This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I think the idea that this is a puzzle, like so much political discourse, is based on a failure to listen to what people say about their beliefs and motives and then believe them. If you're going to keep a secret, you need strong agreement among the people who know about it. People who work for the CIA generally want to help the U.S. and beat the bad guys, not deceive the American people in order to preserve the CIAs "operational reach". People may have hidden motives, but groups rarely do, since new members will be people who believed the public messaging. If they do something to interfere in U.S. domestic politics it'll be because they genuinely believe it is aligned with their mission, like if there's widespread agreement that left-wing radicals are Soviet subversives. Or if they were the next organization to suffer enough SJW institutional capture to decide that the next Republican presidential candidate is a "white-supremacist" who needs to be kept away from power at all costs. Or if they bought into some media narrative and, for instance, think Incel is a terrorist organization. But they aren't going to do that sort of thing for the sake of the CIA itself, their loyalty is to what their worldview says is in the interest of America and/or their sense of morality.
You can often get CIA members to keep a secret against a clear enemy, you can maybe even get the NSA to keep a secret like "using PRISM to scan all internet metadata in the U.S. in order to catch terrorists", though of course that one ultimately leaked. But once you're doing something that members don't view as a natural extension of the CIA's public mission, people aren't going to try doing it and they will probably have whistleblowers if they do. The same is true for the politicians who could have potentially tried (and probably failed) to order the CIA to commit such a deception. Bush claimed Saddam had WMDs (beyond old unusable remnants) because he was biased enough to believe it was true based off the weak and ambiguous evidence, not because he deliberately lied, so why would he suddenly start orchestrating a giant lie after he turned out to be wrong?
The problem with this is that by its very nature, there aren't very many things that you can't justify as being required to achieve the CIA's public mission.
Torture, kidnapping, human experimentation, drug trafficking, they did all that and every time there was a good excuse because their very purview is doing the shady wetwork nobody can be seen doing.
If CIA officials can convince themselves that Operation Northwoods is justified and we only learned about it through declassification, what makes you think they can't convince themselves to fake some evidence? They've been ready to blow up Americans by the truckload to justify wars before.
It can justify a lot of things, but there does need to be some justification that those involved find convincing. Operation Northwoods, for example, was a proposal from the DoD to start a war and thus attain a specific geopolitical goal, rather than justify one that has already occurred. It also drew justification from the greater importance of the Cold War. To justify faking WMDs after Saddam was already overthrown you have to think about it in terms of long-term PR concerns, there isn't any immediate goal. That's enough of a difference to explain why one would be proposed but not the other. (Of course, even if it had been proposed, we wouldn't necessarily know if Bush rejected the idea. I'm inclined to think that it wasn't even a proposal though.)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link