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Comment by ripb | Hacker News Reader

>"The Obama administration in my view is conducting a war against whistleblowers and ultimately against independent journalism."

This is spot on. When you use your power to ground another President's flight in the hope of catching a whistleblower from your own country on it, there is something very wrong.

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I'm always amazed that most people don't know about this incident.

@le_hackour said (and their post was insta-killed):

> In America, this kind of thing is hidden in fine print.

This needs to be unhidden. Any spammers want to donate some of their resources to actually solving problems?

Wow, I had no idea that happened. Here's a link for the lazy...

http://antiwar.com/blog/2013/07/03/us-violates-intl-law-grou...

Would it be considered topical enough to submit this to HN as a separate post?

EDIT: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8519052

Yes, it's pretty incredible. And try to imagine if a foreign power forced down air force 1 and boarded the plane. That would be an act of war.

>Yes, it's pretty incredible. And try to imagine if a foreign power forced down air force 1 and boarded the plane. That would be an act of war.

Absolutely. Imagine if Air Force 1 were even prevented from taking off from a foreign country to return to the US or similar, and the host country demanded to search it for X person or object. There would be massive diplomatic implications.

There's also the story where they hacked Belgian telecom, Belgium being an ally of the US. Isn't that an act of aggression too?

The problem is that American people still don't realize they are living under a regime that, although a lot more sophisticated than most, is really not dissimilar to any other authoritarian regime. We simply use ruse, facade, illusion, etc. to placate and pacify. There is really very little different between our propaganda, a la, "Greatest nation on earth", "rule of law", "one nation", etc. that isn't any less bullshit than all the other bullshit other regimes propagandize their population with.

The very closed in nature of our country is even evidence of that character. We do not want to open our culture and society, because if we realized how other countries lived and how they have solved problems we claim to be working on and how better others have it, we would not be all that pleased. So our regime tries it's darndest to shield the mid to lower classes' eyes with paroles of American exceptionalism.

There is not "a problem." Not even relevant to this issue. Perhaps many Americans don't understand how authoritarian the nation is becoming, but that is a far cry from a defining or singular problem.

Propaganda is propaganda, as you rightly point out, but equating one regime to another based solely on the fact that it uses propaganda is not valid. Degree is important, and there exist now governments both better and worse in more than degree than that of the US. Ignoring that distinction in your rhetoric makes it hard to take you any more seriously than the propagandists you oppose.

You're also a little far off the deep end with your insistence that the US is somehow blinding the middle and lower class to... what, anything outside of the US? They don't have to do that. Americans in those situations don't have the time or resources to spend that much time looking at or caring about those things, nor would it matter to them in any material sense if they could.

So yes, many Americans would be better informed if they better understood the nature of their government. But no, it would not materially matter to them, they would not end up doing anything about it, and your assertions don't actually end up being meaningful in any useful way.

What you may not understand is that because our government and those who control society are significantly more sophisticated than brutish regimes you are most likely thinking of, you don't seem to recognize the ruse and subtle means for propaganda that are used to maintain a certain state, rather than attempt to bruit-force a desirable outcome. We have a long history of brutish and vile actions that led our society to reach the point where a subtle background frequency keeps the system humming. Just because you cannot see something for your inability to step out from the mainstream and get a wider perspective, does not make your attempt at negating valid. It is easy to go with the flow and ride the stream; it is far easier to question yourself and everything you have been taught and think you know. It takes courage and insight not easily gained.

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