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Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

> My takeaway is that all previous U.S. administrations had pretense of morality and rules in both international and domestic politics

This is a perspective that continues to boggle my mind.

Every record of the United States acting internationally has been either:

Explicitly horrific (Invasion of Grenada, Vietnam, Firebombing then nuking Tokyo, Iraq etc…)

Attempts to Subvert or ignore international law (IPCC, ICC, UN…)

Or benefits some major industrial corporation (NAFTA, WTO etc…)

Please point to any type of transcendent “morality or rules” that isn’t just straight up large scale international realpolitik and propaganda around maintaining global capitalism on behalf of American based owners.

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Actually I mentioned "pretense" in the sense of US pretending to be the good guy.

What do you mean by pretense?

The word pretense to me means “we’re gonna actually try this and let’s see how it goes”

The United States has literally never done that and we know that because internal documentations for pretty much anything always have some kind of American benefit Nexus it is not based on any type of foundational belief that transcends the concept of “we’re gonna do whatever the people who are the loudest owners of the political system of the United States want to do”

Everything else including: Powell going to the UN with a vile full of rice is just straight up unabashed unequivocal propaganda

The definition of pretense is (from Google):

an attempt to make something that is not the case appear true. E.g. "his anger is masked by a pretence that all is well"

Yes that checks out, perhaps I misread your initial comment to imply that was something beneficial

Just read the official names of the American military operations and the pretense aspect will be impossible to miss.

I would say USAID (United States Agency for International Development) has done good work overseas:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Agency_for_Inter...

Like all large organizations and projects they are not absolutely perfect or ethical, as you can see in the Concerns and criticism section towards the bottom of the Wikipedia page. Still, I think they made some contribution to humanity. I have seen articles saying the withdrawal of funding has definitely hurt communities USAID had been helping.

I know the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) do (or did) disease prevention work outside the US. There are other examples like these. I don’t know if the government did more good than bad, but they certainly have done some good that is not just designed to benefit American big capitalists.

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