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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   29284 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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The latter seems like the biggest scandal since JFK assassination.

I cannot tell if this is intended to be hyperbole. I feel like I could name a dozen government scandals worse than anything the US government could possibly have been doing with Twitter. Iran-Contra? NSA spying? Watergate? Pentagon papers? The government pressuring a social media company to suppress speech it doesn't like and promote its own agenda is bad, to be sure, but I am not sure it is "sell weapons to Iran and send the profits to South American rebels in direct violation of an act of Congress" bad.

Watergate was a partisan hitjob on Nixon, who did nothing wrong.

Iran-Contra is definitely a bigger scandal in my mind, as are the Snowden revelations. But this seems like a direct extension of Snowden's leaks, showing how the federal government suppresses, surveils, and manipulates speech to maintain control.

But I would say complete warrantless (or rubber stamp secret courts, which is actually worse) surveillance of every single person across every single server that sends data through America is still the biggest scandal in my lifetime, and until someone takes up the mantle of JFK and tries to break the NSA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds, our reaction will continue to be feckless.

until someone takes up the mantle of JFK and tries to break the NSA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds, our reaction will continue to be feckless

If I am reading this correctly, you think there needs to be a martyr president who catches a bullet from the feds to galvanize the people? Because frankly I don't think even that would result in much. Best case scenario is it riles up a group of people, but the whole thing gets spun into a culture war issue. But to begin with I seriously doubt anyone who would earnestly attempt to defang/disband the NSA would ever make it to being president. Bernie is probably the closest.

Hm, if Nixon did nothing wrong, and it was merely a partisan hit job, why did he resign? The Democrats had only 56 seats in the Senate. Why did Barry Goldwater tell him that he only had 15 votes in his favor in the Senate? Why, after the "smoking gun tape" came to light, did 10 congressmen who had voted against impeachment in committee state that they had changed their minds and would vote to impeach when the vote came to the floor? And why did the House minority leader state that he planned to vote in favor of impeachment.

Hm, if Nixon did nothing wrong, and it was merely a partisan hit job, why did he resign?

Because they nailed him very well. And I don't think he did no wrong - he was an outsider who imagined his rank gave him the right to behave as an insider. But that only works if you're doing what the insiders want you to do..

And it's probably fairly naive to think FBI / CIA who were involved had no dirt on people in the senate, and couldn't get some of them to 'see sense'. Collecting dirt on important people is one of the most important jobs of intelligence agencies!

I don’t think those scandals are worse.

  1. Iran is a different country. Our constitution doesn’t apply to them.

  2. NSA spying. I consider this similar level. Perhaps worse because this was government election interference.

  3. Watergate feels like child play to me. Some burglary.

  4. Pentagon Papers - again bad shit we did to people who weren’t Americans. We expect the CIA and Pentagon to fuck up our enemies

Act of Congress < Constitution

Doing things to non-Americans < Americans

This was literally a coup by the deep state against the will of the American people to overthrow a Democratically elected government.

Iran is a different country. Our constitution doesn’t apply to them.

The part of the Iran-Contra affair that is scandalous does not primarily concern events that occurred in Iran. The part that is scandalous is the part where the executive branch of the government deliberately defied a restriction on what it can spend money on passed by Congress, in violation of Article 1 Section 9 of the United States Constitution.

Watergate feels like child play to me. Some burglary.

Again, the significance in Watergate is not in the initial break in, it is in Nixon's attempts to impede or end the investigation into the break in, due its links to his campaign and top officials. Imagine some people are arrested breaking into Mar-A-Lago. Investigation by the FBI reveals the perpetrators are connected to high level members of the Biden administration and perhaps the president himself. The Attorney General appoints a special prosecutor to investigate. After the special prosecutor's investigation implicates Biden, he fires his Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General, because they refuse to fire the special prosecutor and end the investigation into him. Would you characterize the scandal here as "some burglary"?

Pentagon Papers - again bad shit we did to people who weren’t Americans. We expect the CIA and Pentagon to fuck up our enemies

The significance of the Pentagon Papers is only partially the things the US government did in Vietnam, it is also about the way the US government deceived the American people with respect to its intentions and motivations for engaging in the Vietnam War, a war that killed some 50k Americans!

This was literally a coup by the deep state against the will of the American people to overthrow a Democratically elected government.

Can you describe for me, as literally as possible the acts you understood the "deep state" to have taken?

The part that is scandalous is the part where the executive branch of the government deliberately defied a restriction on what it can spend money on passed by Congress, in violation of Article 1 Section 9 of the United States Constitution.

Did you say that Obama's actions with PPACA subsidies were as scandalous as Iran-Contra? Were you upset that the mainstream media barely covered it, nor were concerned in the slightest? (Even now, when I went searching for a link, there was basically nothing from any of the standard center-left outlets, probably because I used the search term "unconstitutional", and they almost certainly didn't want that mood affiliation anywhere near Their President.)

It is funny. Read your watergate example. You are saying “the problem was the cover up that had ties to the Nixon campaign / administration.”

Now, understand what the Republican complaint is here. We had the FBI—amongst other alphabet agencies—actively work to thwart sharing info they knew was coming out that would be harmful to one candidate because the IC favored one candidate over the other.

You might think the above is wrong (though would like to hear the contra argument) but how aren’t those facts clearly worse than watergate?

Directly violated the first amendment - paid a news media organization to censor relevant news with the desire to change a Presidential election (which they successfully accomplishment).

  1. POTUS spend money all the time without the approval of congress. Biden just spent a trillion on student loan relief without congressional approval

  2. Anything with impeding an investigation was also done with Biden here. Suppressing information of criminal activity by Joe Biden is well the same as Watergate. Except there’s more - first Amendment violation and direct interference with our Democracy

  3. Cia constantly doesn’t tell the American people what they are doing in foreign country. We’ve got like 100 Pentagon paper examples.

I mean I don’t agree with all a lot of these actions in 1-3. But it’s different for the FBI/CIA to propagandize American people on matters related to domestic politics with an end goal of changing election results.

But I don’t want to get into a game of X was worse than Z. Maybe Z is stand alone just a really bad fucking thing - like paying private news organizations to censor people. A direct contradiction of the very first value we wrote into our constitution that the government shall not suppress speech.

This seems to fail the turning test. The concern is that the IC took sides in a domestic election to favor one candidate over another by controlling the medium of sharing news.

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