I'm so glad my government, the United States Government, has definitely never spread propaganda in foreign countries with the express interest of creating a more favorable political climate there for their interests.
When a foreign government disrupts my free elections though, I'm going to be troubled by it. What you're saying is effectively belittling the importance of hardening our own systems from this foreign influence.
The 2nd highest comment is "honestly curious" whether the US participates in propaganda campaigns.
Anyone who reads the article, and thinks "this is outrageous!" instead of treating it as a chess move by an opponent.
Radio Free Europe was at least just using the airwaves. These efforts are using US corporations against the US.
Having the hyper-free-speech internet that we created turned against us in ways that more authoritarian countries are immune to is a huge slap in the face. We need to figure out a way to handle this.
I really only see the outcome of this outrage over foreign interference in our democracy resulting in a spectrum of terrible to shameful. In the terrible case, we are hyping up defensive nationalism and disregarding our own actions and history, which may very well lead to all kinds of barbaric, jingoistic policies moving forward. In the shameful case, we are taking advantage of these stories on foreign manipulation as a means to ignore what is wrong with our society, passing the blame solely onto a non american third party.
In neither case are we reviewing our history as a nation. I fear we will ignore all the possible lessons we might learn from honestly reviewing the times where we have disenfranchised our own people, overthrew foreign governments for adhering to a different socio-economic ideology, or were so blinded by our own propaganda and fear that we were convinced of conveniently simple narratives about who was bad and who was good and who we had to kill and who had to do the killing.
I feel like there is a common aphorism about how you need to fail 10 times to have a decent chance to succeed once. It seems like we have an opportunity to review our history at this moment. We didn't do any such examination after the fall of the USSR in the 90s. Nope, we were vindicated and there was no longer a reason to pen-test neoliberal-capitalism as either an economic system or a larger ideology.
It took 2 inane wars, a massive recession, and the election of idiot-nationalist reality tv show star / shitty condo developer to provide us with an opportunity to introspect, and I'll be damned if I dont make the strongest appeal my young perspective can muster for us to do that introspection.
And aren’t you just exercising a black or white binary fallacy when we are really comparing a light shade of grey to a much darker one?
And which are you saying is which?
https://www.npr.org/2016/12/22/506625913/database-tracks-his...
I think it is generally improper, or not preferable, to use coercive or manipulative force to alter the autonomous decision making process of a population you yourself (or your cadre) have lite or no direct stake in, accountability to, or reliance on. When the US interferes in foreign politics in a duplicitous way, we betray most of the principles of democracy. When any government or corporation or religion does this, they stomp on the idea that people should be able to make decisions for themselves. And when you live in a world dominated by the influence of immaterial third-parties, you become deeply frustrated, and this is one of the reasons things are so volatile right now.
I dunno, all you did was link to a logical fallacy article on wikipedia, so like maybe you didnt ask for me to write a missive on this notion of mine, but if I am being honest, I am honestly so frustrated by the prevalence of people thinking that pointing out a logical fallacy (aka rhetorical technique) functions as anything other than tepid dismissal.
All countries also need to defend themselves against this. Sovereignty isn’t just about borders.
Y'know, like if you're a nation who is always going on about democracy and freedom (who even starts wars that kills 100,000s of people for these ideals), maybe don't subjugate the majority and centralize socio-economic power into the hands of a tiny minority.