alt Hacker NewsYou're assuming that I subscribe to the left-right paradigm and that I am an American but that is not the case.
The way I see it the modern American left-right paradigm that you identify with is the problem. The little gotchas that you describe with people who complained about DOGE or ACAB are the problem.
Modern America itself is the problem. Modern Americans lack the mental capacity to reason about this.
I don't mean that as an insult, I mean that Americans for generations now are conditioned to not be able to reason about America not being the dominant player in the world, they can't process a scenario where America falls, and due to the past ten+ years of hyper-partisan political discourse and the corrosive effects that it has on their brains they lack the ability to understand these things when people talk about them.
Many Americans still believe that their country can be saved -- that it merely requires a reconfiguration of the existing pieces with some hardworking, dedicated people in the right positions to put things back in order. I'm sure there were people who believed the same in the USSR even in the final days before it fell apart but that didn't turn out to be the case.
You can put as many friendly people as you can find in the police force, and the same with the NSA and CIA, but it would be just as futile as doing the same with the Stasi, the KGB or the GRU.
The time to fix this was twenty years ago. George Bush and Dick Cheney should have spent the last twenty years in prison. Same with the heads of the NSA and CIA and thousands of other bureaucrats, the oligarchs who caused the 2008 financial crisis.
It didn't happen and it won't happen for this bunch of pedophile war criminals.
Authoritarians and theocrats have taken over.
America is falling down and it isn't going to get back up. I don't want that to be the case but it just is.
> You're assuming that I subscribe to the left-right paradigm and that I am an American but that is not the case.
Not really. And you can choose to not subscribe to a "left-right paradigm", but it remains a functional reality in the US. Not believing in something doesn't always make it less real!
> Modern America itself is the problem. Modern Americans lack the mental capacity to reason about this.
This is a wildly arrogant take. I don't necessarily disagree that there are (a lot of!) real problems with "Modern America", but writing an entire country off, as an outsider, is incredibly self-centered.
> You can put as many friendly people as you can find in the police force, and the same with the NSA and CIA, but it would be just as futile as doing the same with the Stasi, the KGB or the GRU.
This is completely incorrect. If the government behind any of the examples you cited were actually full of "friendly people", those organizations would never have reached the points the did, or done the things they did.
You have a weirdly immutable view of the world, as if completely changing the moral and ethical makeup of entire governments would somehow have no effect on the actions that government takes?