People make a ridiculous deal out of someone at any point doing any work with the CIA, or a company having IQT on their cap table, or anything like that.
Yeah, right, as soon as you get involved you instantly meet with the smoking man from the X-Files and see the dead aliens and become part of some kind of grand conspiracy. After that every single thing you say or do is part of some giant perfectly organized CIA plot. Please.
Most of what these three letter agencies do is boring.
It’s a lot like guilt by association: “this person did business with this person therefore they are totally the same on everything and part of some big agenda.” False.
Most of what the 3 letter agencies do is also fraud- some drunk station chief phoning in some changes as "I made that happen!".
The CIA is a pillar to prop up stuck cultures excuses for why they get nothing good done - when your own ideology has no explanation power and thus no real help to offer, except calls for endless uprisings and civil wars. It also keeps a whole "nonacademic" wing of academia propped up. For when your theories have no predictive power and reality merciless digresses- its all a conspiracy by the 3 letters.
Most of the work is probably boring and not consequential on its own. But I think that's sepaerate from whether it's reasonable to encourage people to draw an ethical line. We probably wouldn't feel comfortable with someone who knowingly did work for the KKK, even if that work was just making photocopies, picking up office supplies, and keeping track of membership dues.
Then you don't say stuff like “In my experience The Agency was completely different from its image; it was liberal, nonviolent and honorable”. It is not "guilt by association" anymore, it is pure complicity.
"The Agency" isn't a monolith. These government agencies are big sprawling bureaucracies. There are probably pockets of "liberal, nonviolent and honorable" people and pockets of total assholes and monsters and people doing nefarious things.
Just like in a large corporation where your experience working there can vary wildly depending on your department and who your boss is.
Look: I don't even know much about her. I'm just responding to conspiranoid guilt by association social media rumor mill crap. Maybe she was part of some agenda. If so, "I did some work for the CIA and the people I met there were nice" is not proof of anything. You'd need more evidence, like actual documentation that she was an ongoing CIA asset who was paid to promote certain views in her writing.
I'm just sick of lazy conspiracism, which is basically all discourse now. Seems like a lot of people have limited contact with the real world and get their impression of it from TV shows and movies. The real world is actually stranger than fiction, but strange in different ways from the way fiction is strange. It's boring in the ways fiction is strange and titillating, and weird in the ways fiction tries to be not-weird.
This article says exactly the opposite: everything was completely coherent and known within the CIA. The information gathered on student leaders and members by the supposedly "liberal, nonviolent and honorable" side was never kept away from the "total assholes and monsters" who could sell them away to their dictator friends.
Yes, yes, the good ol' "liberal, non-violent, and honorable" CIA of the 50s and 60s. So different from the one we have now.
Is this the CIA that overthrew the democratically elected prime minister of Iran after he nationalized their oil industry? Or is it the one that installed a dictatorship in Guatemala to stop land reform and tend to the whims of the United Fruit Company?
Maybe it's the organization that murdered the first elected leader of Congo, to keep cheap copper, colbat and uranium flowing? Certainly it can't be the agency that illegally spied on American citizens who fought for Civil Rights or protested against the Vietnam War.
> Is this the CIA that overthrew the democratically elected prime minister of Iran
Mosaddegh Was not democratically elected, he was appointed by the Shah after the recommendation by the Majlis which itself was largely appointed. Later Mosaddegh rigged a real election and tried to give himself emergency power to dictate law. The Shah and his generals with the help of the US and Britain removed Mosaddegh. Yes the British wanted to get involved because of oil nationalization but Mosaddegh was trying to become a dictator, and alienated a lot of the population.
It interesting because the people at the CIA probably could be fairly described as "liberal, non-violent, and honorable". That sort of thing is heavily into banality of evil territory - lovely people, just a bit thoughtless about the effects they were having on huge tracts of the world.
With those types the best you can hope for is at least they act rationally and effectively. It gets really sad when they do tremendous damage for reasons that make little sense, even in context.
It’s the residual Puritanism. Foreign-facing federal agencies like the CIA were the last bastion of American WASPs. I grew up around these people because my dad worked for a contractor for USAID, which was at times a front for the State Department, and was similarly WASPy culturally. They’re lovely people. Soft-spoken, orderly and rule-following, public service-oriented, intellectually curious. But they also have this cultivated detachment from baser emotions that enable them to pursue abstract ideas to their logical conclusions without normal gut feelings and common sense getting in the way.
Feminism has always been bundled up in the idea of American cultural superiority that justifies pursuing hegemony (although the term used is usually "women's rights").
Sure. I thought briefly about using the phrase "American Feminism".
But, regardless, to be more nuanced: Feminism gets rhetorically roped into the case for Western cultural hegemony, which in turn gets used as a justification for US military adventurism.
It is a shame but there are almost no true grassroots political organizations, most of them are payed, bought or employed by someone.
A very good example of this is that we don't see any major feminist rallies against how the government is handling the Epstein files, whose victims where predominately young girls and women.
> Still, whatever the truth of the extent of the CIA’s financial involvement with Abstract Expressionism, Anfam believes that it was “the best thing the institution ever paid for”. He smiles. “I’d much rather they spent money on Abstract Expressionism than toppling left-wing dictators.”
I had a similar view of my work that involved SDI "Star Wars". Better spent on my paycheck than on bombs. Don't forget, the gorgeous mirror in the Vera Rubin Telescope was one of two donated from another three-letter agency's dumpster.
I could tell you, but then you'd have to be shredded.
Buddhists like to "turn poison into medicine". So should we all.
31 comments
[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 7.3 ms ] threadYeah, right, as soon as you get involved you instantly meet with the smoking man from the X-Files and see the dead aliens and become part of some kind of grand conspiracy. After that every single thing you say or do is part of some giant perfectly organized CIA plot. Please.
Most of what these three letter agencies do is boring.
It’s a lot like guilt by association: “this person did business with this person therefore they are totally the same on everything and part of some big agenda.” False.
I don’t think this means anything at all.
The CIA is a pillar to prop up stuck cultures excuses for why they get nothing good done - when your own ideology has no explanation power and thus no real help to offer, except calls for endless uprisings and civil wars. It also keeps a whole "nonacademic" wing of academia propped up. For when your theories have no predictive power and reality merciless digresses- its all a conspiracy by the 3 letters.
Cultural Inability to Advance is everywhere!
Just like in a large corporation where your experience working there can vary wildly depending on your department and who your boss is.
Look: I don't even know much about her. I'm just responding to conspiranoid guilt by association social media rumor mill crap. Maybe she was part of some agenda. If so, "I did some work for the CIA and the people I met there were nice" is not proof of anything. You'd need more evidence, like actual documentation that she was an ongoing CIA asset who was paid to promote certain views in her writing.
I'm just sick of lazy conspiracism, which is basically all discourse now. Seems like a lot of people have limited contact with the real world and get their impression of it from TV shows and movies. The real world is actually stranger than fiction, but strange in different ways from the way fiction is strange. It's boring in the ways fiction is strange and titillating, and weird in the ways fiction tries to be not-weird.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/23/a-friend-of-th...
This person is referring to having an abortion as "killing their unborn child", they clearly aren't interested in non-inflammatory language.
Otherwise, it's kinda like saying that everyone ever employed by General Motors was a mechanical engineer.
(And bear in mind that James Bond is about as realistic a depiction of "spy" as Bugs Bunny is a depiction of "rabbit".)
A serious article on the activities Steinem was involved in: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/23/a-friend-of-th...
Is this the CIA that overthrew the democratically elected prime minister of Iran after he nationalized their oil industry? Or is it the one that installed a dictatorship in Guatemala to stop land reform and tend to the whims of the United Fruit Company?
Maybe it's the organization that murdered the first elected leader of Congo, to keep cheap copper, colbat and uranium flowing? Certainly it can't be the agency that illegally spied on American citizens who fought for Civil Rights or protested against the Vietnam War.
So much for soft power.
Mosaddegh Was not democratically elected, he was appointed by the Shah after the recommendation by the Majlis which itself was largely appointed. Later Mosaddegh rigged a real election and tried to give himself emergency power to dictate law. The Shah and his generals with the help of the US and Britain removed Mosaddegh. Yes the British wanted to get involved because of oil nationalization but Mosaddegh was trying to become a dictator, and alienated a lot of the population.
With those types the best you can hope for is at least they act rationally and effectively. It gets really sad when they do tremendous damage for reasons that make little sense, even in context.
Good point. A major WASP institution (namely, a religious denomination) is literally called "universalism".
But, regardless, to be more nuanced: Feminism gets rhetorically roped into the case for Western cultural hegemony, which in turn gets used as a justification for US military adventurism.
A very good example of this is that we don't see any major feminist rallies against how the government is handling the Epstein files, whose victims where predominately young girls and women.
> Still, whatever the truth of the extent of the CIA’s financial involvement with Abstract Expressionism, Anfam believes that it was “the best thing the institution ever paid for”. He smiles. “I’d much rather they spent money on Abstract Expressionism than toppling left-wing dictators.”
I had a similar view of my work that involved SDI "Star Wars". Better spent on my paycheck than on bombs. Don't forget, the gorgeous mirror in the Vera Rubin Telescope was one of two donated from another three-letter agency's dumpster.
I could tell you, but then you'd have to be shredded.
Buddhists like to "turn poison into medicine". So should we all.
[0] https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20161004-was-modern-art-...