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Comment by grecy | Hacker News Reader

While many in the tech community won't see this as news, I think it's important for the American people to realize what the government is doing to other countries on their behalf.

For anyone that doesn't know what I'm talking about, I strongly suggest you spend some time in any of Honduras, Panama, Chile, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, etc.

People in those countries don't "Hate Americans because of their Freedom(TM)", they dislike America for what it's done to their countries for decades.

Americans need to know about this kind of action being taken by their government so they can have input on whether it should continue or not.

EDIT: Yes, I meant "Kind of action" ... thanks.

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^ This right here is why I don't even bother debating some issues with some people. I just know feelings/pride is going to be hurt and people will be offended. I just wish I could somehow tell them, without telling them, that if they only knew the stuff American-corp/gov does to other countries directly and in-directly they would know what's really behind "Hate Americans because of their Freedom(TM)". But alas, any site that I get my news from will probably considered "Extremist Propaganda Against America" by the folks I'm thinking of.

Would you mind sharing some of those news sites?

Not the parent, but a personal example; My father thinks Al-jezeera is "terrorist propaganda".

It may not be terrorist propaganda, but do you think Aljazeera will ever criticise the goverment of Qatar?

Which makes it a great source of non-Qatar news, which is probably 100% of the news I'm interested in.

If you are a showtime subscriber check out Oliver Stone's untold history of the United States. From his point of view the reaction we get from the rest of the world should be expected. He goes into great detail about why.

http://www.understandingpower.com/

just the basic huffingtonpost.com, bbc.co.uk(yes really, some partly consider this propaganda), freakonomics.com, HackerNews, Digg(yes I still check it from time to time), LinkedIn-News(this one is more based on who/what I subscribe to follow so this might be a special case)... oh and until GoogleReader disappeared I had TED.com feeds to read from time to time. I need to resubsribe with a different rss-reader. I think these sites are pretty balanced sources of info & news, but I do understand that huffingtonpost leans a very deep left-wing. Not extremist, but pretty deep. Though I don't recall them outright purposely lying about stuff.

I've had a subscription to the Guardian for ages (on my Kindle, I don't live in the UK) because I think it's the best newspaper out there, period. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guardian#Ownership for how it maintains independence (and why supporting it financially is a good thing).

In the context of China, this is a red herring. China is not a poor little country being bullied around by the United States. China is a major power and has a long history of engaging in cyber attacks against the US government and US companies, including many companies that people here work for. This is a serious PITA for the tech industry and has resulted in data being stolen from hundreds of companies. We expect our government to do something about it, and Snowden leaking the details of how they are doing it is not benevolent in any sense, in my opinion.

There is no China angle where it is easy to hate America. Not that I blame people, there is no credible peer.

We get mad at China for hacking us so shouldn't the Chinese get mad about us hacking them? Really it needs to stop on all sides but each side, government and civilians, believe that they are entitled to hacking foreigners.

I've never been in any of those countries, but I totally agree with the sentiment. By the way, you meant "kind of action," right? Unless that was irony.

> For anyone that doesn't know what I'm talking about

Can you elaborate? I have no idea what you are talking about. And I already live in one of those places.

Sure.

In Panama you could look at the shooting of unarmed, civilian students by American soldiers[1], or the invasion of Panama[2], an act that was condemned by the UN.

In Chile you could look at the ongoing intervention by the USA [3] - read the whole article, I especially like the quote "A White House press release in November 2000 acknowledged that "actions approved by the U.S. government during this period aggravated political polarization and affected Chile's long tradition of democratic elections...""

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martyrs%27_Day_%28Panama%29#The...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_invasion_of_Panam...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_intervention_in_C...

Is it really necessary to spend time in those countries to learn what the government is doing? I prefer to read about it I think. Is there an easy to read "international offences" type of list somewhere?

This being the top comment on a thread about how HN's new golden boy, Snowden, is just another scumbag says a lot about what HN is now. We have had vapid ranting articles up voted for the last two days in some circle jerk because people who I assume are usually intelligent have temporarily lost all capacity for critical thought in some deluded quest to take down the US. My brother thinks he is taking down the government by not paying taxes but he is only slowly shooting himself in the foot. I am not downplaying the importance of proper oversight of intelligence.

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