Assange: “The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out” (2011) | Hacker News Reader

Assange: “The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out” (2011)

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16 pointshncurious7 comments

It is an observable side effect over every large and largely unaccountable government plan that it will be used to channel money.

Strategically,

* Having U.S. bases on the the line from North Korea to Syria

* Having U.S. bases right next to former USSR countries

* Having U.S. bases near the tribal areas of Pakistan

were all worthy and in long term U.S. interests, but that ship has sailed.

It's been painfully obvious that money laundering is one of the primary activities of the CIA. Doing illegal things to get money to do more illegal things is the name of the game.

It's a sign of decay.

This pandemic shook me of most of my inhibitions against conspiracy theories. The "establishment" faced the reality of a completely new crisis, and we got to peek behind the curtain. "They" are far far less competent than we thought. They are very quick to support a consensus, whether or not that consensus is based on solid reasoning (masks don't work, it's impossible for the virus to come from a lab). They are very fast to stamp oposition to that consensus - including literal media and social media bans. They are good at crearing sides and polarization - you doubt the consensus? you're the same as anti vaxers and trumpists. They prefer to use a much less efficient response if it helps their political goals -everything Trump ever suggested is taboo, good or bad. They're slow to change and loath real reform - FDA ... ok, I just can't decide which example to use for that. Just google "fda delenda est".

So yeah. Did "they" keep the war going for political or personal reasons, even if the overall effect was waste and suffering? I don't know. But it sure is in character.

I've been thinking along these lines myself lately, and I can't help but think about something I'd read from a tweet, which I'll paraphrase (at much greater length):

In business, its very hard to hire an employee over the age of 65. Retirement age exists, in part, because we recognize that there's an actual cognitive decline that takes place in aging humans. So you find a dearth of elderly people in the workforce, as one might expect.

However, this simply doesn't apply to politics. Far too many of our elected officials in the US are over the retirement age, and some percentage of them must be experiencing the difficulties that come with aging. Yet, here they are, attempting to address some of the hardest problems humanity has faced, while simultaneously showing visible signs of decline in public. This isn't a party issue -- both parties have this problem for certain.

Is it any wonder then that the "solutions" they come up with aren't adequately thought through? Or that their plans are so easily guided by lobbyists, moneyed interested, and so on?

This isn't a conspiracy; its just life. At some point, many of us will take on parental roles with our own parents. We do this to care for our families, and because it's necessary; it's very human thing. But we can't seem to implement this for our government, a place where it is sorely needed. We must break the back of our gerontocracy if we're going to survive the coming climate catastrophe. At this point, "necessary" doesn't adequately communicate the urgency of our situation.

The retirement age should be enforced for all publicly-held offices.

Personally, I attribute the overwhelming majority of it to corruption than age-related cognitive decline.

Your examples of conspiracy (masks and lab leak) seem pretty inconsequential. We were told masks were in executive for the whole of a few weeks before the official position changed. Regarding lab leak or not, the original consensus was that it is not a man made virus. That is still the consensus. Somewhere along the way, media and politicians construed not man made to mean "could never have been in a lab or had any work done to it".

If those two things made you completely open to all kinds of conspiracy theories, it didn't take much.

For the masks thing, there was a consensus on something that was wrong, provably wrong, _and yet_ was used successfully by something like 1/4 population (most of Asia). Bit of a strange hill to die on, if you ask me.

I don't remember any real consensus that was non a man made virus. I do remember a bunch of guys that had received serious money to do gain of function research up and say that it was NOT gain of function research. The conflict of interest is so glaring as to make it have almost zero predictive power. "Of course they'd say that - the world hasn't changed much now that they actually did".

If you're stuck in finding reasons for how this got the way it is, just move a step back and imagine ... not a perfect world, just a normal, shitty world in which:

- Surgeon general takes a look at studies, says: masks don't hurt and they very likely help in a hospital setting. If you're in a crowded, risky place that resembles hospital settings you should probably wear them. And just in case, let's buy a bunch of N95... oh, we don't have those, anything close? yeah, KN95 are about the same. Let's buy a bunch just in case. They can't hurt, they definitely help stop the spread from the infected and we'll wait on studies to tell us if they can actually protect the uninfected as well. Hopefully something fast tracked, shouldn't take more than a couple of weeks.

^^^ is NOT rocket science. It's just the opposite of what we heard, at least for a while.

I'm not doing the "gain of function, China" thing 'cause it leaves me feeling dirty.

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