Hacker News Reader

Comment by southerntofu | Hacker News Reader

Assuming you're from the USA, your two main parties are exactly like that. The appearances have changed, but Obama drone-assassinating random children on the other side of the world was not much better than what Trump is doing.

Not defending Trump, to be clear, just saying US imperialism and fascism has much deeper roots and that removing Trump is not going to fix any issues the rest of the world has with the USA.

View on HN

USA government is corrupt, true. Current admin is balls-out corrupt in ways that have a French legislator calling out that impeachment would have happened there. It's shockingly out in the open corrupt, and that's saying a lot because most of the people ripping us off want to be somewhat quiet about it and not draw attention.

I didn't hear about this french legislator, but that's funny given the level of rampant corruption in french government. Nothing new (see also Pasqua, Foccart, etc), but in the past decades the information was not widely available so it was at least possible to pretend not to know.

Much of the government including Macron himself are involved in corruption scandals. Others are involved in rape scandals. Others in fiscal fraud. But you're correct they're not as open about it as Trump is.

Can you point to an objective assessment of Obama's drone policy?

Unfortunately, i don't know of a complete reference resource. I'd be interested if you found one. A quick research later i found this CFR resource [1] which probably underestimates the number of civilians killed.

I remember reports at the time on the Intercept and other media about the entire kill chain. If i remember correctly, the policy was to count anyone who was not proved to be a civilian as an active enemy in the body count. There was this DOD/CIA press conference announcing they made a targeted killing and that their target assessment was mostly based on the individual's height.

Then there's of course Obama famously and publicly joking about his children's lovers suggesting they should behave or would get killed by « predator drones ». [2] Let me know if you dig interesting links on the topic!

[1] https://www.cfr.org/articles/obamas-final-drone-strike-data

[2] https://abcnews.com/WN/president-obama-tells-joke-jonas-brot...

> famously and publicly joking ...at the white house correspondents dinner. I think that context matters.

I also think drone strikes exacerbate public outrage much the way mass shootings do: if we want to decrease gun deaths, limiting AR-15s isn't the way to do it because the vast majority of gun deaths are handguns. But mass shootings upset people, so we outlaw the guns that upset them. Similarly with drones, people don't get as upset about tens of thousands killed in a broader war, they're put off by the smaller number of casualties caused by drones.

You would think that if the policy was as flawed as you describe it would be easier to find evidence of it now?

It was not better, it was less. US imperialism has deep roots, yes, but a large chunk of the world who would tolerate a moderate level of it, don't tolerate this level.

I don’t see any not tolerating it in practice.

A lot of invective, but nothing in practice that really indicates not tolerating.

I hear rumblings about foreign companies disconnecting from American services and products. You don't turn large ships on a dime, but they are turning.

I don't think it was less, though only future historians will come up with actual numbers. It was less public, though.

Most of the world never tolerated it. Even when western governments tolerated it, the population did not; see also the huge worldwide demonstrations against the Iraq war.

I think the difference in perception is because the european oligarchy is now being effectively treated as was previously the rest of the world, so they're now taking a stance because they feel threatened, whereas they previously saw themselves as aligned with the US government no matter what.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com