--- my comment from an older relevant post ----
I personally reported 3 posts on different FB pages
1st was a religion extremist guy who says to Iraqi people that they should protest and fight the "other side" of the religion (aka start a new civil war) instead of protesting against the corrupted government.
2nd was a post that was praising the guy who murdered the Danish (Or was he Norwegian?) teacher who mocked Islam, and calling him a hero.
and the 3rd was a post that says "Women education is satanic, women's purpose is marriage".
--- end old comment ---
4th report was a friend of mine, he reported a page that post's pictures of underage boys im boxers/underwear and write nasty shit in the post and comments, like an obvious pedo community.
all of these 4 reports was "The post was reviewed, and though it doesn't go against one of our specific Community Standards" and then it explains how to block pages
4 years ago one of my clients wanted to "donate" a system for the local fire department to help them do a quick proximity search to find the fire hydrants and quickly choose the healthy one near the fire.
And since it was charity and had a bunch of private data Google was not an option ($$$$), so I (just a full-stack developer back then) was like "listen I have no idea what is this GIS stuff, but I'll give it a try", after a quick research boom PostGIS, reading the docs and testing things, plus QGIS to visualize and to help understand it better 10/10!
That was my unintentional "career" shift, thanks to PostGIS I'm now a senior dev at the largest food delivery company (local), specialized in GIS and realtime data driven systems using PostGIS everyday lol
not sure if this applies to you directly, but here's my 2¢:
1. a lot of people fall for the meme and drink the koolaid that if you spend 6+ years doing nothing more than studying then BOOM, you'll graduate and companies will just blindly start throwing money at your face. surprise surprise, it doesn't work like that.
2. people should follow their passion and everything but they should also at least keep an eye on the market.
3. students (not universities) should really start considering an university course unfinished without some kind of internship. if you manage to get an internship in a company that uses the tech you're interested into (in your case, gis) you can either realize you don't like it that much or understand what the direction for your studies need to be in order to be more proficient. (applying for internships is sampling the market, btw)
4. specialists are only needed up to a certain points. in most situations a good generalists can learn enough to get the ball rolling and bring home results. see like an 80-20 pareto principle or something like that. btw, a good generalist can surpass a specialist over time.
> I blame the internet and the accessibility of knowledge to the point where people can go "IDK WTF this is, but lemme google it".
the people you complain about probably can already do a lot of other useful stuff, to the point they can just "lemme google it".
I think it's more that the tooling has been commoditised. Historically, professional GIS was very much about Esri's tools (and, to a lesser extent, MapInfo). Your employability was directly linked to your ArcGIS proficiency.
Now, there's a massive ecosystem of open-source GIS: PostGIS is probably the standout, but also QGIS, everything around OSM, GDAL/OGR, and a hundred others. For government work and some parts of academia then Esri still dominates, but there's now much more to "geo".
This right here. GIS is accessible to anyone who knows Javascript, Python, and SQL thanks to the open source GIS ecosystem. Previously it was the sole domain of ESRI priests.
Now this is a net good thing, but there are downsides. Generalists wielding specialist tools means that a lot of the wonky basics aren't known until things break. But this is a blip compared to the step-change of making an entire field accessible to anyone who's a decent programmer with a healthy appetite for research. It's crazy how much you can spin up with PostGIS, Python, Mapbox and/or Leaflet...no ESRI license needed.
Indeed. This was my experience when a nonprofit in my area set up their geomapping for Covid-19 support. There was of course some domain growth, but I was super impressed with the tooling. Even more so now that networkx and Qneat3 support other topological use cases. All and all exciting stuff.
I was doing ArcGis about 10 years ago and it was amazing the quality of the free maps MN data deli provided. Your comment makes me excited to try out these new tools even tho I mainly do front end work now. It’s a great time to be a programmer!
It's an obvious "following the local law" thingy, Facebook doesn't give a s*t, I personally reported 3 posts on different FB pages
1st was a religion extremist guy who says to Iraqi people that they should protest and fight the "other side" of the religion (aka start a new civil war) instead of protesting against the corrupted government.
2nd was a post that was praising the guy who murdered the Danish (Or was he Norwegian?) teacher who mocked Islam, and calling him a hero.
and the 3rd was a post that says "Women education is satanic, women's purpose is marriage".
all of these 3 reports was "The post was reviewed, and though it doesn't go against one of our specific Community Standards" and then it explains how to block blablabla... I don't report things anymore lol
I've given up during the time when ISIS regularly posted videos on social media. I've reported a video with a literal beheading about two thirds of the video in, and it didn't go against Facebook's community standards.
I guess whichever moderator saw it didn't bother to skip ahead during those like 5-10 seconds they reach their decision in.
Yeah, I've reported a bunch of stuff, all of it egregious. I have an inbox full of "thank you but this does not violate our community standards" to show for it.
Facebook has so much power with censoring only one side of the extremists. A good experiment would be if you could find a Christian priest to report, and check whether their response is weighted differently.
Data that Facebook is fighting hard to make sure people can't collect. Just like how they were poisoning the well while suing academic teams just trying to get information on ads data.
Genuine question, how viable is it, if we (code monkeys) created some sort of a blacklist of the entities that are not allowed to use our open source projects?
--
something like "We don't support Internet Explorer" but a bit more aggressive? like "These entities don't understand the Internet, we don't support them, they cant use our software"?
Maintaining that list would be a ton of work and edge cases tho :/
Any organization you create to manage such a list will be captured by non-programmers with an agenda that is political and stops serving the original purpose. They will play favorites.
Original contributors are in charge of the distribution restriction.
The organization is purely operational and enforces distribution restrictions, per original authors’.
They can infiltrate the distribution org as much as they want, as long as the original author to org hand-off is legally constrained. The main puzzle is what is that legal mechanism, which may be nothing more than licensing.
Agreed, but we could clarify it. If you sue or take any legal action against an open source program, you forfeit the right to use any software that is open source, forever.
Which basically means you can no longer use a computer, which in pratice should be a strong enough deterent.
Do you really want to live in a world where software is politicized to the point that FOSS devs are maintaining shit-lists of undesirables barred from using basic tools?
It won't end well, and the adverse effects will disproportionately impact people without power, not the large companies you have in mind.
Yeah, I guess it can be abused easily, but again... how can we as code monkeys fight these power hungry practices that keep dragging us backward ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
By refusing to work for whoever employs these practices.
Open Source code and their licenses are better left open; "they" will always need to hire someone who can use it.
Just be prepared to say no to some good money when the time comes.
Software is already political. Commercial software traditionally does this through direct and indirect lobbying efforts. The DMCA didn't just spontaneously appear out of thin air. There must be action-for-action retaliation.
DMCA does have legitimate uses, though. If someone was stealing my IP, I'd certainly consider invoking it. It just becomes a problem when big companies with lawyers™ use it to stop someone from doing something legal that they don't like.
Maybe. Some will argue for software parents too. Copyright infringement was illegal before the DMCA and I'm not convinced it improves things. In fact, I'm pretty sure we'd be better off if it was repealed.
Isn't one of the largest benefits of DMCA the safe harbor protections? Like you said, copyright law exists without DMCA, in which case the Githubs and Youtubes of the world could be sued.
But I don't think safe harbour was entirely new with DMCA - it's a formalisation of what was there? Wasn't there some cases in the 90s where free web hosts and isps were found to not be responsible for users hosting copyright material? Maybe I misremeber.
You have the option to pursue legal action without the DMCA. The problem with the DMCA is that it lets would-be rights holders take down content without any due process - without any other party even reviewing their claim.
Hm, I misremebered the patent clause in apache2 - I thought it revoked both copyright license and patent license - but it is limited to the patent. At any rate my suggestion/idea was to take inspiration from:
> If You institute patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the Work or a Contribution incorporated within the Work constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses granted to You under this License for that Work shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.
I'm not sure if it could work with, or be a good idea for, the DMCA. But I'd guess one would say something along the lines of "any invocation of provisions in the DMCA revoke any license grants herein".
Again invocation of the DMCA against whom, the original license issuer for that specific project or for any party and cause?
The patent clause in Apache is rather common in various FRAND and open standard agreements to prevent the project from being taken hostage in disputes between corporations.
If you apply something similar to a wide spread license like GPL for example it means that if I’m hosting a website running on FOSS with this license software that hosts say copies of Netflix shows Netflix can’t use DMCA against me because they also use FOSS software under the same license.
I cannot speak to its viability, but the BipCot NoGov License is a pioneer along these lines. It has been around at least 5 years: https://bipcot.org
'The BipCot NoGov License allows any use of software, media, products or services EXCEPT by governments. The BipCot NoGov License threatens no “government guns” for violators. It is not copyright-based, it is entirely shame-based.'
A government is like fire, a handy servant, but a dangerous master
Government comes in many forms but at its core government is a monopoly on the invitation of force. Governments are instituted to use force to compell action or inaction. The laws of a government can be democratic or dictorial but in either case the laws are backed by this threat of force
Evil is a subjective value. So for a government to be evil you would need to agree with the statement "it is unethical to initiate the use of force"
Of you believe it is unethical to initiate force then one would alose believe government is evil or unethical
Government is a tool and not perfect,this is why I think you can see western democracies which are bound to be mediocre but can actually adjust over time and most of the issues can be blamed on the population as a whole as they still hold voting power, whereas you also have evil government such as the Chinese government that openly has concentration camps and tortures millions in them but the populace at large (in China) seems to be okay with it and couldn't really do anything about it anyway, as they are controlled completely by less than 1% of the population and short of a civil war can't really do anything about it.
This can be a theoretical argumentation, but I'd still think it is crazy. I'd love have an open source being used to improve the lives of other citizens.
Keep in mind there is no singular we. There will be code monkeys you agree with. There will be code monkeys you dont agree with. There will be code monkeys you sorta agree with. They would all start to make their own lists. You'll be on some of this lists.
All we've really ended up doing is fragmenting the internet more.
Interesting. I was fully expecting this license to also prohibit any uses involving proof-of-work-based cryptocurrencies, but it only focuses on fossil fuels.
Open Source is not the same as Free Software and does not say
much about the license other than that the source can be viewed.
At least that is my understanding.
Open source was coined by the guys at mozilla to avoid the ambiguity people are trying to create. Open source has a clear and well-defined meaning and it's not defined by whether the source is viewable.
Your understanding is correct. Open source means nothing more than you can view the source. It's just typically open source software also comes with a license that allows you to use it free, either with MIT or similar.
You are thinking of Source-Available Software[1], not Open Source. The sets of Open Source and Free Software licenses are (almost) identical. OSS == FOSS == FLOSS == FS, etc.
Your understanding is not correct. Open source does not only mean than you can view the source. If you're not familiar with the term, look it up. Don't make things up.
That's why I'm curious, it's more of a movement I guess, also there are multiple types license and idk if blacklisting a specific entity is possible or if it has any legal grounds
It does have legal precedent. There's some spat with a color that's copyrighted (related to vantablack iirc) and the copyright specifically says that the other person is the only person who does not have the right to use the color.
I don't know if that was tested, but I'm not aware of any laws that would prohibit you from excluding an entity or entities from your copyright.
There's a bit of disagreement in this subthread over what "Open Source" means. I think the issue here is that there multiple ways that people define "open source":
1) The source is viewable (regardless of license)
2) The source is licensed under an OSI-approved license [1] (and thus also viewable)
There other definitions that I've seen as well, but I think these two are the main ones in play here.
It's clear to me from the context that slooonz is using the 2nd definition, but it's also clear from the disagreement that others are using the 1st definition (or one close to it).
Down thread [0], another user linked a page from the FSF [2]. It says:
>The official definition of “open source software” (which is published by the Open Source Initiative and is too long to include here) was derived indirectly from our criteria for free software. It is not the same; it is a little looser in some respects. Nonetheless, their definition agrees with our definition in most cases.
>However, the obvious meaning for the expression “open source software”—and the one most people seem to think it means—is “You can look at the source code.” That criterion is much weaker than the free software definition, much weaker also than the official definition of open source. It includes many programs that are neither free nor open source.
>Since the obvious meaning for “open source” is not the meaning that its advocates intend, the result is that most people misunderstand the term.
So I think the disagreements come from not defining Open Source in the same way.
And for the record, I agree (using definition 2 from above) that adding a clause to the license to restrict who can use the software would make it no longer Open Source per OSI's definition [3]:
> 5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups
> The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.
> 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
>The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
Sounds like what you are looking for is closed source software where you get to dictate precisely who your licensees are and under what specific terms they must use your software.
This is a model I have started to seriously consider due to increasingly prolific IP theft concerns. There is software that is so capable that it could be considered a weapons platform from some perspectives. I really worry about this stuff in context of China/Russia/India/et.al. and our willingness to relinquish our various competitive advantages.
Look at the FSF, EFF...old MIT wizards went through the same...we should avoid centralised hosting for projects like these or be bullied into closing them by lobby groups
I lived in Syria before the war and stuff, even back in 2010, because of the US export laws Syrians were banned from downloading the most basic shit like Java runtime, adobe flash player, and Nvidia gpu drivers, Skype, Messengers like Yahoo etc...
This type of internet "stupidity" is in every government DNA lol
>US export laws Syrians were banned from downloading the most basic shit like Java runtime
That's still the case for many encryption products from Oracle. You have to register and sign T&C which say you will not export this .jar to a banned country. It's been like this since I remember... 2005 maybe?
Dr. Vincent Racaniello, Ph.D. (@profvrr on twitter) is Higgins Professor of Microbiology & Immunology at Columbia University Medical Center. He has been studying viruses for over 40 years.
Dr Racaniello is also the host of the This Week in Virology podcast, which I highly recommend.
They've had a series of episodes on COVID-19 recently, all highly informative. Episode 590, the most recent one, debunked the "two strains" rumor that's been going around.
You can hear the episode here: [1] and read a transcript of the portion of the episode where the rumor was debunked here: [2]
The group leading the protest? wtf? there is no group leading the protest and the current government and all the political parties involved have been in power since the US gave it to them in 2003, and before that was Saddam for 30 years and as far as I know no one else was in power and Saddam is long dead...
Please stop making ignorant statements about my country... kthxbai
Wait, didn't America wage a war to install a pro-American government in Iraq? Are they somehow pro-American and pro-Iran at the same time, or did they switch alliances while nobody in the west was paying attention?
The initial government was pro-American, but the consequence of pushing a country to have democratic elections is that they sometimes elect people that you don't like.
When you want a country to be free and democratic, you can't also tell them who to elect. You have to choose one or the other. The United States has often chosen the latter while pretending to want the former, but at least with Iraq they seem to be mostly hands off (in recent years).
> The initial government was pro-American, but the consequence of pushing a country to have democratic elections is that they sometimes elect people that you don't like.
I don't the right prior here is "elections = real democracy", for cases like Iraq. The US has long history of installing "democratic" governments that are not actually democratic, but rather military states who violently suppress the people, but support US interests. The list of countries where this has borne out is long, but if you are interested, an easy place to start would be Cold War era South America (Guatemala and El Salvador being two straightforward examples).
Ironically whole thing started with CIA staged double coup(first one did not work apparently) in Iran during 1953(declassified recently). It was so successful that they copy-pasted it to LATAM and elsewhere. [1]
Interesting fact: Kermit Roosevelt Jr. a grandson of U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt, played the lead role in the CIA-sponsored overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh, the democratically elected leader of Iran, in August 1953. [2]
After World War I the British redrew the map of the middle east pretty arbitrarily after defeating the Ottoman Turks founding modern Iraq. It wasn't really guaranteed in the first place to include people who like each other.
I'm totally in agreement with you, and yet I'm still saddened that people fall prey to this trick which they have in their power to fix, by learning to forgive and live together in harmony and piece. The tragedy is how hard it is for people to come together and collaborate in good faith. And when that truth is exploited it's even more sad.
The Khmer Rouge is an interesting example, as it was a left-wing totalitarian government that the USA supported[0], albeit often at arms length. It was part of the geopolitics at the time, as the USA was aligned with the PRC and the Khmer Rouge against the Soviet bloc. A lot of it was also a petty vendetta against Vietnam, as arming the Khmer Rouge was a way to get back at Vietnamese Communists for winning the Vietnam War.
From the Wikipedia article on the Pinochet regime [1]:
> The regime was characterized by the systematic suppression of political parties and the persecution of dissidents to an extent unprecedented in the history of Chile. Overall, the regime left over 3,000 dead or missing, tortured tens of thousands of prisoners, and drove an estimated 200,000 Chileans into exile.
From the Wikipedia article on Carlos Castillo Armas [2]:
> Upon taking power Castillo Armas, worried that he lacked popular support, attempted to eliminate all opposition. He quickly arrested many thousands of opposition leaders, branding them communists. Detention camps were built to hold the prisoners when the jails exceeded their capacity. Historians have estimated that more than 3,000 people were arrested following the coup, and that approximately 1,000 agricultural workers were killed by Castillo Armas's troops in the province of Tiquisate. Acting on the advice of Dulles, Castillo Armas also detained a number of citizens trying to flee the country. He also created a National Committee of Defense Against Communism (CDNCC), with sweeping powers of arrest, detention, and deportation. Over the next few years, the committee investigated nearly 70,000 people. Many were imprisoned, executed, or "disappeared", frequently without trial.
"Totalitarian regimes are different from other authoritarian ones. The latter denotes a state in which the single power holder – an individual "dictator", a committee or a junta or an otherwise small group of political elite – monopolizes political power. "[The] authoritarian state [...] is only concerned with political power and as long as that is not contested it gives society a certain degree of liberty".[8] Authoritarianism "does not attempt to change the world and human nature".[8] In contrast, a totalitarian regime attempts to control virtually all aspects of the social life, including the economy, education, art, science, private life and morals of citizens."
So Chile and Guatemala were Authoritarian, but not Totalitarian. The practical difference is that an Authoritarian Chilean government kills 3,000 people while the Totalitarian Khmer Rouge kills 1.5 to 2 million of its own people.
"Perhaps from 710,000 to slightly over 3,500,000 people have been murdered, with a mid-estimate of almost 1,600,000. But these figures are little more than educated guesses"
Saying they are the same thing is ridiculous and really soft pedals how insane some communist regimes were.
There is no defense of the Pinochet era. I believe that his predecessor tragically abused governance though, seizing control over so many lives, there and abroad.
I feel this is such important context for what followed. It raised such a fervor of hatred toward the communist political body. I still believe this was theft of property from people's families and estates built over many generations of effort.
1. USA ousts Saddam Hussein, and is obligated to help Iraq transition to a democratic government (because they invasion was done under the pretext of liberating a country from a mad dictator with weapons of mass destruction, instead of the commonly cited argument of securing resources for the American empire).
2. USA backs a candidate and initially gets a government elected that is favorable to the USA. However, these politicians turn out to be kind of scummy and screw up just about everything.
3. Iran realizes that elections can be influenced (they watched the USA influence the first election), and having lots of paramilitary type forces that are trained in information operations, decides to capitalize. They flood across the porous border to spread propaganda (the current scumbags in government make it so the Iranian propaganda doesn't even have to lie, it just has to point out how much the current guys suck).
4. Iraqi citizens, growing sick of the crappy politicians they elected initially, start listening to the propaganda and elect a government friendly to Iran. This is the first time this has happened in a long time, Iraq has not been allies with Iran for several decades.
5. End result- USA invades, eventually loses influence to Iran. The global hegemony USA got outplayed by a regional hegemony because they backed unethical and incompetent sellouts rather than finding a good candidate.
Standing between Saudi Arabia and Iran was Saddam Hussein and his military. By removing him it created a power vacuum that has been filled by various groups over time.
The different election results in Iraq over the years now point to a chess game between Iran and Saudi Arabia for regional control.
Now instead of Iraq standing between the other two, it's serving as a way to create conflict where the two may eventually fight each other like the Iran-Iraq war in the 80s.
If the U.S. does not get involved in this scenario then the long term strategic outcome of the 2003 Iraq war might be seen differently. On the other hand, if Iran wins and becomes more powerful, the Iraq war will look even worse.
"That's a very volatile part of the world. And if you take down the central government in Iraq, you could easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off. Part of it the Syrians would like to have, the west. Part of eastern Iraq the Iranians would like to claim. Fought over for eight years. In the north, you've got the Kurds. And if the Kurds spin loose and join with Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey. It's a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq." -- Dick Cheney
Correct me if I am wrong but isn't Cheney the one that basically pushed the war? When is this quote from?
From the Wikipedia article:
> Following the US invasion of Iraq, Cheney remained steadfast in his support of the war, stating that it would be an "enormous success story",[90] and made many visits to the country. He often criticized war critics, calling them "opportunists" who were peddling "cynical and pernicious falsehoods" to gain political advantage while US soldiers died in Iraq. In response, Senator John Kerry asserted, "It is hard to name a government official with less credibility on Iraq [than Cheney].
> instead of the commonly cited argument of securing resources for the American empire).
I'm sorry but there are very few "citations" that state that the war was about securing resources for the American "empire". It was primarily about exactly the stated reasons and there is a popular and uncited belief that it was about oil. If you have some scholarly articles that state that it was completely about oil I'd love to see them.
As someone alive and paying attention to that period in time, I got the impression the "for oil" thing was generally hyperbole never explicitly stated but probably loosely true right since the VP was an oil guy.
Except that American oil companies didn't get any benefit so how does that make any sense? If we are willing to accept the evidence that oil companies in the US didn't meaningfully benefit, doesn't that whole argument kind of seem silly?
It's bad enough that we invaded under pretenses that really really really should have been obviously incorrect at the time, with no plan, just... I don't know. It seems unnecessary to even bother linking it to oil. It was evil. It was stupid.
> Except that American oil companies didn't get any benefit so how does that make any sense? If we are willing to accept the evidence that oil companies in the US didn't meaningfully benefit, doesn't that whole argument kind of seem silly?
Let me start by saying that I don't know much about the history of this period. That being said, I imagine these questions can be answered in two ways:
1. If you don't succeed at doing X, it does not mean that you never intended to do X. Something as chaotic as war will be full of unintended consequences. Maybe American oil companies did not benefit as a result of the war, even though America wanted them to; similar to how ISIS was formed as a result of the war, even though America certainly didn't want it to.
2. I don't think the narrative has ever been that US wanted to directly benefit American oil companies, à la United Fruit Company. The theory is, rather, that the US wanted to ensure that the flow of oil to international markets would not be stopped due to Iraq's actions. Think of it this way: the work US navy does to secure international trading routes is not about directly benefiting US shipping and insurance companies. It is about keeping the wheels of global trade and economy moving. The US companies may benefit from this non-directly, but other nations and companies will benefit from this equally as well. The narrative is not about the US going to war as a colonizer to steal Iraqi oil or get sweetheart deals for US companies. It is that it went to war to ensure continued flow of Iraqi oil to the market and ensure Iraqi government would not throw a wrench in the oil shipments through the region. Ultimately, the reasons for the war, according to this theory, were economical rather than humanitarian or defence-related.
Now I don't know if the above statements are true. I just wanted to bring up the arguments and assertions people make, lest the debate delve into attacking a straw man.
It's the plan cooked up in the late 90s by a think tank called "Project for a New American Century"[0]. The founders were a bunch of reganites whose names pepper the list of high officials of the two Bush presidencies. They believed they could secure the middle east's resources and maintain US hegemony by fighting and winning several concurrent foreign wars. The crazy thing is they laid it all out in their publications three years before 9/11 gave them the political capital to mobilize their plans, and very few people talked about it during the war.
in 1998, Kristol and Kagan advocated regime change in Iraq throughout the Iraq disarmament process through articles that were published in the New York Times.[22][23] Following perceived Iraqi unwillingness to co-operate with UN weapons inspections, core members of the PNAC including Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, R. James Woolsey, Elliot Abrams, Donald Rumsfeld, Robert Zoellick, and John Bolton were among the signatories of an open letter initiated by the PNAC to President Bill Clinton calling for the removal of Saddam Hussein.[19][24] Portraying Saddam Hussein as a threat to the United States, its Middle East allies, and oil resources in the region, and emphasizing the potential danger of any weapons of mass destruction under Iraq's control, the letter asserted that the United States could "no longer depend on our partners in the Gulf War to continue to uphold the sanctions or to punish Saddam when he blocks or evades UN inspections." Stating that American policy "cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council," the letter's signatories asserted that "the U.S. has the authority under existing UN resolutions to take the necessary steps, including military steps, to protect our vital interests in the Gulf."[25] Believing that UN sanctions against Iraq would be an ineffective means of disarming Iraq, PNAC members also wrote a letter to Republican members of the U.S. Congress Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott,[26] urging Congress to act, and supported the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 (H.R.4655)[27][28] which President Clinton signed into law in October 1998.
The idea that any part of the US government could do the sorts of things attributed to this "hegemony" is palpably ridiculous. Especially "find a good candidate". The US has a system for finding a good candidate to run a country, and it found Donald Trump.
If the hegemony that controls everything has been defeated at every turn for generations, clearly someone's talking bollocks. The more rhetoric like this you consume, the less you can appreciate what's going on.
I fail to see how this isn't a win for the US. The Iraqis get a less terrible government no matter who it is and we get to wash our hands of the situation without pissing off Israel or the Saudis.
It's not a win for the USA because one of their enemies gained influence in the region. It's really as simple as that, but:
The invasion also led to the rise of ISIS, which is widely seen as a embarrassment to the USA because they were supposed to be rebuilding a country and ended up allowing a large and deadly terrorist group to form under their noses.
And just to add on, there are literal losses as well. When the Iraqi army retreated from Mosul in 2014, they left behind a bunch of US supplied equipment that ISIS took control of. Iraq has "lost" at least a billion dollars of military equipment in recent years, most of which has been taken by ISIS and enabled terrorism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_Mosulhttps://www.newsweek.com/us-military-lost-track-1-billion-wo...
No. I’m just saying that they used the money that we lost to gain strength and power, and they used those weapons to kill us and many others. Gaining power and resources provided them with the ability to leverage that and grow even more, and to fund new criminal enterprises. Focusing on the relatively small dollar amount we lost to them initially doesn’t really capture the total loss.
They got in, shot down Saddam, got a bunch of anti-Saddam parties and gave them power... most of them were hiding in Iran or worked with Iran during the Iraq/Iran war they didn't understand the powerplay by Iran, they kept struggling with troops in or out whos who etc... withdrawn and left the incompetent government alone, gave Iran, even more, breathing space to take over
IRGC and Russian bombing had driven out most of the Sunni's from Southern Syria towards north Syria, close to Turkish borders. and Iran is repopulating the land with Shias from allover from Afghanistan to Lebanon.
IRGC has sort of created a contiguous Shia controlled land mass from Iran, Iraq, Syria to Lebanon. Some geopolitical observers I follow, expect the next will be in Afghanistan, with Afghani Shias against Pakistan controlled Sunni Talibans, as soon as US withdraws from Afghanistan.
- to the people, it means a government that is less corrupt and more accountable to do the people's work; a semi-meritocracy.
- in diplomatic circles, it means whatever Americans and their rich owner-class want. There aren't very many democratic countries allowed; they're usually small and don't have a resource curse.
Iraq is an example of country with government that "Americans and their rich owner-class" definitely didn't want. It's democratic in the actual sense of the word:
-- It's a government that got majority of the vote.
This has little to do with corruption/accountability, iraqis tend to vote along sectarian lines. There are more shia, they are better organized, they win.
On the ground it might be more helpful to think of Pro-Saudi vs. Pro-Iran rather than involving America directly - those two political hegemonies are much more relevant to locals.
The initial goal was set by the policy makers who understand "unknown unknown" very well, along with most mainstream media journalists who share the same ideology/beliefs/cult. However knowing "unknown unknown" prohibit them from knowing "unknown unknown unknown". So the the final result doesn't align with initial intentions.
The same mistake is repeated again and again, even today.
--- my comment from an older relevant post ---- I personally reported 3 posts on different FB pages 1st was a religion extremist guy who says to Iraqi people that they should protest and fight the "other side" of the religion (aka start a new civil war) instead of protesting against the corrupted government.
2nd was a post that was praising the guy who murdered the Danish (Or was he Norwegian?) teacher who mocked Islam, and calling him a hero.
and the 3rd was a post that says "Women education is satanic, women's purpose is marriage". --- end old comment ---
4th report was a friend of mine, he reported a page that post's pictures of underage boys im boxers/underwear and write nasty shit in the post and comments, like an obvious pedo community.
all of these 4 reports was "The post was reviewed, and though it doesn't go against one of our specific Community Standards" and then it explains how to block pages