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Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

People make a ridiculous deal out of someone at any point doing any work with the CIA, or a company having IQT on their cap table, or anything like that.

Yeah, right, as soon as you get involved you instantly meet with the smoking man from the X-Files and see the dead aliens and become part of some kind of grand conspiracy. After that every single thing you say or do is part of some giant perfectly organized CIA plot. Please.

Most of what these three letter agencies do is boring.

It’s a lot like guilt by association: “this person did business with this person therefore they are totally the same on everything and part of some big agenda.” False.

I don’t think this means anything at all.

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> It’s a lot like guilt by association

What would you think of someone who works for KGB (now FSB) and propagandizes the values of USSR (or modern Russia)?

secondly: CIA job is exactly promote the image of a "liberal, nonviolent and honorable” agency, while killing thousands people to overthrown elected governments just because uncle Sam did not like them...

Most of the work is probably boring and not consequential on its own. But I think that's sepaerate from whether it's reasonable to encourage people to draw an ethical line. We probably wouldn't feel comfortable with someone who knowingly did work for the KKK, even if that work was just making photocopies, picking up office supplies, and keeping track of membership dues.

Yes, I think it's a big deal if you worked for a big evil organization on purpose.

Then you don't say stuff like “In my experience The Agency was completely different from its image; it was liberal, nonviolent and honorable”. It is not "guilt by association" anymore, it is pure complicity.

I don't even know much about her. I'm just sick of lazy conspiracism, which has totally taken over the discourse now because people aren't getting enough experience in the real world and living their life behind screens. Reality is not a TV show or a social media conspiracy theory.

I think she was probably an American liberal who worked with some people at the CIA who were nice at least to her and who also wrote about feminism.

And yes, the CIA has also done terrible things. It's a huge sprawling many-headed bureaucracy and she probably had contact with an entirely different part of it than the one running around fucking up Latin America.

Or hey, maybe since Gloria Steinem said something good about the CIA therefore all feminism and all 60s social movements were all 100% CIA psyops and everything she wrote was dictated to her through her brain implant. Could be for all I know.

This article says exactly the opposite: everything was completely coherent and known within the CIA. The information gathered on student leaders and members by the supposedly "liberal, nonviolent and honorable" side was never kept away from the "total assholes and monsters" who could sell them away to their dictator friends.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/23/a-friend-of-th...

Sure, but it is really interesting to think that the 50s arts and 60s youth movements as top-down "soft power" countermeasures to the USSR and communist revolutions, and that it's not so spontaneous as it's typically thought of.

Something similar was happening with CIA promotion of abstract expressionism in art:

https://www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus/en/did-you-know/la-cia-y-e...

Most of what the 3 letter agencies do is also fraud- some drunk station chief phoning in some changes as "I made that happen!".

The CIA is a pillar to prop up stuck cultures excuses for why they get nothing good done - when your own ideology has no explanation power and thus no real help to offer, except calls for endless uprisings and civil wars. It also keeps a whole "nonacademic" wing of academia propped up. For when your theories have no predictive power and reality merciless digresses- its all a conspiracy by the 3 letters.

Cultural Inability to Advance is everywhere!

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