On 6/30/16 1:10 PM, juan wrote: On Thu, 30 Jun 2016 12:33:22 -0700 "Stephen D. Williams" [1] wrote: In the unlikely event that we elect Trump, He is unlikely to be elected because he's marginally better than that murderours cunt, your boss hitlery. Not sure why a sexist slur makes any difference. Murderous? Are all US leaders, in general, murderous because the US (and others) feels it has to act as world policeman in generally impossible to finesse circumstances? Are policemen "murderous" because some of them are? What is your measure for 'murderous' here? At what point is self-defense not murderous? Do you think it is unfair for the US to have an asymmetric advantage? What does the presence of several orders of magnitude of better technological sophistication say about any particular pairing of cultures? The US never wants to fight. The goal is always to buy and sell things, share ideas, and party. Ignorant idiots who imagine that they will pick a fight and somehow 'win' without first building a more effective culture are sadly clueless. The US is too open and too self-examining in public for much false propaganda to get very far for long. Of course. The only propaganda that the US tolerates is 'true' propaganda. Feel free to point out the propaganda. There certainly have been untrue or weak statements made by certain politicians and officials, and usually are followed up quickly by public dissection and correction by the US and other media and others. Perhaps in the very short term, this is sometimes propaganda, but usually it seems more like mistakes / wrong guesses / inferences, self-delusion, and, once in a while, ruses. Even secret things often eventually get out; by US law, most secret things have to be disclosed after some period of time. But feel free to highlight, specifically, all of the propaganda that you are assailed with. I'm not sure that American Sniper is propaganda, Of course not. It's not propaganda! It's jew-kristian art. If you say so. Seems like a character study to me, sad all around. The US almost completely holds back on propaganda Right. The US psycho-leaders and all their sheep don't even know what 'propaganda' means. They've never seen any, let alone produced it. Examples? References? However, when hardly anyone in Afghanistan knows anything at all about 9/11 or similar, That's interesting. So you know exactly what the population of afghanistan (let's assume 25 million) knows? Research much? [2]http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/09/11/in-rural-afghanistan-many-don%E 2%80%99t-know-911/ Last year, when 1,000 men in the southern Helmand and Kandahar provinces were read a three-paragraph description of the attacks, only 8 percent said they knew about them, [3]according to a survey by the International Council on Security and Development think tank. The finding suggested a vast majority of men in those provinces - a major area of conflict between coalition forces and the Taliban - didn’t know about the event that precipitated the invasion of their country. Journalist Adam Pletts went to see for himself. While on patrol with U.S. Marines in Helmand province recently, he showed pictures of the burning World Trade Center towers to Afghan men. In encounter after encounter, villagers and Afghan policemen said they didn’t know about 9/11. “We don’t know, sir, because we’re farmers. We never heard anything else about the world,” one said, according to a translator with Pletts. When Pletts showed pictures to several elders in one village, an elder said he thought the city in the picture was Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital. “(He) clearly had never been to Kabul. Just shows you how isolated they are, even in their own country,” Marine Capt. Zachary Shore said. The attacks, or at least parts of them, aren’t a mystery to everyone in Helmand and Kandahar. In the 2010 ICSD survey, 68 percent in those provinces said they did recognize pictures of the burning twin towers, even if most of them didn't recognize the three-paragraph description. [4]The Wall Street Journal noted that the events of 9/11 “are known to educated Afghans, and to many residents of big cities,” and described interviews at Kabul University where “students said... they were fully aware of the September 11 attacks.” But Shore isn’t surprised by the number of rural Afghans who apparently aren’t aware of the event that prompted the United States to attack the Taliban, which was harboring the al Qaeda terror movement. “If I’d just got here, I would have been surprised, but having been here now for six months, I’m not,” the Marine said. “This is pretty much the stone ages, where we are.” [5]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ka-ImUVvXWM [6]http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111904103404576556531604340 742 [7]http://www.rferl.org/content/what_afghans_know_about_911/24318456.ht ml How did you manage that one? You must have a high ranking position in the americunt 'national security' 'industry' eh. And you speak a few varieties of persian I assume? We call it 'free press' and 'investigative journalism'. Sure, there is a little bias in what they decide to investigate. But any untruths would be quickly countered by another news organization somewhere in the Western world. Or RT, which doesn't seem half bad except for certain Russian-interest reporting. that is a failure of the world to provide even basic knowledge to everyone. And now you sound flatly crazy. The 'world' is supposed to provide knowledge? What, you think "world" means "fascist public indoctrination system"? Basic humanist principles. If you think that allowing people to suffer and die in ignorance, from disease, starvation, and stone age practices, is the only way to avoid fascism, then your argument is pretty weak. What is fascist about educating people about science, sociology, psychology, etc.? At any rate, I'd bet a couple of cents that people in afhanistan know about your 9/11 false flag attack. See above. You have to be very uninformed and impressionable to believe it was a false flag attack. it would seem like an important strategy for both US State and Defense, but I don't see it happening much. So we have a piece of neocunt shit making world domination plans in the cpunks mailing list. How cute is that? The US and the Western world have been dominating the world in the cultural / technological / defense senses for a long, long time. Usually, they studiously try to avoid direct domination now by enlightened choice. To a large extent, the US doesn't want or need to dominate the world except for security purposes. Everyone sane wants people everywhere to have better lives in every sense. A few of those people think that expanding religion is the answer; I'm completely opposed to that in all forms. Most think that better secular knowledge and training would produce a much better life, regardless of starting point. Unfortunately, minimizing knowledge is a key component is a key part of the survival meme set of many religions. The truly educated tend to graduate from religion. If you were to choose 1000, and maybe even only 100 competent individuals with a good range of knowledge and skill from the US or a number of Western countries, and placed them in a village anywhere in the world, absent fundamentalist warfare, they would start a growing evolution / revolution within a generation. The differences between societies aren't geographic, genetic, or magic: poorly educated people with broken culture will fail anywhere while the opposite is generally true. Nationalist fighting as if it were equivalent sports teams or family feud squabbles with no right or wrong just obscures the real issues. That tends to hurt everyone not in the US and EU; on average, it hardly affects our lives. For me, Russia is a Western country in this sense. Metropolitan China, Japan, and India are too. So, First World really, but most of those are converging on Western values where it counts. Anyway, enough time wasted. Yes, it seems you have been wasting your time. The US has no need to try to make people like it; that should not generally be a goal. But the world, especially including the capable Western world, both governments and populations, has a responsibility to educate those with abject ignorance, poverty, and knowing nothing but conflict that there are better ways of being, limitless opportunities, and that they could effectively work to modernize and become effective societies and cultures. We need something similar to 'genocide' to identify pathological ignorance, recognize that it leads to the ruin of many lives, and determine how to take action to stop it. There is no need for each culture to be exactly like the West or a particular form of government, but they should understand the options, understand how things can work effectively and why, and be able to incorporate elements in a local way to eventually make it work. We need to decide how hands off we should be in allowing large areas to fumble about without making progress and even regress. The prime directive should only apply to societies that are functioning to a reasonable degree. An interesting question is whether and how poisoned thinking, i.e. bad memes, are shared, instilled, and propagated to eventually create terrorists and criminals: What should we do to prevent spreading poisonous ideas? Should we be rooting out bad imams, literature, religious leaders? Ideally, our values and culture is an effective answer to these sources, but, just like in the biological world, eventually a successful defense will occur. If you've read The Selfish Gene, you know that truth, rightness, or goodness are not the goals of particular genes or memes (ideas). The only thing that determines success is successful competition and replication. Our Western ideas can successfully compete and replicate against these bad meme sets, but only if they are present. We seem to be in a situation where some of our allies are supporting the teaching of memes that are directly opposed to modern knowledge, including social and political knowledge. What should we do about that? All of this is crosscutting to security, encryption, communication, publishing, and surveillance. Distrust is healthy, and sometimes prudent. And, if we fail totally as a modern society, we may need it to maintain a modern underground in our new dark ages. In addition to safe commerce and social connection, and balancing government and keeping it healthy, we should even better organize and extend the ways that we help enlighten the ignorant while combating meme cancer. I imagine that soon we'll have universally available Internet (LEOs for instance), ultra-inexpensive devices (smart phones are down to $50 or less now), and organized, complete, and effective educational material that is somehow available, safe, and effective for everyone. There should be some kind of support systems of various kinds, to the extent possible. We are failing for not working toward these kind of things effectively enough. sdw sdw References 1. mailto:sdw@lig.net 2. http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/09/11/in-rural-afghanistan-many-don’t-know-911/ 3. http://www.icosgroup.net/static/reports/afghanistan_transition_missing_variables.pdf 4. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904103404576556531604340742.html 5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ka-ImUVvXWM 6. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111904103404576556531604340742 7. http://www.rferl.org/content/what_afghans_know_about_911/24318456.html