolutely any sufficiently complex society.

That there is optimal corruption, in a static system, makes sense to me.

Changing the system for the better (I.e. start requiring US Supreme Court justices to actually avoid conflicts of interest, or forbid coordinated out of state money for state’s senate races) could incrementally reduce the corruption stable point.

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What strikes me as a missed opportunity, is that democracies haven’t institutionalized a response to the inevitability of corruption. Despite most sources of corruption being out in the open.

Scientists don’t reinvent all the math for thermodynamics every time they stumble on some new context with disorder.

But currently, eliminating corruption is systemically difficult to change because of the corruption! There is no Constitutional responsibility to respond to it.

“Eliminating corruption”, including power centralization (which both requires, incentivizes and enables more corruption) should be right up there with “passing laws”, “implementing laws”, and “interpreting laws”, as an ongoing Constitutionally organized effort.

So many things, including the effectively two-party system that drives so much partisanship, are a result of corruption and the door left open for power centralizations like single party rule. (Seat limits on parties would completely upend that dynamic.)

What would that look like?

Citizen assemblies (juries)? Sortition? Modest, obvious reforms like passing For The People Act (HB1)?

(I'm very interested in the idea that there might be an optimum level of corruption. Counter intuitive and makes me uncomfortable; so it's probably meritorious.)

Corruption is a pretty fuzzy concept, and most people aren't very good to handle gray areas. I think it's an issue of there not being incentives for any successful group to keep corruption as primary topic in the Overton window, since it's equivalent to marking yourself as an outsider to the political class.

From time to time you'd have waves of populism that can be ridden, and outsiders can get in power, but those never really last.

In my Eastern-European backwards nation that's affected by endemic corruption I was actually thinking of founding at one point a suicide-party, that is basically unelectable but who's main purpose would be to bring the necessary ideas in the Overton window, so that the successful parties at least have to address them.

It's definitely not an easy problem, as most of those that actually understand social processes and can do something have mostly become wealthy and indifferent to the greater good.

Suicide party sounds like a great idea. However, there is a danger. If population is polarized (like US-style) and this new party will seem to be taking a side, party's image would be ruined for people who take the other side. That creates a risk that ideas you bring will immediately look bad for people on the other side because these ideas come from your party i.e. their opponent. But maybe it's not important, as long as ideas are now being discussed.

I was born in a country so corrupt and backwards that such a party would not make a difference.

I think most of the response needed to suppress bad behaviour is cultural and peer pressure. Rules and regulations just externalise that problem into an administrative function. People can demonstrate compliance without having to worry about the actual purpose of the rule. And that technical compliance can be used to protect them from any consequences.

Yes, there will always be power mongers and corrupt individuals. So why have a system of rules & regulation?

Why have a democracy, a constitution, laws?

Because separation of powers, regular mandated elections, and other rules that make power harder to centralize, reduce the chance of autocracy from nearly 100% to something much lower.

And debugging that system when obvious in-the-open systematic corruption occurs also has great impact.

I.e. the bill of rights, equal rights amendments, etc

Rules & regulations are a program running on squishy human “hardware”, of course, but fixing clear bugs makes a difference.

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Which is why my question isn’t whether fixing government system flaws is worth doing, but whether there is a way to make that activity more regular, more incentivized, more likely.

For instance, the simple rule of requiring elections on a calendar makes elections much much likely.

Maybe some rules that ensured party dominance resulted in an extended period of party handicap would do it? Less incentives and outright necessity for corruption when it isn’t going to extend your hold on power anyway.

I am sure that if a country was writing a new constitution, they could learn something from all the different corrupt vs. less corrupt behaviors of existing democracies.

Surely the best constitution isn’t a solved problem, and constitution innovation hasn’t run into some final optimization limit.

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Stockholm syndrome might reduce our awareness of these opportunities, but they exist, despite the difficulty implementing even simple reforms today.

That makes asking how reforms that reduce corruption, and power consolidation, could be made more likely even more important.

>Is that necessarily a bad thing?

One could argue that. I know an Egyptian that had to leave after critique of previous and current regime but now has some appreciation for the current one whilst still acknowledging it's terrible authoritarianism. Similarly I'm very close Saudi that recognizes how democracy protests were brutally suppressed with beheadings but considers them to have had no chance of success whilst also recognizing the presence of fundamentalists types that led to the grand mosque seizure and it's subsequent effects on the country and is thus somewhat of a monarchist despite supporting democracy in Europe. I imagine there's similar situations all over the world from Armenian views on Russian influence in the light of Azerbaijani threat to Africans choosing between resource extractors.

However those are locals seeing local nuance and not foreign interventionists with something to gain and I'd say the CIA has a horrid track record when it comes to choosing the lesser evil (Perhaps born from a cold war time when allowing non alignment and the like was sadly not considered an option.) to the point where you're better of looking at the interests they represent in a given scenario than any plainly stated claims about goodwill or lesser evils.

Consider another view of the scenario:

A small group of dictators and their affiliates holds power in a small country with abundant natural resources, which a foreign entity harvests at relatively low costs - only having to pay and protect the dictatorship, while the vast majority of the population lives in squalor and poverty, only having access to low-wage menial labor.

Democratization of the economy would entail vast economic losses for the foreign power, due to a steep rise in the cost of the raw materials (see Arab oil crisis), or the conversion of the country to an industrial power that doesn't export raw materials or agricultural produce, but instead manufactured goods, causing it to become a global power (see China).

In this scenario, the role of the CIA is to sabotage all economic and political development in the country - much as the British throne and its affiliated Crown Corporations attempted to do in the American colonies for the 100 years preceding the American Revolution. When people say, "the USA acts as an economic imperialist in Latin and South America", this is the kind of thing they're talking about.

This tradeoff makes much more sense from the outsider’s perspective.

Living in a stable democracy comes with a certain set of values and preferences. One of those is predictability. When stuff runs smoothly , interest rates are low and you can plan your life ten years in advance.

Now from insider’s perspective it’s a different type of a question. It’s increasing the risk of the violent things happening to you in near future vs long term benefits for your children. People value stability much less when they are on the receiving side of the status quo.

Yes, it really is a bad thing. All dictatorships suck except for a narrow class of people favored by or directly benefiting from the regime. Period. Any other view is either cope or Orientalism (“maybe democracy doesn’t work for X people”).

Sometimes it takes the subjects of a dictatorship multiple generations to realize that dictatorships suck, especially if they are partisans and their dictator is a “hero” fighting their boogeyman (secular dictator fighting religious boogeyman, religious dictator fighting secular boogeyman, chauvinist dictator pretending to fight some other country like in 1984 but really the biggest enemy is him, a minority dictator pretending to protect the minorities as an excuse for carpet bombing and torturing members of the majority to hold onto power, etc…).

Keep in mind that for long lasting dictatorships, half the population or more was raised on their propaganda. They’re literally brainwashed, and the dictator ensures that no one becomes independently successful enough to challenge their authority, so people often have nothing better to do that sit around, smoke, and talk about the regime’s enemies as if they’re the proximate threat. So don’t blindly accept when someone from a country with a dictatorship says their dictatorship is good. Trust me, you have it beyond good in America , you truly have no idea how bad a bad government is.

> All dictatorships suck except for a narrow class of people favored by or directly benefiting from the regime

And even they can fall out of favor and become victims in an instant. You only need to say the wrong thing or have someone report that you said the wrong thing (whether or not you did) and the party's over.

> If the regime collapses even greater violence and general horrible stuff happens.

There might be violence, but in general you can't know this. And in the end you end up arguing against democracy itself; the opposition cannot be allowed to win, even if they have the votes, because of the risk of rioting by pro-regime supporters. And in order to suppress them winning, you have to commit more crimes.

> There might be violence, but in general you can't know this

Well, in general we do know this because that's what regularly has been observed to happen.

>"suppressing the release of that information to protect the fragile stability and prevent a possible greater evil"

It is one thing to not start bloody revolution. Hiding information however is never good in my opinion. Rather criminal in my book,

Bad/good is a subjective matter, but I would say it is a mistake to prioritize lesser evil over long term effects and sustainable solutions. You can get away with anything in the lesser evil mindset.

IMO information doesn't have the impact most people think it does. It seems to play much more of a role in shaping long-term views rather than driving immediate short-term responses. One would have expected the Snowden revelations to trigger a monumental response. They did not, and so a cynic might say people mostly didn't care. But that also seems wrong. Rather it seems to have played (and is playing) a significant role in shaping people's views of the world over the long-term. Instead of driving people to do some radical action, it instead drove things like a great anti-establishment type sentiment, and more people to acknowledge the role of realpolitik in the world.

Things like the Arab Spring weren't really driven by information such as by well organized Western trained individuals organizing efforts to overthrow their governments. Those groups were largely just waiting for some event to use as a justification for a planned action. And in any large country those events will inevitably happen. This [1] article from the times is quite amusing. In a nutshell, 'No we didn't fund them to start protests, we simply recruited people who despised their government, and trained them in organization, networking, and other forms of advocacy. And then we made sure the protests that did happen received 24/7 positive coverage. But really we played no role whatsoever in these completely organic movements.'

So the point I'd make with this is that information itself is something that should be free. Because it shapes views. Where things get dodgy is in 'inorganic' organizing and promotion. Inorganic is always tough to define both because we live in a global world, and because behind any revolution there are always genuine and real grievances. But I think everybody can agree that the Romanian people overthrowing Ceaușescu after he called everybody into a square for a propaganda rally was completely organic [2], and the CIA overthrowing Iran over oil in 1953 was completely inorganic [3]. Lots of things are going to fall in between those two extremes, but the more foreign involvement (and propaganda), the less organic something is.

But information? Information wants to, and should, be free.

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[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/world/15aid.html

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_Revolution#Revolution...

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d'%C3%A9tat#...

Really nice insight: > So the point I'd make with this is that information itself is something that should be free. Because it shapes views. Where things get dodgy is in 'inorganic' organizing and promotion.

It is this that I would like journalists and even states to protect the people against. Not censor but a nice little banner like Youtube and Twitter saying this media comes from <something> and is part of a campaign. In that banner then publish the analysis and criteria used.

Youtube does it for in-video advertising so the logic exists even in the commercial space. I find it plausible it would be valuable in the virtual agora.

The US employs the largest psyop operations investment in the world, why would you trust the government to manage info authenticity and integrity for the public?

I can see the allure of a parental figure where the state makes sure its citizens are protected from bad stuff but I think you’ve got it backwards, it’s the state itself which is not only bad but has all the power and leverage for that badness to materialize itself. Unfortunately it’s not so simple when you want to give all the power to a group to wield over you, you’ll find they’re more interested in that power than protecting you with it even if they’re peformative about it

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