Hacker News Reader

Comment by xenophonf | Hacker News Reader

I am so disappointed. The kinds of outreach and charity provided by USAID isn't perfect, but the intent behind it was always good. Heck, if anything I'm really, really proud of the humanitarian work the U.S. government does, including USAID at State and NIH and CDC at HHS. Overthrowing governments is completely at odds with humanitarian missions, never mind the fact that the outcomes (especially in the Americas) for covert U.S. interventions in foreign governments are _not_ generally positive.

View on HN

> Overthrowing governments is completely at odds with humanitarian missions

Is it? Oppressive regimes can pose a direct threat to human well-being and sometimes the best thing you can do for people's humanity is to overthrough said regime.

When are we going after the house of Saud?

> When are we going after the house of Saud?

There's actually been increased isolation from Saudi Arabia over the past year.

Human well-being, along with literacy, are Cuba's strong suit. They send doctors all over the world, such as during environmental disasters. During the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the U.S. sent troops, weird. But I guess the Haitians are free to eat mud cakes. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jul/29/food.internatio...

There's more to well-being than being nominally healthy and literate.

Cuba might have great doctors, but they're not much use to political prisoners. Cubans might be literate, but they can't read whatever they want. [1]

1: https://www.hrw.org/americas/cuba

Maybe there would be more political freedom elsewhere if all the orange, red, purple revolutions weren't being orchestrated by washington.

why are all of the anti-us comments being up voted and the the reverse down voted? I feel like the voting system here on hn does nothing but push one specific agenda/view

That (or the opposite) is a sign that this is a political article, and as such should simply be flagged and removed as off-topic.

I have not down voted morgante, I want dialog. Sorry if I'm not spewing the party line.

I always think that when people compliment Cuba's medical system it sounds an awful lot like people saying of Mussolini "but at least he made the trains run on time".

Did he? Well that is commendable. I also read that he was not gung-ho like hitler to round up the jews. Otherwise, yeah, the dude had to go.

Technically no he didn't, not any more so than they normally run on time in Italy anyway. Even if we assume it was true though, should it really color our opinion of him?

I mean shit, during that time period the Germans campaigned against smoking and began construction of the autobahn. Those things were positive and are correctly credited as things that they got right, but obviously those things should not be used to justify the regime in any way.

(http://www.snopes.com/history/govern/trains.asp)

Nazi crimes did not stop the U.S. from recruiting their rocket scientists and welcoming their intelligence people into the fold. I was just correcting Morgante. I'm not saying Cuba is some social paradise. But you sure seem to be comparing Cuba to Nazi Germany. Something I thought only those exiles did.

Althought strictly speaking I would say that I am comparing Mussolini to the Nazis (@gadders is the one that compared Cuba to Mussolini's Italy), I firmly believe that you can compare anything to anything.

I can compare apples to oranges ("oranges are more acidic and juicier, and apples are crunchier, although both are quite tastey"), I can compare apples to Hitler ("More people have enjoyed apples, and Hitler was a better painter than any apple that I have ever seen, although both are biological organisms") and I can certainly compare any world leader to Hitler and any government to the Nazis.

What I am certainly not doing is equating them. Mussolini's Italy and Nazi Germany were similar in many respects, and dissimilar in many other respects.

I meant compare as balance, equate. but I'm sure you understood that you pedantic ass.

I am not being pedantic, I have genuine concern about blanket objections to comparisons to Hitler or the Nazis.

Obviously nobody was actually equating Cuba with the Nazis. Nobody in this discussion believes that Castro is ordering the extermination of millions. Nobody in here believes that Castro wants a land war with Russia, wants to invade Poland, or has any particularly threatening military aspirations.

Nobody in this discussion even believes that Castro and Hitler are even as evil or morally bankrupt as each other, despite the obvious geographic, temporal, political, or military differences.

You of course know all of this.

The comparison that was actually made was drawing attention to perceived similarities between defenses that are mounted or have been mounted for Mussolini and Castro. (Namely, pointing out that despite all the other bad things that have been said about [subject], at least [subject] excels in one particular way. The person who made drew attention to this perceived similarity perceives a similarity because they believe the "particular way" that the subject excels is of little relative consequence in the grand scheme of all of [subject]'s actions).

I could just as easily compare my ex-boss to Mussolini: "Say what you want about [REDACTED], at least he came in to work on time." In this case my "defense" of my ex boss is actually an sarcastic quip that is meant to be critical. However obviously I am not balancing or equating an ex boss to a 20th century Fascist.

Having a train arrive on time does not equate to getting needed medical care, or having survival rights put ahead of someone else's property rights. I was not building a defencse for Cuba. I was correcting Morgante's implied point that Cuban people's well-being requires immediate action, like they are dying. On the contrary their health is much better than surrounding or any third world conditions. I corrected that. Then I'm marked as an appologist, comparable to defending hitler and mussolini which is nonsense. I don't see Cuba as a paradise. I don't see Cuba as needing to be villified as a dictatorship either when that is all what the U.S. sets up around the world. So the U.S. kidnaps Haiti's Aristide, and the place is still corrupt, still a basket case. Running to the West like the Ukraine coup plotters did does not fix things when fascists are running amuck and you are in debt with the IMF up to your ears. The freedom the U.S. govt wants for these countries is the freedom to destabilize them and once they have "our bastards" in place they look away like with Saudi Arabia, Columbia, Honduras, and Libya and people like you quickly stop squaking about freedom.

Yeah they have a great medical system! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TD7mLp9j-3k

People repeat what they hear without knowing the reality. I'm sure everyone in NK has the same standard of living as Pyongyang too.

/Sarcasm

You would make a great PR rep for NSA :)

The doctors Cuba sends to other countries, The cuban government gets paid for, it's a business. They keep armed guards on them to keep them from defecting. My father in law was sent by the Cuban government to Libya in the 1980s under the same type of "work exchange" system.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com