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Comment by beebmam | Hacker News Reader

The US is a state entity where its representatives are elected, and those representatives make the policy decisions on what nations get financial support for their militaries.

To claim that these representatives don't make their decisions based on morality, or any other value that individuals have, is strictly false.

One might argue that only individuals who have opinions in line with national interests are electable, but that would be bullshit. If there's anything to truly be internalized about the elections of Barack Obama followed by Donald Trump, it's that individuals have a profound influence on American policy. If there were national interests that were solely responsible for US policy, they why was both foreign and domestic policy profoundly different across presidencies?

I'm genuinely curious how your worldview has an answer to this.

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Incompetence, greed and moralistic propaganda sure can masquerade as a functioning democracy.

Is your claim that the US is not a functioning democracy? Would you be willing to offer definitions of what you mean by "functioning" and "democracy"? Many people use the word "democracy" when they mean "democratic republic".

I read your other replies, and disliked those too. So no, I will not be offering anything more because I do not care about what you think enough to do so.

But the US support for dictatorships hasn't changed between Obama and Trump (or Biden). The US will support any dictatorship that furthers US interests and will oppose any dictatorship that does the opposite.

Thus it's perfectly valid to say that it's never about whether it's morally right to support dictatorships. China is disliked by the US because it's a threat to America being #1 economically, not because it's a dictatorship. The same is true for human rights abuses, of course.

Individual politicians might have certain morals or values. I really believe Obama wanted to close Gitmo but if you look at the results, they're absolutely predictable and not at all based on any morals the US claims to have.

I think your first sentence is strictly false. For easy counterexamples, the US changed its policy towards both Cuba and Venezuela from cooperation/reproachment to outright hostility if not regime change between the Obama and Trump administrations.

Is this the case? I thought the USAID department allocated mainly its appropriations for foreign aid not the legislature? My understanding is the allocations are guided by the president, Secretary of State, and NSC.

Different leaders have different policies thus the US is a true democracy and is moral? Just because the Overton Window[1] is large in the US doesn't mean that political dissenting opinions are not suppressed.

Consider the Twitterfiles, the government is actively censoring speech critical of the FBI and politicians. Think of the Hunter Biden laptop story, do you think that if that speech was not censored that different policies would be supported by the masses and that they would elect different representatives?

People need to know information to make good decisions. If they don't know the information, obviously, they won't consider that in the decision making process

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

The original claim is that the US acts out of national interest only, and doesn't take actions based on morality or other values that individuals have. To oppose that claim, one simply needs to show that individual values have at least some influence on US policy, not that individual values drive ALL policy. I've shown that

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