USA deserved Russian election meddling

Hercules56 said:
For decades the USA has been promoting, enacting and justifying coups all over the world.

Iran, Vietnam, Egypt, Syria, Guatemala, Lebanon, Dominican Republic, Cuba, Chile, Nicuraugua, Panama, etc etc.

We have been sticking our noses in other people's business, and finally its come back to bite us in the ass.

That's why while I don't condone the Russian meddling, I also don't oppose it. I see it as karma and justice for what we have done throughout the world for many years.

Hopefully we have learned our lesson.
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Conceded that the U.S. has (and probably still does) meddle in the affairs of other States.

What, in your opinion, is an appropriate response from the targets of that meddling?

Would you suggest that States who have experienced election meddling by the U.S. accept that meddling as a " fait accompli "? Or are they completely justified in questioning the legitimacy of the government that a foreign power has helped to install?
 
Hercules56 said:
For decades the USA has been promoting, enacting and justifying coups all over the world.

Iran, Vietnam, Egypt, Syria, Guatemala, Lebanon, Dominican Republic, Cuba, Chile, Nicuraugua, Panama, etc etc.
...
That's why while I don't condone the Russian meddling, I also don't oppose it. I see it as karma and justice for what we have done throughout the world for many years.
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Ah yes, a common argument among Trump supporters... "There's no evidence but there's evidence and trump didn't know, but even with all the evidence its OK to have Trump be a puppet of Putin because of stuff".

So, lets look at this particular claim, shall we?

I'm not going to be too upset if the U.S. (for example) tried to depose Castro in Cuba, because, well, it is a dictatorship that's not respecting the will of its people to begin wit. I'm also not going to be upset about situations that may have occurred before I was born.

So, I am going to challenge you with this one thing:

Give me the last time when the U.S. has interfered in the elections of another country, where:

1) The incident occurred within the past few decades (perhaps since the end of the last cold war... since I don't think its fair to judge the U.S. on events many of us either weren't alive for, or weren't of voting age)

2) The U.S. was interfering with a stable, functioning democracy (i.e. the country wasn't some despotic hell-hole.)

3) The election would have been (without the U.S. interference) completely fair, without other foreign entities exhibiting undue influence

I rather suspect that when you apply those 3 criteria, you'll find that the U.S. is actually pretty clean.
 
Hercules56 said:
For decades the USA has been promoting, enacting and justifying coups all over the world.

Iran, Vietnam, Egypt, Syria, Guatemala, Lebanon, Dominican Republic, Cuba, Chile, Nicuraugua, Panama, etc etc.

We have been sticking our noses in other people's business, and finally its come back to bite us in the ass.

That's why while I don't condone the Russian meddling, I also don't oppose it. I see it as karma and justice for what we have done throughout the world for many years.

Hopefully we have learned our lesson.
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Karma has nothing to do with it. "Deserve" is not an operative factor. Espionage and propaganda, like diplomacy and warfare, are legitimate tools of influence among nation states. The ethics of their use is always utilitarian and situational.

There is no percentage in holding back out of some misplaced sense of moral virtue. That sense of virtue will not protect your allies. It will not deter your worst enemies or your strongest rivals. Instead, you must present a pragmatic balance sheet of deeds, some appealing to virtue, some appealing to the world as it is, and all working together for the advantage of you and your allies.

Your butthurt sermon is baby stuff. At some point you must move beyond this bitter tantrum and devise a coherent and realistic policy of national engagement. A policy that includes defense, commerce, diplomacy, aid, and all the rest. "The US deserved it" is far too small an idea to encompass anything useful. Try again.
 
theprestige said:
Karma has nothing to do with it. "Deserve" is not an operative factor. Espionage and propaganda, like diplomacy and warfare, are legitimate tools of influence among nation states. The ethics of their use is always utilitarian and situational.

There is no percentage in holding back out of some misplaced sense of moral virtue. That sense of virtue will not protect your allies. It will not deter your worst enemies or your strongest rivals. Instead, you must present a pragmatic balance sheet of deeds, some appealing to virtue, some appealing to the world as it is, and all working together for the advantage of you and your allies.

Your butthurt sermon is baby stuff. At some point you must move beyond this bitter tantrum and devise a coherent and realistic policy of national engagement. A policy that includes defense, commerce, diplomacy, aid, and all the rest. "The US deserved it" is far too small an idea to encompass anything useful. Try again.
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I agree with this for the most part. What frustrates me about U.S. meddling was the level of incompetence, specifically the failure to understand long term effects of our interference, and our poor track record of success.
 
When I saw the thread title, I thought of a different angle. The US "deserved" Russian meddling because we are a bunch of rubes. Too many of us get our "news and opinion" from partisan blogs, internet memes, unsourced nonsense and, sadly, satirical websites like the Onion. Then we pass them along to each other over social media and they become ersatz factoids that too many of us believe. All the Russians did was exploit our own stupidity and I hope that enough of us have learned a lesson. I mean, have you seen some of the stupid Facebook ads they took out? If those ads actually influenced people to vote one way or the other -and you KNOW they did- holy ****, dude, we are toast. If my current Facebook feed is any indication, someone better get the toast and jelly.
 
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Put it this way guys: the USA has no business getting involved in the internal affairs and govt. of another nation unless they were butchering their own people or engaging in ethnic cleansing/genocide.

Worrying that the government may be too Lefist is not a justifiable reason to stage a coup or support a coup.
 
Imhotep said:
I agree with this for the most part. What frustrates me about U.S. meddling was the level of incompetence, specifically the failure to understand long term effects of our interference, and our poor track record of success.
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Exactly!!!

Our interventions in many cases made situations MUCH worse to the point of creating a new enemy for the USA, i.e. Iran.
 
Imhotep said:
I agree with this for the most part. What frustrates me about U.S. meddling was the level of incompetence, specifically the failure to understand long term effects of our interference, and our poor track record of success.
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Yep. That's what frustrates me also. That and the ugly truth that far too often our meddling was *not* virtuous, and that our incompetence created perverse incentives for the meddlers. But these things do not add up to a karmic justification for Russian meddling. The justification for Russian meddling is simply that the US and Russia exist as nation states with conflicting goals.
 
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xjx388 said:
When I saw the thread title, I thought of a different angle. The US "deserved" Russian meddling because we are a bunch of rubes. Too many of us get our "news and opinion" from partisan blogs, internet memes, unsourced nonsense and, sadly, satirical websites like the Onion. Then we pass them along to each other over social media and they become ersatz factoids that too many of us believe. All the Russians did was exploit our own stupidity and I hope that enough of us have learned a lesson. I mean, have you seen some of the stupid Facebook ads they took out? If those ads actually influenced people to vote one way or the other -and you KNOW they did- holy ****, dude, we are toast. If my current Facebook feed is any indication, someone better get the toast and jelly.
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Yep. "Deserves" isn't necessarily the word I would use, but we have definitely left ourselves wide open to this kind of attack.

On the whole, I think it's a good trade-off, and I think we'll figure out how to strengthen our defenses without descending into totalitarianism, but it would help if more people took the time to see the problem clearly, rather than through a romantic lens.
 
Amazing that some folks actually question if the USA staged or supported coups throughout the world. This is common knowledge, peeps.
 
Hercules56 said:
Put it this way guys: the USA has no business getting involved in the internal affairs and govt. of another nation unless they were butchering their own people or engaging in ethnic cleansing/genocide.
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Add "sponsoring terrorism" to the list and you and I agree almost entirely. If the US had a robust and aggressive policy towards these three things, and kept its hands of everything else, I'd probably be okay with that.

Worrying that the government may be too Lefist is not a justifiable reason to stage a coup or support a coup.
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A lot of the stuff you're referring to is Cold War stuff, so let's be clear: The Soviet Union was absolutely butchering its own people and engaging in ethnic cleansing and genocide. Ethnic cleansing--the systematic uprooting and transfer of populations--was a principal tool of state control in the Soviet Union. And the horrific practices of the Soviet regime were propagated to every vassal state they acquired. Soviet-sponsored communist revolutions weren't just about setting up governments that were "too Leftist". They were about infecting more and more of the world with the Soviet sickness. Che Guevara wasn't just an idealist with a t-shirt concession. He was a butcher with a substantial body count. A lot of the US history of meddling springs from this context. It's not necessarily justified, but the nuances of its historical realities should be taken into account.

Actually, your notion of karma kind of turns reality on its head. Rhodesia may have had a government that was "too Rightist", but they weren't butchering their own people or engaging in ethnic cleansing/genocide. But that didn't stop the Soviet Union from getting involved in Rhodesia's internal affairs. By your reckoning, the Russians thus deserve whatever meddling they got... From there your whole moral framework collapses.
 
Hercules56 said:
Exactly!!!

Our interventions in many cases made situations MUCH worse to the point of creating a new enemy for the USA, i.e. Iran.
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I agree. But this doesn't add up to your thesis of karmic retribution. And what's your takeaway from the example of Iran? That Russia may have made the US a worse enemy than before, by its recent actions? Are you now an enemy of Russia, the way Iran is an enemy of the US?
 
Hercules56 said:
Yes.

Our meddling in other nations is pathetic.

The list is pathetic.

We really earned some very bad karma and payback is a bitch.
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Why is it pathetic? Pretty much every state in history has done this. The question isn't if it was surprising that Russian did this, but whether someone within the US government helped a foreign and hostile nation to this.
 
Yes, we do, and have done, terrible things. Nobody's hands are clean. But I'd rather be here than in Russia and so would just about everybody else in the world. We have a proud tradition of immigration. It gets marred by these episodes of isolationism and xenophobia, but even the GOP, with complete control, hasn't built The Wall (tm), or completely stopped immigration.
 
Hercules56 said:
Amazing that some folks actually question if the USA staged or supported coups throughout the world. This is common knowledge, peeps.
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I assume that particular post was directed at me.

I think its rather revealing that rather than address the point I brought up, you incorrectly cling to your initial flawed insinuation.

I do not doubt that the U.S. has interfered in the internal affairs of other nations. The question is, how often has it interfered in situations where:
- Interference has occurred recently (i.e. not some situation that happened before many/most of us were born)
- The interference happened with a country that was a functioning democracy
- The country would otherwise have had an election free from outside interference

So try again.... give me the most recent case that meets those criteria.
 
theprestige said:
Amazing that some folks actually question if the USA staged or supported coups throughout the world. This is common knowledge, peeps.
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Who's questioning it?
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His post was probably directed at me.

I never claimed that the U.S. never supported coups or interfered in other country's elections, but I pointed out that if you dig deeper, you would find that in cases where that happened, the country was either a dictatorship (or with a flawed political system), or the event happened before any of us were born. But since actually addressing those points would show how flawed the assertions are in his original post, they have to create a straw man.
 
LSSBB said:
Do you remember the Cold War?
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You mean when we didn't care if a leader was a mudering, corrupt dictator as long as he wasn't a Commie? Yes, I remember. And yes, I do understand that in some cases, it was better for our interests to support the murdering corrupt dictator than to let the Communists take over, but I also think that policy often came back to bite us.
 
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