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#14964441
Tainari88 wrote:Kaiser what the USA is to Central America is the Destroyer. The one that trains the elitist torture,murder and horror. You should be ashamed of what has gone on in the name of the US in Central America. My mother was there in 1980 during some bad times. She was on a literacy campaign. The peasants described U.S. soldiers training fascist troops on how to torture,mutilate, rape and kill in the name of stopping 'communism'. A more humble,Christian and communal group of people is hard to find....no they are not the Dad. They are Freddy Krueger.

If people should feel shame for events in the past, they also ought to take pride in past achievements. It is exactly my point that overall pride ought to outweigh shame.

I made my "dad" comment because the blame game is so expansive that the only version of the US which would not be regarded as responsible for a problem in Central America (and probably in Latin America for good measure) is in the realm of fiction, some kind of benevolent father figure which looks after the little ones.
#14964454
Kaiserschmarrn wrote:Sorry for the trouble with the links. This should open the excel sheet directly, although you will have to search for the countries and do some calculations to get to my numbers.


I will admit to laziness and simply accept the numbers you previously stated.

Capitalism doesn't magically prevent public health care systems from being created. But more importantly, I'm not going to consider alternative reality scenarios because you don't do it either when it comes to the US. As history shows countries can mess things up all by themselves and in the absence of a more powerful country others can intervene in various ways and for various reasons. You on the other hand assume that everything would have gone to plan and socialist paradises would have been created. Not to mention that communists and socialists when they come to power are not necessarily squeamish regarding mass killings either and that their track record in providing the same living standards as capitalist countries is poor.


No, I am discussing actual elected leftist governments who were on their way to create public health care systems when US supported dictatorships took over.

Please see above for why I'm not considering alternate reality scenarios.


They do not seem to be alternate reality scenarios.

I'm willing to do this if you manage to quantify the US's responsibility for violence in Central America. After all, you cannot attribute all of the violence to the US either.


Well, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, all had dictatorships supported by the USA.

And since none of these would have happened without US help, the Us is responsible for it all.

As I said, I do consider the US to be partly responsible for the political instability, but not for anything else you mentioned. The US is not Central America's dad.


I totally agree that the USA has had a paternalistic attitude to Central America, which is why they feel they are allowed to overthrown elected governments there. I completely agree that this attitude has to change.
#14964459
Pants-of-dog wrote:No, I am discussing actual elected leftist governments who were on their way to create public health care systems when US supported dictatorships took over.

Well, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, all had dictatorships supported by the USA.

And since none of these would have happened without US help, the Us is responsible for it all.

President Trump has suggested we stop helping them anymore by withdrawing our financial aid. It appears that his tactic to stop the catch and release policy of past administrations may work as long as some crazy judge doesn't rule against it.
#14964463
Why are certain organizations in small overwhelmingly Christian rural little countries such a huge threat to the USA? Who died and declared the USA the one who has a right to interfere in nations who fought very hard to get away from Spanish colonialism to get stuck with some USA hypocrites who ousted King George and spout the beauty of independence and self rule to then turn around and stamp out Democratic aspirations on tiny nations who only want decent lives? It is shameful and hypocritical!
#14964486
I am unfamiliar with the School of the Americas, but found this.
Trained to Torture? The Human Rights Effects of Military Training at the School of the Americas.
The results of this study do not support the prediction that students with the most exposure to professional military training will show the greatest respect for human rights. Looking at SOA graduates, we see that while the overall number of abusers is small, the abusers themselves are disproportionately represented by officers (at nearly four times the rate of enlisted soldiers) and by repeat graduates: students who took multiple courses at the school are more than three times more likely to violate human rights than their counterparts who took only one course. These findings are highly significant across all analyses and over 40 years, implying that repeated exposure to SOA training is associated with increased human rights violations in times of war and peace, under democratic and dictatorial regimes, and both during and after the cold war.

As with any study that attempts to show large-scale patterns, there are many important issues that are not addressed here. What types of soldiers attend the SOA and similar training programs? What does the training process entail? What place does SOA training occupy in a soldier’s overall career? While the answers to these questions might contribute to a broader picture of the politics and psychology of SOA-style training, such questions cannot be adequately addressed with the limited information available on SOA graduates. Yet, despite the challenge of limited information, more research is urgently needed on foreign military training programs. The results of this study suggest that such programs are problematic for human rights and that systematic oversight and greater transparency are needed. The fact that the School of the Americas, which fares poorly on human rights in this study, is perhaps the most transparent U.S. foreign training program leaves one to wonder about the effects of dozens of other such programs both in the United States and abroad. Given the results of this study, it is not unreasonable to ask whether such programs are in fact training people to torture.
#14964488
As with any study that attempts to show large-scale patterns, there are many important issues that are not addressed here. What types of soldiers attend the SOA and similar training programs? What does the training process entail? What place does SOA training occupy in a soldier’s overall career?


Yup. Pretty important. You take officers from countries where just being an officer is a power position and rarely hard earned and to be selected to attend an overseas school identifies the officer as a power player; countries with no tradition of particular respect for individual rights and then attempt to statistically prove that one short-term school causes them to go out and behave exactly consistently with typical behaviors in the region, and this gets you a PhD. I wish I had gone to that school.

Really Wellsy. Doesn't this seem a bit over the top to you? With that kind of rigor I could easily prove that Trump causes lung cancer. (I really could given her standard of evidence.)
#14964489
Kaiserschmarrn wrote:If people should feel shame for events in the past, they also ought to take pride in past achievements. It is exactly my point that overall pride ought to outweigh shame.

I made my "dad" comment because the blame game is so expansive that the only version of the US which would not be regarded as responsible for a problem in Central America (and probably in Latin America for good measure) is in the realm of fiction, some kind of benevolent father figure which looks after the little ones.

Look Kaiser have you studied the overall histories of the Central American nations? The New World starts off with a very dark, painful and oppressive history. Panama was a northern province of Colombia. The USA wanted a canal zone to be able to unite the eastern and western coasts without going all the way around the southern tip of South America. Nicaragua was the ideal place for canal ambitions but they had an issue with a nationalist leader from Nicaragua by the name of A. Sandino. If you start studying what the he'll happened it is a study in ugly, unjustified greed, arrogance, imperialism and manifest destiny rooted in the worst aspects of American hypocritical disgusting disrespectful human rights violations Kaiser.
The only political people who think all that crap is necessary against tiny nations who do not even number 2 million souls are sociopaths who love abuse and sadism and that the USA has a God given right to every land on Earth because it is the only government that is Superior. It is shameful. In the extreme.
#14964523
One Degree wrote:@XogGyux
Your melodramatic theorizing is not an argument. I believe you also mixed posts from others with mine and then replied as if they were mine. Carelessness or deliberate?
Morality has different levels. You seem to believe you are on the highest looking down. You should be looking up for the next level instead of lecturing others with your supposed moral superiority.
Do you have an argument how us accepting these immigrants makes anything better in their countries? What purpose does this serve? Is this just to salve some ‘guilt’ we are suppose to have?

LOL I did not make any claims about which morals were superior. You seem to be projecting and I wonder why. Did I strike a cord?
I think you are free to think it is OK to shoot people for trying to get in your country for a better life. They shouldn’t have been born on Guatemala or Honduras, or anywhere else, how dare them.
#14964545
XogGyux wrote:LOL I did not make any claims about which morals were superior. You seem to be projecting and I wonder why. Did I strike a cord?
I think you are free to think it is OK to shoot people for trying to get in your country for a better life. They shouldn’t have been born on Guatemala or Honduras, or anywhere else, how dare them.


I see you did not want to reply to my on topic questions you quoted, and preferred to use the morals reference as an escape.
Your post seems to indicate being born in these countries makes these people ‘inferior’ and in need of our ‘superior’ assistance. This is a level of moral intellectual reasoning I decided was insufficient for me to reflect what being equal really means. It does not respect the ability of others to solve their own problems.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think the levels should be described as superior. Individuals and societies seem to be required to progress through them all. This makes each one essential and therefore can not be inferior. The best I can describe it would be ‘more appropriate’ for the individual or the society.
The reasoning you are using is currently in sync with a liberal society. This results in an arrogance of view imo. That view is now being challenged by populists who want to return to ‘law and order’ but also by those who no longer see ‘individual rights’ as sufficient to solve what it means to be equal.
So when you disrespect me by assuming my reasoning is beneath yours, and to be disregarded with insults then you are simply closing your eyes to any thought your reasoning does not provide the answers for everyone. It is comforting when the world seems to fit with our reasoning but it is just a delusion of our perception.
So this is why I currently believe all levels of reasoning are correct but should be limited to only those who agree with you and not forced upon other communities. Immigration from less developed areas will result in a conflict of reasoning levels (part of culture) resulting in conflict, not harmony. They need to develop their own society by progressing through the stages of development. We can’t really help them do this other than leaving them alone in peace. Inviting them here is not a benefit to either society.
#14964551
Drlee wrote:Come on. Do you expect us to believe that US military advisors were teaching them how to rape and murder people. Do be serious for a moment.



US counter-insurgency "advisors" have been teaching fascists how to conduct dirty wars at least since the Phoenix Program in the Vietnam era.

From El Salvador to Iraq: Washington's man behind brutal police squads
In 2004, with the war in Iraq going from bad to worse, the US drafted in a veteran of Central America's dirty wars to help set up a new force to fight the insurgency. The result: secret detention centres, torture and a spiral into sectarian carnage
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/ ... washington



#14964562
They need to develop their own society by progressing through the stages of development. We can’t really help them do this other than leaving them alone in peace.


Well, though off topic, this is clearly untrue. Developed nations have helped less developed nations progress since antiquity. Besides. There is no inherent problem with their "society". There is a problem with their government. There was no problem with German society but the Nazi government was a real problem. Remove that government, fixed.

Inviting them here is not a benefit to either society.


You seem to be fixated on the term "society". There are no societal issues here. These are economic ones. "Their" economies are helped by remittances from here to their families at home. No doubt about that. I am not thrilled by this but it has very little effect on our economy. Our economy benefits from good immigrant labor. So the issue of immigration is truly individual. Some of these immigrants will be very good for our economy and others, not so much.

If immigrants become a lingering underclass then that is our own fault. Once someone is allowed to live here it is in our enlightened self-interest to help them progress as far and as quickly as possible. Even so. The cold hard fact remains that we need unskilled as well as skilled laborers and, in times like now where there is full employment, we have a shortage of both.

What purpose does this serve? Is this just to salve some ‘guilt’ we are suppose to have?


Not guilt. I have already argued enough against that. Compassion. That is quite a different thing. Compassion is frequently inconvenient. Try it sometime though. Normal people find it rewarding.
#14964567
Drlee wrote:Well, though off topic, this is clearly untrue. Developed nations have helped less developed nations progress since antiquity. Besides. There is no inherent problem with their "society". There is a problem with their government. There was no problem with German society but the Nazi government was a real problem. Remove that government, fixed.



You seem to be fixated on the term "society". There are no societal issues here. These are economic ones. "Their" economies are helped by remittances from here to their families at home. No doubt about that. I am not thrilled by this but it has very little effect on our economy. Our economy benefits from good immigrant labor. So the issue of immigration is truly individual. Some of these immigrants will be very good for our economy and others, not so much.

If immigrants become a lingering underclass then that is our own fault. Once someone is allowed to live here it is in our enlightened self-interest to help them progress as far and as quickly as possible. Even so. The cold hard fact remains that we need unskilled as well as skilled laborers and, in times like now where there is full employment, we have a shortage of both.



Not guilt. I have already argued enough against that. Compassion. That is quite a different thing. Compassion is frequently inconvenient. Try it sometime though. Normal people find it rewarding.


Using economics as a measure of success in our intervention in other societies is a delusion based upon our own limited beliefs. Why has our ‘help’ in Africa been so often disastrous for the people there? When you go into a society that still reasons on rule by the most powerful and try to yank them into liberalism bypassing law and order, you create a confused and disorganized society. The majority of individuals must progress to a level of reasoning before the society can function on that level. It is a matter of what is appropriate for them. To believe our current level is appropriate for everyone else simply because we no longer need their level is wrong headed. They still need it.
This is true of the US itself. We have communities that need a law and order society. We also have communities that need a liberal society. We have communities that need more than liberalism offers.
There are individuals who need to move to a community more appropriate to their reasoning. I am sure some immigrants are in this category, but it is extremely unlikely the vast majority are. They are a result of the level of reasoning of the society they are leaving. Believing them going to a community that does not match their reasoning is an improvement for them is wrong headed and arrogant. It creates additional obstacles for the receiving community to overcome to progress and it places the immigrants in a society where they don’t understand how it really functions.
Eliminate economics from your thinking if you want to be compassionate.
#14964572
Drlee wrote:Yup. Pretty important. You take officers from countries where just being an officer is a power position and rarely hard earned and to be selected to attend an overseas school identifies the officer as a power player; countries with no tradition of particular respect for individual rights and then attempt to statistically prove that one short-term school causes them to go out and behave exactly consistently with typical behaviors in the region, and this gets you a PhD. I wish I had gone to that school.

Really Wellsy. Doesn't this seem a bit over the top to you? With that kind of rigor I could easily prove that Trump causes lung cancer. (I really could given her standard of evidence.)

I think it allows a conservative judgement and speculation to the standards it does have with a lack of information and rigour. But really I don’t expect extensive and elaborate studies on such a topic as its difficult to imagine how one would occur.


It seems the grounds on which it is reasonable a base to debate is the significance of US support in human rights outcomes in latin america.

It sounds like what reaources it gave to latin american countries is dismissed as inevtobility of conflict within unstable countries who are thought to not have achieved a mature government or such abused are expected or perhaps seen as necessary because of the cold war implying that the US support was somewhat significant but on equal terms of being as bad as the ‘enemy’. Although this is unclear with reference to gulags except to the extent its about double standards of condemnation that is hard to see without reference to a double standard within a specific individual more so than a group.

And I can sympathize with the sentiment that not everything that is wrong in a country is the US’ fault but it would be unreasonable it had no significant part to play in the Latin American dictatorships and the harm they brought once in power. Which seems a more readily defensible claim than the denied function of the school of the americas.
Which I suspect is accepted and retorted with earlier comments of it being defensible because of the nature of the cold war and that some of the democratically elected left wing groups or those who overthrew previous US backed dictorships were equally bad or were a significant threat to warrant such terror. Where could then bring it to any specific individuals defense of left wong atrocities. Although its unclear to me Tainari is one individual who is sympathetic to things like the gulags in the US.
But perhaps could make an argument that such wrongs are on anyones hands and no one has the clean record in conflicts. Although it does lookbad in latin america how many leftist groups were elected and exemplify part of why latin american countries aren’t democratically mature.
#14964577
The Monroe Doctrine complicates our relationship with Latin America. Any leftist government will be seen as intrusion in ‘our’ hemisphere by others. This does not mean the US will not let these countries develop on their own, but it does place some limitations on them.
Liberal globalism and Obama gave lip service to the Monroe Doctrine no longer being a factor, but they are lying. Neither political party is ready to abandon it. It is the nationalism under the globalism facade.
#14964609
RT wrote: Unconditional love will stand tall and feverish hate shall fall short. A warm heart worn on the sleeve will melt a cold shoulder. Tough love is the language of Nature. A potter's firm and steady hand shapes soft clay, whilst day divides the night.

Strike a balance!


Potemkin wrote:Decided to post a picture of a "hippie"
You can compartmentalize a gentle message any way you wish, but it doesn't properly reflect my original sentiment. Satiric nihilism and a pinch of argumentum ad hominem will not tarnish an altruistic portrait. It's very easy to reduce a complex human being into a myth via image or label.

AS for this topic, again, read The Society of the Spectacle by Debord.

Lastly, Potemkin, I'm not amused by your cartoonish characterizations of other people. It's a shame you seem hardened and conditioned by various preceptive classifications; obsessed with abstract constructs, never seeing the love humanity can offer.

It's quite clear, reading posts here, that humanity is hampered by divisive terms and isms. Furthermore, it's quite clear there's a war on consciousness. Political bandages will never address this core issue and psychosocial allopathic constructs cannot bridge arbitrary cultural gaps and provide us with a holistic system of self-realization.



One LOVE,

-RT
#14964633
https://www.foxnews.com/world/angry-tij ... nt-caravan
This story has some interesting snippets. The Tijuana mayor wants the ‘migrant bums’ gone. They are fighting with Tijuana residents.
Trump had a great tweet. ‘If they are escaping the problems of their country, why are they waving their country’s flag.’
#14964644
Wellsy the USA's ideas about their 'backyard, i.e. All of Latin America is error filled. First of all Spain lost its colonies through the 19th century. The USA instead Of learning from its mistakes by seeing how British colonialism that they lived through, went on to act exactly the same towards Latin America. Throughout history nations who betray their own founding principles due to greed....wind up in decay and decline. I won't shed a tear if 200 years into the future the Asian nations call the USA a shithole and worthless. They chose their destiny...that Christian biblical saying of what you do to the least you do to me..you treat other places with arrogance,disdain and disrespectful behaviour you are going to reap what you sow...now or in a thousand years. It is gonna happen like the law of gravity.
#14964665
Tainari88 wrote:Wellsy the USA's ideas about their 'backyard, i.e. All of Latin America is error filled. First of all Spain lost its colonies through the 19th century. The USA instead Of learning from its mistakes by seeing how British colonialism that they lived through, went on to act exactly the same towards Latin America. Throughout history nations who betray their own founding principles due to greed....wind up in decay and decline. I won't shed a tear if 200 years into the future the Asian nations call the USA a shithole and worthless. They chose their destiny...that Christian biblical saying of what you do to the least you do to me..you treat other places with arrogance,disdain and disrespectful behaviour you are going to reap what you sow...now or in a thousand years. It is gonna happen like the law of gravity.
This is an example of how my peers think separation is real. Notice how this poster describes geographical areas as abstract constructs (USA, Asian nations, Latin America, etc). Instead of recognizing how human ideas create taxonomic systems in order to organize the motion of a physical system (words influence worlds and worlds influence words), the poster assumes that these abstract classifications are solid things. As if an abstraction is more real than the ebb & flow of human behavior (where did the ancient world go?). If we continue to divide planet Earth and the human species we will be extinct in 200 or 1000 years from now.

Once we build an artificial nervous system around planet Earth and develop a fully autonomic noosphere, ideas will be seen as evolutionary modifiers. Planetary perception will be integrated & interrelated (The internet is an early model, because technology is an extension of our senses), and issues like war and poverty will be treated as noospheric pathogens disrupting the whole planetary nervous system. This is a very difficult thing to reveal let alone explain to a civilization that is still under the spell of dualism.

Mind impregnates matter and matter impregnates mind, it's a feedback loop. A single movement, in a multiplex message of ecological information, driving the evolutionary development of humanity. Binary conflict will no longer play a role in life. The identity of the species will not be defined by scarcity. Competition when pushed to its limit will reverse and become collaboration (I'm not sure what will trigger this reversal, perhaps a global natural disaster, existential crisis, etc).

1 vs 0 or 1...0...0...1 in a causal chain broke down after our perception of this movement or relationship changed. Today, we see [1010] as an underlying simultaneous happening refracted by dimensional entanglement (We're enfolded in the unfolding and the nature of our sensory interface affects observation). Once we change our perception of a situation, we change our behavior. Think about solving a puzzle, until you discover the right perspective or piece of information, it's quite difficult to give pattern recognition to the whole puzzle. Such an epistemological breakthrough happened in physics, as quantum mechanics overlapped classical systems.

The communicative process of interconnected information (the living language of consciousness and matter) in our evolutionary development will transform our perception of reality. We will realize that physical competition or natural selection is a form of primitive collaboration (if you wish to do good, do a little evil, we react & adapt collectively. The connection is a single act), and it unconsciously guided us to this point in time. Intelligent selection will overthrow natural selection (gene editing is an early model of this mindset). Intelligent collaboration will eventually lead to intelligent evolution.

There is only one war, and that war is on humanity and our consciousness. Humanity, NOT China-Russia-USA, will reap what it sows. The choice is NOW!
Last edited by RhetoricThug on 18 Nov 2018 22:39, edited 8 times in total.
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